Random occurrence in lab today got me reminiscing. We have a UPLC/MS-MS instrument (triple quad) sitting on one of those nice combination pump enclosure/instrument benches. The pump enclosure part pretty much silences the noise from the rough pump (which for some damned reason is a friggin' monster on this instrument) and keeps everything OSHA-compliant as far as 8 hour noise exposure. Now, this enclosure has a fan to keep the pump cool and, well, the fan failed.
In grad school, this would have meant scrounging a fan up from some closet somewhere, and if that failed, setting a box fan near it until a fan from cheapasscrap.com came in (and inevitably failed 2 weeks after the 60 day warranty). This would be an unacceptable delay in productivity, and since the OSHA noise requirements don't count in an academic lab, we just left the pumps out in the open. Which gets to the second part of today's tale. To keep the pump happy we propped the door to the enclosure open, and people kept closing it because of the noise. The LC/MS scientist eventually had to put a note on the door. It made me think back to the days when we shut down all the pumps (due to planned power outage or maintenance) and how much silence there was. It also made me remember the constant headaches and general edginess associated with that type of sound exposure. It also brings back the memory of observing zero/first years when they first entered the lab and saw/heard what lengths one must go to in order to maintain that amount of truly research grade mass spectrometers. Oh the power of those instruments, how I wish I still had some time on those beasts of Purdue.
One of the UG interns accidentally threw me into the breach today. I'm half-assed trained on one of the normal HPLC's, but even though it's ancient by industry standards (I think it's 2006ish), it's new compared to what I've used (I used the 2003 version of it with 2001 software at Dow, and a completely different brand on 1999 software at Purdue). So, I can run it, I can keep it alive, but I fumble around on the software pretty hardcore. Well, the intern came by asking where the column for rosemary analysis, I dig it out and hand it over and she just kinda stared at me. Turns out by "where's my column" she really meant "I've never set up any of this before." Long story short, nothing blew up, samples were run and I learned a lot about the software under a somewhat stressful situation. Nothing worse than the n00b Ph.D. struggling to help the undergrad, worse yet is I realized how far behind the software I am. At least my chromatography tricks are still current, I guess that's the whole point of the degree. The Science is the hard part, the software is just seat time.
Industry definitely tests your multitaskability (my word, patent pending). But I like that challenge.
-J
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Catching a breather.
Yeah, it's been a little while. Things have been crazy on a whole bunch of different levels recently, hopefully I'll get the hang of this.
Graduate school really does struggle to even remotely prepare a chemist for industrial life. Back in Dec. I was putting together a proposal to buy a couple spectrometers for my projects, and was told by the company I had 2.5 weeks to get a purchase order in to get the massive end of year savings. Well, my project is going to show up on the end of year expenditures as a significant figure, so 30% savings was attractive to the terrified first year employee. Well, to get the officers and the capital equipment committee to sign off on it I had to convince them. This convincing was two-fold. First, I needed to put together slides for a 5-10 min presentation to the board. Plus, I had to hand them to the CTO so he could present them. Second, I needed to calculate an IRR. Don't know what that is? It's an internal rate of return, basically it evaluates what the equivalent return on (for us) a 7yr basis for the expenditure. These are great for proposals that are going to make money (for example, buying a bigger pump for a vacuum distillation column is easy), however my project is one that saves QC time. This makes things harder because basically what I'm saying is that I can take X%/yr of workload off of QC, which means that when the company grows at Y% (Y>X), we won't become overwhelmed. Bad things happen when QC can't keep up with production, and increasing QC throughput is expensive.
Grad. school never prepared me for an IRR, because that kind of thing isn't a worry in basic research. The IRR of federally funded grants in Chemistry nationwide is probably -50%...for every dollar the federal gov't spends $0.50 of it is lost on the scale of 7 years. Now, it's still a good investment, because what you're generating is Ph.D.s and we will end up making money for the government over our careers. Another example of where IRR's shouldn't be applied (but finance people will try to apply them everywhere).
Now, a skill I learned in grad school that is winning the video game so far is reading. To people still in grad school, read read read. That's the skill that's doing the most for me right now. Read journals, find your favorites, and read them again. My job has basically developed into three priorities 1.) Process Analytical Technology, 2.) New method exploration and 3.) Random project bitch. That number 2 is basically continuing to read separation and MS journals along with ACHEM to try to see what's being developed. Ironically, number 3 may see my name on a patent application, it's funny how things filter out.
It's strangely rewarding working for such a small company (funny when a touch over 100M revenue is small). Work that my tiny little Analytical group is involved with has significant impacts on the entire company's bottom line. A $150k project is all of a sudden big friggin' news around here, unlike Dow or Merck where it was simply a rounding error. Now, I'll never be on a $1B patent here, but there's plenty of time for that in the future.
-J
Graduate school really does struggle to even remotely prepare a chemist for industrial life. Back in Dec. I was putting together a proposal to buy a couple spectrometers for my projects, and was told by the company I had 2.5 weeks to get a purchase order in to get the massive end of year savings. Well, my project is going to show up on the end of year expenditures as a significant figure, so 30% savings was attractive to the terrified first year employee. Well, to get the officers and the capital equipment committee to sign off on it I had to convince them. This convincing was two-fold. First, I needed to put together slides for a 5-10 min presentation to the board. Plus, I had to hand them to the CTO so he could present them. Second, I needed to calculate an IRR. Don't know what that is? It's an internal rate of return, basically it evaluates what the equivalent return on (for us) a 7yr basis for the expenditure. These are great for proposals that are going to make money (for example, buying a bigger pump for a vacuum distillation column is easy), however my project is one that saves QC time. This makes things harder because basically what I'm saying is that I can take X%/yr of workload off of QC, which means that when the company grows at Y% (Y>X), we won't become overwhelmed. Bad things happen when QC can't keep up with production, and increasing QC throughput is expensive.
Grad. school never prepared me for an IRR, because that kind of thing isn't a worry in basic research. The IRR of federally funded grants in Chemistry nationwide is probably -50%...for every dollar the federal gov't spends $0.50 of it is lost on the scale of 7 years. Now, it's still a good investment, because what you're generating is Ph.D.s and we will end up making money for the government over our careers. Another example of where IRR's shouldn't be applied (but finance people will try to apply them everywhere).
Now, a skill I learned in grad school that is winning the video game so far is reading. To people still in grad school, read read read. That's the skill that's doing the most for me right now. Read journals, find your favorites, and read them again. My job has basically developed into three priorities 1.) Process Analytical Technology, 2.) New method exploration and 3.) Random project bitch. That number 2 is basically continuing to read separation and MS journals along with ACHEM to try to see what's being developed. Ironically, number 3 may see my name on a patent application, it's funny how things filter out.
It's strangely rewarding working for such a small company (funny when a touch over 100M revenue is small). Work that my tiny little Analytical group is involved with has significant impacts on the entire company's bottom line. A $150k project is all of a sudden big friggin' news around here, unlike Dow or Merck where it was simply a rounding error. Now, I'll never be on a $1B patent here, but there's plenty of time for that in the future.
-J
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)