Career Paths

Ping
Xiao

Innovation Is Also the Key for Your Career Success In a Post-recession World in the Industry -The 7 Innovation Secrets of Steve

Innovation is a fundamental skill for a PhD, an important part of being a good technician and helping the PhD to design experiments that yield precise results.  In order to get a PhD degree, however, one has to have new ideas and new findings in a specific field. Yes, we know how to analyze, an...


Mike
Chang

Planning an accidental career

Hi, my name is Mike, and I consider myself first and foremost a scientist. I am currently a Senior Systems Analyst at a non-profit institution. Quite a departure from the bench, eh? I was invited to share my career experiences, which haven’t been terribly typical. I hope that sharing my lessons le...


Todd
Pihl

Academics to Business – The Tough Transition

Over the next few months, my colleagues and I are going to be writing about the transition from being an academic scientist to working in the commercial sector.  In some cases, we'll talk about it from the standpoint of a postdoc looking for their first  position in the commercial sector a...


Randall
Ribaudo

The Importance of Understanding the Human Workflows

What is the Human Workflow?  It is my passion. It is the process by which actual users-- real humans want or need to function in order to get certain tasks done.  And it is one of the most ignored concepts in the business world-- whether in product development, sales, customer support-- wh...


Randall
Ribaudo

A Case Study of Moving from Academia to Industry

I'm really excited to be part of the Bio Careers blogosphere and am looking forward to interacting with you all.  I'm a molecular immunologist by training and came up through the well-worn academic path-- Biochemistry/Physiology undergrad program (McGill University) followed by PhD program in i...


Jenne
Relucio

5 Ways to Find Out What Else You Can Do With that PhD!

As far as the average graduate career goes, the realization that the academic path is not the way you want to go can hit anytime. It may strike during your post-quals slump, or when you’ve spent a month’s worth of late weekend nights in the lab, or even the year before you graduate. Unfortunatel...


Clement
Weinberger

How I got to work as a medical writer (You might be surprised)

I had been occupied for four years selling oncology reference laboratory testing services. It was a great job. It was with a start-up venture capital-backed company. We offered a wide range of immunohistochemical testing and gene rearrangement analyses that the “big labs” didn't do yet. Was a Ph...


Wenny
Lin

Out of the lab and into a post-doc in government

At the end of my graduate career at the University of Pennsylvania, I deeply dreaded doing a post-doctoral fellowship.  How many more sleepless nights would I run the same mindless assays to find that the experiments didn’t work?  How many more hundreds of nameless mice would be sacrific...


Christie
Canaria

Making Friends in All Sorts of Places

Not too long ago my neighborhood had a street festival, the kind that’s celebrated with a community parade, a Ferris wheel, and 26 dedicated street blocks for booths. One of those booths happened to be the local Department of Energy (DOE) Lab’s booth, where I volunteered to work.


Ken
Zeidner

Patent law, intro

Hi All, As I indicated in my previous entry, the good folks at Bio Careers have asked me to blog about my experiences regarding my transition from scientist to patent law attorney.  Before getting into that, I thought I would dedicate this entry to a brief review of Bilski.  As you may or may n...