Helping Young Scientists Get Started

Tracking scientific career news and trends to enlighten young scientists is done at Science's Next Wave, a weekly online career magazine for students and young scientists. When Scotland native Hazel Crocker arrived in the Cambridge office in 1997 to begin reaching out to academic and scientific communities, Next Wave officially became international—two years after its US kickoff. Since then, she says, they have a better network, international universities with access to Next Wave increased from eight to 100 universities and they even have student representatives.

Hazel Crocker, Kirstie Urquhart

Within that short while, Next Wave has developed different home pages for different countries, adopting even the local spelling styles. "Each page has a local feel, in that the pages are written in the native language of that country and cover relevant topics, which change weekly, according to what is an issue in that region… We're filling an information gap; we don't deal with recruitment at all," Crocker says.

"Now, the UK site is a UK site, and that's really important," says Kirstie Urquhart, the European editor. "For example, a German scientist working in the UK could look at both the UK and German sites and see different material.

"Giving people the feeling they can change is important," adds Urquhart, a former postdoc who sympathizes with the feeling of not having had the information she needed to make informed decisions about her career. "You had to figure it out and do it yourself, or just drown."

Urquhart, who formerly reported on the UK, is now responsible for covering career advice and mobility on a pan-European web portal for 27 countries.

—Lisa Onaga

17 June 2002

For more information, read related articles:

• Growing Presence in Europe for Science, AAAS
• Editors in UK Make Science More Accessible
• Covering the Latest Scientific News—With a European Twist
• Promoting Science and AAAS from a Global Perspective