Department of Chemistry March 2023 Newsletter

This edition of the newsletter includes the Mallory Group Lab Profile, department happenings, a message from the Department Head and the GSA, and Jackie Bortiatynski's Teaching Corner.

If you wish to have a story shared in a future newsletter, please contact me at chemcommunications@psu.edu.

Kathryn Harlow, Communications Coordinator

A Message from the Department Head

Enhancing student success: Mentoring

Dear Chemistry Colleagues,

I wrote last time that I would begin addressing how Chemistry is working towards the five points President Bendapudi outlined in her recent Vision for Penn State. Her first point is “Enhance student success”. It is appropriate that students come first on her list because students make up a university and our research efforts. President Bendapudi mentioned many different aspects to enhancing student success, but I’m going to focus on just one: mentoring. I wrote several years ago about letting the undergraduates we teach know “I’m on your side”. Today I’m writing to say the same thing for our graduate students. As PIs, we need to let our students know that we truly want them to succeed, and we have to mean it! There are altruistic reasons for this; helping others and doing the right thing. But there is a pragmatic one too; when our students succeed, we all succeed. When our students publish papers, we all publish papers. When our students have breakthroughs, we all have breakthroughs. When our students win awards, we all receive recognition. Furthermore, I feel it is important to give the most attention not to the student whose project is working, but to the one whose project is stalled out. After all, they need us the most. As PIs, we have accumulated years of experience and we are needed to get them unstuck.

A joy in my own life is my long standing relationships with my own Ph.D. and postdoc mentors. I still talk with them at least once a year. I know that they rejoice in successes I have in my career and they still give me advice. I try to pay it back by modeling their mentoring skills with my own students. My Ph.D. advisor was recently recognized with an outstanding mentoring award from the RNA Society, which inspires me to grow in my own mentoring efforts. Lifelong relationships with our graduate students is one of the deepest joys a faculty member can have. When I look back over my career, I’m most proud of the 28 Ph.D. students I have mentored. So PIs, let's do all we can to enhance our students’ success. It is the right thing to do, and when they are successful, we’re all successful.

Best Wishes,

Phil Bevilacqua

As the weather is getting nicer, we are becoming more and more excited for what is to come! Events to look forward to next month include a Blue & White game tailgate and a hike! Follow us on Instagram (psuchemgsa), Twitter (@ChemGSA_PSU), Facebook (PSU Chemistry GSA) and LinkedIn (Penn State Chemistry Alumni) for more updates.

We are also very excited to announce that a new GSA board has been elected! The board is as follows:

GSA Executive Board 2023-2024: Mary Kate Caucci, President | Kara Pytko, Vice President | Brandt Graham, Secretary | David Olori, Treasurer | Gaurav Dey, Outreach Chair | Olivia Peduzzi, External Liaison

Teaching Corner with Jackie

Soft Skills

This month I wanted to share some professional skills I believe our students need. Specifically, our students need help with communication and to further develop the other skills (engagement, teamwork, and leadership) as critical professional skills, sometimes called “soft skills”. The American Chemical Society (ACS) has recognized this and held a symposium called “Becoming a chemist: Scaffolding authentic professional skill experiences into the undergraduate chemistry and biochemistry curricula” at the Spring 2020 national meeting in Philadelphia. An ACS publication on this symposium is available. The book is divided into 5 sections, and section 2 of the book focuses on scaffolding professional skills into the curriculum. I bring this up for many reasons.

A few weeks ago I attended two Nittany Chemical Society (NCS) meetings that provided the students presenting posters at the 2023 National ACS Meeting in Indianapolis an opportunity to practice their presentations. NCS began hosting these practice sessions last spring to help their members gain feedback and confidence in presenting research posters. I was especially excited to see the presentations again this year because they had a record 18 posters accepted for the meeting and 33 students traveling together to Indianapolis! What I observed in the practice sessions this year was not much different from the practice sessions last year. It was clear the students understood the research they had done in the lab, but you could hear the hesitation in their voices because they were not entirely comfortable giving the presentation. Being nervous about giving a presentation is normal, but there were aspects of their presentations that we would hope they already grasped through their experiences in our courses. The presentations given were not gauged for the broader audience of chemists they would encounter at the meeting. Not all of these students have had the opportunity (yet) to practice in front of their research groups, but I had hoped some basic skills would have come through in these presentations.

I could not help but think that, as chemistry instructors, we need to work with each other to fully align how we are teaching presentation skills. We all know that communication skills are developed through scaffolding experiences and providing targeted and aligned feedback. Are we sending united messages in our feedback when our students give presentations? Are we providing templates and rubrics for these types of assignments that are aligned? If not, how do we fill these holes?

We have incredibly talented students and they look to us for guidance. Sending a unified message on the development of professional skills that are critical to their development as chemists would benefit them greatly as they proceed to the next stage in their careers. I think it is important to remember that we have two courses dedicated to providing introduction and practice of professional skills in our program curriculum: First Year Seminar (PSU 016), taken first semester in the first year, and CHEM 316, taken in the fall of the third or fourth year. Not all chemistry majors take their first year seminar with our department, but they all take CHEM 316, the Professional Chemist. We are fortunate to have a third year seminar course for our majors that continues the development of professional skills and introduces career paths in chemistry. However, we can’t rely solely on this course to provide all the alignment of the development of professional skills introduced in our other courses. We also have an informal Summer Professional Development Program that meets weekly and allows all chemistry majors to participate. This program started in the summer of 2020, and it focuses on science communication and networking opportunities. We need to work together to find opportunities as a team to provide our majors with the continued developmental experiences they need to become great communicators, collaborators, and leaders.

If anyone would like to collaborate on aligning the teaching of professional skills, I would love to meet.

Take care,

Jackie Bortiatynski