Source Event

Last Friday was devoted to Nature’s science careers fair and conference. I was quite pleased to be invited to speak at the fair – some sort of recognition of what i have been doing here at King’s. Also some recognition of the role that professional careers advice can play in supporting the career management of researchers. Well done us – The Careers Group and King’s College Graduate school. 

Chairing my sesion was Tristram Hooley of Vitae. Tristram is moving onto head the Careers Research Unit at Derby University. So our paths might cross again in that context.

I went to session on bid-writing given by Tony Woods of the Wellcome Trust. Strongly recommend people to listen to the pod-cast: lots of very common sense points about bid writing. It reminded me of the sorts of things we say about CV’s. He reckoned that he could tell in about 80% of cases whether the bid would get funded within about 30 seconds; a bit scary if you think that it could take 6 months to put a bid together. Its all in the project summary. What is the research question, will the activities proposed answer that question. Use the classic SMART objectives.

A UCL lecturer gave a very personal account of the unpredictabilty of a Research career which in her case spanned a number of separate disciplines and roles and a many countries. She was a Marie Curie fellow.

There was a talk form Merck serono about Clinical trials management, and then a mad presentation by the brilliant William Bains. He had the audience in stitches though a couple of very strait-laced people did leave in the middle with very concermed looks on their faces.

The apparently rambling talk covered a steely analytical brain that was determined to have some FUN. We started with Isaac Asimov and electric trainsets, silicon, the cost of filing a patent (30 quid!), the importance of the confidentiality agreements, science as a personality defect (“How many of you are scientists?” Forest of hands. “Well half of you are wrong and the other half have my deepest sympathy”, how to lose 12 grand ( he did it his way). He is the Eddie Izzard of Biotechnology start-ups. He is that good.