A Few Alternatives to Bench Work

It seems like the path that everyone knows and is told when considering graduate school: get your Ph.D., apply for a fellowship and try to get a professorship. If you don't get your professorship before the fellowship is over, then get another fellowship. I have a number of friends who have gone through their 2nd and even their 3rd fellowship before they get a position as an associate professor somewhere. I also have friends who managed to change career paths, industries, and were successful in making that transition. I would like to offer the alternatives that I have seen beside field work. Please let me know if there are other alternatives that you have heard of or experienced yourself so I can add to this short list. This is not to say that the traditional route is not a viable option. However, in this high unemployment environment, I think it’s worthwhile to consider all the alternatives.

1.      Education

You can consider a position as a lecturer at a small liberal arts school, or a community college. This can also open doors for administrative positions within educational institute.

I have known a successful scientist who teaches on the side for extra income. He said the hardest thing was to set up the teaching materials for that first semester. After that, he said the courses were similar with the exception of him changing the quiz materials around and updating the information once in a while.

Keep in mind that the pay is low. However, a friend of mine told me that she knew people who would go from school to school teaching and generated a fair amount of income. Another avenue is to look at teaching jobs for private tutoring firms, like Kaplan or private trade schools. For Kaplan, they do like candidates with high test scores, so be prepared to show them your SAT/GRE results.

Everyone has to TA at least a short period of time during their post-doctorate trainings. You can use this as teaching experience on your CV. If you don’t have the experience, considering apply for another TA position. This can move you into an adjunct professor position, where you would design a whole course: compiling the teaching material, creating the quizzes and tests, and teaches the students, manages the TAs if you have any, etc. This is also a low paying position, but will gain you valuable experience if education is in your path.

 I have a number of friends who move from high profile schools to state or community college and are much happier. The focus of these schools is less about research, but more about teaching. Therefore, you can expect to teach more and the scope of your research may be limited by the department funding. So, don’t expect to be able to do research of monkey or anything expensive.

Lastly, the key to this is for you to like teaching and are good at presenting a new concept or idea. If you think back to your thesis defense or the number of times you presented your data at lab meetings, what were the feedbacks?

2.      Government

Beside government research facilities, consider positions in places like the state, county and district labs, the VA, the EPA, the USDA and even police department ‘s crime labs. 

Many state labs are moving into the molecular biology space now that CDC and the FDA are allowing techniques like qPCRs, sequencings, LC/MS and the likes to be used in the clinical diagnostic domain for monitoring and detecting of viruses and bacteria in the interest of protecting human lives. Crime labs have long used sequencing to do DNA-fingerprinting for human identification as well as LC/MS or GC to test toxicology levels for forensic results.

When applying for government positions, it is important to note the grade level for the position. Some of these positions can be positions that require you to have already experience in a grade level below; hence they are more for promotion purpose.  For example, a G-13 level might require experience at a G-12 level position.

Applying for these jobs could require some patience and some luck. I have heard of those who apply the first time and got in right away. Some, however, have the opposite experience requiring applications to as many as 50 positions before gaining success in obtaining employment.

Some government positions require a written exam or an oral exam. Some require both. The oral exam is the face-to-face interview. The process can be long, taking up to 3 months sometimes. You have to have perseverance as well as be persistence with government jobs.  If you read the job description, the requirements are there. There maybe certain course requirements or certifications or exams you needed to take. All are written down in the job requirement section.

PS. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. I am without editor at the moment, so please let me know of any error you see so I can fix it. In other words, please be my editor, but be kind when you write. Thanks!