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Second Annual CNS/CELEST Student/Postdoc Career Day
The CNS/CELEST 2nd Career Day, sponsored by the Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, Science, and Technology (CELEST), was held on October 22, 2008 at the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS) at Boston University .
Three hi-tech companies and one BU center participated in this student-organized event. Representatives from Kiva Systems, Oracle Corporation, Biomimetic Systems, and BU's Institute for Technology, Entrepreneurship & Commercialization interacted with students and postdocs from selected departments from Boston University and the larger CELEST community, including the departments of Cognitive and Neural Systems, Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology. Approximately 35 students and postdocs were in attendance.
The advertisement and organization of the event was supported by a website http://www.cns.bu.edu/careerday developed by Greg Amis, a PhD student at the CNS department. This website helped students and postdocs familiarize themselves with company representatives before the event and allowed for the companies to have access the CVs of attendees ahead of time.
The Career Day was held from 8:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m. in the CNS auditorium. One of the topics of this year's career day was entrepreneurship. Pete Russo, Director of ITEC, and Socrates Deligeorges, President and CEO of Biomimetic Systems, a BU spin-off, talked about the theory and practice of starting up companies from academia.
Company presentations were followed by a panel discussion and lunch and breakout sessions where students, postdocs, and company representatives had the chance to closely interact and learn about each other's work, with some forming valuable connections.
Jeffrey Markowitz co-organized the Career Day. "One focus of this year event," said Jeffrey, "was entrepreneurship, which is an often overlooked aspect of "life after academia". Today's event was a successful step in filling this gap."
Many thanks to the Career Day organizing committee: Jeff Markowitz, Greg Amis, Max Versace, Heather Ames, Arun Ravindran, Ben Chandler, Karthik Srinivasan, Himanshu Mhatre, and Neel Kishan.