The Sales Pitch

I was finishing out the last few months of a two-year research fellowship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The research had been extremely promising, but NIST didn’t come through on its commitments to support my work, so I wasn’t able to purchase essential equipment and had to cobble together a kludge that was ultimately inadequate. I went to a job interview at the Naval Research Laboratory, hoping for a more supportive environment. I craved academic freedom more than anything. I spent a few hours talking to the other researchers and sizing up the facilities. At the end of my visit, the head guy sat down with me and gave me a short pitch for the job. “You’ll never get rich working here. You can go into fiber optics, make a million dollars. But what we can offer is the opportunity for you to have control over the type of research you want to do and the direction you want your research to go.” I sat spellbound for a moment. Did he just say a million dollars? Fiber optics, eh?

I turned down the job, went home and rewrote my resume to target fiber optics. Within a couple of months I had a job lined up with a fiber optics company that paid a lot more than academic research and offered stock options and bonuses. Unfortunately, the company went out of business three years later and I didn’t make a million dollars. But I’m still thankful for the tip that job interviewer gave me. It broke me out of a cycle of making small but cumulative compromises that were taking me progressively farther from what I was really excited about intellectually, but always leading me to think I could find a way back later. Once I started working a commercial job, I knew my employer would give no support for my scientific ideas, so I saw more clearly that I had to use the extra money and spare time to pursue what excited me now, instead of putting it off to some uncertain future.