41 “If you don’t have a pedigree, don’t apply,” said one of my colleagues after I told him my ambitions about becoming a faculty member at some R1 school….
I decided to consider my pedigree… My undergrad prof did a lot of good work – essentially inventing the concept of measuring secondary KIEs by NMR. As you can imagine however, he’s now retired (he was quite old when I was in his lab). My PhD adviser is, well, wrapped up in his world. He’s young and has been successful and maybe in 10 years he’ll be someone with clout. He’s certainly willing to throw down the shit to get me a job – but he’s very focused on getting to the point where his reputation precedes him. He’s not there yet, though I have faith that he will.
My current boss is famous and award winning and all that… but that’s it. That’s the extent of my pedigree: A yesteryear superstar retiree, an ambitious young pup with hardly 200 publications under his belt and a post doc adviser who’s a frequent contender for the Nobel prize (but that cupboard is bare). I wonder if that’s enough?
Then, there’s industry… but … *sigh*… I don’t want to work for [big phramra] industry. If working at Eli Lilly taught me one thing it was that R&D was a show. A distraction. A way for a drug industry to claim it cost billions of dollars to bring a drug to market. (Which is funny ’cause I think Zyprexa was the last drug Lilly brought to market from in house and it has cost them billions of dollars just to KEEP IT ON THE MARKET.)
Nevertheless, I won’t be going into big pharma. I hated pharma research. I think it’s a horrible place with limited ambitions and, if working retail to get my way through school taught me anything, I’d rather not invent ways to extend the life of obnoxious fat men. Nature had a plan for fat men: get depressed, die of congestive heart failure on the couch. I’d rather not be a part of the team that cured fatness… if only so it wouldn’t deprive me of the pleasure of knowing fat men die on their couch.
Back to academics: there are about 200 universities that offer PhDs in chemistry. About 100 of them aren’t even worth applying to. Of those 100, only a few hire every year. Each job will consider about 500 candidates – and some of them will not hire a single one.
What wonderful things to be pondering before bed….
UPDATE: Maybe I should be more clear: I was shitting on working for big pharma. A job at IBM or some other materials research firm (or, maybe, Altec-Lucent) would be an interesting adventure, I think. And yes, I do think working for big pharma sucks. It pays well and lets you spend time with your family, if you own one, but it’s a depressing shithole with management always trying to pound how ever-close we are to being destroyed by a nationalized health care system/drug and price regulation/blah blah blah.
UPDATE II: I should be clearer – I wrote that post late at night while on Ambien. I don’t even have a recollection of writing it. It was written poorly, confusing and circular. I’ve tried to clean it up and am tempted to just delete it. I want to remind everyone: If you take Ambien GO TO BED. Don’t dick around on the computer until you get tried. Ambien is bad juju. Further, I have no explanation for the shit below.
P.S. You can make your own Kenyan birth certificate. Look, I found one for that crazy lady lawyer, Oily Taintz:
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Say you become a professor at an R1 university. Will you be telling all your students that pharmaceutical R&D is a “horrible place with limited ambitions”?
I would advise anyone interested in seeking a position in R&D with a large pharmaceutical company to reconsider, yes. I’d also add that it’s a horrible place, yes.
I think your blanket view of all of pharmaceutical R&D as a “horrible place” is remarkably small-minded.
Obviously, not everyone shares your view. Plenty of chemists have had happy, fulfilling careers at Pfizer, Merck, or other big companies.
I suspect that you do realize that many chemists have vastly different impressions of pharmaceutical R&D than you. If you ignore that fact when you are advising your (at this point hypothetical) students, you are doing them a disservice.
You don’t have to say pharma is great. You can certainly say that *you* had a terrible time there. But extrapolating from your limited experience at a single R&D position to a blanket view of an entire industry is borderline laughable. Your future students deserve better.
each company is different, I was with three smaller companies that became a part of large one (Aventis, Pfizer, Celera) and have pretty mixed feelings about the industry and big pharma in particular. I would recommend to look for a mid-size, stable company that has approved drugs and strong pipeline. Then I would try to get hold of people working there, informally, and ask them about their impression (how much baloeny and politics goes on there). Each place is different, because personalities of people in management differ and so does the level of “injelitis” (see Parkinson’s laws). For example Paul Docherty from Totally Synthetic seems happily busy at Astra Zeneca in London.
As a chemist with academic ambitions, I also have a very poor pedigree. I would never even consider an R01 level institution. I’m extremely smart, but won’t be given much of chance within academia.
You say pharma is a “horrible place with limited ambitions” but a lot of times it seems that academia is even worse. Your fate decided by a pedigree? It seems like the world outside of academia would give you more of a chance to prove your smarts. “But you need money” well, gotta be smart and ballsy enough to get it. Or else stay in academia and beg for it from the government.
I don’t think the industrial setting is that bad (though I only interned at the #1 pharma company…). I liked it because the pedigrees did not matter as much later in a person’s career.
The belief that a chem PhD must choose between academia and industry is short sighted. There are a number of other things you can do with a degree besides those two ’stock’ professions.
There’s patent law, you could work on Capital Hill making sure congressmen actually understand the science they’re working on, a good computer programmer could get on with any of the journals/societies/companies and make science more palatable to web surfers, science journalism… We even had a speaker last year tell us about opportunities for someone with a science background in venture capitalism.
Many people do choose the ‘normal’ career path… but don’t think those are the only 2 options.
How do I get into venture capitalism? Keep in mind, that I don’t have capital to venture with.
I think you would be a perfect choice, to play a vulture capitalist in a movie. (Or a corporate raider. Or Poland invader).
You go to a venture capital firm and say ‘hey, do you dabble in anything related to science? Then you need someone with a science background so you don’t venture your capital down the toilet.’
Then you can venture other peoples’ capital.
The real question is: What are you going to do if you do not get that coveted academic job? Are you going to go into a holding pattern by taking another postdoc? Can you compete with someone who did their PhD with Dr FancyPants at Haavaad and a Postdoc with Dr Swanky at Scripps?
There are a lot of people with PhDs who have really good lives working in the chemical industry. Big pharma, while sexy and cool, is not the end all and be all of employment options.
It is good to keep all options open.
While there may be places that sort applications by pedigree I’ve been assured that EVERY application package gets read. That may be lip service and I know there are people that definitely skim a lot (500 apps @ 10-15 pgs each……..ouch) BUT you know where I think pedigree matters most? Who are your trusted BFF’s that will evaluate your brilliant snowflake ideas and help you edit your props?
Industry = big pharma and only big pharma? Come on, are you really that shallow?
There are endless numbers of small entities (such as my employer, hint, hint) where I have access to great people and equipment, where there is an endless variety of projects coming in the door (som of which are even from big pharma) and where you either make a significant contribution or you are out the door. And yes, you can still publish.
If you work for a company with 100,000 employees, you are 0.001% of the company and your contributions or lack thereof will not be noticed. If you work for a company with 10 employees, you can be quite sure that everything you do and don’t do will have a huge impact on the bottom line.
The problem is that YOU will have to make an effort to locate these entities. They are too small to find you and you will not know them by reputation. Nor will your family or friends.
Sorry about the nasty tone, but it irks me to see someone like you think that they have their whole career path all planned out when they haven’t even started. It’s not that different from the UG’s who ask “Will this be on the test?” as if the test is the only thing that matters in life and that there is no chance that they will ever find a use for it during the rest of their life.
Your attitude is certainly not all your fault as you’ve been in academia all your life and the atmosphere there is one that only looks to propagate academia and if you don’t do that, you are a failure. Personally, I think that the atmosphere just described is the failure, as everyone in it is complicit in making it a dirty, little, quiet secret that 99% of them will not make it further in academia.
I have clarified my position in an update to the post. By singling out drug R&D I did not mean to imply that it was the only other option. Obviously there are many other options, it’s just that it seems the least palatable.
Working for a small startup can be very exciting. If you (and your company) succeed you will get recognition. Working hours and deadlines might be even crazier than academia. Of course in the end you will get acquired by big pharma. But the ride can be spectacular while it lasts. Just read “The Billion Dollar Molecule” about the early days of Vertex; it’s comparable to anything you could find in academia.
Yeah, but his wife wants munchkins – it’s probably doable, but he probably won’t see family much (though I guess as an R1 asst. prof., you’re not going to see family anyway). In addn., startups are unlikely to have the infrastructure (NMR/MS, library/info sources, etc.) that an R1 university will have (all those equipment grants and >30% overhead). Finally, I think the J. Comb. Chem. guy getting rolled from the company he started because of depression (and at least, in the end, geting $9M from them) didn’t exactly warm my heart.
On the other hand, small companies and startup are probably where the jobs are.
startup pays crap and if you succeed you will make the founders rich but the stock options they give you will hardly make for the salary difference. At that point your place will be sold to a big company and you will have to put up with lots of baloney related to the change of management and integration – if your keep your job at all. Alternatively, the company is not doing well, the research is underfunded and overstreched, you cannot hire enough people to do the job and when the palce eventually folds you don’t have much on your resume.
It is much better to start at mid-size or large company and then after few years get hired away by a startup, with the corresponding promotion – if not in salary then at least in position and stock options.
“startup pays crap and if you succeed you will mke the founders rich…”
Well, that’s why all the jobs are there. If you actually got paid well, there wouldn’t be so much left for the management, VC, and investors, and so they wouldn’t be so willing to make the jobs. There’s lot of smart people in other places that might do well here, but at least part of why people want more visas for foreign chemists is to push employment costs down further. I didn’t mean to imply that you would necessarily want to work there (or why, if that’s the culture, why you would want to go into the field at all). I think that mgmt. and investors would prefer to pretend cause-and-effect relationships don’t apply to them, or that they can play a game of the job market as three-card monte until they cash out.
a lot of startups are born at universities, and housed there…and thus have access to a lot of relevant instrumentation. they can be fun places to work without a lot of the BS you get from (university administration, etc). i really liked the one i worked at right before grad school. not necessarily a long-term option, but not a bad place to be while you apply for other positions either IMO.
Write your own ticket by being a Nobel Laureate. An organic ambient temp supercon is a wide short path to success. Little at Stanford published the specs. Make the benzil, bis-methylenate (Tebbe), assemble the polyacetylene via ethylene extrusion (ADMET polymerization) or Ben Zhong Tang. Long chains on each mer for liquid crystal solubility. Perhaps hole or electron dope to Meisser effect. ‘S no biggie,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/pave1.png
hydrogens and pi bonds omitted
10,10′-dibromo-9,9′-bianthracene, benzyne, Wurtz or electrochemical reductive dehalogenation polymerize, FeCl3/MeNO2, dope,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/bitrypta.png bitrypt2a.png bitrypt2b.png
if you like linear polyarenes
You cannot possibly succeed by doing a boss’ work. The technical term for a hard worker is “fungible.”
Maybe it’s the beer, thought Geiger. He had just found that he could not move a finger, toe, or nose hair. Seven beers will do that to you.
Across the table, the strangely indistinct man was talking. “You reach this point in life, and you see the world as it really exists. You are caught in a web not of your own making.”
Whatever, Geiger thought.
“Take your situation. Yes, to study the science of chemistry is perfectly respectable, but the politics of it all, the inescapable and unforeseen consequences of your choice – there are things of which you were not informed.”
That’s a nice way to say the bastards lie like dogs.
“Perhaps you had a vision of yourself, or perhaps you had the late inspiration that became a new dream. You would like to become a Professor of Chemistry. Oh, it doesn’t have to be Harvard. You would be perfectly happy running a small research group at a modest liberal arts college somewhere in a rural setting. Then you discover, and somehow no one ever had the foresight to tell you this, that it is already too late. The faculty at even the smallest college all obtained their doctorates from a handful of schools. All others are shut out.
“So you accept that, unfair as it might seem to you, and you begin to come around to the decision that a career in industry would suit you better. Shorter work hours, better equipment, no constant writing of grant proposals. As you can see the end of your studies approaching, you begin to read in earnest the employment advertisements in the Sunday paper, and those in such publications as Today’s Chemist, but there seems to be something missing. You might keep track of jobs that are available at a large, respectable company like DuPont. You see positions for technicians and jobs for ordinary chemists who possess the bachelor of arts or the batchelor of sciences. Perhaps the master’s degree is required. Yet you see few openings for the Ph.D. chemists. You know DuPont employs many, many doctors of philosophy, and you hear through your personal connections, perhaps even read brief announcements in your professional publications or see that an author of a paper you are reading is no longer where he was but is now in the employ of the Pfizer Corporation. Where did he read about that job that you cannot? Then you realize that these jobs are never publicized. They are filled by word of mouth, by passing the information through a series of connections. And you are working for someone who seems to have no connection.”
What the fuck? How does he know all this?,/i>
“What you most urgently desire at that moment is that some doorway open to you, some heretofore unknown route around these obstacles.”
Geiger shook himself, all his muscles contracting one after the other in a seismic wave that passed around his body, just to prove to himself that he was not paralyzed for life. He sat bolt upright. “And I suppose you are that…door?”
Fuck, that sounded idiotic.
The man smiled. “Possibly.”
Where the hell did you get that from? I like it.
there might be an informal society of chemists that is obviously keen on privacy (and hence they made you believe that it’s the actually the Bilderbergers and Illuminati who is running this planet). You can’t apply to join but they have been watching and you might get invited if you are useful to the agenda. And wouldn’t it be amazing to learn how our continental shelfs were fabricated, who controls the values of physical constants and what fungus the Hot Pockets are really harvested from?
materials research is awesome (though the learning curve is really sharp from a straight synth background). you should come on over to the dark side
but Luke, she is your sister!
mmmmm materials!
It’s true, materials has rainbows and puppies and happy little trees. Its awesome!
I also hear that Agilent is a good place to work for.
srsly? i like their toys a lot. i would work for them
and cookies!
Perhaps I am unusual because I really liked my industrial career. My projects were funded every year without a lot of paperwork or self aggrandizement, I just showed up every day. My job was to improve the affinity of our candidate compounds while managing the lipophilicity and metabolic properties.
I was a hired gun working in a company that had a complete infrastructure built to enable commercialization of candidate compounds. If I was successful, it was possible for my company to be successful without my having to do everything myself. We ventured to sell science to the public.
Could I work in academics where I or my advisor could not generate the resources to compete with a company that was risking huge amounts of capital in an effort to provide something to the public that was deemed so valuable to be worthy of the investment? That is a question of ego.
In attending Gordon Research Conferences, I generally thought that academics were at a disadvantage in competing with industrial research, in manpower and equipment. I never came to think those in academics were superior in any way. I will grant this venue did not encourage contributions from plumbers of either rank. My opinion is only one of the quality of the science (I know there are janitors and plumbers everywhere).
On the day to day operation, I thought chemistry and science. I was a problem solver. What question did my last experiment mean to solve and what did I learn that will enable me to advance (my) science? For me, those questions are not bound by a company or university. That is what one does. If your ego is so great that your solution(s) cannot be shared, then you should seek the appropriate venue.
This is just my opinion, in neither academics or industry, will you be given a silver spoon. Your super-duper freshman grant proposal won’t get the billion dollars, 200 post-docs, and new private research building you may ask for. Bit by bit and proposal by proposal may, if you are as good as you claim to be, may get you to that position after a long and productive career, but I won’t be holding my breath just yet. I am just cynical enough to know that companies can have a lot of baloney standing between you and your coming up with the next great discovery. That cynicism leads me to believe that academics and the funding bureaucracy also have similar baloney. I won’t make the boo-hurrah arguments, but it is my opinion that I think for a scientist, the industrial ladder is easier to climb more quickly. All of the arguments about middle or small companies should be applied to academic recognition in the national science arena.
If Big Pharma is a shit-hole, then what’s the point of getting a PHD in organic chemistry in the first place? We all can’t be professors.
I second that!
“Working for a small startup can be very exciting. If you (and your company) succeed you will get recognition. Working hours and deadlines might be even crazier than academia. Of course in the end you will get acquired by big pharma.”
Many a start-up company was founded by a Prof, so the atmosphere is often, unless the Venture Capitalists keep a close eye, not that different from academia.
What happens to the scientists, who developed the exciting new technology/product, when the start-up gets acquired by a big chemical/pharmaceutical company? Will they be offered jobs in the big one?
I wouldn’t work for a start up unless I were offered stock options as part of the sign up when the company went public. I’d gladly take worthless shares and cash them in for a sweet retirement when the product hits the market.
That’s how mummy retired at 43…
Nah, she just ran a crystal meth lab to GLP..And lied to you.
The penny share to early retirement route has worked in the past, however, you have to gamble that the IPO window is open when you need it, and/or the product /project keeps looking good past your lock-in, otherwise you’re looking at penny shares again. Unless you are the CFO, then you always cash in.
I’ve thought a lot about this too, even whilst sober. My best remedy is to publish a couple papers in Science and Nature. Although these things are exceptionally rare, they are more likely to happen when you are postdocing on the big stage.
Uhhhh, it sounds like your pedigree is better than mine. And if I publish a couple of JCAS in my postdoc I could probably get an assistant professor job if I really wanted to. So, um… stop whining. Just apply for jobs and see how you do.
If you don’t see yourself doing anything else, then don’t worry. You can always lie to your loved ones and current bosses if you don’t have any firm future plans and make some shit up to get them off your back / a good reference. “Yes Professor Blank, I have considered a position in academia and after some serious thinking I decided it would be the best fit for me since I can work on my ideas and teach at the same time. Both things that I really enjoy. It’s one of the reasons why I decided to join your group”. or “Don’t worry dear, if I don’t get an offer in the first six month of next year I won’t do a second postdoc. I’ll probably get a research job at that Pharma company close to your parents’ place”.
My favorite one though, was “Yes grandma, I know it’s not normal for a young man my age to live alone for so long without a girlfriend. But right now I’m a chemistry Ph.D. student and my apartment is kind of small and I don’t have a lot of free time and money for that. I’m entirely focused on my degree. What? Yes, I stopped playing video games completely. I don’t have time for that stuff. When I’m done, I’ll be desired by many women due to having a very large income and a nice house/car. What? No, don’t worry, I won’t pick the first one that latches onto my money and professorial fame, I’ll take the time to choose wisely. Yes, someone intelligent and who can cook. Of course.”
Unfortunately, it gets a lot harder to use that one when you start the postdoc due to built-up expectations… Anyways, you’d think one of the best female doctors in her country during the harsh after-WW2 years would be less ‘old-fashioned’.
Your boss doesn’t need to have a Nobel prize to help you get a good position. They just have to be well known and have a good reputation in the field. In academia, at least, the reputation of your boss follows you around. If you boss is known as a nice person, somehow that gets casts on you a little bit if you are actually nice or not.
So, no, your boss doesn’t need to have a Nobel to help you out. He just needs to have a good reputation in the field (famous).
“It was written poorly, confusing and circular. I’ve tried to clean it up and am tempted to just delete it.”
Sorry Kyle, you’ve been cached! Google’s got it forever.
http://74.125.155.132/search?q.....&gl=us
Late to the party, but another research option is to try to get a job at a National Lab. Do well there, and it is definitely possible to move into academia at an R1-type school, regardless of prior pedigree.