Hi, I was just wondering what the opinion was on the bearing of the methods used in your PhD and the rest of your career. If I were to do a PhD mainly working on Drosophila (fruit flys, good for genetics! For all you non-biosciences people), would that make it very hard to obtain a position in any other biochemical field, or working on any other model, afterwards? As much as I love the little beggers, I don't know if I'll be as enthuiastic after 4 years.
Cheers

If you feel there would be a problem with the field, what to do would be to make sure you incorporate a lot of techniques - your next job is only as good as the work you can perform

For example it doesn't matter what you studied as long as you have the right techniques - think about what you might like to get into afterwards and tailor your experiments around it this way

One of the guys just finishing his PhD in my Lab started as microbiologist but changed it through techniques to a more biochemical focused one with real time PCR, 2d gel analysis pcr etc etc

so he ended up cross disciplinary - microbiology and Biochemistry -

Techniques are very important but it is possible to get jobs where you learn new ones - its just a lot harder at the start

hope this helps

S

People do change models - but it will be easier to get a post working on the same model. You might also think about your enthusiasm for said model. Some years ago I swapped working on human cell cultures for working with fungi. That was a big mistake - although the project, processes and techniques were similar to the work I had been doing my enthusiasm just totally crashed (I'm now in a completely different filed).

A good talk I went to a while back, was a senior female researcher describing her career and how whenever she moved to a new post, she took something of what she already did but incorporated a new aspect.

It meant that she had a grasp of the area, while learning something new and inspiring while diversifying.