ChemBark

Now that my job search is over, I can share all of the stupid things I did and instances where I completely fouled up. This story is, by far, the most mortifying of all my search-related experiences…

After reviewing the application packages they receive for faculty positions, most schools do a round of phone interviews before deciding on which candidates to invite for on-site interviews. Few things are more exciting in your job search than being asked to schedule a phone interview, because it often represents the first meaningful acknowledgment of receipt (and advancement) of your application package. Most of the applications you submit get sucked into a vacuum where you never hear that you’ve been rejected until six months later.

After submitting an application in early October to a school in the Pacific Northwest, I received a phone call three weeks later from the chairman of the department asking to schedule a Skype interview. Great. This was the first time I’d been asked to do a video interview, but I have a Skype account and a computer with a webcam, so everything was ready to go. While I rarely use Skype, I had used it to talk with a friend in China only two months prior.

On the day of the interview, I changed into a dress shirt in my office, logged on to Skype, and awaited the call. When I answered, my video stream popped up normally for a second, but quickly changed to the following:

While I could see the search committee just fine, they saw me as a sad kitten. I know this because (i) I could see my feed in a small box on my screen, and (ii) the professors on the committee were looking at their screen and chuckling. What’s worse is that every time I talked, the kitten’s mouth would open and close. I was mortified.

I started frantically scrolling down all of the menus in Skype trying to remedy the situation. What the hell was happening? No one else ever uses my computer, and I was certain I hadn’t adjusted any of the settings in Skype. It had worked fine just two months earlier.

After trudging through the first three minutes of the interview while trying to fix the stream—a major distraction—the chairman suggested that I just kill the video and proceed on audio only. I guess it is hard to have a serious discussion about chemistry with a talking kitten?

I thought the rest of the interview went well—really well. I made a call sheet for every phoner that summarized the points I wanted to make, and putting that on the screen allowed me to refocus and get my head back into the game.

When the call was over, I resumed the effort of determining what had happened. A friend on Facebook pointed me to this blog post. It turns out that Skype is not to blame; it is some sort of default setting in the webcam software on Dell computers. Why you would set a kitten avatar as a default is beyond my comprehension, but there you go. It turns out that another user had the same experience just a couple of days later.

I sent a follow up e-mail to the chair thanking him for the interview and sharing what I had discovered about the problem.

Paul,

No worries! It’s an understandable problem and the interview worked well doing it audio only (we still had your Skype profile picture to look at, so it wasn’t actually all that different). It was nice talking to you.

XXXXXX

 

On Oct 30, 2012, at 3:50 PM, “Paul Bracher” <bracher-at-caltech/edu> wrote:

Hi XXXXXX,

I wanted to thank you and the rest of the committee for taking the time to chat earlier today. I had a great time, aside from the mortification associated with my bizarre video feed. It seems that I am not the first person to fall victim to Dell’s webcam software:

http://www.bitbybit.dk/carsten/blog/?p=269

A number of my friends in lab have died laughing, but you have my profound apologies. I would have preferred that you and the committee had been able to see the enthusiasm on my face during our discussion. I remain very excited about the position at —————!

All the best,
Paul “the Kitten” Bracher

The response was gracious, but the damage was done. I think what was especially damaging about the situation was that you have some guy who has put together a decent Web site, runs a blog, and stresses the importance of incorporating new technology into his teaching proposals, yet he can’t figure out how to use Skype properly. In hindsight, I should have done another test run, instead of thinking that my use of Skype two months prior was sufficient.

After radio silence for the next month, I assumed the worst. The stages of the search seem to progress pretty quickly once they’ve started, so when you’ve lost contact for several weeks, it’s usually a bad sign. My suspicions were confirmed in February:

Dear Paul,

It was a pleasure to talk to you a couple months ago. I write to inform you that ————— has offered the Assistant Professor in Organic Chemistry position to another candidate. The decision was very difficult and time consuming (which is why you’re only just hearing back from us), as you were in a field of outstanding candidates.

I would like to convey my appreciation for your interest in —————. Please accept my best wishes for the future development of your career.

Sincerely,

XXXXX
Chair, Search Committee

The cold sting of rejection. Oh well. Who knows what could have been were it not for the kitty interview?

This image of a fish-and-chips shop in Glasgow was kindly sent in by longtime reader/commenter Eugene. (Thanks!)

While “organic” oil is great, a silicone oil might help control customers’ gas.

I wonder if this restaurant is owned by the same people as the Boston dry cleaners boasting about their “organic” solvents?

Yes, you read that title correctly: Jean-Luc Picard, the greatest starship captain of all-time, failed organic chemistry at Starfleet Academy. In his defense, it was probably less to do with intelligence and more to do with being distracted:

I pulled that video clip so I can show it to my students during our opening lecture. It should go well with the “How to Win Orgo” handout.

Update (5/1): Thanks to a tip in the comments from “bad wolf”, I went and pulled a clip from Star Trek: Generations where it is revealed that one of Picard’s ancestors won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. It makes his failure in orgo all the more astonishing.

The big news on Friday was that a California judge denied UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran’s motion to dismiss or reduce the charges against him relating to the death of Sheri Sangji in a tragic tert-butyllithium accident in Harran’s lab. C&EN and the LA Times both had reporters in the courtroom. Chemjobber and Jyllian Kemsley are curating lists of links.

I’ve weighed in on the subject before, and my views have not changed. There is plenty of blame to go around. Should Sangji have taken more precautions in running her experiment, the most important of which would have been wearing a lab coat? Certainly. She had to have known better, but she paid the ultimate price. Now, it’s past time to decide what responsibility Harran bears in the accident. I think the judge made the right decision in allowing the case to go to trial, and unless the sides strike a plea bargain, a jury will now decide if Harran broke the law. I don’t like Professor Harran’s chances in front of a jury. While most people who’ve been in grad school may recognize the lax oversight by Harran as “normal”, that doesn’t make it legal.

And while Harran faces the possibility of 4.5 years in prison, I still don’t think a prison sentence is warranted should Harran be convicted. The most effective and relevant punishment would be something that specifically limits Harran’s ability to run a laboratory. What I also find distressing is UCLA’s “unwavering” support of Harran. (Side note: Does that include Harran’s claim that UCLA never trained him properly?) UCLA is sending a bad message here; schools should make a point of requiring that professors take their responsibilities in managing labs and training students more seriously.

It looks like someone is using the deadly nerve agent sarin in the ongoing civil war in Syria, which may very well draw the United States into the conflict. I did a project on sarin for a class in my sophomore year of college at NYU. Here is the handout I prepared to accompany my talk.

Looking back on the document, a few things stand out:

1. It’s amazing how simple of a compound sarin is.

2. I had bizarre taste in fonts.

3. I’d forgotten I had written about Osama bin Laden a full year before the attacks on 9-11-01.

This week, Just Like Cooking has been hosting the Chemistry at the Movies blog carnival. I’m slipping in my contribution just under the wire…

I don’t especially care for the movies, but I’ve been given special dispensation by See Arr Oh to discuss chemistry in television, instead. The West Wing is my second-favorite fictional TV series of all-time (after Star Trek: The Next Generation), and I was excited when an episode in the third season prominently featured the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis.

Here is but one clip of the many times the episode referenced Mullis, who never appeared on camera. The Bartlet White House was hosting a dinner for Nobel Laureates, and Press Secretary C.J. Cregg was stressing about sitting next to Mullis:

I suppose the clip doesn’t make chemists look terribly great. It certainly highlights the difficulties we’ve had interacting with the general public, but I always get a kick out of seeing “real” chemistry and chemists in pop culture. And while Jean-Luc Picard failed organic chemistry, it seems like President Bartlet has some technical skills regarding gen chem.

Kary Mullis is just such an interesting guy. On one hand, you have his absolutely brilliant development of PCR. The technique was revolutionary, yet extraordinarily straightforward—one of those things that other scientists curse themselves over not having thought of first. But Mullis also has a weird side. He believes HIV does not cause AIDS (video), and he claims to have once engaged in conversation with a fluorescent raccoon. The autobiography he submitted to the Nobel Foundation is also very odd. At times, it reads like the narration to Stand By Me:

We tortured the cows. We sliced apples and slipped them onto the electric fence that contained them in the newer parts of the pasture. Cows like apples and they kept trying. We watched the chickens pecking at the black mud around their chicken house. We heard the squeal of young pigs being castrated by my grandfather and the veterinarian, but we weren’t allowed to watch.

When my great-grandmother died she was almost a hundred and we were glad to see her go because every time she would come over to my grandmother’s house, she would try to kiss all of us. She looked almost a hundred and, heartless, cruel, mindless little children that we were, she repulsed us. She grabbed us anyway and kissed us until she was through. They put her body in a metal casket with gauzy curtains and left it in the living room near the grandfather’s clock, which announced the hours with a number of resonant bongs and marked the half-hours with a single chilling tone. Her body was there for three days until the service on Sunday at Mt Zion Baptist Church. We dared each other to go in and look at her. The adults were unaffected and took their regular meals right in the next room. We found it difficult to sleep. The clock seemed more alive than usual.

You’ve got to read the full thing. It is short, which is what makes the above passages so weird. It’s not like I pulled them from a 300-page book. Mullis added an addendum to his autobiography in 1999:

Addendum, August 1999

And then early in the spring of 1997 there was Nancy and my whole heart began to unfold and everything else before seemed like a long dream from which I had awakened at last. Married: Nancy Lier Cosgrove, San Francisco, CA March 21, 1998.

And here’s where I can attest that Mullis is indeed an odd creature. In 1998, I was invited to Jackson Hole, Wyoming for the American Academy of Achievement‘s annual banquet. They invite high schoolers who’ve done well in a variety of competitions to attend their annual celebration to induct more ridiculously famous achievers into their ranks. The whole experience was surreal. On the first night, I sat ten feet from Puff Daddy as he talked to the audience about stowing-away on Amtrak trains to get to recording studios when he was starting out. In a different session, I sat between the owner of the company that made Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and George Lucas. Perhaps experiencing sensory overload, I skipped out on a subsequent session to sit on a couch in the lobby of the main lodge that overlooked the Grand Teton Mountains. While minding my own business, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and some other guy walked up, said hello, then sat down on the couch on the other side of the coffee table. Like I said, surreal.

What does all of this have to do with Kary Mullis? Well, he was there too. I had already fallen in love with chemistry as a high schooler, so I knew who Mullis was and I kept my eyes peeled for him and other Nobel laureates. As it turned out, Mullis was not too hard to spot, since he was constantly full-on making out with his new wife. It was unreal…in the hallway, at dinner, in the audience at the sessions. In a room packed with high schoolers, Mullis was the one who stood out for excessive amorous behavior.

I guess inventing PCR entitles you to a bit of PDA?