The Pharma Transition

I still have a couple of manuscripts to tie up with the academic lab so I’m flitting between “pharma mode” and “academia mode”.  All the while it feels like I’m never really 100% focused on one or the other.  It’s like I’m stuck at customs instead of crossing borders and this time it has nothing to do with my license plate.

A major distraction on the manuscripts front is that one of them has recently been bounced back by the journal to which it was submitted - one of the big ones, beginning with “N” and ending with “ature“.  To be knocked back isn’t actually such a big deal… I’m sure we’re in good company! But to be knocked back when two out of three referees deemed the work worthy of publication hurts.  To be knocked back when the third referee merely stated something along the lines that the manuscript ”left unanswered questions raised in previous publications from the group” without actually bothering to state what these questions happened to be, is excruciating.  For appeals to the editor to result in a reply that based on “confidential” comments from referee number 3 the decision still stands to reject the work (despite the two positive referees), is preposterous.  How on earth can authors defend themselves against “confidential” comments?

On one hand, this saga has made me feel glad to be out of academia… or at least stuck at customs with a view over the border.  On the other hand, it makes me wonder whether I’ll miss these fights to get the results of a year and half of hard work published and the feeling of elation that comes with the acceptance letter, be it from a journal with an impact factor of thirty or of three.

Crossing the border from academia to industry is one thing.  Crossing international borders on a daily basis to do so is quite another.  I live in France and work mainly in France but also have several meetings a week in Switzerland. Even when I’m working on the French site I cut through Switzerland to get from where I live to where I work.  So, on any working day I pass through customs at least 4 times…. with a Spanish license plate.  I have discovered that this automatically makes me a suspect ETA terrorist or a drug dealer.  Today, it seems that the guard who stopped me remembered me from a previous occasion.

Guard: “So, still the same car eh?”

Me: “Yes, I’m saving up for an Aston Martin – until then I’m sticking with the Hyundai” (What did he expect me to say? Besides, it’s the license plate that’s the problem and not the car.)

Guard: “Please park in that bay over there and prepare your passport and vehicle documents for inspection”

Me: “They’re the same ones I showed you last time!”

The guard then said something that sounded quite ominous but my French wasn’t quite up to getting the full gist of it. 

Me: “If I say sorry can I get on to work?… I have an eight O’clock meeting”

Guard: “No”

Time I arrived at work: 08:30

I really must get around to changing my license plate.

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.