I'm Baaaaack!

Greetings community,

Wow! It's been over a year since I posted. Well to catch you up, 6 months after I graduated and published my paper (yay!), I took a job with a management consultant firm. After a year of ups and many downs, I left them a little under two weeks ago.

I could go into detail about last year, but I feel like it was really a lost year. I was working so much I felt like my soul was slipping away.

So now I'm going through a career transition and am trying to determine the next best step. During this time, I'm working with a group in my church to help me with this decision. This includes taking 5 minutes to journal about what's going on in my life and with the transition.

Here are the rules:
1. I have permission to write badly (:
2. If I get stuck, I can answer the question "Today I learned. . . "

So for today's journal entry I'm going to start with the question that I've sought to answer to since the spring semester of my senior year in high school: What am I going to be when I grow up?

When I went to college, my interests included music and child psychology. However, it was a physiology class that made me fall in love with science. Just being able to learn exactly how my body worked was enough for me to catch the science bug.

Because of my grades, I was recruited by the Ronald E. McNair program to conduct research the summer after my physiology class. By that time I decided that I would transition from a General Major to Biology. But after my summer of research and learning about Biochemistry in Chem 101 I quickly changed my major to Biochemistry.

It didn't matter that this was one of the harder majors at my school. It didn't matter that I had to take extra chemistry classes and make up for a lost year of school. I loved what I was learning and took every opportunity to do research in the summers and during the school year. My future was set. I would become a professor and conduct research at a tier 1 university. I finally knew what I was going to do!

It seemed that I found my groove in the sciences. I couldn't wait to go to grad school and so I did. Less than 1 month after graduating college, I dove head first into grad school. I really didn't want to spend the summer at home and I longed for the big city. Ironically, I was also afraid of the big city and was blessed to be able to stay with my sister while I learned how to live in Chicago.

Life in grad school was ok at first. I took classes the first year and felt a little fatigue from just coming out of the same environment (note to college seniors--definitely take at least a year off before grad school). After my first year, I joined a lab and got to work. Fast forward 4 years--I decided to end a dead end project and was struggling to get out of a bout of depression. 6 months later, my boss told me that the lab was closing due to lack of funding and I'd have to start over in a new lab.

At this point, the adviser for my program told me that I could leave and pursue science policy. I previously expressed an interest in this field to my boss and I think it was taken as "She doesn't want to be a professor--abandon ship!" During the previous years, I found that I wanted more than sitting at a lab bench all day, closeted away from society. I wanted more interaction with world events, and my experiments weren't working. I started doubting if I had the patience to be a scientist. That's when I learned about the AAAS Science Policy fellowship. It's a fellowship that enables PhD's to apply their knowledge in governmental agencies.

But that didn't mean that I wanted to walk away now. I sweat blood, tears, and time in this program, I was going to walk away with what I came for. So with a swift kick in the butt by a good friend (he basically set up an appointment with a professor without telling me!) I started my search for a new lab.

When I found a position in a lab studying Cancer Biology with Yeast Genetics , I thought everything would be fine right? Wrong. I still struggled to get out of bed everyday. I had to start from scratch and was not motivated by the idea of finishing. I know that sounds weird but when you are at the bottom of a well and the opening looks like a pinhole, it's easy to only see the darkness that surrounds you.

I would take another year before I decided, "It's time to go". That meant that what I was working on had to change because it wasn't going anywhere. And so I re-examined all of our papers, came up with an idea, pitched it to my boss and got to work. Through much trial and error, I ended up with two projects that were paper-worthy, wrote and defended my thesis, and graduated!!! What a wonderful feeling! After my defense, when the same adviser who told me that I could leave said, "Congratulations Doctor!" , I knew that I was finally done. I felt so free and euphoric. It was the same feeling of euphoria that I had the day after Barak Obama won the election. It was great!

So here I am, in September of 2009. I have to find a job! I already made peace with not becoming a professor (it took a while to shake free of the brainwashing that started while in college). But what next? Government! I applied for government jobs, I started networking like crazy. I wrote essay upon essay and . . .nothing. At the same time, I happened to see that the consulting firm that I interviewed with a year before was hiring again and I knew one of the people who worked there. After a referral and three interviews I was in! I had a job in a really bad economy.

I was definitely grateful. This was literally my first professional job outside of school. I had to make some major adjustments. Who would have thought that waking up early everyday would be so hard? After 14 years of getting up whenever I wanted, it was a challenge. I adapted, I worked to conform to this corporate jungle. I lost sleep, I worked like crazy. I let people talk to me like a child, etc. . . thinking back, I think that I let people get to me too much. I didn't know how to play the game. And when I had to go to the ER to investigate stress-related chest pains, I knew that this life was not sustainable.

And so here I am, working to figure it out so that I get it right this time. I know that that sounds harsh but I really want to get it right. I want a career that doesn't feel like one. I am glad that I got my Ph D, and worked in the corporate world. I have a solid base of knowledge in the sciences and professional skills. Now I'm off to figure out how to use what I've learned to figure out what to do next.

I'm looking at the non-profit sector. Throughout my college and graduate careers, I've given back as a mentor, teacher, volunteer, and community leader. These roles are part of who I am. I think that I've been hesitant to embrace them because I don't want to be broke all the time. I know how that feels and I don't want to go back there. But, I think that I'm going to have to take some kind of pay cut to do what I love. So let's hope that it's temporary.

The positions that I'm looking at right now fall into different areas:

Non-profit with maybe some science and some Marketing
Technology Transfer
Non-Profit Consulting Analyst

Non-profit with or without science
Development Officer / Fundraiser
Alumni Relations Associate
Program Manager

Mostly Science
Clinical Genetics Fellow
Postdoc-Ugh! Maybe I need to be a bit more positive here and think about what type of Postdoc that I want to be

Corporatish (When I don't have the luxury of being picky)
Medical Affairs
Marketing

I'm also building my network and talking to people about career options that I may not know of. Any suggestions?

Well, time to get started with my search. Today, I'm working on updating my resume and writing a cover letter for a few positions that I found this weekend. Wish me luck!

Chi(: