From the inbox, a chance to get famous!:
The Chemical Educational Foundation (CEF) (www.chemed.org) is looking for chemists to use in You Be The Chemist Challenge marketing pieces and events for this year’s “careers in chemistry” theme. (The Challenge is an academic competition for grade 5-8 students that focuses on chemistry and its real-world applications.) For example, we might feature a few chemists on a periodic table poster to distribute to schools. We are looking for employed chemists between the ages of 20-35 (i.e., people middle school students could see themselves becoming in 15 years) who can provide us with: 1) a high-quality headshot and 2) a few sentences about what they do, focusing on aspects of their job in chemistry that might be of particular interest to grade 5-8 students.
If interested, please send a headshot and a few sentences about what you do to Elena Lien at elien -at- chemed/dot/org by September 19.Enjoy!
"We are looking for employed chemists… people middle school students could see themselves becoming in 15 years"
ReplyDeleteThis is a cruel trick to play on the children. Why don't we just show pictures of lottery winners, celebrities and pro athletes and convince the children that that will be their future? Oh, nevermind.
Maybe they should feature a bunch of angry, bitter 33-year-old postdocs to give the kids a realistic picture, plus someone who had a nervous breakdown in grad school and is now working some crappy retail job!
DeletePeople telling kids to go into chemistry should be arrested.
ReplyDelete"yeah kiddo, just stay in school for 5-8 years longer then your buddy in engineering, and maybe one day in your late 40s your income will catch up with him, just before you are slacked once again in yet another round of big pharma consolidation. But you will always have the satisfaction of looking down on him and everyone else more successful because they are not fake doctors like you..."
Do they looking for a specific kind of "working chemist" (academics, industry, and/or govt. jobs)?
ReplyDeleteThanks!
More industry/government than academic, I think.
DeleteI wrote an email to that organization and to the contact Elena about how it's unrealistic and cruel to nudge kids toward science careers.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I agree about the fake doctors thing. It makes me so angry at myself (for choosing science) knowing that I'm entitled to the same title as those with good careers (MDs). It just doesn't seem right. PhDs should have a different kind of title, why not Philosopher So-So. We are natural philosophers after all.
Last week, 19 years after I finished my doctorate in Germany, I finally gave my doctoral supervisor a piece of my mind. His research group was always 25-30 people. After graduating, I learned from my colleagues that the research director had a reputation of NOT assisting 95% of his former students with their job search (by the way, he was the former president of the German Chemical Society). Here is what he said about having responsibility for the employment outcomes for those who worked 60 hours/week on his behalf. The following was pasted DIRECTLY out of his response to me:
ReplyDelete"indeed I expect from grown-up persons that they find a job without my help"