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Pallavi Phartiyal (Mon)

September 22, 2014 By Pallavi Phartiyal

A relatively open, meetings-lite calendar is always a welcome sign for Monday mornings. But I’ve been doing this job long enough to not be too optimistic about open blocks of time to get to pending readings and writings. Today turned out no different. My calendar has only two meetings for the day, one of which was cancelled but quickly replaced by another. The other was scheduled for a half-hour (very limited times this actually works) and ended up being 1.5-hr long. The upside is both were productive and necessary.

Today, I found myself squarely in the managerial space as we’re wrapping up our Financial Year 2015 (FY15) planning. The deadline to submit our FY15 workplan to our organizational leadership was today, and we still had a few loose ends to tie: final review and edits to the proposed activities, meeting with our communications staff to finalize our plan on how we would engage our roughly half a million supporters on the projects we’d be working on throughout the year, speaking with our HR manager and Finance staff about budget appropriations and last-minute reallocations, and verifying time and project assignments for our 11-person team. It was all wrapped up and shipped out as the clock struck COB: “close of business.”

20140922 ClimateMarchOther tasks today included approving timesheets for staff, brainstorming membership of a steering committee to guide an upcoming meeting I’m organizing on food equity in a few months’ time, and responding to general stream of emails on topics as wide-ranging as a new research tool we’re testing to build up our analytical capacity, to a letter on scientific integrity policies for the Secretary of the Department of Energy, to a climate rally I’m joining in New York City later this month.

Climate rally4

Pallavi Phartiyal | Union of Concerned Scientists
Pallavi Phartiyal (Tues)

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Pallavi Phartiyal, PhD

Senior Analyst and Program Manager, Center for Science and Democracy
Union of Concerned Scientists

PhD, Molecular and Cellular Biology

Molecular Determinants of Heteromeric hERG Channel Assembly and Trafficking

University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007

Connect with Pallavi

My professional philosophy in a nutshell:

Put yourself in their shoes.

Which is more important: luck, smarts, or know-how?

Smarts with humility

Pallavi's "Week in the Life"

  • Pallavi Phartiyal | One Year Later
  • PhDs 004: Science and Democracy – with Pallavi Phartiyal
  • Pallavi Phartiyal (Fri)
  • Pallavi Phartiyal (Thurs)
  • Pallavi Phartiyal (Wed)
  • Pallavi Phartiyal (Tues)
  • Pallavi Phartiyal (Mon)
  • Pallavi Phartiyal | Union of Concerned Scientists

Best career advice I ever received:

Don’t shy away from unpaid internship as a stepping stone when transitioning from academic to another sector. As PhDs, we often believe we should be paid because we have a specific expertise (which is true) but when trying to get your foot in the door, you’re competing with non-PhDs, who are keen on (paid or unpaid) internship, especially in D.C. so be prepared to take on any and every relevant opportunity to get real-world work experience.

If I had to do it all over again, I would…

... take coursework in economics.

More Non-Profit Bloggers

  • Maria Lahuerta | ICAP
  • Hanna Griff-Sleven | Museum at Eldridge Street
  • Pallavi Phartiyal | Union of Concerned Scientists
  • Christopher P. Thornton | National Geographic Society
  • Tony Kireopoulos | National Council of Churches
  • Rosemary G. Feal | Modern Language Association
  • Joseph Shahadi | The Art of Brooklyn
  • Sara Ogger | New York Council for the Humanities
  • Sean Carson | Berkeley Art Museum

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