Postdoctoral and Predoctoral Openings in Health and Aging at The University of North Carolina

The Carolina Program on Health and Aging Research (CPHAR) at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has two openings at the postdoctoral level for postdoctoral fellows, and three openings for predoctoral fellows, to commence this summer. Postdoctoral fellows are recruited nationally, while predoctoral applications are accepted from currently enrolled UNC doctoral students.

Supported by a National Research Service Award from the NIH to the UNC Institute on Aging, the program has 39 faculty mentors from public health, the social sciences, and clinical sciences. CPHAR has a strong commitment to aging research focusing on diversity and minority issues, rural health, health promotion, health services, and aging workforce research. Fellows will have the opportunity to publish from their doctoral work, participate in ongoing research, and develop new projects in a strong, multidisciplinary research environment. UNC's strengths in the clinical, public health and social sciences, as well as its many leading research institutes such as the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, the Carolina Population Center, the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, and the Institute's own Center for Aging and Diversity (directed by current GSA President, Peggye Dilworth-Anderson) enhance the quality of the program. For more information, see www.aging.unc.edu/research/cphar.

The application deadline is March 15, 2010. Contact the Program Director, Victor Marshall (victor_marshall@unc.edu) or the Program Administrator, Cathy Hatley (cathat@schsr.unc.edu).

"Navigating the GSA Conference" brochure

The 2009 edition of the "How to Navigate the Annual GSA Conference" brochure is now available.

Members needed to review ESPO awards

GSA's Emerging Scholar and Professional Organization (ESPO) is seeking GSA members — from all disciplines and career stages — to serve as reviewers for the ESPO paper and poster awards to be presented at the upcoming Annual Scientific Meeting. To indicate interest in becoming a reviewer, please contact ESPO Student Paper Award Committee Chair Chivon Mingo, MA, at cmingo@cas.usf.edu by 5 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, September 30.

Travel grants to annual meeting

The Carol A. Schutz Scholarship fund presents five students (ESPO or transitional member) $400 travel grants to attend the Annual Meeting. To apply, email gsaespo@gmail.com with your name and contact information, GSA section membership, presentation title (if applicable), and if you are an undergraduate presenter (if applicable) by September 18th, 2009.

Volunteers needed at meeting

Volunteers are needed for GSA’s 62nd Annual Scientific Meeting!

Volunteers will receive complimentary meeting registration in exchange for eight hours of work assisting at the registration desk, answering attendees’ questions, and supporting GSA Staff and the Local Arrangements Committee. If you are interested in volunteering, please contact Ellie Daniels at eldaniels@msm.edu.

Room sharing for conference

If you would like to find another GSA member to share a hotel room with for the upcoming conference, please go to our Facebook group page ("GSA Emerging Scholar & Professional Organization") and use the discussion board to post and connect with one another.

ESPO & The Economy (Part 1)

From the April newsletter (Amber Watts, Secretary):

ESPO & The Economy (Part 1): Outlook, Impact, & The Recovery & Reinvestment Act

Many emerging scholars are seeking employment or research funding. Academia and aging research & service are among the many industries that have been affected by the economic crunch. Many university budgets have seen major cut backs. Competition for grants has been stiff. This month we focus on the possible impact of the economy on emerging scholars. Next month’s issue will address what emerging scholars can do to improve their chances at making it in the current economic climate.

We interviewed C. Joanne Grabinski, author of 101 Careers in Gerontology, to get her take on the situation.

Outlook
Her first message is to avoid an outlook of “doom and gloom.” Given the aging of the population, there is still demand for careers related to aging. The need for aging experts & professionals is not declining. In fact, the effect of the changing economy on older adults presents opportunities for gerontologists to help. Some areas that may see new opportunities are training older workers on computer & technology skills, assistance with job transitions, and unemployment counseling. For example, centers for work & families deal with credit counseling, consumer counseling, and helping older adults transition back to productive living after being laid off. Advocates will be needed for mental health, homelessness, and other human service fields.

Impact
When a shift occurs in the economy, some jobs may be lost while others may remain relatively stable. Lower level positions like paid caregivers may see higher rates of unemployment. However professionals like social workers, nurses, and geriatric physicians probably have more job security. There is also a need for educators to train new professionals in these fields. There will likely be new jobs in the health work force at all levels.

Pay rates for those beginning new jobs are likely to be lower than in recent years, especially at the masters, bachelors, and associate degree levels. They are likely to be wage-based and have more limited benefit packages. Full time jobs may be cut back into part time positions. Many will need to consider two part time jobs. Academic salaries and benefits are likely to remain fairly competitive, but employees may pay more for their insurance. The number of open positions may decrease for a time, but late-career academics will still be likely to retire and create new openings.

Recovery & Reinvestment Act
The current president’s economic plan is focused on creating jobs across the spectrum.
Some of the aging-related areas targeted by the Recovery & Reinvestment Act:
$100 million for senior nutrition meals
$34.3 million for independent living services (including for older blind adults)
$120 million for employment for low-income older Americans
$700 million for training of health professionals (at all levels)
and many others

Emerging scholars looking for research and job opportunities may want to consider some of these fields that are growing and new areas that have received recent funding increases.

Next month’s issue will have tips for how to make yourself stand out in the job search and survive these tough economic times.

Special thanks to Kelly Niles-Yokum for connecting ESPO with C. Joanne Grabinski.

C. Joanne Grabinski is President/Educator & Consultant for AgeEd, a private consulting firm and a Lecturer of Gerontology at Eastern Michigan University.


Websites with more information:

• http://newageofaging.org/content/american_recovery_and_reinvestment_act_2009
  
• http://recovery.gov
  
• http://www.NCOA.org

AGHE Student Representative application

APPLY NOW: AGHE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE
APLICATION DEADLINE: MAY 15th, 2009

Applications are being accepted now through MAY 15th for the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education (AGHE) Student Representative Position on the AGHE Executive Committee, 2010-2011.

AGHE is fast becoming the international leader in advancing education on aging and is the only institutional membership organization devoted primarily to gerontology and geriatrics education since 1974. AGHE’s mission is two-fold (1) To advance gerontology and geriatrics education in academic institutions; and (2) To provide leadership and support of gerontology and geriatrics education to faculty and students in educational institutions. AGHE is the educational unit of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA).

The role of the AGHE Student Representative is to facilitate student interests and address student concerns within AGHE. Responsibilities include: serving as a voting member of the AGHE Executive Committee; chairing the AGHE Student Committee; sitting on various AGHE Committees and Task Forces as requested; running events at Annual Meetings of AGHE and GSA; collaborating with Sigma Phi Omega, GSA Emerging Scholars and Professions Organization (ESPO), and coordinating with the AGHE Student Institutional Representatives.

This is a great opportunity for you to assume a leadership role in the gerontology community. The position offers an excellent learning experience involving broad networking and leadership preparation. If you are concerned with student affairs and gerontological education, are innovative, and work well with others, consider applying. Details below:

CRITERIA:
To be considered for the Student Representative position, you must be enrolled in an undergraduate, masters, doctoral, or fellowship program, and must retain student status (full or part-time) for the next two years. This first year you would serve as the Student Representative Designee (June 1, 2009 through March 7, 2010) to be immediately followed by a year as the Student Representative (March 7, 2010 through March 2011). Finally, you should be able to attend both the GSA and AGHE Annual Meetings.

APPLICATION PROCESS:
Email a cover letter expressing your interest in applying for the position. Within this letter please address why you are interested in being selected the next AGHE student representative. A current copy of your curriculum vitae should also be attached in this email.

Send these materials to Angela Baker at abaker@aghe.org by May 15th, 2009. Send yours in today!

For more information about the position, please do not hesitate to contact me, Lydia Manning, AGHE Student Representative, at manninlk@muohio.edu

Selecting a journal for your work

From the March 2009 GSA newsletter (Amber Watts, Secretary):

One of the primary goals of emerging scholars is to learn the ins and outs of getting published, yet we rarely have formal training on issues like how to select a journal that suits our work. Here are some tips that might help.

Start by asking yourself some questions:

1. What are my goals?
Is your piece informative, proposing theory, building on previous results. Many journals have a statement of goals that help you assess whether your work fits. Some journals only accept empirical work; others publish literature reviews, qualitative studies, or policy analysis.

2. Who is my intended audience?
Are you talking to MDs, policy makers, academics? Who would you expect to be most interested in your results and their implications? You may want to consider journals specific to Gerontology, but journals from other disciplines may also be a good fit. Try education journals, nursing journals, journals of family studies, policy journals, just to name a few.

3. What tier am I shooting for?
Not all papers will make it to Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Does that mean you shouldn’t try? Get advice from co-authors and mentors about the tier of journal you should shoot for. In deciding to aim high, you may want to consider how long you are willing to wait on getting reviews or revising the paper. If it gets rejected you might want to have a back up plan for where to send it next.

4. Where do the people I know publish?
In what journals do your mentors publish? What about your peers or students that completed their degrees before you? What journals do you cite in your work?

Do your research:

1. Find relevant journals.
Use an electronic database to do a broad search for possible journals. For example, there are 41 journals with titles including the word “aging” and 23 with the word “gerontology” listed on PubMed Journal Database. Only 3 come up when you narrow the search to “psychology” and “aging” as title keywords.

2. Search individual journal websites.
Most journals have a description, statement of purpose and intended audience, instructions for authors who want to submit. You can also look at the list of editors for the journal. Are they names you recognize from your field?

3. Look at examples of other articles published in the journal.
A good way to determine what the journal will accept is by seeing what they have already published. Do the articles seem similar in topic, scope, audience, methods, manuscript length to what you are hoping to submit? Has your topic already been covered ad nauseum in that journal? Look through the tables of contents for the last few years and take an in depth look at a couple of articles.

4. Find out the journal’s impact factor.
The impact factor is a rating scale that gives us an idea of how important the journal is, how frequently it is read and cited, and indirectly indicates how tough it is likely to be to get accepted there. You may want to start with the less visible, lower tier journals for your first submissions.

5. Ask the editor.
Once the paper is ready to submit, it never hurts to email the editor your abstract and ask if it is something they are interested in at the moment.

6. Look for calls for papers.
Often journals have special issues on a certain topic and put out a request for submissions. For example, The Journal of Aging and Social Policy recently put out a call for papers on Advancing Aging Policy for the Second Decade of the Century.

Methodology training workshops

From the February 2009 GSA newsletter (Amber Watts, Secretary):

A topic I commonly hear discussed among graduate students and other emerging scholars is the difficulty of keeping up with the newest research methods. Maybe you saw a great paper at GSA and wanted to learn how they did that with their data! Sometimes the courses you need are not offered. Other times you run into snags when you actually try to apply what you’ve learned in class to real data using new and complex data analysis programs. Maybe there is no one in your department who has the time to sit down with you and help you get your programs running or interpret the meaning of your results output.

One good way to get training and assistance is by attending one of the many statistical methodology workshops offered in several regions around the country and abroad. Most of these workshops offer an opportunity to learn about new methods, statistical software programming, and get personalized attention to your specific research questions. Many allow you to bring your own data and get assistance running your analyses. Courses are offered using a variety of different data analysis software packages including SAS, LISREL, Mplus, and others. This is great for help with dissertation data or writing research papers. If you are looking for opportunities to use publicly available datasets, for example the Health and Retirement Study (HRS-AHEAD), often there are courses for that purpose as well that can teach you how to get permission to use the data and how to use it.

These workshops are usually hosted by universities or professional organizations (like GSA) and many are offered in the summer time so they won’t interfere with your academic calendar. It is also a great opportunity for networking with other scholars in and outside of your area of research who use similar methods. It is a great addition to your CV and it couldn’t hurt to go check out other universities for potential future employment opportunities. Some programs offer student rates, scholarships, or may be partly financed through your graduate program. It is not too soon to start thinking about registering for summer workshops now.

Topics that have recently been covered include:
Structural Equation Modeling, Multilevel Modeling, Longitudinal Data Analysis Techniques, Meta-Analysis, Item Response Theory, Social Network Dynamics, Factor Analysis, Categorical Data Analysis, Growth Curve Modeling, Missing Data Analysis, Survival Analysis

There are many courses available, some of which are listed on GSA’s events calendar starting in the month of June 2009.

You can also check with your own university for available courses. If you know of other courses that you’d like to share with ESPO or GSA members, contact us (amberwatts@ku.edu) or add them to the GSA events calendar.

Increasing communication and participation in ESPO

From the January 2009 GSA newsletter (Amber Watts, Secretary):

As the new secretary of the ESPO section of GSA, I welcome my first newsletter as an opportunity to introduce myself, highlight the successes of ESPO over the past year, and introduce some goals for our upcoming year.

As a student who defended her dissertation in December 2008, I was very aware this year of the role of GSA’s annual meeting in the lives of its emerging scholars. I was a keen observer of the value of ESPO for professional networking, job hunting, establishing a unique role in the field, and developing interdisciplinary collaboration.

During the past year, ESPO has made progress on several programs including the Campus Ambassador program and ad-hoc planning committee. A major goal this year was to increase communication and participation among ESPO members outside of the annual meeting. An ESPO Facebook page and academic blog were some creative solutions to reach this goal. Please check them out online (see the web addresses below). We had continuing success at the annual meeting with our traditional events including the paper award, wine and cheese, and fellows meet the students.

To increase participation at the annual meeting, several new ideas were debuted including an ESPO lounge for members to network in an informal setting, the ESPO dine around to give members a chance to network with colleagues over dinner, the creation of materials to get the word out about activities of interest to emerging scholars, and encouragement of participation in the IAGG meeting in Paris (July 2009).

For the coming year, new ideas continue to be explored to improve the resources available to ESPO members. One new idea is the development of a reviewer-in-training program to mentor junior scholars in the process of journal reviews. We also hope to introduce online resources for emerging scholars such as example grant applications and tips about choosing journals for manuscript submission.

We love to hear innovative ideas from ESPO members throughout the year. Please feel free to let us know how ESPO and GSA can better serve the needs of its emerging scholars. Contact me at amberwat@usc.edu.

Amber Watts
ESPO Secretary

For more information see the following resources:
ESPO Homepage
http://www.geron.org/Students/

ESPO Blog
http://gsa-espo.blogspot.com/

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com
Search: GSA Emerging Scholar & Professional Organization

ESPO articles in GSA newsletter

On this blog, we will post the ESPO articles that you read in the GSA newsletter that you receive in the mail every month. This way, you will have easy electronic access to previous articles.

Sometimes the articles provide helpful advice or information, but you have lost the paper newsletter. Now you will be able to reference them again by visiting the ESPO blog.

Ideas for fundraising?

Do you have any ideas for fundraising? ESPO needs to raise funds to pay for the highly successful ESPO Lounge, as well as the annual Wine and Cheese networking event.

Both the ESPO Lounge and the Wine & Cheese have been extremely helpful for our members. Please leave a comment below with any suggestions for fundraising. Thank you!

Blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Webpage

We have several ways of staying in touch with our ESPO members -- our blog, Facebook, Twitter, and webpage. Through these methods, we will publicize ESPO events, activities, newsletter articles, as well as relevant announcements and information for young gerontology scholars.

Blog
Since you are already on our blog, you know how to get here! Our blog address is gsa-espo.blogspot.com. The blog is interactive in that you can leave comments to posts. Please feel free to do so.

Facebook
There are two ways in which we are using Facebook to communicate with our members. The first is our Facebook group, "GSA Emerging Scholar & Professional Organization." Search for our group and request to be added as a member.

Second, we have a Facebook "member" called "GSA ESPO." Search for this member and send a friend request. We will add you as a friend. This connects you with the current Technology Chair.

Twitter
Follow us on Twitter at gsaespo@gmail.com.



Webpage
Our webpage on the GSA website provides information about ESPO, including resources such as "ESPO 101" and "Navigating the Annual Scientific Meeting."

Please leave us feedback and suggestions for how we can use these technological tools to serve you better!

New Technology Chair -- Introduction

Hello ESPO members!

My name is Michelle Cheuk, and I am serving as your ESPO Technology Chair for this year, 2008-09. I am a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. My research area is the social context of disability onset in the older population.

I look forward to taking advantage of the technological tools available to help our members stay informed about ESPO activities. I welcome any comments and suggestions that you have for how we can serve you better. Feel free to leave a comment to this post or e-mail me at gsaespo@gmail.com.

Thank you, and cheers!

Michelle