Finding a Postdoc Position is a Difficult Journey but here are 15 Tips to Help You Along the Way.

My impression, from the anecdotes of others as well as my own experience, is that finding a postdoctoral position is a widely unknown and undiscussed process that one learns about via “trial by fire.” For example, Mitch wrote about the surprises he experienced during his interview last January.

Unlike applying for college or graduate school, there is no formal application process for obtaining a postdoc. From what I have been told it more closely resembles the job search process, but for further complication, many postdoc openings are not advertised and only become available when the right applicant inquires. In an effort to support future postdoctoral hopefuls, I am going to expand on Mitch’s prior post with insight and advice I acquired through trial and error and gleaned from the stories of others. It is a long list but hopefully some of this information will be helpful.

Get your foot in the door…
1. Begin your search one to two years before graduation. A few professors shared this insight with me after they learned I began my postdoc search only nine months before my own graduation (oops). It makes sense now when I think about it because potential advisors need time to allocate money, resources and a project for your estimated date of arrival.

2. Find four or five research groups you are interested in working with. I focused primarily on finding groups working in the flavor of research I am interested in. Other searchers may prioritize location. Another variable, more important than either, is whether the lab you are interested in will serve as a stepping stone for your long-term professional goals.

3. Write a cover letter to each professor. This letter should include a brief overview of the research you have conducted and why you are interested in their work. I recommend subtly incorporating the skills, tools, and ideas you would bring to their research. I would also mention a willingness to pursue external funding sources or to request recommendations for any fellowships they may know that you could apply for.

4. Ask your advisor to send a short email on your behalf. It is not unusual for a top research professor to get several postdoctoral applications each week. Regardless of how good your qualifications may be it can be difficult to differentiate your email from the others. If your advisor is willing, have them send a truncated recommendation email saying something like, “I have a spectacular graduate student that is interested in being a postdoc in your research group and you would be a fool to pass them up. They will be sending you their CV and cover letter shortly.” If the professors know each other it can be huge advantage in your favor and sometimes this email is all it takes to get an offer.

5. Send an email with cover letter and CV attached. Example email text: “I am a fifth year graduate student in the …. research group at the University of …. This email is to express my interest in joining your research group as a postdoc starting in Month 201x. Attached are a cover letter and curriculum vitae. Letters of recommendation are soon to follow. I am happy to provide any other information you may find helpful.”

6. Send a hard copy of the cover letter and CV. Even if your email gets ignored you can pretty much guarantee that a physical letter will at least be opened and your name will cross the professor’s mind at least one more time.

7. Wait for a reply. Hopefully you hear back from the professor with good or at least a neutral (not no) reply. In the best case scenario you get a job offer or an interview. If they do not extend an invitation for a campus visit, you can insist on paying for your own visit and offer to give a talk. This option of course depends on how badly you want the position, as well as the state of your bank account. My theory is that it would be much more difficult to say no after a person has demonstrated that they are highly interested and competent (assuming you demonstrate these qualities). If you do not hear back in several weeks you should send a follow up email asking for an update on the postdoctoral position.

You have planned a visit. Before you go…
8. Do your homework. Looking into the research group’s goals and methods should be a no-brainer. It is unlikely that you will get a pop quiz on their research. However, your general dialog with the adviser and group members will flow much better and you will leave a better impression. Nothing says “I have a scientific mind” like asking a really insightful question. If possible, think of a proposal or direction they could shift their research. They might not want to pursue your ideas but it does show that you have them.

9. Have a one hour talk prepared. Instinctively you might feel the need to include as much of your PhD work as you can cram into an hour but it is much more effective to present a small subset of your research with a coherent storyline. This talk should also be tailored in a similar manner as your cover letter as to clearly demonstrate skills/tools/ideas you can bring to their research.

During the visit…
10. Consider how to dress. This is a point where I respectfully disagree with Mitch. If you are someone that is comfortable or enjoys wearing a suit by all means look more professional. However, I am not willing to sacrifice my comfort for appearance. The more relaxed I am the better I will perform in both my presentation and one-on-one meetings. For my postdoc interviews (and defense) I wore a nice pair of jeans and a suite coat.

11. What to expect. Your visit will most likely be comprised of a lab tour, possibly a short campus tour, a meeting with the adviser/grad students/postdocs, lunch and a presentation (either to the group or the entire department). Not necessarily in that order. If there are in-house collaborators, a meeting with them can be expected but thanks to Mitch I now know that you might also be asked to meet with other professors in the department.

12. Be prepared for a long, energy consuming day. You will likely be putting in an 8-hour day of constant discussions. I have heard rumors that when veteran professors are interviewing a candidate they will set up a meeting in the morning and one at the end of the day. The reason they do this is to first catch you in the morning to see how awake and energetic you are, and then at the end of the day to see if you are the same way. It is a method of finding out who you really are. It is very difficult to keep up a facade for 8 hours. Also if you can keep up your energy that entire time you are probably going to get a lot of work done.

After your visit…
13. Send a follow-up email. A few days after the interview I sent a follow-up email thanking the professor and their group members for their time, reemphasized my interest in their research group and closed by asking for updates on the position. If I did not hear back within a month I sent a second email asking for an update.

14. Funding. Even if you have received an offer that includes full financial support it is still a good idea to apply for postdoc fellowships not only for the money but also the prestige that comes with receiving a fellowship. Most advisors are willing to help you write a proposal based on their work or an original proposal idea. Whether or not you get the fellowship you will still learn a lot about your future projects.

15. Making a decision. Believe it or not, this might be one of the more difficult parts of the process. If you only receive one offer out of several attempts it greatly simplifies your decision. However, if you get a few offers it may be more difficult. This is the time to ask some honest questions about your future advisor and group members. Will they help you find a job? Do they like the area? What is it like working their? Many of us also have to consider the two body problem. Can my significant other find a job there?

The final advice I will give is that the process is so individualized that you should consult everyone you can that has undergone their own postdoc adventure. If others have any more information to share, please do so.

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The most bracing (and sad) chemical sentence you will read today

“I will roar argon into chlorine, xenon into fluorine, all the noble gases into reactive ones… My lament will terrify even the stars.” – Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

From Dwight Gardner’s review in the New York Times. Dr. Stern is an expert on terrorism; she believes her interest in terror stems from a brutal and violent incident from her childhood.

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Art On A Chip

Albert Folch from Lab on a Chip released a cool artsy project this past Friday that the journal has been working on. Defined bluntly, the project is a collaborative flickr account to share the pictures of your science.  The general theme is miniaturization, and of course dyed water on chips. The images already stored there are appealing to the eye and some are displayed below.

Droplet-scale estrogen assays in breast tissue, blood, and serum. A picture of the first microfluidic device (25 × 12.5 mm) applied to the extraction and quantification of estrogen in 1 l samples of breast tissue homogenate, whole blood and serum (Mais Jebrail, University of Toronto).

Cells on a micropallet array. Four 3T3 fibroblast cells are constrained to individual polymer pedestals (micropallets) on a glass substrate. Each micropallet can be released individually from the system using a high-powered laser (Nicholas Gunn, UC Irvine)

My only two real issues with the project are….

1) I wish I had thought of the idea. Although, if anyone is interested in making a more generic project along similar lines I’m game.

2) I have no idea how to add pictures to the “joint” flickr account! The announcement from Lab Chip, Introducing LOC: Art on a Chip, gave no instructions on how to do it. It isn’t like I’m totally naive with regards to technology, I have my own flickr account, I just don’t understand how one goes about adding pictures to someone else’s account. Check this post for an update when some nice person in the comments section finally explains the process to me, or when I find the magic button.

The Announcement: Introducing LOC: Art on a Chip

Mitch

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My Advice to First-Year Ken (Time Machine Availability Pending)

Having just successfully defended my dissertation and finding myself with spare time during a cross-country drive between Los Angeles to North Carolina, I have compiled a list of things that I did or, in retrospect, wish I had done at the beginning of graduate school. I hope that those who are just entering a program this fall will find it useful. One thing to keep in mind while reading this list is that I am primarily a synthetic chemist. Yet, I am optimistic that there is something useful to all chemists, no matter the flavor.

In no particular order:

1) Search through every nook and cranny of your lab. When you first start working you should look through every drawer/cabinet/fridge/corner in your group’s space just to get a feel for what is available to you. At some point you might need a unique item that you recall happening across during your initial search. Keep in mind that while group materials are often shared, some of the senior group members might not be happy if they find you going through “their stuff” so you might want to either ask them or do it at night when no one is around.

2) Have an extra set of clothing/shoes in desk. You never know when you will sacrifice an item of clothing on the alter of science (Ignore this point if you enjoy public nudity).

3) Use a numbering system for your files. Early in your graduate career you might be tempted to label your spectroscopic files (NMR, UV-Vis, IR, etc.) after the name of your molecules. However, unless you are going to list the full IUPAC name it will result in some acronym or abbreviation that could change over time. To avoid much frustration and ordeal while sorting through your first-year files as you write your dissertation it is much better just to name your files by notebook number or some systematic way that will not change over time.

4) Write down everything. I realize you are told this many times but you have no idea how difficult it is to recreate a procedure four years later with notes that are not up to par. If you are not motivated by the fear of your own personal frustration later on, do it for the next person that needs to recreate your results.

5) Always remain skeptical. It is very easy to convince yourself that there is a peak or signal or whatever when you want it to be there. Yet, no matter how much you want to have discovered a new phenomena or synthesized your final product, you have to double/triple check your results and use multiple measurements to be sure. If a result is to good to be true, it often is. There is nothing more devastating than to be “certain” of your results only to find out they are far from it.

6) Get a screw driver set. Although your research group may have public use tool, I strongly recommend keeping a personal set of both small and regular-sized screw drivers in your desk drawer. They will always be there and in good working condition when you need them (In consideration of point #1 – write your name on all personal items).

7) Buy Invest in a comfortable chair. Over the course of your graduate career (4-7 years) you will spend many hours in your chair, especially when writing up papers or your dissertation. Being physically sore due to a crappy chair does not help your mental well-being and thus can end up hindering your research.

8 ) Stagger your hours. No matter how close you are with your lab mates, make no mistake; you will be competing with them for lab space and equipment (rotovaps, spectroscopic machines, etc.). Although the idea of working from 6am to 4pm may not sound appealing, you can get a lot of work done when you have free reign over EVERYTHING.

9) Have a couple of 3 1/2” floppy disks in your desk. Working in a state of the art research facility does not always mean you are working with state of the art operating systems/software. In the event that you need to get data off of a machine without USB drives, running windows 98 it is handy to have your floppy disks readily available.

10) Screw up early and often and learn from it. You are going to make mistakes in lab. During your first year be prepared to fail. A lot. The key to success is to learn from your mistakes. As a senior group member I had no problem walking a first-year through a procedure or trouble shooting some issue, but if I had to do it three or four times I was less likely to help them in the future.

11) Pick and choose your battles. Although it is difficult to foresee what battles are important, especially when you are first starting your research career, the best advice I can offer is to ask yourself, “will this experiment support the narrative of my research/papers? Will it help me graduate?” For example, if you are not a synthetic chemist and only care about the properties of your final product it is not worth your time to optimize your reaction yields from 50 to 80%. If your product is valuable let someone else figure out an efficient way to make it. You should just worry about measuring pure product.

12) On your first day in lab figure out who the smartest member of your research group is and hit them with a lunch tray. Just kidding. Prison rules only apply 75% of the time in graduate school. But seriously, not every opinion from senior group members is equally valuable. Get a feel early on for who is able and willing to help you with your questions.

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ACS Member Dues

It is that time of the year for me when I need to dole out the cash to renew my ACS membership. For the first time I have to pay the full membership price of $145. The process is made more complicated than usual since I need to switch from the graduate student member rate to the full member rate and there is no button available to do it from the website. :sigh:

So with member dues on the brain I went to investigate why they are set at $145. In 1986 the dues were $70 and it was decided to set all future dues to that inflation corrected price. $145 may seem like a lot of money but the ACS Committee on Budget and Finance’s website points out that it is a very middle of the road amount when compared to other scientific societies.

However, that is not a fair comparison to make. Whenever the topic of executive compensation comes up at ACS we’re always reminded that ACS is a huge publishing house connected to a nonprofit, thus salaries and benefits of the top executives are matched to norms in the publishing industry. In one case it is fair to compare something to scientific society norms, in the other case we have to include the norms of a publishing house.

Out of my own curiosity I dug into the numbers behind member dues and have found that total dues were $15,500,000 and brought in $2,200,000 in net revenue for 2009. So how much does the society make per year? Do we make enough as a society to forgo paying dues into 3 digits? Below is a table showing the finances of the society, I’ve also included the income payed out to the top executives for comparison

The society made enough net revenue in 2009 to easily refund 1/3 of our member dues, but it would never do that as I’ll explain. If you look at the table and try to match the society’s executive incomes to performance you will have a hard time, if you can see a pattern please let me know. In 2008 as the society’s net assets decreased in value by 72% the income of the executives increased. As the total revenue of the society brought in slowly increased, the executive income increased faster. As the net revenue of the society has remained flat, besides the small peak in 2009, the executive income increased. So how exactly is the salary and benefits of the top executives valued, it seems disconnected from normal metrics of financial health?

The society will hire an outside firm to decide what the compensation should be. The firm will take into consideration that ACS is a publishing house and a non-profit. The firm will also consider the health of the global economy and other factors and will set certain benchmarks for the executives to meet in order to get bonuses on top of their paychecks. So the reason their income seems decoupled from performance is because the benchmarks they must meet are already coupled to the passions and whims of the national economy.

I will argue that this road for ACS is unhealthy.

If I ask any top executive at ACS what their job is, I’m sure they will tell me that their job is to return as much value back to ACS members while generating as much revenue they can for the society. The society will indirectly self-select individuals that can maximize that function. But this leads to the horrible disease of group-thinking. I have no doubt that Rudy Baum actually dislikes open-access, but I also have no doubt that ACS has indirectly placed people in positions of influence who will maximize the function of revenue vs. value.

I have faith that the net revenues made by the society for 2009 will be used for a good purpose. Maybe it’ll be put towards shoring up the losses in net assets, maybe it’ll be used to make the budget for next year more affordable. However, I do know it will never be given back to members as a rebate on their membership dues. A rebate would be considered an expense and would decrease net revenue the society made the following year and thus decrease bonuses.

There is no clear answer to what would make my favorite chemistry club healthier and more affordable, but the current tethering of compensation and salaries to the same wonderful metrics that financial institutions use seems illogical.

Mitch

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Chemical Safety Board Produces Safety Video For Teenagers

The chemical safety board is the federal government agency charged with investigating industrial chemical accidents. So I was surprised to see them release a youtube video aimed at high school students earlier this week. Apparently, high school students have been getting themselves killed by going to abandoned oil production sites and exploding low grade crude oil filled tanks. In the past 27 years 36 teenagers and 6 young adults have died at these sites.

The video is shown through the eyes of friends and family of two recently deceased teenagers.

Press Release: CSB Releases Video “No Place to Hang Out” Focusing on Deaths of Teenagers in Oil Site Explosions

Update 1: Apparently also covered by CENtral Science – Exploding oil storage sites are “No Place To Hangout”

Mitch

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You are my density … I mean Destiny*

(for other entries in the Chemistry in Space series, click here)

Chemistry in space has been greatly aided by the addition of the Destiny Laboratory Module (see also: here for overview, and here for images) to the International Space Station.  Destiny was delivered by the Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-98 in February 2001.  It is the first permanent operating orbital research station since Skylab was vacated in February 1974.  Destiny is a cylinder measuring 28 feet long and 14 feet wide.  Inside, there are 24 ‘racks’ (6 on each side) measuring 73 inches by 42 inches.  The racks can be configured for storage, life support systems, or – more importantly – science experiments (check out the interactive on this page).   13 racks are available for science, while 11 are used for other purposes.

One rack bay remains open and houses the highlight of the module: a 20 inch optically perfect window made of telescope-quality glass – the largest produced for use in space.  It allows the use of high quality video and still cameras primarily for capturing images of Earth in detail not before possible.  One rack bay houses the Minus Eighty Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI).  It has 4 dewars of 75 liters which can hold samples of various sizes and shapes and keep them at variable controlled temperatures.  Currently, temperatures of -80 degC, -24 degC and +4 degC are in operation on the ISS.

The purpose of Destiny is to provide space for scientific research, including experiments in the physical sciences.  Experiments are designed and built into the shape of one rack, which is ported into space and installed in Destiny.  Racks can be built to be controlled by astronauts aboard the ISS or remotely by scientists on Earth.  Destiny is joined by Columbus and Kibo as the main research ‘wing’ of the ISS.  Columbus is the science laboratory contributed by the European Space Agency and Kibo is the science laboratory contributed by the Japanese space agency JAXA.  Kibo also includes a ‘terrace’ where experiment payloads are fully exposed to the space environment.

Check back for stories of experiments conducted in the microgravity of space aboard the ISS.  There’s some pretty awesome research being undertaken.

*Bonus points if you can tell me what movie that’s from

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Gaint Machine Creates Science: The Onion on LHC

In case you are still wondering what exactly the LHC does and why it’s important, this infographics from America’s Finest News Source sums it up pretty nicely:

While you marvel at the beautiful illustrations, I will duck back to my cave and try to finish my last (and very very painful) semester of coursework. Hope everyone had a great time at ACS! The weather here in the midwest is so good that it almost feels like San Francisco.

Noel

Source

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ACS Day 2: March 22nd

An interesting day at the 239th ACS National Meeting and Exposition in San Francisco: The most popular booth at the expo, Open Access publishers, and Going meatless NOT the way to save the planet.

Aside from talks and meetings, the huge vendor exposition also takes place through Wednesday in Moscone South’s large Halls B&C.

As you can see, hundreds of vendors and many more hundreds of attendees showed up. An interesting and, after a quick headcount and comparison, the most popular booth at the Expo was Rod Griffin’s Australian Boulder Opal…jewelry display:

It just goes to show…even chemists can’t resist shiny things.

Also showing up were a few Open Access journals, such as Chemistry Central. These are free, online, peer-reviewed publications. A while back I wrote a pro vs. con on open-access journals here. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. Some “selling” points of Chemistry Central are:

• free online access
• peer review
• authors retain copyright to their work
• rapid publication

On the science side, an interesting report presented at the meeting concluded that decreasing the consumption of meat and dairy products won’t have a major effect in combating global warming. Unfortunately the misconception that the world “going meatless” will significantly reduce greenhouse gas production is becoming more popular. Initiatives like “Meatless Monday“, while we can respect their goal of improving our personal health, incorrectly believes that cutting back meat consumption will “improve the health of our planet”. There is even a European campaign called “Less Meat = Less Heat” that was launched late last year (although TreeHugger thought of that catch phrase first).

Now people who have read the 2006 UN report on climate change, which claimed that the livestock sector is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions (measured in CO2 equivalents) than the transportation sector, will call foul on Frank Mitloehner, Ph. D. UC Davis; the air quality expert that presented the scientific rebuttal on Monday. He faulted the methodology of the UN report and contended that the numbers for the livestock sector were calculated differently from transportation. The calculated livestock emissions included gases produced by growing animal feed, animals’ digestive emissions, and processing meat and milk into foods. The transportation analysis factored in only emissions from fossil fuels burned while driving and not all other transport life-cycle related factors. [ACS Press Release March 22, 12p.m.]

Mitloehner says that instead of focusing our efforts on cutting back meat consumption, developed countries should focus on increasing efficient meat production in developing countries where growing populations need more nutritious food and archaic farming practices produce more greenhouse gases.

There were a couple of other things. Cold Fusion quacks were out in force with their new book. Also, the Sci Mix was a blast, even if I didn’t get any drink tickets (and unlike Mitch, didn’t go begging). I found a lovely example of recycling in chemistry that I’ll blog about later.

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