Beijing Genomics Institute

A: Applicants ; I: Interviewer

A: I am tenure professor and I want to apply a job at your institute.
I: I am afraid you’re over-qualified. You know, we have many high-school dropouts here working 48 hours a day and have published in Science or Nature, as first author, at their teenage. They dont need any degree to proof their ability or enhance their confident :p but we do count experience, what did you do?
A: well, I studied gene regulation of mainly gene1, gene2 and gene3. We used mouse as the model organism and created many different kinds of knockouts, knockins, etc. I know ChIP…
I: You did ChIP-SEQ?
A: What’s that?
I: ChIP coupled with next generation sequencing.
A: That’s too expensive to try.
I: really? but it’s too small in scale, dont you think? we do not even include it in our pipeline. We do collaborate with other researchers in this case, and help them with the sequencing part. Normally, we do it in tea time. 15 mins is about right.
A: er… I spent my whole life there…
I: really? how old are you?
A: I’ve got tenured two years earlier, so, (saying proudly) thirty-….
I: Oh! the average age of our group is 25, which is one year younger than that of NASA. You know, we are very proud of it… you are just … a bit over-qualified and …
A: over-aged…
I: well… our staff is just too brilliant
A: you can sequence them for the eliteome….
I: yes, we’re thinking of giving them their genome sequences as bonus… we will see…
I: in fact, we made all the data available with ftp.
A: Can I download 1000 Genomes from the ftp?
I: sure, if you dont mind… but we can ship the data to you in hard disk, I guess it’s faster; but we will charge you with the cost of shipping, labour, hard disk….
A: never mind, I will just ask my student to do the downloading…

*** The above conservation is not captured in a real life situation. It is just created by me after an inspiring talk given by sb from the institute. and I must say that this sb is really smart (say from heart). impressed by his presentation and his way of handling questions. ***