You might have noticed I didn’t post for a few weeks there. The reason for that is that I wasn’t managing to work on the job search because of thesis and other academic work. I have, however, just completed my final semester at Scripps College and have now restarted the job search in earnest.
The real world seems really scary. There are a lot of jobs out there that I’m almost qualified for, but am missing essential pieces of (I don’t have cellular and molecular biology techniques, unfortunately.) As of yet, the perfect job asking for exactly my experience hasn’t popped up, but I have been working on figuring out ways in which my experience does prepare me for jobs, and trying to think of good examples of my strengths. My last day at Scripps I met with Valinda to talk about some techniques and ideas for interviewing (and job searching in general), which was both incredibly helpful and reassuring.
Since that meeting I’ve been trying to think of general strengths of mine, and I’ve come up with two important things. One is that I have experience doing original laboratory research and writing about it through senior thesis. I also know that I still love my field, even after spending countless hours in the lab and writing. I’ve learned how to motivate myself to keep working, even when I’ve spent over 40 hours on the project that week and it’s only Tuesday. A second strength of mine is that I know what kind of environment I like to work in. The laboratory group I was with was fantastically supportive and collaborative, which made it much more exciting to go in and do work. I know that whatever lab I end up in won’t be the exact same, but I hope that I can find a lab with a similar sense of excitement and collaboration. I’ve also been trying to think of things I may need to work on with respect to work, and how I have worked on these things in the past and made improvements. One thing that currently comes to mind is that I have had trouble with keeping detailed and coherent records of what I have done in lab. To work on this, I made a point of always having my lab notebook and a pen out when I was working in lab, and writing anything that I thought could be at all useful down. I also typed up all of the procedures I did in lab and saved them as Google documents so that other lab members could access them.
About two days ago I sent another follow-up to a primary investigator I was talking to this summer, and I just received a reply saying that he has 10-15 hours a week available, and may have a full-time position available in February (depending on funding) which he would consider me as an applicant for. As much as I’d love to find a full-time position right now, a part-time will give me a lot of really good experience and I will be able to apply a lot of the skills I learned at Scripps while simultaneously learning new skills. I’m hoping to meet with this PI sometime in the next two weeks to discuss it. For now, though, I just feel so lucky to have gotten some positive feedback.