I just transitioned from a graduate student to seed industry
Jul 12, 2020
Hello dear reader,
This post is super long overdue, my apologies… everything is shit. There is more racial injustice than ever, we have a global pandemic going on, international students and scholars being banned from returning from to their schools, jobs, new homes, childrens authors with large platforms spreading negative rhetoric about our trans neighbors, colleagues, friends and family, and probably 10M other atrocities that I am unaware of because of my privilege status as a cis white male.
My only good news is that I submitted my dissertation to my committee (one member has yet to acknowledge recieving it despite multiple emails and twitter DMs) and am now the Genetics Application Leader for Pepper at HM.Clause! I can already tell that there are MASSIVE differences between the way that teams work in academia and industry. Only time will tell if this is my forever home, so I am actively trying to keep my toes in academic projects to try to maintain some publication record. Until I know for sure, I am going 100%.
Starting a new job during a pandemic with Type-1 Diabetes is very odd… and scary… and exciting… and there are so many aspects that are unknown about how things will look going forward that it is hard to really say how I feel. Despite that there are just a ton of things that I am excited about working with this company and I will try to keep things updated as I can, but everything is stressful right now…
This position is supposed to be ~25-30% travel, primarily international travel to France, Mexico, India, Thailand, and other pepper places. But not right now, and certainly not for me. My colleagues, teammates, and collaborators are now spread around the globe and my only way to interact with them is painfully (for me) early phone calls and email, which is no way to build a rewarding relationship with anyone. Fingers crossed for a COVID vaccine that works and can be made rapidly available to people and fingers crossed that people will get it and fingers crossed people that get it will continue to social distance and wear masks regardless.
Wear your mask, keep your distance,
Your friend, Mitchell