career development

It was with considerable shock that I realized, one quiet evening between Christmas and New Year's, that it's been four years since I obtained my Ph.D. It's been four years since my education ended formally and my career commenced. At a quick glance, I'm doing all right. I had a fantastic job in Grenoble, well paid, exciting and with my boss as a colleague. My current job is sufficiently paid, lets me manage my own affairs and allows me to live in the greatest city of all. Where is the problem, and why was I shocked?

What I've enumerated in the previous paragraph were jobs, but a list of jobs alone doesn't make a career. There has to be progress, and that's something that I don't see. I'm doing my job, but I'm not going anywhere. I'm not developing, and I'm not advancing. As I can't do forever what I'm doing now, I have to make the step to the next level. For those past four years, the next step has remained elusive.

My C.V. has just about the same bullet points as it did four years ago. I haven't picked up too many new skills, and I haven't had much chance to exercise those that I pride myself in. Over the last four years, I've done pretty much the same work most of the days. That's a scary situation, even if the same work means unchangingly challenging projects that require drive and creativity.

In Grenoble, I learned to handle membrane proteins, but I wasn't fortunate enough with a crazy project to produce any results. In London, I've broadened my system, database and web administration skills and got good at php. Unfortunately, this is a silent skill. I have little written testimony. There is only the lab web page. In any case, unless I start applying for jobs in computers, it's not gonna be of any help.

I have improved my Spanish and picked up some beginner's Arabic, and my skills at the recorder have progressed such that I'm no inevitable ear tormentor anymore. My sister and I even played a handful of duets for Christmas – with mom as the only, and very forgiving, audience. These skills are strangers to this post. I acquired them for my personal satisfaction and will never benefit from them professionally. I doubt I'll ever mention any one in an interview situation.

The questions are thus: Should I devote myself more to my job and focus all my energy on it, inside the lab and out? Should I learn new techniques and pick up skills likely to be beneficial professionally, even if that means investing extra hours besides labwork? To take it one step further: Should I have my life by dominated by my profession? To be honest, this is a hard thing to do. I live in London and want to enjoy the big city as much as I can. In addition, I am not a student anymore and have lost some of the masochistic energy of my youth. Fourteen-hour days just don't cut it for my anymore. At home, at night, I don't want to read papers or work on the structure I couldn't finish during the day.

Maybe the questions are ill posed and my doubts ungrounded. Science is not an activity with a predetermined outcome. It must involve curiosity and eagerness on the side of the practitioner. Conventional wisdom has it that luck will strike at some point. Results will then come forth whose presentation in print and at the microphone will eventually lead to the desired faculty position or into the comfy chair of a biotech company.

Over the last few years, results have been scarce. I have to admit that there are moments when I wonder whether I do the right thing, or whether I'm even the right one for science. The words of encouragement I get are always the same. 'Solving hard problems isn't easy. Keep gnawing at it, be relentless, you shall prevail.' The problem is that other hard problems have been solved but mine are still sitting there staring at me in defiance. What I am going to do with them long-term is one of the questions I have to solve in this new year. Should I continue to pursue or abandon them – and science by extension? Making a decision on that would be quite a step forward.