Tools for your PhD Journey – My Path - a podcast by David Mendes, PhD

Download"Tools for Your PhD Journey"Now !Episode transcript:
Hi everyone! Today I'm bringing you a different episode. Today I'll be talking about my path - what brought me here, to what I do today and to the Papa PhD adventure.Your PhD is literally an adventure - it's an exploration, a journey into the unknown. And some of the greatest lessons and memories of grad school that you will bring with you throughout your life are going to be the obstacles you found and surpassed along the way. And this is one of the most important messages that I'd like to share during this episode. What I'm going to talk about throughout is going to be what my career path has been like until today and what lessons I learned going through my PhD - what worked for me and what didn't work for me.And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I have prepared for you a toolkit where I summarize the most important lessons I've learned. A set of strategies that will help you go through your degree smoothly and be prepared for your transition into the non-academic job space or into whatever comes after your degree.I'll also try and share advice on how to be very intentional from day one in planning ahead and preparing your professional life, no matter what it ends up being. Again, I will share a link to this toolkit at the end of the episode, so stay with me.Now to talk about my story. Eventually you'll see that I got stumped along the way, that I hit some roadblocks, but I have lessons learned from all of those obstacles and all of those difficulties. Plus, now having interviewed 30 plus guests on the Papa PhD podcast, I have also tried to collect some of the best advice that they have shared on the show, and to distill it into this document that I'll be sharing at the end of the episode.So – My academic path started in Portugal. Coming out of high school I had two possible avenues – two things I liked and was good at. And these were languages and natural sciences. So, eventually, I followed the scientific path and did a bachelor's in microbiology and genetics at the University of Lisbon. After my bachelor's, I stuck around the lab where I had done my final project for a couple of years, TAing in different training programs and doing research in kind of a post-bac experience. Eventually, I had the opportunity of taking part in a program proomted by INFARMED – the drug and medicine agency in Portugal. At the time, generic drugs were being introduced in Portugal and I had the privilege of being part of a small team of graduates who were trained and sent out to medical centres around the country to explain what generic drugs were to the medical community, to dispel any worries or doubts they had about the quality and safety of these products.It was a very formative year: we were trained on public speaking, on how to present the data, on how to discuss objections. All skills that really served me later on. And it was my first professional experience out of the lab.After one year as an INFARMED representative, the government changed and the program was closed.After that, through connections that I had made in this position, I had the privilege of being invited to give lab classes, but at a private university in Lisbon - a school that was specifically offering training for people who wanted to have technical careers in the health domain. This was a great experience. I really, really enjoyed teaching. But what happened was that, looking at the professors, I started thinking that"I'd really like to teach at that level". And what was the requirement to teach at that level? Well, it was to hold a PhD.So, five years after having finished my undergrad degree, I decided to embark on the PhD adventure. I interviewed in two PhD programs and I was accepted in the BEB program offered by the Center for Neuroscience and cell Biology at the University of Coimbra, a program with a strong neuroscience component.I was part of the 2003 cohort.

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