What are your career choices after graduate school? Will you develop technology yourself? Will you work in a team? Will you guide people? Where will you work: in industry, research lab, or academia? Regardless where you work, there is generally one item that you are not being taught in graduate school: your communication skills. Come and hear my personal perspective on working in Industry (Texas Instruments) for 4 years, in a U.S. government research laboratory (NASA JPL) for 6 years and in an academic institution (Purdue University) for over 5 years. Within the presentation I will highlight my “recipe” for a strategically structured presentation that is open and inviting to any audience. The key message is that about 1/3 of the presentation should introduce the overall topic and relevance of the problems to be solved. The next 1/3 of the presentation should highlight the beautiful solutions that have been achieved without any technical details. These 2/3 of the presentation should be accessible to all members of the audience. The next 1/6 of the presentation addresses details of the work that are understandable to experts in the audience, the last 1/6 gathers the whole audience and provides a perspective of what needs to be done with the topic in the future.

Gerhard Klimeck is the Reilly Director of the Center for Predictive Materials and Devices (c-PRIMED) and the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) and a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.

He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP),a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), a Fellow of IEEE and member of HKN and TBP.

He guides the technical developments and strategies of nanoHUB.org which annually serves over 320,000 users worldwide with on-line simulation, tutorials, and seminars.

Prof. Klimeck's research interest is in the modeling of nanoelectronic devices, parallel cluster computing, and genetic algorithms. He drives the development of the Nanoelectronic Modeling Tool NEMO5.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Gerhard Klimeck (2009), "Your Career Choices after Graduate School and The Most-Neglected Item in your Career Development (2015)," https://nanohub.org/resources/7615.

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1. professional development