"The best career advice given to the young is, 'Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.'" -Katharine Whitehorn, journalist In addition to the awesome science that was presented at the two conferences I went to last weekend, which I talked about in my last blog post, both conferences featured speakers who offered us their perspectives on what to do after grad school.
Career advice in science often tends to boil down to one central question: Academia or Industry? Students are encouraged to choose either the "tenure track" and become professors at Universities, or the "industry route" by applying for jobs at businesses in pharmaceutical companies or the biotech industry. The unfortunate fact is that the two sides tend to denigrate each other - academics might think of going to industry as "selling out" or becoming a corporate drone, while industry workers tend to think of academia as out of touch and slow to change. At the HHMI Symposium we got the valuable opportunity to hear from someone who has done both. Dr. Morris Birnbaum was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for nearly 20 years before changing track and joining Pfizer as the chief scientific officer for cardiovascular and metabolic disease research. He presented a salient list of "myths" about industry he heard while he was an academic. Some rumors about industry, he says, are simply false (people are less engaged in science and work less collaboratively). Some myths are semi-truths (there are a lot of meetings, you get told what to work on). And finally, there were the myths that are just true (the goal of the company is to make money, and having an advisor or department head is not like having a boss). Dr. Birnbaum's talk encouraged us to think of industry not as the "evil" alternative to academic jobs (although I think this type of thinking is becoming less and less common), but to think of it as a choice that may or may not fit with your personality. He also encouraged both sides to try and reach a better understanding of the other, so that collaborations between academics and industry will go better. The theme of finding a fit for your individual personality was also discussed at the CSB retreat, where we had a fascinating panel of former MIT CSB grad students talk about their careers in the few years since they got their PhD. It was an uncommon opportunity to hear from people in between - after grad school, but before establishing a full career and reputation. The alumni panel had a great representation of different career paths. Albert Cheng is just starting up his lab at the Jackson Laboratory, after a post-doc at the other campus of the same organization. Alex Robertson works as a Software Engineer at Counsyl, a biotech company that does clinical genome sequencing, and Robin Friedman is the very first employee at a new start-up called VL34. For me, this panel showed the futility of the simple divide between academia and industry. The job that Dr. Birnbaum did as a professor at UPenn was very different from the one Dr. Cheng will do as head of an academic lab at a smaller institution not connected with a traditional university. And his job at the Pharma giant Pfizer would be unrecognizable to Dr. Robertson working at a biotech firm in Silicon Valley, and they are both a world away from Dr. Friedman's work with a nascent start-up company. Condensing all of this career information over the past week and a half has been an experience of further subdivision past "academia vs industry." I have gone from "leaning towards industry" to thinking about whether I would fit in better with a small start up or a huge pharmaceutical company, with more tech-minded businesses or bio-focused drug discovery ventures. Each of the alumni emphasized the importance of passion for what you do. Despite the very different environments where they work, they each seem to love their jobs, as they went the route that felt right to them. One piece of advice that I found particularly memorable was Robin's urging to take a post-doctoral position after grad school only for the "right reasons" - not to simply move along the trajectory of "what comes next" but to gain an experience you will treasure along the way. I have always felt that it is important to prize each step along your life's path, and never treat years of your limited lifespan simply as a tool to get from point A to point B.
0 Comments
"By periodical and migratory meetings, to promote intercourse between those who are cultivating science in different parts of the United States....To give a stronger and... more systematic direction to scientific research in our country." - Louis Agassiz, on the founding of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1848 Last weekend I got to attend two wonderful conferences, one right after another. Both were student-focused, and so presenters offered not only summaries of the science taking place in their labs, but also valuable career advice. I plan to make a blog post about each. First and foremost, of course, SCIENCE!
The first conference I attended was the HHMI Med Into Grad Symposium hosted by the Leder Human Biology program at Harvard Medical School. The theme of the Symposium was "Metabolism: Fueling Translational Research." It was a pleasure to attend. I really enjoyed the chance to meet other translational PhD students from universities across the Northeast, and the talks were fascinating. The theme of several of the talks was diabetes and obesity. I was struck by how every single one of the speakers wanted to turn the conventional models on their heads, in order to approach this ancient problem with new eyes and fresh optimism. The fabulous presenters included Dr. David Ludwig, who advocates changing the view of cause & effect in obesity, so that the traditional advice to "just eat less and exercise more" is not only doomed to fail, but potentially harmful. Dr. Sudha Biddinger showed compelling molecular data that argued that in type II diabetes, the community has focused overly much on glucose, and that to prevent cardiovascular disease, we should perhaps be paying attention to FMO3 and the FOXO1 signaling pathway instead. And Dr. Morris Birnbaum advocated for a new model of insulin resistance, focusing on increased glucose in the liver causing higher levels of insulin, which overwhelms the system and causes defective insulin signaling. These creative approaches highlight the importance of scientists daring to question their forebears and approach old problems in new ways. I was also seriously impressed by the student presenters at MiG, a group which I was honored to be part of. If you had asked me about metabolism just a few months ago, I would have shuddered at the memory of biochemistry classes that failed to ignite my curiosity for anything smaller than a protein. After seeing these students present their work on a myriad of important translational topics in metabolism, I can say I am very happy that metabolism data managed to worm its way into my own project. Perhaps it is just post-conference glow, but it is hard to think of a topic more relevant to the health of living organisms than the creation and consumption of energy. On the second half my four-day weekend, I attended my graduate program's CSB retreat, which featured a wider range of topics. Dr. Zhipeng Wang presented extremely interesting work on detecting structural DNA variants from short-reads in Whole Genome Sequencing, Dr. Wendy Gilbert showcased her lab's work on differences in our RNA translation efficiency (something that I feel deserves more attention in our gene-expression-obsessed field), Dr. Brenton Graveley talked about alternative splicing in the Drosophila gene DSCAM (using the exciting new MinION sequencing platform!), and Dr. Otto Cordero described his new lab at MIT, where he focuses on modeling the ecological dynamics of microbes. We also heard from my awesome fellow students and, most interestingly, from program alumni (more on that in Part 2). For my own part, at both conferences I presented my work on OmicsIntegrator, a tool that the Fraenkel lab created to analyse several types of high-throughput data in one sample. It was a great experience to present my work (my first time speaking at a conference outside of my undergrad institution!), and to very engaged audiences. I was very pleased to see that several students seemed to be interested in trying our tool in their own projects. Attending well-organized conferences never fails to inspire me in my own work, and speaking at these conferences actually deepened my engagement with the conference as a whole. I took the opportunity to jot down ideas for my project as they occurred to me, and I hope to incorporate several of these into my work in the coming months. It is times like these I remember to think of science as a community, and to value opportunities to engage with it. |
AuthorAmanda Kedaigle's work in the Broad Institute focuses on leveraging brand new biological data modalities to study novel models of human brain development. Archives
February 2022
Categories |