Chapter 21
Young Scientists without Borders
Downloaded by UNIV OF ROCHESTER on June 23, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): March 10, 2014 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2014-1157.ch021
Jens Breffke* Department of Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, United States *E-mail:
[email protected] In today’s global chemistry enterprise it is important for young scientists to have not just the best scientific skills but also the soft skills that gives them the advantage over their competing job seekers and coworkers. Mastering team and project management today also requires the ability to deal with ethnic diversity across cultural values and language barriers. Therefore the need for opportunities for young scientists to experience diversity becomes a key element of success. There are exchange scholar programs run by governmental institutions. In addition, scientific non-profit organizations with their younger member committees can often provide additional opportunities very effectively. The author currently presides the International Activities Work Group of the ACS Younger Chemists Committee. A native of Germany, he was chair of the German JungChemikerForum of the German Chemical Society. He promoted the idea and founded in 2007 the European Younger Chemists Network (EYCN) of EuCheMS. EYCN today is an association of 25 European younger chemist divisions within their societies, representing more than 50,000 younger chemists.
The globalization of the world’s leading industries is well underway, and by 2025 most countries will be working intertwined to perform research, manufacture products, and distribute those products to consumers around the world. The chemical industry is one of these market segments where globalization has produced great rewards with cheaper products and innovative technologies
© 2014 American Chemical Society Cheng et al.; Vision 2025: How To Succeed in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
Downloaded by UNIV OF ROCHESTER on June 23, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): March 10, 2014 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2014-1157.ch021
incorporated into sophisticated, high-tech products. This trend will continue which demands additional and inevitable skills from the people working in this field. The working environment becomes more and more diverse with respect to culture, language, and religion. With international colleagues entering your home workforce brings challenges, but the chances that you already are or will be the foreigner yourself in someone else’s country are getting higher. During my tenure as chair of the German JungChemikerForum (JCF) of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh) in 2006/07, I was a student at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Germany working in a research group side by side with people from Russia, Spain, India, Iran, and China. I found that each nationality has its own humor, habits, principles and predominant religions. These are each important to recognize and embrace. For instance, if you are not familiar with other religion’s practices, it may be surprising to find your Muslim co-worker praying inside the lab behind the bench on the floor in the middle of day on a small carpet. I was always fascinated by these kinds of things that you just had never seen or experienced before. At this time in my studies, I had the great pleasure to invite my counterparts from other European chemical societies to come to Berlin to work out the bylaws for the foundation of the European Young Chemists’ Network within the European Association of Chemical and Molecular Sciences (EuCheMS). Together with my Hungarian fellow Csaba Janáky, then student at the University of Szeged, we worked at this meeting to bring all people to an agreement that satisfied all. Thirteen societies were represented by about 20 delegates that had mostly never seen or even really talked to each other. Looking back today on why this meeting was a success despite the tremendous challenges in moderating such a group, then because we were able to think beyond what we were personally used to and believed to be right and good and to respect what other people had to say. This perspective goes along with the patience to listen to someone who doesn’t speak the meeting language very well. Today EYCN works for the benefits and interest of more than 300,000 younger chemists in more than 20 societies in Europe. This is possible only because of the attitudes of respect and openness on the part of the leaders involved. Since 2001, the German Chemical Society (GDCh) has had an ongoing exchange program with the Northeastern Section of ACS (NESACS) where younger chemists travel to an international conference in the respective other country. As a selected delegate I was granted the opportunity to attend the ACS National Meeting in Boston in August of 2007. Having worked with chemical societies in Europe and their conferences it was a completely new experience seeing the scale of operation of the American Chemical Society. This exchange program includes participation at a national or regional meeting and is followed by a professional as well as a social program. Visiting large pharmaceutical companies and labs at Harvard and MIT in combination with a trip to Cape Cod left impressions for a lifetime. After returning to Germany I was never able to completely let go of the idea of potentially pursuing a PhD career in the USA. But the truth is I wasn’t sure if I could really handle it. Am I good enough? Would anyone in the States be willing to take me as a graduate student? Could I handle leaving my home country for an 216 Cheng et al.; Vision 2025: How To Succeed in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
Downloaded by UNIV OF ROCHESTER on June 23, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): March 10, 2014 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2014-1157.ch021
undetermined amount of time? Maybe I would never come back!? Even though I enjoy and embrace diversity I was not free of doubt. My mind said it would be great but my heart had doubts. I talked with my research mentor, who was from Spain, and he offered to connect me to his old PI and in order for me to possibly go abroad for three months to Spain. What sounded like a great idea turned out being more involved than I initially anticipated. Fortunately, I was able to get a Leonardo-da-Vinci II Fellowship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) that made it affordable – and it was certainly a big improvement to my CV. The most distinct experience I had by going to the University of Santiago de Compostela in the northwest of Spain was something I didn’t quite expect: People there barely spoke any English – and I didn’t speak any Spanish. I thought that in a college town people would easily speak English but I was mistaken. During this one semester in Spain I acquired a basic knowledge of the language without attending any actual classes. The take-home message for me was this: Even though I didn’t speak the language I had a great time and was able to do some interesting science even though the lab I worked in was not equipped as well as I was used from Berlin. Back in Germany I knew I was able to handle being long distances from friends and family, the change in language, and being able to adapt to a new environment. That being said I decided to send out applications to professors in the United States for whom I wanted to do research to get my PhD. That would have been the way to go if you would want to get into a research group in Germany. However, something that I was not aware of is that in the US you have enrollment into graduate school generally only for the fall semester and that the GRE test and, for foreigners, an additional TOEFL test are required. My anecdote to the GRE General: The verbal part is meant to challenge native speaker so it seems unrealistic that a non-native speaker could ace it, but that’s why you have to take the additional TOEFL test to somehow make up for that. I do agree though that I should be able to master the math part as someone who is in the STEM sciences. However, I performed only moderately on that part and here is why: I am scientist. We work based on the SI unit system. The GRE math part is asking you: “You have a bathroom that is 5x7 ft. Your tiles are 11x11 in. How many tiles do you need to cover your bathroom floor?” I was honestly not prepared for that kind of question. Not that I could not have answered the actual geometry question but the conversion from foot to inch was unknown to me – at the time. Later in an interview with graduate schools I was asked why they should accept me with such a poor performance in math according to the GRE math test. Fortunately, after I told this anecdote to the committee they granted my application while laughing loudly. But that story could have gone poorly for me, too. Despite all the administrative challenges I got lucky by writing a professor at Penn State who I knew from a visit at the Humboldt University a year earlier and who did similar research to what I worked on. Thirty-six hours after I sent him my application by email he replied positively to my request. Due to the different timeline of German semesters I was not able to get into the graduate program for fall of 2008; however, my new PI made it possible for me to be admitted for the spring semester of 2009 which is when I started graduate school at the Pennsylvania State University. Two major problems occurred with respect to 217 Cheng et al.; Vision 2025: How To Succeed in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
Downloaded by UNIV OF ROCHESTER on June 23, 2017 | http://pubs.acs.org Publication Date (Web): March 10, 2014 | doi: 10.1021/bk-2014-1157.ch021
the transferability of my German Diplom degree to the US. The German Diplom Degree is usually a 6-year program and generally considered Masters-equivalent. However, my transcripts were available in German only and my program didn’t use the credit point system. As result no US university would have accepted my degree as a Masters equivalent degree. This problem is one of the major reasons why going abroad was not very appealing to Germans at the time. A lot has happened since then in the German educational system and today programs do have English syllabi and provide a credit point scores. Starting over again and having to take classes for one more year is certainly not appealing, but one has to keep the bigger picture in mind. After finishing my involvement in the JCF and EYCN I focused on getting settled in the United States. Not long after I arrived at Penn State I received a message from a former chair of the ACS Younger Chemists Committee, Melissa Hellman. We met in 2008 at the EYCN Delegate Assembly in Madrid, Spain. We had invited an YCC representative to join our meeting and offered affiliation to establish long term communication channels. In this message she encouraged me to submit my resume to the ACS committee for appointment. This was an opportunity I couldn’t let pass. My appointment came right away for January of 2010. Mick Hurrey, then the chair of YCC, asked me to take initiative on some international programming for the upcoming International Year of Chemistry (IYC) 2011. Two events were successfully organized. First, we coordinated a symposium at the National Meeting in Anaheim in April 2011 in which speakers from North America and Europe presented remotely to talk about different graduate school opportunities in different countries. In this symposium it was important to me that the presenters explicitly addressed degree transferability and other administrative obstacles of which one should be aware. Second – because I am a child of the program by NESACS and GDCh – I proposed that YCC launch an exchange program based on the same template. This was accomplished, and we had six European younger chemists and a representative from EYCN come to the ACS National Meeting in Denver. This pilot project required substantial financial resources and we were able to acquire all funding necessary to make it happen. With the support of the ACS Denver local section, European students from Finland, Russia, Spain, Germany and Austria had similar positive experiences like what I experienced just a few years earlier. Even past IYC 2011 YCC was able to continue the true spirit of the exchange program and US students went in 2012 to the European Chemistry Congress in Prague, Czech Republic. Summarizing, certainly not all events went smoothly and did not just happen. But this is what it is about: You grow with the challenges – not with the easy parts in life. I encourage everyone to look for opportunities and make them happen. Rarely these opportunities will come to you by the themselves or will reveal as such easily. In order to succeed you may have to accept set backs in the beginning. In ancient Rome they labeled maps with “hic sunt leones” (here are lions) in areas that were unknown. The bottom line is globalization is already here and there is no way back. Globalization can be embraced and should be embraced – not feared. One needs to be open minded to the things we don’t know and are not used to even though they may be strange to us. 218 Cheng et al.; Vision 2025: How To Succeed in the Global Chemistry Enterprise ACS Symposium Series; American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 2014.
