[blackcat]

I am a organic materials synthetic chemist.

I got a job offer in Germany which starts somewhere November this year or latest next January, depending on the Work Permit.

But my current postdoc contract ends at the end of September, i.e. there is a gap.

I personally wanna work more, but do you think 1-3 month temporary researcher position is just too short? Too hard to find? I would like to work more and publish more.

[Corribus]

Hard to imagine 1-3 months being worth it for anyone. Can't you just talk to your current supervisor, see if he/she will extend you for a month or two?

[blackcat]

Hard to imagine 1-3 months being worth it for anyone. Can't you just talk to your current supervisor, see if he/she will extend you for a month or two?

The point is I do not want to stay in this group anymore

[wildfyr]

Flip burgers? Temp job with phones? Probably more money for less work for such a short time.

[Babcock_Hall]

If you can afford to take the time off, you can spend it reading on the background and techniques of your new project.

[blackcat]

What I am thinking now is to ask two professors that I know (they think highly of me and they did contact me for work before).

One of them is in France and another in China. I think for France, research work < 3 months does not need work permit. Anyone familiar with this?

[jeffmoonchop]

Take a holiday, you'll rarely get the opportunity

[wildfyr]

Agree with vacation. Getting 3 months off is so rare. If your money situation is not critical, then do it. How much real research can you do in 3 months in a strange city? Unless you're fantastically lucky it will just be learning a couple new techniques then youre gone.

[Enthalpy]

Do not work in France.

For one, because chiefs are chosen for their incompetence an friendship with the state. This makes the contents of jobs meaningless. The French industry is already >10 years late in building the European Pressurized Reactor, just to give a sense of the problem. All the chiefs do is create conflicts to retain their position. The French are the first consumers of anxiolytics worldwide, don't look for an other reason.

And worse, the French intelligence services destroy the private life of all people working in the weapons industry, or any big company, or making research that has any kind of economic importance, even so small.

A fellow student developed anti-radar coatings, possibly for the Rafale then. At the end of his work, a driver sent him against a bridge pile and flew away. My friend lives in a wheelchair since then. An other fellow student who wrote a software to identify fighter jet models and their orientation lost the use of a hand in a separate car accident.

As a student, I participated in the first TFT for LCD screens outside Japan. My grandfather died the same day that our TFT worked. My student colleague got serious problems too. Patrick Sangouard, my professor who carried the project on, nearly lost a child, then his colleagues almost killed him in a fool prank, he got so many problems that it became a topic of jokes in the lab, then he narrowly survived a paraglider accident that left him badly wounded. At that time, the intelligence services had no legal basis to intervene in this typical industrial project, so our partner company alleged the project was meant for France's nuclear deterrence submarines.

Even as I worked in Germany and my employer had a customer in France, Peugeot, it happened. Half a dozen colleagues and I went to France where we saw a prototype of the 407 car. Besides finding our homes and cars opened, all people who saw the prototype got big problems within a year. Two colleagues lost their father, one was young. The son of the technical director survived a bad car accident. The project leader got his wife and son sick, his car damaged. We had 3 flat tyres on the highway, and I saw on time how a spy tried to push broken glass on the path of my tyre before I left a car park to join the highway. I also narrowly survived poison evaporating from my coat.

The extent was such that the colleagues noticed the abnormal problems without hints from me. Some resigned rather than going again to our French customer. I could make the link for having worked several times in the weapons industry, used Ariane, and so on. I got fired as I refused to go again to Peugeot.

At that German company, we had customers all around the world, but only the French intelligence services were such morons.

Work on OLED, economically as important as LCD screens, would be an obvious excuse for the French intelligence services.