Quitting Academia

In my previous post I promised sharing my reasons for quitting academia. I just celebrated my 1 year anniversary in big pharma and boy did I make the right decision. So what was the problem for me? First of all my problem was not isolated to my geographical location. I have former academic colleagues all over the world and things are pretty much the same all over the place. In fact, relatively speaking I had it pretty good in Denmark compared to other countries. For the record the places I have heard about are limited to Europe, Asia, Australia and North America. Maybe things are fantastic in South America and Africa. I sincerely hope so but I would be surprised.

For context: I am male (born 1971) and held a position as a non-tenured Associate Professor in medicinal chemistry at the University of Copenhagen.

So in brief of the top of my head here are 10 things I was fed up with:

1. Writing grant applications ad nauseam and having them rejected
2. Applying for money for just about any insane idea that anyone could come up with (the curse of no tenure. You can’t be picky. Money is money.)
3. Not getting funding for your application in the field where you are a specialist, either because a) it is not innovative (just more of the same), or b) it is too innovative and high risk and they don’t believe you can pull it off. (I have tried getting both answers for the same application depending on which funding body I sent it to)
4. Finally getting funding for the totally insane project idea that you know close to nothing about. I was rather good at getting these
5. Top-tuning my CV to fulfill criteria set by funding bodies and governments. I cannot begin to tell you how much I detest the H-index and other ridiculous systems that determines how good you are (can you believe that this was my main motivation for staring to write reviews? You gotta pump that H-index!)
6. Submitting you manuscripts to journals where you believe they will get rejected only in the hope that you might get a better impact factor
7. Submitting your good manuscript to a completely reasonable journal and having it rejected due to poor peer-review. When will someone come up with a smart solution to that problem?
8. Receiving manuscripts for peer-review that should never have made it past the editorial office. I should note that the difference between journals is huge. Some editors take their job seriously and spend the required time on it. I have much better experience with the society owned journals from the RSC and the ACS than the rest
9. That being a great teacher despite what they may say counts for absolutely nothing where it matters (i.e. tenure and $ £ €). Here I must be fair and say that this is not universal. Some of the best universities in the world prioritise and reward teaching (whilst others pretend they do so)
10. That the infrastructure is terrible. Constantly instruments breaking down and me attempting to fix it so that the research projects can keep going. Obviously not a problem at the top universities or if you are a Professor with lots of money

Well that’s enough ranting for now :-) I’ll try to post something more cheerful next time.

Do I miss anything? Yes, I miss my students. My greatest pleasure was to train the guys in the lab to become independent research scientists. But pretty much everything else you can stick where the sun don’t shine. D!

Is there a Future for Organic Chemists in the Pharmaceutical Industry outside China and India?

I have copy/pasted the headline for this post from the editorial in the most recent issue of Organic Process Research and Development. It's a good question that is being asked and I believe that the answer is YES. However, we really need to come up with something new to justify our existence. The Chinese and others are just as good as us at doing Med Chem SAR working their way through methyl, ethyl, propyl, futile...but they can do the work at a much lower cost. The same thing that happened to the textile industry sometime last century is happening to the pharmaceutical industry. The design is made in the western world but the actual product is manufactured at some cheap site in Asia. The way forward is to invent new ingenious stuff. Start biotech companies with crazy, innovative new technologies, start working at the biology/chemistry interface modifying proteins; oligonucleosides etc. in predictable ways for use a medicinal agents and so on. Ultimately this development is a good thing. It is forcing us to think and evolve. In the end humanity will benefit from some great new discoveries and technologies that will spring from the effort we put into this. So get up and go invent something brilliant that will make the world a better place. D!

PhD in Medicinal Chemistry

Design and synthesis of the first selective ligands for the GPRC6A receptor – a novel human G-protein coupled receptor with unknown physiological function

More info at this web site.

DO NOT email us but please follow the application procedure at the bottom of this web page.

There are links to all necessary information on the same web page.

D!

Making the cut

I keep thinking that I'm all done paper pushing and then somehow magically I'm back at it full force. So recently I've submitted four grant proposals, written a chapter for a book, started teaching again and in parallel I'm doing a half hearted attempt at some lab work. So the last thing I needed to see was this paper Don't read that paper if you are a suicidal post doc.
I guess it's the life I've picked but it sure is tempting to bail out and get a "real job" as my mum calls it. Anyway, posting is about to resume with some exciting stuff on how to turn a primary amine into a leaving group. Sigh, D

Career plans

Not surprisingly, most of Curly Arrows readers are early career chemists, predominantly PhD students and Post Docs. So although subjects such as publications, H index, impact factors etc. have been beaten to death elsewhere I thought I'd do a brief post on the topic here because it is very important for your career prospects that you start thinking of these things early on. When in the past I have been presented with a pile of job applications the first things I (and others) look at are:
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a) Name of applicant and of recent supervisors (to see if I know any of them)

b) Publication list
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So since 95% of the time I don't know the people the applications fate is determined in the course of 1 minute based on your publication list.

It sounds unreasonable but this is how you quickly eliminate 75% of the applicants. If you make it through the first screen then people actually sit down and read your application in detail, request references etc.

So if you want to get the dream job work hard and publish lots of papers. It doesn't have to be Nature papers the main thing is that your look productive (journals with impact factor >2 are fine for a synthetic organic chemist).

Unfortunately, too many supervisors will give you dead end piece of shite projects that are destined for the bin. Check your prospective boss out. How much does he publish, in what journals, talk to former and current students in the group etc. Also worth considering is whether the group publish papers with alphabetical author lists or not. The alphabetical approach can really screw your career in a fair few countries. When you apply for grants in Denmark they generally look for first and last authorship to determine your project input but also at which journals you published in to estimate the quality/impact of the work.

Having a decent track record and publication list is going to get you through the first screening round. However, to make it to the interview good references and relevant skills will obviously be very important. So think about it and start planning your career early on. D!