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Amy Bishop, a tenure track faculty member of the Biology Department at the University of Alabama-Huntsville shot and killed three faculty members and wounded three others after learning that her appeal of a negative tenure decision was denied. While this incident doesn’t typify the response of faculty members who are denied tenure (subsequent reports suggest that she previously accidentally shot and killed her brother 20 years ago), it illustrates how high the stakes are or (may be perceived) by those aspiring to successful academic careers. 

Based my own experiences, being denied tenure is emotionally debilitating—mostly because of the public humiliation and stigma associated with it. Despite what your friends, loved ones or fellow faculty members say to you to ease the pain, being denied tenure suggests that you weren’t scientifically astute or “smart enough” to be guaranteed a job for life. It doesn’t matter whether or not the decision was fair or that there may have been extenuating personal or political circumstances, the bottom line is that you had your shot (no pun intended)and you simply didn’t have the right stuff to gain membership into the elite club populated by “outstanding scientists.” Put simply, your failure to win tenure has earned you the label of being a “failed scientist.” While nobody will ever utter those words, I can assure you, based on my own experiences that they think it no matter how successful you ultimately may become.

If I sound bitter...well....I am; but not for the reasons that you may suspect (being denied tenure was probably best career move that I was ever forced to make). While being denied tenure at institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia or other elite universities doesn’t mean that you cannot have a successful academic career at lesser institutions, being denied tenure the University of Miami School of Medicine (or the University of Alabama-Huntsville for that matter) almost always means that your academic career is over. This means that after chasing an academic career for most of your professional life, you can longer do what you were trained to do and you must now do something else with your life Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the vast majority of graduate students and postdocs that I have talked with over the past 15 years have given little thought to what that something else may be.

But, don’t be too hard yourself because you have no idea what you next career move may be after the academic career route path is no longer viable. The blame for this conundrum falls squarely on shoulders of the faculty members (mostly tenured) who train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows for careers in the life sciences. Despite the fact that only 10 percent of PhD-trained life scientists land tenure track positions after completing their training, graduate programs continue to exclusively focus on academic careers for their graduates and trainees. While I believe that this practice is ill-advised and clearly flies in the face of supply side economics, the steadfast refusal of life sciences graduate programs to develop alternative career tracts within their training programs to accommodate the career needs of a majority of their graduates is especially egregious and odious.

It is not difficult to understand why many tenured faculty members don’t give much thought about future employment prospects for their graduate students and postdocs. After all, they already have jobs that are guaranteed for life and it stands to reason that the careers and employment opportunities for others are not high on their priority lists.  Like it or not, when it comes to employment opportunities and career choices, most graduate students and postdocs are on their own!

It is extremely tragic that three people lost their lives and several others were wounded by a deeply troubled and misguided former tenure track faculty member. It won’t be surprising if certain faculty members dismiss the incident and attribute its horrific nature to a seriously disturbed and deranged person. After all, who in their right mind would do such an awful thing? However, I am certain that the humiliation, outrage and psychological pain experienced by Bishop are fairly common among individual who are denied tenure. Rather than turn her rage inward, she decided to take it out on the people who she thought had destroyed her life.  Maybe this incident will induce graduate programs to consider implementing career development programs that showcase alternate careers beyond the traditional tenure track career path.

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!

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While this isn’t a new topic, I wanted to raise the question again because I recently received a message  from a reader that greatly troubled me. The person who posted the comment has a PhD degree in biomedical engineering and is extremely angry with the existing system because of the lack of employment opportunities in her field. Put simply, she is so frustrated with the system that she no longer believes that it is ethical to advise young people to pursue careers in the life sciences. I know that she isn’t alone and that many of you share her anger and frustration with the lies (as she put it) about employment opportunities for life sciences PhD candidates and postdoctoral fellows

From time to time, I am invited by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to talk about alternative careers in the life sciences. I try to remain upbeat and positive during my presentation but generally I can’t control myself by the Q&A session. Invariably, I rant and rave about how dysfunctional academia has become. Interestingly, I recently was uninvited by my former graduate department where I was slated to present a seminar on alternate career choices for life scientists. As the tenured faculty member (you know how I feel about tenure) who would have sponsored my visit told me “the seminars that we offer our students are scientific in nature and much different than many of the topics that I discuss on my very interesting blog.” Consequently, he informed me that I was no longer invited to give my talk (I was previously invited by the Department Chair who happened to be a former colleague of mine who decided to move to another institution before my visit). In an e-mail response to his un-invitation, I told him that I wanted to visit the Department and give the talk because I believe that my graduate education is what enabled me to maneuver the minefield that ultimately became my career path. Also, I told him that I wanted to share my insights and career experiences with current graduate students and postdoctoral fellows because I thought that many may benefit from them. Not surprisingly, I never heard back from him. 

The point that I am trying to make is that my message about alternative careers for PhD students is diametrically opposed to the mission of most PhD programs; which is to prepare 100% of their students for academic careers. Unfortunately, as I have stated many times in the past, only about 10% of those who receive life sciences PhD degrees land academic appointments. What are the remaining 90% of the folks who toiled long and hard for their PhD degrees suppose to do with their lives? In the past, as many as 50% or more of these students were able to garner jobs as research scientists at biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies or with government agencies like the CDC, FDA, EPA and others. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has laid off over 200,000 employees in the past 3 years, funding for biotech companies has hit an all time low and we are experiencing the worst recession in almost 70 years which is causing government agencies to stop hiring! This begs the question: what are graduate students pursuing PhD degrees and postdoctoral fellows suppose to do to put food on the table to feed their families and themselves? 

While I don’t have an easy answer to that question, I can tell you that getting angry and frustrated or dropping out of the system isn’t going to change anything. I will also tell you that the system isn’t going to change by itself! To that end, it may make sense for all of you angry and frustrated graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to band together and tell your advisors and mentors that “you are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.” To show them that you are serious, I highly recommend that your offer them a plan to address your concerns about finding gainful employment (not decade long postdoctoral fellowships) following completion of your PhD degrees. For example, you may suggest that they add alternate career certificate and degree programs to their existing curricula. Or, if new programs are too costly, suggest that they offer courses that showcase alternate career options like entrepreneurship, science writing or medical communications. Finally, at the very list, insist that they work with local companies and organization to create sponsored internship opportunities and get them to commit to supporting annual career development symposia or job fairs for graduate students and postdocs.

For the past decade or more, I have struggled to convince many of my academic colleagues to consider any and all of the above suggestions. Unfortunately, my pleas for creation of new courses and programs have fallen upon deaf ears! Given my current lack of success, I suspect that it is going to take more than one person (me) to induce the academic establishment to consider systemic change. That said anybody who may be interested in joining the “cause” to improve employment opportunities for PhD life scientists, please feel free to contact me!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Organizing!!!!!

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For the past 10 years or so, I have been providing career counseling and development seminars and workshops for life scientists. In the early years, students, postdocs and a smattering of faculty members would attend to learn about the industry trends, the job market and more recently alternate careers for PhDs and postdoctoral fellows. However, over the last few years, a disturbing trend has emerged—the lack of faculty participation at these events. 

Yesterday, I was invited to participate as a panel member to moderate a career development event sponsored by the graduate student and postdoctoral associations at the University Of Rochester School Of Medicine. The event was well attended (over 85 participants) and the discussion lasted for more than 2 hours. Joining me on the panel was a PhD-trained scientist/manager from Bristol Myers Squibb and a healthcare company executive who received his PhD degree from the university about 16 years ago. Many of the questions asked by the participants were spot on and revealed that graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are extremely anxious about their futures. The panel did its best to describe what it takes to get a job in the life sciences, the process and steps required to successfully win jobs and some ideas for alternate career options for PhD-trained scientists. Unfortunately, not a single University of Rochester medical school faculty member attended the event. In fact, I met the PI of one of the postdocs who sponsored my visit and he said with all sincerity (I think) “Thanks for coming...the students are really looking forward to your talk.” Obviously, I don’t it ever crossed his mind that he, like his students and postdocs might learn and benefit from a discussion about career options and hear (probably for the first time) how anxious and fearful his and other students are about future job prospects.

The fact that faculty members are routinely eschewing career development seminars and forums is troubling and extremely disturbing for a variety of reasons. First, as I have said many times before, I believe that PIs have moral and ethical obligations to help their students determine what careers they are best suited for. I don’t think it is too much to ask or labor-intensive for PIs to learn about what is going on with the job market outside of academia. Despite an ongoing lack of tenured track faculty positions and the extremely fierce competition to win them, academicians continue to exclusively train and prepare students for academic careers. This makes absolutely no sense from a “supply and demand” perspective. Second, the lack of faculty support and participation sends a clear message to graduate students and postdocs that their anxieties, fears and concerns about job prospects simply isn’t that important to their PIs.  The mantra of most academicians —“just continue to do good science and everything will be okay”— is outdated, anachronistic and self serving (for PIs) at best.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the failure of  tenured faculty members to actively engage and participate in discussions about career options reveals the unbridled contempt that most academicians have for scientists who work outside of academia. Most academics choose to not concern themselves with non-academic and mundane issues like jobs and careers. And why should they? Once they win tenure, their lives are set because they are guaranteed jobs and benefits for life!

We are living in very challenging and troubling times. In the past three years, over 180,000 pharmaceutical workers lost their jobs and national unemployment will likely hit 15%.  Academic and government jobs are hard to come by and the competition for these jobs is ferocious and extremely competitive. And, sadly, current academic training programs are woefully inadequate to prepare graduate students and postdocs for alternate career opportunities in the life sciences. 

As I have stated numerous times before, life science graduate training programs are in dire need of systemic change and be overhauled to remain relevant. Unfortunately, systemic changes are unlikely because tenured faculty members can’t be forced or induced to change their practices, attitudes or beliefs. While a minority of life sciences faculty members realizes that the system is broken, the majority doesn’t.  To that end, if graduate students and postdoctoral fellows want change to occur than they must band together and collectively send a message to their PIs and mentors that “We are mad as hell and we aren’t going to take it anymore!” Anything short of a widespread massive protest will be ineffectual!

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!

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Cliff Mintz, BioCrowd co-founder and the mastermind behind BioJobBlog, is featured today in an online article at the Science Careers website entitled “Life After Rejection.” The piece was expertly crafted by Siri Carpenter, PhD a free lance science writer based in Madison, Wisconsin— coincidentally, the institution that awarded me my PhD. 

Being denied tenure as an Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology was one of the most devastating events in my professional life. It literally took me over 10 year to come to terms with the implications of the decision. But, I am here to tell you (and in the article) that there IS life after being denied tenure; and in many ways, it is quite liberating. My tenure denial empowered me to explore careers that were previously closed to me as an academician and perhaps, more importantly, to find out who I am and what I really wanted to do with the rest of my life!

Don't get me wrong; it still bugs me that I wasn’t awarded tenure—mostly because being refused tenure implies that you “weren’t smart enough” to make it in academia. Not surprisingly, the “not-being-smart-enough label” doesn’t do much for a person’s self esteem and, many who are denied tenure (including me) tend to view themselves as abject failures in the eyes of their colleagues and friends.

However, looking back, being denied tenure was probably one of the best things that had ever happened to me. Truth be told, I would have been a lousy academic. I am too social and entrepreneurial to have flourished in a system that is rigid, parochial and not conducive to change.  That said, if I sound bitter and a bit envious of those who were granted tenure, you are correct!  After all, who wouldn’t be envious of  people who come and go as they please, don’t have to answer to a boss and are guaranteed a job for life; regardless of their social skills, academic performance or contribution to education?

The point that I want to make is that being denied tenure is an emotionally devastating and traumatic event that nobody ought to experience. However,  if  you should to find yourself in the uncomfortable position of being denied tenure, please remember to continue to believe in yourself, don't give up and, as corny as it may sound, "follow the advice of your heart" when making your next career move!

Until next time....

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!

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The competition for National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funding has been intensifying over the past five years or more. In the past, NIH had gone to extraordinary lengths to insure that senior investigators didn’t lose their funding so as to not hinder the progress of long standing research programs. However, in recent years, NIH funding managers have eschewed the unwritten policy of preferentially funding established investigators in favor of younger ones!  According to an article in today’s New York Times, NIH grant managers are increasingly ignoring the advice of study sections and funding scientists whose projects receive less favorable reviews than those denied money. Many of the favored funding recipients are “new investigators,” or scientists who had never before received a grant from NIH. Further, in 2007, the last year for which figures are available, “19 percent of the grants awarded to individual scientists were made as exceptions, or given outside of rankings by scientific reviewers, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. Nearly all of the increase in exceptions in 2007 went to new investigators, with the young scientists’ share rising from 20 percent of all exceptions in 2003 to half in 2007.”

Not surprisingly, many senior investigators are calling “foul” despite the fact that the median age at which scientists win their first NIH grant has risen steadily, to 41 years, from 35 in 1980. While all meritorious grant proposals ought to be funded, the reality is that there simply isn’t enough money to around. As a former tenure track faculty member, I believe that new investigators deserve something of a handicap or edge when it comes to competing for their first grants. After all, how can an overwhelmed, newly minted faculty member be expected to successfully compete with established investigators who have mastered their jobs and more importantly, the art of grant writing? Sadly, the old practice of preferentially funding established investigators over new ones tended to stifle innovation and reward scientists who liked to play it safe!

We live in an increasingly competitive world where innovation is at a premium. American scientists and granting agencies must abandon their old practices if they want to remain competitive on the world stage. To that end, funding some young, innovative investigators over a few established faculty members who have enjoyed long successful scientific careers doesn’t seem like a bad investment to me! After all isn’t all about retun on investment these days?

Until next time...

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!

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I had many discussions with undergraduate students at the ABRCMS in Orlando last week who were interested in pursuing PhD degrees in the biomedical sciences. I felt that I had an ethical and moral responsibility as a former academic and career development professional to tell them that the job market for PhDs is not good and that it is likely to get worse over the next few years. These discussions prompted me to revisit the role and contributions of tenure to the lack of academic jobs in the US today.

As I stated in a previous post, systemic changes must be made to the current academic paradigm to increase the likelihood that PhDs will be able to find jobs at the end of their training. In that post, I suggested that abolishing tenure and replacing it with renewable, performance-based five year contracts may help to reduce the glut of jobless PhDs by freeing up a small percentage of new faculty positions every five years. While this approach has been tried at several academic institutions, it has been largely been deemed unsuccessful. That said, I came across a provocative article in today’s New York Times about a bold new tenure proposal put forth by Michelle Rhee, the new, 38-year old Chancellor of the Washington, DC school system.

Ms Rhee’s revolutionary proposal offers tenured teachers salaries raises of up to $40,000 per year to give up tenure. It is important to note she has not proposed to completely abolish tenure. Under her proposal, teachers would choose between two compensation options—the green or red plans. Salaries for teachers in the green plan would rise meteorically, nearly doubling by 2010, but they would have to give up tenure for one year, after which they would need a principal’s recommendation to keep their job or face dismissal. Teachers who choose the red plan would also get big pay raises but would lose seniority rights that allow them to bump more junior teachers if their school closes or is overhauled. Red plan teachers who are not hired by other schools would either have to take early retirement, a buyout or face eventual dismissal. I like her plan because poorly- or under performing teachers can opt to take the cash and then either drastically improve to keep their higher paying jobs or do nothing, get paid well for a year or two and then get fired.

While Ms. Rhee’s proposal may work at the primary and secondary school levels, it likely would not be effective at the college and postgraduate levels, where salaries vary widely and are largely grant driven. Instead, I propose that tenure-for-life should remain intact at these institutions but be replaced with a “for cause” tenure review system. This system is tried and true and similar models have been successfully used for over 100 years by employers and labor unions. In this model, management and its unions agree upon the job responsibilities and performance metrics for individual that must be met each year, e.g. an annual performance review.  If a person is under performing or fails to meet his/her performance metrics, an employer can attempt to dismiss the employee “for cause” reasons.  However, before a dismissal for cause can occur, the employer must convince a judge or arbitrator in a hearing that the employee in question has violated the “dismissal for cause” provisions.  Because an employer must prove that an employee has violated the provisions that constitute for cause dismissal, the “for cause” claims against individual employees must be fastidiously documented and vigorously substantiated. This prevents employers from arbitrarily firing employees who are either outspoken troublesome or disruptive. According to my wife, who has been a union-side labor lawyer and union representative for 20 year, this system works well because the players (management and unions) all understand, abide by and play according to the rules of the game.

So what are some of the performance-based “for cause” metrics that I think ought to be considered for yearly evaluations of tenured professors? They are not much different than those currently used to adjudicate tenure decisions. That said, I propose the following five categories: 1) teaching, 2) publication record, 3) grant support, 4) institutional service and 5) commitment to innovation. In my opinion, adoption of the “for cause” tenure review model would help to do two things: improve the overall performance of tenured faculty members and provide newly minted PhDs and postdoctoral fellows with regularly occurring new job opportunities.

Until next time…

Good Luck and Good Job Hunting!!!!!!!!

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