Joining a Trend, Scientists Increasingly Say 'Call My Agent'

摘要

When cell biologist David Voehringer finished his postdoc in the Stanford University laboratory of Leonard Herzenberg, he faced a chasm in his career. Ready to strike out on his own, Voehringer drew up a list of contacts and made inquiries. But the market in 2001 was crashing, and highly qualified candidates like him had flooded it with resumes. He recalls the search for an independent job as "really the first time that a lot of us are faced with chronic rejection." But Voehringer did get an encouraging call―from a representative at Lab Support, a Calabasas, California-based agency that places scientific personnel in temporary assignments. Would Voehringer be interested in a 3-month stint at a biotech company called Sugen, a South San Francisco firm specializing in signal trans-duction research? It wasn't exactly what Voehringer was looking for, but he took the job anyway. He picked up industry experience and ultimately landed a permanent position at Cell Biosciences, a biotech company based in nearby Palo Alto.