C&EN Washington

In August, C&EN ran an item on its letters page seeking people willing to be interviewed about their experiences on their first jobs in the chemical sciences. In a week, e-mails started arriving, and this article reflects much of what the respondents said in interviews. First jobbers who shared their experiences with C&EN range in age from 22 to 68. Almost without exception, the interviewees said they wanted to help others because they had found similar articles helpful when they were in school. What follows is a virtual roundtable discussion.

The days of taking a job right out of college and staying with the same company in the same line of work are all but gone, says Frank E. Walworth, manager of professional services at the American Chemical Society. "During an individual's working life, a recent graduate can expect to hold six to 10 jobs, usually for three to five different companies.

"But the first job is very important because, in many respects, it sets the tone for other positions in your career. And it is the make-or-break experience for some candidates. It makes employees ask the question of whether they want to do what they're doing for the rest of their life or leads them to find out what else they need to do to enhance their options."

And first jobs are very different from school. First jobbers, especially at the bachelor's degree level, tell C&EN that the specific content of their undergraduate curricula has not been called upon as much as have the skills developed just by going to college and majoring in the chemical sciences.

"I think my education prepared me to design a test and write a lab report, interpret the results, and do a statistical analysis," says Sheila Ali, 25, a B.S. biochemist who has been working in product development and new products at Clorox Services Co., Pleasanton, Calif. Ali does analysis, testing, and troubleshooting as well as customer support for a number of consumer products. "In my job, I use those kinds of skills, rather than the skills I learned in organic chemistry class."

"I did learn a great deal of chemistry in college, but knowing what an eigenfunction is did not win me a job," says Brian J. Fairman, 22, a recent graduate with a B.S. in chemistry and an economics minor. "I have many more marketable skills now than I did four years ago. However, college was more important in building my self-confidence and my drive for fulfillment. The maturity that came with college and an awareness of the world around me was the best gift I received from college." Fairman works for Pittsburgh zinc broker MetalChem, handling logistical issues and implementing software for computer systems while "learning the subtle aspects of trading zinc."

At the Ph.D. level, there is a substantial difference in work done as a student and that done afterward. C&EN first spoke to Ph.D. biochemist Jeffery R. Schultz, 29, on his first day as an assistant professor at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Wash. "Well, you realize that you're in charge of the class," Schultz says. "And this really threw me for a loop the first time I taught a class. You want to be everybody's friend--this was the way you were as a teaching assistant and you don't want to get anybody upset. And now I'm actually in charge of the grades, which is a startling responsibility."

Salvador G. Alvarez, 34, a new Ph.D. hire at Novartis Pharma, the Japanese subsidiary of Novartis, Basel, Switzerland, works as a synthetic organic-medicinal chemist involved in the multistep synthesis of small-molecule drugs. "At the university, we could spend more time on basic research," he relates. "We were focused on completing several experiments with the goal of publishing, and we generally worked individually.

"At Novartis, we work in an interdisciplinary team environment," he continues. "Because of the fierce global competitive nature of our industry, we have less time to spend on basic research. We have to use our time efficiently because our bottom line is to prepare compounds with biological activity by using the easiest procedures available in the shortest time possible. Our main objective is to find drug candidates quickly without compromising quality, obtain patent protection, and then publish."

In an industrial setting, a major shift in thinking does need to take place, and, according to Walworth, one way to describe it is making a values shift between "perfect but late to good enough on time." He says the shift occurs when a product must be delivered to the market within, say, 18 months and "you'd love to have the luxury of running out one or two more data points, but for the sake of the project, you are not able to do it." He says that very often, that shift from the academic to the industrial world takes some first timers by surprise.

"Only rarely do chemical scientists lose their jobs because they are technically incompetent," says Walworth. "But plenty of chemists run into difficulty on their first job because they could not get reports done on time; they had to learn how to communicate and interface with scientists from other disciplines and be able to talk with them."

Joel I. Shulman, manager of external relations at Procter & Gamble, agrees. "People at the Ph.D. level, for example, can write a technical article but they can't necessarily make a persuasive argument about why what they've done is important or put it into context," he says. "And that is a problem, because P&G operates best when people at the lower levels propose what should be done and push those ideas up the line, as opposed to the other way around. Part of the communication needs to be directed toward influencing other people. That's the kind of thing that is not taught at universities."

Job rotations can help first jobbers with communications among coworkers and customers. Chemical engineer Leandra S. Morris, 25, is working through the engineering training program (ETP) at Ceramaseal, New Lebanon, N.Y. She describes ETP as a 16-month training program, with rotations in technical sales and marketing, manufacturing and process engineering, materials and purchasing/quality control, and design engineering.

"It's difficult to work with people from different departments, because they don't necessarily know what's going on in your department and may not have a technical background," says Morris. "Even if I end up with my career in engineering, having worked in sales will help when I have a salesman come to me with a problem. I'll have a little bit more empathy because I was there at one point. It just makes your view of the whole business and the whole company a lot wider when you've worked in a lot of different departments."

Having something to talk about and saying it persuasively are vitally important to securing any job, but particularly a first job. "My team leader loves to say that I interviewed so well," says Melissa Fletcher, 28, who works as a chemist on the analytical services and physical testing team at Reichhold Chemicals, Research Triangle Park, N.C. "He also will tell me over and over how critical my summer jobs were--not just for my résumé, but to give me something to talk about so that he could see that I had experienced a similar environment and that I could articulate what I did."

Fletcher recalls that there was a person she was interviewing with, and "she hadn't had the industrial experience, and in the interview they just talked about the summer trip she had taken--Ouch!"

And there are also interpersonal communications issues that need to be worked out, Morris says. "Sometimes you run into problems because people don't know how to approach you about certain things. Unfortunately, a lot of people in this country think that people of color are inadequate when it comes to technical jobs and education. Sometimes you find yourself in a little 'I'm smarter than you' match," she says.

And some students have found out that going into an industrial career before earning a Ph.D. degree has put them at odds with the visions of their professors. But grad school isn't in the cards for an increasing number of chemical scientists. According to the most recent ACS data, fewer chemical sciences majors are going to graduate school. But pursuit of a Ph.D. degree is still considered by many professors to be the prerequisite for a successful career. It's understandable--they all have Ph.D.s. and they have successful careers. But this narrow vision can be a frustration for some students who want to follow other paths, say new jobbers who talked with C&EN.

"I was pushed toward pursuing an advanced degree by my professors," Fletcher says. "They had a pretty strong aim of getting people to go to medical school or to get a Ph.D. in chemistry so they could teach. Anything less than a doctorate was considered selling yourself short, and you would not be very happy with your life."

She says it was "very tough to tell them I wanted to work in industry. I think they were disappointed that I went into industry, and I'm kind of disappointed in them. Maybe they just don't understand the opportunities that are available in industry, so they really couldn't give it a fair shake."

Ali had similar experiences. "I got a lot of discouragement from college professors who said you won't be able to get a good job without a Ph.D. degree." She says she's thought about it and decided not to pursue a Ph.D., but will steer toward the management track at Clorox. "I don't think a Ph.D. would help at this point," she muses. "If anything, it would be an MBA."

"My professors were surprised by my decision to become a professor at a primarily undergraduate institution whose focus is on teaching," Pacific Lutheran University's Schultz says. "At that time, the department as a whole was not fully supportive of my decision because, the way they saw it, you were not there to spend your time learning how to teach, you were there to learn how to do research. I tried not to make it common knowledge that I was teaching at the community college because I didn't want to have any flack for pursuing an alternative career path."

And that predegree experience helped many of the first timers to refine their career focus and to do it early enough in their undergraduate careers that they could make midcourse corrections if necessary.

Sometimes colleges help. For example, Fletcher's alma mater, Salem College, Winston-Salem, N.C., set aside every January as a time that students could take a single course or pursue an internship. She took advantage of that January program to do an internship in a biochemistry lab doing cancer research. "I didn't like it at all, it wasn't my bag," she recalls. "Things were too microscopic. I couldn't see a problem, I couldn't touch a problem," she says. "My next internship was with Glaxo, now Glaxo-Wellcome's pharmaceutical department in the materials science area. I felt more comfortable there. But with my summer jobs, I was able to determine that I really like being in an analytical troubleshooting job."

"I really enjoy what I'm doing. Why would I want to do something else?" asks Cliff Meints, 68, professor of chemistry at Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa. "It's a mighty long tenure--41 years--but it is a first job," he says. Meints had summer industrial jobs while he was a Ph.D. student that helped point him in the direction of teaching. "I spent three successive summers in graduate school in a summer program at Dow Chemical Co. One summer I worked in agricultural chemicals, and it was a complete disaster," he laughs. "It was my job to make dinitrated heterocycles that could be screened for certain kinds of activities. I made black char all summer. Everything I tried turned to black char.

"I saw this as research, and frankly, I think that this has affected my attitude toward research. I'm much more classroom oriented. It didn't discourage me from going into chemistry, but it did affect maybe my picture of what aspect I wanted to get into," he says.

In college, Morris worked for a chemistry professor who was doing work for General Electric. After her sophomore year, she went to work for eight-and-a-half months at Merck & Co. as a chemical engineering intern. "My internship at Merck gave me my first taste of what a chemical engineer really does, and that's when I decided to become one," she says. The next summer, she was an intern at Brookhaven National Laboratory's National Synchrotron Light Source, Upton, N.Y., working with physicists. Morris says the variety of experience gives "you an idea of what you have to look forward to when you get out. And it gives you a good idea how to work with people."

Sometimes, however, new employees need some work in communications. This may consist of classes in "interpersonal effectiveness" or simply some education in the school of hard knocks. "Sometimes I've met people who have come straight from college and haven't worked and they have a lot of bumps and bruises along the way because they don't know how to conduct themselves in a business fashion, and they don't know a lot about corporate culture. It definitely helps to have had work experience," Morris says.

Procter & Gamble's Shulman agrees that people who have had work experience are more attractive hires. About one-third of the engineers who are hired by P&G at the bachelor's level on a full-time basis have done summer internships at the company. "It works," he says, because "it helps both sides: It gives people at P&G a very good idea of what somebody can do, and it gives the person a good look at the inside of the company."

Walworth adds: "Even if it's a summer internship, however brief, work experience exposes students to the market and lets them begin the networking process. They have established the contact, they know what it's like to be employed, and they can fall back on that later on."

Ali agrees that an internship is "like a three-month interview where they see you on a daily basis. If you've interned with a company, you can bypass a lot of the human resources activities. In a stack of résumés, it's hard to get noticed. But I could call the people in my department directly and also my former supervisor and ask if there were any openings. And since they already knew me, it was a much easier interview process. It was a condensed version of what I've seen new hires go through here at Clorox."

Pacific Lutheran's Schultz says: "I have always been interested in teaching at the undergraduate level. So I made a significant effort during graduate school to get as much experience as I could by being a teaching assistant. And then, during my second to last year in graduate school, I taught for a year at a community college." He explains, "You must have teaching as part of your package to present to the schools--especially if you're applying to strictly undergraduate, liberal arts colleges. They want to see that you've done teaching and research. It's not just one or the other--they really want both."

Some experience can be gained by traveling abroad. Working in another country, learning about another culture, and learning another language are important ways to foster good working connections to the world, coworkers, and customers. International study and travel experiences have led some to their jobs, and others to learn more about themselves.

MetalChem's Fairman studied chemistry at the University of Newcastle, in Australia, for a semester while an undergraduate. "Not only do you learn about another culture, but you are able to see your own culture from a new perspective--and this is priceless," he says. "Earth became my marketplace, because I was no longer geographically bound in my search for a rewarding career."

Jason Tylenda, 23, is an R&D technician at Henkel Surface Technologies in Madison Heights, Mich. He says his international travel experiences, while not directly related to his chemistry degree, have helped him to refine his career goal, which is to land a job in an international business environment. "I highly recommend at least one semester abroad to college students," he says. "I spent two semesters and one summer in three different countries and have no regrets. Of course, there is always the possibility of going abroad as a tourist or as an expatriate, but the experiences one can have as a student across an ocean are hard to repeat later in life."

Alvarez says: "For my postdoc, I wanted to go to Japan because I think more Americans should learn about one of our major trading partners. And international collaborations are a nice way to bridge friendships. So, I wrote a proposal to the National Science Foundation and the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science to study new reactions for the synthesis of vitamin D-3 analogs. I was awarded a two-year contract to study my proposal at Waseda University in Tokyo. To me, this international postdoc was a good way to polish and refine my research skills in multistep synthesis with the added bonus of learning about another culture. With this background, I felt more prepared for a position in the international pharmaceutical industry."

The actual search for a first job is an eye-opener for many new graduates. It isn't easy and job offers come in all sorts of ways, from the very well planned job-finding strategy to a serendipitous meeting. Usually the networking that a candidate has done as a student pays off in some way, although not always. And making use of the services offered by the American Chemical Society can help, too.

"I gave a talk at the ACS Western Regional Meeting in Irvine, Calif., a little more than a year ago," says Steven R. Ragsdale, 30, a Ph.D. research electrochemist at Broadley-James Corp., a manufacturer of pH and oxygen sensors for scientific and industrial applications in Irvine. "While at that meeting, I decided to take part in the regional employment clearinghouse." And that's where he met up with his employer. "It was a small clearinghouse, but, I thought, you never know. There were only two jobs that I had interest in, and there was an on-site interview for one. The interview went well, and they called me back for a second interview, and then after the third interview I got an offer."

Ragsdale is glad that he was able to access opportunities at a smaller regional employment clearinghouse. "In a larger clearinghouse," he says, "we wouldn't have hooked up because if there were thousands of employers and jobs, we wouldn't have meshed together because I think the recruiter checked off materials science and general chemistry as his areas of interest. And I had checked off electrochemistry, physical chemistry, and analytical chemistry. But when I read the job description, I knew it was a job I could do because the bioprobes are electrochemical devices."

Tylenda, on the other hand, came back from a semester abroad and started sending out résumés to companies and to temporary agencies. "And one temp agency placed me at Henkel," he says. "They gave me a time frame of a month to see how things would work out, and it worked out and two months later I was hired full time." He says quite a few technicians at Henkel have been hired this way.

"Luckily for me, there was no formal interview for my job," says Fairman. "However, there was an informal interview that lasted approximately five years. I began working for the president of the company at the end of my junior year of high school as his golf caddie. He took me under his wing, helped me grow, offered me an internship when I returned from Australia, and then hired me full time beginning after Labor Day of this year."

"My last internship was at Pharmacia & Upjohn in the environmental area," says Karen DeWyse, 23, a bachelor's-level environmental specialist at Pharmacia & Upjohn in Portage, Mich. It is DeWyse's job to interpret environmental regulations and to model volatile organic compounds for air emissions reports. "I liked what I was doing in my internship," she recalls, "but when I graduated in December 1997, I was looking for jobs in organic chemistry or analytical chemistry. Then my manager asked me if I'd like to stay on doing what I was doing. And I said 'sure.' So, I guess the job kind of found me."

But her job isn't anything like the job she had imagined doing as a student. "All through school, I took research jobs, so I was always in the lab," she says. "And in college, I took umpteen million hours' worth of chemistry labs. So, I always thought I'd be a bench chemist running routine experiments or researching something. Now, I do computer model simulations for facility emissions. There is no bench work at all, but there is a lot of reading and a lot of paperwork. So it's really different." And she says it's working out very well.

Tylenda had no desire to do lab work, and his job involves a lot of lab work. While it's not what he expected, he's liking it. "I was really put off with the idea of ever working in a lab, but it's not as bad as I expected it to be," he says. "I expected to be sitting in a lab doing titrations all day--doing the same thing. However, this is a lot more varied than I expected, so I'm not doing just one thing all day long. I've also had the chance to get out and go into the field and see where the technology that I'm working on applies to the real world."

Alvarez started reading C&EN in his second quarter of organic chemistry. "I have been reading and learning about the competitive global nature of the pharmaceutical industry and that time is money. Also, I knew about the interdisciplinary nature of drug discovery groups at pharmaceutical companies," he says. "So I guess this is what I expected."

Mentors also can help ease the transitions from expectations to reality on the job. "My father is an industrial chemist," says Fletcher. "And he was a great mentor in my summer jobs. He explained things to me and helped me find the bigger picture in some of the menial tasks that a summer worker is asked to do. When I wanted to pursue independent study in college to get more practical experience with infrared, he helped me to design a project. He's there if I have a career question. Just today, we were talking about different possible career paths that I could take from here, given the experience I've gotten and the strengths he sees in me. I am sure that we will continue that discussion. He has made science a lot of fun."

In addition, Fletcher has had a mentor at work. A scientist at Reichhold with a year to go before retiring showed her the ropes. "He would tell me, 'This is going on, but stay out of it,' or 'Don't worry about it--it will blow over'--that sort of stuff. Sometimes it can get kind of scary because things are going on really fast and you just don't know what's going on."

Multiple mentors have been important to Fairman as well. "In college, I had three mentors--one for my spiritual life, one for my academic life, and one for my career guidance. And then there was my 'all-purpose' mentor, my mother. I highly recommend this approach. You can learn so much from those who have been down the alley you're taking. Just be careful to screen whose information you are putting into action," he cautions.

DeWyse says her best mentor has been her manager. "She always had the big picture in mind and included me in everything she did. Even if it didn't pertain to my emissions modeling, she'd always say, 'Sit in on this meeting with me and listen.' And I would ask a few questions here and there and I learned more about each area.

"I think that's how I got this job, because I was more well rounded and I was actually cross-trained in a few areas. So the more I sat in with her and the more she shared with me and the more of the big picture I got, the more I could put everything together. I'm still working with her. I think that's why I stayed on," says DeWyse.

More and more, companies are making mentoring of new hires an integral part of more seasoned employees' careers. And supervisors and managers are frequently reviewed on how well they perform this function. "P&G's supervisors have ultimate responsibility for the 'onboarding' of a new employee and then another person is assigned as a peer to show them the ropes--kind of a designated buddy," says Shulman.

"Our organization is very flat," observes Fletcher. "It is team based so it's difficult to see a path forward. In my father's generation, it used to be that you were a bench chemist, and then a staff chemist, then a group leader, and you went on. You could see a very clear road of ascension. That is difficult for me to see right now, so I need to go and have some mentoring sessions," she says.

And to some, there's the shock of just going to work every day. "It's tough after you've been responsible for yourself for so long to start doing what other people tell you," Fairman says. "Don't get me wrong, I work with fabulous people, but it's still an adjustment. I am not really fond of getting up at 7 o'clock every morning either. I used to purposely schedule my classes around my sleeping time. Now it's up to work everyday at the same time. Maybe I should start drinking coffee. It is nice to earn a paycheck, too, but for some reason, I seemed to have more money when I was unemployed!" All of these "adult" expenses are a real hassle, he says.

Most of us, no matter how many years we are away from starting our first jobs, not only remember our own personal version of Fairman's revelation, but actually still have a twinge every now and then. But those first jobs lead to lifetime careers that take as many different satisfying career paths as there are chemical scientists to pursue them.

"People will often tell me, 'You were so lucky to get this job,' " Fletcher says. "And I think that I was. And then my parents remind me 'Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.' "

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