Hm. What next? Part V

Ok, so hypothetically, let's say I take that post-doc in Europe. Then what? I've told you why I don't want to be a professor, what I want in a job, and some other types of jobs that are out there. So now I'm finally to the point of spilling the beans as to what I think would be a great career choice for me.

I think it'd be really neat to run a mass spec facility. Many large universities have such a facility, and some large pharmaceutical or manufacturing companies do as well. We have a fantastic mass spec facility in our department, and while the majority of existing facilities don't operate the same way that ours do, a lot of the aspects that I like about our director's job would still exist. Our facility has a PhD-level director, a PhD-level staff scientist, 2 grad student workers (who work in the facility rather than TA), and an engineer to help keep instruments up and running. There is an enormous variety of instrumentation - all the way from "low-end," fairly simple instrumentation (costing say around $75k) to very sophisticated "high-end" instrumentation (worth over $1 million). They run a huge variety of samples (from small molecules of all sorts to large things like synthetic and biological polymers) from other researchers in the department, in other labs on campus, and even off-campus users from other universities.

I really like the idea of still being able to be very hands-on - using instruments, deciding how to run samples, trouble shooting instrument or sample complications. The vast majority of facility samples are routine - a synthetic chemist wanting to confirm that they made the molecule they think they did, for example. However a facility at a research institution can get plenty of research-oriented samples and questions where an experienced mass spectrometrist would be a huge advantage. I could still be involved in research, and frankly be involved in a much wider variety of research problems than I can be as a graduate student. The idea of working on a wide variety of projects is really appealing, with the huge, huge benefit of being able to go home at the end of the day.

I'm sure there would still be some stress, some writing to do (mostly for grants to acquire new instrumentation), and deadlines to meet. But at the end of the day, it's a facility with set hours, and none of the research projects are mine, so I could go home at the end of the day. I'm really looking forward to the day when I can shake this perpetual feeling of grad-student-guilt and enjoy my evenings and spent time with family and friends.

When I TA'd as an undergrad I really enjoyed it, and I wouldn't mind teaching full-time in some venue in the future, but frankly I'd like to make more money for the nearer future. :) One perk of a facility job, especially one in an academic setting, is that I could still have the opportunity to teach. There would be one-on-one situations - teaching graduate students or researchers about the instrumentation and experiments that answer their questions - guest-lecturing in courses, and teaching short-courses specifically on mass spec.

Facilities like the one here aren't super common. There are a lot of facilities that have mostly low-end instrumentation that are for "walk-up" use - i.e. researchers run their own samples. The only time grad students use facility instrumentation themselves is when they have a long-term project requiring heavy usage. In this case they get trained by the facility director before being allowed to run their own samples. Even at an institution where the facility is limited to lower-end user-oriented instrumentation, there will probably be potential for me to expand and grow a facility to include research-oriented mass spectrometry. Mass spec can be used to address such a wide variety of research questions for all sorts of samples. With effort to educate other scientists as to the benefits and power of mass spec, and lots of grant writing to obtain funding for new instrumentation a facility can be "built" or expanded. It could be fun to build a facility from the ground up to benefit a research community.

Even though I don't want to be a professor or run a research program, I do like the laid-back atmosphere of academia. I could be ok with being able to wear jeans to work 95% of the time. :) Although dressing up for a "real grown-up" job would be fun too. For a little while at least...

Ok, so while I don't have my heart set 100% on it, all that pretty much sums up why I think running a facility could be a great job, particularly for me.