Job!
Mar 29th 2006WallabyGeneral & nerd alert
Some of you (who hear from me in ways other than reading this) may know I was actually offered a postdoc last month, after a couple months of trying without success to find one in North Carolina. Oddly enough, it’s here at the same school, same department, with a professor whose office is just down the hall. We hadn’t talked — I don’t think we’d even met — until my advisor asked him to be on my committee at the last minute, to replace someone who’d recently passed away. (I’m kinda hard on my committee.) Apparently he was so impressed at my data meeting that he decided he needed to hire me for his lab.
Downside — it’s up here, still, instead of down there.
Upside — it’s pretty cool research that I know next to nothing about, it should pay substantially more than the average postdoc in chemistry, it’s technically a competitive award instead of just a job, and Cathy said go for it.
Can’t promise I’ll be posting anything about it, because there’s very little of it I can talk about at all. Even assuming I wind up actually understanding it. It’s mostly to do with optics and ultrafast spectroscopy, which have not historically been my strengths; fortunately he does understand that I’m an analytical chemist instead of a quantum physicist. So it’s mostly applications, rather than the basics.
Now I just have to finish dissertating! About 40 pages done by the end of the week, target is 100.