finish all your peas and then you can go play
Jan 10th 2006Wallabynerd alert
Nice mini-talk with my advisor yesterday, first about what I need to do and when I need to do it — data meeting mid-February, defend by the end of April — and then about postdocs. His advice is still to find something in biomedical engineering rather than chemistry. At first look, he’s got a point: much of the research even in chemistry departments comes from chemistry having expanded out towards other departments (biology in particular), which are also expanding into chemistry, so the name of the department matters less than what one is actually working on.
However, three problems that I just cannot seem to make clear to him:
1. I looked at a lot of pages on BME research groups yesterday. There was no research at all that I was actually excited about; my goal would be padding my CV and learning microfluidics. (Admittedly, that’s also my goal for doing a postdoc at all.)
2. Suppose I get a postdoc in a BME department somewhere — say NCSU. A year, maybe two, and a half-dozen or so good publications. Now I’m looking for a job again… but where? Chemistry departments, especially at small schools, are going to say “why’s an engineer looking here?” The ones that notice all my degrees are in chemistry are going to worry that “BME background” means “wants to do lots of animal research here”. OK… he said consider BME long-term. I’ve never taken an engineering class in my life, so I certainly can’t teach that. I’d be too much of one and not nearly enough of the other.
3. Did I mention I just don’t want to do biomedical research? Not that I object to helping people or anything, but I certainly could have studied biology instead if I wanted to. The idea of turning a good analytical chemist into a half-trained biomedical engineer (insufficient biology, no engineering at all) seems much worse than the idea of a good analytical chemist staying a chemist and collaborating with real biomedical engineers.
Sometimes he can be very, very frustrating. Maybe I should just send a copy of this to him 