graduate researcher

graduate assistant

research associate

postdoctoral fellow

research assistant

Colorado State University

My goal is to extend my knowledge, experiences, and diverse cultural background of the past 25 years in preclinical and clinical scientific research to the development of national trials and regulatory issues in prevention of obesity and cancer. As a principal investigator (PI) or co-PI, I have been actively responsible for or involved in at least six concurrent collaborated research projects or human trials (e.g. TREC) with separate staffs and budgets in initiating research projects, developing protocols, conducting studies, documenting findings, interpreting results in published papers, and supervising staffs. I have held the positions of Associate Professor and chief of molecular biological section for eight years and served as an appointed member of scientific peer-review panels in the USA and China for 4 and 5 years. The energy balance and obesity as well as breast cancer prevention projects have been ongoing for 16 years and consist of 1 clinical trial and 3 preclinical studies. More than 25 papers have been published in addition to presentations. From the clinical trial, I gained abilities in experiment planning, development, implementation, and evaluation, collaboration with clinical staffs, sample collection, transfer, and storage, Lab analyses, and results elucidation in papers.
Skills:
During past several years, I have been involved in scientific peer review meetings both in USA and China and accumulated extensive experiences that are important in determining and recruiting reviewer expertise, assigning applications/proposals to reviewers, providing appropriate guidance and instruction to reviewers, monitoring submission timeline and quality of draft critiques, providing appropriate feedback to reviewers, administrating review meeting, and performing quality control. From the involvement and management in multiple and diverse scientific research projects and community services as well as writing review critique, grants and papers, I gained high level of biomedical or other related subject matter expertise and many skills in time management, verbal and written communication, writing and editing, and meeting facilitation. The abilities gained also include collaboration with leading figures in the scientific community at different organizations, representatives of academic institutions, and members of foreign scientific organizations to exchange information on scientific research and coordinate projects of mutual interest.

My typical day at CSU is working with trades personnel to acquire or maintain professional licensures and certifications.  I handle everything from event coordination, to include travel, to all of the accounting activities that go hand in hand with registrations, renewals, record keeping and so on.  I  maintain training records for the staff both hard copy and digitally.  This position is a culmination of the different positions that I have held during my tenure at CSU.

I have learned many organizational skills between the positions that I have held as well as computer software applications.  While these programs are not what private sector may incorporate, the challenges that a higher education institute faces when working with different software programs for accounting, recordkeeping, etc., have played a big roll in honing my critical thinking skills, especially in the financial portion of my job.

The people I work with at Facilities Management are a hard working, dedicated group as are all of the staff at CSU.  The people are what really make the university great.

The most difficult part of my job is finding time to accomplish all of the tasks that everyday activity demands.  I use a great deal of organizational prioritization to stay on top of an ever increasing workload, while dealing with the day to day foot traffic of the needs of the department.

My favorite part of the job is working with the people and getting them the training they need to accomplish their jobs with the tools that they need to be successful.  I also enjoy the financial reconciliation, as it gives me a chance to slow the pace a bit and use my problem solving skills for budgets and transactions that affect the same.

I was responsible for a majority of the writing for the College of Business, including magazine feature stories, newsletter articles and press releases. I also had the responsibility of editing the writing of the other student workers. Furthermore, I played an important role in enhancing the College of Business social media presence. I managed the college's Facebook and Twitter pages and was the lead on all blogging activity. 

I learned a lot about working in a team environment, how to properly execute media relations, what it takes to produce a high-quality magazine, and many best practices concerning social media promotions and monitoring. 

I thoroughly enjoy working with my colleagues at the College of Business. The environment is professional but fun, and my coworkers were dedicated to conveying an accurate and positive picture of the College of Business. 

As I spent more time at the College of Business, I was handed the responsibility of training new employees and editing their work. The college adheres strictly to CSU's style guide, so it was sometimes difficult to make sure that all employees were referencing the style guide as diligently as they should. 

I loved the trust that my supervisors placed in me. I was entrusted with generating content for the Facebook and Twitter pages as well as the blog. I also interviewed high-profile clients for our articles, and they knew that I could execute these interviews autonomously. 

I have worked at CSU for seven years, first for CSU Online and then the Office of Engagement and Extension (OEE), which now oversees CSU Online. My experience has varied VASTLY depending on leadership, which has completely changed every 1-2 years. I have had multiple managers, directors, senior directors, and VPs (and several interim leaders). Some have been excellent (including my current manager). Others have been an absolute nightmare and forced to resign. The only constant has been change. For a few years, our leadership was a revolving door. I'm sure it's not this way in some departments, but that has been my experience with OEE. Fortunately, our current leadership seems much more stable/capable and my dept. is finally about 90% fully staffed (for a time, it was a skeleton crew). As a whole, CSU offers good work-life balance, very generous PTO and sick leave, and has a very ethical hiring/firing process. You will not get fired simply because someone doesn't like you. In general, most people are kind and care about education and helping students. Lack of competitive pay/salary for rank-and-file staff is the biggest issue (we only received a 1% cost of living increase in 2024), along with a lack of upward mobility for many positions. However, if you value work/life balance over money, CSU is a good choice (but again, your experience may vary depending on the department).

As a hazardous waste specialist II at CSU, my daily work load covered an array of duties and responsibilities. As a team three, my manager, co-worker and myself went around CSU campus collecting hazardous waste from all research facilities. Once this was complete, we collected the waste at our facility to then segregate and bulk into appropriate drums or cells. With this, we took responsibility for a pilot chemical inventory set up by my boss and also the chemical amnesty program. We worked in accordance with state and federal regulations while going above and beyond to promote CSU's mission statement of sustainability. Through working there for two years, I obtained multiple certifications (40 hour Hazwoper, DOT, CDL, GHS) while gaining very valuable work experience. At times this job was very dangerous because of the nature of the work. This in turn gave me job experience few undergraduates have before graduation. The hardest part of my job was working with labs and researchers to supply their hazardous waste in compliance with federal and state regulations as well as for our own safety. This was one of the challenges I faced that once again gave me insight and experience that few student employees gain. This job has given me both experience and important certifications that will aid me and future employers.

Part of being a Resident Assistant is providing student engagement activities, consistently.  Every month at least one academic and one social engagement activity was required per RA.  This required planning and coordination with those who would help, as well as the students that attended.  Monitoring the progress of each student in your hall and providing guidance for college life.  To me, that was the fun part.  It was a lot of work, but I find event coordination to be a fun challenge.  The unpleasant part of being an RA was the required 24 hour surveillance of the building.  In pairs we would patrol the building to make sure no one was in danger and no rules being violated (dorm parties).  Some of the down side was lack of sleep on the nights you worked, but I mostly spent the on call hours studying or doing laundry.  The tough part was citing students for rule breaking when often times it was very minor and they were kids trying to blow off some steam.  The ones that were definitely guilty of breaking the rules were usually not sober and didn't make your job any easier.
The management staff kept weekly meetings and made sure to provide help and guidance.  This was greatly appreciated and help in my job satisfaction.

Pros:
As I said, very laid back(depending on department), and you pretty much know exactly what you'll be getting into each day. The exception being on call, which is usually stupid stuff, on pieces of junk. The money is alright, the benefits are-- well --state benefits, and extremely stable.  'Stable' as in you'll have to pull a Corporal Klinger(MASH) to get fired, and even that may not work. 

Cons:
In contrast to the final pro, people never get fired unless a specific set of offenses are committed.  Which means that the bad eggs usually get to stay in the carton. Management is a joke. They are only in their positions because of some form of politics.  You won't hear a word from them unless you do something they don't like.  You will be kept in the dark on everything except for things they don't like. No grievances or suggestions are confidential, and are immediately interpreted  adversarial.  Raises are really only accessible through promotion, which is, again, very political and NEVER has anything to do with qualification. 

Plan on being your own boss, stay under the radar, be content with what you make and don't take anything seriously.  If you can do that, it's a great job.  

I've not really worked at CSU as a professional for a very long time. I worked for 5 years as a student employee which was great. Housing and Dining allowed absolutely no job advancement, but it was very easy to keep the job. 

Working for the rec center was great because they provided TONS of programs for learning and career advancement. People were fun and encouraging, and actually cared about their jobs. I learned a lot about customer service and being part of a bigger goal/team, management was reasonable and positive. A typical day at work was spent serving others that are in the same community as you and working to make a great place to recreate. The hardest part of the job was enforcing rules when customers were unhappy about it- it wasn't any fun for anybody.

As a professional, I only worked for a few months during a field season. It was fun, people were cool, but we worked in the outdoors far from the rest of CSU. I don't think I could accurately review what it's like to work for CSU in general as a professional.

•	By designing unique floor and window displays, the products I included, often sold out.  In fact, the Nike Manufacturer’s Representative told me he wanted me to design all his products’ displays.  He often took pictures of my displays to show other stores a good example for displaying his products. 
•	Preparing incoming orders so the merchandise is floor/display-ready is critical to merchandising.  Customers will not likely purchase a wrinkled t-shirt or a dusty baseball cap.  
•	In my merchandising role, I helped plan promotional events, from planning the event to creating advertising buzz about the event and working it to make sure it was a success. 
•	My Final Project in this internship was to create a merchandising plan to assist the merchandising team in becoming more effective and efficient. I created a schedule to ensure the merchandise in the out-facing window displays was re-designed at least once each week to continue to attract customers that walked by our store daily.  This included a checklist to ensure we re-ordered merchandise in a timely manner so we had inventory overlap.

Overall administration of eight departments with budgets in excess of $8M in sales annually. Superivsed 12 full time and 45 part time employees. Facility management of up one million square feet, event management, managed food service contract and child care center contract with over 65 empolyees total, managed three service contracts for products for entire campus. Work with both academic and non academic departments to provide services.
I learned people can be your best asset and having the right people in the right place is critical to great customer service and customer service is vital to running successful businesses.
Hardest part was keep up with each area on a daily basis and most recently the lack of consistent leadership due to the number of vacancies. Communincation was difficult and lacking in many ways which hampered our ability to do business properly.
The most enjoyable part of the job was the many people who I was able to work with and become friends with and develop many successes in our operations.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Graduate researcher 8 salaries reported	$36,000 per year
Graduate assistant 4 salaries reported	$25,500 per year
Research associate 6 salaries reported	$48,167 per year
Postdoctoral fellow 3 salaries reported	$64,333 per year
Research assistant 6 salaries reported	$44,000 per year

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