Position Vacant - Are they kidding?

Please remember local definition of “Native speaker” means passport holder… I can see a Taiwanese with fresh passport off the presses here.

This PhD fever is really annoying, but then you must remember the G’ment gives “incentives” ($$$) for institutions to hire PhD’s so…

lol I’m ‘Taiwanese’ and I’ve recently graduated with a PhD. I’m tempted to apply for the position and hire an aussie undergrad BA student to correct the english for $20 per hour :slight_smile:

nah to be fair, a good scientific writer is very very hard to come by. I know drug companies pay very good money for scientific writers (all have PhDs).

This post comes up every few years, I applied it for it many years ago but they turned me down cos didn’t have the PhD, even though I had the right background and worked in A.S. at the time, well I think that was it! Would have been nice as a temporary position. These govt institutions run on their own hot air…they just want to see papers published. Advancement depends on this solely… NTU professors don’t get paid well compared to overseas but they do get free family housing, benefits, pensions etc…well the ones connected to Academia Sinica do. They can live very well. Many act as consultants on the side.

Eh? I don’t even have an A-Level in sieyunce!

And I don’t edit for non-native speakers. It’s a pain in the hole.

I know for a fact they’ve written reports and 散文 (prose… articles? factual short stories?) and we have to write a play… but essays… hmmm.

I remember teaching essays and how to construct an argument to my one-on-one student last year. At first her writing was shocking, but once she understood what I was telling her to do she suddenly started producing some pretty good stuff. After I finished teaching her I found out that her graduate thesis was the third most referenced paper in all of Taiwan for two years running.

Looking back on her first lot of essays, that’s actually kinda scary.

I know for a fact they’ve written reports and 散文 (prose… articles? factual short stories?) and we have to write a play… but essays… hmmm.

I remember teaching essays and how to construct an argument to my one-on-one student last year. At first her writing was shocking, but once she understood what I was telling her to do she suddenly started producing some pretty good stuff. After I finished teaching her I found out that her graduate thesis was the third most referenced paper in all of Taiwan for two years running.

Looking back on her first lot of essays, that’s actually kinda scary.[/quote]

Thanks for that. It does seem to be a real problem all East Asian students have (albeit from the tiny sample I’ve come across!).

generally only a PhD will have the requisite background knowledge and experience in writing readable scientific prose to make light work of that job. It is definitely not a simple technical English editing position, though it does pay like one, i guess. What is not stated in the position advert is the fact that there is zero scope for advancement: nil, nada and zip.

That pay scale is pretty average for a government job, but nothing like one could make in private. Still if you’re a native speaker of English, with a good grasp of molecular biology and ancillary microbial and genetic approaches, it would make for an interesting position for a while. I mean, face it, who wants to be stuck in a lab for their whole life? Not me.

I don’t agree a PhD was neccessary at all, just paper writing /editing experience and mol.bio background. It’s up to the P.I. to write his own paper…not hold their hand or be silent co-author!
That’s the way these guys work though, they really work the crap out of their research teams to get papers published.

papers originiating from Chinese-speaking countries have a rejection rate that is far, far higher than deserved, almost always due to the English, even if it is passable. Journals in the West still habitually file anything from Chinese speakers in the round filing cabinet without even looking at it, unfairly so in many cases as the science therein may well be top notch, and for Academia Sinica it generally is. If they can speak at conferences, their English is good enough. This is science we are dealing with, not frikkin literature, so that element of heavy handed rejection smacks of racism. I mean, space is tight in good journals, but entrenched as they are, there is a danger that the middle ground of most science journal houses will soon lose their place to Chinese language journals if they don’t fix their publication rate for non-European native speakers.

It is for that reason only that AS hires quality English editors to heavily edit and often almost rewrite papers so that the English is impeccable, so at least there is one less barrier to being published.

And don’t kid yourself that any neophyte with a smattering of mol biol knowledge can edit such papers.

I just got back from a medical writing conference where I was once again reminded how many people in the field of medical/scientific communications come from the liberal arts. I agree with your quotation above, but a doctorate is certainly not necessary to do quality scientific editing. A strong science background is extremely helpful, especially when working with non-native speakers, but equally important are an eye for detail, a logical mind, intuition (for what the author wants to say), and the persistence to stick with a project until it is clear and precise. The rest can be learned on the job.

FWIW, the Academia Sinica ad is also running on the Science and Nature Web sites, so maybe they’re offering a decent salary?

Disclaimer: I do similar work, for a large company in the US, and have just a BS in biology plus a couple years of graduate school in molecular genetics.

Want a bet? :laughing:

I do agree that a PhD is not absolutely essential. However, I know for a fact that a person with strong science background gained from many years experience dissecting papers (either by reading them critically, as in the role of a reviewer for a journal, or by actually writing them in the first place) can offer much more than language editing. The position being advertised at IMB is not for a language editor: they already have an MA linguist for that. The position is for a scientific editor, someone who will correct the language, but, more importantly and far more difficult, can provide that additional scientific editing that a non-specialist simply cannot offer.

By that, I mean the ability to read a paper and say: you show this link here, but it’s not proven, you have forgotten to address the possible contribution made by this drug in your model, you have glossed over the possible interference from the primed Th1 cells, the age of these cells means that they have lost the expression of immature cell markers that you are using as a sign of such and such, this slide looks like a poor stain, these data are of insufficient statistical power to prove a 2% shift on a background of 1% noise, this gel has been manipulated and cannot be presented, you have not controlled for that effect, that is an artifact of your compression algorithm or selection process, etc etc.

other things that the role requires are assistance with professional scientific graphing, protein modelling, and image analysis programs.

I also agree that they will woefully underpay anyone who does take that position. On the other hand, there is no alternative employment in academia in Taiwan that will not underpay (in Western terms) for the same position. Going private was the only way. I am interested to see them now placing the ad in Science and Nature websites, as I recommended six months ago.

I see, their expectations are pretty high for this role combining BOTH English editing and editorial review. I’m sure you helped them immensely when you were there regarding construction of their papers and now they will be expecting this from the next poor lug…

Yes, I understand the nature of editing that is required and the level of pay typical in Taiwan. That’s one of the reasons I eventually left Taiwan.

And, in all fairness, most PhD writers/editors I’ve worked with don’t go to the level of detail you describe. It takes the right temperament, too.

At least the institution that has posted the add is being up front with what they want. A number of universities in Asia have a habit of hiring PhDs for post-doc stints, or even positions described as tenure-track ones, but then immediately pile them neck high with editing work. Such positions are created with the aim of getting non-native English speakers in the department published in the A-list journals, not with the aim of the person filling the post actually publishing. I have the feeling that this has become widespread in Hong Kong, and seeing as how most department heads claim to be running English-medium programs, this is a practice that they want kept firmly under the rug . I met a guy at lunch a couple of months ago who was hired on the standard two year tenure-track assistant professor contract, and has spent the first half of it re-writing other people’s work rather than getting his own stuff done in the lab. If he doesn’t get published, he will not get tenure, of course. Totally fucking scandalous.

At least they are being upfront. the whole messy situation you describe, OTOH, does suck. another thing to look out for is post-docs arriving for a position that becomes permanent (on post-doc salaries) or PhD students that end up working in large collaborative schemes but generate no papers of their own, and are forced to stay on for seven or eight years until they finally scrape together enough data to make a paper. the best data and the most promising lines of research get given to the supervisor’s favored students, and the marginalised students (often overseas students) get left with incoherent bits that never make a whole story, yet do all the work. It’s far cheaper to run PhDs than postdocs, and it’s far cheaper to run postdocs than career scientific officers.

[quote=“tomthorne”]
Does anyone who works in Taiwanese state schools know if the Taiwanese students ever write essays in Mandarin, or is it always just cloze exercises?[/quote]

I asked a local about this once; she said she didn’t need to write long essays. She was required to write poetry, though.

A bit off topic but I find there is a market for those with a good science background and excellent professional writing skills. I did some public speaking classes in the Hsinchu science park several years ago and some students asked me to review their proposed submissions for publication in journals. I did so, with pay of course. They told friends and I still get several papers to edit every month. Word gets around and it’s nice to be able to just do your work at home. Track your time. Also, when sending it back, make sure that they read it for any unintentional change of meaning. When dealing with academia, it is easy to unwittingly change the content meaning. Some that I get are really in good order but some are pure shit and need a lot of re-wording which can cause big problems with the basic process used in the research and methodology.
By the way, for those who want to point out any writing errors for me, I am writing this on a damned mini-laptop because my desktop is in for upgrades today.