1. HELPING CHEMISTS FIND JOBS IN A TOUGH MARKET. 2. TOWARDS A QUANTITATIVE UNDERSTANDING OF THE QUALITY OF THE CHEMISTRY JOB MARKET.
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| "Fellas, it's bin good t'know ya!" |
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.
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(*For the literal-minded, this is a joke. Mostly.)
Fallen soldiers? Or perhaps that's just a dirty, empty vessel.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, I've thought of that one.
DeleteJust had our annual RCRA training this morning. The moment you decide that a material is a) obsolete or b) can no longer be used for its intended purpose, it becomes "waste". Hence, I think you made the right call CJ (assuming you placed it in the appropriate waste stream!)
ReplyDeleteWe commonly refer to these as DTSers (down the sink, meant metaphorically, of course.
ReplyDeleteRCR. Red Can Reactions.
ReplyDeleteWe'd mark them NFG's, as in No F'ing Good.
ReplyDeleteOr we'd give them to underemployed undergrads to see what they could isolate from the mix.
'Strategic asset'. Since, if you're not planning to set up anything else soon, it will keep the human parasites born from lack of lab-space away from your fumehood. Other good 'strategic assets' include flasks with some copper salts dissolved in water and stirring away with a drying tube on top (if you desperately need something and there is no real dead reaction handy).
ReplyDeleteNFTK - notebook filler, thesis killer.
ReplyDeleteI had a colleague in grad school who had a tough natural product synthesis project. He ran by far the most reactions in our group and filled up notebook after notebook. However, he'd get to key steps in the proposed routes and then just run into brick walls - every reaction ended up in the waste after a handful of awful looking TLC's and no desired product formation by H-NMR or MS. He finally got his PhD after 5 years, but never made the natural product, had just one marginal publication, and probably ran a couple hundred "NFTK"'s.
They are called deficiencies on the safety audit checklist.
ReplyDeleteWWD- Waiting for Waste Drum (reminiscent of WMD but much easier to produce)
ReplyDeletewe call it accelerated workup. Remove the stirbar, then with gentle swirling by hand agitate the solids and pour the resultiong suspension into the waste drum
ReplyDeleteA German postdoc I once worked with smiled and told me this kind of reaction needed a 'French Workup.'
ReplyDelete