I, like most biological or chemical scientists need to face
the decision of choosing to work in academia and become a professor at a
research university, or make a move and find an alternative science-related
job. Since starting our PhD, we as scientists are always presented with the
gold standard of a PhD, publish a lot and in high impact journals, land a
faculty position at a research-oriented university such as Harvard, Yale, UCSF,
Vanderbilt, Columbia, Stanford, etc; and become the top researcher in the
field, National Academy of Sciences membership, a Howard Hughes investigator
and if you are truly special a Nobel Laureate. We are implicitly forced to believe
by the scientific community that anything less than this golden path, would be
considered failure. I am now on my third year of a postdoctoral fellowship and
even if no one has ever said this to me, I assume that becoming a professor at
a teaching-oriented university or working for industry is either a failure or
being a quitter. Why being a quitter? Because this other golden path is not an
easy one, it requires very long working hours, working on the weekends, a lot
of ass kissing and more than anything else, a fair deal of luck. No matter how
hard you work, if you don’t by chance run into a big finding, or even if not
big something that other people think is hot, you will not get the first author
Cell, Nature or Science paper; which is almost an irreplaceable requirement to
land one of these faculty positions. At least today, as I was looking through a
listing for a faculty position at a big research university, the second
requirement after a PhD with at least 4 years of postdoctoral experience was: “at
least 2 first author publications in 2 of these journals.” The irony of this
requirement is that in the current state of the politics-controlled scientific
community having one of these publications doesn’t reflect how good you are,
but who you work for (who is the last author on the paper); of course an
obvious exception to this would be making a truly remarkable discovery.
What happens after you have landed your dream academic job
is also another uphill battle. In the US, if you have met those difficult
requirements listed above, big universities will hire you and offer you a big
salary, the catch is that you have to pay your own salary by spending countless
hours writing grants; these grants by the way will only get funded less than
10% of the time if you are truly remarkable. So if your salary comes from your
grant and you have a less than a 10% chance of getting that grant, what does
that say about your job security? I personally think I have a better chance at
making a living by playing Black Jack than following this career path (BTW I am
really good at math, so I truly enjoy playing this game where every hand is NOT
an independent event, but dependent on the previous hand, giving anybody that
is a fan of statistics a chance to be able to beat the casino), perhaps I’ll
write a blog about this in the near future.
However, in the academia field, if you are not a math-gifted BJ player
or the casino, the only winners out of this whole scenario are the big private
universities who are getting the same amount of money as the value of the grant
in “indirect” costs without doing much work, other than providing space and a
‘collaborative’ environment. Now my question is: if this all sounds so bad and
undesirable: Why do I still feel a burning need to pursue it? The only answers
that I can come up with are foolishness or the fact that as most people can
attest that I am very competitive and I have been told that this will make me
thrive in this environment.
But what awaits me on this other ‘failure’ path? Although I
can no say so much about this, I can enumerate the pros and cons of the most
popular alternative career option (in my opinion): Industry. Cons: no freedom
to choose what you inves
tigate (I think). No publications = no prestige or
recognition (I think). Pros: much higher income, better working hours, no grant
writing, actually working on research that would impact human health and not
just mouse health, life outside of your job, no emotional attachment to your
science (not sure if this is a pro or a con, but let’s go with a pro). One more
time I ask my self, why am I still more inclined to pursue academia? I would
love as much discussion as possible about this topic from people defending both
sides. I think it will provide a lot of help to my troubled mind!
Maybe this article may prove helpful to some of you, it didn't help me much: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.1000388
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