Day 3 to 18

Day 3

I was just informed that we will be “restructuring our budget.”  I will now be paid directly from university coffers. I am decidedly less optimistic than the cheery HR woman who informs me of this fact.  It’s May, 2009; the housing bubble popped audibly about six months ago, and the university’s endowment is down by about 30%. 

I begin perusing the Want ads.

Day 7

Four hundred people are laid off from University’s hospital system.  My annual contract with the university is scheduled to end in three weeks.  For the time being, I decide not to order any more business cards with my university address. 

Day 9

One of my colleagues is informed the university will not be able to renew his contract. 

Day 11

I and one other colleague are now living on the good graces of the University of Chicago. Bruce is desperately trying to save money. He attempts to convince us that we do not need high-quality health insurance, as we are both young and healthy. Quoting from an email regarding this: “For example, if you have good teeth, you might not need good dental insurance.”

Day 18

The health insurance email confirmed that we were scraping the bottom of the financial barrel. Ah, to know the concealed desperation of the rushed job search. I’ve got three job options. None of them are particularly grand. Let’s take them one at a time:  

Job #1: A research associate job at Northwestern. The good: It’s nearby; I wouldn’t have to leave my serious girlfriend Susan. The bad: It’s more low level academic research.  It won’t advance my career, doesn’t pay well, but I could leave it easily when a better option came along.  This would be the safe play, like punting on fourth down.

Job #2: A lab manager/postdoc job at UC Davis. The good: The lab had money, and it’s closer to Silicon Valley and the biotech companies there. The bad: Everything about the lab sucked. I flew out there to interview  and was incredibly unimpressed. The first person I met, a frazzled girl who was obviously holding the lab together, told me I should avoid this job like the plague. The PI (the lab’s head guy) looked like a human version of Garfield the cat. If Garfield spoke the Chinese-laced form of English known as ‘Engrish,’ that is. For someone with such a poor mastery of my native tongue, this guy could talk your ear off; Several times during my interview, I found myself on the brink of dozing off. Two weeks here and I’d have a gun in my mouth. I’d decided not to take the job within 20 minutes of laying eyes on the place, but I decided to negotiate salary with the guy, just for shits and giggles. Turns out the PI wanted to start me out at some incredibly low amount (like 30K or some other ridiculous number) and raise my pay by five thousand dollars each time I published a scientific paper. Grimly fascinated, I made the mistake of asking him how that policy did anything other than encourage fast, crappy science. Things went downhill from there. Obviously, this was the worst option, like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and swallowing it.

Job #3: A scientist position in Silicon Valley for a start-up biotech company.  The good: The pay is slightly (only slightly) better, and it was an opportunity to break into industry.  There were some substantial drawbacks to the job: the company was tiny, only a handful of people.  There was also an awful lot of sketchiness. When I’d flown out to interview, all the employees were at a farewell lunch for another departing scientist. I met no one but the potential boss, who was, coincidentally, my biggest reservation.  He seemed like an oily businessman masquerading as a pseudoscientist. It was hard to sell if the company had a chance of making a product, or whether he was selling snake oil. From what I could tell, he’d started the company by selling the sizzle of an intriguing idea. To that end, he was cagey about the sources and amount of his funding. I also suspected he might be a terrorist. This was the riskiest option, going for it on fourth down.

Next Time: Noah makes his pick, Bruce gets weirder, and Noah explains how he shot himself in the foot.