Posted on behalf of Mushy:

One of the reasons which drew me to the physical sciences and maths was the inherent, cold, emotionless objectivity. There was right or wrong; black or white. No matter what my lecturers' views on me, all I ever had to do was write down in an exam what they'd told me in the previous year, and I'd get top marks. Easy as that. Right was right.

Fast forwarding to postgraduate studies, when armed with a clean, fully-assigned NMR and a sensible mass spec, it was a piece of cake to go into a meeting, basking in the warm, hazy glow of certainty that no matter who was in the room, the facts would speak for themselves. I had made what I intended, and woe betide anyone who differs. I was right. The facts were there for anyone to see, criticise, and then ultimately to agree with me. [In truth, none of that happened very much; I was a dreadful synthetic chemist. My NMRs were seldom clean, often shoddily-assigned, and my mass specs mostly laughable. But I digress – that’s all for a later post]. Right—for the most part—was still right.

Fast forwarding further, I found myself in the Big Wide World, and the crutch that had borne the weight of my hubris over the past eight years of university was suddenly whipped from under my shoulder. All of a sudden, right as I needed to be, potentially, it could mean nothing. With a receptive ear further up The Company Hierarchy, my words would be heard, my judgments considered, and my recommendations acted upon. If the ear was less receptive, however, I could find myself in a completely foreign place. I had never before been in the situation where I could prove conclusively that what I was saying was right, that I had a surfeit of evidence, and yet it could mean nothing. No matter what I said, or how I said it; the evidence I produced, or how I produced it, I was completely unable to prove myself right. As a recovering scientist, this was anathema to me. In all honesty, it still is. Gradually, I had to transform from being the analyst I was at university, into the salesman I needed to be in order to get across the ideas which I though were correct. I no longer dealt in cold, emotionless, fact. I was now a purveyor of warm, fuzzy, dangerous perception. Right—all of a sudden—was only what my boss perceived it to be.

Of all the culture shocks to have hit me throughout my slow and ongoing transition from scientist to whatever-it-is-I-do-now, not being able to trust just being right is the greatest, and by orders of magnitude. Being a chemist was—for the most part—great. Working in the City is—for the most part—great. In order to jump between the two, however, it has been necessary to subdue a few of the preconceptions I held dear, and to try to assimilate a whole new bunch of concepts which—useful as they are—are not as black and white.

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Mushy:

The answer to this question is entirely dependent on the day you ask me, and the mood I'm in at the time. It's probably best to break the question down into what I liked about chemistry, and what I like about my current job.

As a chemist, I loved the act of finding out new stuff; of holding a vial full of some nondescript green powder, and knowing that nobody had ever had a vial of it in their hand in the whole of human existence. Even now, I find that thought exciting, and lament that it will never happen to me again. The problems thrown up by the subject needed so many different skills to solve that it was impossible to get bored. There were issues that needed to be addressed computationally, graphically, quantitatively, creatively, and methodically. I still don't know of any other pursuit so varied. The academic freedom was splendid, too. Sometimes, the joy of carrying out a task — not to carry out a specific function, but just because you're curious to see what happens — is something not experienced too often when there are shareholders to keep happy.

Working in software development, there's still plenty to enjoy. I work in a small, close-knit team with constant deadlines looming over us. All the time, we have to come up with cunning new plans in order to make our application work the way our users need it, making the most efficient use of man-hours and processor cycles. The pressure of constant, rolling deadlines is more than compensated by the pride in meeting them with the release of a lean, new version of the application. Whenever new specs arrive, we have to be creative yet analytical in order to plan how to deliver them. Being part of a development team, we have to constantly keep in mind new technologies to see if there's a cool new way of solving a previously insoluble problem.

You don't need to be too perceptive to notice that the reasons I like each occupation are pretty much the same in both cases. I suppose that's why the answer to my initial question — for today at least — is no, I don't miss being a chemist. That's because in many ways, I still am one.

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Mushy:

The flippant answer is this: I do.

The proper answer deserves perhaps a little more discussion.

When I finished my PhD, as I have discussed previously, I spent quite a while holidaying on the state*. During this time, one of my thoughts was that I could set up my own business making presentations for academics. I looked into this matter pretty seriously. Armed with a copy of ChemDraw, and another of PowerPoint, I had the building blocks of my empire and eventual happy oligarchy. It was not to be. When I started looking for a market for a professional slide-maker, I was quite surprised to find out that no such market existed. I was even more surprised to find that there was no appetite for this market.

During the years of my studies, I was forced to sit through infinite interminable lectures given by speakers both in-house, and external. Although some were splendid, in most cases it never ceased to amaze me that people so meticulous and caring over their chemistry could be so slapdash when it came to communicating it to their peers. To me, this negligence was to miss the whole purpose of science. What point is there in carrying out research if its eventual communication is carried out in such a manner as to make it inaccessible?

Although I was lucky to work in a field which lent itself to the aesthetic, there are tips which apply to any presentation given in any field of science.

Tell a story. In most cases, you have 45-50 minutes to introduce yourself and your field to an audience of strangers. Ask yourself what you want to say, and how best to say it. Presenting 45 minutes of results tables—although impressive in its own right—does not make a good talk. It will, however, make a good paper (see below). If you can use the time of your presence to capture the imagination of your audience, they'll go and read the paper themselves after you've left.

Less really is more. Of the many hundreds of slides which I produced, the one which I remember having the most impact was in a group literature review meeting. After waxing on about a field of chemistry too obscure to remember, I segued into a slide with the line "So what use is this work?" I then removed the old acetate, and replaced it with a completely blank one. I think that made the point fairly well. Although an extreme example, it got me thinking how easy it is to camouflage a great result with unnecessary text on a slide. If a slide is cluttered with paragraphs of 10-point font writing, it's easy for your audience to miss-or to misunderstand-what you're trying to tell them.

Papers are not presentations. When people read a paper in a journal, all they are doing at that time is reading. There's nothing to get in the way of that activity, and we can do it well. To create a successful presentation, different considerations need to be borne in mind. Humans—especially males—are only really good at concentrating on one thing at a time. If you want someone to concentrate on what you're saying, have little to nothing on the screen. Conversely, if you want a person to concentrate on the screen, say little to nothing. Both tactics are hard to grasp, and quite daring to pull off successfully, but can be extremely successful.

Think about fonts. Although seemingly trivial, the font in which your presentation appears can have a huge impact. Much has been written on font choice, although a good rule of thumb is this. Serif fonts—such as Times and Palatino—work well from a printed page. For viewing from a screen or projector, sans serif fonts—such as Verdana and Arial—are particularly well suited.

A picture is worth 1000 words. But if you don't have a picture, please don't substitute it with 1000 words instead. There's few things worse than spending 45 minutes of your life reading spectacularly wordy slides whilst the lecturer reads them verbatim. Written prose differs spectacularly from the spoken word in its construction, so don't try and orate a sentence which looks good on paper, and vice versa.

That's enough preaching for now. If anyone is interested in any of this, leave a comment, and I can write more. Failing that, if you think I'm writing a load of old tosh, then I'm more than happy to hear your views also.

- Mushy

*Unemployed

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Mushy:

At Uni, I was never one for the Thursday afternoon seminar from a guest speaker. As a presentation snob, I resented the often shoddy slides on show, and to be perfectly honest, I just don't get biochemistry. All in all, this meant that I had no desire to be at about 50 % of the seminars on offer, but as a member of Rent-a-Crowd, that wasn't an option I had.

After much moping, a friend and I decided to liven up the seminars with a game of Buzzword Bingo. The premise was simple. Each participant bought a ticket upon which a number of buzzwords were printed. Each ticket contained a random selection of 15 buzzwords from a pool of forty. Whenever the buzzword was mentioned, it got crossed off of the player's ticket. At the end of the seminar, the person with the most correct buzzwords ticked off won the pool of entrance money. As a gesture of altruism - and naiveté - the house kept no money.

It all started as a terribly amusing ruse. The generation of the buzzword pool immediately became something of a problem, though. After selecting pleasantries such as "Thank you", "honour", and "pleasure", adding a couple of colours, and then throwing in a few wildcards such as "lettuce" and "flounder", we were left with about 20-30 buzzwords which we still had to fill. To make up this shortfall with likely suggestions, this meant that my friend and I actually had to read some of the speaker's papers before the lecture, and produce candidates from there.

With the buzzword list complete, selling the tickets proved to be the easy part; the easily-bored graduate student will do just about anything to alleviate the tedium of sitting through the most interminable of lectures. Then the strangest thing started happening. Each Thursday, a few more people turned up. When we were in the seminars, the back half of the room - the traditional seating area of the graduate student - was actually paying attention throughout the duration of the lecture. We even encouraged the graduate students to ask questions, as it was well within the rules to try to lead the guest lecturer into saying one of your buzzwords, no matter how contrived the set-up. I was even reading a bit more of the literature!

If we ever got found out (I think that the senior faculty started getting wind of our scheme when we started selling them tickets), I already had my defense arranged. As a noble gesture, my friend and I had done what no threat from the faculty had yet achieved. Attendances were up, and the students were attentive throughout, and asking many - sometimes strangely-worded - questions of the speaker at the conclusion.

The only negative thing was that after a few years of paper-reading and attention-paying, I still don't understand biochem...

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 02:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

[Editor's note: over the next few months we will feature guest bloggers from a range of backgrounds and hopefully some of these posts will turn into regular series... first up is Mushy, a former chemist who has left it all behind for the bright lights of the City!]

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Posted on behalf of Mushy:

My name is Mushy, and I am a recovering chemist - it's been over 6 years since I ran my last chromatography column. I have been asked to write on the Sceptical Chymist every now and then to give the views of an ex-chemist.

After completing a PhD in supramolecular chemistry in the US, and following a rather meandering job path, the undisputed highlight of which was months of unemployment, I now work in IT in the City of London.

After finishing Uni, I was certain that I didn't want to work in chemistry. I had something of a long job search, most of which was spent mired in a Catch-22 where I was not qualified for the jobs which I wanted, and the only jobs for which I was qualified, I didn't want. In spite of a few negative experiences with - sour grapes notwithstanding - short-sighted companies which only wanted people with very specific degrees, nothing could be further from the truth. The skills I learned as a chemist - the methodical approach, the empiricism, the confidence, the flawless proff-reading - have served me well in an industry in which I had no experience at the outset.

I suppose that that's where I'll start summing up my inaugural post.

At work, I've never been asked to explain a [4+2] cycloaddition. The astrophysicists have never been asked their opinions on the Hubble constant. The chemical engineers have never become embroiled in heated debates about theoretical plates. The molecular biologists have never orated on the pros and cons of gel electrophoresis. The people who studied golf course management - well - they didn't get the job. What we all do use every day of our working lives, though, is the thought process that got us into science in the first place, and the excitement of finding out new facts and methods. That's the most transferable of all skills.

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)