Entering the “real world”

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.

An uncertain future

The responses I’ve been getting from people when I tell them I’m planning to graduate in December are interesting. By far the most common is “Why are you graduating early?” It’s a hard question for me to answer. Part of the reason is “Because I can.” I took 5 classes for three semesters, and I came in with a pretty good idea of what I wanted to major in (I thought biology or math, which morphed into neuroscience fairly easily.) For the record, I do not recommend taking 5 classes at a time for most students. I wouldn’t do it again if I had the choice, I was pretty stressed those semesters and didn’t spend as much time having fun and relaxing as I think I should have. But I did, so now I can graduate early. The other reason I’m leaving early is that I think I’m ready to. I will miss everyone here, and I will miss my classes, but as much as the real world terrifies me, I think that I’m up to the challenge of moving to the next stage of my life.

The second most common question I am asked is, “What are you doing next semester?” This is the question I dread. Although I have, what I feel, is a pretty solid plan, and I’m perfectly able to say, “I’m planning on finding a position as a lab tech for a few years before applying to grad school,” it feels like a long explanation compared to what many of my peers are doing. In some ways I’m jealous of my friends who can just say, “Oh, I’m applying to grad school in thus-and-such for next year” and proceed to commiserate with the questioner about how challenging application essays are or how much they are studying for the GRE’s. Even saying “Oh, I’m applying for a Watson and a Fulbright” seems easier than my plan. I know that not everyone from Scripps goes to grad school right away, in fact, it’s only about 20% of us who go straight to grad school, but it still feels like that is what is overwhelmingly discussed. Perhaps that’s because over half of us (66% to be exact) will end up in grad school within five years of graduating. Still, it feels like I’m an alien in a world full of pre-graduate and pre-medical students.

Of course, this isn’t true of the folks at CP&R, who are aware of and able to help with a huge variety of potential paths. Mostly I think that the uncertain nature of the job search process means that people are less willing to discuss their plans, simply because it is stressful. On the other hand, I think that if we were more open in discussing the job search, it would feel a lot more comfortable and we could get both support and suggestions from our peers. Ultimately, it seems that that is what this blog is about, I just wish that more of the people I encounter on a day-to-day basis seemed to be in the same boat as me.

Posters and Socials

I haven’t written in a while due to my trip to the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting. At the meeting I got to present my research at the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience poster session, which was a great chance to practice talking about what I do with people of various scientific backgrounds, and hopefully make a good impression with the faculty who were there. I was fairly pleased with how the poster session went, and I feel much more comfortable describing my research spur of the moment now that I’ve gone through it with at least 10 different people coming from different backgrounds and wanting different levels of detail. At the poster session, someone also mentioned an online undergraduate journal that is looking for both contributors and people for the review board, so I am thinking I will apply for a review board position. It seems like a good way to keep up with what other people my age are working on, and can’t hurt my CV, but mostly it just sounds fun.

One other exciting part of the conference was the social I went to. As a satellite event to the main meeting, there was a social held for people doing research similar to mine. My research advisor and a former lab-mate were both attending, and I decided that it would be a good chance to meet people who might have leads on jobs (and to have fun with people who are as geeky as I am). I have to say, socializing with people I don’t know is not my strong point. I felt really awkward for the first 15 minutes or so, since I didn’t want to cling to my professor or friend and prevent them from having a good time, and I felt really shy about just walking up to random people and introducing myself, especially since it seemed like everyone else already knew each other.

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On lab and Life Connections

I keep shifting between being completely overwhelmed by the job search and feeling completely in control of it. Last week I emailed a Scripps alum through the Life Connections section of the student portal, and was amazed at the response I got. The woman I emailed was a neuroscience major who now works in Seattle, and she had an amazing list of places I should check out for possible jobs, things I should look for that will make a lab experience good, and things I should watch out for.

One of the things that she mentioned that I’ve noticed being important to me so far is that I should be wary of places with an unspoken code that the newer people will be working nights and weekends in addition to full daytime hours. I’ve already noticed several job postings that say things like, “Applicant must be available to work some nights and weekends.” Those are labs I will not be applying to. It’s not that I necessarily would mind working some nights and weekends; there are projects that require that kind of time commitment, and I hope to be genuinely excited about my work to the point that staying overtime is rewarding. On the other hand, though, I don’t want to feel like I have to be in lab all the time or I’ll lose my job. Continue reading

New techniques in job hunting and science

I’m tutoring OChem this semester, and I’ve decided that a good use of my down-time (when no students are present) will be working on the job search. (By the way, to any OChem students reading this, please come to tutoring, it’s lonely without you.) At any rate, I’ve spent the past two and a half hours emailing people on Life Connections, looking for job openings on websites, and uploading my resume. The places I’m looking at were suggested to me by one of the people who I contacted on Life Connections who managed to respond already, which is awesome.

One trend I’m noticing (and that the Life Connections contact did mention) is that almost everybody wants me to have either molecular biology or bio-chemistry lab techniques. It’s frustrating realizing that I need those skills, but it’s too late to take the classes in which I would learn them. I wish that I had realized earlier on in my time at Scripps how prevalent and necessary these techniques are; I might have signed up for different courses had I been more aware. Anyway, seeing that got me thinking about how I could possibly acquire at least a passing knowledge of these skills so I can demonstrate that I’m willing/eager to learn what is necessary for the job. I realized that one of my friends works in a molecular biology lab, and decided to ask her if she was willing to teach me some of the skills. She agreed, as long as I come in at the same time as other people she’s training; I’m very excited to learn new techniques, and am very grateful to my friend for being willing to help me. Although it won’t be the same as being “very familiar” on my CV, but I’ll at least be able to say I’ve observed and understood the techniques, which is a good start.

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