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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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.)
LANL huh.. Can I ask what type of chemistry you do there? Is there any opportunity for a synthetic chemists at LANL?
ReplyDeleteI'm a synthetic chemist by training, mostly organometallics & inorganic clusters (long story). My PD project is working on nanoparticle/polymer composites to achieve desired properties by controlling mesoscale ordering. I'm technically in the materials physics division, but I know the lab has been hiring a lot of chemists lately. I think there's probably plenty of opportunity, best thing to do is look through their jobs site.
ReplyDeleteLots of postdocs at the national labs, not so many full time positions. Too bad, I really enjoyed my time at one of them.
ReplyDeleteAccording to a friend who recently got hired on full-time after a successful PD at a national lab: get a postdoc there and kill it.
DeleteI've had a few friends from industry who've successfully made the transition to national labs, but I've heard that a lot of assistant professors who don't make tenure end up moving to national labs. Can anyone speak to that observation?
ReplyDeleteMy cousin worked at LANL for almost 30 years and said it was a wonderful place; stimulating colleagues, job security, good salaries and benefits, and of course, spectacular views if you are into that kind of a thing. But he also saw both the quality and the job security declining after management changed hands, unwarranted heavy-handed backlash against purported leaks engendered resentment and a general atmosphere of lethargy started permeating the lab after the end of the Cold War. There's still some very smart people and equipment there though, and from what I hear, postdoc salaries still exceed those in universities.
ReplyDeletePD salaries for all national labs are publicly posted & easily available. Universally much higher than academic postdocs. I don't know what assistant professors are getting nation-wide, but I know my salary now is pretty close to that of new higher assistant profs at my graduate institution.
ReplyDeleteThe conversion thing is always up in the air, highly dependent on who has money, like anything.