HOW TO GET A JOB IN A SCIENCE LAB
(Or anywhere else, for that matter.)
NSoW recently caught up with Ken Caldeira at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a climate scientist working at Carnegie Institution’s Dept. of Global Ecology on the Stanford University campus. He is also a Professor (by courtesy) at Stanford University’s Dept. of Environmental Earth System Science.”
We asked him: What is the best way to get a job in a lab? This is what he wrote:
My experience is that people come in and want to start at the top. They typically come and say “I have these great skills that I want to apply to your research.” Then they get offended when you say that you don’t think you can maximize your marginal return on investment by paying them to do the thing that they were trained to do.
Instead people should come in and listen to what we do and try to figure out what we need that would make our work become more efficient and productive and then offer to do that thing (or those things).
If people are local, they should ask if they can join us for lunch on “nothing special, just ordinary lunch” days. They should come to seminars, ask if they can sit in on group meetings. If you hear some little thing that you would be able to help on, say “Oh, I can do that.” At first, make it something small. Do it fast and well.
Start out by being helpful. Let people discover your skills and abilities. Look for chances to demonstrate your skills and abilities. If you sit in a bunch of meetings and never see an opportunity to make use of your skills, that might be a message.
So, rather than presenting your wonderful skills, show that you can fill a need and improve group productivity. Rather than asking to work, entrain yourself into the life of the lab.
If people really do not like you, they will eventually tell you to go away.
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I just offered a part-time job to one of my former students who asked to have a social lunch with me and my group. The issue of work never came up at lunch, but when I needed something done I thought, ‘oh, if this student is asking to have lunch with us, she probably is interested and wants to be entrained in our activities, so I will ask her first to she if she wants the part time job.’ Even though there were better students, I didn’t offer the job to them because they did not demonstrate to me the same level of interest or motivation. When I asked her if she wanted part time work, she was very happy.
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People over-interpret the lack of response to an email as a negative reply. I would recommend interpreting no answer to an email message to mean “I am busy and do not have time to read every incoming email from people I have never heard of.” Be persistent and keep emailing until you get a response. After the third time, you can start putting in your emails “Please let me know if you want me to stop emailing you.”
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I hired a post-doc who I never would have hired except that she was so persistent. First she kept on emailing me saying she wanted to work with me. I said that it did not really look like a fit and that I would not pay for her to fly overseas to interview her. She offered to pay her own way to come out for an interview (we usually pay travel for prospective employees). I thought “If she is that motivated, let her come out to visit us.” She was familiar with my work and enthusiastic about how much she wanted to work with me. I thought, if she is so highly motivated to work with me, I should give her a chance. So, I offered her a post-doc position.
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Most scientists are egomaniacs. Before you interview with a group, read their papers. When you visit, ask the scientists and post-docs about their work. Show that you are familiar with their work and the questions they are addressing. Mostly, you should be asking questions about their work, not telling them about your own.
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Start the job in the interview. Pretend it is your first day on the job and you are figuring out what you are going to do. Ask the questions you would need to ask in order to start working.
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When you read a scientific paper and you have a question or comment, email the lead author (or authors) with your comment or question. Be complimentary if you can. Most scientists love it when people are interested in their work and saying nice things.
Chances are, if you are interested in their work, you will bump into them in the course of your career. Having that email contact gives you a connection that could lead to a job, a positive review, etc.
I made an offer of a post-doc position to a graduate student who I never would have offered a job to except that he had emailed me several times over the prior year asking intelligent questions about my papers.
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Best,
Ken
PS, After this is published, I will probably be saturated with people attempting these strategies on me. Your best bet may be to try these strategies on someone else.
Readers of Ken’s piece will certainly be interested in Brooke Allen’s article over at Science Careers — here:
Brooke’s Article at Science Careers
We’d love to see your comments, at our blog, here:
Science Careers Blog Entry
Thanks,
Jim Austin, Editor
Science Careers
http://www.sciencecareers.org
“PS, After this is published, I will probably be saturated with people attempting these strategies on me. Your best bet may be to try these strategies on someone else.”
:>
No worries, there. The most important peice for me, however was this:
“People over-interpret the lack of response to an email as a negative reply.”
That happens to me quite often. I need to remember that until someone tells me to stop contacting them they may not even know I am contacting them.
I never did understand this over-persistence bit. If someone kept doing this to me, I’d never ever want them around me. I guess I look at it through the lens of someone trying to sell me something (which this is). In my case persistence does NOT pay. If I want your product or services I’ll look for them and then ask you for it. If you are in my face day in and day out trying to sell me something, you will be the LAST person I go to.
I figured everyone else was like me. No response (or a response of NO), especially after asking a few times, means “go away.”
Show up to lunches? ??? If some strange person that sent in an application just starts showing up in your lab and asking people to go to lunch, you trust this person? Now you want to hire them?
OTOH, I totally get the correspondence about the lab’s papers and previous work. Although it’s still pretty much a thinly veiled version of the over-persistence bit. The only difference is that you can see that the prospect knows their stuff and is generally motivated to work in this area of research.
Can someone please explain why I’m wrong about over-persistence? Why, if I submit a constant barrage of inquiries, is this seen as anything but obnoxious and a nuisance?
I am not upset with someone being persistent in attempting to reach me if they are offering something I WANT, not just trying to get me to give them something THEY WANT. But, I am usually too busy to respond to all the people offering me things I want, I can’t get back to everyone.
I am often bugged by people who want me to give them personal advice on how to get a job. I talk to them, and it turns out that they don’t want advice at all; they just want me to give them a job. or to reinforce their theories of why they fail. Now I ask them what job hunting advice books they have read, and invariably, they haven’t looked at a single one. (My recommendation: What Color is Your Parachute.)
If you are trying to contact someone you want to work for, but can’t think of a single reason they might want something you have to offer, than why would they want to hire you in the first place? Start by asking yourself, “Why would they want to talk to me?” and if you have a really good answer, persist. They will thank you for it.
I used to have a problem with persistent sales people because I was a wimp. Because I was afraid of offending, I would waste other people’s time, and drive them nuts, by trying to make them guess what my unresponsiveness means.
Now, I take the time to tell them I am not interested, and that I don’t want them to call any more. They don’t persist, why would they? They need to make sales. Or I will tell them that I might be interested in November, and please call then. Or, I’m not interested, but I can think of someone who might be and I’ll introduce them.
They thank me for that. In fact, once I took a sales class, I got a newfound respect for salespeople. If you can befriend them, they are more likely than anyone at getting you the next job. Good salespeople understand what Karma is all about. And they know everyone.
The best way of not being perceived as a “creep” is to not be one. Sure, some people will still think you are one, but so what, you are not one, so what do you care what they think? Just make sure that when people spend time with you, it is time well spent.
My Grandmother summarized it well… it is a matter of whose interests you have in mind.
My Grandmother’s Advice
One final thing that bugs me: People will call me and ask me to change their mind about something, kind of how you are. I’ll make a case. Then they will argue with me some more, as if they will convince me that I’m wrong. But I did not ask to have my mind changed, they did. If they want to change their minds, stop arguing with me, do the experiment, and collect a statistically significant amount of data.
So, before you say I still haven’t convinced you that Ken is right about being persistent, read up on how to be pleasantly persistent, and then over the next 50 instances where Ken might say “be persistent” and you might say “back off” just flip a coin to pick one. Keep track of your results, and see if being persistent pays off. If it doesn’t, before rejecting his hypothesis, see if you can get someone to do a postmortem for you and see if you’re doing it wrong.
If it still turns out that being pleasantly persistent with people, when you have their best interests at heart, is inferior to going away and forgetting about it – well then, I want to see the data. That would be news.
Regards,
Brooke Allen