A new
school year is upon us. For some students, it means starting the last year of
high school or college, with all of the decisions the
last year entails—what will I do after high school, will I go on to
college, or if finished with college, what will I do after that, will I go on
to graduate school, medical school, law school, or will I try to find a job instead?
None of these decisions is trivial; in fact, what you choose to do with your
life in your late teens/twenties often determines the type of field you remain
in for the rest of your work life. It’s not impossible to move out of that field
in an attempt to change career path, and it’s entirely possible to shift to a new
type of job within one field. I just want to point out that it’s worth considering
what is available to you in terms of careers if you choose to, for example,
pursue a doctorate in the natural or life sciences.
I have
mentored a number of PhD students through the years, as both primary and
secondary advisor; I can tell you that for each year that passes, it becomes
harder for me to encourage college graduates to pursue doctoral studies. There
are many reasons for this; none of them have to do with money. Stipends for PhD
students are in fact quite good now, at least in Scandinavia, ditto for
postdocs and scientists, in contrast to the meager salaries for all of these positions
some fifteen to twenty years ago. The problems have more to do with why you
might want to pursue a PhD, and where you see yourself with that PhD in ten
years. It is a topic for serious consideration before you start a PhD program, not
during or after you finish. You would
think this would be the normal common-sense approach; I can tell you that the
opposite is often true. Students start PhD studies without a real understanding
of what they’re choosing or what it will lead to. They may have a friend who
has started on his or her doctorate; they may see it as a way to ‘postpone’
having to think about what it is they want to do with their lives. The fact
remains--it is much harder now to get a postdoctoral position after you finish
your PhD than it was fifteen years ago; if you are lucky to get a postdoctoral
position, it becomes that much harder to obtain grant funding to become a
research scientist, and so on. With each step, the eye of the needle narrows. Academia
is elitist; the higher up the ladder you come, the more elitist it gets. There
is no guarantee that you will be able to have a research career in academia, if
you define that as being an independent principal investigator with a small
research group. You will find that the doors close once you finish the
doctorate, doors that once were open to you. Where you were once encouraged,
you are now discouraged. It can happen very directly, when you are told that
you are not good enough to pursue a postdoc, or more commonly, you are simply
denied the opportunity to go forward because you will not get funding to go
forward. There is a long list of potential postdoc candidates each year that
wait to hear if they have gotten funding or not. And then let’s say for
argument’s sake that you get postdoctoral funding for some years; after you
finish that work, you start the real work—of trying to become an independent principal
investigator and scientist, one who has his or her own grant funding for
specific projects, technical support, lab space, and other such necessities.
You need these things, otherwise you get nowhere. So back to
my own consideration at the beginning of this paragraph--how can I encourage college
graduates to go down the PhD path when I know that doing so will most likely
not lead to career opportunities for them within academia or even outside of academia?
Many scientific and biotech companies consider job applicants with PhDs to be
overqualified. They would prefer that their salespeople are well-educated, but
not necessarily at the doctoral level.
So perhaps it
makes sense to just focus on and encourage the very few top students at all academic
levels. It would mean fewer PhD students overall, but perhaps that is best for
all concerned. In this way, academia can remain elitist—for the very few who
have made it through the eye of the needle. However, the focus nowadays in the
academic circles I wander through is that ‘the more PhD students, the better’.
This of course is from the standpoints of the mentors and group leaders, who
eye potential students as means to their ends—more publications and thus more
money, more hands for the inevitable and
time-consuming lab work, and so on. Research groups with many PhD students are
looked favorably upon. Those who manage to accumulate a number of such students
are considered successful in academia, because a large group generates grant
funding, whereas a small group does not. The trend nowadays is to merge small
groups into larger ones; doing so increases the chances of getting funding and
getting more students. This is all well and good for the large research group;
I’m just not sure it’s in the best interests of the PhD students who are
looking at a different sort of future when it comes to the job market. It may
just be me, but it seems rather pointless to invest a large amount of time and
energy in mentoring students who will not be staying in academia. Most of the
PhD students I have had the privilege of knowing finished their degrees and left academia for jobs in
industry; they are salespeople, application specialists, clinical research
associates, and the like. These jobs are all very good jobs, but they do not necessarily
require a PhD. Many of these men and women are glad they took their PhDs in
terms of having fulfilled a personal goal; some are not. The latter are those
who originally wanted (or thought they did) an academic career, and were tossed
around in the system by mentors who did not really care about their professional
advancement. Or they experienced the nightmare of being one of many doctoral
students in a research group, all of whom required their own research projects,
all of whom struggled with their group leader over how their projects were
defined and who had the primary responsibility for these projects. These few students were exceptionally
bright and talented, and in my estimation, were forced out by group leaders who
made it impossible for them to stay, because their intelligence and directness
challenged the group leader. Or because the group leader knew that there was
nothing to offer them in the way of an actual career. So wouldn’t it have made
more sense to have discouraged them at a much earlier time point?
Should you
pursue a doctorate and an academic research career? No one can answer that question
for you. Think long and hard about what you want out of life. If you choose the
academic route, know that you have chosen a career where you will always have homework or the feeling of not having
finished your homework, where you will work long hours in the lab or in the
office analyzing data and writing articles. Unless you are extremely bright,
talented and creative, you will not rise in the system. And even if you are all
of these, there is no guarantee that you will rise in the system—due to other
factors such as political jockeying, pissing contests, and the like. You’ve got
to know and understand, really understand, what it is you are choosing. If you
don’t, you can end up like many middle-aged and close-to-retirement academic
researchers in the current system who find themselves with little funding and
no students. The system changed and they were displaced. The small groups they
ran are not interesting anymore. They
hang on ‘in quiet desperation’. They are small-fish small-pond scientists who suddenly
found themselves in larger ponds, at the mercy of the larger and more predatory
fish. That is the current reality of many research academics. There are less
stressful ways to make a living.
