Cover letters are possibly the most important documents you will write in your career because they can open or close the door to your dream job.

But, surprisingly, people often under-estimate their importance and assume that they are just the lesser companion to the CV/resume.

Of course, that’s not the case. Your cover letter should “cover”, but not regurgitate, your CV in a few paragraphs. It is your marketing pitch for yourself, your first (and often your only) chance to make yourself stand out from the crowd of applicants that have applied for this superb position along with you.

Here are 15 tips on how to write killer cover letters that will help you climb up the career ladder at double speed. Read more »

Amid growing recognition that a successful scientific career requires skills beyond scientific acumen, institutions are racing to provide management training for newly minted principal investigators. Young scientists spend years conducting complicated experiments and crunching data, but when they are finally given the keys to their own lab, they suddenly face tasks they were never trained for in graduate school.

That’s the opening snippet of the analysis article in the March 21st issue of Cell about Managing to Excel at Science.
Read more »

For many of us, grad school immerses us so deeply in first-hand laboratory research that we begin to think that that’s all there is, and when faced with either limited opportunities for postdoctoral and (later) faculty research positions, we become blind to our other options. Others simply want to get out of academia and don’t know where to start. Frankly, this is the situation that I’ve found myself in over the last year, and like everyone, I’ve been learning the job market as I go along. Read more »

What happens when you finally get the degree you worked so long for and then realize you really don’t want to spend the rest of your life in the lab?

Or if you get tired of working long hours with few results and low pay… or you succumb to any of the other reasons that might put you off being a scientist.

One option is to hang up your lab coat and move into something else… and there are a lot of great options for people with a science background and post-graduate degrees that lead to rewarding and lucrative careers.

Here is a list of career paths you might consider if you ever decide its time to leave the lab. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but might give you a few ideas…
Read more »

Have you ever had a sales person suggest just the right new kit or enzyme that makes your life a whole lot easier? Or on the flip side, how about when a sales person doesn’t get the hint that you are in the middle of keeping track of setting up a 96 well plate of PCR reactions and can’t stop what you’re doing?

Being a sales rep is a really tough job, requiring a thick skin, good interpersonal skills and the ability to handle rejection and a lot of pressure. I’m sure many of you have had the experience of sales people who were very good, as well as those of the more clueless variety so thought it would be fun for us to discuss our experiences, both good and bad. Here are some questions we could look at:

1- What makes a good sales person ?
2- What are the worst qualities in a sales person you have observed that should be avoided at all costs?
3- What is your funniest or best sales rep story? (Please, no company names, unless you are giving kudos!)

So here are my answers: Read more »

This is a rather personal post for me, as I’m getting set to follow my wife abroad, while still seeking a research or lecturing position of some kind, whatever may happen. The situation is sometimes known in academia as the “two-body problem,” and is occasionally lamented as a fact of life for the challenging life of a researcher.

In searching for stories that I could relate to, given my situation, I came across one in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Helen Atwood (a pseudonym) mentions many of the emotional and stressful points of my situation, although the details are of course different. I don’t know whether my story will turn out as well as hers did, but I would rather take the chance than lose my marriage.

Atwood offers some advice, that I’ll try to follow, and others might be interested in as well: Read more »

For most scientists, writing their PhD thesis will be one of the most time consuming and complicated individual tasks they ever undertake. In my experience, the most common approach taken by students is to bury their head in the sand, get on with the research and only start thinking about the thesis when they absolutely have to, as the end of their PhD approaches. This obviously works, but it generally leads to a very stressful few months (yes, months) of writing. But it doesn’t have to be that way, with the right approach you can make the whole process much easier - here’s how: Read more »

Last month, Thomas C. Erren and colleagues published an editorial in PLoS Computational Biology entitled 10 simple rules for doing your best research, according to Hamming. The article provides some great philosophical guidance on setting out to do great research, drawing on advice given by the mathematician Richard Hamming during a Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar in 1986. Read more »

After all that hard work, you finally have your PhD. Now what? If your career choice is academic research, your first post-doc position beckons. The choice of where, and with whom, to take up a post-doc position is a very important one as it is at the post-doc stage where publications are required to move to the next level (tenure-track) and where your research direction is determined. Whether you will publish or perish is drastically affected by your choice. How do you make sure you choose wisely? Here is some advice I wish someone had given me when I was making the decision. Read more »

For every half-way decent mentor or adviser that an aspiring scientist comes across, it sometimes seems as though there is another lurking, who is simply a jerk^*. Let’s face it - scientists aren’t consistently “people-persons.” Maybe they had bad mentors, and inadvertently end up passing on the karma. Or maybe science just attracts a higher-than-average number of socially inept individuals - who knows. Read more »