How to give a great elevator pitch #SCSDublin2015

The ISCB Student Council organized an hour long session on elevator pitch or “selling yourself” as part of Applied Knowledge Education Sessions (AKES) on the 11th of July. This session along with others that followed under the theme “How to navigate a bioinformatics career path” was a collaboration between the Student Council, the Junior Principal Investigator group (JPI) and the The ISCB Computational Biology Education — ISCB Communities of Special Interest (COBE COSI). The motivation behind this session was from the fact that it is sometimes difficult to develop a career path and that it would be useful to have some presentations that serve as guidance and ideas for the future.

The speaker for the elevator pitch session was Dr. Mick Watson, Director of Ark-Genomics at University of Edinburgh. After a brief introduction on the importance of a good elevator pitch, he asked the audience to jot down what they would say to a potential employer if all they had were three points to share about themselves/their work. Mick then invited volunteers to do a round of speeches. It was interesting to see the different angles the students approached the idea from. While some talked about their skills, others dived into the details of their research.

There was some feedback on the various elevator speeches following which Mick provided some tips that he considered important to setting a good impression. “What are you doing and why?”, “how are you achieving that?” and “why should someone remember you?” (for your work) are some of the points I could remember from the list. He went on to give his elevator speech with three neat statements which went on to become inspiration for round two of volunteer pitches.

The same volunteers returned with new speeches and wow! There were some nice improvements and I personally picked up a few tips for my elevator pitch that I would need to deliver in the future. So a big thank you to Mick for his presentation and the volunteers for being brave!

I hope the other attendees of this session found Mick’s talk interesting too. The ISCB Student Council hopes to organize more events of such nature year after year and we hope to see you at our symposium next year in Florida!

Disclaimer: Any views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily those of PLOS.