IAMO Alumni Talk

Reflection on what the daily work routine in research requires and what the frequent change of location, both at national and international level, means. Furthermore, working in academic research and in the European Commission will be compared.

The talk highlights how vital it is to establish and maintain new contacts and how significant these connections are for personal research projects. In addition, the benefits and challenges of working in two countries at the same time are considered.

This time, the IAMO Alumni Podcast does not shed light on the career path of an IAMO alumnus, but offers an interview with IAMO-Director Prof. Dr Thomas Herzfeld, one of the three scientific directors of the Institute. In the talk with IAMO PhD student Laura Moritz he speaks about the challenge of balancing strategic career and family planning, the need to always have a plan B and the immense importance of having your own academic network.

The talk between Dr. Henriette Hanf, Dr. Klodjan Rama and IAMO PhD student Janine Läpple was produced during the IAMO Forum 2020. Henriette and Klodjan did their PhD at IAMO and now work for the GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), Henriette in Germany, Klodjan from Albania. They talk about planned and not so planned career paths, reflect their time at IAMO and discuss challenges and opportunities of an academic education that should prepare the candidates also for a job market outside research. They also discuss which soft skills are important for careers outside the academic world, and what prospects foreign academics have when they return to their home country after successfully completing their PhDs.

The first episode of the IAMO Alumni Podcast is a conversation between Dr Lijuan Miao and PhD Student Daniela Peña Guerrero. Lijuan Miao has been a researcher at IAMO since 2017 and her main research interests are land use and climate change. After three years in Halle, during which she worked in various research projects at IAMO, she is now returning to her home university in China, where she will work as an assistant professor in the future. Daniela Peña Guerrero has been a PhD student at IAMO since 2019 and is researching the effects of climate change on agricultural production in Central Asia. Her talk will focus on the planning and predictability of career paths, on differences between the German and Chinese higher education systems and on a very special challenge: learning the German language.