Help Wanted: "Working Hours" Survey

Ofer Kedem, a postdoctoral researcher in the Weiss lab at Northwestern, has posted a survey to try and get a handle on the daily grind for academic chemists. He and his colleagues hope to garner enough data to publish their results in an open-source journal.

In the interest of statistical significance, won't you help them out?

HERE'S THE LINK.

(Thanks!)

What's Important? Data Analysis

Thanks again to everyone who wrote in with their two (or three) most important job criteria.

We had a final tally of 42 (!) respondents, who gave a total of 94 answers. Here's the much-vaunted pie chart I promised on Friday:

Comments:

1. Many people wanted "meaning" behind their daily work. There're a lot of terms one could use to describe that special feeling of fulfillment - they're all included in the largest pie wedge.

2. Only a tenth of you indicated salary or benefits as part of your criteria. Two percent mentioned promotions or advancement. Shocking, really, especially in a down economy.

3. The "Misc" category included responses such as autonomy, lack of bureaucracy, morality, health, and...free food.

4. Prediction: If I offered a 5-year job working on cures for neglected diseases, starring top-flight, team-oriented colleagues located 10 minutes down the street from your house, most of you would take it.

Right?

So, in the end, have we vindicated Mr. Sturgeon's beliefs about modern science workers? I believe we have. Interesting work and collegiality really do seem to matter most!*

*Limitations: Now, this only surveyed 42 chemists, so I'm missing out on the other 90,858. I'm well aware that the survey only caught 1) chemists reading blogs, 2) chemists on Twitter, and 3) chemists who could comment on blogs during (presumably) working hours. Not exactly perfect conditions for such a study. My 'analysis,' such as it was, had no tests for accuracy, and no way to filter out trolls. C'est la vie.

Challenge: I'd love to see this survey writ large...wouldn't you? Perhaps a larger journal or scientific society could issue the survey to their members (lookin' at you, ACS, Science...).

Readers: Questions, comments? Feel free to contact me (Seearroh_AT_gmail).

Christmas Break, Links, Survey

As we reach the end of Just Like Cooking "Year 1," I wanted to first and foremost thank everyone who dropped in to say hello. I hope you enjoyed it, maybe even learned something, and that my posts prompted some discussion among you and yours.


Brief Survey: What would you like to see as the Blog moves forward? More "everyday chemistry?" More reactions? More structures? More media diatribes? More "deep questions?" Or something I haven't mentioned? 


Please let me know in the comments...thanks!


In case you're up late during the holidays, and want something chemmy to sink your teeth into, here's some link love:


Synthesis of Halichondrin C (seriously, isn't Kishi like 125 years old? Still kickin' though!)
Scalable Enantioselective Total Synthesis of Taxanes (well, we're a few C-H oxidations away from curing cancer here, but it's a stab in an interesting direction)
Paul's "Chemmy" Nominations, 2011


Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy Kwanzaa to all readers. Happy New Year, too!