[PRL] Fwd: TP Msg. #1183 The Best of Both Worlds - Industry and Academia

Mitchell Wand wand at ccs.neu.edu
Fri Jun 1 11:59:12 EDT 2012


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rick Reis <reis at stanford.edu>
Date: Thu, May 31, 2012 at 6:35 PM
Subject: TP Msg. #1183 The Best of Both Worlds - Industry and Academia
To: tomorrows-professor <tomorrows-professor at lists.stanford.edu>


Choosing to work in industry does not preclude a return to academe. But the
move back takes some planning and finesse.
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Folks:

The posting looks at advice on how to transition from academia into
industry and back. It is by Hannah Waters and it appeared in the April 1,
2012 Careers issue of The Scientist: Magazine of the Life Sciences [
http://the-scientist.com/]. © Copyright 2012, The Scientist, Inc. All
rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis at stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Co-Teaching as a Strategy for Balancing Workload


Tomorrow's Academic Careers

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The Best of Both Worlds - Industry and Academia


Choosing to work in industry does not preclude a return to academe. But the
move back takes some planning and finesse.

Plant geneticist Harry Klee always assumed that, after finishing his
postdoc, he’d pursue an academic career. But one afternoon in the
mid-1980s, he opened up an issue of Science to find a paper reporting the
first “transgenic plant in the history of mankind,” he recalls. It wasn’t
the accomplishment so much as the fact that the paper was written by
scientists at Monsanto that blew him away.

At the time, industry was considered the career path for scientists who
couldn’t cut it in academia, he says. Yet, although he’d gotten a job offer
as an associate professor, when the time came to set out on his own, Klee
decided to join the agricultural science company. “All the stuff Monsanto
was doing was what I wanted to do,” he says—and when he visited the
facilities, his inclination was confirmed: “It was clear that they were the
best lab to do plant molecular biology in the world, bar none.”

However, after a decade of research that he “wouldn’t trade for anything,”
Klee hit a glass ceiling. He felt pressure to leave research for management
roles. Instead of succumbing to the inevitable in industry, he decided to
put out feelers. He found the perfect spot at the University of Florida,
working on a project to improve the tomato using genetic engineering. But
the jump back to academia wouldn’t have been possible without his
publication record and dedication to a focused research topic, Klee
cautions.

For advice on how to transition from academia into industry and back, The
Scientist interviewed recruiters on both sides and researchers who have
made the round trip, to learn how they did it—and how they’d do it better
next time.

GETTING INTO INDUSTRY

* Don’t stress about your slides

Far more important than glossy slides, says Megan Driscoll, founder and
president of PharmaLogics Recruiting, is the quality of your presentation
to the interview panel. The interviewers will want to see how you work
through a scientific problem. “It’s more about how you present your data,
think critically, present problems, field questions,” she says. “How good
your presentation is has very little to do even with the topic or the data.”

* Network, network, network

Having contacts who can vouch for you at the company you’re applying to can
substantially increase your chances of landing the position. Recent or
soon-to-be grads should “network with the people who graduated ahead of
you: anyone who is in industry and who has graduated in the previous 5
years,” Driscoll says—both for advice and for recommendations.

* Revise your resume

Add a “skills summary” section that gives a good overview of your
expertise, including specific methods at which you excel. But be honest.
“Don’t put analytical methods in your skills sections that you’ve done one
time,” Driscoll cautions.

* Do your homework

Make sure the interviewers know why you want to work for their company in
general, and what attracts you about their research in particular. Study
their website, and if you know which representatives you’ll be meeting,
read their papers and familiarize yourself with their research.
“[Companies] want someone who has done their homework, and who knows what
they can contribute to the team.”

* Prepare some real-life experiences

It’s common in interviews, Driscoll says, to be asked for an example of how
you’ve handled conflict in your lab. She says it’s best to have a few
scenarios ready to share. For example, if there was a disagreement about
lab equipment use, explain how you showed leadership by creating a sign-up
sheet and starting a discussion about expectations for the tool’s usage.

GETTING BACK TO ACADEMIA

* Keep publishing

It’s unanimous: continuing to publish while working in industry is
absolutely vital if you want to return to academia one day. “What makes it
possible to jump back and forth is publishing, and if you can’t publish in
industry, you’re not going to be able to jump back to academia,” says
molecular physiologist Sue Bodine, who transitioned from Regeneron
Pharmaceuticals to the University of California, Davis. Publications prove
that you’ve continued to do quality science, can produce publishable data,
and can ultimately win grant money.

But if you want to publish, you may have to push yourself to make it
happen. While many companies encourage publication, “the problem is that
there are no rewards for publishing, so you really have to do it on your
own time,” says Klee. That means doing experiments with positive and
negative controls beyond what your supervisor requires; taking beautiful
photos; and remembering to go back and publish after patents are filed, he
adds.

* Do a PubMed search

If you think you might want to return to academia one day, ensure from the
outset that promises of a publication-friendly environment aren’t empty.
“Every company says that 20 percent of the time you can work on whatever
you want,” including publications, says Martin Seidel, the head of the
Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation. But don’t take them
at their word, he says; instead, do a PubMed search to see just how
frequently the company publishes, and assess the quality of the journals.
Then search for the section you might be interested in joining and look up
the records of researchers in that area to make sure you’re “joining a part
of that company where [publishing] is a tradition.”

* Choose your meetings carefully

“It’s tricky when you’re in industry: if you’re spending all your time
[attending meetings], then you’re the first one to go” when layoffs come
around, says biochemist Patrick Griffin, a former research director at
Merck who now directs the Scripps Translational Research Institute in
Florida. Companies are businesses, so if you spend too much time working on
presentations and attending meetings, you are less valuable. But it doesn’t
mean you shouldn’t attend any conferences. His advice: scrutinize agendas
ahead of time to select the conferences attended by those people most
likely to help you in the future, such as potential collaborators,
academics working on similar projects, and administrators of programs that
interest you.

* Build a scientific narrative

Just as the career of an academic researcher is, at heart, a scientific
narrative, so should your industry science follow a single thread. For
Klee, that thread was working on transgenic plants and eventually honing in
on the tomato. Eva Chin, a molecular kinesiologist at the University of
Maryland, College Park, spent time in several branches of Pfizer’s research
and management—but, “except for my two years as a project manager, I always
focused on the same theme,” she says. When applying for academic jobs, she
presented her story about molecular signaling in muscle, beginning with her
postdoctoral research; added in data from industry abstracts and
presentations; and “integrated what I had done with what people at the
universities had done.”

* Old acquaintances should not be forgotten

A good way to keep one foot in the university once you’ve gone into
industry is by “maintaining contacts with classmates of yours that went
into academia,” says Griffin. Those people can not only help you find a
position in the future, but can speak to the quality of your science to
potential employers. Attend the same meetings, and even develop
collaborations. Chin, for example, sent transgenic mice she developed at
Pfizer to her colleagues in academia—and later, they helped her secure her
job. “Having known these people throughout my earlier career, they knew I
had done really good work,” and her continued contact helped solidify her
scientific reputation in the field.

* Get experience with grants

Klee started reviewing grants for the US Department of Agriculture and the
National Science Foundation through contacts he made at meetings. “I had
read and been on grant panels for a hundred grants before I ever had to
write one, so I had a good idea of what a good grant looked like and what a
bad grant looked like.” This, says Klee, reassured the search committee
that he would be able to win funding, despite never having written his own
grants. And it wasn’t all show: it really did keep him from floundering.
“My first grant was funded,” he says. “I knew what they were looking for.”

* Keep your eyes open

Finding the right academic position to make the switch to is the hardest
part. “You have to be surveying the landscape constantly,” says Griffin.
For example, in recent years many academic institutions have taken an
interest in developing translational research programs, where
industry-learned skills are esteemed—a development that helped Griffin land
his job. Another selling point might be a screening technique you picked up
in industry that could be applied to a burgeoning area of academic
research. These kinds of opportunities are often found at medical or
technology-focused schools that are “very entrepreneurial and oriented
towards having an impact on biomedical research,” he adds.

SUCCEEDING IN ACADEMIA ONCE YOU’RE BACK

* Negotiate a good start-up package

When Chin reentered the academic lab, she assumed that with her data and
big plans for research she’d be able to quickly secure a few grants. But 3
years into academic work, she has yet to rake in big bucks from government
funds. “It takes time to get a research lab running, and you need to know
that it may be 3 to 4 years in before you can land a grant,” she says. She
wishes that she had known this before she returned to academia, because she
would have negotiated a better contract. “Your department should be
supporting you through that time,” Chin says. Many associate professor jobs
only cover 9 months out of the year, so make sure you negotiate summer pay
on top of that, she adds.

* Find a grant-writing mentor

“One of the hardest parts when you come back—even if you come back as a
full professor—is getting back into the mode of writing grants,” says
Bodine. It’s not only about carving out time to write grants, but also
about learning how to structure them. “You need a good mentor to help you
get your grants: how to write them, how to approach them, and how to sell
your ideas,” she says. “I had one mentor that I think acknowledged the
difficulty and helped me a lot and, in hindsight, it was more difficult
than I thought it was going to be.”

* Keep your lesson plans

When Bodine left academia, she never thought she would return, so she
tossed all of her lecture notes and lesson plans—a huge regret. “All of
sudden, you’re developing all these new courses and lectures, teaching
stuff you haven’t touched for a while, and relearning everything,” she
says. Keeping those old notes can help tremendously, both for remembering
how to best structure lectures and for refreshing one’s memory.


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