Updated career skills open exciting career path
Dawn Mugrage had been looking for a lab-technician job for close to six months when she came across a newspaper ad for CBET’s bioprocessing certificate program.
Mugrage was new to the Rochester job scene, having recently moved from Cincinnati with her husband and two children. The couple bought a house and Mugrage started looking for work.
That’s when she realized her skills were out of date. Mugrage had completed three years of a Ph.D. program in genetics, but that was 13 years earlier. Since then, she had taught high school biology and raised children—neither of which gave her the edge she needed to land a job.
CBET changed all that. The certificate program in Bioprocessing Operations provided hands-on training she’d never received in the theory-heavy Ph.D. program, she says. What’s more, CBET instructors knew the local science scene and offered good job contacts.
After graduating with her certificate, Mugrage took a position as a molecular biology lab technician with the Human Genetics Project at RIT's Department of Biological Sciences. Her work involves searching for a gene connected to age-related hearing loss.
Mugrage says the CBET training has opened a variety of possible career paths. She enjoys her current work and might remain a lab technician. Or, she might enter another Ph.D. program.
“That wouldn’t have been an option before; I’d been out of graduate school too long, and didn’t have a job that kept me current on lab procedures,” Mugrage says. “CBET gives you a good understanding of what’s actually being done in industry now. Almost everything I do in the lab is something we went over and I learned or refreshed during the CBET program.”
