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Advice for Your Life in Science | BenchFly

Your Career in a Sentence – How to Craft an Elevator Pitch

How to craft an elevator pitchAn “Elevator Pitch” – the idea that you should be able to explain your idea, project or lab within a 20-30 second elevator ride – is like explaining your project in a Tweet.  You’ve got to trim the fat and get to the point, or else you just get cut off.  Never has the art of brevity been more important than in today’s society, where people face constant information and sensory overload.  In every interaction, people are constantly forced to make a quick judgment call on whether what they’re hearing is worth their time.

Despite understanding the concept of the elevator pitch, it can often be very difficult to craft, especially when you’re working on a very specific problem that needs a few minutes of background to be put in context.

Or so you think….

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The Chemistry of Skunky Beer

Beer chemistryPepé le Pew: funny.  Beer: delicious.

Pepé le Pew in your booze? Not funny OR delicious.

Occasionally, you may hear friends complain of “skunky beer” – but what does that mean?  Is it just slang for a terrible brew?  Did they just insult your drink?  Actually, there is some truth to the term, and a little bit of chemistry helps make sense of it.

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Working at a Small Company, Part 2

Working at a Small Company, Part 2You’ve decided to join a small company, so you sign the contract and celebrate with some friends.  The next day, amidst a pounding headache, the stress sets in.  A new world awaits… what’s going to happen?  What do they expect?  Was that the right decision?

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Molecular Gastronomy: Experiments You Can Eat

molecular gastronomyThe last thing most of us think about when pulling a tube out of the centrifuge or taking a vial out of the desiccators is eating it.  Unless you’re willing to grow a third arm out of your back, consuming your experiments should never cross your mind…

Or should it…

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Win a Flip Camera!

gold-medalLike when you pick a single colony from a bacterial plate and it sequences correctly…YOU’RE A WINNER!!

Actually, you haven’t won anything yet.

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Working at a Small Company, Part 1

Working at a Small Company, Part 1One of the classic choices facing grad students or postdocs looking to move into industry is whether to join a large or small company.  For most of us, who have only academic research experience when looking for that first job, there is little opportunity to understand what really goes on in companies.  In many cases, it’s not until you accept the position and begin working that the consequences of the decision are finally apparent…for better or worse.

To shed some light on small company life, we interviewed Patrick Hillas, Ph.D. about the transition from academics to biotech, the pros and cons of the decision and the expectations placed upon new hires.

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How to Remove Static from a Scale

It was almost midnight at the end of a very long day and my friend Walter and I were sitting at our benches, half-delirious, joking about protocols to film.  As if sent from above, our labmate, whose language would make the father from “A Christmas Story” blush, walked into the room right on cue.[Continue Reading…]

Our Pledge to You

Our Pledge to YouWe are incredibly fortunate to live in this era.  We’ve got a front-row seat to watch the collision of the internet and science.  Over the next decade, we can expect major changes in the scientific process – from teaching to learning to the way we think about publication.

Whatever happens, we, BenchFly, pledge that the following statement will always be true:

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Our Mission

Who am I?our-mission

I’m a third generation chemist, following in the footsteps of my father and grandfather.  Some of my earliest memories include weekend trips into the lab with my dad.  Although they were by no means every week, as I grew older the trips were frequent enough to instill in me a genuine respect for research and it’s role in society.

As an undergraduate, I joined an organic chemistry lab and quickly found out that the NMR was not, in fact, a huge cotton-candy machine, as I had imagined when I was a kid.

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How to Choose a Good Scientific Problem

how-to-choose-a-good-scientific-problemChoosing a good scientific problem is essential for being a good scientist. But what is a good problem, and how to choose one? The subject is not usually discussed explicitly within our profession. Scientists are expected to be smart enough to figure it out on their own and through observation of their teachers. This lack of explicit discussion leaves a vacuum that can lead to approaches such as: choose problems that can give results that merit publication in valued journals, resulting in a job and tenure.

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