ACS AMA Hi Reddit! My name is Lindsay Johnson and I am a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry at the University of Minnesota (UMN). I received my B.S. in Chemistry from Virginia Tech in 2012; my undergrad and grad research has focused on developing, modifying, and characterizing polymers for enhanced drug delivery. I’m very active in my home Department of Chemistry, serving as the Student Seminar Series Committee Chair, and the chair for the Graduate Student Symposium Planning Committee. I have also been involved with the planning committees of several outreach events (for committees like our Women In Science and Engineering, etc). In the American Chemical Society, I serve on the Graduate Education Advisory Board, and was selected as a recipient of the ACS Younger Chemist Leadership Development Award in 2017 and so attended the ACS Leadership Development Institute in Dallas, TX earlier this year. Today I’d love to talk with you about professional development so you can make the most of your student program and then excel in your career! Whether you’re looking to get into academia, industry, science policy, business, or something else entirely, there are going to be certain critical skills necessary to be competitive in that field. I want to help you identify what those are! The process of building your own INDIVIDUAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN starts with identifying your career goals. Then you back-formulate what skill sets you will need. By mapping out a proactive plan to help you achieve your individual goals, you can then develop yourself to be a competitive applicant in your future. Some ideas on how to design your plan can be found in the ACS’s ChemIDP tool [https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/students/graduate/gettingready/chemidp.html] I look forward to answering your questions on potential careers, available resources, development opportunities, how to get involved, or tailoring your resume. Ask me anything about professional development! I’ll be back to answer your questions at 11am CDT (12pm EDT, 9am PDT, 4pm UTC). 11:00 AM here in sunny MN! Let’s do this! 12:00 PM That’s all for now, folks! I’ll check back in later today to see if I can help answer any more questions. Best of luck in all of your professional endeavors!