Jobs
Category archives for Jobs
PNAS: Will Hendrick, (Former) Biomedical Technician
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 25, 2011 (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Will Hendrick, who worked as a lab tech before returning to school. (This may seem like an odd inclusion, but there are people who do this sort of thing forever, so I think it’s valid.) The goal is…
PNAS: Amy Young, Saponifier
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 24, 2011 (This post is part of the new round of interviews of non-academic scientists, giving the responses of Amy Young, who runs her own soap-making business. The goal is to provide some additional information for science students thinking about their fiuture careers, describing options beyond the assumed default Ph.D.–post-doc–academic-job track.) 1) What is your non-academic job?…
Return of the Project for Non-Academic Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 19, 2011 In keeping with this week’s unofficial theme of wibbling about academia, there’s an article at The Nation about the evils of graduate school that’s prompted some discussion. Sean says more or less what I would, though maybe a little more nicely than I would. I wouldn’t bother to comment further, except this spurred Sean to…
Your Problems Are Not Unique
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 31, 2011 Via Mad Mike, a discussion of why it sucks to be a biomedical scientist: 87% of my blog-related e-mail is from unhappy, bitter, troubled, distraught biomed grad students, postdocs, technicians, and early-career faculty. Others write to me with problems, but these tend to be of the “I’m frustrated with my advisor” sort rather than the…
Student Comments and Internet Reviews
Posted by Chad Orzel on March 30, 2011 I got my student comments from last term’s intro mechanics course yesterday, which is always a stressful moment. As tends to happen, they were all over the map, with some students really liking me and others absolutely hating me. It struck me while I was reading through the written comments that the experience is a…
Physics Job Market: Same As It Ever Was
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 8, 2010 The American Institute of Physics has a statistics division that produces lots of interesting analyses of issues relevant to the discipline. A couple of them were released just recently, including one on the job status of new Ph.D.’s (PDF). The key graph from the report is this one: The text of the report talks up…
Poll: Working Late
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 18, 2010 Daniel Lemire has a new blog post arguing that working long hours is stupid. This collided with Bee’s Backreaction post on what keeps physicists up at night, included in this morning’s Links Dump. This got me to thinking about academic work habits, which led to the following poll: How long will you keep working, continuously,…
Academic Poll: How Do You Like Your Interviews?
Posted by Chad Orzel on January 18, 2010 The always interesting Timothy Burke has a post on the economics of conference attendance, inspired by Brian Croxall’s essay about why he didn’t attend the MLA. The key problem for both of them is that the way the academic job market is structured inn the humanities forces job seekers to attend the MLA for “screening…
What Our CV’s Say About Our Profession
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 21, 2009 As mentioned on Twitter, I spent much of yesterday reading and rating a huge number of grant proposals. As such, I’ve looked at a lot of CV’s and resumes, and the contrast is striking. People who work in industry tend to use a resume format that is mostly just a list of jobs and degrees,…
PNAS: Julie Myers-Irvin, Scientist Administrator
Posted by Chad Orzel on August 11, 2009 (On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This…
