Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Phone+business

I never use my phone for work.  The only thing I have in it is Busy/Available synced to my work Outlook so I don't mess up my scheduling for tests/dinners/etc.  Also, since I travel for a lot of studies and corporate portfolio meetings I need to make sure I'm not in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The email on my phone is personal.  No one, but a select few from work, have my cell.  Not even the president of my company (my boss). I don't even do web searches on it for work.  Here's my open tabs:

Cracked
NPR News
AV Club
Food Network
Amazon for watches
Wikipedia for Frozen (Film)
The homepage for my new department<-this is kind of work related, I know....

Nothing related to my current work.  Something about work encroaching on my real life bums me out.  My entire group is like this.  There should be work-life balance; not work-life integration.  We all realize that if you don't have time to switch off then you'll burn out.  Some people can handle it, we just would rather be hiking or hanging out with friends.

But my soon-to-be-successor asked me today how to get his phone on the 'network'.  Then he was shocked and started passing judgement on us when we said we didn't know.  First, he said we were luddites!  Then he said it made us seem undedicated!  We work on the cutting edge of technology.  We have created complicated implants that can manipulate the body into doing what we want.  We've written software that Google would drool over. But because we don't want to constantly be connected to the office we're undedicated and dumb?  Our group of a few has impacted more lives than the thousands of other groups in our company combined even though we switch off at the end of the day.

I understand some people like to be connected, but don't insult us when we want to have separate lives from work.  There's a conference next week where he'll be showcasing some of our technology with me to some MDs.  I guarantee he can't answer the first question they ask him.  And when leadership hears this I'm certain he'll be moving groups.  Probably through a promotion...

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Paper review

To stay in the academic loop, I'm a reviewer for two major journals in my field.  Been doing this since as soon as I graduated a few years back.  The past year I've reviewed about a dozen papers.

When I was in grad school, at first I thought everything was brand spanking new and going to change the world. That quickly changed as I realized that the research was cool and beneficial but 99.9% of it won't have any direct clinical impact. For the stuff that isn't basic science it's still so far cutting edge that the impact is unrealized. In industry, my work has changed the medical device world with tons of direct impact. Well, maybe not the world, but 10's of thousand's of peoples' lives. But it's not really brand spanking new besides a few things.  But I have to keep these things on the D.L. to keep other companies from utilizing it.  A lot of the ideas in the papers I've read have been thought of before. I've only read one article that I was amazed by, but it was written so poorly it nearly got completely rejected. I reviewed this paper this week and it reminded me about how awesome writing is. 

It's a great way to organize your thoughts. Throw some pictures and diagrams in a great document and you've just won yourself a multimillion dollar grant. Or look back at your old writing and discover how much better you've become. Or discover how you've changed as a person and scientist. But you don't necessarily need good writing for nonprofessional writing (ahem...this blog).

I love technical writing because it's the culmination of a lot of hard work. Through the planning, organizing, reporting, and discussing results, it's a lot of fun to pull everything together and let the world know what's going on. In order to do this, the language of most prevalence is English. While my English isn't the best I'm pretty decent at disseminating my work. This paper I'm reviewing is reminding me that if you want to do science you should either learn great English writing or work and publish in an area where you don't need good English. With this paper I'm reading it's just such a shame that the PI approved submitting this paper without reworking the writing and figures. I'm going to try and push this into major revs (so it's not killed) because it's great work. It's just very tough since the writing and figs are sub-par. As a big fan of writing, it just kills me to see work like this that's been approved by a PI. If this person tried to submit this crap to the FDA he would be heavily punished for it. The PI is doing the grad student that wrote this a disservice by not pushing the student to learn better writing skills. Some people will probably say, "students won't listen, are incapable, don't have time, etc".  To that, I was a mediocre writer when I entered grad school. My former advisor wouldn't let me submit anything for publication until he says it was acceptable. This improved my writing dramatically.  At first it took forever (months of constant rewrites) to submit pubs.  Holding off publication (and therefore graduation) is one of the few things PIs can use to control the students. And it's for good reason: learning to disseminate information is part of the scientific process, so this needs to be learned. 

Again, this is probably just my naïveté. But my advisor was just as busy as the rest and had time to teach me writing. I teach entry level scientists and engineers better writing. Why can't the corresponding author on this paper teach good writing? Or at least not let this garbage get submitted. 

Thursday, May 15, 2014

#InnovationDeficit



I've always wanted to help become a bridge between industry and academia. I think this is part of why departments took kindly to me while looking for an academic post. I think so, but I still don't know how the faculty hiring process works. This involves a few different approaches (I'm omitting some things but these are the biggest):

1. Funding acacdemic labs to do basic science I don't have time for

2. Hiring interns from schools

3. Giving talks at academic conferences and universities

4. Convincing my company to sponsor academic conferences and different university events and students

5. Working directly with local schools (K-12 and universities) and my company to show the youths that STEMs are fun, lucrative, necessary, and useful.

The last one involves me traveling to schools, taking part in tours, outreach with FIRST, SWE, ASME, MAES, SASE, and BMES (e.g., random acronyms) events, etc.  I try my hardest to get people into STEMs.  We need more of us of any race, religion, and creed.  The problem with this is we can convince more people to want to join, but without the funds to pay for college and have jobs for them, my recruiting efforts are useless.

While I wasn't born in the USA, I bleed the stars and stripes.  I love this country, which is part of why I recruit so heavily for STEMs.  To prevent our country from falling behind we have to have innovation.  And we need people with advanced knowledge to spur this on.  And to have innovation, we must have the funds to provide the best possible education, paying for tuition, fees, and stipends; especially for those who can't pay on their own.  We need funds to pay for more (and accountable) professors (and K-12 teachers) for the influx of students.  We need the funds to create the technologies that turn into the next generation of businesses to fund many a STEMer to come.  In industry, I fund a lot of academic research, but it's still a drop in the bucket compared to what the NIH/NSF/DoD give out.  But to handle the influx of STEMers we need to keep innovation going on the homefront. We need more investment.  This is something I've always preached.

This bring me to this website: http://www.innovationdeficit.org

When I saw this today, I saw statistics that I've always seen, but this is a very nice way to present them.  There has been all kinds of talk about funding being so bleak right now from federal agencies.  I have heard it in regard mainly to grant-funding.  But there's so much more to the lack of funding occurring in the academic environment. There needs to be more professors to handl the influx of students (and grants for them), we need the best labs and classrooms for them. And events to get them pumped about the fields.  As a country we need to start thinking about this and understanding our priorities.  Or companies need to start investing in our future since these students will be the eventual STEMers these companies need.  There needs to be an interaction between industry and the government.  Discussions about how they can work together: the government spending in a way to protect our intellectual future, with industry willing to shoulder some of the burden.

#InnovationDeficit

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Sponsoring the children

I donate to a scholarship where I can sponsor the students I specifically pick (all applications are from the same university). It costs me around $10k/student/year (I sponsor two) and mainly this provides a partial stipend, but the schools appreciate the private money so much the university fills in the rest if the stipend and covers tuition/fees/etc. I had this when I was in grad school so it's only right that I give back.  If the student has a fellowship already then this money goes on top of that.  Pretty awesome.  I pick my students based on what kind of research they do and then their personal/professional essays.  I've met some great people this way.  There's a big ceremony where the students get their awards and get to meet their sponsors.  It's a lot of fun to take part in as a student, and just as fun as a sponsor.

I really enjoy this because I get to see some of the state-of-the-art, talk with interesting people that really care about research, and get a couple nice dinners.  At the most recent dinner I started to realize that I may not be able to take part as much for a couple reasons next year.  First, I'll have less disposable income.  Second, I'm concerned about the conflict-of-interest.  Is funding a different PI's student at a competing university ethical?  I guess I could reach out to my new school's local chapter of this scholarship and fund a student, but what if I like one of my own student's research the most.  If I don't select the one I want to fund I fear it's wrong, and if I do select my own, then I'm using personal money to fund one of my "employees".  But giving to another university when my new place could use the money presents me with a dilemma.

Regardless, I will take part, if nothing else but volunteering with the organization.  I really enjoyed my experience with this scholarship, and I don't want to give up sponsoring students.  Should I?

Friday, May 9, 2014

Requesting vacation time

When I took my industry job I ended up with 2.5 weeks of vacation time in my first year. Coming from grad school this was actually kind of low so I ended up using every second. After the first year I was promoted to a pay grade where we're required to have 4 allocated weeks regardless of time with the company (typically promotions here give 2 days/year of service) with 0.5 weeks added per year. I use about 3 weeks when you factor in the holidays, occasional Fridays off, miscellaneous time for when family or friends are in town, half days, etc.  The amount of time off doesn't bother me since my schedule prevents me from taking more than that, my problem with vacation time is that I have to request it, get approved, and make sure that I'm not taking too much time off in the eyes of the higher-ups.  I get even more judgment passed on me because I have a bustling out-of-work life with plenty of friends and hobbies. The higher-ups work all the time. So when I'm taking long weekends and extra vacation time beyond the 1 week the higher-ups allocate to themselves I get looks of disappointment. I felt guilty at first but now I don't. While I love my work, I love my personal life more. 

But I still hate getting the looks of disappointment/anger every time I put on vacation time. That is one thing I'm really looking forward to about academia. If I need to take off for something personal or just need some time off to decompress, or help out family or friends. I don't have to formally request anything.  It also opens me up for longer lunches.  So long as I make meetings and classes I get relative freedom. Sure, there will still be judgment and lots of work to make up for, but I won't have to login to the vacation website and request a set number of hours while keeping track of what I have left. There's a quote I've heard before: "academia is great; you can work 80 hours a week whenever you want."  I'm fine with long hours, I just want to work and take time off without requesting it. Something about that website reminds me of how owned I am. And NO PERSON SHALL OWN ME! :)

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Life's been nuts!

I saw my old advisor recently and he was very excited about the summer: two conferences, no teaching, all the students spending most of their time on the lab, etc. He said he gets more free time for whatever he wants. I would love that. 

My schedule has been absolutely crazy as of late. I try to keep a few short term goals for every couple months. My current goals include finishing four projects, and trying these out in animals by June 1.  We're on track, but we still have to do bench testing. So I've been working with my techs to get these done so I can try these out ex vivo. This is coupled with some big corporate meetings that are taking a lot of my time. But more importantly, I'm also prepping for conference travels. These are conferences to start building my academic reputation. I can't present work, but I can show up as an industry representative, take professors out for dinner and drinks on the corporate card (their students will have to come to make it a recruiting expense...otherwise it's just stealing money), and talk starting up my own lab. I want to get this kind of research out of the way so as soon as I get there I can start getting equipment. My plan is to go out there a year from now to start recruiting students and finding a house. 

So I've been doing a lot of research at home, started on grants, and even started spewing out exactly the equipment I want to buy. This has been in my off-time, which there isn't much because of these devices I want to get out before I close-up-shop. I also want to really show leadership how I got stuff done, and that they would be stupid not to fund my academic lab. 

So during the day I'm doing R&D, planning studies, traveling, and reporting results. At night I write, read, and plan for my future life (this is in addition to donning a cape a mask for all the crime fighting at night).  I know that the less I plan for now, the more hectic life will be when I'm trying I find a house and set up my lab come next summer.  Too darn busy. 

So while my advisor is relaxing in the tower, I'm preparing to visit the tower while also working in the fields. Part of me wants to just delay all the academic stuff until I start, but I don't want to screw over future-Phindustry. 

This is all packed on top of several social obligations that have arisen recently (weddings, dinners, game-nights, etc). I rely heavily on friends for support. And so I spread myself thinner to ensure friends (and spouse) don't feel ignored. Honestly, these are the only people I care about disappointing. And so I type these blog entries when I'm in public and it's too noisy to get work done. It's the only 'alone' time I have to decompress from obligations.  I don't know how the hyper busy people manage their lives. Do they let something slide?  

My boss is technically a senior citizen and never been married. And I never hear him talking about friends. My fear is that I'll eventually slip into his mindset and be devoid of the things I find most fun in life because I'm too focused on ensuring the career is taken care of. I don't have kids but I liken it to having multiple kids. If you spend too much time on one, the others will fall behind on parental influence. I want a well-rounded family but I find that 24 hours in a day just isn't enough right now. 

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Dancing for the executives

Every year, throughout my company and its sister companies, we have to present a bunch of new technologies to the executives.  Today was that day.  This is a way to let management know what's in the pipeline.  If we present technology that they like, we get to keep our budget. If we present technology they hate, we can all be confident people will be getting fired. However, if we present something absolutely amazing they will give us an extra $15 million (this happened last year). So tensions have been high lately. People have been doing everything they can to show off as many ground-breaking things as possible. Internal groups compete like we're from different companies. It's absolutely insane, and I despise it.

I hate it because I feel like such a pawn. I put on my tap shoes and have to dance for a bunch of higher-ups that think of me as just another chess piece they can replace. I've never felt so unappreciated. And I hate talking sales all day, when we SHOULD be making these products to save lives. This week we worked 2x our usual hours to get ready for the visit. We tested every last project, and wowed the executives. 

We got a crazy amount of money for two projects specifically and they want these in people by December. Considering we haven't done a single animal study we're a little on-edge. Except me. I don't feel anything. I feel like a kid that just worked overtime for my parents' praise, got it, but realized that life will go on and I can be happy without it. I'm glad we got the money since it will go a long ways to save lives. I just hate having to do this show every year. I feel like I'm whoring my science out to a bunch of rich businessmen...

Added to this are the talks by the executives. I was the representative from my division for a meeting attended by a bunch of board members and presidents of sister companies, and I heard "forward-thinking", "synergize", "vertical integration", and "value added" enough times to drive someone mad. I went nuts.  These same people came by to look at my group's new technology and they kept asking "what's the market?" and "what kind of sales would you expect?".  These are different ways of asking "what's the disease target?" and "how many lives will this save?".  The difference is that business-types think of sales numbers. This is something I can't wait to get away from. In my bio I say I'm a PhD in the medical device field trying to cleanse the soul and get into academia. This is the soul-cleansing I'm talking about.  I understand that we always have to fight for more money, but I hate being trotted in front of the executives like I'm at Westminster.

On the plus side, my boss took my group out for one hell of a nice dinner.