First let me introduce myself, I am Sean's Better Half also known as "the wife". Sean has been trying to get me to write on his blog for a very long time now but I have always said "NO", because I am not an IT or computer geek. Therefore, I felt that anything I wrote about would not be right for his blog but as you can see I have finally given in to his nagging.

     Some background on me: I do not work in the IT field but I am in a science field. I have worked on and off for about 10 years in the bio-tech field. I used to work in industry but am now in Academia. I currently do Cancer research in a lab at the University of Maryland in Baltimore (yeah, the one with the great Shock Trauma Center and yes, I do see the helicopters often). I decided to go into Academia because we have a child starting college soon and the benefit of free tuition at any state funded school was one the we just couldn't pass on especially after going to a college fair and seeing the average cost of tuition at a small private college (who has $40,000.00/year to send their kid to school? Lord knows we don't unless that lottery ticket hits tonight). I am the mom of 4 boys ages 16,10,5, and 21 months but it seems like 5 boys if you include Sean. And I have come to the conclusion that all of you IT guys are little boys with more expensive toys.  As you can imagine it is never quiet at our house.

     I just wanted to list some of the things I have noticed since I started working where I am now. It is more typical in my field for people to want to go from Academia to Industry instead of the other way around like I have. That is unless you want to be a professor/faculty at a University and constantly have to write grants in order to get money to do your research. Every time I would tell people here that I had come from industry they would look at me like I had a second head and then I would get asked why did I leave? I would tell them that I came because of the benefits (where else can you accumulate leave at the rate of  20 vacation days and 15 sick/year while also getting 15 holiday and 4 personal days when you first start)? Another thing I have noticed is that many people in the Science/research field who have a PhD and a lot of the MDs  here at the hospital are very intelligent in their particular field but don't seem to have that broad of a horizon when it comes to knowledge or common sense about a lot of every day topics. I am assuming that this is because they have to put so much time and effort into what they are studying or doing research on. At least I hope that is why. I have also learned quite a lot about Visas. I mean the kind that you need to work or go to school here in the US. I am not the norm in my lab. I never was in industry either because I am a female but here it is because I am a white female who is a US citizen. I work with a lot of people from India and China. I have found that it is very hard to get a post-Doctoral candidate who is from the US to work in Academia. It could be because most of the US candidates go into industry where the pay is significantly better. I put out a job advertisement recently for a post doctoral candidate in our lab and didn't get one applicant who was a US citizen. This isn't saying that scientists from other countries aren't intelligent in fact my boss is from Germany and two of my co-workers are from India and they are all very good at what they do. I just find it interesting the lack of US citizens that are choosing to go into biomedical research. It is also a very complicated procedure when hiring someone from another country. The visa process usually can take up to 3 months or more depending on what kind of Visa the person has. I do have a problem with how some of the people from other countries are treated once they get here to work in these positions but that is another story. Anyway, I have babbled enough and must do some work.

I hope my husband is happy that I finally posted a blog entry about something. Sorry it had nothing to do about IT!