How Bench Scientists Are Getting Ahead With AI

I'm Karina Klingman, scientist turned CEO of a talent strategy consulting firm. I've helped over 85 biotechs hire and develop thousands of amazing employees, so I know what works and what doesn't work when it comes to landing a job and then excelling in it. I created the Biotech Career Coach Podcast to give you simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies to help you land your dream biotech job, then move up the career ladder. If you are exploring career paths, looking to learn about biotech, or simply striving to be the type of person who makes an impact and gets promoted, you're in the right place. Today we have a really interesting episode format, and really the backstory is that in our community we use a lot of AI tools. I want everybody to be using AI intelligently, so I don't want AI slop. I don't want a bunch of resumes that are clearly written by AI and badly, which is honestly what you get if you go to some of these AI tools that you can use online, especially if you're a scientist. They just don't work for us. But As I'm teaching people to use these tools, a few people in the community have emerged as super users and have really jumped on this bandwagon with me. And I don't know, I'm a self-professed nerd. You may or may not have picked that up as you've been listening to my podcast, but I really love learning new things. Maybe it's the scientist in me. And AI has captivated my attention, especially lately. And so I've identified a few people in my community who are kindred spirits. Let's just say Heather is one of our amazing students. She is on the job hunt right now., and I'll let her introduce herself, but we have geeked out, I'll just say, a few times in the past few weeks about what we're doing with AI in our own lives. And so we wanted to bring you just a few ideas if you're struggling to implement AI in your life and you're like, well, I'm a bench scientist, like where does this really come in for me besides maybe data analysis? I promise you we have some really cool use cases. So Heather, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about yourself, about your job search, and then let's just be nerds for a little while.

My name is Heather Carner, and I am a bench scientist who works with actually a lot of machine learning scientists. So I've actually been very interested in how to use AI and machine learning to better science. But after joining the community, I really kind of jumped on the bandwagon of how can I just use AI to better my own life and also just my own research at the bench and just make everything just way more efficient than what I had been dealing with previously. And I was definitely one of those more skeptical type of people, but I think honestly, after just simply playing with it, it's really opened a lot of doors and opened my eyes and also has gotten a lot of other people in my life curious. Wanting help from me now.

Yeah. You were saying that you're starting to teach people kind of out of reciprocity. They do you a favor, and so you teach them a little bit of like the AI tips and tricks. So it's certainly, I think I have noticed that for scientists who in all areas of our lives have been really quick learners, quick to adapt, like, you know, that's what your PhD kind of is all about, right? People are really averse to just starting to use AI, but once they do, it kind of kicks things off. So, so tell us what you've been teaching, like your lab members and your friends.

So my friends, when I told them the types of things that I was using AI for, so it just in going to all of the networking events, like in JPM, I've met so many new people and one of them, she's kind of the marketing team for a biotech company out here in the Bay Area. And we were just chatting about how she uses Claude to help her with writing her media posts that she has to do for the company often. And it, you know, it, that's a lot of work you have to do on a daily basis. And she's like, I just get it done so quickly. And I've, you know, written it to, to teach to so that it learns on my writing. Now when I have talked to other people in the community, they're like, well, yeah, my company bought Notion for us, but I don't know how to do that. And they're also in marketing. And I'm like, well, you know, this other person that I have met, she's very curious like ourselves. And I'm like, well, I can help you. You know, I can teach you how to write instructions and how to make it so that it sounds like yourself and not just AI slop, as we call it, you know, and just putting that out there. And just trying to make them more comfortable. Now, as far as the scientists in my lab go, a lot of them were very interested in some instructions that I had made for kind of a manuscript editor that you can talk to at any time. So I'll actually be teaching them that tomorrow, how to build one for themselves.

I think we both brought a bunch of use cases that we use and that we brainstorm. So I'm excited for that style of episode. Maybe we can go back and forth with each of our use cases. Maybe we came up with the same ones. We did these in isolation over the weekend just to flex our creative muscles over the weekend. I just want to set this up with a quick overview for people that maybe— there's a bunch of AI gurus out there. So if you want to go really nerd out, then you can do like me and Heather do, and you can go subscribe to the podcasts of the AI gurus and like their YouTube channels. This is not that. Okay? Neither of us are here telling you that we're like the super technical expert. We are just normal people using AI in our normal course of our work to be more efficient. And maybe we've gone a little bit geekier in some areas and kind of tried new things, but really, if we can do it, like, I think anybody can do it. I mean, would you agree with that, Heather?

Oh, 100%.

Yeah. We're not like special tech nerds over here. We're just, we're just people. So I wanna put that out there. Not guru talk. We're not gonna be telling you have to use this or that. I'm going to tell you what I use. Heather's going to tell you what she uses. We both use Notion. I'll put a link for Notion in the show notes. You can get a trial and I believe the trial comes with a bunch of AI stuff for a month. I think you get a business trial, which comes with Notion AI and all the agents, or at least you can start to use some of the agents in there and see how they, how you like them. So that's a low lift. And then if you do like Notion, it's only $24 a month to subscribe to. And to put this in context, in my examples, I'm going to tell you about the different LLM models that I like using for each of these use cases. And most people, if you're not in a Notion, you would have to go subscribe to each of these models if you wanted the upgraded version of these models and you didn't want to run into usage limits. Notion lets you use any of the models I'm going to talk about within it. So with one subscription, you Provide infinite context because Notion can house everything and your LLM can then pull from all the different things you're doing. And you get to choose whether you want to use a Claude model or an OpenAI model or Gemini. So you get to pick and choose for your use case. I think it's an incredible deal. I'm not pushing this because I make money from Notion. I just, I'm a savvy person and like, I don't want to spend more money than I have to. So that is why I like Notion so much, but. You do you, you pick your models you like to use and, you know, take what we say with a grain of salt. So Heather, why don't you kick us off? What is your first use case that you have brought to share with people?

The first use case is something that I built over the weekend that you had recommended or had said was probably a fun thing to do with the Notion agents. Now, I didn't end up using the Notion agents cuz I saw that there's like a token and you probably have to start paying and this particular thing was probably gonna cost a bit of money. So instead I used Claude to write instructions for a daily brief for myself and I had it focus on my job search. So are there any signals that I should be paying attention to? Are there any papers that are coming out that I should be paying attention to? Are there any company deals? Or clinical trials that I should be paying attention to that are important for me, for any companies I should be looking out for. And I can tell you I've used it like, I think 4 times now.

Fantastic. What kind of stuff do you get out of it? Tell us like an example of something amazing you— it gave you.

It told me about some deals for Gilead and a couple of other companies that are on my high target list that they've done some acquisitions in the RNA world. And that, okay, this is a signal that they might be growing this. And I'm an RNA biology person at heart. And they're like, hey, these are some signals that, that they might be hiring soon. And this is also some oncology work that Gilead is doing that they might be expanding further because they did some acquisitions in SF specifically. Eli Lilly as well have done some acquisitions. So it seems like they might be growing their SF area. Watch out, look for job opportunities potentially, or in general, the potential RNA sector growing. It also pointed out FDA clearing up the regulatory requirements, kind of the pathway to success for FDA. They've cleared that up recently and it said, hey, watch out for that. That actually makes it much easier for companies to go forward in their work and hire more people. Yeah, so those are two, two kind of important things. But also papers, like it kind of told me, you know, I think I set it going off last night at 12 and it's like, hey, you know, the new AlphaFold just came out, their paper in Nature. Yeah, I was like, nice. And then I saw it all over LinkedIn the next morning. Yeah, so it's kind of nice how just getting— you, you get inundated with a bunch of emails if you try and sign up for every, every subscription, every bioRxiv thing you're interested in, but it's nice to have it focused to me and what I care about and what I'm interested in as far as science goes. Yeah. So that's my first very useful, uh, use case that's pretty easy to make. Just use the AI to make it for you.

Absolutely. And so do you run this in cloud? Where are you running this now?

Oh, so I run this in Notion. So I had it make an instruction sheet. You know, you set the instructions for the AI to the instructions sheet that has to do, I call it morning brief. And then when I set those instructions, I say, hey, brief me. And then it'll go and start collecting all this data from any, anything you can find online. It'll go through my specific database or list of companies that I'm interested in and companies that I've applied to. And then it will see if there's any news around surrounding those companies. And then it will compile all of that into a nice daily brief database that has also been, that it also made for me as well in Notion. So all of this is happening in Notion. It's mainly with Claude. Sometimes I forget and it goes on auto, but it makes it just fine because the, the instructions are so specific. But I prefer Claude Sonnet for this type of thing because it just, it writes better and in plain language. Yeah. So it also tells me like why these various things are important or why it flagged them as well. So it's really comprehensive. Yeah. And it was only maybe like 30 minutes of me chatting with the AI to build this. That's awesome. And make it specific for me.

Yeah, I love that. I'm gonna piggyback off yours. I have an agent that I run and I happen to run this on OpenClaw, which is a lot harder to set up. So the barrier to entry on OpenClaw is a lot more. So I'm not recommending that to people. I do, if you wanna go down that rabbit hole, there's a ton of YouTube videos out there. I'm not gonna explain it. But suffice it to say, I have it running on its very own computer because you don't want to give it access to everything you have because it's very powerful and you don't want it choosing to do stuff on your computer that you didn't intend. But it has access to the internet. And so I have a business development brief that's a lot like what Heather just described, but this could be modified for a job search. So I have it looking for funding signals. So in my other, in my real job where I run my recruiting consultancy, I am always looking for companies getting funding because that is usually the precursor to hiring, just like Heather said. So as a job seeker, this is also very interesting to you. So if you're seeing these funding announcements, know that pretty soon the jobs are going to start being posted. So I always, I'm big into networking. If you know me, you know that. I have it spit out a list of people on LinkedIn, which it can usually find because LinkedIn public profiles are searchable, that would be high probability networking targets for me based on those funding announcements. So that every week I have a list of people that I should go prioritize linking in with. But you could do that for your job search too, right? The same exact thing. What types of companies? So you just would give your LLM, your prompt would be specific to the types of jobs you're looking for, maybe the modalities that you're interested in or the disease area indications. Heather's very interested in RNA, as am I. So, you know, we might be looking for RNA companies that are getting funding. And then so our networking targets might be the same, you know, mine might be the decision makers and yours would be the peers. And so then you would tell that too. Like for me, I would want to be linking in with the people who are the deciders in the company. Company, so I'm on their radar. I'm not asking for anything. I'm just getting into their world as they're thinking about maybe hiring. Same thing, right? Get into the world of the peers, and if that is confusing to you, go back into my archives of my podcast and look for my networking episodes where you do it in a non-spammy way, but you would just be starting to build the connections around the jobs that you might want when they become available. So that could be like the next iteration of Heather's morning brief could also be, now I need a list of the people I should go LinkedIn with.

Yeah, that's actually really cool. I mean, I try and see if there's anyone I already know for like first connections, but yeah, that actually might be even easier, especially since there's plenty of companies out there that I just, I don't know, there's so many people in this world. That actually, I think I'll, I'll see, I'll have a chat with it tonight and see if we can add that in.

That's the awesome thing about these two is I think about like V1 of anything I've ever built with these agents and very different, right? Because once you have a few days to get used to it, you're like, oh, could you also do this? And you sort of add functionality. So sky's the limit, right? If you like, if you think something might be useful, just ask for it. Awesome. Yeah. What's your next use case you brought for us?

This is kind of related. It's like literature review and managing knowledge type of thing. So there's like so many different tools out there that you can use. Like one that I've played with is Cherron, I think is how you say it. It's C-H-E-I-R-O-N. Okay. And they're trying to be even bigger than that, but It's supposed to be a place where you can kind of do a bunch of like science-related type things. So it's not only can it do a literature review for you, which a lot of people are just making the LLMs do for them anyways, but the interface is really nice, but it makes it just kind of faster to see like, hey, has anyone even done this before? But I think they're also trying to turn it into something potentially similar to Notion. We'll have to see what they do with that, but they're really trying to like integrate biotech needs into their AI platform. But as far as what I've used it for, I mainly just used it for a literature review and it was able to like rank the journals and tell me like, these are top tier journals, these are for bioRxiv, this is the summary of them, gave me a table. It was really nice. And honestly, just in general, as far as like Starting science in high school when you needed to request from the library if you could have a PDF copy of a journal article. This is amazing. Just be able to in general have AI options, but also just talk to your LLM to just do a literature review for you so that you're not reading 10 papers and maybe 5 of them were useful. It's like, don't just tell me, I need this quicker. Science is moving so fast. Your life is moving so fast. You only have so much time. I think you talked about this earlier today, actually, during an office hours, blocking your time, right? So that you can be very efficient. And you're like, I have this much time to maybe write an introduction or to just start writing up a proposal for this project. I need what I need now. I need the proper information now quickly, just so that I, you know, this is my workday. Yeah. So it just helps it go a lot faster.

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I love that use case. I have another tool that might also work with something like that. I haven't heard of this, Cheriann. We'll link it in the show notes if anyone wants to check it out. I certainly will. If you already have the papers or if you have protocols, so I just remember like amassing just so many PDFs of stuff during any research project, right? And so you've got all the papers that you have read to be able to even start the project, right? Then you've got all the protocols you've thought about. So you've got like Thermo Fisher's guide to, you know, this assay and like BD's, like you've got everything, right? It just, it's, there's so many PDFs and they all have to be stored somewhere. And so I used to just have folders on my desktop, then you'd forget what's where. And I vividly remember being like, I know I have this protocol somewhere. I don't remember what it's called though. And then just like, oh, when are you ever going to find it again? So I love two tools for this. Notion is always going to be my favorite. So I'm just going to throw that out there. I'm biased. I know I'm biased, but I've also been really enjoying Notebook LM, which is a Google product. And Notebook LM allows you to upload any references and also websites, which is cool too. So if you have PDFs, I don't know, I think other document types as well, slide decks, things like that, websites, like whatever is in a project and you make a notebook, they call it a notebook, and you just put it all together. So you could be like, okay, we're embarking on this type of experiment. Here's all the crap. It's all here. And then you can query it and you can do so many things now. They, every I can't keep up with it. So I'm, if I even tell you all the things that are in NotebookLM at the moment, it's, it's gonna be overwhelming. But my, a couple of my favorite things, you can make a podcast out of it. Literally, you can have two podcast people, just voices to have a conversation about a topic. So you could say, here are all the protocols I might use for this. I don't know the pros and cons for them, or like, give me the pros and cons and make it into a podcast. And then you can listen to two kind of hilarious people discuss these different essays that you might be deciding between, or like different vendors or things like that. You can make slide decks out of it so you can point it to a certain thing and say, okay, here's all the information. I do wanna go ahead with this. You know, to your point, I need to make a proposal so that my boss greenlights this. Make a slide deck for me. And it will do that for you. Like it just, it'll make outlines, it'll make infographics, it'll make anything. That might support your thought process and just kind of sorting through the amounts, number of documents, websites, et cetera, that you might need for a project. So I really like that. Notion will do all the same things, but you have to be paying for Notion. Whereas if you have a Google account, you can have up to a number of notebooks and they have to be out of rotation. So you can't have unlimited, but like you could, I think you can get 5 or something. So that's enough to get started. So that's why I'm giving you the free option too, in addition to Notion.

The notebook itself, does it hold like a bunch of different things in it? Like, does it, is that part unlimited? Like how much you can stuff into one?

Probably not for a free version, but I, I don't think I've found the limit. Like if you were, I think it depends on the media type too. If it's a lot of video and stuff, but for our use case, it's honestly, mostly like documents, you know, PDFs and things like that. Yes. I really haven't found the limit for, and I, I think for research projects you'd probably be safe. For people who are out there doing like content creation and maybe they have a whole bunch of YouTube videos, I could see them putting limits on that. But like, you know, we're talking about science, so probably you're fine. And then if you have any sort of paid Google account, that increases the limit. So. Most people have a free Gmail account, and so that gives you access to NotebookLM, but the free tier. But if you were to upgrade that to whatever their base, I think $8 a month or something, then I think that gives you almost unlimited for NotebookLM. But don't quote me on that. Again, things change every single day, every single minute. I feel like there's new stuff, but you know, that's just another option for scientists.

Yeah, I think like you said, Notion is probably the first choice because Yeah, for me, like you said, even that one, I have not found the limit yet. I just keep dumping things into it more and more. I'm like, oh yeah, you can get, you know, let's build this thing. Let's build that thing. Yeah. You know, I wanna do, you know, all of this. Here's this PDF. Here's that picture.

I run multiple businesses in Notion, all in one account. Mm-hmm. I, every single individual I coach gives me documents weekly, if not more often than that. I haven't found a limit. I mean, it just keeps absorbing. I'm sure there is, there's gotta be a limit, right? But like, I'm a power user. It's never ever told me that I have too much stuff in my Notion, and my Notion is immense.

Related to this too, as far as like managing, like literature review and managing knowledge, something I had said. To, that I do say to people is that it's really nice to have kind of a tireless teacher available to you 24/7. Yeah. So I was doing a more kind of nerdy build. I wanted to try and put something on GitHub. So I had built this project and like the step-by-step things that I'm gonna need to do in Notion. And it also like wrote out prompts for me that I would need to put into the AI to get the correct code. And I could just ask it like, what does this mean? What does that mean? What does that, you know, this thing mean? Oh no, I got this error. This, you know, this happened. And honestly, after like 30 minutes of that with a real person, they're like, I'm so sick of you. Can you get it right? Or why don't you just understand? You know, they just get, they get tired. So it's nice to kind of have like a 24-hour teacher available. Now, Obviously there's the context window limits, but learning that I can just ask it to do a session handoff and then I could just have endless conversations with the AI and it doesn't get— it gets tired, but not in the same way. It's more like, oh, we're reaching the end, let's do a handoff, start again in a new chat window. Keep going, go ahead.

Yeah, and just to double-click on that, anybody who doesn't understand what she just said, once you start using AI, what you're going to find is that sometimes the conversation gets weird after a while and you're like, we talked about that already and you're not remembering that. And so every different LLM has a different length context window. And one reason I really like the Anthropic models, so that's Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet. I like those because they have really big context windows. But I will tell you this, it's like a million token context window. It's hard to reach the end of it. But it's not hard to get too much stuff in there where you're like, this conversation's kind of degrading. And the moment you think that, it's really wise to ask for a handoff document. So you just literally ask your LLM and say, hey, I need to start a new conversation. Can you compile a handoff document for yourself? It knows, it gets it, and it'll create a nice little document, a prompt that you copy paste into your next brand new session. And then it's like having a clean slate. It's really fast again. Picks things up quickly. So it will happen and people get really frustrated in the community. I see this all the time and I'm like, well, how long have you been chatting about it? Like how many resumes have you made in this same conversation? Because yeah, it's going to get confused. Like let's have a new— every resume project for me is a brand new context. I just have a good prompt that gives it all the context it needs so that I have a nice clean slate because Yeah, you'll find the end of that reasonable context window pretty quick when you have a long conversation. So anyone confused, that's what that means. I love that as a use case though. I think teaching, learning new things. One of my use cases is related and it is use AI to learn AI. So just anything that you want to do, anything you can use AI again as that tireless teacher to learn about it. I'm going to create a project on the fly. I just thought of it. There are any number of free transcript grabber tools for YouTube. You can go in the Chrome Store and you can find a free transcript grabber. If you are listening to this on a podcast, go to the YouTube channel, grab the transcript from this podcast, it won't offend me, and stick it into your LLM of choice and say, hey, you know, Heather mentioned this thing, or Karina mentioned this thing. What did they mean? And then just start going down that rabbit hole and ask it to teach you, like, oh, Karina mentioned OpenClaw. What is that? Oh, how might I think about that? Like, how would I implement that? Where would I find resources for that? And it'll help you. It'll find things. It'll point you to resources. It'll point you to the right website, the right YouTube video. It's really great at teaching you what you don't know. And so use it to learn AI, like start there. You can find endless videos on things, but unless you're doing the exact same thing as they're doing in the video, sometimes you're going to get lost for your use case and how you want to translate that to your life. So just ask. I am a shameless asker of AI. I am in there all the time just being like, teach me all your ways. I don't know. I don't know what I don't know, but I know you know. And for coding, for, I mean, I can code a little bit in Python, like a little bit. Now I feel like a superstar. I can code anything I want now. It's amazing. And I'm like remembering like, oh, what does this mean? Like when you say this thing, what do you mean by that? And it'll break it down into like 5th grade understanding, which is great.

I feel like a 5-year-old again. I can just like, I can ask as many questions as I want and the adult will not get annoyed. They're just like, yeah, let's do this. And it gets, it also gets a little excited. I think in Notion you can set personalities. Mine is supposed to be analytical, but every once in a while it was like, let's do this. It's like, this is a, this is very ambitious what you wanna do, but I'm excited for your project. I'm like, thank you. You're not telling me, no, that's not a good idea. But they're like, you know, that's ambitious. Let's talk about more how we can do this. And so I'm like, thank you for not limiting me and my ideas.

Unlike AI, my patience is not limitless. And so one really great use case is you can use your AI to help draft something if you need like a diplomatic way to say something. And we all have a colleague or coworker or a situation where you're just like, okay, I need to handle this like an adult. I was coaching somebody recently and she has a boss that probably should not be her boss. And so I'm coaching her into what we call managing up. So she needs to manage her manager a little bit. And one of the reasons this person probably shouldn't be her boss is that they really don't understand even the basic workflow of what they're doing. They were put into this position and honestly, they come to her a lot to ask, you know, well, where's this thing? And she has to point out, well, per our workflow, it's here, you know? And so she has to be really diplomatic because it's her boss, right? And she's frustrated. And that is valid. She is validly frustrated. She has shared some of the conversations with me and I'm like, yeah, that would be really frustrating. So what I have told her to do is to let AI help her to work that frustration out while drafting replies to things. And so we have worked out this persona where she can go to her AI, she can turn on her voice recorder. I use Whisperflow. I'm going to link that also in the show notes. Whisperflow will change your life. You will forget how to type and you will be totally okay with it. So I have her turn on Whisper Flow and say, oh sweetie, it's really a shame that you don't know where things live and you really should know these things, but I'm going to help you out here. Whenever we do a draft like this, it goes in this folder in the Google Drive. And so I'm like, you know, just talk to her like she's an absolute idiot. Oh sweetie, bless your little heart. And so I'm like, give her license to just absolutely be so snarky. And then have her LLM turn that into a really nice diplomatic, safe-for-work reply. And she feels so much better afterward. And sometimes, I'm sorry, but sometimes you have to do that. Sometimes you have to work it out. And again, you've got this teammate now who can help you to do that and to translate it into a really diplomatic, excellent reply that will not get you fired. So, that's my use case.

That's a fantastic use case that I definitely, though it has not been that severe, I've definitely used AI sometimes to draft responses because, you know, in my day-to-day, sometimes I, I'm maybe I just like my brain is just going a little too fast and I'm just like, but you know, write something that, that I think the person will totally get in context and have gotten misunderstandings before. So now I'm like, let me put this in the AI or the LLM or Claude Sonnet specifically. It's like, oh, you can add this, this, this, and this. I'm like, oh, that probably would help them understand better.

Especially cross-functional colleagues, like you said, working with that.

Yeah. Yeah. No, 100%. That has been super helpful with cross-functional colleagues as well to make sure that I'm coming across clearly. And that, you know, also that sometimes I run it, their answers through. So I'm like, what did they mean by this? I don't know. Kind of like how you said put the transcript through for today's podcast. Sometimes I'm like, they just spat this out at me very jargony. I don't know what these things mean.

Help.

Yeah. Which leads me to my next use case actually, which I'm 100%— you're the one that told me about this too, and I've been using it ever since. AI note-taking in general, and that is one that I've seen across the board at all of the in-person networking events I've gone to. A lot of us will sit down and start sharing like, what AI are you guys using lately? And a lot of them will be like AI note-taking and they'll say like their favorites. Some of them are paid for, some of them are, you know, kind of, they might be free up to a point. I know Calendly now has a little note-taker that can come with it. I use the Notion one. It's already in there. And honestly, I think that's really good in general to have it in Notion because then it can work into your workflow because you have the transcript there and you're like, okay, I just had this conversation with my boss and you've now, it summarized everything and gave you like step-by-step things that you need to do after this. Well, now you can take that transcript and maybe it's a conversation about a direction you want to go for a paper, and it can now help you look at what you've done on your paper and be like, hey, here's just how you can implement it now. So now I could look across the two different pages and help you work on things more efficiently and better. And also you focused on the meeting a little bit better as well. So another example of how AI note-taking has made me more efficient, there was a 10-minute meeting that I had the other day. Now you might think, oh, 10 minutes, you guys probably didn't talk about very much. We did. The AI note taker was like, yeah, do you actually have 10 action items? I'm like, wait, I don't remember. Whoa. I don't remember talking about all those things. Oh my gosh, I did promise that.

Yeah.

In 10 minutes. Yeah, I forgot everything. And you might think, oh, well, maybe your meeting wasn't actually that good. It's like, no, actually we were extremely efficient. We talked about more things because we were in the moment focused on things. And now the AI note-taker just handled all of the aftermath because things just out of my head. It's not their fault that it flies out of my head. That's just my brain. It can't hold onto everything. It was written down. I remember it forever though. Yeah.

And being able to be present in the conversations, that's something that's been, at least for me and my team on the recruiting side, game-changing because we used to have to take notes the whole time during our conversations, and you miss things. You miss even the ability to just read the context, read the room with the other person. And so for recruiting, it's been amazing. So AI lifting was one of my use cases too in the context of interviewing. And so I just want to normalize for everyone at this time, I Almost everybody is just very comfortable that AI note takers are a thing and will be present most of the time, whether you're in an in-person meeting or you're in a virtual meeting. My pick for note takers, if you're not using Notion, is called Fathom. There's a really robust free version that will honestly, of course they want you to pay for it, but like this free version is very robust. You do not need to pay for it. And probably by saying this, they're going to find some limitations to stick on it, but I just, it's a really good note taker. It comes into any Zoom, Meet, Teams, like whatever. And so that's great. I love Notion on my phone for in-person meetings because I can just, and I just say like, hey, I'm going to have my note taker running and I just set the phone down and my Notion is there. It captures everything. It's not weird like having a computer out. It is. It's totally acceptable in interviews to bring a note-taker, whether you're in person or whether it's virtual, and simply say, I really want to focus on the conversation, but I am a big note-taker, so I've brought my AI note-taker so that I can just have a great conversation with you. It's totally normal, and the interviewers should not balk at it. If they're going to talk about proprietary things and you've signed an NDA, You might not be able to take it for one of those meetings, but in general, and then you can learn so much from it because you can debrief on your own interview. You can debrief on your meetings as you're moving through your career, as you're having conversations with people at different levels. Take those transcripts and then ask your amazing life coach that lives there in your AI, Like, how effective was I in this meeting? Next time, what could I have done better? Did I communicate everything well enough? Get curious. Like, how can you improve? You can do that for your interviews, you can do that for all of the meetings in your career. And I guarantee you, you will learn things about yourself, your communication style, and you will be a better communicator for it. So that's my use case.

Kind of along the thinking and storytelling line. So this is more for like brainstorming. I just heard from one of my friends the other day how sometimes the people that she works with, they will write up something and it, it's terrible. That's not good. It's very jargony that no one's going to understand this. And this is supposed to be helpful for marketing for the company. And, you know, she's talking with scientists in the company. They're not trained in necessarily marketing writing. So now she's told them like, please talk to the, just put it into the LLM and have a conversation with it. Tell it and don't, you know, put it in an echo chamber. 'Cause sometimes you'll just simply put it in there and you're like, what do you think of this? And it might be very positive. So that's something that people kind of are maybe not, you know, completely enacting the power of an LLM for assessment. You have to tell it like, please assess this for this particular point. Or you're an editor for Cell and you are very knowledgeable about this topic. Please read over this abstract and let me know, does it pass muster? Assess it or critique it. Tell me exactly these things. And that has really helped in general for them on helping to, again, cross-functionally communicate with each other. It's like, please talk to the LLM first and then give it to us. And then we can work together to better tell your science.

I love that. Great minds. This is my last use case here for today. What you just said, and you have heard me maybe in some of our coaching sessions and our group coaching, sometimes somebody comes to coaching. And we have a lot of people where, you know, English is their second language. We have a lot of immigrant scientists. And when somebody comes with a problem, sometimes it's not communicated very clearly, even in the context of coaching. And sometimes I have a hard time following the story. There's a lot of people in it, players, there's science, there's institutions, you know. And so somebody coming to me and I have limited time in our coaching sessions, I have to get to everybody in a group coaching session. It's like a big long story, right? And it's not maybe being communicated particularly crisply, whether English is their first or second language, it kind of doesn't matter. This happens in both situations. And so sometimes my advice is, hey, I would love to really fully understand this story, but I don't actually think that it's perfectly clear in your own mind because I'm hearing a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress here. There's emotions. So I tell them to do exactly what you just said, you know, go I tell them to use Whisperflow because it's easy to just have a total stream of consciousness data dump, right? Brain dump, just everything. And then help me organize this for a career coach who's going to help me with this. You know, I need to be able to have a concise, clear, linear story here so that somebody else, an outsider, can understand what my frustration is and, you know, what's going on in this situation. That is so amazing for people who are really flustered. So that's another use case is like if you have a lot of things in your head and you just need to get them out and find a clear through line, LLMs are great for that. I use them all the time. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Little tip on that, cuz I still haven't downloaded WhisperFlow.

What?

Where are you?

What, what are you doing with your life?

I know. Well, but what I've been doing actually is just brain dumping on the AI note taker and then just telling it to read the transcript.

Yeah.

So it's like, it's kind of the same thing, but it has been helpful too. I did that after an onsite that I had finished and I just went, blah, here's everything I remember because it was in person and I didn't have, you know, I had like little notes here and there, but I was like, I want to make sure that I don't forget the day and I'm just, I just talk to it for an hour and had it like break down for me the day as well. And it also was helpful in writing all the thank you emails to everyone. So I was like, hey, you know, go back to my brain dump that I did and let me know if there's anything I can pull out for this person. So it was quite helpful in that sense as well.

Oh, I love that. I'll give two tools just to finish up that I think are so valuable. For anybody. So the beauty of Whisperflow, because every LLM does have the ability to just chat at it now, like there is a voice button in every, if you want to go into, even Notion has a voice button. Just, you can always just go and have a brain dump. Whisperflow though, any place there is a text box anywhere, this can be in your email, anywhere on your computer, not even in browsers, like in browsers on your desktop, wherever, any place you might type text. WhisperFlow can be there. And so not every text box does have this dictation function, but beyond that, because like Apple, like Macs have dictation, it's garbage. It's really bad. WhisperFlow is really good and it even organizes things into like lists. So like it'll bullet out lists. It'll correct even things that you say wrong. So if I'm saying, oh, I need to go to the store for milk. No, I meant cheese. It won't say milk, no, I meant cheese. It'll just say cheese. Like, or if it's a list of things, it'll bullet out that list. And if I want to, oh no, I didn't mean this. It'll like rearrange the, it's beautiful. It just comes out as if I wrote the thing. And so that's why it's so powerful. So Whisperflow, hands down, one of my favorite tools. It's a close second to Notion. So I'm going to link, I have a free trial for Whisperflow for anyone who wants to try it. It's a 30-day free trial. 30 days will change your life. And then it's really affordable after that. Like, for the time it saves you, I think it's a few dollars a month and it will save you so much time. So I love it. The second tool that I think everyone should have is Grammarly, and there are free versions and paid versions of Grammarly, especially if English is your second language. Every single communication in your job search is part of your interview process. Everything. So I just want to absolutely, I've said this before and I'll say it again, you cannot have any typos or grammatical errors anywhere in anything you're doing related to a job search. The bar is high. It's really high. And luckily Grammarly exists to absolutely remove this as a barrier for anybody. Like Grammarly is your sidekick for just making sure it's right. I really like Grammarly. My team has been using Grammarly for years and it has just gotten better and better. And so I, the free version is great and the paid version is very affordable if you need more power. So those are my two tools where it's like, if you're going to pay for something, so if you were going to go all in and you paid for Notion and Grammarly and Whisperflow, it's under $50 for all of those things. And I think. You probably are saving, I don't even know how many hours in your week, month, year. Too many. Like, ridiculous. It's impossible to add up. So I'm like, for $50 a month, like, that seems really reasonable. If you think about a salary, you know, $50 an hour is approximately a $100,000 salary. So for 1 hour of your work a month, you're probably saving yourself 50 hours of, I mean, conservatively, easily for me. So putting that out there, you know, everything is a trade-off, but there is also time and thinking about, you know, if you could apply to 5 more jobs because you're more efficient, that's 5 more shots on goal, right? So I just, I really believe that sometimes you have to pay a little bit to get ahead. And yet the free versions of these things are pretty damn powerful all by themselves. So you can probably get away with it. All right. Any parting words of wisdom, any tools that you're loving?

There's so many other tools out there. I think like for the scientists in the lab, you could use Notion, but also Benchling is a common tool that people use in the lab to have all of their protocols and stuff. And they've started integrating more and more AI items. As well, such as voice-to-text integration. It also has this compose agent. So like if you quickly like scribble down notes, it can look at that and fix it to basically compose it and properly put it into words or a chart or whatever it might have been, a table into your benchling. Cool. So that's kind of more science side of things.

Awesome. Well, this was really fun. Let us know if you enjoyed this format where we just kind of share what is working right now. I certainly did, and every day I feel like a new thing changes, so I'm always out playing. I'm happy to talk about it. I love talking about it, in fact. So if you want to hear more episodes like this periodically, just let us know. We have a lot of fun in the community. It's about job success. Seeking and career development, and I think there are really great connections made. There's a lot of just wisdom shared. People are all kind of working toward sort of the same goals, but in their own ways, and it's just really great. So if you haven't given us a try, do, and we share what we know, you know, as we learn it. Heather's always making good posts about AI, which is awesome. So thank you so much for being with me today, Heather. This was a lot of fun.

Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah, I'll see you in the community. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach podcast by the Collaboratory Career Hub. Join our school community to get access to support, resources, and materials, and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn. Pro tip: when you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. Have an amazing week and we'll see you back here next Friday.