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Pursue a Career in Biotechnology

When most people think of opportunities for careers in biotechnology, they think of a scientist in a white coat in a laboratory developing drugs to improve the quality of life. However, biotechnology has a wide variety of career opportunities ranging from sales and marketing, to research and development, to manufacturing and quality control and assurance.

The biotechnology industry continues to flourish nationwide. Not only are the total number of biotechnology companies increasing, but employment in the biotechnology field continues to grow as well.

Links to Career Information and Employment Opportunities

Biotechnology in the United States is a dynamic industry so there are many opportunities for employment. Below are some links to job listings and information about careers in the biotech field.

ActionBioScience.org

Adsumo: A Life Sciences Career Website

America's Job Bank

America's Recruiting, Inc.

American Society of Plant Biologists

American Society for Microbiology

BioHealthRx

BioJobNet

Biojobnetwork

Biocom

Biocom Workforce

Bio-Link

BioSpace

Biotechnology Jobs, Seattle, WA

Chemistry.org

Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education

Hire Health

LifeWorks

Medzilla

NASA Kids Science News Network

Nature Jobs

NIH Careers

Pharma opportunities Biotech Jobs

Science Jobs

Tiny Tech Jobs

Under the Microscope: Biotechnology Jobs in California

Vault

Wet Feet

If you are an employer and would like your company's employment page linked to our site, please e-mail biotechdhaba@gmail.com.

How to Pursue a Biotech Career

The biotechnology industry is constantly growing; during the past 10 years the number of employees has increased by more than 90 percent! If you enjoy science, math, technology, investigating and solving problems, and making useful products, a career in biotechnology may be for you. To begin to prepare for a career in biotechnology, here are several steps to consider that may be helpful.

Education

Education and training requirements for positions in the biotechnology industry vary greatly depending on the type of position, the size of the company, and the industry sector.

Historically, the biotechnology industry has needed intellectual talent at the master's degree and doctoral levels, but the growth of the industry has caused a shift in the types of workers needed to fill critical skill gaps. The education needed for scientific positions ranges from an Associate's Degree to a Doctoral degree, with many community colleges now offering curricula to train biotechnology technicians.

Additionally, there are many other occupations within biotechnology such as: quality control, quality assurance, information technology, human resources, facilities, and infrastructure maintenance and manufacturing.

While many positions in quality control and assurance, as well as information technology, human resources, and manufacturing do require four-year degrees, a significant and growing number of positions now require two-year degrees or less. Manufacturing positions for example, require only a high school degree and training.

Be Well-rounded

Most importantly, make sure to be well-rounded in all subject areas. Although scientific knowledge is important, people entering biotechnology careers need basic skills such as computer use, effective written and verbal communication, and math ability.

Network and Stay Connected

Make contacts and network in the biotechnology field. Talk to professionals. Be familiar with state and national biotech organizations and professional groups. Join the Biotechnology Institute forums and connect with our social media communities. Gain experience in the industry through work-based learning opportunities such as internships, co-ops, work study, and job shadowing.

Keep Learning

Be aware of developments in the field. Research on the web, and read newspapers, trade journals, and technical magazines as well as our industry and research news feed on the homepage.

The biotechnology industry is constantly growing. During the past 10 years, the number of employees has increased by more than 90 percent! If you enjoy science, math, technology, investigating and solving problems, and making useful products, a career in biotechnology may be for you!

By Manish Kumar

Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, Bad Nauheim, Germany.

Email: manish.kumar@mpi-bn.mpg.de

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Martin A. Schwartz

Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA

e-mail: maschwartz@virginia.edu

Accepted 9 April 2008

Journal of Cell Science 121, 1771 Published by The Company of Biologists 2008

doi:10.1242/jcs.033340

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school,

went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a majorenvironmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she

said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else. I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and

her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way. Let me explain. For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can’t be

the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and

doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn’t know how to solve the problem I was having in his area.

I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn’t have the answer, nobody did.

That’s when it hit me: nobody did. That’s why it was a research problem.

And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn’t really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It’s a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional

or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty. Second, we don’t do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don’t feel stupid it means we’re not really trying. I’m not talking about ‘relative´stupidity’, in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don’t. I’m also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don’t match their talents. Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, ‘I don’t know’. The point of the exam isn’t to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it’s the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student’s weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student’s knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project. Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

Journal of