I got a job!

I've been waiting to write this blog post for longer than I've been blogging here.  It's a pretty big day!  I accepted my offer letter and am officially going to be a curriculum writer with one of my favorite clients! 

I've got lots of reasons to feel good about this (it's a job!), but I wanted to walk back through some of the key choices and experiences that helped me actually get into a position to take a job I'd never hear of in an industry that didn't exist when I entered school (Lo', those many years ago...).

I struggled a lot with the idea of really moving into a field that is very distant from my previous work.  The job (write a HS curriculum about vocational programs) is certainly not something I need a PhD to do, or a background in virology.  I'll write more about that struggle later, but there were some  things I did in grad school that did help me get this job.  And not just the "hard work and transferable skills" stuff.  I designed a course for undergrads that I taught one semester.  I enjoyed designing the course, but was petrified as an instructor.  That made me think I didn't want to get into education (one reason I hesitated to pursue this).  I also wrote a lot, and made an effort to develop that as a skill.  This was mostly just a couple manuscripts and a dissertation, but while I had colleagues who would rather die of papercuts that put words to paper, I enjoyed the process.  (Although I did totally hate parts of it too).  I hated revisions, so this made me think I was too sensitive to let writign be my primary skill.  By the time I left grad school, I knew I didn't want to be at the bench forever, and I was scared to teach or write.  Nifty.

The day I stopped working I started volunteering at the Carnegie Science Center.  I believed that I probably had some workplace competencies that etc.) my adviser would not be able to speak to (showing up to work on time, dressing appropriately, and I wanted some structure in my long, tedious days of job hunting.  This transformed into a much more responsible position that I had been able to predict, and I was able to (among other things), write and execute scalable demos (for 1-many students, and for all ages).  I did handle a small budget and some other project management skills, but developing demos was the key.

I made a HUGE effort to build up my LinkedIn profile.  I did everything anyone suggested there, including improving my profile to include all my skills and experience, not just my science background, and joined tons of groups.  One group I joined (Possibly a subgroup of Science Jobs- the Freelance group), someone asked for help writing some science lessons.  It didn't sound like anything I'd done before, but I wrote some letter with hubris that said I've got a PhD, I worked at the science center, I can totally smash you lessons.  This lead me to my first client, Words & Numbers.  Work there was sporadic, and after having tried plenty of other routes, I realized I had months of experience in this field (curriculum development), and there seemed to be a lot of off site opportunities.  While I was trying to amass more clients, I ran across an ad for a local company in this industry and applied- again with a letter I thought was ridiculous.  I've often that that I should amend this entry to say that as crazy as I thought the letter was, it was read, and I got the job- well, not the job I applied for but I was able to quit working at the bank to take on writing full time.

After working with them for several months, telling everyone there how much I enjoyed it and how interested I was in more work (and several contract renewals), I decided to take matters into my own hands and told the guy who hired me I was looking to apply to another job at the company.  This prompted a discussion about how I could continue to work with his team in a more permanent basis that VERY SLOWLY (I sent that first email in August) turned into a full time job offer.  Tada!

Obviously, I couldn't have predicted this combination of things, and a lot of the other stuff I was doing prepared me to respond well to what turned out to be the key opportunities.  A few things turned out to be help for me.  I never got good at 'leveraging contacts' to open doors to invisible job opportunities.  I did met loads of folks who gladly shared information about their careers, but I decided that the easiest way to impress someone was by doing the job- that's why I volunteered and took contracts.  And that did give me a chance to impress the people who gave me my job.  And of course, I work for a company that makes online curricula for credit recovery and educational development.  5 years ago the publishing industry wasn't prepared for ebooks, and now there are any number of companies making mixed media learning tools.  It's just not a job I could have gotten prepared for by any traditional route. 

I promise at least one more write up on the internal components of getting and taking this job as well. 

Perks of working from home

There are parts of all jobs that suck.  I think finding a job where the parts that do suck are manageable is really important to finding career happiness.  For me, part of that is recognizing the parts that don't suck.  I don't love working from home- spending so much time with my cat makes me feel like a crazy cat lady.  But taking editing contracts for foreign scientists and writing curricula from home are the jobs I keep getting. I used to have really fun coworkers and went to work in a very interesting neighborhood and I'd like to have all that again (but get paid more to work less).  Until that job comes to my door, there are some really great things about working from home.

1) I set my own hours.  Even working on an hourly contract, I just put the hours in where they fit for me.  Today is too beautiful and I gotta take a long walk?  Fine.  My sweetie is gone for the evening, I'll put some hours in.
2) No commute.  I quickly realized that my 20 hr a week bank job takes at least 25 hours of my week, including a 30 min drive on both ends.  No commute give me that time back for whatever I feel like.
3) No dress code.  Yeah, I am one of those freelancers that works in my PJs.  At least until I feel like a mid-morning shower.  For the bank job, it takes me almost an hour to go through the ritual of showering, and putting on make-up, and getting dressed, and packing a lunch.... Add another 5 hours a week to that 20 hour a week job.
4) No workplace drama.  Yes, I miss my coworkers, in no small part because it's good to have a cohort you can share those stressful experiences with.  Can you believe the department chair did that?  Who took the last of the free seminar food? As another off-site worker told me, "There is no one at the office that I don't like."
5) I set the play list.  My old lab had the best taste in music, don't get me wrong.  But sometimes when we would turn the music up too loud the department chair would just turn off our radio.  As I was blasting some sweet tunes this morning, I was relishing that no one was going to turn them off for me.
6) Contracts are low commitment.  All that phobia about what might suck about a job (terrible coworkers, awful work, tedious tasks) seems more manageable when it's only for a few days or a few weeks.  It also means I've done a lot of different things in the last year.
7) All I need to work is an internet connection.  I could work from Starbucks, or the library.  I'm currently planning to go to my parent's house for a week and work there.  My client doesn't care- they just want to see the work done.  (I have mixed feelings about combining working and vacations- it makes work more fun, but it is much less like a vacation when you are looking for 40 hours to get some work done).
8)  I'm at my house.  I don't live in a super trendy neighborhood with fun shops and restaurants, but my office is the same place I cook, it's where my garden is, it's where my mail gets delivered and I sign for packages.  We need to schedule a repair guy, no big.  I want to get some laundry started, cool, I'll take a break.  Especially for a dual career family, it's nice to have someone who is/can be at home.
9) Time worked = Dollars earned.  Science is frustrating because hard work is not always tied to success.  For a pretty simple definition of success (financial reward), I just put in the time and out comes the money.  It's easier to feel detached about doing the work when you get the pay-off that way.
10) I like to talk to editors by email.  I'm not sure if it's because editors make their money from writing, or they understand that our relationship is based predominantly on written communication, but they clearly go out of their way to be polite and professional.  When you see your coworkers/collaborators all the time, it's ok to send brief, unfriendly emails "Here's the figure you wanted."  It's hard to interpret that as passive-aggressive if you just shared a laugh over coffee.  My editors don't have that luxury, and they seem to put a lot of context into their email. ("Great questions," "I appreciate you asking about that...," "Thanks for pointing out those problems.")  I always found it hard to take criticism in person, even though that is a big part of professional work.  "The figure is unintelligible.  Please make it better by doing the following...."  It's a lot easier to write the email that says, "Great, I will incorporate those suggestions," than to try and say it while not pulling a face.
11) My editors understand the challenge of being a contractor.  They treat me like I am doing them a real favor to be on their team, and try to make all the other stuff (getting paid, understanding the task, understanding deadlines and expectations) as clear as possible so that the only hard part of the job is the job itself.  Of course, this just shows I am working with some really great editors right now.
12) I enjoy this work.  At the moment, I don't have any single employer to fill my time, I am compiling most of my work from a variety of sources.  Basically, I get to find projects I like and work on them.  I can't say every one has been as much fun as a pony ride, but I also can't think of any that have been as miserable as a day in the cold room that ended in colossal failure. 
13) Comparatively, I can make a lot of money (compared to doing the same work in grad school).  I make money now for editing scientific manuscripts and designing courses.  These are activities that I actually would have scheduled to do outside of my normal working hours as a grad student.  In fact, the course I designed and taught as a grad students occurred almost exclusively outside the normal work day.  I'm currently editing a 6 page paper for 354RMB (or about $50), and working on a contract with a pay rate of $45/hour.  All this for work I would have done outside of my real work.  Nice!
14) This job doesn't have things I disliked about other jobs.  Examples include brutal protocols that needed to be repeated ad nauseum, and then rehashed in yet another painful lab meeting.  Or irate customers.  Or fickle equipment that is prone to failure.  Actually, I would say that I like how much more of this job is in my control compared to being a grad student or working at the bank.

Yes, I am giving myself a pep-talk about how much fun I'm having at this job, but in the interest of fairness (and for the benefit of others who might be wondering about the lifestyle), there are some fundamental ways that being a contract laborer is different (and arguably less ideal).  The downside:
1) It's all me.  I find my own contracts, I set my own hours, if the work doesn't get done, it's my bad. No pressure.  And when the contracts as short, it's hard not to feel like each on is an interview to see if they consider giving you another. 
2) I'm a LOT more involved in my own taxes.  I have a small business license to cover this work, which means that I pay business taxes.  I also have no withholdings in my paychecks- so what seems like a lot of money now is going to feel like a lot less come April.  I am also buying my own health insurance and retirement plan.
3) Invoicing feels much more tedious than just filling out an hours sheet, or better yet, being salaried.  The form takes a little more time to fill out, but it takes some of my clients 45 days to cut me a check.  That's a big lag between doing work and getting paid.  This is annoying for me, but manageable because I don't provide the primary income at our house.  If I did, I'm not sure I could swing this career step.
This list of perks is still much longer, and looking over them, we can say that I like to be in control of my day to day.  Interesting insight.

On the STEM Skills gap

I have, in the past, weighed in on the question of over-producing Ph.D., and I will probably never run out of things to say on this topic.  But recently I've been thinking about the flip side of this problem, sometimes called the STEM Skills Gap.  You see, there are apparently many companies and recruiters who are at a loss to find qualified people to fill positions under that STEM umbrella (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math).  From my perspective, this is why I get rejected for positions that require some clinical trials experience, or GxP experience.  Locally, employers like Boeing and Amazon need employees to push forward the boundaries of modern manufacturing, and run their SQL data bases or use Sharepoint or other things that we don't do in school.  The argument is that if 'we' (in this case the US or WA workforce) don't provide adequate workers, these jobs will go elsewhere.  I get that, the company needs a workforce that provide the engine of labor to move forward.

What I don't get is why they think these skills are so hard to come by- in contrast to, say, a Ph.D.  All of those 'experiences' I mentioned before are simply things a bright person could pick up on the job.  In a era of tight budgets, there is no time or money to train an insufficient candidate, and apparently leaving a role empty is less of a burden than hiring someone who might be inefficient at their role for a period. Is there a place where there is an experienced workforce ready to mobilize on these challenges?  If these companies don't stay here, where are they going instead, and how are those workers prepared that those of us here are not?  I'd really like to know the answer to this, I think we could learn a lot.

I like the phrase the Skills Gap, because it implies there is a disconnect on both sides.  Schools train us to do something no one will hire us to do directly, jobs are looking for people with training that doesn't exist.  If schools would help their graduates recognize that while your training may provide you expertise in some specific arena, this type of training prepares you, generally, to be successful in a wide array of fields.  And then those companies might be willing to look at these trainees with an eye towards their future, rather than just their ability today.  I think companies are too myopic in their hiring practices.  If the industry is as dynamic and changing as they insist it is, why aren't they looking for a workforce that is as well?  People who are brave enough to take on a technical challenge and have a history of success with other technical challenges are probably going to be just what Microsoft or Philips need to compete. 

I have one other gripe about this process- I don't believe that the people in charge of hiring really understand what they want and need in a candidate.  I was hired at the bank because (among other things) I am "good at math."  I took math up to 3 dimensional calculus; this does not make me a better teller.  Not once have I been asked to calculate an interest rate and returns for a client on the fly. I sometimes total checks and subtract withdrawals, but that is arithmetic- a skill set that I all but lost touch with by high school.  Yes, a teller needs to be comfortable with numbers and fairly detail oriented in that way, but no quantity of calculus will be required on that job. I often worry that I am overlooked as a candidate because my experience doesn't match verbatum the ambitions of a hiring manager who is asking for the stars and willing to settle in between.

I will recognize that if I had been involved in an actual clinical trial as a graduate student, my job prospects would be better.  But our work was funded to be basic research by the NIH.  I did some drug discovery, which means I learned how to pull the very interesting parts out of huge datasets, and how to refine my assumptions by performing iterative analysis.  Unfortunately, potential employers seem to believe that the ability to submit a 510K for FDA approval is WAY more important to my potential for success than my capacity to solve problems.  Sure, the first is easier to quantify.  But there are much fewer funding opportunities for academic researchers who have interest in commercializing their science.  This is why so few of us come out of our training with that perspective.

When I hear educators complain about the leaky STEM pipeline, my heart breaks.  They are looking at students who can't perform in basic skills categories that make it nearly impossible for them to perform, let alone compete for good jobs and opportunities.  When I hear employers talk about the leaky pipeline, I want to scream.  To them, the biggest leak is those who stay in the pipeline and fail to train into the fields that we didn't know existed.  But I don't want to leave this as just an angry tirade.  The gap is real, and it is part of the compartmentalized cultures of "academia" and "industry."  All parties need to do better about seeking out input from the other side about what funding can be earned, what training should be provided and what skills will be necessary to present a workforce that keeps up with the changing demands of the global economy.

Day 2- STEM Economy

Today was the wrap up of the STEM summit.  I heard about STEM oriented K-12 school, STEM/Maker-inspired school programs, and novel ways of building post-secondary education.  I worked with a team to develop a short curriculum that could be used in a variety of different ways to teach math, physics, Project Management and communication using a hydroelectric power generation.  I even got to be on the STEM Education panel, representing informal education. 

We talked about the role and importance of STEM Education, how to make that more engaging and where to draw resources from.  What did I choose to highlight? I have feelings on all those things- I talked about how all citizens in a democracy need to have a basic understanding of STEM, including the ability to continue to learn, in order to contribute to our national needs.  I talked about how at the Girls Math & Science Program we have refined techniques for getting girls to engage in STEM, and why this (ie- compassion) might work well for other underrepresented groups as well.  We know we need to provide mentors who look like our girls, to explain the pathway to entry, and to provide an external motivation (studying hard today opens opportunities in your future, like good pay and fun work). Girls like collaboration, so that's a huge part of how we structure events and activities.

And finally, I talked about drawing on students to be mentors.  As I said, my boss doesn't know as much as I do about the workforce right now- he's had his job for 20 years.  Someone did a rough estimate that each of these STEM high schools has a graduating class of 150 students every year, that it would be just impossible to find the mentors for all those students.  I would argue that one mentor can have relationships with multiple mentees, and that borrowing from people who are farther along in the pipeline (post-docs, grad students), helps those of us in training remember why we got on this crazy train in the first place.  My panel also talked a bit about the Grand Challenges in Engineering and Global Health, but I'd like to talk about that more later.

If you are a teacher who wants to bring more hands-on, inquiry-based or  different teaching materials into your classroom, here are some of the interesting resources I learned that are available:
Braincake.org- the Girl's Math and Science Partnership that I work with- we have educational games and materials
Fwee.org- Energy related resources
TransitionMathProject.org- changing our math-phobic culture
Firstwa.org - Science Competitions in Washington (I believe this is a national program)

Another way to get teaching experience?

For reasons that seem silly to explain, I was searching on the AP Central website for info about AP Bio exam. If you were a bright kid in a well funded school district, you might have taken AP Bio for college credit, and the experience culminated in taking a long standardized exam. Remember that?

Now that you've got your degree, you could be on the other side of that exam. Turns out they always need people to read those exams. My impression is you need to have taught Intro Bio at the college level in the last three years. I'd never really thought of using my teaching experience anywhere but inside a classroom, but obviously there are plenty of other opportunities for the creative career seeker.

That kinda made me wonder who scores the GREs. Looks like they are always in need of science writers, and teaching type folks. If you like thinking about pedagogy, this might be a cool way to supplement your experience, or just a good career to pursue.

Ideas for getting the bills paid

When I tell people from my normal life I've got my Ph.D., there is usually some well-meaning inference that "you can work anywhere." If by "anywhere" you mean in a select numbers of currently funded labs in diverse geographic locations, then yes, I might just end up anywhere. While I am trying not to fall into the caustically narrow-minded opinion that my options are limited, it's hard not to envy the writer/artist/freelance types who can generate themselves income as needed, and from anywhere.

But even the best laid plans for a dream post leave you with a bit of a gap. You know, grant cycles and academic calenders don't always sync up with the other factors influencing your job hunt, or more importantly, your credit card billing dates. So how can a scientist make some short term cash, or even just boost your CV while your dream job waits for that NIH gravy train?

The most common suggestion is to teach a semester, at your alma mater or a nearby school/community college. All calibers of schools will have surprise staffing shortages and may need someone to step into teach intro bio labs or senior writing seminars. Contact the department directly (especially someone in charge of curriculum), an ad hoc position may be exempt from affirmative action- meaning the person in charge of hiring can pick any candidate for any bias reason at all. Like there was a desperate need and you sent an email. If you know the right person to ask, this can be an easy job to find. These positions are not lucrative, but may provide some much needed teaching experience for your job hunt.

If you are more interested in the pay check and flexible schedule than the accredited experience and strong letter, you might want to look into teaching online courses. These gigs can vary in caliber and time commitment, but you don't have to commute. Or bathe. To me, this sounds like a great deal, although I've never heard of anyone doing it, just wanting to find this plum job.

What if you have no interest in teaching, but still need a paycheck? If you are a native (or proficient) English speaker, you may be able to be an editor for ESL scientists trying to send articles to English language journals. Working on short contracts may sound like a nice way to make some beer money, but this can be a full time salary if you work at it. This position will give you a chance to stay in the game, or even make some extra cash, until your dream job pulls in.

I know that most of the major recruiting firms say that they are looking to fill temporary positions for tech's etc. The rumors I've heard lead me to believe that these are temp contracts that lead to permanent placement. These also aren't any easier to get than any other type of job, so start looking early. However, this might be a good way to get some "industry experience" before you go back on the market for the dream job.

What else do scientists do in lieu of freelance mini-preps?

Get it on your resume: Anatomy and Physiology

Are you interested in teaching? In teaching at a small college? Then I must encourage you to find some way to get experience with Anatomy and Physiology (A&P).

Universities and Colleges attract many students who are (or want to be) pre-med. All of these students have to take A&P, and very rarely do A&P students stay on track to become professors at these types of institutions. I've heard it from many different sources, schools all need instructors and professors for A&P. Having some experience or confidence in teaching A&P (by TAing it or taking the course) would be a major gold star on your application which you should highlight.

And if you are in a position to be teaching A&P, let me direct you towards the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS). They offer resources for teachers and graduate credit for students who want to learn about teaching A&P. Are there other ways to get A&P credentials, if you, like most of us, are not an A&P researcher?