Hello PhD

Think about your training as a grad student and postdoc – you spend countless hours at the bench, running experiments and reading papers to finish your personal research project.

Now think about your PI or faculty advisor.

Does she spend time at the bench?  Or are you more likely to find her in her office, writing grants, attending departmental meetings, and managing people, projects, and money?

If you’re noticing a mismatch between academic training and the actual work of a faculty member, you’re not alone.  The skills and traits that make us successful students may not translate into making us successful professors and PIs.

That’s where a unique postdoctoral fellowship steps in to bridge the gap: it’s the Academic Pathways program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Their goal is to prepare postdocs for entry-level faculty jobs, with a special focus on increasing diversity at the highest levels of academia.

On The Path

This week, we take Hello PhD ‘on the road’ to record in front of a live audience at Vanderbilt University.  We were joined by three postdocs in the very first cohort of Academic Pathways Fellows: Lillian Brady, Rashanique Quarels and Diego Mesa.

These scholars tell us about the Academic Pathways program, and what makes it so different from traditional postdoctoral training.

That difference starts with the interview process. Rather than submitting a research statement describing their plan for the next 2-3 years, fellows visit Vanderbilt and collaborate on a research plan with a faculty advisor.  The committee then selects fellows based on the result – proving that they not only have a plan, but also a productive relationship with a mentor.

The program carves out protected time for advancing that research plan, but it’s not all bench work. Fellows receive tailored training and opportunities to advance their own skills in mentorship, teaching, and management.  They’re also introduced to the political aspects of faculty life, meeting with Deans and program directors to understand how an academic department handles appointments, funding, and personnel.

An important aspect of Academic Pathways is its commitment to improving diversity in science. Statistically, it’s easy to identify the problem at many Universities where women, people of color, and other groups are underrepresented in professorships and research labs.  Our panelists share the personal side of those statistics and how they plan to encourage the next generation of students.

They also share valuable advice on assembling a ‘panel of mentors’ to assist you in each stage of your career, the value of ‘just applying’ to programs and awards, and the importance of being kind to yourself after a hard day in lab.

These Beverages May Be Habit Forming

For our Science in the News segment, we’re discussing California’s decision to label cups of coffee with a cancer warning.

The coffee roasting process produces acrylamide, which has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals. A small amount of that acrylamide ends up in your morning mocha, so a judge has determined that retailers must warn bleary-eyed coffee consumers.

We dissect the acrylamide research, and warn you about a few other foods that might be cause for concern.

But no matter how dire the warning,

Josh and Daniel are on the road this week, so we decided to bring you some goodies from the archive.  An 8-ish step plan to save science!  

Biomedical science is broken.  Funding is unpredictable, training programs drag on indefinitely, and some of our best scientists are drawn to careers outside of the university or drowned in paperwork if they stay.  Can anything be done to support research staff and boost lab productivity?

Saving Science

These topics are regularly debated in the literature, but a recent meta-analysis by Pickett et al. in PNAS works to find the consensus among a dizzying number of suggestions.  Their paper, Toward a sustainable biomedical research enterprise: Finding consensus and implementing recommendations, could be re-titled “8 Ways to Save Science.”  And while these 8 ideas may appear across the literature, they’re not without controversy.

This week on the show, we unpack the 8 recommendations and debate their merits.  Should all graduate school programs be limited to 5 years?  Should the federal government increase overall funding?  Should postdocs receive higher pay?

To summarize, the 8 recommendations are:

* Make funding predictable from year-to-year

* Increase the total amount of money the federal government hands out

* Reduce regulations

* Pay postdocs more

* Shorten graduate school to 5 years

* Train students and postdocs for “alternative” careers other than faculty PI

* Change how trainees are funded

* Increase opportunities for staff scientists

Josh throws in a bonus recommendation that didn’t quite make the top 8: increase diversity in the biomedical enterprise.

Did you applaud every item on this list, or did the authors miss the mark?  Leave your comments below and let us know what you’d add or remove to make biomedical science a more sustainable enterprise.

Also in this episode, we pay tribute to all the Oregonians who don’t listen to our podcast by drinking Dead Guy Ale from Rogue.  It’s an Oregon beer and we’re pandering for listeners in that great state, so tell a friend!

References:

States in order by quality of their beer offerings.

Newt Gingrich (NYT April 2015): “Double the NIH budget”

PIs spend 42% of their time on administrivia

Stanford recently bumped starting postdoc pay to $50K

NIH recently started a funding mechanism called “Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST)”.

Have you ever submitted a grant, only to have it rejected?  You respond to the reviewers’ comments, addressing weaknesses and tweaking the protocol to honor their suggestions.

Then, when you resubmit, the proposal is rejected again.  This new group of reviewers suggest changes to the protocol. And guess what, their suggestions sound a lot like your original idea that you removed to satisfy the last group of reviewers.

Are you the butt of some cruel academic joke, or is the grant funding process really this subjective and unpredictable?

Mad Money

Grants are serious business to an academic lab.  The NIH alone awards over $30 billion to support 300,000 researchers at 2,500 universities.

Applying for one of these grants requires the investigator to prepare a lengthy proposal, detailing the work they intend to do, preliminary results, and how they will address challenges. As anyone who has applied for a grant knows, it’s a grueling process.

After submission, the grant is read and scored by 2-5 reviewers, and those grants receiving a sufficiently high score are sent to ‘study section,’ where they’re reviewed and ranked by a larger peer group of scientists.

Review boards at the NIH then take these rankings and award money to the top-scoring proposals.  The others are returned with comments on how to improve the research program, and those labs can then re-submit a proposal in the next round of funding.

All of this talk of scores and rankings might lead you to believe that the grant review process is objective, consistent, and repeatable. But notice that behind the numerical values are a group of humans applying their individual judgement to assign a score.

A recent paper in PNAS by Pier et al. at Princeton University questions the fundamental validity of the grant peer review process.

The study’s authors wanted to know: if you give a group of reviewers the same high-quality grant proposals, will they score them consistently?  In other words, do reviewers agree about what makes a quality research proposal?

The paper’s title,: “Low agreement among reviewers evaluating the same NIH grant applications” , makes it clear that reviewers absolutely did NOT agree.

In fact, the authors conclude:

It appeared that the outcome of the grant review depended more on the reviewer to whom the grant was assigned than the research proposed in the grant.

This week on the show, we dive deep into the grant review process, and explain the study showing the wide variation in scores given to the same grants. We also suggest some changes that might make the process more fair, even if human bias and judgement cannot be removed from the equation.

Triple Threat

The science making news this week brings you three papers exploring the role of doctors increasing patient mortality rates!  We describe two studies on the “July Phenomenon” – a period in July where new medical residents start their hospital rotations.  Do these new MDs actually kill more patients while they learn the ropes?

We also mention a recent paper indicating that patients admitted to the hospital for heart attacks survive longer if their doctor is away at a conference!

The old phrase about “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” takes on new meaning.  Maybe the nutrition in the apple is secondary – the primary health benefit is in keeping the doctor away!

And to celebrate St Patrick’s Day, we down some 

On a graduate student’s stipend, it’s hard to imagine having enough money left over to afford a dinner out, let alone enough to invest for retirement.

But if you can scrape together a few dollars each month, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to grow that investment. As a grad student, time is on your side.

Compound Interest

This week on the show, we welcome back our grad-school-finance-guru Emily Roberts, PhD. Not only is Emily a scientist, she’s also a coach, speaker, and the creator of Personal Finance for PhDs.

If you are a grad student or postdoc, and you’ve managed to pay down your other debts, it’s time to start thinking about retirement.  That’s because the money you set aside today will have longer to grow, compounding year after year, until your retirement.

But choosing an investment strategy may seem daunting.  In fact, many students never invest at all because they don’t know where to begin!

Emily recommends finding out if you are eligible for one of several tax-sheltered savings accounts.  If you receive a W-2 form each year, or are married to someone who does, you’ve got a couple of options.

* Traditional accounts (IRAs, 403Bs, etc.) give you a tax break in the year you invest.  So if you earn a $30,000 stipend and invest $1,000 in a traditional IRA, you’ll only pay taxes on $29,000 of your income.  That money will grow over time tax free, but when you take money out of the account at retirement, you’ll pay income tax at that time.

* Roth accounts give you a tax break in the future.  In our example, you’ll pay the full tax amount on your $30,000 stipend, but when you withdraw the money in your retirement, you’ll pay no additional taxes.  This option tends to work well for grad students who are currently earning in the lowest tax brackets, but may be in a higher tax bracket at retirement.

Whichever tax-structure you choose, you’ll probably want to choose an investment that works without a lot of baby-sitting.  Emily recommends index funds (investments that track the growth of the overall market) and those with low fees.

For the simplest set-it-and-forget-it option, choose a target-date fund that automatically shifts the money from high-growth, high-risk options like the stock market while you’re young, to low-growth, low-risk options like cash and bonds when you’re nearing retirement age.

Bottom line: investing for retirement can be easy, and it can be automated.  The best thing to do is start early, and make adjustments as you learn more.

Emily has many great resources on her website, and a special page for Hello PhD listeners.  Just visit pfforphds.com/hellophd for information, an investing newsletter, and an upcoming webinar on tax preparation for grad students.

You may also like:

033: It’s Tax Season – Here’s What You Need to Know

068: Use Targeted Savings Accounts for Irregular Expenses

Science Silencer

The recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida is just one more tragic line in the story of gun violence in America.  Guns rank as one of the top-five killers for people under the age of 65 in the U.S.

It wasn’t so long ago that gun-related injuries were recognized as a public health threat.  In fact, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) studied the epidemiology of gun deaths until 1996 when the Dickey Amendment started a cascade of changes that

But I have no skills! At least no skills employers would be interested in!

As a career counselor, Melanie Sinche heard grad students and postdocs voice this concern nearly every day.  She looked at these talented scholars and saw the ability to think critically, analyze data, and solve problems. To her eye, these were transferable skills very much in demand outside the research lab.  Why couldn’t the students see it?

“I felt frustrated by that comment, and motivated to conduct a research study around skill development. I would argue that scientific training, by its very nature, lends itself to the development of LOTS of skills.”

Data Wins Arguments

Sinche developed a survey for early PhDs who had entered the workforce, to find out which skills they needed to do their current jobs, and how well their graduate training had prepared them.  Over 8,000 responded.

“It’s important for PhDs to recognize and have the confidence to express the skills that they’ve developed through their training,” Sinche says.

Here are the 15 skills, ranked by how well prepared the PhDs felt after their graduate training (Most Prepared to Least):

* Discipline specific knowledge

* Ability to gather and interpret information

* Ability to analyze data

* Written communication skills

* Oral communication skills

* Ability to make decisions and solve problems

* Ability to learn quickly

* Creativity/innovative thinking

* Ability to manage a project

* Ability to set a vision and goals

* Time management

* Ability to work on a team

* Ability to work with people outside the organization

* Ability to manage others

* Career planning and awareness

The last four items in that list exhibited a skill gap for the respondents – they didn’t feel the PhD program had adequately prepared them for their work.  It’s an opportunity for improvements in graduate training, and students should seek additional help.

For the other eleven skills, graduate training was helpful, making PhDs especially competitive in roles where data analysis, learning quickly,  and communication are key.

And one more piece of good news from the study – PhDs appear to be pretty happy with their work!

When asked about job satisfaction, an impressive 80% of respondents said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs.  This was true both for those in research intensive careers (e.g. faculty, industry) and those in non-research intensive careers (e.g. teaching, science writing)

“I was so encouraged by what I found.  There is life after the PhD – life after the posdoc!” Sinche concluded.

You can read the entire paper at this link:

An evidence-based evaluation of transferrable skills and job satisfaction for science PhDs

Or read her book:

Next Gen PhD: A Guide to Career Paths in Science

Hazy Shade

This week, we also share a story about an assault on the hallowed tradition of anonymous peer review.  After a legal fracas between Cross Fit Inc. and The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, a judge has ordered that the reviewers of a Cross Fit exercise study be unmasked.

We discuss the history of anonymous peer review, and why the current legal action is so unusual.

And we mellow out with the Purple Haze Lager from Abita Brewing Company in New Orleans.  Hey, it’s Mardi Gras, someone throw us some beads!

Some decisions in life are simple (“Yes, I want cheese on that burger!”) and some are difficult (“Do I want to spend the rest of my life with this person?”).

On that spectrum, choosing a University graduate program sits closer to marriage than it does to your lunch options.

First, grad school takes a long time – usually 4-6 years – and it sets you rather firmly in a career path that can be challenging to change afterward. It’s a life-decision.

Second, once you choose, you’re committing to a series of events and impacts that will be out of your control. You don’t get a “do-over” when the lab you wanted to join moves away or a postdoc picks up the project you learned about during your interview.

Take a cohort of students at any research university in the country, and you’ll find some that graduate with three first-author papers in just four years.  You’ll find others who never make it to the degree, either due to conflicts with their advisors, projects that don’t work out, or personal issues stemming from the stress of graduate studies.

So we know the stakes are high, but how, exactly, are you supposed to choose a PhD program?

 Make the Choice

This week on the show, we answer listener emails.  Mikaela wants to know what factors to consider when choosing a University and degree program, and Katie shares her specific conundrum: going with an offer she has vs. waiting for something better.

We lay out some general guidelines that will help any student-to-be.

1. Fascinating Research

It goes without saying that you should find a program with interesting research topics, but many students make a critical mistake in their focus.  They find one faculty member – one research lab – that sounds absolutely amazing and choose the degree program in the hopes of working in that lab.

Then, after moving, enrolling, and starting classes, they learn the PI has moved away or the lab is full and can’t accept new students.  Now they’re stuck in a program and forced to settle for something else.

Imagine spending the next five years of your life doing research you don’t care about!

Instead, look for programs with a variety of interesting topics.  This is obviously a deeply personal measure, but the goal is to find a variety of labs that satisfy your interests.  Make sure there are three to five research topics you could invest in, and you’ll be ready with Plan B, C, and D when Plan A falls through.

2. Love the Place

We’ve already mentioned you’ll be living in a university town for a few years, and you’ll spend plenty of time outside the lab.  Make sure you like your new home town.

This includes concerns like climate, but also the subtle character of that particular city. Is it bike-able? Is it near the beach? Does it have excellent restaurants? Can you stay close to family?

You want to enjoy the location, but make sure you experience it before you pass judgement.  All too often, students miss a great opportunity to step out of their comfort zones because they’re convinced they “never want to live in the city” or “can’t imagine moving to the East coast.”

Apply everywhere, and use the interview to explore new places.  You may just fall in love.

3. Professional Development

Most universities offer quality classes and cutting edge research, but not all programs are created equal when it comes to professional development.  There are still departments that consider a faculty position the only viable outcome of PhD training.  Others are strapped for resources and don’t offer additional help on career exploration or skill training.

Instead, look for a program that recognizes the diversity of PhD careers, and fosters your development in your chosen path...

Turning over the last page of the calendar seems to naturally invite some reflection on the previous 365 days. When you look back at 2017, what went well? And what do you wish you could change in the coming year?

This week, we take the opportunity to reflect back much farther – to our days in graduate and postdoctoral training!  With years of hindsight, we offer advice and perspective to the scientists we were, and devise some resolutions you can adopt in your scientific training.

Grad School Resolutions

 1.  Remember that training is temporary

When you’re ‘on the inside,’ graduate training can seem like an endless tunnel – the light at the end just a distant pin-prick.  For many, the daily stress of lab life closes in and we begin to feel trapped and hopeless.  This year, pause to consider that your training is just a brief step in your scientific career, and that people do finish! We promise!

2. Be mindful of your unique skills and motivations

Many students wait to think about a suitable career until they have a degree in their hands and a PI’s foot on their backside.  We recommend taking stock of your natural motivation and skill patterns early AND often.

It can be as simple as reflecting at the end of the day or on a Friday afternoon.  What did you accomplish this week? Which activities left you feeling energized?  Which left you drained? When did you lose track of time because you were engrossed in the task? Jot each item in a notebook or on a post-it and save them.

After a few months, you’ll have a detailed list of skills and activities you like to use and those you’d like to avoid.  These patterns can persist over a lifetime, so spend some time examining the notes and identifying the common themes.  That way, when you’re reading job postings, you’ll know exactly which positions fit your personality.

3. Push beyond your comfort zone

Starting a graduate program often means moving to a new town, meeting hundreds of new people, and dropping the support networks you enjoyed in college. That makes many introverted science-types turn further inward as we try to avoid the stress of new situations.

But remember that many of the people you meet feel exactly the same way.  Push yourself to engage, and you’ll be rewarded with new friends and colleagues that will last a lifetime.  Graduate training is full of never-to-be-repeated opportunities if you’re willing to step up and take them.

4. Make science fun again #MSFA

Don’t forget that you chose a career in science because science is amazing.  Maybe it fascinated you as a child, but we quickly lose that child-like curiosity the moment Figure 4 of our paper is due.

Every once in awhile, it’s okay to let loose and try an experiment because you think it’s fun, or you just can’t predict how it will turn out. This will not only stoke your love of science, it may lead to your next line of inquiry.

5. Find emotional support before you think you need it

Graduate training may be one of the most stressful periods of your life.  That’s not unusual. But too many of us try to ‘power through’ on our own.  Anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and worse are the rewards.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.  Your mental health is as vitally important as your physical health.  If eating right and going to the gym are admirable, then so are finding a counselor or mental health professional to help you on this journey.  As we look back over our own graduate training, we wish we had found this support sooner.

So that’s it – five resolutions for a happier, healthier, sciencier you.  Leave a comment below to let us know YOUR New Year’s Resolutions, or the advice you wish you’d gotten as a grad student or postdoc.

Shock Lobster

Pick up any newspaper and you’ll find an article summarizing the ‘latest research’ on the health benefits of chocolate, a new treatment for Alzheimers, or the long-term risks of screen time for your toddler.

As a scientist, you probably groan before you reach the end of the title: the claims are extreme, the statistics are dubious, and often, the information a reader should know is buried below the fold.

If you’d like to see science communication reach new levels of accuracy and relevance, it may be time to step away from your lab bench and pick up a pen.

AAAS Mass Media Fellowship

Scientists are trained to describe their work to other scientists in papers, posters, and presentations, but they may struggle to describe the importance of that work to a non-technical audience.

Journalists are trained to uncover facts, and tell a compelling story quickly and accurately, but they may not be familiar with the subtle nuances of a scientific field or technique.

For forty years, a fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has bridged that divide, placing scientists into the busiest newsrooms in the world.

The AAAS Media Science & Engineering Fellowship is competitive summer program that allows students, postdocs, and recent grads to spend 10 weeks practicing journalism with media outlets like The Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, WIRED, and Scientific American.

This week, we talk with Project Director Rebekah Corlew, PhD, about this amazing opportunity for scientists to improve their communication skills and their networks.  She shares a few stories about past fellows (including one whose article made the cover of Time Magazine!) and tips for a successful application.

The application deadline is January 15th, so click here to apply now!

Need more information? Watch this pre-recorded webinar or read the Q&A.

CDC Word Ban

Last week, the Washington Post reported that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had issued a ‘word ban’ for their annual budget request.  The undesirable terms were: “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

Many readers, lawmakers, and scientists responded with outrage about the supposed ban, while the department of Health and Human Services attempted to claim it was all a misunderstanding.

We share our thoughts on the story, which is likely more nuanced and less villainous than the headlines would have you believe.

We also sample another German favorite, the Allgäuer Büble Bier Edelbräu from Allgauer Brauhaus from Kempten, Germany.  It travelled a long way to reach our studio, but it was well worth the trip!

In every episode of Hello PhD, we explore science training and life in the lab.  But for every scientist, that saga begins with a grad school application.

Whether you’re ready to apply today, or would like to apply to a graduate program ‘some day,’ we share a few tips and tricks that will make the application process simpler and more effective.

Grad School Application: Step by Step

A grad school application has a few basic (but vital!) parts.

The CV

The core of your application is your Curriculum vitae (CV).  You’ll use it to list your educational experience, and more importantly, your research experience.  The admissions committee will want to see evidence that you’ve actually had some success in the lab before you enter grad school.

Why is this so critical?  Look at it from the committee’s perspective:  You have a stack of qualified applicants and a limited number of spots. Would you take a chance on a student who claims to ‘love science’ but has never picked up a Pipetman? Or would you choose the student who has worked in a real lab for 3 semesters?

‘Loving science’ is not the same as ‘loving lab work,’ and the committee knows the difference.  You’ll need to get some lab experience before you apply.  That will also help you on the next section of your application…

The Personal Statement

This section strikes fear into the hearts of applicants.  Is this supposed to be a story about getting your first chemistry kit when you were nine? A detailed description of the experiment you did last summer?  A love-letter to science?

An effective personal statement contains three essential elements:

* An overview of your research experience and your personal contribution to the project (sound familiar?)

* A description of why you believe graduate school is the vital next-step in your training

* A description of why this particular school and graduate program are a good fit for you academically and personally

We unpack each of these ideas in this week’s show, but keep in mind that your statement must be specific to the program – a form letter will not catch the committee’s attention.

Letters of Recommendation

Hey, remember when we talked about how important research experience is in your CV and personal statement?  Well, it’s important in your letters of recommendation too!

Make sure at least one of your letters comes from your research advisor.  It’s great that your chemistry professor, dentist, and Aunt Mary think you’re a wonderful student (and devoted flosser), but the committee wants to hear what your lab supervisor saw in your work and your potential.

Transcripts and Tests

Unfortunately, you can’t take a ‘do-over’ on that terrible semester Freshman year.  Your transcripts are fixed, but more important than the GPA is the trajectory of your grades.  While you may have a bad semester, the committee will look for those grades to improve over time, and to see that you took, and succeeded, in classes related to your field.

And while we don’t like it, the GRE is a requirement for admission to many programs. (Here are a few that don’t require it!).  In most of the science grad programs, your quantitative scores will count for more than verbal, so be sure to study before the test.

Regardless, a middling GRE score shouldn’t preclude you from applying to, or entering, a graduate program.  They’re

Publishing your research in a peer-reviewed academic journal is an exercise in patience. You write and edit, wait for feedback from your PI, wrangle the figures into some esoteric format, and then submit.  That’s when the real patience begins.

From submission to publication, the peer review process can take more than a year.  Meanwhile, you’re moving on to other work, and hoping a competing lab doesn’t scoop the science you showed at the last conference.

Enter the preprint.  Though it sounds unassuming, it’s a source of real controversy in the biomedical sciences.

Like Reprints, But Way Earlier

Essentially, a preprint is just a manuscript submitted to an online repository before it has gone through peer review.

The benefits are perhaps unexpected: preprints enable anyone to access your research, regardless of their budget for journal subscriptions.  Peers can comment on the work, and offer suggestions for follow-up experiments that may speed your research through the traditional review process. And preprinting can establish your lab’s primacy when another researcher tries to scoop your work.

But preprints offer hazards as well.  Will the quality of research decline if experiments are not reviewed first? What if no one shows up to comment or collaborate?

Launched in 2013, bioRxiv.org intends to answer these questions empirically.  Based on the longstanding ArXiv.org, a preprint server for physics and mathematics, bioRxiv “is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences.”

In this week’s episode we talk with Jessica Polka, PhD. She’s the Director of ASAPbio where she works to promote the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. She explores the common concerns she hears from biomedical scientists, and how she believes preprints could revolutionize discovery and collaboration.

The Tax Man Cometh

As if you haven’t heard, the United States House of Representatives just passed a tax bill that could destroy graduate education as we know it.

Think that sounds a bit hyperbolic? The plan would make graduate tuition waivers taxable, adding $1,800 to $9,000 to your tax bill on April 15th. Raise your hand if your stipend has an extra $9,000 you were just itching to spend!

Luckily, there’s a lot you can do.

* Educate yourself on the details of the plan and how it would impact your training.

* Find the contact information for your representatives. (Senators are your best point of contact, as they have not yet voted and their version of the bill does not revoke tuition exemptions at the time of this writing.)

* Make the call to let them know how important graduate research and science education are to our society.  For help, try this script, or take this advice from a former education lobbyist on how to make your voice heard.

In other news, here’s a running list of graduate programs that no longer require the GRE!

And if all of this is too much for you, why not kick back with the Pumpkin Pie Porter from Deep River Brewing Company in Clayton, NC.