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