EDITORIAL
Some Remarks about Students and Employees The ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry has served its members especially well in recent issues of its "DAC Newsletter." The most recent newsletter contained several commentaries by industrial analytical chemists on the metamorphosis that they undergo from being in an academic environment to an industrial one. The descriptions of the processes of new employee training and adaptation are impressive and thought-provoking, revealing many facts and nuances of the process that are well understood by our industrial colleagues. The commentaries should be informative reading both for graduate students still in the process of obtaining their degrees and for professors. Parts of the commentaries point out differences between the academic environment of a graduate student and that of the new industrial employee. I would like to add a few observations along those lines. Many of the academic-industrial differences flow, I think, from an essentially intrinsic factor: the particular difference between the words student and employee. The business of students is to study and learn and, at the graduate level, to demonstrate a capacity for independent investigation and original thinking. The business of an employee is to act as part of a team, in support of the objectives and interests—both intellectual and commercial—of the company or institutional employer. These statements oversimplify mat-
ters, of course; graduate research projects very often require collaboration (a word used in academia more often than team) among students, and teams of industrial scientists will surely flounder if there is no capacity for independent thinking and originality among their members. But student and employee nonetheless are intrinsically different states of life, and manifestations of that—for example, differences in time pressure, goalsetting, individual focus—are described in the commentaries. Other differences between student and employee life clearly are not intrinsic and exist because of the nature of academic versus industrial organizations. In the industrial world, these differences would include a more formal approach to laboratory safety, greater availability of interdisciplinary human and library resources (because industrial teams often cut across disciplinary lines), a greater need for cooperative interpersonal relations (e.g., in providing analytical services and supervising other laboratory workers), and a more frequent need to simultaneously confront more than one project. Academic institutions would benefit, as would their students, if they followed industry's lead and paid more attention to factors such as these.
ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 64, NO. 19, OCTOBER 1, 1992 · 913 A
