Epiphanies are a strange and wonderful thing, but sometimes they can leave you feeling pretty stupid. This is especially true when you are being broadsided by the obvious. Applying to positions outside of the Ivory Tower has not been, to say the least, all that intuitive a process. Or perhaps closer to the truth, it is such an obvious process that I could not, for lack of a better expression, see the forest for the trees.
While applying for jobs as a medical writer, the two truths I have learned are that being a scientist when you're writing about science is not a good thing and that headhunters are not scientists.
As I was jumping through the last few university hoops toward my doctorate in animal sciences, the one feat that I really focused on was publishing the results of my research on horses and equine exercise physiology. My feeling was that I would be more marketable with an established list of published articles. While my research was not in the super sexy world of biotechnology and gene chips, nonetheless I believed it was sound, and the journals I'd published in respectable.
I truly thought that I had a nice-looking vita, with my educational background listed first and my publications at the end. Imagine my horror when I read Clayton R. Randall's chapter on technical writing in Alternative Careers in Science (Academic Press, 1998), where he describes the common résumé of graduate students. It begins, he says, with education and ends with a list of publications with incomprehensible titles. This, he continues, screams "scientist."
And this is a bad thing?
I guess the word "scientist" conjures up pictures of men and women in Coke-bottle glasses who think lab coats function as dinner jackets and who go to bars to discuss alcohol dehydrongenase. Here I thought that companies looking for someone to prepare posters and slide presentations for national meetings, or to ready manuscripts for submission to medical journals and abstracts would want a scientist. This is, after all, what we are trained to do. My first epiphany hit when I came to understand the need for a functional résumé -- one that emphasized job-related skills like the ability to use word-processing and desktop-publishing programs over knowing how to accurately pipet miniscule volumes of reagents.
My first callback came after I listed proficiencies in Microsoft Word and Aldus PageMaker on my résumé. This was a shock. I thought word-processing skills came with mother's milk. I was wrong. If scientists are more computer literate than the vast majority of the world, and if this sets us apart, then computer literacy is certainly a marketable skill and a skill to be listed.
But let's face it, writing medical manuscripts involves a very precise and sterile style that does not carry over well to the nonacademic world. That was driven home when I attended a talk recently at a continuing-education conference. It was intended to be a meeting bridging the worlds of today's hot scientists and everyday people.
Now, I have attended my share of departmental seminars and national meetings where prestigious scientists show slide after slide of charts, tables, and graphs, all the while droning on in an emotionally void monotone that can only be described as an insomniac's best friend. But at a meeting designed to connect with the public, having a speaker that possessed a modicum of charisma -- or at the very least, the desire to connect with his or her audience -- would have been preferable.
Again I was wrong. From a marketing standpoint, it cannot be good for business when your audience should be hearing about the implications of cloning sheep but instead are only wanting to count sheep. Medical-writing companies, I have come to believe, would rather hire people who are only proficient in the dry voice of science, than those who have demonstrated the skill of writing in several voices. Just keep it straight and to the point. Experience writing and submitting "IND's" and "NDA's" does not hurt either, I'm told. So I guess I better know what those are. I had never heard of either term until I started looking for pharmaceutical work. Most headhunters don't seem to know what the terms mean either, they just know that people wanting a job in the industry had better have experience with both. I've since learned that "NDA" stands for new drug application, and "IND" for investigational new drug application -- both are the formal applications that must be made to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration before a new drug can be marketed and sold. Glad that's cleared up.
My next revelation came after dealing with headhunters for the first time. I contacted a medical headhunter who was recommended to me by some friends. I asked if the service had any job opportunities that might be suited to my background. And after a short and quite animated phone discussion about one job in particular, I sent in my vita. I felt pretty good about the phone interview. That is, until I received an e-mail message later that day. It seems the company was not interested in hiring veterinarians, they were looking for someone with more research experience in cardiovascular drugs -- the topic of my dissertation.
Did I miss something?
Last time I checked, I was not a veterinarian, nor had I ever attended vet school. Then I figured it out. On my vita, I had listed my research work with horses -- therefore, I must be a vet.
I had assumed most headhunters and recruiters for this field were either scientists or had a technical background. Wrong yet again, a theme I certainly am hoping to change. There is nothing wrong with recruiters' not having a science background. But I can see the potential for confusion, such as what happened in my case.
I have since deleted all references to "horse" from my résumé, as the word seemed to have pigeonholed me. It could be worse, but I still would rather not be typecast.
So what have I learned? To market yourself you need a functional résumé. Period. A vita may only serve to have you mistaken for something out of Dilbert or an extra from Revenge of the Nerds. So why confuse your headhunter?
