Avoiding pigeonholing?
Those not intimately involved in science sometimes think that a given researcher is fully versed in the entire body of knowledge their field has ever produced. For instance, since I am a biochemist, I should be able to perform MacGyver-esque transformations of household products into psychedelic drugs at a moment’s notice. Also, since I’m a biochemist, I am fully familiar with the migratory patterns of african swallows. Of course those of us who are involved with science know that this is definitely not the way of things. In truth, science is incredibly specialized, almost to the point of balkanization. Even when I go to our weekly biochemistry seminar, at times it can be a stretch to wrap my head around anything deeper than a basic understanding of the work being presented.
Of course, the reasoning for this is that the things we study are remarkably complex, and it’s often necessary to immerse yourself deep into the intricacies of a given system in order to make advances in understanding.
The problem that I have with this specialization at the moment is that it makes finding a job pretty tough. It’s abundantly clear from most postings that the hiring party has a very specific candidate in mind that has a very particular skillset matching the duties they will be expected to perform. As a job candidate, this makes me feel like I’m locked into doing the exact same types of experiments on the same systems indefinitely.
Professors seem to have some ability to break out, but it’s still tough. In some ways, they are even more restricted - funding agencies aren’t very likely to give someone money to do something that they’ve never done before. On the other hand, once the money is in hand, the investigator has more leeway to use whatever tools are necessary (including those that they might not have a history of using before).
My question is to those who are in science - how do you deal with this in finding jobs? Is this a problem in your field? If you are in the position of hiring, do you always look for candidates that will be ready to run your experiments on day 1 due to prior experience, or do you just look for the best overall candidate, even if they may need some training?
