Partnering with business faculty to boost soft skills

The daily lives of graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in the sciences are filled with a variety of tasks: reading, studying, long hours in the lab, writing reports, creating cell cultures, analyzing data, and more.

As students and postdocs begin job searching, they find themselves in need of new skill sets. Now they must present themselves and their work persuasively, manage a budget, and negotiate effectively when job offers arrive.

Andy Bullock, associate director of the University of Notre Dame’s Harper Cancer Research Institute (HCRI), realized that many of these “soft” skills, which are crucial for leading a lab or landing a job outside academia, are not part of the curriculum.

“Excellent cancer research happens right here at Harper. And we have one of the most successful business schools in the country, right across the street. So I thought, ‘Why don’t we do something together?’” he says.

He also recalled a presentation by Notre Dame alumnus Andrew Petros, now a Research Fellow at AbbVie, who presented a Career Pathways seminar on drug discovery in 2018. Petros told the group that the one skill that he thought was most important is business communication. The ability to summarize a project in a few minutes—to give an “elevator pitch”—is crucial to a project’s success.

Bullock then decided to reach out to Mendoza College of Business faculty members. Together with Amanda McKendree, teaching professor in the Department of Management & Organization and Director of the Eugene D. Fanning Center for Business Communication, Bullock solidified a vision and the learning goals for a new program called the Strategic Management Initiative (SM).

It was planned that the HCRI program would have four focus areas: Budgeting and Management; Conflict Management; Negotiation; and Research Presentation Skills. McKendree designed individual modules and identified ideal Mendoza faculty members to instruct each module: Jeffrey Bernel, Adjunct Teaching Professor (Budgeting & Management), Joe Holt, Teaching Professor (Negotiation), and James O’Rourke, Teaching Professor (Research Presentation Skills). McKendree leads the Conflict Management module for the participants.

The goal of the SMI is “to create an educational opportunity that emphasizes practical skills and reflection as well as peer and instructor feedback” geared toward strengthening the business acumen of early career, cross-disciplinary researchers, said Amanda.

The positive feedback from program participants is the best testimony to the program’s lasting impact.

“My favorite part of the program was the negotiation workshop and the tech review/elevator pitch workshop,” said Nicholas Ross, a bioengineering graduate student in the (Thomas) O’Sullivan Lab.“The former armed us with tools that we can use when negotiating our salaries in the future, and the latter assisted us in better disseminating our research to the masses,”

For Kyler Pugh, former graduate student in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, the SMI had a lasting impact on his future career. “Recently, I have been considering pursuing an MBA after my PhD, and the SMI program has been instrumental in solidifying my decision,” he stated. “The engaging lectures and elevator pitches helped open my eyes to the synergies between science and business. I am very grateful to the Harper Cancer Research Institute and the amazing instructors from the Mendoza College of Business for creating an amazing program that has made a lasting impact on my future career.”

Future plans include engaging broadly in Spring 2024 with graduate students and postdocs while identifying those students we think would benefit from the SMI, facilitating meetings with previous SMI participants and potential ones, and building a support network.

If you are an HCRI-affiliated graduate student or postdoc interested in the Strategic Management Institute, please contact Khoa Huynh at khuynh@nd.edu.

Originally posted on Harper Cancer Research Institute’s news page.