So long, thanks for all the fish...

A few mornings ago, I was exposed to an unexpected bout of 'inside baseball' regarding landing a job in academia. Turns out that faculty hiring committees are pretty ruthless, and the interview process is quite rough (perhaps even more so than I assumed). Candidates are expected to have a very broad range of knowledge, extending far beyond their own field. This requires a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. Some day, perhaps sooner than I expect, I will be applying for such jobs, and if I'm to land one, I'm going to have to put yet more work into honing my skills as a scientist.

I'm certain that I'm not the first person to realize that a postdoc is very different from a Ph.D. For one, I put in far more hours here than I did before. Also, none of these hours involve doing things like perusing blogs or reading interesting science news. I have way too much responsibility to my lab mates and work that needs doing to be able to do any of that. And it's not getting any better: in fact, as my time here progresses, I'm gaining more responsibility and more projects to look into. I've actually changed my lifestyle such that I go to the gym early every single morning, then stay at the lab until 7:30 - 8:00 pm every night before a 1 hour commute home. To be honest, the last thing I want to do is sit down and blog about science.

I've come to a crossroads that I'm sure that every aspiring scientist must come to at some point during their life. It's a very competitive field, and many people aren't willing to make the necessary sacrifices required to eventually get their own lab. I think I'm doing pretty good so far: last week I hit the double-digits in terms of Pubmed citations - and I've got another paper recently accepted. Yesterday I found out that my application for the coveted NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship award was accepted. This is very, very good, and puts me on track to get a good job out out all of this 'science' stuff. A Nature paper would be really nice at this point, and I think that I really need to focus on building my 'portfolio'.

My time would be much better spent writing research proposals, manuscripts, and review papers than it would contributing to a blog. I've really had to admit to myself that I just don't have time to run this thing. Actually, it's worse than that - I really don't have time to participate much in the blogosphere.

So, though it be bittersweet, I feel that I must shut down this adventure that I've been pursuing for the past few years. Thanks to all the folks who commented and participated in the discussions we had here - I've learned a lot and had a good time in the process. I wish that I could have written more, and perhaps had a more fond farewell over a series of posts, but it's probably better that I just get a post up here letting people know that the hammer has come down.

Things are looking good, I'm excited about what I'm doing, and I'm really enjoying living here in the States. I'm going to try to put together some sort of profile on one of the social media sites or something so that people will always have a place to contact me. If that happens, I'll let you know.

I wish you all well in your endeavors, thanks for making this a lot of fun!

Carlo