Feeling low....

Hi
It's been a long time, again.
Yet, I'm still pretty much in the same place in life, only with a new language(!), a new address(!), a longer gap of unemployment(!), and less desire than ever to return to the bench.

Husband, LittleOne and I packed up our home from the last 6 years in PhDLand and, on LittleOne's 1st Birthday, flew to a new (to me) country (NewCountry) where Husband could start postdoc #2 (after an unsuccessful tenure-track job hunt and a loooooooong 16 months of unemployment). One main attractive feature though: it's Husband's home country, where his family still live, and where he is a native speaker. This dramatically simplifies important things like immigration and housing applications. My abilities in NewLanguage are pretty decent, at least on the social level, but I've never had professional experience in a NewLanguage environment. I'm hopeful that my NewLanguage skills will improve with more time spent here, but as it stands, I spend 90% of my time home alone with now 15 month old LittleOne, who is (not yet) the greatest conversationalist. Husband and I speak English together, and I don't yet know any NewLanguage speakers in our new town, so my progress is pretty limited to food ordering and shopping skills and short chats with the sweet grandmotherly lady who runs the little grocery store down the street.

On the job front, I was pleasantly surprised when my work visa arrived much faster than anticipated and immediately started applying for any and all industry jobs I thought I was remotely qualified for, plus numerous spontaneous applications with local pharma and biotech companies. And... after 3 months, I haven't had a single interview. Most haven't even replied that they filled the job with someone else (at least form PFO letters allowed me to close the door on applications and slide yet another folder form the "Open Applications" folder to the "Jobs I didn't get" folder on my laptop. How much longer can I keep this up? I was initially giving myself 6 months, but at the half way point, I'm already feeling pretty low.

Husband's parents took LittleOne for his very first sleepover at their house tonight to give me more than the usual hour-long bursts of job hunting time while LittleOne naps, in order to re-work my CV and re-think my job hunt. Trouble is, I don't know what to change. I don't know how things work here in NewCountry. And until now, I've only replied to job postings in English, and not those in NewLanguage. So at least one way to start is to make a NewLanguage version of my CV.

Why why why does this have to be so hard? A lot of days I love being home with LittleOne, but one crappy postdoc salary is just not going to cut it in the long run in stupid-expensive NewCountry, and I'm getting desperate for some non-mom aspect to my life.

So... I decided to try to revive this blog, if nothing more than as an outlet for job hunting frustrations, and, in an effort to motivate myself more, a place to record my job hunt progress so that I feel accountable for my time. So, bear with me. I'll try to post each time I apply to something new or make some sort of progress in Project GetAJob, and maybe some other stuff in between.

Today I applied for a position with this job title:

1. Regulatory Affairs CMC Specialist (limited 1 year contract)

And I did these job hunting tasks:

1. Updated my English CV for January 2011

2. Re-designed a cover letter template with a more active voice, shorter, more concise sentences, and bullet form lists showing I understood the job posting and how I fulfilled each point

Now, to enjoy a baby-free evening with Husband (whenever he gets home from the lab). There's a little pub down the street from our new place that I've been wanting to try out since we moved here. I'll try not to miss LittleOne too much (and maybe call to check up on him after bed time...)

Now what?

Hi there
Wow, February already huh? LittleOne has been keeping me busy and life has been a satisfying slow, but with lots of things to think about pace that has left me more than a little stressed. That said, I'm really enjoying (and so grateful it's been a possibility) my maternity leave. As I've been watching Husband struggle through the post-postdoc job search (he's been unemployed since last summer) I've been spending a lot of time reflecting about whether I really want to go down that postdoc route or if I should jump academic ship while I still can... A great friend and former labmate has been so helpful in listening to all my inner worries and finds solutions to all my doubts. She is currently 2 years into her postdoc and loving it right now, and really encouraging me to do one too. But I still have all these nagging thoughts and feelings... so, I thought I'd share them here. If anyone is still out there reading, I'd love to hear your take, your experiences, your advice...

So, why am I so doubtful about the whole postdoc experience? Besides the work/family balance, the huge open "can we even think of making this work financially?" and "do I even want to move to another not home country AGAIN and start over my whole village AGAIN?" or for that matter, do I want to be the REASON to uproot our family and take them farther away from family AGAIN or is that just more than a bit too much pressure to have hanging over my head at the beginning of a postdoc?

To be honest. I'm still feeling exceptionally stupid. I miss work, miss experiments, miss hearing/reading about cool science, but I feel so out of the loop. And I'm not even sure how to get back in, though thanks to great friend I now have access to online journals again. And then, I'm not even sure anymore what questions I'm interested in, let alone who is working on those things, and definitely not who would be a great or a crappy boss to work for. I'm not sure why I want to do a postdoc, since I'm really not sure if a group leader job is in my future, and if it's not then what is the point? I guess mostly I'm scared that I suck and no one would want to hire me (I'm terrified of interviews right now) since I have a kid and I'm still pregnancy/mom brain stupid and I'm not feeling even slightly ambitious. Or they would hire me and then be so disappointed :(

See, I read a message from great science friends now postdocing at amazing places, or even make a trip into visit the lab and I hear all about everyone's cool projects and ideas and I get excited for them, but just end up thinking that I'd never be smart or creative enough to think up a project on my own, or know what to do to make the project a success. Friend put it really well when she said that in the lab where we did our PhDs we learned a lot (A LOT!) but the price we paid was our confidence, and our enthusiasm.

I'm having kind of a rough time emotionally/psychologically right now though, and I'm super stressed about money/visas/jobs/having a place to live right now so I know that's clouding my judgment, but it certainly doesn't motivate me to start reading and researching out postdocs. I hate hate hate living in limbo. I'm so sick of it and I feel like I've been stuck here in uncertain future limbo land for several years now.

Friend tells me that the worst reason to NOT do something is because you're afraid it won't work out. I think friend is a wise wise lady. But I'm still not so sure I'm ready (or ever will be ready) to take that blind leap off the cliff and jump into postdoc land.

Still around...

Well, somehow the last several months have come and gone with nary a post from me... I cleaned out my bench, handed over my projects, and, I'll admit it, cried a little over the past 5 years as I did my last experiment - both in a happy and sad way all at the same time.

And on October 26, a full two weeks early, after 25 hours of labor (!) my little boy entered the world. And I haven't looked back. He is, by far, my greatest piece of work, and my most important project. WAY better than my C/N/S paper. Hands down.

I've been back to visit the lab twice now since LittleOne was born, and have been overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity and support from my supervisor and lab mates. If you'd asked me a few years ago how any of the people in my lab environment would react to me having a baby it would have been the total opposite of what I've experienced. I never thought I would say it, but I LIKE, almost LOVE, my lab mates and I kind of miss seeing them on a daily basis. Some of them even showed up at the hospital to visit me, flowers in hand, the day after LittleOne was born. Living away from home, they were my first and nearly only visitors in my whole 5 day long hospital stay. I was so touched that they would come.

Professionally, there have been no changes. I sent some data to a collaborator a few days before LittleOne was born, and I'm receiving regular updates from the PhD student who took over my project, but otherwise I'm on total professional hiatus. I even stopped reading Science blogs.

But here in LittleOne's 6th week of life, I'm starting to feel a bit more like myself and starting to think more about how to go on from here. I've given myself permission to NOT look actively for something new until Easter. My maternity leave benefits here in PhDCity allow me a full year with great financial support so I don't have that pressure pushing me to find something new, and can really take the time to enjoy LittleOne's earliest days. But still, I'd like there to be a future for me professionally. I'm just not sure what that future looks like anymore. If you'll bear with me (and I find some time during naps) I'll be trying to figure that out in the coming months.

Happy December everyone!

Who'd have thought?!

So, since I'm leaving the lab before my project is finished, I am hoping to hand it off to someone else in the lab. I had a meeting yesterday with one of the other PhD students to give hir a rundown on the whole thing. To prepare for the meeting I actually went back to read portions of my PhD thesis where I had written a discussion about what I thought might be going on and how to proceed and test those ideas. Now, I think 99% of people probably never open their thesis again after the exam, unless it's for a method or something. Usually if I hear someone re-read their thesis they find a load of errors/typos/things that just don't make sense, so I was expecting that. So I was pleasantly surprised to find I still liked what I'd written. It made sense, was well thought out and made some great points that I admit I'd kind of forgotten about over the last year or so. Who'd have thought? I worked really hard on my thesis when I was at a very difficult low point in my personal life. It was a major accomplishment for me to finish it and hand it in. I even had it bound in beautiful linen fabric cover in my favorite colour of sky blue. I'm so pleased to still like it.

On the experimental front I managed to confirm *most* of my antibody/construct results yesterday, just a few things to tweak a bit before I can move on to new things. I'm leaving for 10 days starting tonight so I'm looking forward to the break and coming back refreshed and ready to start fresh with new experiments.

Data outliers....

We had an interesting discussion this morning in a group meeting. Say you do an experiment on 5 independent days. Each day's data consists of multiple parallel replicates for each experiment, including an internal positive control. If one of the days shows that the internal control was actually negative, is it ok to throw away the whole data set for that day (because something was wrong with the assay?)? What if the other days showed a lot (or very little) variation? Does it make any difference if the experiment is a Western Blot, versus an immunostaining, versus a quantitative measurement (like cell proliferation values, or a luciferase reporter)? To be honest, I think I'd throw out that whole day as an off day and repeat it or use the n of 4 days... What say you?

In other news, I got wicked nice looking data with my new antibodies yesterday... today I'll try to reconfirm with antibodies against the tags instead of the protein of interest. AND I think there might be someone to take over my project when I leave, and s/he'd be the PERFECT choice - I'd be so happy to have this settled and start some work together before I have to leave. So, yeah!

Nothing works :(

Well, like the title says, nothing works! I feel like I've been busting my butt trying to get experiments to work. I'm trying to characterize a totally uncharacterized protein picked up in a loss of function screen with a super cool (if not so penetrant) phenotype. I made an antibody. And I'm trying (desperately) to figure out if it works, and where my protein is expressed and localized. Nothing works. Or it half works, or it just doesn't make sense and things are conflicting. Or the controls don't even work in the experiment. *sigh* So much for my group meeting/progress report this week. Summary: no progress made, oh except for the realization that I screwed up the cloning of my overexpression contructs and had to remake everything (at least I think I'm mostly caught back up with completed constructs). Not the best way to end my nearly 5 year stay in the lab (it's likely to be my last presentation before I leave in September). I am bummed. Why won't SOMETHING, ANYTHING work?

Struggling

OK, it's been a while again. I'm having a bit of an identity crisis. I always thought of myself as part of the "women in science" set, but these days, with my career on hold for my family, my project rapidly headed down the crapper, and my motivation dwindling to a near all-time low, I'm even a bit more saddened that 9 times of out 10 when I interact with someone else from the lab they ask me about my pregnancy and not about my work :( Is it because they think it's not worth talking about any more? I'm not one of them anymore? Or just an innocent curiosity about pregnancy?

I'm trying hard to make an effort NOT to bring it up myself because I don't want to be one of those women who can only talk about babies when they're pregnant. Of course it is an important part of my life now, but it's not the only part (or is it?) Most days I'd just rather go back to being "one of the guys".

I feel rather out of the loop though, in between PhD and postdoc, without any meetings/conferences coming up (except a talk I'm giving Friday at a local symposium), no manuscript I'm working on, a project I won't be able to see to its finish... I'm reading lots of other blogs out there with people counting down to defense, waiting for reviewer comments, writing grant applications and I just don't fit. I feel like I'm already "out" of science. And I'm sad about that. And I don't see when or how it's going to get better. I think back to the very kind email I got from one PI whose lab I applied to for a postdoc and she wrote that science will always be there for me when/if I want to come back, but I haven't even left yet and I still feel like it's already gone.