The Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students Rocks!
I just returned from the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minority Students (ABRCMS) that was held in Orlando from November 5-8, 2008. The annual meeting, which is configured like most life sciences conferences with plenary oral sessions and poster presentations, is primarily intended to expose minority students to possible career opportunities in the life and biomedical sciences. I was at the meeting working for FASEB Careers as a career development and resume critiquing consultant.
I have to say that this year's ABRCMS was one of the most exciting and motivational meetings that I have attended in my career as a scientist and educator. Part of the excitement and upbeat feeling at the meeting may have been a direct result of last Tuesday's historic election of Barack Obama (who wasn't excited?). Nevertheless, I met countless numbers of bright, highly motivated and talented minority students who want to pursue careers in science, medicine and sometimes both! I was pleasantly surprised to learn that many of the undergraduate students who attend this meeting are actively engaged in basic research in laboratories at their institutions. Further, unlike many of their non-minority counterparts, most of the students who I chatted with were well informed about their intended careers and had divined well thought out strategies to help them realize their career goals and aspirations.
Kudos to the conference organizers and their sponsors! I look forward to attending next year’s conference in Phoenix, AZ.
Until next time…
Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!
I am sitting in Newark Airport waiting for my flight to San Diego which, not surprisingly, has been delayed for about 2 hours. As you might have guessed from the title of this post, I am on my way to the 2008 FASEB Career Development Symposium which is run every year at the annual FASEB meeting. 
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I read an interesting article by G. Pascal Zachary in the Sunday Business Section of the NY times entitled 
Although industry and academia share a common bond (no pun intended), which is obviously science, the lexicons of these two seemingly similar but parallel worlds are markedly different. For example, do you know what the acronyms IND, NDA, cGMP, cGLP, BLA, CTD, PK or PD stand for? If you cannot decipher any of them, you ought to forget about getting a job in industry and stay in academia. If you know what 95 % or less of them mean, I highly recommend that you get some additional training before applying for your first industrial position. If you are one of the lucky few who recognized and correctly interpreted 100% of the acronyms, you are either working in industry or recently completed some postgraduate training in drug development and regulatory affairs. The point that I am trying to make is that you cannot possibly expect to get a job in industry if can’t speak the language that you need to know in order to succeed! As the old saying goes “You need to learn how to walk before you can run”. 
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I received a call the other day from a former biotechnology master’s degree student of mine who recently secured a job at a local biotech/medical device company. She called to inquire about training for her laboratory co-workers in 
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Regulatory affairs is one of the hottest and fasting growing career tracks in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical devices industries. The trouble is,there is very little formal training available to prepare individuals for careers in regulatory affairs. Historically, most regulatory affairs professionals honed their skills through on-the-job training. This meant that the only way to pursue a career in regulatory affairs was to first get hired at a pharmaceutical or biotechnology company and then transfer into the regulatory affairs department to learn your craft. Not surprisingly, due to expansive growth of the biotech and medical devices industries, there are ongoing shortages of regulatory affairs professionals, most notably in the area of regulatory writing. In an attempt to deal with these shortages, a number of universities including 
As many of you may know, I sometimes moonlight as a medical writer to put food on the table to feed my family. Several graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have approached me at career fairs and asked “How do I become a medical writer?” Until now, I really did not have a good answer to that question (maybe because I do not know how I became a medical writer?). That said, a colleague of mine, 
Frequently, students who I teach in the NY Biotechnology Center's "Fundamentals for Biotechnology Certificate Program" and the "Georgetown Biotechnology Masters Program" ask me about internship opportunities. My lack of knowledge regarding student internships led me to check out what type of internship opportunities exist at various government agencies. Lo and behold, 
Those of you who are old enough may remember a time when a good medicinal chemistry group was crucial to the success of any pharmaceutical company. For those of you who don’t know, the job of a medicinal chemist is to use traditional organic chemistry to create variants of promising lead compounds with the hope of identifying an NME with optimized therapeutic properties. Much of the art associated with medicinal chemistry was lost over the past decade because of the increased emphasis placed combinatorial chemistry. Not surprisingly, as the interest in combinatorial chemistry grew, there as a concomitant decrease in the number of medicinal chemistry jobs. Despite all of the hype and fanfare surrounding combinatorial chemistry, it has not delivered on its promise of creating “hundreds on new molecular entities each year”. Instead, combinatorial chemistry has just become another tool in the drug discovery and development armamentarium.
My colleagues on the 
Over the past few days, I received several inquiries regarding training for individuals interested in pursuing careers in medical writing and medical communications. The good news is that both of these fields are exploding and there simply are not enough qualified candidates to fill all of the positions that are open. The bad news is that there is very little formal training or instruction to prepare folks for jobs in these fields. 
