Job hunting and interviews
I know I have posted anything recently about my career plans, etc., so I figured now is as good of a time as ever. Right now, I’m writing this on a plane on the way back from an interview.
First off, I have been offered the opportunity to teach a class at the U of M this fall. I’ll be a recitation instructor for the senior process design class. This is going to be quite a lot of work, as I will have to lecture twice a week, but also design a unique capstone design project for the students to do. I’m quite excited for the opportunity to teach, but a little nervous about designing the project for them to do. Pretty soon, I need to start coming up with ideas and working the design out myself. I haven’t dealt with this kind of thing in 3 years, so I’m sure it will take a while to refresh. One good thing is that I will have a TA, so I won’t have to spend much time grading.
What this means is that I’m not longer under a major time crunch for job hunting and graduating. I will be in Minneapolis until the end of December, so all I need to do is graduate sometime before then. That also allows me to have a firm start date for whatever job I take … the beginning of January.
I currently have three leads on the job front.
First is a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I just got a phone call from them Monday with the formal offer, which is quite exciting. The work would be atmospheric and geoscience related. This is quite the far stretch from my current research, but I’m sure I could catch on. The bad thing would be the cost … LLNL is about 1 hour east of San Francisco. Nice area, but very expensive.
Secondly, I am flying home from a two-day interview for a postdoc at Sandia National Laboratory. This has always been sort of a dream job for me, as they have a large, awesome computational fluid dynamics group. While LLNL is very physics-oriented, SNL is a very engineering-oriented lab. I would have the opportunity to work with many UMN CEMS graduates on a variety of projects ranging from batteries to coatings to weapons systems to satellites. The work is awesome, the resources are amazing, and the benefits package is great. And, I even kind of like Albuquerque, NM. It’s pretty. I don’t have an offer from them yet or anything, but I’m hoping for the best.
Finally, I have written a proposal for National Research Council postdoctoral fellowship. I spent the better part of the last two weeks learning about the project and writing the proposal. If I got this, I could end up working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Washington, DC. The project deals with determining the interfacial properties (diffusion, surface tensions, etc.) of a emulsion system with surfactants. I’d primarily be doing modeling, with a little bit of experience, too. This is a much more academic-like position, but is very related to my current research. I won’t know about getting this job, however, until late October.
So that’s it. I’m not planning on looking for additional opportunities, because all three of these would be exciting and good for my career. I’m just hoping for the best that in October, I’ll have a few offers to choose from.