The plethora of job listings over at BioMedCentral is almost enough to make me want to cross the pond. They have positions available in production, web work, editorial roles, and sales.

If you are in the U.K. and interested in OA jobs, make sure to give them a look. They also seem to be one of the better companies at keeping their job offer pages up to date, so even if there is nothing that strikes your fancy now it might be worthwhile to check back later.

Full disclosure: I had some extremely preliminary contact with some people over at BMC in regards to jobs, but this was before they realized that I was a yankee. I had of course been looking at their website for some time before this in the hope of finding a telecommuting-type position. They didn’t seem to be against remote employment, but I’m not entirely sure how the logistics work out for such a long separation.

Yesterday was the closing date for applications on a job prospect that I’m hoping for. I don’t think I’ve mentioned in this space which job this is (I think I’m starting to get superstitious about these things), but it’s an editorial position at an OA journal. The job offer is relatively close to one of Mrs. PA’s post-doc prospects, and therefore it’s just sort of a conglomeration of good things(tm). Of course this makes me even more nervous about the whole thing.

Add onto that the tough spot we’re in. Mrs. PA defended her thesis a few months ago, unfortunately without having a job lined up in advance. Since then it’s been a ticking clock until her contract runs out, which is very soon now. Because of that hard deadline, there is some urgency to resolve the situation as soon as possible. We’d prefer not to commit to living apart for a terribly long time, and the two jobs we’re hoping for here are the first that we’ve found close enough to one another so that we can live together.

The situation has made it tougher for me to get off the fence with my graduate school trajectory as well. I feel like if we had a concrete lead on where we were going next, it would ease my decision on how best to finish up my work here. The nebulous situation that we’re in, without any sort of specific location or date of a move, makes it tougher to set hard deadlines in my own work.

What makes the situation even a little more bothersome is that we might be doing something similar in a few years, when Mrs. PA finishes her post-doc. Once again, this is a selling point of the location that our current prospects are in; it’s a major area, and hopefully she’d be able to find gainful employment there without us having to move again.

There have been one or two other times that I felt we were close to sorting all of this out, and those have all fallen through so far. It makes me a bit pessimistic, but at the same time one can always hope.

There is a date on the calendar I can point to.  As of this writing, on that day:

• We won’t have a place to live (lease runs out on our house)
• Which is sort of good, because our household income will consist of a single grad student stipend

Needless to say, since that date is less than 3 months away, I’m a little nervous these days.

Mrs. PA and I are going into major job hunt mode.  She’s got a few candidates kicking around, but unfortunately I have work to do on getting my grad school situation sorted.  I’ve got a few things out there, but I think it’s (past) time for “the talk” with my adviser, and also a redoubling of my own hunt for a position.

More later.

The time has come to make a decision.  Perhaps it is past time, but here we are.  I’ve been putting this off for some time because it is one of the most important and most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make: do I try to power through and get my Ph.D., or do I write up what I have and move on with a Masters degree?  The issue is that neither solution is without drawbacks, of course.

I had some tough conversations with several groups of friends this weekend (it just seemed like everyone wanted to talk about it).  These made me realize that I’ve been sort of doggedly remaining on autopilot, when I should have been spending more time thinking about how to resolve my situation.

Since I like to obtain input from as many sources as possible before making big decisions (I research everything to death), I thought I’d lay the situation out and see what you have to say.

(more…)

Using web-based tools to manage labs is a key interest of mine.  I believe that these tools are more or less already available, and would greatly aid investigators who are already spread thin due to competing demands on their time.  This is why I’ve made calls for open source LIMS packages as well as taken some initial steps towards building one myself.

My efforts to create a system have not had a high sense of urgency about them.  There are several reasons for this; it will be some time before I have to worry about this myself (if ever), I have other work to do which is actually related to my Ph.D., and because I tend to get discouraged when I run into programming challenges that I can’t handle quickly.

The whole thing has become more important to me, however, since one of my good friends (who posts in the comments occasionally as The Argonaut) is preparing to begin his career as a tenure-track professor.  He needs a solution, and rather soonish.  I’m not sure if I’ll be able to create something functional in the time period he’s got before he starts his job, so I thought I would try to cobble together a list of already-available technologies that I think are really useful, and can be installed today.

First of all, set up a Google Calendar.  Use it.  Post everything there, and share it with your lab.  I’ll repeat this - use it.  It’s easy to think of taking the time to list what you are doing on a calendar as an inconvenience and waste of time, but it’s invaluable (both for your own scheduling as well as your students).

Install some sort of version management system.  Trac + Subversion is a good way to go.  This sort of system is used very often in software development, but I think it has applicability to any project, including research projects.  The system is designed to assign and monitor workflow of a project - just think of it as a file folder of your progress, in every project going on in the lab.  Trac has a built-in Wiki, which you can use to store protocols and other lab-wide documents that you’d like to share.  You can use Subversion to get version control of your grants and papers, rather than dealing with endless iterations of new word documents.  It’s becoming more trendy to use a distributed version control system, so you might look at using Git as opposed to Subversion.  Both should integrate with Trac, although Git requires a plugin (makes sure to check out the entire trac-hacks site, as there are many useful plugins there).

If Trac seems too daunting, you can try out MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia as well as OpenWetWare and many other great sites.  The version control isn’t quite as rigorous (you’re left looking at page edit histories), but it’s a bit more user-friendly.

So at this point you have a calendar and project management running.  This is a pretty solid base, and you’re blowing most labs out of the water as far as organization.  I would leverage the wiki functionality of Trac to build in some other things like inventory management as well.

The last thing you probably want is a public-facing website.  You have several options here, although a content management system (CMS) of some type is going to make life a lot easier.  If you just want a simple website, you can use blogging software such as Wordpress, or MovableType.  These are relatively easy to install, theme, and update with new content.  If you’re looking for something more powerful, you may consider the free and open-source Drupal.  It’s more complicated to use, but also has a lot more functionality.

If you can manage to get all of these running and convince your lab to use them, congratulations!  It will probably take some time to become familiar with using each of these systems, but for the most part they are accessible to novices.  The effort it takes will be well worth it.  Of course, it would be best if all of these functions lived under one roof, rather than split across 3 or 4 different software packages.  This is the goal of a LIMS, and I should probably GB2W on my pet project…

Dr. Porter, of Discovering Biology in a Digital World has been running a series of posts on the job market for scientists.  While I think that in some places her conclusions are dubious, the ensuing discussion in the comments has been interesting.  I’ve posted most of my thoughts there, so rather than go into detail here I’ll just provide links to each of her posts.

• Workplace Shortages in Biotechnology Part I: Why is this a problem?
• Workplace Shortages in Biotechnology Part II: How do we fill the pipeline?
• More workforce issues in science: Where have all the grad students gone?
• Life science Ph.D.s as industrial-strength technicians?
• Finding work in a science-related field: Where do you begin?

Unrelated to the actual body of this post, but possibly of more interest to you, dear reader is that I’ve sent in another job application.  This time it is for an Associate Editor position at the esteemed Science magazine.  My qualifications are a bit less than what they seemed to be looking for, so I’m not terribly optimistic (what’s new).  As usual though I’m nervous…  All right, on to the actual post!

I like to think (perhaps a bit ambitiously) that all of my tinkering around has elevated me to the level of “novice” programmer.  I can usually decipher things that others have written (ok, I can often do so), and I’ve written several command-line scripts that will do something useful.  I think one of the key things I’ve learned is that coding is hard, and I have tons of respect for the people who’ve chosen to do this as their career.  Now that I’m starting to get a handle on everything I don’t know, I feel like I’m also starting to find the handholds I need to climb a little farther up the cliff/learning curve.

So far I’ve had the most success writing things in Python.  This is most likely because it’s a relatively simple language, designed to be accessible to noobs like me.  It’s a fine language which tends to do what I like in ways that (more or less) make sense, and since it’s usage is fairly widespread in bioinformatics I don’t feel like it’s a waste of time to learn.

The problem with most of my “applications” so far is that, like I said above, they are uniformly command-line scripts which either take console or text file input.  For my own personal use this is fine - I understand the quirks of the program and am comfortable operating from the console.  This tends to be a barrier to more widespread usage, however.  Most people (who might use one of the things I’ve coded) aren’t very comfortable at all with entering commands into the terminal or editing a configuration file by hand.

So, I wanted to start looking into ways to start writing things that had a friendlier user interface.  I looked into using Glade to make graphical front-ends, but was having trouble wrapping my head around all of the handlers and things.  I was also a little worried that this would restrict the final product to a Gnome-based desktop.  What I really wanted to do was make something accessible via the web, so that I could install the application on our lab’s central machine and let people use it from their own computers.  My problem was that I couldn’t find a decent (i.e. quickly understandable by me) way to build web apps based on Python.  That is until I found Django.

Django is a web framework based on Python that just makes it easy to develop a Python-based application and distribute it via the web.  I haven’t had time to build anything from the ground up yet (I’ve been working my way through the online tutorial/book), but I can definitely see the potential.  I’ve gotten much farther with Django in a much shorter time than with any of the other solutions I’ve looked at so far.

I’ll keep you up to date as I continue my experimentation.

Mrs. PA and I are both looking for gainful employment these days, and we’re having a tough time finding two jobs that look interesting, are reasonably near one another, and which we both have a chance of actually getting.

So far I’ve done most of my searching using the internet of course.  I’ve tried RSS feeds from Craigslist job postings, manually checking individual sites, and other feeds from job aggregators (like ScienceCareers).  I feel like it’s a pretty wide net, but I haven’t caught many keepers yet.  Mrs. PA has found a few positions that she’s applied for, but they tend to be in fairly backwater places where my chances of employment are slim.  I’m worried that we’re looking for jobs in all the wrong places.

So, I guess it’s not a bad idea to ask people who have jobs where they found them.  Did you use one of the big job sites online?  Personal contact?  Newspapers?  How long did your job search take?  Did you go on a lot of interviews, or did you just happen to mesh with the first company?

This weekend, Mrs. PA and I went out to dinner in town (where, coincidentally, I had one of the best beers I’ve ever tasted).  During the meal, we had a wide-ranging conversation on the difficulties of running a successful lab group.  The training you get as an undergraduate, graduate students, and post-doc does little to prepare you for many of the duties you undertake as a professor.  Teaching, grant-writing, and personnel management are areas that you spend a lot of time working in as a professor but likely have little to no exposure to prior to this position.  Indeed, the level of multitasking it takes in order to be effective as a Principal Investigator at a major research institution is rather astounding.  What tends to happen, in many cases, is that some facet of the position is left to its own devices.  Often this is the personnel management side of things.

We realized that there is already a position, prevalent in industry, which could help ease the burden on professors - the “Principal/Senior Scientist” job.  I did an internship at GiantPharm one summer, and worked in a small group.  There was a leader of the group, but his office was actually in another building on a hallway with other group leaders.  My interaction with him was sort of minimal.  I did, however, spend a lot of time talking to my immediate supervisor.  He was a long-time employee, Ph.D., and incredibly intelligent.  If I was stuck on a task or needed further direction, his office was always open.  Since he was doing research of his own, it was easy to chat with him informally about the work and hash out new ideas.  If I were a professor, I’d love to have someone like this in the lab.

In academia, there are sometimes “Research Scientists” working in a group.  In my experience these tend to be glorified (more or less permanent) post-docs.  They are focused on their own project, and could often not care less about mentoring graduate students or ensuring that the lab is running smoothly (as long as it doesn’t significantly impede their work they are ambivalent).  It’s worth noting that post-docs themselves frequently have a similar attitude.

I think that there is some room here.  Why not delegate some of the roles typically shouldered by a single P.I.?  For instance, the P.I. can focus on “the big picture” (where is the research going, what are our major findings, what is going on in the community), getting money, and their teaching duties.  In the meantime, you can bring in a scientist to be the “research lead”.  By this I mean the person who is in the lab working on a project, but who also oversees the day-to-day activities.  If a graduate student is having trouble getting their affinity column to work, they can go to the Scientist.  This person could be responsible for some of the management of the lab as well - if a student isn’t showing up to work, they can talk to them and/or elevate the situation to the P.I.

Now, I’m not a professor.  I’m sure there are some issues with this plan (or else why wouldn’t it be implemented).  Some that come to mind:

• Funding - you are going to have to pay this Scientist more than you pay a post-doc.  $50,000/yr?  Somewhere in that ballpark is my guess.  It’s roughly equivalent to one post-doc plus an additional graduate student.  I don’t think that this is too onerous.
• Appearance of laziness - Will other faculty members think that you are unable to “handle” being a professor if you have to hire someone else to share the workload?  I’m not really sure about the answer here, but I’d hope this could be minimized.
• What about the Scientist’s career? Won’t they get unhappy and leave?  In my perfect world, the candidate would be someone who has completed their Ph.D. but is uninterested in some of the aspects of joining a faculty.  Perhaps they just don’t like writing grants and want to work at the bench, but aren’t fond of industrial work either.  There are people out there like this, trust me.  They would be thrilled to have a position like the one I’m talking about here.

I’m sure there are other problems, and I hope you’ll bring them up in the comments.  If you are in a faculty-like position, I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this.  Do you see the utility of hiring such a researcher?  Why is it not done?

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?