What's next?

Thursday, 14 January 2010 13:39

Hello fellow PhD students and postdocs my name is Richard Heideman and I’m 34 years old. Currently I’m working as a last year PhD student in the group of Dr. H. Jacobs at the immunology department of the NKI-AvL in Amsterdam. My research focuses on antibody diversification processes like V(D)J recombination, somatic hypermutation and class switch recombination. The major aim is to understand how disregulation of these mutagenic processes can initiate lymphomagenesis.

So what happened the years before I started my PhD? When puberty kicked in, I was kicked out of athenaeum and continued high school at the HAVO of the Calls College in Nieuwegein. After I graduated in 1992 I started studying biochemistry at the Laboratory School (HLO) in Utrecht. Five years later I graduated with a thesis discussing the isolation and characterization of proteins from the plasmamembrane of boar sperm. At that time I had no clue what to do next. I ended up working via an employment agency for Intervet de Bilt, which was at that time a branch of Akzo Nobel specialized in the development and production of medication for pets and bio-industry animals. Soon I had a permanent position and didn’t have to go to the employment agency for my money every week. During my time at Intervet I got involved in the production of vaccines and the optimization of vaccine production processes. To be honest I hated that job, and wanted to quit after one year. At that time I was thinking of leaving the laboratory for good and to apply for manager/organizer positions in the concert & club circuit.

I think destiny wanted me to stay in the lab, because as I was about to tell my boss what my plans were, he offered me a position at Intervet Cambridge England. Although the work there was not much different from what I was already doing in de Bilt, I liked the challenge of going abroad and building up a life in a new city, so I took the offer and went to England! In total, I stayed nearly one year in Cambridge and had an excellent time there. The main lesson I learned from that trip was my ability to build up a social network from scratch and live a happy life abroad, away from family and friends. Not long after I returned from Cambridge I resigned. Without clear ideas of my ambitions I decided that I wanted to stay in the lab. I applied for a job as research technician in the group of Prof. Dr. P.C. van der Vliet at the physiology department of the UMC in Utrecht. I got the job and my first task was to set up a bioreactor facility for large scale recombinant protein production, supposed to feed numerous in vitro assays and crystal structure studies. Because I couldn’t fill in 40 hours a week with the facility I started doing experiments for Dr. A.B. Brenkman, a PhD student at that time, working on adenovirus DNA replication. During that period I realized that I really enjoyed solving scientific problems by designing and performing experiments. Soon I came to the conclusion that I wanted to be the person in charge of the experiments and the results, which was not possible as a research technician. At that time I was 27 years old and for the first time I knew what my ambitions were: I wanted to be a scientist!

The first step towards that goal was the new master study Developmental Biology and Biomedical Genetics (DBBG) at the University of Utrecht. Thanks to Prof. Dr. P.C. van der Vliet I could combine my full time job as a research technician with a full time master study. After two tough years I graduated and was the first DBBG Master ever in Holland! The next logical step in my career plan was to find a PhD-studentship. I resigned at the UMC and applied at the NKI-AvL where I started as PhD student in January 2005. Now the last year of my PhD has started it was time to think about the next step of my career.

To get an overview of the future possibilities as a postdoc and to know how to continue my career in an efficient way I joined the postdoc retreat in Heeze. This turned out to be a good idea; the retreat helped me in different ways. Most importantly I found out that my ambitions are really in a scientific career and not in doing research for a company. During the retrait I attended different workshops; one of them called “You are so much more than your knowledge and CV”, taught me about my strengths and how to deal with my weaknesses. In addition we had to make an overview of energizing moments and ask ourselves how often they occurred at the workplace. Although I already knew that I liked doing my job, looking in a critical way to what makes it that good was interesting and very refreshing. Besides the workshops there was a diversity of excellent talks, showing the contrast between top science and working for a company. The highlight for me was the presentation of Prof. Dr. H. Ploegh. He told us in a very inspiring and entertaining manner about his journey to the top of science, which really motivated me to continue working in academia. To conclude I would say that I liked the postdoc retreat very much and that it was a very valuable meeting, which really forced me to think about my career. In addition the atmosphere was friendly and the organization (partly by full time members & partly by volunteering PhD students and postdocs) was excellent!

Via my PCDI weblog I will keep you informed about my life as a last year PhD student and hopefully as a starting postdoc soon. I will share my experiences, choices, plans, annoyances and hopefully discuss them with you. Stay posted!