The prompt “How I found my postdoc,” on its surface, is a simple one. However, a good bit of deconvolution is needed to trace the series of decisions that ultimately led to my postdoctoral position here at UCSF, all of which were influenced by changing career goals, a desire to explore the country, and perhaps most of all, the “two body problem”. Each of these key influencing factors could be the topic of posts in their own right; however, here I will give the relatively streamlined version of my path to my postdoc, with some nods to these various themes along the way. To begin, we need to go back about 10 years, to my junior year of college. Not to get overly sentimental, but this was when I met my to-be wife, Amy, who was a fellow Biochemistry major and student researcher at our mid-sized liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. At the time, I had spent the prior two years of my studies focused exclusively on gaining admittance to a medical school and eventually becoming a physician. However, over the course of those two years, I had become increasingly involved in the small, but lively undergraduate research program. There were no graduate students at our institution, so both Amy and I led our own projects. Progress was glacial in pace, but I was enamored with the research process. By the time I started gaining clinical experience, my desire to be a physician had slowly waned, and I decided to simultaneously apply to both medical schools and PhD programs. As the application season began in earnest, Amy and I also started dating. Initially, we didn’t know where the relationship was going to lead, but when we each had independently decided that grad school was our likely next step, we started applying to a few common schools. As we began to interview at different institutions, our relationship deepened. In April, we went on a date to Khan’s Mongolian Grill in Minneapolis and had the conversation that had been six months in the making. An interesting aspect of the scientific path is that career-defining decisions often align with the big life decisions. We had to not only decide what graduate school would be best for us, but also if we wanted to embark on a cross-country move with a significant other, all at the ripe age of 22. Ultimately, we decided that we did want to take the plunge together. We chose to expand our horizons beyond the cold upper Midwest and move together to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to pursue our PhDs. Five years later, as our PhDs were winding down and we started to consider life after graduate school, we both knew postdocs were likely for each of us. However, over the course of our graduate studies, our paths had diverged, with Amy leaning towards a career in industry, and I towards the academic journey. This led to a broad, nationwide search for postdocs where we would each be fulfilled. Given the Bay Area’s stature as a biomedical research hub, much of our search focused on labs in this area, and Amy was soon offered an exciting position at Genentech. Unfortunately, there weren’t any research labs working in coagulation, my field of graduate study, which forced me to look for other potential landing spots. I had always had an interest in protein engineering, so my initial search focused on labs in this field. As Amy already had secured a desirable position in the Bay Area, the next few weeks for me were anxiety-ridden as I sifted through hundreds of potential labs. Fortunately, Amy’s new PI was willing to have a couple conversations with me about protein engineering labs he felt would provide a good postdoc experience, which was a tremendous help. As stressful as this period was, it was a blessing in disguise. After reaching out to around a dozen labs, I managed to secure a spot in my current lab doing proteomics and protein engineering, which were two topics I was keen on learning coming out of graduate school. Now, we are both about two and a half years into our postdoctoral journeys. Looking ahead, I am hoping to integrate the new approaches I have learned as a postdoc into a coagulation-focused research program. I’m not sure what our next step together will be, but it will be an exciting one! Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash AUTHOR
Jamie Byrnes
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