Slashdot Mirror
Industrial Labs that Still Do Fundamental Research
An anonymous reader asks: "I am a graduate student of Mechanical Engineering at a reputed University in the United States. I have had a lot of fun working towards my PhD. I have published papers and done exciting research. I should be finishing up in the next few months or so, but I would like to continue doing the same kind of work that I am doing now. One option would be to take up a post-doctoral research appointment and find myself a faculty position. I am somehow not attracted to this option because of the tenure and grant pressure. My ideal job would be in something like the Bell Labs of yester-years. Do you know of labs that have that kind of environment? National labs are supposed to have such an atmosphere, but my stint in one of them makes me think otherwise. Google does seem to have such an environment but I am not a CS person. Does Slashdot know of labs where basic research in applied engineering is still done in the US, without the pressure of money and immediate results?"
http://ge.com/research/
http://ge.com/research/grc_3_1.html
Personally I can add a my two cents working in Defense Labs and National Labs: the political forces are too strong for blue-sky research to happen there. But if they happen to be already involved in what you like doing, then you will fit. I'm guessing you want to stick with what the parent post suggested. Good luck!
Check out Southwest Research Institute, there is a variety of government and commercial R&D being conducted in many fields that relate to Mechanical Engineering. The environment is relaxed and encourages self motivated people.
To be honest, if you want to do "useless"/interesting research, your best bet may be a government lab. There's plenty of pie-in-the-sky research at places like JPL. I met a ton of interesting people there, and a lot of the challenges of exploring other planets actually bring about some rather abstract problems to be solved.
These are all fine words, but in most places this is not what happens by default.
First of all academia is about teaching students. It used to be that the students were advanced enough so that teaching a course actually related to the research work, but this is not true anymore. Today undergrad is like a highschool especially if one considers the development in science and technology.
Secondly, at best, postdoc is a three-year position, often less. Which means you will not be thinking about any longterm research - in the time you have left over from comittee meetings, teaching classes and applying for grants.
Thirdly, there is a question of money. I know that it is often considered good manners not consider this, but I always found this silly. Money is a way to apply engineering to resource problems. If you are in science you should practice it.
So, one benchmark is to see whether you can freely afford the tools to do your research. Can you buy a computer that you need ? Does your grant/salary has enough to buy those Wiley or Springer books that you wanted ? Can you take them with you when you go on to the next job ? Can you buy a car or have an apartment close by so you don't waste time getting to and from office ? Can you go to the conference you are interested in ? More often then not the postdoc gets a small cut above a grad student..
A second benchmark is to look at sustainability - will you get paid enough (eventually) to let your children take the same path ? Would you be able to send them to the best school suited to their abilities ?
Lastly, on a more positive note (for the original poster), there are places when you can have fun - but these are defined by particular people, not establishments. Find someone you would like to work with.. Don't look for a university.
Ohh, and there are places like Lincoln labs or LANL which can be a whole lot of fun.
While private labs may have dried up, that doesn't necessarily mean that research is coming to a standstill in America. As a PhD engineering student, I see a great number of projects, including my own, that are funded by private companies. While the company may have a very specific goal in mind, but if a professor is smart it accomplishes so much more. The nature of university research combined with the need to publish papers means that fundamental research is being done. Personally, my group is working with funding from a major corporation to answer some fundamental mechanics questions that they simply don't have the facilities, expertice (and patience, I think) to answer. The result will be a real-world product as well as some serious "pie in the sky" research. If you want to feel like you are in a corporate lab of yesteryear, get a teaching position at a university and seek funding from a corporation. You may be doing almost the same thing.
From the horse's mouth:
Download the PDF on the linked page for the full skinny. In essence, any US Citizen (or qualified alien) may become a patent agent (which means you can perform patent registrations, etc.) if you pass the exam, and have an appropriate scientific education. As an ME grad student, you've got the education down.
As a Biomedical Engineering Grad student, I have considered becoming a patent agent, but I'd rather do research work instead of getting stuck doing all the patent work at a company too cheap to hire a patent attorney.
not true, the long range planning and r&d of companies in the mid 20th century was when we were much more capitalistic and much less "state capitalistic". Selling out the country to enrich non-capitalist societies, forcing people to accept less quality in goods and less quality of living, enslaving people, usury, theft and corruption are not capitalism. True capitalism only occurs when two parties mutually consent treating each other as rational beings. We're getting very, very far from that.
The parent is absolutely correct. Much of the top level R&D work, even "6.1" work (DoD jargon for basic research) is contracted out. There are some DoD labs that still do cutting edge work. The NRL is one. The alternative is to work for one of the contractors. You don't need to work for a juggernaut like Raytheon or Northrup Grumman. There are plenty of small companies that do advanced research. You should take a look for companies that are winning SBIR awards in research areas that interest you. The great thing about looking for SBIR winners is that you aren't limited to DOD work. There's also money from NIH, NASA, etc.
Of course, there are pressures for project management and some of these programs need to turn into products. It's hard to get away from the fact that it's hard to get research funding unless you have an ultimate application and the money won't keep coming unless you have some success in your work. Even in the glory days of Bell Labs when there was some time and money avaiable for curiosity driven research, most of the work had an application. Academic research faces similar hassles. Your advisor might have shielded you from some of that, but a professer needs to pull in research grants, and if your proposals don't have an ultimate application, it's hard to get funding, especially when you're starting out. If you don't get funding as an assistant professor, you will find that once your start-up money runs out you can't recruit students. Furthermore, the speed of research will grind to a halt since your existing students must teach all the time and you can't afford new equipment. Professors in this situation don't get tenure. For the most part, the professors who get money for pure unapplied science have already established themselves as brilliant researchers who are leaders in their fields at top universities.
For example, I regularly saw students take advanced calculus that had problems with basic algebra (like what is 1/a+1/b). Bright students at that - they simply were not taught in highschool properly.
I am sorry, but you are not going to appreciate modern research without knowing algebra so you can do it without thinking. You could get away with unsure calculus (by replacing it with computers and algebra - though this is not ideal either), but algebra is a must. And, to think of it, geometry would be nice too.
Neither of these are anything cutting edge. It is just in the race to get all engineering students "know" calculus we end up with them missing on something a whole lot more basic - algebra, analytic geometry, logic.
And lastly, would not you think there should be progress ? Should not a student today be at least as good as average student 50 years ago ? After all back then some of these things were somewhat new and modern kids had lots of time to adapt.
I agree,
Too often "researchers" have wasted tax-payer's money playing with cockemany schemes just shy of perpetual motion, cold fusion, water-powered cars, and related hubris. If you want to investigate the unproven - you will probably need to find the money somewhere other than my back pocket - or the back pockets of well-managed investments.
Real life is 90% hard work and 10% new - unfinished - pie-in-the-sky cockamany what-if scenarios. If you want real pay - you might try real life. If starving student is your true aim - you might be able to hop from one useless project to the next eternally.
Best luck on whichever you choose.
AIK
For example, though only 0.25% of the world population, Jewish scientists make up 28% of Nobel prize winners in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics, and have accounted for more than half of world chess champions.[5] In the United States, Ashkenazi Jews represent 2% of the population, but have won 40% of the US Nobel Prizes in science, and 25% of the ACM Turing Awards (the Nobel-equivalent in computer science). A significant decline in the number of Nobel prizes awarded to Europeans and a corresponding increase in the number of prizes awarded to US citizens occurred at the same time as Nazi persecutions of Jews during the 1930s and the Holocaust during the 1940s.[6]
Instructional faculty includes tenured positions. Also, there is a question of whether they include law, business and medical schools - which would skew the average.
But consider that these are top schools - other places would pay less.
Also, I notice that University of Michigan is on the 32nd place. I happen to have a link to the salaries of all employees there (this is public data). Have fun browsing ! (and there are plenty of postdoc positions which pay 40K).
China has been doubling their spending on pure (fundamental) science since 1996! Literally, they now spend x1000 more on science than they did 10 year ago!
I know several Nobel-class American scientists just from my University that packed up their labs and moved over to China (where they are offered no-strings-attached, unlimited funding, and all the postdocs they bother to grab), as opposed to getting their funding cut by incompetent neokooks in charge for the last five years.
The fact that half of prospective postdocs have been denied visas recently due to National Security concerns does not help either. I am sure our National Security benefits greatly when they go advance the Chinese or Canadian science instead!
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I too have been involved in projects where a bunch of PhD's who think that real life research has "no budget or time pressure" (read: who think they're still in school), have ended up costing taxpayers billions. Literally, and yes that billion is with an 's'. This happened as recently as the last 5 years. Meaning- everyone who has a job in the U.S. got charged because some PhD's wanted to play research.
Stay in academia and be true to yourself if you want to pursue abstract research. That's fine. Please don't apply to work for any commercial company or government lab if you have no intention of actually working on the applied research they need to pay your paycheck. Please.
My buddy is a mechE (thermal guy) working there on very esoteric thermal problems (he got hired for his work in micro-bubble cooling as an undergrad and masters student, one of only 4 guys in his 50 person group without a PhD...)
his job description is "invent stuff, don't worry about practical applications, we have whole buildings full of engineers who take your work and find uses for it"
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
I looked at TJ Watson as well. Being in microelectronics, I was advised that there isn't much difference between TJ Watson and Fishkill (both IBM) these days. For people outside, TJ Watson sounds more like a research place and Fishkill more as a manufacturing plant - but almost all the work now is done at Fishkill.
Regarding basic research, I had the same question. Who does the blue sky research at IBM ? As the senior manager puts it - it is like having a startup within a big company. You have to fight for it and make it work. No management will just drop in the money for free. So I wondered why they have quantum computing group ? Answer is simple - those people are some of the best in the world. It doesn't harm IBM to have these people around and not produce anything useful immediately. But then IBM can use the fame of these people to boost the research portfolio.
I have a different experience with national labs. The bureaucracy was not too bad at PNNL, and friends at Oak Ridge have never complained about it.
On the other hand, a lot of Los Alamos employees have complained about it.
You could visit potential employers and ask people there about the work environment, office politics, etc. That would probably also give you the best feel of your possible future co-workers.
Do you have any preference for which part(s) of the country you would like to live in?