Our own Natalie LaFranzo, chair of the St Louis Section YCC and Secretary-elect, told her unconventional story of job search success in Chemical & Engineering News (Nov 4, p 46, member credentials required for online access).
Natalie and eight other recently (re)employed chemists related their search strategies in a feature on “determined feats, lucky breaks, and clever strategies.” We’ll let you decide which category best describe Natalie’s tale:
Through the Biotechnology & Life Science Advising (BALSA) Group, a nonprofit consulting group founded and led by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows at Washington University in St. Louis, I had the opportunity to interact with a number of local start-up companies during graduate school. This inspired me to pursue a career in industry.
I liked the idea of working for a small start-up company. However, I knew that finding a job in that kind of firm might be difficult as many start-ups and small companies do not have enough funds to hire a full-time scientist.
I constantly attended networking events and scoured LinkedIn for open positions. In the end, I found the opening for my current position at Cofactor Genomics through a posting on Craigslist!
Craigslist turned out to be a good place to look for a job; many companies post openings there to avoid using more expensive sites. One piece of job-search advice: Don’t discount any venue for job postings. Use every resource available to you!
Natalie LaFranzo is now project scientist at Cofactor Genomics in Saint Louis.
“Computers and the physics of complex biological systems”
