1. HELPING CHEMISTS FIND JOBS IN A TOUGH MARKET. 2. TOWARDS A QUANTITATIVE UNDERSTANDING OF THE QUALITY OF THE CHEMISTRY JOB MARKET.
 |
| There are clouds there, too. Photo credit: Flickr user **Mary** |
What's the job market like for chemists? Dude -- it's always bad.*
How bad is it? How the heck should I know? Quantifying the chemistry job market is what this blog is about. That, and helping chemists find jobs.
E-mail chemjobber with helpful tips, career questions or angry comments at chemjobber -at- gmail dotcom. All correspondence is kept confidential. (Didn't get an e-mail back? It's okay to try again.) Please address correspondence to "Chemjobber" or "CJ."
Voicemail/SMS: (302) 313-6257
Twitter: @chemjobber
RSS feed here
(The Blogger spam filter gets hungry sometimes, and likes to eat comments. You can e-mail me, and sometimes I can get it to cough up your comment. I am always happy to try.)
(*For the literal-minded, this is a joke. Mostly.)
From some people I work with I've heard of some long-term unemployed (>1 year) getting employment now. I hope this trend continues.
ReplyDeleteI just got a job, starting next week. Big thanks to Derek Lowe.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I used to work in the labs where Glen Ernst is going quite recently (I left in December last year). The people are good but the complicated politics and extreme bureaucracy of Johns Hopkins and the super-expensive parking will take some getting used to.
Congratulations on the new position, milkshake. Could not have happened to a better guy.
ReplyDeleteCongrats on the position, Milkshake! I'm really happy to hear that you find employment!
ReplyDeleteWould you be willing to tell a bit more about what type of work you will be doing? Just curious.
Congrats again.
I will be working on self-assembling polymers for targeted drug delivery and gene therapy. It looks like polymer and material science groups need organikers too - to make various building blocks that go into producing the polymers. But since I will be making polymers as well, I have a lot of catching up to do, especially since the purification methods and the instrumentation used to characterize polymers are somewhat different from small molecule work. And then there is the drug formulation/self-assembly that I don't know much about yet. It will be pretty interesting/
ReplyDeletecongratulations milkshake!
ReplyDeleteYour career choices give me confidence in my recent career change. While still working in synthesis, I am also doing some formulation. It is nice to see I am in very good company! :-) I wish you great success in your new career!
Na zdraví, Milkshake!
ReplyDeleteGlad to hear about your new job, especially since you'll be learning something new and useful. A lot of folks in basic research don't understand (nor are they required to) the intricacies of drug formulation. A commonly glossed over fact is that IC50's acquired from plate-based assays don't always translate to in vivo efficacy. Hopefully you won't be working with a bunch of arrogant turds who are overpaid to do shotgun Suzuki couplings.
Have fun with the dialysis and GPC...at least you aren't expected to have EA values ±0.4% or even HRMS within 0.01amu!
@Milkshake: Going to visit JHU in a week. What's scarier, the JHU bureaucracy or Bal'more itself, hon?
ReplyDeleteBaltimore has some really nice parts, I suggest that you go to eat fresh crabs and take water taxi ride from the Harbor. But it is true that ghetto begins right at the north and east edge of the JHU School of Medicine campus and while the campus is safe the nearby areas are not.
ReplyDeleteI suggest that you look for housing away from the inner city; you should expect to drive to work, maybe something within a 30 min commute. (The apartment rentals in the inner city that are nice are extremely expensive and typically the parking is extra - after paying $120/month to park at the campus you will not have spare money to pay for parking at your apartment. JHU housing services are useless, don't waste any time with them).
Bureaucracy - it is not scary but it can be positively frustrating and tedious because when starting as a new employee they will put you through more hoops than any other employer I know. Anything that has to be done through the central administration (central human resources, "benefits", housing department, parking department, mandatory TB test and illicit drug test, mandatory orientation, setting up a computer account) takes a long time and you should expect to interact with unmotivated admins; JHU employs over 100 thousand people and it shows. (My health insurance took over one month - I needed to see a dentist urgently - they were unable to start processing it without my computer login ID. And my computer login ID took more than a week to set up.)
To help you start as a new employee, find a admin assistant or HR person from your own department and ask them to write e-mails and make calls for you.
Also, if you get frustrated with simple matters that are simple anywhere else but at JHU, like facilities that promise to fix something in the lab but are nowhere to be seen, ask your boss to make the inquiries - do not involve yourself. There are complicated politics and you need to figure out how the institution works first.