[Pipet Devel] Job interviews, etc

[deanne at density.biop.umich.edu]

I thought I'd take a side tack for a moment and tell you guys what I'm
doing and why it's taking me so long to get up to speed.

Python is eeaaaasy. I have the O'reilly book and so far i love the
language. It makes perfect sense.

Gnome took forever to correctly configure on my machine and I'm still
getting odd errors that I can't trace, now and again. I still can't get my
soundcard to work. :) I had to re-build the whole system on my box and
compile a new kernel and new glib and etc....needed to be done, but took
me a bit of time.

Oh, yea, and in all of this, I'm trying to write a journal article on
quantum physics/NMR and finish my thesis.

I've also been looking for jobs in bioinformatics (which is how I found
you guys, btw, which was a nice coincidence). I have an interview at
Harvard Medical School as a research computing scientist in
bioinformatics, a job offer that's kind of weird at Novartis Functional
Genomics Institute (check out www.nifg.org, they've got openings in their
computational biology area) and also possibly other job opportunities at a
few other pharm companies, though we'll see. 

A few comments, unsolicited, from a job hunter:

1) Rosetta Inpharm has lousy interviewers with bad attitude
2) Novartis IFG offered me a job and then is kind of backpedaling a bit,
somehow wondering if I can "handle" more of a concentration in biology
(!)
3) Harvard Med School is very cool with neat people. So far.
4) It's hard to convince anyone in bioinformatics industry/academia that
if you haven't been a bioinformatics graduate student but have had all the
relevant experience, that you can "do this". Which is kind of silly.

Anyway, I'll be away until Monday. Wish me luck and productivity.

Your new-found friend,
Deanne