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Our Communication Lab teams are always thinking about new communication skills and scenarios that we can help to demystify and support. Find our latest resources below:

New Blog Posts

Quick tips on handy skills and first-hand reflections about communication experiences, from Communication Fellows and MIT community members

It’s too hot in this conference room and I’m sweating through my blazer. On the way up to the podium, I trip over someone’s laptop charger and almost drop my notes. The screen freezes on the second slide of my presentation, and then someone walks out of the room while I’m in the middle of a sentence. I need to sneeze. Needless to say, this presentation isn’t going the way that I had hoped. This is a big conference and there are important people in this room, but things keep going wrong. What should I do?

Starting a postdoc in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) is exciting, but it can also feel overwhelming. Between research expectations, career uncertainty, relocation, networking, and adapting to a new environment, there is often a steep learning curve that nobody formally explains.

As engineers, we’re always encouraged to work collaboratively. In most cases, projects are designed to be dependent on multiple individuals. However, as student researchers in grad school, it’s easy to become solely involved in our own projects.

This is the first of three blog posts on what I learned about leaving academia for industry as a PhD. It focuses on the piece I most needed and least expected to have to figure out on my own: how PhDs are actually valued in the market, and why our instincts about that value are so often wrong. Later posts will cover how to show up in industry conversations and how to think about an offer once you have one.

This is the second of three posts on what I learned about leaving academia for industry as a PhD. The first post discussed how PhDs consistently underestimate their market value because they are trained inside an economy that does not price scarce capability. This post is about how that understanding changes the way you approach interviews, conversations with hiring managers, and the recruiting process more broadly.

This is the third and final post on what I learned about leaving academia for industry as a PhD. This post is about the last conversation in the sequence, the one that produces the offer itself. The central idea is that negotiation, for the kinds of roles PhDs typically enter, is not a fight over a number. It is the natural conclusion of a conversation you have been having all along, and the number itself is one piece of a much larger picture.

Haoran Li is a postdoctoral associate at MIT who recently concluded his CEE Communication Fellowship. In this post, Haoran reflects on the “unique and rewarding dynamic” of being a Comm Fellow in CEE.

Journalists live in their own world, a world where deadlines are on the order of days or hours instead of months or years. Because of this, you might find yourself in a situation where you are asked to give an interview on very short notice. I certainly did.

During his two years as a CEE Communication Fellow at MIT, Teja Jammalamadaka hosted 98 individual coaching appointments, and led workshops on visual communication, PhD thesis proposal writing, and the responsible use of generative AI in scientific writing. In this post, Teja reflects on his Comm Fellow journey and the lessons he has learned along the way.

Scientific research strengthens our understanding of so many aspects of the world, from microbes to planets. Whether a study advances knowledge in a relatively minor way, or by leaps and bounds, in order to reach the scientific community the work must be communicated clearly and effectively. Peer-reviewed journals remain trustworthy sources of scientific knowledge, and ‘getting published’ is a significant accomplishment for young and experienced researchers alike.

Students spend hours and hours working beside each other in classrooms and lecture halls. Despite such constant proximity, these settings can be lonely places where each student forges ahead (or falls behind) without feeling connected to a supportive classroom community.

It has been about two years since ChatGPT took the world by storm, offering a quick and easy way to ask questions in plain text, generate new information, and get clarification on more things than ever before. And I hate it.

New & Updated CommKits

Discipline-specific how-to’s and annotated examples, covering both technical and professional communication.

You can also see CommKits in other scientific/engineering disciplines.