In today’s AMIC lunch with industry seminar, Dr. Allen Clauss, R&D manager, teaching professor, and technology consultant with broad industrial experience, provided overviews of wide-ranging professional positions and projects that highlight a career spanning industry, academia, and technology consulting.
After earning his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Clauss worked for Procter & Gamble as a senior R&D manager responsible for big projects in Japan and China and acquiring extensive business development experience and cultural competencies. He then became a teaching faculty at UW-Madison’s chemistry department, where a high-tech spinoff Xolve Inc was founded. Dr. Clauss emphasized the importance of networking for that career opportunity, “it just fell from the sky on my head because I was right there, and I have the right experience to become its VP.” After selling Xolve Inc. to a large multinational corporation in 2016, where he served as an independent consultant in India for a while via his consulting company CTI Consulting, LLC. “AMIC membership allows members to access many expensive instruments in the Wisconsin Centers for Nanoscale Technology with a 25% discount, which is very critical to my independent consulting business, and all the SEM measurement photos on my slides were taken there in the center!” said Dr. Clauss.
Seminar participants learned that fear is the greatest enemy we face for a drastic career change. However, many successful chemistry professionals who overcome this can enjoy more fulfilling and rewarding career experiences. As the philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre so brilliantly wrote, “the human being is what it is not and is not what it is.” Hence, no matter how precarious the circumstance, anyone can tap into the reservoir of true creativity. Success follows those who understand that their reality is not absolute, their perceptions are not set in stone, and the chains that tie them down are merely the mental restraints they place on themselves. We can curate our desires, form our destinies, and tell our own stories.
We thank the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center for sponsoring this inaugural seminar series and our AMIC community members who contributed to this inaugural seminar series. Please visit our event calendar for an updated schedule, and we hope to see you at our next seminar with Ingersoll Machine Tools. Remember to visit our AMIC website and follow us on LinkedIn!