How Your Principal Investigator's Reputation Can Affect Your Job Search

As a columnist who uses my own limited experience to make sweeping generalizations about science careers, I’m sometimes approached by trainees in one pickle or another. This past winter, for example, I received such an email from a former student at a large research university in the United States. I don’t want to disclose her identity, for reasons I’ll explain shortly, so let’s just say that she’s an adult human, and her email address has the “@” symbol in it.