My Experience of Finding A Job After My Ph.D

MY BACKGROUND

I completed my Ph.D. biochemistry in August 2011. After 4 years of hard work it felt great to be finished, in fact it feels a bit like this. I had of years of laboratory based research experience supplemented by extensive undergraduate teaching duties. I considered myself skilled and experienced in experimental design, data management/analysis, managing work flow, direct supervision of undergraduate projects, and teaching, in addition to the use of modern molecular biology techniques, and biochemistry used in the expression, purification, and characterisation of proteins. In short, I was educated, and experienced. I wanted to stay in Ireland, but I had to acknowledge most of the work for post-doctoral research was overseas.

TRANSITIONING TO POST-DOC RESEARCH

My initial job applications were focused on post-doctoral research opportunities in my field and focused mainly in the UK. While there was a constant stream of relevant positions coming online it quickly became apparent that without a firm experimental background in structural biology my current skill-set was not enough to secure a position. So I changed tactics, and began applying for research assistant positions. These positions can require less experience and expertise and are an excellent way to transition between two specialities. You become skilled in new techniques while maintaining your competency in general laboratory skills, and your employer gets an experienced scientist at low cost that will become proficient very quickly, it’s a win-win situation. However, on the few occasions where applications resulted in interviews I was dismissed as either not being skilled in what they wanted, or not being taken seriously because why would a Ph.D. apply for such a position, clearly, I was going to leave at the first opportunity contracts, responsibility and professionalism be damned!

PLAN B - INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS

So, without the right set of skills for academia, I decided to change tactics again. Clearly academia was flooded with skilled and experienced scientists, so I focused on industry applications. The major barrier for job applications in this area turned out to be recruitment agents which many companies insist on using. Through a mixture of incompetence, and simple refusal to consider any application without GMP written on it I made almost no progress while “working” with recruitment agents. The best success I’ve had with industry applications has been direct applications to the  company itself, even when they are not advertising positions. I’ve received emails from the owners of smaller companies thanking me for my interest, I’ve made new contacts which may lead to work years down the line, and importantly they now know I exist, and I have skills that are useful to them.

PLAN Z - BACK TO EDUCATION...SORT OF

After nine months of applications without any success I decided to take advantage of the new government sponsored upskilling programmes run for science graduates to allow employment in the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector. Despite the government parading the term “knowledge based economy” at every opportunity, this is not backed up by private or public investment in research facilities here. Instead Ireland is used as a manufacturing hub requiring specific skills which can only be obtained through years of industry experience. In the hope of acquiring some of these skills I joined, and subsequently left a state sponsored course designed to ease the transition between academia and industry. Overall, things were beginning to feel a bit like this.

After attending the first lecture I realised I could teach the material, so I offered my services for free. I would get good lecturing experience, reduce their work load at the same time, as well as possibly leave myself in a good position for getting paid work down the line. This looked like it might go somewhere, but it turns out there are bureaucratic difficulties in turning up somewhere to work for free. Everyone involved wanted it to happen, but it couldn’t be done. Least helpful of all were the department of social welfare. Since I was on social welfare payments it would be illegal for me to volunteer for anything that was not on their list. University lecturing was not on their list, neither was laboratory work.

JOBS-BRIDGE

While attending a second state sponsored course I was called for interview for an internship I had applied for months previously. It was out of my field of expertise, but since the idea of jobs-bridge was to allow inexperienced graduates to upskill I was hopeful something would come of it, and amazingly it did. I was offered the position, a nine month contract performing research in analytical chemistry, where I would gain hands on experience with relevant techniques. I was happy to accept accept the position, 18 months after I first started applying for jobs.

THE HAPPY ENDING

My current situation is that I’m employed full time on a 5 year contract. I’m gaining relevant experience in a regulated industry setting while performing research that I find fascinating, and challenging in equal measure. For me, the jobs-bridge programme was critical to my getting a foot in the door. It allowed my employer to take a chance on me, set up an experimental research project at low cost until such time as they were in a position to hire me.

MY ADVICE

From December 2010, to September 2012 I applied for over 100 jobs mostly within Ireland and the UK, and was called for interview on 10 occasions. As a newly graduated Ph.D. I found it impossible to get my foot in the door, and for anyone to take me seriously. The tide is beginning to change now as experienced people are being snapped up, and companies are becoming more flexible on their requirements. But I don’t envy anyone looking for work over the next few years.

The best piece of advice I can give here is where at all possible bypass the recruitment agents completely. For the most part they are not scientifically literate, and they will have almost no understanding of what the job entails. Secondly, persist! Keep applying, and where possible get in touch with the company directly. Finally, join LinkedIn, and use it. Posting answers to questions on its forums is a great way to make new contacts and establish a name for yourself as someone who knows their subject matter, but also as someone that cares about their work, and act collaboratively to solve problems. Finally, get that first few months experience if you can. It might mean working for free, but it won’t be forever.

Do You Mendeley? - My Experience of a Stress Free Reference Management Tool

BACKGROUND

As an experimental biochemist embedded in a largely computational research group I was lucky enough to be exposed to some clever software tools that simplify everyday tasks such as primer design, DNA sequencing, homology modelling, and viewing protein structures. However I noticed my peers were still performing many tedious tasks by hand, or using some really terrible software. The best example of this was reference management, where Endnote was essentially ubiquitous, but everyone had problems with it. However, there is a better way. Mendeley is a free reference management tool that integrates seamlessly with MS Word, and Open Office. The developers of Mendeley have an excellent website with easy to follow tutorials on the main features, see here, but nothing beats the experiences of someone who uses it on a daily basis.

WHAT IS MENDELEY?

Essentially, Mendeley is iTunes for your research papers. Its allows for easy uploading, storage, and retrieval of your papers from multiple computers, in multiple formats. In addition, it automatically generates a copy of all your documents on the cloud, thanks to the free 500Mb of storage space they provide for every user. Here is what it looks like when you have built your library. 

You can see it's very well laid out. The main screen is your selection of research papers, with all the useful details listed such as title, authors, year of publication, and journal. Just having all your research papers like this makes a huge difference to how you find and use them. Mendeley is packed full of useful features, but after using this software for over two years the main features I think people will be interested in are as follows,

• cataloguing of all of your research papers visible through one portal
• super-fast library searching
• sending and receiving documents to/from other Mendeley users
• access the original website from which the article was downloaded
• digital annotation and highlighting of articles/sections of articles
• the ability to access your library from any online computer

CREATING YOUR LIBRARY

Creating your library is straightforward. I found the best way was to simply select the “Watch Folder” option from the add files menu in the main toolbar, and browse to the folder which contains your documents of interest. They can be pdf or word documents. Mendeley will now proceed to add each document to the library, scanning each for useful details such the title, the authors, the journal it was published in. In addition, any documents subsequently added to the folder will now automatically be visible in Mendeley. The documents do not need to be labelled logically for Mendeley to populate the metadata for each article. This is akin to letting iTunes fetch the details of a particular track for you, so that you have the correct album art, singer, album name etc. However, Mendeley does not always get this right, so some manual manipulation may be required to clean up the data. I consider this a small price to pay considering the benefits granted by the rest of the functions. Once you have your documents imported I recommend using the synchronisation functionality, this uploads everything to the cloud storage they provide, allowing you to access it from any computer with an internet connection.

SEARCHING YOUR LIBRARY

Once you have imported your documents the first thing you’ll notice is that double clicking on any one of the articles beings you to a full version of the document. This is fully searchable via the toolbar on the top right. It might not seem like a major feature, but when you’re trying to remember where you came across the evidence for that statement in your thesis it’s an extremely valuable and saving feature. In addition, your whole library is searchable, so you can search for authors names, or journal name, or just individual terms you are interested in. It’s happened to me before that I couldn’t remember the author, but I could remember a particular term used with the article, a few keystrokes quickly narrows down the list of possible suspects. It’s worth noting, the more effort you put into having the correct details for each article the better the results of any search will be. If you’re slightly OCD like me you’ll actually get enjoyment out of making sure everything is correct, and welcome the distraction from writing your thesis.

SENDING/RECEIVING ARTICLES

How much you use this feature depends on how collaborative your research group is, and how many other people you can convince to use Mendeley. Essentially it allows you to select any of journal articles from your library and send them to any other Mendeley user that you have invited to join Mendeley. It’s actually much quicker than email, and the document is automatically integrated to your existing library, including any notes, and annotation made by the previous “owner”. The recipient does not have to have a subscription to the online publisher of that article, so it’s an excellent way to share papers among less privileged colleagues.

ACCESS TO ORIGINAL URL

This is perhaps one of my favourite features in Mendely. It very common for the research paper you are reading to cite other articles of interest. Tracking down references can be extremely time- consuming (read pain in the ass!) depending on how the original paper referenced them. The easiest way by far is to go to the URL of the original paper, and hope that they have supplied there list of references as hyperlinks. This would allow you to get all their references relatively quickly. However, even this means you still have search for the original paper in Google Scholar, or PubMed, Mendeley can by-pass all of that time consuming nonsense by providing the URL of the source article you are reading in the right-hand toolbar. Think about what this means now. With the URL provided to you all you have to do is click on the link and you are on the correct webpage for that article! From here you can go straight to the reference section of the look for hyperlinks. It’s an extremely fast and very effective way to navigate from source to source with no typing involved. 

DIGITAL ANNOTATION AND HIGHLIGHTING

A relatively minor, but useful feature of Mendeley is that individual documents can be have “sticky notes” attached to them, essentially a collapsible text box which you can place anywhere. Generally useful for making quick notes of questions, or thoughts as you read the paper. It’s also possible to make more detailed notes in the toolbar on the right hand side, this is a better option in my opinion, since these notes are searchable, so you can actually pick out a paper based on the contents of the notes you made as you were reading it.

ACCESS, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE

Provided you have synchronised your library and you have downloaded Mendeley you will have access to your library from any computer with an internet connection. So, for example, I used to do the majority of my thesis writing in my University. But occasionally I would work from home. For me this meant I lost my access rights to the journals that supplied all those nice papers I needed. So. on these occasions I would make sure to dump any relevant research paper I could into Mendeley nd syncronise it before leaving for home. Once home, Mendeley allowed me to continue reading and inserting citations to my thesis as if I had university access. But if I ever needed something I could always get it send to me from someone who also had that document in their library. This allowed for seamless integration between multiple computers. In fact during the writing on my thesis I went through three laptops and two desktops, but it was never a problem, my library was always on the cloud, and between Dropbox and Mendeley I was back writing from where I left off within 20mins of switching to an entirely new computer I had never used before. Think about that for a moment, normally a computer failing is a massive problem mid-thesis write up. But Mendeley and Dropbox together meant I never had a single problem I could not recover from quickly. 

THE CONCLUSION

In short, I can’t recommend this software highly enough. It's fantastic. It’s intuitive, and actually fun to use. On the one occasion I had a technical issue it was resolved within 24 hours, with follow up from the support team to make sure I had what I needed. Bear in mind, this is free software, and the support they offer is far superior than anything I’ve experienced with Dell, or Microsoft. Download it, play with it, and enjoy stress free referencing! Do it now! :)