The home stretch, and next steps

Photo by zizzy on Flickr

I’ve been neglecting my blog lately, through no fault of its own. There’s been lots going on, and lots not going on as a result, so I just wanted to post a quick update.

I’m a little over a month away from handing in my dissertation, which means many hours that might have gone towards writing blog posts instead went towards writing the darn thing. Learning LaTeX wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, especially with a handy Stanford thesis template and some web resources. I just handed a copy of the draft to my committee for comments and hoped for a brief respite to take care of some random bits (like all those appendices, code documentation, etc…).

Of course, my advisor says, “Now that you have nothing to do, why don’t you write a paper?” So now I’m writing a paper… which is probably a good thing, since there does seem to be enough material for a paper, and I might as well write it while I’m in so-called “writing mode”. I have the feeling by the time this is over, though, even Twitter will seem like too much writing!

Most of the rest of the time is spent on activities related to Ultimate, which started up about a month ago. There’s been two tournaments, some practices, various pickup games which are pseudo-mandatory for me, and various workouts to get in shape for the season.

Even with those two things, there’s probably ample time to squeeze in a post or two. But the mental energy isn’t quite there. And maybe it’s also because I still spend a couple hours cooking and get 8-9 hours of sleep most nights. Some things just can’t be sacrificed. Like home made strawberry shortcake with freshly whipped cream. :)

So that’s mostly what I’ve been up to the last couple months. The next month will probably be much the same. And then?

Well, I think it’s official enough now that I can announce it: I’ve accepted an offer to join 23andMe as a scientific curator in late August! I’m very excited about working with them and hopefully will be able to contribute across multiple facets of the company.

The end – and a new beginning – is in sight!

Breaking out of “the last bastion of indentured servitude”

(Note: I originally had this comic as an illustration but have removed it while I check whether I have permission to use it as the image is under copyright.)

The Stanford undergraduate program in biomedical computation and graduate program in biomedical informatics jointly hosted an industry panel tonight to highlight career paths outside of academia. The panel was diverse, including:

• someone who had worked at a small biotech prior to enrolling in a Ph.D. program and co-founded a startup while still finishing his degree,
• someone who had gone from a Ph.D. and a post-doc in bench science to working in venture capital, and
• someone who worked in chemical engineering and toxicology before becoming head of a biomedical informatics division at a large pharmaceutical company and is soon starting an MBA.

They talked about how they got to where they are now, general advice for people considering whether to get a Ph.D. or an M.D., how to approach startups, and some differences between working in academia vs. large companies vs. small startups. Some general themes that came out of the discussion were:

• Getting a Ph.D. is a good idea. As one panelist put it, “I hated it, it was the worst time in my life, but I’m so glad I did it.” Having a Ph.D. simply offers you more opportunity and removes the glass ceiling which unfortunately is present for those who do not have higher degrees. Even in less technical jobs, a Ph.D. is often useful. In venture capital, for example, you might be interacting with very technical people on very technical projects, and a Ph.D. not only gives you leverage to build rapport with them but also gives you the training to understand the details of those projects. (The same is also true for consulting.)
• Seek out diverse experiences and broaden your view. Even in a Ph.D. where you’re focusing on a very specific area, you should be aware of what’s going on elsewhere because nothing is completely isolated from everything else. One panelist encouraged students to do multiple internships to explore industries and career options.
• Learn how to fail, and be tenacious. You hear this everywhere but it really is true: don’t be afraid to fail, and to fail often. People are more likely to hire someone who has failed and learned from it than someone who has always succeeded. If you’ve always succeeded, it may mean you’ve never been tested, and similarly, that you’ve never taken risks. If you go to graduate school, however, you’ll definitely fail a lot…
• There’s no “right” path. Each of the panelists started out thinking they were going to do one thing and ended up doing something different – sometimes something wildly different. None of them took a direct line to get to where they are now. You shouldn’t expect to, either. Explore, be flexible, and take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. Just keep thinking about what you enjoy doing and what fires you up. This leads to the next theme.
• Find your passion. You will be hired if you are passionate about that work. Your startup will be more likely to succeed if you are passionate about it. You will have more of an impact if you are passionate about it.

In addition to this general advice, the panelists fielded several questions surrounding startups – how to evaluate ideas and the pros and cons of startups vs. other types of companies or academia.

To startup or not to startup?

This depends on your goals. If you just want to make a lot of money, by all means start a company. If you want a specific experience, you may be better off joining an existing small company that does something you get excited about. When evaluating a startup idea, it can be helpful to ask whether the idea is an enabling technology for a tangible application. Even if the market isn’t quite there yet, your idea will create one if you can demonstrate that your product makes something possible that wasn’t possible before. An example of this is the technology that enabled high-throughput parallel assays of gene expression, which was later acquired by Affymetrix.

What makes a startup different from a large company or academia?

A major difference is pace. Things happen fast in the startup environment and attitude is very much “fail early and fail often.” Decisions are made and executed quickly. In contrast, decision-making can be incredibly slow in a large company, which often is much less willing to take risks. Ironically, large companies often have lots of money to throw around, which is something that startups and academic labs must work very hard to get. For a large company, the hardest resource to find is good personnel. Startups have an easier time attracting personnel but it’s still not cheap. Personnel, however, is very cheap plentiful and relatively cheap for academia (one panelist described graduate school as “the last bastion of indentured servitude”).

I hope the following diagrams (inspired by Indexed) are helpful in illustrating these differences*:

* Diagrams are from a peon’s perspective and not necessarily to scale.

Contemplating careers: startups

Stanford often seems synonymous with startups. Nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley and bursting at the seams with smart, driven individuals, it’s no surprise that starting a company can be just a day in the life of a typical graduate student. And if we don’t start a company, there are dozens that we can join. Here, there is no stubborn expectation that Ph.D. students will pursue tenure-track academic positions. Many do (about 50% in my department), but just as many go on to do other things related to science, and they are fruitful, and multiply.

Photo by balakov on Flickr

For me, joining a startup as my next step could be a no-brainer; after all, I’m here, I’m young, and I have relatively few responsibilities. I don’t need job security, I need experience. I like being able to dive into details while having the freedom to think about the big picture. I don’t want to be a cog in the big machine, I want to look at the machine, poke at different parts of it, and help build it into something better. I’d like to try as many things as possible. Sounds like a startup to me.

But it has to be the right startup. I think it’s safe to say that you don’t half-ass working at a startup, so it has to be for something I will love telling people about. Something that gets me jazzed up. Something that I can believe in, and that I can contribute to.

Now I just have to find one that believes in me as well.

Some very academic advice

For many graduate students, the question of what to do next is a hard one. Do I want to do research? Teach? Get involved with business? Something completely different? What kind of lifestyle do I value and what are my priorities? Let’s say you have some idea of the answers to these questions, and have decided you want to pursue academic jobs. Then what?

Even though I’m fairly certain academia is not in my future, I found a panel discussion at a department retreat this week centered on these questions to be very informative. The panel was geared towards Ph.D. students thinking about either post-doc or faculty positions. Something to note is that while a post-doc, if not mandatory, is at least heavily encouraged in the life sciences if you are pursuing a career in academia, but is not necessarily required for fields like bioinformatics or computer science – that is, you can be hired as an assistant professor straight out of your Ph.D. This discussion covered both post-doc and faculty applications.

Each panel member was assigned one of the following topics to cover in 5-10 minutes of podium time:

• Preparing your CV and choosing where to apply
• Crafting a compelling teaching statement
• Crafting a compelling research statement
• The job talk

Each panelist fielded some questions from the audience during their talk but there was also an open discussion afterward. Below, I’ll try to summarize the main points each panelist made and then provide my own thoughts.

1. Preparing your CV and choosing where to apply.

This portion was heavily tailored towards biomedical informatics and towards our institution, which has a certain template for the CV, but I would guess that the main content is applicable at least to other biomedical informatics type people.

Structure of the CV:

1. Name and contact information
2. Education, most recent first. Your graduate training should include the title of your dissertation and the name(s) of your advisor(s).
3. Relevant work experience, e.g. any appointments if applicable, teaching positions, industry positions, etc.
4. Publications in peer-reviewed archival journals. Conference papers go here if they were peer-reviewed.
5. Invited talks. If someone paid for you to come give the talk, it probably counts. These are great because it shows other people are interested in you or your work.
6. Other publications, such as conference papers, book chapters, and popular articles.
7. Service and leadership. This includes participation on review boards, program committees, organizing committees,
8. Awards and honors – fellowships, grants, and anything that was competitive in nature. Best Poster award? Check. Travel funding award? Check. Genius grant? Check.
9. Other activities. Whatever you spend a significant amount of time on outside of your research and academics. If you’ve earned any distinctions in those activities, be sure to list them.
10. Membership in professional societies or organizations, e.g. ISCB, AAAS, ACS, [insert acronym here].

Most people who review your CV will look first at sections 1, 2, and 4. Your publications – the titles, the number, and where they’re published – are likely to be what determine whether they look at the rest of the CV (for better or for worse). Then the rest of your CV is what will distinguish you from the rest of the pile.

Photo by SOCIALisBETTER on Flickr

Regarding where to apply, there were a few major points:

• If you are applying for a post-doc, apply to places where you can learn something new, ideally at a different institution. Learning something new shows that you’re not a one trick pony. Going somewhere else shows that your success is due to YOU and not your graduate advisor.
• Think about what you want to do and what your priorities are. Whether you prefer research or teaching or both will determine what kind of schools you should look for. Then, of course, there are considerations such as location, whether you have a significant other that factors into the equation, etc.
• It’s similar to college or graduate admissions – you have your “reach” schools, your “target” schools, and your “safety schools”. Your target and reach schools should be institutions at the same level as your current one.
• Don’t compare theoretical job offers, only actual ones. It’s pointless to spend time debating over job offers you don’t even have yet, so just apply to whatever you think you might be interested in. When you have offers, then you should spend time thinking about them.

And, one of the most important things to do is to leverage your network, in particular when applying for post-docs. Cold-calling a professor almost never works, so ask your advisors and your committee members to make some phone calls on your behalf – this is part of their job!

2. Crafting a compelling teaching statement.

If teaching is what you want to do, this statement is critical. First, you need to demonstrate your commitment to teaching. This means getting started as soon as possible actually teaching, whether it be tutoring, organizing workshops or talks, TA-ing and giving lectures, even writing review articles – whatever shows that you have engaged in activities requiring you to synthesize a lot of material and explain complicated concepts succinctly and effectively. Whenever possible, seek evaluative feedback from your audience so that you can figure out what you’re doing well and what you need to do better.

Photo by foundphotoslj on Flickr

As part of this, you need to make it obvious why you want to teach. What motivates you? Why is teaching important to you? Maybe it’s the satisfaction you get seeing someone improve their understanding due to your efforts. Whatever it is, use actual experiences to make your motivations concrete.

The second part is showing that you are a successful teacher. This could be through examples of how you helped people learn, through being invited to give lectures or talks, through awards or honors, etc. Videos were not mentioned but I can imagine these being useful material for the committee reviewing your application. SciVee or even JoVE, if you can publish there, could come in handy for this.

Even if you are applying to a research-heavy institution, you usually still need to include a teaching statement, it might just be shorter.

3. Crafting a compelling research statement.

What problems are you trying to solve and why? Again, they want to hear your motivations. What have you done so far to solve these problems and what are your research plans for the future? You need to convince them not only that you have a track record of investigating difficult and important questions, but that you have ideas you will explore successfully if they hire you. In essence, they want to hear what your first few grants will be.

Then, make sure you are describing everything for a broad scientific audience – don’t assume that everyone on your committee has an intimate knowledge of your problem area. You should also be able to step back and provide an overall vision for your work, placing it in context and recognizing its impact. With all things written, keep it as short as possible while still getting your points across! (This goes for the teaching statement, too.)

4. The job talk

So let’s say they liked your CV, your teaching and research statements, and your recommendation letters. At this point, they will invite you to visit them for a day or two, wherein you will give a talk and meet with multiple faculty and probably some students.

The #1 rule: Know your audience. The more you know about who you’re presenting for, the better you can plan for the scope and content of your talk and the better prepared you will be for questions that come up.

#2: You must know your work and your talk so well that you can adapt your talk on the fly and interact with the audience effectively. A necessary skill is the ability to field questions with confidence, grace, and the appropriate amount of humility. Most people don’t do this well and it is primarily a social skill. Repeating the question is often a good idea, both to clarify, give you time to think, and, in some cases, clue the rest of the audience in to the situation if the question happens to be ridiculous. When someone takes issue with your work, you want to empower the questioner while still giving yourself and your work sufficient credit. Agree with whatever aspect of the question is accurate, but then give your perspective on why the rest of the statement may not be accurate. (If the questioner is insistent, it is often effective to express your interest in their statement and ask if you could discuss it with them afterward. Then, follow up! They might actually have a good point.)

Photo by psd on Flickr

#3: Be prepared to give a “chalk talk” – that is, a talk without slides or notes. This may happen as part of a second interview with a smaller audience, where the main goal is to be able to have a frank discussion with you about your research and your intended plans. Here, as with your research statement, it’s important to have a good idea of what your first two grants will be, to the detail of the specific aims.

Other thoughts: Start looking 6-12 months before you want to start the new job. Try to schedule interviews at “safety” schools before the ones you really care about. You’re going to make mistakes, and you want to make them early and learn from them. Go to job talks at your own school, to see how they’re done and to learn. Practice answering questions with friends and colleagues about your work. Have a 1 minute elevator pitch about your work and also a phrase or slogan that others can remember (e.g. if your work is on imaging informatics, it could be “so many images, so little time”). Also, letters of recommendation are extremely important. Things like giving back to your department or your field, being a good colleague, volunteering your time for scientific pursuits, showing initiative – these types of things will motivate your references to write you glowing letters of recommendation.

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Many of these tips are useful for non-academic job applications as well, such as having an elevator pitch, being able to answer questions well, and engaging in activities that highlight your leadership and initiative. Something that is good to keep in mind is that once you’ve cleared one hurdle, it doesn’t matter by how much. So if you got a first round interview, don’t worry about how your CV might have stacked up to the others – focus on doing well on your job talk and interviews because that is all that matters now. If you make it to the second round, don’t worry about what might have happened in the first round. And once you get a job offer, you’re in control – they are committed to their choice and will do what they can to get you to accept. So learn from your mistakes, but keep looking forward!

Contemplating careers: science writing

Writing is one of those things – I enjoy it, I’m reasonably capable at it, but I often need a reason to do it. Similarly, science is something I enjoy and am reasonably good at, but I am finding that I also increasingly need a reason to do it. Simply doing science in a vacuum doesn’t appeal to me, nor does writing for the sake of writing, though both remain attractive to me in the theoretical sense.

With blogging, I’m starting to wonder whether writing about science could become a viable career path. I doubt I could ever churn out a full-fledged book but maybe that’s mostly because I’ve never been close to trying. Regardless, being a science writer now means many things, from writing books to writing articles or blog posts to writing short blurbs on websites. And, there is anecdotal evidence that you don’t necessarily need formal training in writing or journalism to become a science writer.

In bioinformatics, I’ve always felt that computer scientists who learn biology tend to fare better than biologists who learn how to program. That is obviously a biased view, and self-identifying mostly as one of the latter, it might explain why I’m less inclined towards pursuing a career as a strict bioinformatician. ;) But I also wonder if science writing comes more easily to a scientist who happens to write well, or to a writer who learns about science? The advantages of being a scientist might be that you may grasp new scientific concepts more easily or have some insight from your experiences, but you’d still need to learn about each unfamiliar topic and distill it for public consumption. Being a writer, you might be better at expressing the concepts for a lay audience and be familiar with stylistic and journalistic conventions but you might have a harder time understanding or synthesizing the material.

At this point, it’s probably just a matter of the frame of reference. If you grew up speaking English without exposure to other languages, you might find it incredibly difficult to learn the intonations of Chinese or the grammatical structures of Japanese, and equally vice versa. But if you are smart and dedicated, you should be able to pick it up eventually.

Now a real question might be, what advice might people have for building a collection of writing samples? What are things to keep in mind when one is writing a piece for a popular audience? Having no writing background myself, it would be really helpful to have some guidelines. I’m also curious whether it would be appropriate to point to my blog posts (in the “Science & technology” category) as examples of my writing, at least for less formal writing jobs (i.e. not a position at Newsweek or the New York Times). Could I do this as-is or should I use some of the posts as starting points for more formal versions?

A continually updated list of interesting science writing links on the web as I come across them (please feel free to suggest others):

• Why is good science writing hard?
• Science writing and editing: Job description and resources
• Science writing in the lay media
• The shock value of science blogs
• Ombudsman explores nuances of science writing
• Who are the science journalists?
• Science Writing Workshop (reading list and guidelines)

Contemplating careers: stepping stones

Now that I’ve passed the final test of my Ph.D., the question I keep hearing is “what’s next?” Half of these come from friends and colleagues, but the other half comes from the persistent echoes of the question reverberating in my head, which after my defense seemed to empty itself of all substance. It’s a good question. An exciting question. Also a scary question. The wide open future alternately exhilarates and paralyzes me.

There are a couple of big decisions. Academia vs. Industry is the traditional one, but there is also Research vs. Not-research (e.g. education, policy, management), and perhaps Science vs. Not-science. I’ve thought about whether I want to to pursue something outside of science – graphic design, baking, educational games, organic farming – but I’ve since realized that science is definitely one thing that would motivate me in a full-time job. The big picture fascinates me, the intricate details amaze me, and the fact that we can gather and analyze data to make discoveries tickles me.

But I also know that science by itself will not do the trick. This rules out the typical academic and industry jobs. Straight research also doesn’t appeal to me. Ideally, I’d like to find something that combines aspects of science communication, outreach/education, art/design, discovery/analysis, and open science principles, despite my having very little formal experience in most of these things. But I also know that I have a long career ahead of me, and I can shape it as I go. I don’t need to arrive just yet.

So this is my plan to avoid getting overwhelmed. Focus on finishing the Ph.D., most of the time. Work on concrete career-oriented tasks (more on this later), some of the time. Relax, the rest of the time. All of the time, think about everything as a possible stepping stone – useful for getting somewhere, but on no predetermined path.

Obviously I don’t have everything figured out, so please chime in with advice or comments!