Recovery of a Mad Scientist: A Laid-Off Chemist Seeks a New Career

For twenty-five years I worked as a research scientist in several chemistry laboratories, mostly for big pharmaceutical companies.  One year ago, in spite of a career of solid contributions and positive annual performance reviews, I was laid off.  My shock and anger at losing my job, actually my second such layoff in six years, transformed normally mild-mannered me into a mad scientist.  An angry, mad scientist to be again pounding the street looking for a new chemistry job where I could apply my quarter-century of skills and experience toward the improvement of the human condition.  Unfortunately, over the past year, and with U.S. pharmaceutical and chemistry employers still announcing more job layoffs as far as the eye can see, no suitable jobs existed or likely will exist any time soon.

The net result is that I’m no longer a mad scientist, now I’m just mad.  Angry that chemistry as a desirable, rewarding profession is now essentially dead.  Incredulous that chemistry has been largely abandoned by corporate America.  Now it’s time for me to move on to Plan B, to find a new profession, and hopefully also to get rid of this pent-up anger.

As I’ve thought about pursuing an alternate career, I realized that I needed to heed the advice that I had been giving my two daughters as they’ve progressed through high school and college.  Words of wisdom like:  (a) find a job that you like, that makes you happy, and that you’ll enjoy doing;  (b) stay away from anything that can be outsourced overseas;  (c) target a job that pays well enough to live comfortably;  (d) identify a profession currently in demand and likely to remain in demand;  and (e) ideally, find something that addresses the major unmet needs and issues of this country and the world.

Having pondered those words of career wisdom, I reached the obvious conclusion that advice is easy to give, but not so easy to put into practice. Particularly for someone already fifty years old and lacking the proper credentials for any new job besides in chemistry.

In this era practically every attractive career has a fairly rigid path which must be followed before acceptance and being hired.  Typically, the path includes a college degree in that field, preferably a graduate degree in that field, and practical experience.  In other words, precisely all the things that I have already accomplished in chemistry.  Do I really want or need to chuck out chemistry and start all over again?

The standard answer would be yes, to go back to school and start over in a new field, gaining the necessary credentials needed for entry into a new career.  Looking back, however, my getting the necessary education and training in chemistry was an arduous eight-year process to my B.S. and Ph.D. degrees, and not something I care to repeat in another area.  Plus, I never dreamed that chemistry would become a dying profession, as it has.  What luck or confidence would I have picking a new career field for myself and starting all over now?

The bottom line is that no, I’m not going back to school to start over.  I need to take advantage of what I have already gained as a career scientist:  the ability to examine and make sense of information, to think logically, to formulate ideas, to solve problems, to make plans, and to execute them to reach a goal.  My mad scientist brain is full of random ideas, observations, and experiences from my fifty years on this earth.  I’ve been told that I have a dry, rather twisted sense of humor as well.  Maybe I can put these factors together in a useful way.

So my Plan B now looks like this:  to share my life’s worth of miscellany that might prove to be educational, entertaining, and/or humorous.  This goal I hope to accomplish in the time-honored way, by putting pen to paper and hoping that somebody is willing to pay for and read it.  Or in this day and age, to type on a computer, post it on the internet, and hope for Google hits to lead to fame and fortune.

P.S.  Help me recover from mad ex-scientist to happy, successful writer by checking out my published essays on garyacainphd.com.