Career Catalyst with Molly Beestrum
On the first Friday of the academic year, Molly Beestrum, the Education and Curriculum Librarian for the Galter Health Sciences Library and CRS’s Library Liaison, led our CRS trainees through the first CRS Career Catalyst. Molly’s presentation titled “Utilizing Library Resources to Enhance your Academic Potential” was a comprehensive overview of Northwestern’s library resources and tools that are important to our scientific community’s research success.
Each year Molly helps lead our trainees through the multitude of important and useful library hosted tools and research platforms. For students beginning their research projects, as our 1st year MS-RSM and new RSM cluster pre-doctoral trainees are initiating this quarter, insight into these tools is critical to their research endeavors. Even seasoned researchers, who have navigated the physical and digital libraries for decades, learned new search strategies. These strategies can simplify and focus literature searches, which are the foundations of any primary research, literature review, or perspectives article. In addition to literature search tools, Molly discussed strategies to understand our impact within the science community. What documents are counted towards impact scores and how can understanding these metrics assist you in building you professional path? These are questions that perhaps one does not think about until later stages in one’s career. However, understanding these tools and how to use them towards your benefit is critical in our digital age.
Molly wrapped up her Career Catalyst session with information on how to access the numerous classes offered by the Galter Library. Over 20 classes are available to faculty, staff, and trainees on such topics as citing and writing, data management, genome browsing and hubs, research dissemination and impact and much more. Molly is an amazing resource at Northwestern and her advice and research tool knowledge is an asset for our CRS community.
To contact Molly Beestrum email molly.beestrum@northwestern.edu