Question: Is there a lot of competition for your type of job? What sets you apart from other people who applied for your job?

Austin Elliott answered on 18 Jun 2012:

There is a lot of competition for lectureships, and jobs as a lab head, because there are quite a lot of people who do a science doctoral degree (PhD), and work in a lab after that as a ‘postdoctoral researcher’, and would ultimately like to run their own laboratory. It isn’t the only job you can do in science, though – people with science PhD degrees (and BScs) go on to do all sorts of jobs.

Speaking from having been part of discussions about hiring people to be lab heads, there isn’t a big secret as to what sets the people apart who get the jobs. It’s a combination of track record, future plans, and how they would fit in to the department (what sort of things they work on, what sort of methods they specialise in etc). What sort of impression someone makes at an interview counts too.

My own personal experience isn’t very relevant here, as it’s 25 years since I was hired and things have changed a lot in between. At the time, the main things I had going for me were that I’d worked with the technology they wanted to ‘hire in’ (it was ‘magnetic resonance spectroscopy’ which is related to magnetic resonance imaging, like in MRI machines) , and that I had worked in a well-known lab so I guess I had good references. Anyway, those probably both count as ‘luck’, rather than anything I’d done. I was also hired into my present job very young (aged 25), which doesn’t happen now. Almost everyone we hire to be a lab head now is between 30 and 35 and has been working in research for at least three years after getting a PhD (doctorate), and usually more like 5 or 6 years.