Cast a Wide Net

After Tuesday's post (covered graciously by Derek and Chemjobber), I received plenty of well-wishing and interesting emails pointing to potential jobs. I'm truly thankful for all of the kind responses.

One persistent question came up in multiple venues: What type of job was I looking for?
Was I, perhaps, being too picky?

Below, I've listed a smattering of the job titles I've applied to in the past three years. I'll let you be the judge(s):

Scientist I
Scientist II
Scientist III
Sr. Chemist
Project Leader
Principal Scientist
Blogger
Research Investigator
Investigator
Associate
Polymer Scientist
Consultant / Manager
Flavor Scientist
Technical Adviser
Patent Associate
Biochemist
Asst. Professor
Adjunct Professor
Educational Assistant
Tutor
Editor
Asst. Editor
Social Media Manager
Science Writer
Medical Writer
Lead Chemist
Business Development Associate
Business Development Manager
Marketing Rep
Sales Associate
Customer Affairs Rep
Organometallic Scientist
Accounts Manager
Business Analyst
Applications Development
Metallurgy Engineer
Research Chemist
Food Scientist / Engineer
Analyst
Team Leader
Asst. Director
Technician
Metabolism / Fate Scientist
Research Asst. Professor
Technology Transfer Specialist
Product Specialist

(more as I dig 'em up...)

Reconciliation

A few days ago, I made a sardonic comment on Twitter about the never-ending scientific job quest:

An odd thought: if major diseases aren't cured in my lifetime, it may be because my entire generation spent its time applying for jobs.
— See Arr Oh (@SeeArrOh) October 18, 2013

So, was I just being over-the-top? Let's do some math.

In the past 4 years, I've held 3 different jobs; I'm currently looking for Job #4.

Jobs Applied To, by cycle: 184, 43, 126 (so far!) = 353 jobs
@ 1 hour per job (discovery, cover letter, emails, recommendations, etc.) = 353 hours

Phone Interviews, by cycle: 13, 3, 10 (so far!) = 26 phone calls
(Just 15 minutes? In my experience, they last 45): 26 * 0.75 hour = 20 hours

On-Site Interviews, by cycle: 7, 2, 3 (so far!) = 12 on-sites
@ 8 hours per interview + avg. 4 hours travel = 144 hours

Miscellaneous: Job fairs, reformatting CV, career events, webinars, networking events, ACS meetings, cold-calls, personal development, continuing education = 100 hours

Grand Total: 617 hours spent on some aspect of job-hunting.

Let's put that number into perspective. 617 hours is 25.7 days. Not working days, mind you. Actual 24-hour days. Many U.S. companies start entry-level employees at 2 weeks' vacation, or 80 hours of earned time. That's 320 hours over 4 years.

I have spent nearly twice as long applying for jobs as I have taking vacation in the last 4 years.

(Bonus irony: Several of those vacation days were taken to attend on-site interviews.)

If we measure a "standard" industrial chemist working week at ~50 hours, then I've spent 12.3 working weeks looking for jobs. That's 3 weeks' time, annually.

How much science could you do with an extra 3 weeks? Or if you actually used your vacation to relax, as opposed to looking for work?

Final thought: I'll bet you good money that I'm underestimating the time I've spent searching.

Any leads? I'm willing to listen. Drop me a line, seearroh_AT_gmail

~ Still no new job. Resume radio silence ~

A Brief Interlude

No, I haven't found a new job yet. But, I wanted to take a brief respite from watching a small start-up company crumble all around me, in order to point you to this:

Credit: Randall Munroe | Science Magazine
(Here's the full comic)

Yes, that's the Randall behind xkcd, drawing an Open Access journals infographic in last week's special "Communicating Science" section in, well, Science (!!!). He now joins Jorge Cham (PhD Comics) in the pantheon of cartoonists-cum-science-communicators to grace its hallowed pages in the past few years. It perhaps does not surprise regular readers that I'm an ardent fan of both artists.

I figured that, given recent calls for greater public understanding of science, and even chatter of drawing total synthesis cartoons, these early sci-comic trailblazers should be widely recognized and praised for their efforts. I certainly enjoyed it!

[Back to the hunt...Resume radio silence]

Hiatus

My apologies to regular readers, but Just Like Cooking is going into radio silence while I look for jobs.

I must redouble my search effort, and something's gotta give.

If you have any helpful information, I'm willing to listen. seearroh_AT_gmail

Respectfully,
See Arr Oh

Summer flowers, 2013

A Tasty New Development

Hey there, readers! You may have seen the chatter this morning, or perhaps you've seen Carmen's or Andy Revkin's write-ups?

It's time to hear it from the dog's mouth: I'm now part of the Food Matters family over at Scientific American!

Now, this doesn't mean I'm closing up shop here at Just Like Cooking; far from it. Following Ash's example, I'll write about my love of food chemistry over there, and my love of [everything else] over here. Sound good?

Have a peek at Bora's intro post to learn more about all the new faces, and check out all the smart things my co-authors have written over the years.

Looking forward to this exciting new adventure. Thanks again to everyone who made it happen, and for all of you here at JLC for reading.

Stock Photo Science - Colchicine

Our tiny company doesn't have a true marketing or business development staff, so publicity often falls to the scientists - y'know, during our "down time." : )

For the past month, I've been trawling stock photo sites and "how-to" guides to assemble some company brochures for an upcoming event. Yesterday, I dug up this stock photo gem:

Source: iStockphoto

Now, Just Like Cooking 1.0 might have beleaguered the graphic artist, decrying his lack of experience and shouting about why we need more chemists in design departments. 

But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd. Let's go piece by piece and try to figure out why we can't print this on our marketing materials.

For starters: the molecule I think they're looking for, colchicine, isn't exactly unknown. Doctors and healers have prescribed this plant extract for centuries to treat gout and local inflammation, despite concerns over its toxicity. Chemists have known how to make colchicine since at least the mid-1950s. 

So, here's how the molecule should look. There's some important differences here, perhaps most importantly that the acetamide (the "top" functional group, CH3-C=O-NH) should actually have a bond to the central ring. 

Next, let's move to the bottom right ring, which I'd call a cycloheptatrienone ("hepta" = 7, "trien" = 3 double bonds, "one" = ketone functional group). See how the double bonds are shuffled around in the stock photo? That would be OK, since the system does have other resonance structures, forms where just the electrons move around without breaking the carbon framework. But this structure, where the C=O and C=C bonds overlap, makes 5 bonds at that carbon. That only happens under very specific conditions, but certainly not in this drug.

Finally, check out those bonds on the left. We organic chemists use bond notation to infer a lot of crucial details, not least which atoms connect to which other atoms! Note the line drawn from the 6-membered ring to the "C" of the bottom methoxy (H3CO-) group. Perhaps an artistic choice, centering the group over the bond, but the real molecule shows a C-O bond. 

I know photographers don't often consult chemists before they take these shots, but I'd invite their input here. Wouldn't their business do better if their photos were accurate? 

Speaking as a scientist-cum-designer, it would make my job easier.

Happy Friday, everyone.

-SAO

Bruceollines: Short and Sweet

You can't put your finger on it, but sometimes you just feel compelled to read a paper. This one, from Org. Lett. ASAP, scratched all the usual itches: protecting-group free total synthesis (check), traditional medicine (check), tropical diseases (check), and cool off-the-shelf reagents (check).

I must admit, Gordon Gribble's name at the top caught my attention, but his co-authors hail from the University of the West Indies, a school I've always been curious about.*

The goal? Fast, selective production of bruceollines, medicinal compounds isolated from the roots of a Chinese shrub. The authors initially try to assemble the common indole (the 6-5 aromatic ring) core of the bruceolline family using Fischer conditions, but the starting materials have other ideas and form non-productive intermediates. Starting over, palladium catalysis proceeds smoothly, then relatively gentle oxidation (DDQ) produces the fully oxidized bruceolline E (see picture).

To access the final compound, Gribble & Co. must reduce just one of E's two ketones. The authors attempt borane reductions, but the "usual suspects" (CBS, Alpine) fail miserably. Optimization with (+)-DIP-Cl produces the final bruceolline J in high yield and ee. To make the unnatural enantiomer, the authors turn to a personal favorite: Baker's yeast, more commonly found in breads than labs. After 14 days in a warm, sweet slurry, the wee beasties return ent-bruceolline J in 98% ee.

The synthesis, only 4 short steps, should open the door to develop new antimalarial compounds.


*First, the Hawaii paradox - recruiting high-end, serious grad students to work 4-6 years in a tropical paradise. How does that work? And how do shipping delays from the mainland impact project selection? I can imagine that protecting group-free, relatively robust chemistry would have to be the norm, to survive storms, delays, humidity, etc.