Re: [DIYbio] Re: Career advice for bioengineering Undergrad

 We meet up every few months for food and drinks just to keep in touch.  Many of them talk about how they want more experience and are bored out of their minds, because they've been doing the same quality control tests on the same antibody for a year, or they've been seeding the same cell cultures for months at a time. I never made as much money as them, but they are surprised at all the cool stuff you get to learn at a startup.  Besides learning how to use every single instrument in the lab, Q-TOF LCMS, Triple-quad LCMS, chemiluminescent nitrogen detector, prep LC etc, you also learn how to FIX all those machines.  At a large company if a machine breaks, someone comes and fixes it, at a start-up, you have to take it apart and fix it yourself.  Every single one of our machines "broke" at least once, and every single time we fixed them.

At the incubator, people often toured every week or two weeks, sometimes they were investors, sometimes they were scientists, but they were always interested in what it is you did.  Lesson #2, you had to know your science inside and out, because you never knew when you might be put on the spot to "sell" your company to a stranger who might turn out to be an investor.  It was the opposite of stressful, it was actually kind of fun, because it made you want to learn even more.

Lesson #3 - With only a handful of people working, sometimes you got to get involved with the business side, whether it be through thinking up marketing ideas or working on product development.  In a start up you often get to carry out many different roles within the company, roles which in a larger company would each be filled by individual people.  

Last lesson and perhaps the most important.  Start-ups attract interesting people, and so do incubators that many startups are in.  The network you can build there is truly amazing.  Everyone from VC's to CEO's would tour the labs or be invited to give talks and presentations, and if you went up to them and spoke to them, 9/10 times they'd invite you to drop by their company for a tour and lunch.  Lastly, at least in the incubator, there were about 10 other companies in our shared lab space, and the people that worked for them were some of the smartest people I have ever met.  

See if there are any bio-tech incubators in your area, they tend to hold multiple companies in a smaller space.  If there are none, try to find a start-up who is doing work you find interesting and reach out to them even if they have no job postings.