Cardboard boxes

So I've been traveling a bit recently, which explains the spotty posting and odd posting times. Apologies -- hopefully things will settle down by next Monday or so. A list of small useful things (links) to tide you over:

• Dr. John Borchardt (a longtime ACS career counselor) has been writing a long and methodical approach to job applications over at the ACS Careers Blog. If you're looking for a job, you should really go over there and read them. 
• The Journal of Failed Chemistry Results? Sign me up for a volume. 
• Th'Gaussling writes a memo to Aldrich; personally, I'd like to write a few memos to all the chemical suppliers...
• Matt does a beautiful post in honor of Harry Gray. 
• I can't watch CSB videos without getting a queasy feeling. 
• I'm not a big fan of Sour Patch Kids (or any sweet candy, for that matter), but Sharon is. They're full of protons, don't you know.  

See you late tomorrow, I hope. 

12 lies told in chemistry

1. That reaction is incredibly clean.
2. Our budget just doesn't have any more room for capital equipment.
3. We just maintained that instrument last month!
4. We have a well-trained staff of emergency responders -- I think we'll be fine.
5. No, we think this department is just the right size. No major changes coming.
6. I really think this molecule is going to be the one.
7. You just need to put a little more effort into that project.
8. Shenzhen ABC Chemical Corporation offers only the finest in materials and reagents.
9. You know, that instrument is really easy to learn to use.
10. You just need to run a few more experiments and then we can publish!
11. This vacuum distillation delivers beautiful material cleanly and quickly.
12. Please tell us what you think -- we're all friends here.

Daily Pump Trap: 4/26/11 edition, SAO version

A guest post from the kind and funny See Arr Oh (thanks, SAO! -- CJ):

Good morning!  From April 21-25, there were 41 new jobs posted on ACS Careers.  Of these 9 (22%) are academically connected, 1 (2%) from Kelly Scientific, and a whopping 20 (49%) from our friends at 

MEEEEEEEERCK!   Any chemists in the audience want to be a Machine Operator in Miami?  Perhaps a Customer Representative in Texas, or a Finance Analyst II in New Jersey?

Speaking of Jersey…Plenty of options for the Greater NY / NJ area this week: BASF is hiring an Analytical Ph.D. in Tarrytown; Anichem, a CRO in New Brunswick, offers a synthetic BS / MS position; and CUNY-Brooklyn wants a computer scientist with possible interests in nanotechnology.

Nothing Could be Finer: Tons of opportunities south of the Mason-Dixon: Imerys (GA), Xavier U. and DuPont (LA), U of Kentucky (KY), Unimin and Novan (NC), and Coastal Carolina University (SC) are all hiring.

Further Afield:  The IISC in Bangalore, India is looking for a physical chemist to study soft matter, energy, and polymers.  Are you a “visionary thinker/innovator” who is fluent in Mandarin and English?  Consider applying to be a scientific director at ScinoPharm Taiwan, Ltd.  If synthetic organic is your passion, maybe try being a postdoc in Warsaw, Poland or Liverpool, England.

Or Maybe Politics is Your Thing?  The American Chemistry Council,  a 139-year-old lobbying group based in Washington, D.C., is searching for a Senior Economist / Director, whose responsibilities might include “developing specific information and materials to support the social, technological and economic benefits of the products of chemistry.”  Time to dust off that MBA…

See Arr Oh is a Ph.D. organic chemist in industry.

A modest proposal: Judgement Day (not a week or a month or years)

"Today, I settled all family business, so..."
Photo credit: emulsioncompulsion.com

Rumors of layoffs seem to always overhang the pharmaceutical business -- it seems like, at some companies, there's a slow painful drip of impending cuts. Worse, the pace of cuts seem to be accelerating from once every couple of years to once every few months. These cuts seem to take place in a few awful steps:

1. Cuts are rumored to take place at some near-future date; often, this date gets delayed. 
2. Productive higher-level thinking often grinds to a halt as the 'true' date gets closer and everyone waits until the ax has fallen. 
3. The ax falls: shock, dismay and horror. Survivors' guilt reigns amongst the survivors. The laid-off leave and their absence is felt profoundly. 
4. Employees say, "Wow, they're now cutting bone, not fat. They can't possibly cut anymore."
5. After being asked and asked and asked, management says, "We don't plan to make any cuts again for a long, long time..."
6. Cuts are rumored to take place...

Here's the Chemjobber plan for creating some level of morale in the meantime. It will never get implemented, but what's the harm?:

1. Management decides that they're going to revisit cuts at some future date, 2 or 3 or (dare I suggest) 4 years in the future. 
2. Day 1: Management lays waste to their R&D departments, cutting all the people they think they're going to cut in the next 4 years. 
3. Day 2: Management announces to their workers: "We've cut all the people we're going to cut until October 1, 20XX. Congratulations, you're the new team. You have (whatever) years until we make another decision on layoffs. Breathe easy until then."
4. After 2 months of survivor's guilt and freaking out, everyone settles down and gets to work, ignoring that future date until it's soon enough to worry. 

This, of course, is a plan that completely ignores the reality that business expectations (shareholders, etc.) in our modern times seem to hold. It will never happen. But I think it would create some space for being able to engender some level of trust and calm among the employees.*

*I suspect that this plan would have all sorts of weird effects on hiring, etc. The pharma world would start to look a lot more like professional sports in its hiring patterns, which I'm not quite sure is a good thing. 

Daily Pump Trap: temporarily on hiatus

The DPT will return soon, when I have a much better internet connection. Sincere apologies. 

Are on-campus interviews a good idea?

Graphic credit: stopsmilingonline

A thread on the Chemistry Reddit talks about how people got their first chemistry job out of college. There was a minor smattering of people filling out applications and folks having phone interviews, etc.

As you can see from my response, I got my first job out of college starting with an on-campus interview. "XYZ Corporation will be visiting on March 1 to interview potential candidates. Interested students can drop off their resumes with the department secretary, etc., etc." I hesitate to say that I aced the interview, just that I didn't throw up on my shoes. One on-site interview later, I had my first chemistry job out of college. It was pretty great, I thought.

It must be terribly difficult for companies to come up with an initial screening process to find candidates for on-site interviews. On-campus interviews rely on the thought that surely, there must be a student here that 1) meets our criteria and 2) has free time to come and visit us. Presumably, phone interviews are somewhat less picky; the thought process is 1) here are people who have expressed the desire to work for us and 2) most people are available by phone.

I think there's something about face-to-face interviewing that people really like, because it's so time consuming and expensive relative to phone interviews. The average on-campus interview lasts 20 or 30 minutes and the interviewer has already spent quite a bit of money to get to the campus itself (plane ticket + hotel room?) Phone interviews might take as long, but the cost can be quite a bit lower. I suspect that the wealth of non-verbal information that you can derive from face-to-face interviewing is worth the extra cost.*

*Of course, the way to test this is to see if on-campus interviewing is more successful at bringing in on-site interview candidates and future employees than phone interviews. 

A handy project management flow chart

I was always a big fan of this flowchart growing up -- now that I'm a little older and I work in chemistry, here's my version. 

Chart of the week: where did the jobs go? Not in the US, that's for sure.

Chart credit: David Wessel, Wall Street Journal

From an astute reader, the chart of the week: since 2000 until 2009, major United States-based multinational corporations eliminated 2.9 million jobs in the United States. During that same time, they've added 2.4 million jobs overseas.

I doubt that pharmaceutical and chemical companies are responsible for that much of the gap between the two categories. That being said, I can't imagine that they have not contributed at all.

Gee, I hope this works out well for all of us. 

Daily Pump Trap: 4/21/11 edition

Good evening/morning! Between April 19 and April 20, there have been 21 new positions posted on the ACS Careers website. Of these, 5 (24%) are academically connected and 3 (14%) are from our friends at Kelly Scientific Resources.

But what does that mean?: Lilly is looking for a cheminformatics scientist with at least two years experience; among the minimum requirements, "A proven track record in developing novel computational chemistry / cheminformatics methods with a demonstrated impact on drug discovery research." Wow. I think I know what that means, but I'm not positive. I think it's something more than lots of neat looking Spotfire plots, but I could be wrong.

QC Heaven (or is it Hell?): Novan, Inc. is looking for a B.S. chemist to be an analyst. Duties include being "responsible for conducting performance testing on raw materials, drug substance intermediates, active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), and finished dosage forms (FDF)." Sounds like a party.

More for the analysts: Exova's Gary, Indiana lab is looking for a B.S. chemist with some experience with "gas analyzers, a remelting machine and an ARL 3460 spectrometer". You know, if I were a chemist in Gary, Indiana... (amusingly, local candidates are preferred.)

Moooo, Merck: 6 (29%) positions from our friends at Rahway, including a position to become the Senior Territory Representative for Beef Cattle Products in Utah. You know, I'm crazy enough that I think I would enjoy this position. That being said, you don't need a degree in chemistry to do this job -- so why is it being advertised on ACS Careers? (h/t to devoted commenter See Arr Oh.)

How many people are leaving the pharmaceutical industry (and why?)

What would a similar chart from the pharma world look like?
Image credit: Falk & Rogers, Harvard/Kennedy School of Government

A recent report from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government looks at the various reasons that relatively young junior officers are leaving the military. Surprisingly (or not), neither operational tempo nor better pay in the civilian world were strong reasons for them to decide to get their DD-214.

It would be really interesting (to me, anyway) to know how many people are voluntarily leaving the pharmaceutical and/or biotech worlds. Where are they going (and why), I wonder? I remember a very promising young bench chemist from my Big Pharma days who decided (months after they were given an internal research award) to start over and head off to the intellectual property world. I sincerely hope that gave the senior management something to think about.

What would be my top 4? Job stability, ability to 'make a difference', company bureaucracy, the outlook for the industry easily come off the top of my head. Readers?

While I don't doubt that the most of the reasons are fairly obvious or well-picked over, it would be a good idea for someone in this industry (or ACS, as if they didn't have enough to do) to find out the numbers, track these folks down and interview them. Scientific data (or pseudo-scientific data) would be enough, I'd think, to end a lot of old arguments and start a lot of new ones. 

Daily Pump Trap: 4/19/11 edition

Good evening! Between April 14 and April 18, there were 105 new positions posted on the ACS Careers website. Of these, 9 (9%) are academically connected.

Taxpayer dollars at work: NIH is hiring a (very experienced) Ph.D.-level medicinal chemist to support NCI's Developmental Therapeutics Program. This is a plum for someone, that's for sure. Nice salary, too.

Da, tovarisch!: 80 (76%) of positions posted were from the latest dump by Merck. It's fairly frustrating to sort through this mess of positions. I'm especially amused by the position that's a sales analytics position in Moscow, Russia. Be sure to pack your funny fur hat.

Inks: ITW Trident is a maker of ink jet printer ink; they're looking for a M.S./Ph.D. chemist who has 10+ years experience in ink formulation. I gotta interview one of these people sometime; readers, know any likely subjects?

You could try a Polish Boy!: Ben Venue Laboratories in Bedford, OH is looking for a B.S. chemist with 5+ years experience in the analytical field. Lots of paperwork, protocol writing and some supervision, looks like.

Huh: Watson Pharmaceuticals is looking for a B.S. chemist with 5-8 years of analytical experience to be a Chemist III on the 2nd shift. That's not something you see every day, shift work for chemists...

Daily Pump Trap: Well, not really

Ignore the orange bars; it's the blue bars that are key. Note the drop for the first part of April, with the spike for the recent Merck dump. A real DPT later today, hopefully. 

A reader question: how should a young chemist use their time wisely?

A reader (we'll call them IW) writes in with a question:

I plan to accept a job in a new start up as a chemist. The start up is on a solid platform (well backed by a [important biotech geographical area] VC), so there is no issue about stability for a few years. My question is: how should I use this opportunity to stabilize myself professionally in the drug discovery chemistry field. I am hoping some of your readers might have started their careers in a similar fashion and have some advice for the rough future.

My advice to IW (even though I am not too far from their position is this): attempt to achieve some depth first (really get to know your project and your project's chemistry), and then start to see what kind of breadth you want as well. 

Recent interviews offer good advice: MQ talks about the "building depth" as such:

Keep learning. Take the time to learn as much as you can about the biology going on within your project, especially your primary assays. Talk to the biologists; ask them how they are run, and how to best interpret the data. Talk with the pK folks as well, and anyone else your project interacts with for data. Try to attend as many higher level meetings as you can to get a feel for how the decision making process is handled in your company. Make it a point to go to general informational seminars in other therapeutic areas. Keep learning new things because you just may find yourself transplanted on very short notice.

Kay talks about the importance of keeping up your communication skills (always a difficult thing for somewhat introverted chemists):

Make sure you keep up your writing and presentation skills. When you're busy in the lab, it's easy to brush off writing reports or presenting your work at meetings. But those skills are important in the long term. You can be a terrific bench chemist but if you can't communicate, you will have a hard time getting jobs and advancing in your career. You have to sell your work and you also have to sell yourself. Those skills are also crucial if you ever decide to leave the bench or move into another career.

It's all very difficult and confusing for a young chemist starting out in the industry -- I seem to recall a premed advisor in college (don't ask) saying something like "You know, to get into medical school, it helps to walk on water." But it seems to me that between the learning in the lab, and the learning by talking to people, there will be more than enough opportunity to really start a career on the right track. 


Readers, what do you think? Am I crazy? 

Consulting and volunteering: a tactic for unemployed mid-career chemists?

Today's issue of Chemical and Engineering News has an article by Linda Wang that features the stories of 6 chemists and engineers who found themselves out of work and what they did with their time. (Our friend Daniel Levy is among them.) The common thread? Consulting or otherwise using that time to perform (unpaid) work towards their future employment goals. To wit:

When Ph.D. chemist Steven A. Weissman was laid off from Merck & Co. in 2008, he knew that it would take a while before he found a new job. “I was mentally prepared for a long-term search,” he says. “I had no illusions that it was going to be a one- or two-month thing.” 

"Employers “can have a bias against people whom they perceive to be stale." After allowing himself two weeks to regroup, Weissman immediately got to work. He completed the Mini-MBA program at Rutgers, attended scientific meetings, read scientific publications, served as a coinventor on two patents with former colleagues from Merck, and bolstered his online presence. “You definitely have to answer the question, ‘What have you done with your time in transition? What have you accomplished?’ ” In late 2009, Weissman was offered a job with Concert Pharmaceuticals in Lexington, Mass., where he is now associate director of process chemistry. [snip]

While Ph.D. chemist Paul Young was unemployed after being laid off from Nalco in 2001, he served as an adjunct professor at several colleges in the Chicago area. “My teenage son was making more from his part-time job as a grocery cashier than I did from my part-time job teaching college chemistry,” he recalls. But the experience helped him improve his presentation and public speaking skills. He also kept his mind sharp. “There’s a lot of creativity in teaching when you’re trying to figure out the answer to a good question,” he says. 

During this period, Young also consulted for St. Michael, Minn.-based U.S. Water Services, which provides water treatment services, and it was this work that eventually led to his current full-time position with the company. 

Well, I suppose that's something to remember for unemployed chemists -- on top of searching for a job, you need to try to stay current in your field. Best wishes to all of us.

Goodbye, old girl.

I'll miss you, chariot.

You're not supposed to have a nice car during graduate school, but when I bought this Hyundai in 2003, I thought I had purchased a lovely, lovely vehicle. I took great roadtrips in this little roller skate, wandering all throughout the Midwest in it. I drove it across the plains of Texas and Oklahoma and we took it up into Canada. I wooed my wife-to-be in the front seats and brought my first child home in the back seat.

While cars are mostly a tin box on wheels, they really do become a part of your life, especially when they're one of the few constants in the itinerant life of an young chemist.

Readers, what was your car of graduate school (or was it a bike?)

Chart of the week: a decade's worth of layoffs in Big Pharma

Yesterday, Derek Lowe linked to Matthew Herper's posting of Challenger, Gray and Christmas' listings of ten years of pharmaceutical industry layoffs. I've done the tabulation here.

The chart speaks for itself; Derek notes that he was part of the numbers in 2006. I'll note that for each of the above years after and including 2006, I believe I can name someone I know who was laid off. (Big surprise, really.) A historical (and unfair and possibly inappropriate) comparison: the Battle of Antietam had 23,000 casualties. Operation Overlord is listed with 14,000 to 19,000 casualties (for both sides).

Unfortunately, the numbers don't do a breakdown between R&D and sales forces, etc. But I suspect that it was in 2007 that the site-wide closures (here's looking at you, Ann Arbor) that started really hammering chemistry employment. Of course, there is also churn where people are laid off and immediately rehired elsewhere; this series of comments by Rick puts together a nice summary of that activity.

Best wishes to all of us.

New poll: post-UCLA academic chemical safety

Quick poll: has academic chemical safety improved since the UCLA/Sangji incident? You can comment if you wish; people (other than me) will be reading.

Which has more job stability: process or medicinal chemistry?



It's a cliché -- sorry. (Photo credit: greatermindz) 

 A devoted reader asks if process chemistry is more stable than medicinal chemistry. To be frank, I really don't know.

Let's not pretend that medicinal chemistry is not slowly being pushed overseas. While some "high-value" medchem might be kept here, it doesn't really appear as if there are plans for large pharmaceutical companies to keep armies (as opposed to regiments or battalions) of senior scientists and associates busy cranking out compounds and submitting them for testing in the United States. I am (as yet) unaware of any Big Pharma CEOs saying, "Oh, yes, we're done outsourcing and it's time for us to make big pushes in drug discovery." So the baseline comparison is looking pretty dire.

At the same time, process chemistry is manufacturing-related and thus much closer to the global trends of offshoring manufacturing. It seems that (for whatever reason) much pharmaceutical manufacturing is done overseas already -- will the process development be far behind? I don't know, but there is one sobering thought: what organization doesn't wish that the medicinal chemists talk earlier and more often with the process R&D folks? Which is easier: coordinating teleconferences across time zones or setting up process R&D in international locations?

The turbulence of the last ~8 years doesn't seem to be ending any time soon in the pharmaceutical industry and it seems that there isn't any "safe" place. Best wishes to all of us.

Daily Pump Trap: 4/14/11 edition

Good morning! Between April 12 and April 13, there were 12 new positions posted on the ACS Careers website. Of these, there are no academically connected positions.

I'm guessing business is good: ATL International is hiring an experienced analytical chemist to run its nuclear forensics lab. Why don't the CSIs of Las Vegas PD have one of those? They seem to have everything else. You'll get to interact with DOE, DHS and FBI -- that'll be fun. (Pays pretty good, looks like.)

Another nickel for my collection: Sigma-Aldrich is looking for a Ph.D. synthetic polymer chemist; it appears that they'd like someone who's worked in the industry, but they'd take a new graduate that had knowledge and/or academic experience in the field.

Working for the man: UES works on "structure/processing/properties relationships in nanostructured materials, polymers, and metamaterials. [They] also investigate materials, processes, and architectures for devices such as sensors, flexible electronics, batteries, capacitors, and solar cells." They're looking for Ph.D. chemists to be postdocs in materials science; experience with SEM, TEM, XRD and XPS desired.

Nano-working for the man: Sandia National Labs is looking for a technical director for its division that looks at "Materials - Nano-materials for energy and national security applications with specific attention given to the Nuclear Weapons SMU." Their "current emphasis includes Nano-structured materials and materials with unique Nano-Enabled Properties." Huh. Experience in the nano-world desired. Good luck with that.

Outsourcing corner: Asian Paints (India) is looking for senior scientists -- they're paying well (I hope) and their benefits are "best in the industry." GSK is looking for an experienced chemist to be a medical chemistry team leader in Shanghai -- I'll bet that's good money these days. Ni hao!

RIP David Y. Gin

David Gin: 1967-2011
Photo credit: UIUC

The news that David Gin of MSKCC passed away is awfully tough to take. (Here's a comment from a reader and here's a memorial page from the funeral home -- the list of scholars signing is fairly long and distinguished.)

I only interacted with him once, when I was checking out grad schools and visited Illinois. Sitting in his chair, you could tell that he was incredibly energetic and a pretty cool guy. [There was also a wonderful moment when someone called (apparently writing up some sort of grant application or a short bio or something) and he answered (I'm paraphrasing from memory ten years ago) "Yes, Beckman and Sloan. No, not Cope."]

The Chinese have an expression for young people passing away before their time: they call it "white hair following black." (in reference to a funeral procession.) It is among the most terrible of familial tragedies.

My sympathies to his wife, his children and his group.