Career Paths

Virginie
Adam
It’s not what you know, it’s what you do
Last week I was chatting with some junior graduate students in my lab and the topic of careers outside academia came up. They had heard a vague rumor that a world outside the lab exists, but, being a little science-obsessed, they hadn’t really thought of their lives beyond their theses! Considerin...

Kate
Sleeth
Learning about the Disease you Study from a Different Angle
For the past 11 years I have studied cancer in one way or another. I performed my Ph.D. research on the DNA repair mechanism Base Excision Repair. I then performed research on Homologous Recombination, targeted radiopharmaceuticals and metastatic breast cancer (all were separate projects...

Maida
Taylor
Prescription Drug Crimes: True Lies
I want to do a small series on crime and punishment. I have mentioned before that I have a degree in Russian literature. I venture to say that most life science students have not thought about jobs working at the interface between the life sciences and the law.But there are a wide array of fascinati...

Maida
Taylor
Prescription Drug Crimes: True Lies, Part II
Why am I so interested in prescription drug crimes? Well, a long, long time ago in a city far away across the San Francisco Bay, I worked as an undercover narcotics operative. For almost 2 years, I bought prescription drugs from unscrupulous, unprincipled pharmacies and health care practitioners. Th...

Kate
Sleeth
Science: It’s a girl thing!
I had no idea that the European Commission had made a video to attract more women to careers in science before I witnessed the reactions of friends and fellow scientists in different social media. Within a few posts, I realized that either something must have gone wrong as scientists, both male and ...

Thomas Patrick
Chuna
The most wonderful time of the year?
Hello everyone!As I write this, the thanksgiving holiday was a few days ago.. I hope you all enjoyed yours, mine was a blast. As usual, I ate too much, but that is what holidays are for, right?Do you know what else the holidays are good for? JOB SEARCH. That’s what they are good for. I’ll get to...

Dr
27
The job search – resources for the search part 2
In my previous entry, I talked about the resources I used during my job search and how, for me, sites like Bio Careers® and places targeted to my discipline (a branch of structural biology) yielded better results than all encompassing sites like Monster or Career Builder.

Kate
Sleeth
Being a Supervisor
Over my career as a scientist I had the opportunity to mentor a number of students; both as a graduate student and then as a postdoc. Most summers I had one summer student who I dedicated time and effort to; both in teaching my research to, as well as teaching the skills necessary to ass...

Maida
Taylor
Will “reshoring” = restoring jobs in the USA?
It’s the same old song---contaminated drugs from China. The news was reported by Laurie Burkitt in the Wall Street Journal on April 17, 2012. Chinese authorities halted the sale of 13 drugs, because the gelatin capsules used in manufacturing were found to have high levels of the ...

Maida
Taylor
Bench vs Bedside: Arrowsmith Revisited
In 1925, Sinclair Lewis published Arrowsmith (a novel for which he later won a Pulitzer Prize), the story of a young medical researcher. Martin Arrowsmith, the protagonist, served as a role model for scores of medical students intent on devoting their lives to medical science. The portra...