Bioscope

Event Research and Design


Challenge
Develop and execute a professional development workshop to help graduate students navigate non-academic career options.

Impact
Created an iterative feedback model to continuously improve the event and engage cross disciplinary participants over the course of 8 semesters. Built a network of entrepreneurs, medical writers, patent lawyers, journal editors, industry researchers, and more.

Role
Committee lead, workshop design, and target audience research.

Research strategy
Graduate students have little exposure to non-academic career paths. To help fill this void, I helped lead the redesign of Bioscope: a day-long professional development workshop. We collected insight through student interviews and relaunched Bioscope as a 2 hour conversation with a diverse panel of scientists operating outside the walls of academia.


We solicited participant feedback and learned how to increase impact by facilitating more open conversations. By combining feedback with analytical information we were able to spot trends and improve each iteration of Bioscope. For example, when we had more requests for industry research jobs like lab technicians, we had a higher percentage of Master’s students compared to doctoral. Observing these kinds of patterns helped us shape the panels to provide representation that would resonate with the majority of students.


Example flyers created for the events.