Coming into this venture I was thinking “Oh God, Kansas.” Images of the last two presidential elections and the rising American Theocracy come racing through my head. I had visions of a church on every corner and people trying to convert me a every turn. Vast hilly plans of good ignorant folk.
Okay that last bit was hyperbole. But, I was expecting it to be relatively dull with a strong conservative bent. In some respects I was proven wrong. The city I would be living in is Lawrence, home of Kansas University. Everybody told me, even the guy I was chatting with on the way to the airport, that it was a lovely little town. They were right. I spend about 6 hours driving and walking around down, had dinner (with a very nice little IPA), lunch, and breakfast, and found it to be very pleasant.
I took some pictures if you are interested.
Being in Boston for the last 9 years I have a slanted perspective of what a North American city should offer. There’s a ridiculous amount of culture in Boston. In some of our planning talks for my choir the board members talking about “competition” with other choirs for a audience. They are right in Boston along there are at least 20-30 different choirs of various types and sizes.
A place the size of Lawrence (maybe about 100,000 people) will not be able to support what a metro area of 2.3 million can. So, they just have one or two of everything and it might not be the best. I’m not sure if I will be having much sushi in Lawrence if I end up moving there. The downtown are is a about 5 blocks long and maybe 2 streets wide, small. But all but 3 or so store fronts are occupied and business looked good. Most of the places are local with a few stores that seemed to be higher end or west coast chains that I had not heard of. The Starbucks, Chicos, Abercombie and Fitch, Cold Stone Creamery, and Gap were actually a clustered at one end of the downtown shopping area. Yes, my heart was just a bit warmed that they were up at the low traffic part of the district. My hiking needs might be fulfilled by the near by Clinton Lake.
Despite all of this I would not even be considering this place if the the professional opportunity weren’t so strong. I interview at the lab of Christian Schöneich in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. His back ground is in synthetic chemistry and he has migrated to strong interests in radical chemistry on proteins and proteomics. He as been a close collaborator with my current graduate advisor, Richard Cohen, for about eight years. When you have this type of connection with a lab you know immediately if they are interesting in having you come work for them.
I fit well with the people in Christian’s lab and my knowledge base and experience matched there needs. One of Christian’s post-doc is leaving in the Fall and he needs a replacement. He is in charge of the nano-LC system and their Finnigan Deca and Deca Classic systems. I’m know a big fan of ion traps, but they do get the job done and are very robust pieces of equipment. If I were to decide to come I would be trained on those instruments and in turn would be responsible. Christian and I were also discussing potential projects one is a very good idea and might answer a question that has been nagging me for about 3 years. Most people I talked to there thought that I would be a good fit and like I said, it would be a good move professionally.
Do I really want to move to Lawrence? In short, no. I rather stay in Boston. Could I live there for two or three years? Yes. Believe me there are worse places to be. Any suburb in Maryland or New Jersey for instance. Lawrence is not a bad place to live. It’s much cheaper than Boston. Rent is about half that of Boston rates and there’s a chance that I could even buy something. Christian claimed that you could live a very comfortable living on about $1,000/month. I believe him. I bet I could save 40-50% of my income and use that to buy a property after I am done with my appointment.
For my career I don’t know if I want to stay in this area of chemistry and biology, but I can always cross over at a later point. Cathy Costello made the point to me that Christian’s work does is very close to my current work and that I could get some papers out quickly. If you look on PubMed you’ll see that I don’t currently have any first author papers. Working in this lab will also allow me to maintain connections with my current boss. There’s a lot of potential joint projects there. With the direction Boston University Medical is going that is also not a bad place to maintain contact if I decide not to go into industry. I could be at a small college somewhere yet.
Christian wants an answer by the end of April, a reasonable request considering that one of his post-docs is leaving in the Fall. He’ll be a tough guy to “replace,” but I’m a quick study when it comes to instrumentation and method development. I need to look around still and visit a few other sites. Coming back though I can see that I will most likely choose to move to the middle of the country.
