A reminder that our next FOR meeting will be this Thursday (April 30th) at 6pm at Tufts Medical in downtown Boston. The exact room is Jaharas 508, at 150 Harrison Avenue.

Below is the agenda. Of note, we will be looking for volunteers to help with various FOR related activities over the coming months, particularly the symposium in the fall.

Also, if you know of anyone else who might be interested please forward this on. We would love to have new people joining the group.

-Kristin

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On the agenda is a discussion of our short/medium term goals and the actions to be taken to achieve those goals. We are looking for lots of volunteers to help with various items so think about how you would like to get involved.

We are proposing the following as our short/medium term goals:

Launching sustained conversations about the structure and efficiency of science to connect and educate all who are invested in the future of science
Improving the collection and dissemination of data on the training and workforce of early career researchers. This includes data on postdoc numbers, career outcomes, satisfaction, and job demand.

In the context of these goals we will have the following action areas/committees:

Sustainability – Define the organizational structure for FOR going forward. Create by-laws and work on what needs to be done to become a non-profit.
Connectivity (both online and offline) – Increase blogging on the website, update/redesign the website to make information more accessible, update content on the website with additional links and resources, and organize meetups.
Symposium – Plan and organize the fall symposium.
Transparency – Work on compiling and making available existing data and collecting data that is missing on workforce structure, such as the numbers of postdocs, career outcomes, and satisfaction.

There will be time at the meeting to provide feedback on these proposed goals and action areas. We are soliciting volunteers for each of these areas at the meeting. If you are unable to attend the meeting and would like to volunteer, please let me know which area you want to be involved with. You are welcome to be involved in more than one area if you would like.

At the meeting we would also like to discuss the upcoming fall symposium. It has been proposed that the theme of the meeting could be around the topic of transparency and the recommendations we made in the white paper about increased data on the workforce structure, STEM job demand, etc. If you have ideas for topics or ideas for speakers please bring them with you to the meeting.