Career advice from a successful chemist

This twitter thread delivers excellent career management advice.

Derek Lowe is a medicinal chemist working on preclinical drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry. Lowe has published a blog about this field, "In the Pipeline", since 2002 and is a columnist for the Royal Society of Chemistry's Chemistry World.

I've been asked to talk about how I ended up doing what I'm doing for #YoungScientistNetworking, so here's the story! I've been at this a while, so it's sort of a long tale by now. (1/20) 

I grew up in a small town in NE Arkansas, and was always interested in all sorts of science (astronomy, biology, chemistry and more). I knew that my path wa going to take me somewhere else, but I had no idea where. (2/20) 

When I got to college, I wasn't even sure I would go into the sciences! I had always liked history and literature too, but I decided it would be be easier to have my own library at home than to have my own lab, and became a chemistry major. (3/20) 

I went on to graduate school, figuring I needed the PhD for whatever it was that I was going to do. At the time I always saw myself going into academia - probably at a smaller liberal arts school, like the one I graduated from, Hendrix. (4/20) 

But I became a bit less sure about that after watching academia in action and up close. Grad school was pretty stressful, and I watched young professors fighting for tenure (not always successfully!) who were putting in the same hours I was. (5/20) 

As I completed my degree, I looked for post-doc positions - partly to make me more hire-able, and partly as a holding action while I figured out which way to go. I didn't have my own grant money, so the search was producing mixed results. (6/20) 

Another professor in the department had just landed a Humboldt Foundation faculty grant to go to Germany, and he suggested I look into that for postdoctoral funding. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. (7/20) 

I ended up in Darmstadt for a year doing research, learning German, and traveling around on the weekends (those less-severe European lab hours were very welcome after my PhD!) But I still wasn't sure where I'd go after that. (8/20) 

Job-hunting season came along (it was all print ads, no online postings in 1989), and there really weren't any open academic positions at the sorts of liberal-arts schools where I could see myself joining the faculty. By that time, I had friends who were in industry. too. (9/20) 

I hadn't thought as much about that path, but reports from my old labmates were actually pretty good, and I applied to a slew of biopharma companies (there were a lot of open positions at that point). (10/20) 

I might as well have tossed all those letters into a pond. There were postmarked from Germany, and I don't think anyone read enough of the cover letter to see that I was coming back to the US at the end of the postdoc! Near-zero response. (11/20) 

So I retooled as soon as I got back, with a US address and phone # (and on 8 1/2 by 11 paper instead of A4) and sent off another big pile of CVs. This time there were some bites on the line, to my relief. I ended up with interviews, and two pharma "finalists". (12/20) 

I joined Schering-Plough in the fall of 1989, doing CNS research, and enjoyed it very much, as it turned out. But within a few years, after some organizational changes, I realized that I'd probably be happier somewhere else. (13/20) 

There was a period in the mid-1990s where there were just no biopharma jobs out there. I waited that out, and on the next upswing answered a headhunter call that ended up sending me to Bayer, in CT, in a group targeting metabolic disease. (14/20) 

That went fine, until things stopped going fine for Bayer. Taking their big statin drug off the market and then doing a more-expensive-than-expected takeover of Schering AG led to the closure of the whole CT research site by early 1997. (15/20) 

By this time, I'd been writing the blog for a few years, and more people had heard of me. That helped in the job search, and I ended up landing a position at Vertex up in the Boston/Cambridge bio-hub. We moved the family in hopes we wouldn't have to again. (16/20) 

The Vertex job was very interesting and challenging, but after 10 years a series of management changes and re-orgs turned a lot of positions over, including mine. So I moved on to my fourth company, also in the area, and that's been great. (17/20) 

Over the years I've become more of a chemical biology person and less of a traditional medicinal chemist - I wanted to try to get at some of the underlying issues of target selection, for example. But there are so many puzzles in this business; take your pick! (18/20) 

My advice? Get to know people, at your company and others. Get to know other fields of research outside your own. Watch for how your own field might be changing, and learn the new technology as it comes along. Don't limit your perspective. (19/20) 

Try to offer something to an employer that's useful, valuable, and that they can't easily get more cheaply somewhere else. Keep your eyes out for what those things might be, and you'll be fine! (20/20)