MCAA German Chapter Career Choices Seminar

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Dear member of the “E&N” Working group,
 
The German Chapter of the MCAA is organizing a Career Choices Seminar between 10:00 and 17:00 at the TU Darmstadt on 10th June 2015. Please see https://www.mariecuriealumni.eu/events/mcaa-german-chapter-career-choices-seminar for more details. With 20 days to go, 68 people have registered and the room has a maximum capacity of 100. The agenda is pretty solid. We will broadcast as a GoTo Webinar to any members who can't attend.

At the meeting I plan to say that we will begin organizing research-based events in the next half year, starting with "Life Sciences" at the Medizinische Hochschule Hannover (host institute of Andreia Albuquerque). My experience is that people want to present their research. We imagine having about ten speakers over an afternoon with two of those speakers being more senior (maybe members of MCAA that are already professor) holding keynote talks and the others being PhDs or postdocs presenting short talks. For the second Life Science meeting, we would like to hold something similar at EMBL in Heidelberg with information about how to apply for a COFUND postdoc fellowship at EMBL. Germany is a good place to start such activity because our chapter is big enough (over 200 members) to find ten people to present on very many topics. Life Sciences is obviously the easiest topic to begin with. We would like to keep the costs of such meetings at a minimum and to get the host institutes to deal with some of the organization - room, laptop, beamer, coffee, biscuits and so on. We are also very open to holding joint meetings with other chapters and working groups.

We have made some mistakes - next year we will avoid the 20€ registration charge by inviting a big company to promote themselves as an employer and sponsor us by paying for food and drink.

One final point: The response from current members of the chapter to the career seminar was quite low and in the end the majority of the participants are new members of the chapter and many are new members of the MCAA. We can invite people to speak at research-based events who are not yet MCAA members. We can grow the MCAA by organizing events and advertising them widely.

What help/input/advice can the “E&N” Working group give us?

All the Best,

Brian