Lydia Floreck

The best career advice I ever received came from my mom, who's also in the science industry and still loves her job even 30 years later. She always encouraged my sister and me to find the topic that we love and that we're passionate about, and then pick the job after. For me, it was science. I love science, I love how it's changing, I love biology, especially the cell and molecular side of it. Once I figured out what I loved and what I'm interested in, then I took a step from there. I picked my major, I picked my college, and I started taking classes. Then I experimented a little to see what I liked. I got involved in a research lab, I even did some shadowing for a dentist to see if that's what I wanted to do. Once I really dialed in what I like, then I started taking the next step of what do I want my life to look like when I'm working. I think just starting from the very bottom of what makes me happy to study and to do for the rest of my life, and then letting the job come after that, has been really helpful.

I would say to try everything early on and figure out what branch of science you want to work in. Do you want to work on cancer, or something else? And do you want to be at the bench, behind the scenes, doing your own thing, or do you want to be running meetings and talking to buyers and selling your product? Figure out what piece of the puzzle you want to be. There are so many internships and research labs and summer opportunities for you to experiment and see what you really like. I think you should start early and reach out to people, because they're super helpful. For me at Villanova, our alumni network is awesome, and we can get in touch with alumni who will be mentors to us and tell us about the companies they work at and what they're looking for. Networking in the scientific industry is super important, similar to how business is. So I think just start early, try things out while you can early on, and the rest will fall into place.

I'd have to say the funding cuts in science have been just a huge thing, not even specifically for me, but for other students I know who I worked in the lab with who were trying to pursue PhDs. All of the labs they looked into have lost funding, and I've watched people at my school, like lab techs, lose their jobs because there's no funding. It's really sad. That's why I've started to look at international opportunities, even for research labs, because there is funding over here in Europe, and they believe in science and they want people working on it. I think not only the money part of it, because if you don't have the funding you can't do the research, but the pushback of not wanting to discover these things and not wanting to create new therapies and medications, and people not believing in it, has been just really discouraging as a young biology student who wants to make a career and a life out of this. It's been nice finding a community of people, especially here abroad, with professors who have dedicated their life to this and see how important it is. Surrounding yourself with people who do see the importance of it and want to support you has been how I've tried to navigate that.