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VOICE OVER: This is Alumni Aloud, a podcast by Graduate Center students for Graduate Center students. In each episode we talk with a GC graduate about their career path, the ins and outs of their current position, and the career advice they have for students. This series is sponsored by the Graduate Center’s Office of Career Planning & Professional Development. 

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CARLY BATIST, HOST: In this episode, I talk with Drs. Kriti Kalpana, Miruna Ghinia-Tegla, and Deepak Menon. Kriti and Deepak both earned their PhD’s from the Biochemistry program at the Graduate Center. Miruna earned her PhD in Biology at Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania. This panel was originally held in April 2020. At that time, Kriti was a postdoc at the New York Stem Cell Foundation’s Research Institute in New York City, Deepak was an oncology postdoc at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, and Miruna was a biology postdoc at CUNY’s City College. In this episode, the panelists tell us about the journey from PhD to postdoc, how to navigate the postdoc application process, and customizing your postdoc experience to align with your future goals. If you all could just introduce yourselves, your current positions, where you are, and how you kind of got there from your PhD.  

KRITI KALPANA, PANELIST: Hi, I’m Kriti. I graduated from CUNY two years ago and I’ve been working as a postdoc at the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute, which is in New York, for one and a half years now. I’m working with stem cells. I did my PhD in biochemistry so this was kind of a career transition a little bit. And I’m happy to talk to you and answer your questions.     

DEEPAK MENON, PANELIST: Hi everyone, I’m Deepak. So I graduated from CUNY. I was at Hunter College with Dr. David Foster. I graduated from CUNY in 2017 and started my postdoc right after that and currently at the University of Maryland, the Baltimore campus, associated with the School of Medicine and the School of Dentistry right now. I started off working in lipids and cancer as my graduate research but made a slight shift towards pathological angiogenesis and diabetic eye diseases. So cancer to diabetic eye disease models.  

MIRUNA GHINIA-TEGLA, PANELIST: Alright, hi everyone. Thank you to Jenny and Carly for inviting me today. My name is Miruna Ghinia-Tegla, I am not a CUNY alumnus but I do work at CUNY as a postdoc now for 5 years. I did my PhD at Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania, which is my home country, in parallel with the National Eye Institute at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland and the Institute of Neuroscience in Pisa Italy. My PhD was kind of a typical European PhD with a lot of collaborations. Happy to talk to you about that as well as my life as a postdoc here at CUNY. I work with Dr. Mark Emerson at CCNY [City College]. I do work in retina development, so developmental and cellular neuroscience.  

BATIST: So now getting into the application process a little bit. How did you approach the search for the postdoc, finding a good mentor fit, interviewing? How did that process look for you all?  

KALPANA: So I started looking for postdocs before I defended. Even during the process of writing my thesis I was actively looking but I found a position after I had actually defended. I started looking at different websites. Indeed.com, Science Careers, that’s a good job site for postdocs. Nature also has a job posting site for postdocs, that’s another option. And location was also another important concern for me. I wanted to be in New York at that moment ,so my initial search was mostly in New York. And then I also emailed professors at universities that were in New York and labs that I would be interested in working in. I emailed them directly even if they did not have a job listing on any of these websites. So that was my initial process for looking for postdoc positions.  

BATIST: So your postdoc is through a non-profit. How did you find that application process as opposed to going to a university or something like that?  

KALPANA: I mean, I was applying to mainly academic positions, mainly universities for postdocs. And then I found this which was something that I had no idea about. It was a field that was different to what I was in. My PhD was with Professor Akira Kawamura at Hunter College. And I worked on plant microbials that have immunostimulatory or immune boosting activity. And now I’m working in stem cells and neuroscience, so that was completely different to what I did in my PhD. But stem cells were something I was interested in growing up. They kind of influenced me to get into science in the first place.  

So I thought maybe I’ll try that. And that application process was fairly long. I would occasionally hear back once a week or so, but it took more than a month to get the approval and the offer letter from them. But I had an initial interview with the entire team, a Skype interview. And then after awhile they asked me to come a meet with other people at the organization. And then after I got the call from HR about the position but it did take a long time as compared to some of the other university applications that I was first trying to get. 

BATIST: Miruna, how was it coming as an international citizen, coming here for the postdoc? 

GHINIA-TEGLA: Right. I was pretty a picky postdoctoral candidate to be very honest. I wanted to stay in New York for personal reasons and I also wanted to follow the research I started during my PhD. So I wanted to stay in the retina development field and that of course narrows the options, right. I was patient enough, I started looking for positions around the time that I was preparing my thesis, so a few months before I graduated. And I had a network. The PI that I had during the PhD, she was a great mentor and she introduced me to a lot of people.  

I used to go to conferences, so people knew me from the conferences and were familiar with my research. And I was reaching out to people that I knew were in New York and doing research. Always looking for the research that I’m interested in. And eventually through this big network that I had and my mentor supported me to build, I got in touch with my actual PI and it was a great match. I interviewed in several other labs and again were satisfactory for me for my search. Retina labs as well at different universities here in the city. And then I settled on doing research with Mark Emerson which was great. 

BATIST: And Deepak? 

MENON: So location was a primary concern. I had to move out of New York. As a family we were still looking along the east coast so Maryland was one of the areas of interest because having the NIH and University of Maryland and a bunch of other universities around like George Washington and others around here. So it first was location and then interest. I wanted to explore other fields also apart from cancer. That was one other concern. So these two things together were the primary things that I was looking at. And then I started following the NIH, which has a very good website in terms of postings. Started applying over there. University of Maryland I saw a lot of postings come up on regular job portals like Indeed. So I started applying through them. This particular lab, my PI was trying to make a switch. Like myself, she was also moving on from cancer models to an eye model. She’d recently gotten a grant in collaboration with another lab at Hopkins, the Wilmer Eye Institute. The grant had come in right around the time that I joined. It was a 5-year grant so that secured me 5 years for sure at least without any worrying about the funding part.  

And then following the application, I interviewed with her, gave a talk about my research. Since she was also in the cancer field, she could understand what I had done earlier and how it could be applied to retinal angiogenesis like signaling in retinal angiogenesis. In that way, it was a good fit. I interviewed with her and the collaborator and from there on she had offered me the position. All this happened before starting to write my thesis but I was towards completion of my project. She wanted somebody to join as soon as possible also because the grant had come in, the money was in. I did have a talk with my PI regarding, “Is this a feasible date to defend. Is it possible?” And he was nice about it, he agreed on it and from there I moved on. So I had the position already with me and then I started writing my thesis to finish up. 

BATIST: Great. What were you looking for in a postdoc mentor and how did you come to realize you had found a good fit? And how did that differ potentially from the relationship you had with your PhD advisor? 

KALPANA: My PhD mentor was amazing and I had a really good time during my PhD at CUNY. So I was trying to look at somebody at the same level too. When I did my interviews, I talked to the PhD mentors, I kind of got a vibe of what they’re looking for, how they are, how they behave with the other people in the lab. When they introduce us to the other people in the lab, I think it’s really important to get an idea of how many postdocs have been mentored by the PI that you are applying to. So I got those things straightened out at some of the interviews I went to. My current mentor, she’s really great. She’s amazing too.  

We did not have a lot of interaction before I joined the lab. I only saw her on Skype during the interview when I had that Skype interview. When I finally came to NYSCF to meet with other people, I saw her briefly but I didn’t talk to her, I met with other people at the institute. So I did not really know too much about her. I interacted with her through emails and my email interactions were always nice. And after joining the lab I realized she’s an amazing mentor. She’s hands-on but also she lets you explore your own ideas. I think that’s really important. You need to understand what kind of mentorship you want for your postdoc. If you want a more hands-on person versus a person who lets you independently explore. So that’s something to keep in mind. My experience with my postdoc mentor has been great. 

GHINIA-TEGLA: My experience regarding choosing a PI is slightly different since I was doing a PhD in a multi-institutional situation and had 3 PI’s. So I learned a little bit from each one of them. I was somehow lucky to have their personality spread across a broad spectrum. So I knew exactly what to ask for, for my postdoc. I wanted a work-life balance much more than I had during my PhD. I had a very intense PhD because it’s structured in a way that it’s 4 years. I realized, I learned that I would need to negotiate that from the beginning.  

And what I also learned that is very important is, “Who are the other people in the lab?” Not only the PI. And when I interviewed, I really liked the fact that it was all open. I was able to talk in private with every single one of them and ask my questions openly without any hesitation. And the PI actually encouraged that which I thought signaled transparency to me. I learned a lot from that interview day, spent the whole day interviewing. And yeah, I think that said a lot about him as a PI, as a leader. He was a new PI and I was the first postdoc, still am, the only postdoc in the lab as a matter of fact. But I knew that so I had to decide whether I wanted to do a postdoc in a much more settled lab or help building this lab. And I think I learned a lot by doing this. During my PhD I worked in other labs that were more settled. So now I have both experiences and I think that what I learned from this lab will help me a lot when I want to set up my own lab.  

MENON: So in my case, again, I took postdoc as a stepping stone to the next step in my career. I had some things in mind like I was really interested teaching and research, together. So I asked these questions regarding if she would be supportive of [that]. So that was a priority and I did want to take some time out from my postdoctoral fellowship and teach. And will she be helping me with opportunities like that?  

So that was something I asked her about and she was super supportive of. She said, “Yeah, you’re never going to be a postdoc forever so that’s something I’m totally cool with.” The other thing was if she was supportive of my future career plans or not. Then apart from that, there was a postdoc currently in the lab. I did talk to him about work-life balance, how was she. He did mention that she herself is pretty supportive of family and things like that. So in those terms she was pretty supportive. So that was a signal to me when I talked to the postdoc. In my case also, she was starting off with a totally new project. The grant was there, the money was there, but starting with a new project. So I was the first postdoc to work on this particular project, to start off with. Right now we have 3 postdocs and 2 graduate students but at that time when I started off it was just me starting with this project.  

I wanted a hands-off approach in terms of mentoring. That was my mentoring style that I had seen during my graduate school. That was totally hands-off, we were left. So I preferred that. And by talking to the postdoc and to the PI, I could feel that there was no crazy micro-management on an everyday basis. I think those were the things that were priorities for me and that all worked out. 

BATIST: What are your goals and career plans after the postdoc? 

GHINIA-TEGLA: So I can start since I am the one who has done 5 years in this postdoc so I am pretty much approaching the decision to move on, right. So I have decided that I would like to have my own lab and I would like to stay in academia. That is something that I built, I wasn’t sure from the very beginning. I liked to work in the lab but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work in industry or in academia. But the more I was exposed to students, the more I had to mentor people. That wasn’t something I was used to in the beginning. That was a skill I definitely built as a postdoc. I learned that I actually liked to do that and I get very rewarded by their success. I like to mentor people in parallel with doing researching and reading papers and doing actual experiments. So that was a decision I made in the last year and since then I’ve been trying to think about how to wrap things up. I’m working still on some projects so hopefully they will be able to be published soon and then I hopefully will be able to prepare an application for a faculty position. 

MENON: In my case, I’m taking a slightly different approach. I do want to stay in academia but I’m looking at more teaching-oriented positions. So more focused on teaching, less focused on research. I do want to have a lab but a smaller lab, an undergraduate lab. So I’m focusing on PUI’s they’re called–primarily undergraduate institutions right now. I am working towards sending out applications to local colleges right now. 

KALPANA: In my case, I always wanted to go into academia, I always wanted to have my own research lab. That was my opinion going when I entered my postdoc also. This being a non-profit organization, it is slightly different from academia but it’s in a position that is between academia and industry. In the sense that we do get some philanthropic funding, but my lab and my PI kind of operates as a lab in academia. Because my PI gets her funding from grants, both NIH and otherwise. We have the same set-up with PI, postdocs, technicians in the lab. But no PhD students. I still feel that I want to go into academia. I have never wanted to go into industry. But it may be a different kind of academia setting like the one that I am in right now, in a non-profit organization. Similarly in having your own research and having your own lab and applying for grants. 

MENON: Just as a general tip, if you know what the next step is for you, look at how active their career development program is. Like in the University of Maryland, there is an active National Postdoctoral Association chapter and a career development program that’s going on over the year. And it has been amazingly helpful to work with them. They run these sessions on moving into academia, moving into industry, writing positions, and things like that. We almost have 3-4 events every month where they are able to network us with industry panelists and local universities. So that might be something to explore when you’re venturing out into a postdoc position also. I know NIH has a very strong career development panel. I used to do events at NIH when I was a grad student.  

BATIST: Do you teach at all? And are you a mentor yourself to other PhD students or undergraduate students?   

GHINIA-TEGLA: I do, and as I mentioned before, that was the biggest change compared to my PhD. There I didn’t interact with students, I just went in and did my work. Whereas here from the first day I had to mentor students. Which initially was kind of overwhelming but then I found a lot of joy from it and I started growing my team and it’s actually very interesting because now I have a team in a big lab. Not so much now but in the past I’ve had 4 or 5 undergraduates working with me and I liked that a lot because I got to involve them in projects. Some of them are coauthors with me on my papers. And hopefully I will continue to do so in the future. And the feedback from them made me want to do it more. And I like to work with high school students as well. As long as they are enthusiastic I think that’s amazing.  

KALPANA: In my case, I do get some opportunities to mentor, even though we do have technicians in the lab. They’re not really technicians as in academia or industry because they have their own projects and they’re driving their own projects completely. But we do have undergraduates who come in or sometimes we have high school students. I had two undergrad students last year, this year I’m going to get another one. So I do get to mentor a little bit. I enjoyed doing it in grad school. 

BATIST: Are salaries negotiable or do they tend to be fixed? And what was your experience with negotiations if any.  

MENON: In my case, we did discuss the salary on the day of the interview. She said it would be according to the NIH pay scale because the grant was being funded by NIH. It’s a suggested amount; it’s not compulsory for the PI to pay that amount so I do hear of postdocs being paid less than that but that was a talking point and we discussed that and she said that she would pay according to the NIH pay scale. Those pay scales change every year as you go through your postdoc so I do get those changes. 

KALPANA: In my case, on the day when I came for an in-person interview I did not meet with my PI so we had not discussed salary. But I met with HR and she asked what I would expect as a postdoc and I replied according to the NIH pay scale. That’s what it started out as initially but then after a few months in the NIH scale I got a substantial increase. I feel, at least within my organization, it’s a little bit more than what the NIH pay grade is.  

GHINIA-TEGLA: Similar in my case, NIH standard. We discussed that from the beginning, I was funded by an NIH grant so that was pretty clear. 

BATIST: Had you ever done, in your PhDs, internships outside of the research or lab you were working in? 

MENON: I did one after-school mentoring program with the New York Academy of Sciences where I ran a one semester long course for 5th graders in Queens. So they had a nutrition program, and we had to do a set of science experiments during the after school hours. That was a decent time commitment per semester. So I would finish my work in the lab and at 4 o’clock run and catch the train to Queens with all my stuff for the students over there. That was one major thing that I did during the program. Apart from that, like I said, through CERTL and the New York Academy of Sciences I did a few online teaching courses over there.  

BATIST: Can you talk about, in a numbers game, the application process. Like how many positions did you apply for, how many interviews did you get from that? 

KALPANA: Because I started applying for postdoc positions while I was writing my thesis, I applied in phases. Initially, I wasn’t very serious about it so I would just send in a few applications. Once I had defended and was actively applying, I probably applied to, I want to say over 50 labs for sure. Out of which, some you don’t really hear back from at all. Some you do but they don’t really materialize. I went to about 10 interviews. I did get another position before the one here that I didn’t accept because of certain visa issues.  

GHINIA-TEGLA: So I emailed or reached out to around 20 labs from which, as Kriti said, I didn’t hear back from I’ll say maybe half. And then the 10 that I heard back from, I ended up having around 5 interviews. And 2 didn’t have a budget for an immigrant. I am still on a visa so that was a wrinkle in the process. And then I decided to choose one of the 3 that offered me the position.  

MENON: My case was a similar experience, around 20 applications, heard from about half of them. Some of them did say that there was a funding issue. Basing it out of interest, some of the labs did not have a posting. Interviewed at three, one was a virtual online one, the other two were [in-person] interviews. And one of them I liked more so I ended my search with that. 

BATIST: What is the biggest difference between being a graduate student and being a postdoc? 

MENON: I mean in terms of research, you come with a certain skill set which you’ve already developed during grad school. So you’re good at it, nobody needs to train you again on the same thing. You are responsible for mentoring any new graduate students or undergraduates that come into the lab. I did that in grad school also but here I have graduate students who I co-mentor in terms of, even in their research projects, I have a say. Along with the PI. So those are some things that I find are different being a graduate student.  

GHINIA-TEGLA: I feel like for me, the PI trusted me to be alone and that took some time to understand like ok, now I don’t have to double-check. And that actually felt pretty good because I was able to develop my own experiments and that was the biggest difference in terms of the research. And then being responsible for other peoples’ careers. Some of the Master’s students that I work with, they had to have a research project. I had to make sure that they’re on a good track with a project and that was definitely challenging in the beginning and still is of course sometimes. But it’s part of the deal that actually I really like. And other than that, the similarities I would say is just the pressure. For the PhD, you know, you have to graduate at some point and for the postdoc you have to accomplish something during a pretty much similar amount of time so that you’re ready for the next step.  

KALPANA: So in my PhD, I got a lot a lot of experience in a lot of different fields at the same time. So I wouldn’t call myself an expert in one specific field but I did have tissue culture experience which helped me transition to the postdoc position that I am in right now. Because there’s a lot of tissue culture that we do. Other than that, my skill set was completely different so I had to learn quite a lot of techniques and a lot of different things here. Even in terms of the science, it’s completely different, but as a postdoc it is expected that you do a lot of the learning yourself. Even with trainings themselves, there are people who can help you but you do need to try and figure things out more independently as a postdoc compared to as a graduate student.  

And in my case it was a complete career switch. I had never worked in either stem cells or neuroscience before. I had never studied neuroscience as a topic before, so I had to kind of really put myself in and read a lot and then after awhile my mentor started really trusting me. She would help me, she would ask me for my opinion and ask me to develop my own ideas and develop my own experiments and she trusted my opinion on that. 

BATIST: How do you gauge when you are ready to leave a postdoc position for the next step? 

MENON: I felt as if completion of a project that you took upon as the endpoint. I mean, projects keep on coming in a lab, you can take on another one. But it’s a never-ending cycle in terms of projects. I mean completion of a project is something that you and your mentor can agree upon. That’s what I thought would be the most ideal situation. I mean maybe you agree upon it and your mentor doesn’t, but you want to come to a consensus that this would be a point where I would start looking. Where you feel like it’s at a stage towards publication or it has been published. That could be an endpoint where you can think about discussing with your mentor about moving on.  

BATIST: What kinds of professional networking do you participate in as postdocs? 

GHINIA-TEGLA: So I personally think that if you want to stay in a field, you have to go to conferences. First of all, I get a lot of feedback for my own research and I appreciate that a lot because that’s where all my ideas start coming. Conferences are definitely the main source, for my networking. And that was since my PhD. Even though it wasn’t in my comfort zone to just go to conferences and introduce myself, I found that quite strange in the beginning, I became quite good at it and I think that it’s something that we have to do in our career.  

MENON: In my case I would say yeah, conferences, and then the other thing is speaker lunches where you can talk to speakers and listen to their talks. If they’re interesting then you can build up collaborations. PI’s network, their collaborators. They have been established in the field for so long and their collaborators are definitely part of the network you have. And right now, the job search, I have started networking through LinkedIn. I’ve contacted people to help me with the job process. Again, my career development panel has helped me some of the teaching faculty; I was able to build a network with them around here. And for postdocs who are interested in industry panels, the career development office runs a [program] where the postdocs can actually go and visit the industry site and talk to their recruiters. So that’s another way that was available to me for networking. 

KALPANA: Obviously as you guys said, conferences are one of the best places to network. So at my organization we are encouraged to go to conferences, meetings and symposia as well. Other than that we also have our own conference every year where we do get to meet a lot of people. We have an annual retreat where we meet a lot of people from different fields as well. So my organization is really doing a good job at organizing these events and other professional development forums. As well, we have a program in which they fund postdoctoral fellows from different parts of especially the city but also the tri-state area. So that actually has a lot of professional development and activities that we also get to be a part of even if we are not funded by that particular program. So we have grant writing sessions and how to present at conferences and things like that. So there’s a lot of career development stuff that NYSCF does. 

BATIST: As a follow-up, thoughts on how to virtually network? 

MENON: I’ve been mostly using LinkedIn as a source and I started sending in messages to my network. So if I can have somebody as a referral that works better I would say. So I can say, “Oh this person referred you to me.” 

GHINIA-TEGLA: For me, LinkedIn and Twitter. I’m not a huge Twitter person in terms of posting things or tweeting all the time. But I do follow a lot of people. And the scientific community on Twitter is strong so just commenting on someone’s tweet or re-tweeting someone or getting in contact with them. I think that’s great. 

BATIST: We’re going to start wrapping up. And we’ll do as our last question: what advice would you give to students that are applying to postdocs soon or now and how they can make themselves a more competitive applicant? 

MENON: I would say, if you’re sending out emails with a cover letter or something, do tailor your cover letters. Not the same cover letter is ok for everyone, I would say. So read up on the material. Maybe you can propose a project or if you’re sending out an email where there is no ad, you can propose something that is related to what you have done and how you would be a good fit in terms of what skills you bring to their lab. So do tailor your cover letter to each specific position. Other than that, use your PI’s network. Maybe the PI could be your referral source to that particular lab. Committee members might also be another source. So think about them also.  

GHINIA-TEGLA: Definitely second everything you said, Deepak, and on top of that I would like to add the fact that not everyone is lucky enough to have a supportive PI. That happens and I want to touch on that because there might be people out there who don’t know where to seek this kind of advice. The whole situation is not completely lost. You can still expand your network. Reach out to people because you need to build your network. And don’t be shy of just emailing someone. And if they don’t answer just follow-up. And don’t reach out only to professors, reach out to peers. Postdocs that you might have met at conferences or other people, friends of friends that you might get in touch with. We always help each other and we are here in science for each other. That’s how we all build our networks. So, don’t give up! Just carry on and look for what you want.  

KALPANA: Yeah, I agree with what you guys said. Also, I think I would add that you should also have a realistic timeline of when you should be able to wrap up your projects in your PhD lab and when you would be able to join as a postdoc. Be patient but also don’t be too rigid about something. Be flexible. I guess, you know, even for Deepak and for me as well, we moved into a completely different field now as postdocs. So don’t be rigid about what you want to do and where you want to go. I wanted to go into academia but now I’m thinking about other options as well. There’s a lot of options that are open to you. Don’t think that if you don’t know something that you will never be able to do it. You can always learn. A postdoc is a kind of training so you can always build up on what you have already from your PhD but also learn so much more in your postdoc. So explore whatever options you can get. As a postdoc, it is also a good time to move away from what you already know and move into spheres that you don’t know anything about. You do have that option as well.                                                       

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BATIST, VOICE-OVER: That’s a wrap for this episode of Alumni Aloud. I want to thank our panelists for sharing their experiences as science postdocs. Remember to stay tuned for more episodes of Alumni Aloud, published every 2 weeks during the fall and spring semesters. Subscribe on iTunes and you’ll automatically be notified of new episodes. Also check out our Facebook, Twitter and career planning website at cuny.is/careerplan for more updates from our office or to make appointments with our career counselors. Thanks for listening and see you next time!   

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