The Pharma Transition

Phew.  Busy couple of weeks.  

Good news: 3 month trial period over.  I now have a permanent contract. Obviously, I celebrated with some of the local wines; fabulous… both the wine and the feeling that comes with finally having a permanent contract. Or maybe that was the wine at work too!

More good news: I kind of guessed that I’d be given the permanent contract when I was named project leader a couple of weeks before the end of the trial period.

Bad news: the project post means I REALLY need to brush up on practically everything other than neurophysiology (my thing) in order to participate fully in the project meetings.

As if this wasn’t enough, I could do with an intensive course on industry jargon. Try taking notes in a meeting when half the people are talking in acronyms, and because of the fact that for most English is their second language often they mean “I” when they say “E” or “J” when they say “G”. Does that make any sense? Well, neither did my notes until 3 e-mails, 1 phone call and 20 minutes of Google searching got the right letters in the right order. The Google search coughed up this site.  It didn’t actually help me with my notes but it did make me laugh:

TLA – Three Letter Acronym.  An acronym for acronyms!

My thoughts on all the jargon malarkey? TITS – This Is Too Silly.

I was actually quite happy in my academic post-doc.  I had a reasonably stable position (probably as stable as it gets for an academic post-doc in Spain), I thoroughly enjoyed my work in the lab, and I had a healthy publication record.  So, why leave? 

Somewhere along the way I worked out that just because I was quite happy in academia didn’t mean that I couldn’t be even happier elsewhere.  I realised that the type of academic research I was doing and that I really enjoy, setting up animal models of disease, I could just as happily do in industry.  I came to the conclusion that although I’d probably publish less often, as long as I applied for the right kind of jobs in industry I’d still be doing the research I love but with a much more attractive benefits package and without spending time searching and applying for funding.  I was also convinced that it didn’t have to be a one-way ticket.

Despite the fact that I’ve just made it sound like a very straightforward decision, I mulled it over for months before sending out CVs.  Even when I started the interview process, I was still making mental lists of pros and cons of the transition to industry.  I am slightly embarrassed to admit that one of the points on my cons list was what some of my academic colleagues might think of me.  Almost everybody wants to feel “part of the gang” and walking out of the ivory tower of academia can feel like voluntarily ejecting yourself from a very cool gang.  I did get a couple of “money isn’t everything, have you really thought about this?” comments.  For the most part however, I received encouragement and then hearty congratulations when I finally accepted a position.  So I left on good terms with the gang, looking forward to new challenges in my new job in a new country.  But with the door to the tower still open behind me… just in case.

1. Unique content.
2. Granular posts.
3. Posts should take no longer than 90 seconds to read.

   According to a number of “how to” sites, these are the secrets to a readable blog.  Well, I’m pretty sure that this one won’t be unique, I don’t know what a granular post is (I think it was explained further down the article but I guess I’d reached my 90 seconds before then), and I can make no promises on point number three. What can I promise then?  Probably a few laughs (at my expense), hopefully some information useful to those stumbling across this blog, and most likely another form of procrastination… for me and you.  Here starts the story of a journey from academia to industry, a no-holds-barred account of my triumphs and disasters along the way.