Making Your Bioinformatics Employment Application Sing

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Making Your Bioinformatics Employment Application
Sing One Industry Perspective
Dec 2006
For further information, please contact
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SAIC Overview

• Science Applications International Corporation
• Rated by trade publications as one of the
  top-four worldwide providers of professional
  services
• Innovative science, technology, and engineering
  solutions tocomplex problems
• Systems integration, design, and deployment
• Fast facts
• 8 billion annual revenues, 43,000 employees
• 60 national defense
• 20 applied research, primarily engineering
  disciplines
• 2 bio-research (primarily National Cancer
  Institute/Frederick)
• 0.5 bioinformatics
• San Diego CA-based, with offices in all fifty
  states international offices in more than two
  dozen countries

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Some Questions We Are Asked

• No more than 10 years from now, how can we reduce
  the time from conception-to-market for new drugs
  from 10, to 5, years?
• Weve deployed a drug that has adverse affects in
  0.5 of the population and litigation is eating
  us alive. Within 6 months, we need to know how
  to inexpensively identify the adversely affected
  population else, we will have to pull the drug
  from the market. And, how do we avoid these
  problems in the future?
• We need a system that analyzes 106 whole-cell
  images/day and identifies those that contain
  company-proprietary features with no more than a
  0.05 false-positive rate and a 0.01
  false-negative rate.
• We want to deploy a new cancer-diagnostic system
  as a national screen, but size of the truth- data
  set we have is three orders of magnitude too
  small to allow us to determine whether the
  false-positive and false-negative rates are
  acceptable for that purpose. What can we do?
• We are confronted with a pathogen that evolves
  drug-resistance faster than conventional
  (wet-chem) research methods can produce
  effective drugs against it. What should we do?
• How can we distinguish a naturally occurring,
  from a man-made, distribution of pathogens in a
  highly contaminated environment in less than an
  hour?
• We are seeing a slightly unusual distribution of
  flu-like symptoms on the battlefield. Is this
  evidence of a biological weapon attack?
• Why should I pay employees of your company more
  than universities pay postdocs?

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Some Challenges to Educators and Job Applicants
in Approaching For-Profit Organizations

• The first person to see your application is
  likely to
• promote your materials only if they pass a
  keyword-matching test
• spend about one minute reading it
• A year is eternity, and results are everything,
  in the for-profit world
• Bioinformatics is likely to be better funded in
  bio-defense applications than elsewhere in
  industry over the next five years
• Industrial jobs rarely look like a continuation
  of graduate research
• Being able to solve problems in more than one
  application discipline amplifies your
  attractiveness. Example software engineering
  experience is always a plus

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Requirements, requirements, requirements

• Your research deserves a Nobel, but your
  prospective employer cares only about how you
  meet his/her requirements
• The mapping from your credentials to the job
  requirements has to be made so obvious that even
  a golden retriever could follow it

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Targeting

• Learn what you can about your prospective
  employer weave that knowledge into your
  application
• If you know someone in the organization to which
  you are applying who is closely connected to the
  job posting, send a separate copy of your
  application to them

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Recommended cover letter structure (limit to one
page)

• First paragraph (1 sentence) state that you are
  applying for a specific position
• Second paragraph (5 sentences) a summary of how
  your work experience meets the specific job
  requirements. Boldface requirements keywords from
  the job posting
• Third paragraph
• Your availability and contact information
• I am looking forward to discussing how I can
  help meet your business objectives

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Recommended resume structure(limit to 3 pages)

• Your name and contact information
• Education summary (degrees, dates, institutions)
• Experience summary (one paragraph, no more than
  10 lines, boldfacing the requirements keywords
  in the job posting). Always emphasize that you
• are results-oriented
• have strong communication skills
• are a team player
• are a problem-solver, whatever the application
• Employment history (3 lines per position
  boldface requirements keywords from the job
  posting)
• Publications
• full citations if fewer than 5
• summarize by subject if 5 note complete list
  available on request
• Computer, OS, and programming language
  proficiency
• Two personal references, including phone numbers