JLC Turns Three!

Original Art Credit: Jon Lam (@tyrannos00r)

Wow, everyone. I feel so honored and humbled that you visit my tiny little corner of the Internet sometimes.

Thank you for your continued support and online interactions.

And now, some Salient Factoids from Year 3!
(Year 1 recap | Year 2 recap)

Stats:

Pageviews: 724,000+
Total Posts: 458
Total Tweets (ongoing): 16,900+
Blog Carnivals: 1 #RealTimeChem

(Could it be that ChemCarnivals have dropped out of favor? Or am I just not playing along like I should be?)

Podcasts (4): Collapsed Wavefunction's Bad Science in the Movies, Chemjobber's Start-up Adventure, Calcium Redux, Plagiarism Roundtable

(I still owe you guys those chemical pronunciations...I haven't forgotten!)

Elsewhere: Carrie Arnold of Science Careers asked me about grad school. Still pinch-hitting at Food Matters. I spoke with reporters from Nautilus and Chemistry World, but I've not yet seen their stories.

R.I.P. The Haystack, my first blogging home.

Recurring Themes: Cool reactions (hydrogenation, peroxides, Pauson-Khand, cyclobutanones, ghostly copper); start-ups, #MegaPharma, faculty moves, corrections, #chemjobs, activism, stock photo WWWTP?, book reviews, cool structures

Topsy-Turvy Corporate Culture - From Tiny to Enormous

Let's face it: We humans are rubbish at logs.

I don't mean the huge cuts removed from tree stumps, but rather the mathematical powers of ten that scale up or down our everyday existence. N.dG.T. related a convincing illustration of our teensy experience relative to outer space in his first stint hosting Cosmos; here's another from the JLC archives.

Now, I've been working in pharma for some time, usually in tiny start-up companies with 10-100 people (log₁₀ = 1-2). Recently, I made the jump to "Megapharma," clocking in somewhere around 5 logs (To calibrate you, the total student population of UT-Austin is ~4.7 logs, and the population of Los Angeles is 6.6 logs). It's professionally equivalent to feeling like a single grain of salt in a heaping tablespoon.

And hey, this is only a two-log difference!

Not that I'm an introvert, either: I've been ENTJ for as long as I can remember. I'm perfectly fine with bustling parties (1.5 logs) or attending conferences with ~3. But this type of scale jump takes some adjustment. I find myself buried in organizational charts, figuring out exactly whose workflow covers my next project. I apologize when re-meeting people I've met two weeks before - just not enough space on the mental whiteboard for all the new names. Gone are the days when I could just poke my head in my colleague's lab to get a reagent, or speak directly to my company's founder. The enormities of scale preclude certain "normal" social interactions.

All this to say that my posting schedule will remain sparse until I wrap my brain fully around this new reality. It's not all bad news: Small sub-groups meet to offer community to new folks like me. Megapharma uses lots of ingenious workplace engineering to make the place seem smaller - potted plants, kitchenettes, warm colors, etc. After a little while, my brain will loosen and change, and you'll see floods of new posts about the joys of meetings (to plan other meetings) and #BigPharma life.

Oh...and more chemistry whimsy. Promise.