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Interview
with Andy Farr Andy Farr, Research Laboratory Manager at the
University of Washington, has a lot of contacts. When he needs to hire
a staff person, he tends to network around for a personal referral of
a candidate with the “right stuff.” But of his most recent hire, James Dooley, originally an intern from Shoreline Community College’s Biotechnology Specialist Program, Andy says, “James has turned out to be absolutely fantastic. After beginning as a Staff member, he’s now being reclassified as a Research Scientist. He’s now considered Professional Staff, which means he can get merit raises and has much more job security. He’s more involved in what we do than just a set of hands. In fact, we’ve had four interns from Shoreline and they’ve all been great. Some of them were also placed in permanent positions here at the University after their internships. “Job candidates must have some critical skills like math and must know how to make up solutions and dilutions, do calculations, know some good tissue culture techniques, how to “think sterile” and must understand why certain techniques are done the way they’re done. They must have the principles down and understand the rationale of their actions. They should know what the objective of the assay is and what they’re measuring and what each step is supposed to do. They need to know how to work with controls to test each of these steps independently to tell where in the process a problem occurred and at what point the test went wrong. “A two-year Biotechnology program graduate like James is more valuable than someone who has a four-year degree in Biology but doesn’t have the hands-on experience. Even without formal biology training, James thinks about results and asks questions and doesn’t just hand over data without thinking about what it means. I have a small lab so I put a lot of responsibility on each person working there. James takes on a lot of it, whereas others have not been willing to take on that level of responsibility. “After attending the two -year Shoreline program, James came into the lab with a sense of how things work. It was easy to build on his general understanding of the concepts, since he fully understood what he was doing and why.” Andy looks to the Northwest Biotechnology/Biomedical Education and Career Consortium’s Biotechnology Programs as a source of summer interns. He says that although the University doesn’t pay the interns much, instead typically they invest a lot of time in training. He describes the payoff, saying “I believe in bringing interns on board to continue developing potential new hires for permanent positions. Some tasks require less experience (and take less training time) and we have some turnover. As a result, from time-to-time we offer beginning level positions. Hiring interns that we’ve already ‘tested’ is a great way to get a good return.” He adds, “Our Human Resource people have a responsibility to screen people and place good ones. They would benefit from knowing what a good source of trained people the Consortium’s programs are.” |
