GUC - Ep 10 - Mesfin Bekalu_030223_1752

SONIC Northwestern19min

Lara Schreurs

00:02

ICA Presents. Welcome to Growing Up Comm, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. In this series, we talk about topics primarily relevant to students and early career scholars. I’m your host, Lara Schreurs. I’m a postdoctoral researcher at the School for Mass Communication Research at the KU Leuven in Belgium. In today’s episode, I will talk with communication scholar Dr. Mesfin Bekalu about building strong professional connections through networking. And he’ll share some useful tips for early career scholars looking to build their careers internationally and interculturally. So, Dr. Bekalu, welcome here. I'm very excited to have this conversation with you today. But can I please first ask you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your research trajectory.

Mesfin Bekalu

01:04

Thank you, Lara, for this opportunity. My name is Mesfin, and I am a research scientist here at Harvard Chan School of Public Health. I got my PhD from Leuven. My research focus is on health communication in general. I am interested in looking at the intended and unintended effects of media and communication on health-related outcomes on knowledge, beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors. In general, that is the area I'm working on.

Lara Schreurs

01:38

Which positions did you hold after you obtained your PhD in Leuven? Did you immediately go to Harvard?

Mesfin Bekalu

01:44

When I completed my PhD in Leuven in 2014, I was a postdoctoral research fellow in Leuven for one year, and then I came to Harvard. I also had a brief stay in Ethiopia for six months, as I'm originally from Ethiopia. So I went there and I served in a university as an assistant professor there for six months.

Lara Schreurs

02:12

For a student and early career researcher such as myself, that sounds like a very impressive international trajectory. So do you think networking played a role in that?

Mesfin Bekalu

02:23

I would say yeah. Like I said, I am originally from Ethiopia. That's where I grew up and did my undergrad. So I had to take these proactive efforts to reach out to people in my field in order to advance my studies. So it was not through meeting people at conferences as such, but I had to send cold emails, unsolicited emails to professors in my field, looking for opportunities to network with them and to advance my career. So yeah, I would say networking played a role in my career advancement.

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