Depressing view of Academia

So I officially started going through available post-doc positions this week, now that I'm back from my vacation. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do when I finish my PhD next year (assuming I do...), and of course, I came back to the academia vs. industry question.

In weighing the evidence, a friend pointed me to this article on the problems facing new scientists in academia. Somehow, it does a nice job of dissuading me from thinking about going down that route - although I'm not completely convinced industry is the way to go yet either.

Read for yourself: Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research

8 Postdoc positions

I don't want to spam anything, but since this is my own web page, I guess I can advertise as much as I'd like. I was just passed an email from a colleague at the Plant Science department at UBC, where they're currently looking for eight post doc positions: mainly people who have or are interested in gaining Illumina sequence processing experience.

I figured this is noteworthy for several reasons:

1. There is a growing demand for next-gen trained bioinformaticians, which looks good for the future career prospects of anyone in the Next-gen Sequencing/Genomics field (though this is hardly a surprise),
2. Genomics is beginning to expand out of the narrow {yeast | human | C.elegans | etc} model organism fields into areas such as plant science, where it will have a huge impact. (going mainstream is always a good thing for a field of science, in my humble opinion.)
3. Some of the positions will put bioinformaticians into key positions where they become the cornerstone of research projects, which is a far cry from the "bioinformaticians as a service" role that's been popular in many research settings.

Anyhow, I can highly recommend at least one of these positions, having worked with the professor before, so if anyone is interested in the email, I'd be happy to forward along the advertisements.