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Too Many Biomedical Graduate Students, Not Enough Jobs
stillnotelf writes "ScienceInsider is covering a National Institutes of Health advisory committee report that details problems in the U.S. biomedical research workforce. Current policies encourage the training of large numbers of biomedical graduate students, as they are the cheapest labor available, but the research enterprise is not structured to absorb them into full-time scientist positions. The report's varied suggestions include removing graduate student funding from investigator-linked research grants (shifting it to institution-linked training grants instead) and encouraging the hiring of staff scientists as permanent lab members. This would reduce the number of trainees, but increase the proportion of trainees that maintain careers as researchers. ScienceInsider further notes that a National Research Council report 14 years ago noted a similar problem, but never motivated change."
also get rid of unpiad and college only internships (paid or unpaid) We need to get rid of the idea of pay to work / work for free and pay full price for Credits.
No job outside school? Stay in and continue to work for peanuts while paying tuition.
The economy needs more post-doc students!
Agreed. Not everyone "deserves" a degree (I'm not talking about perceived ability, rather potential).
I'm assuming that most will agree that there are a lot of "feelgood, will pay" degrees given to otherwise unemployable individuals.
Wet-lab fields tend not to be like that.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The report cited is quite thoughtful and accurate in identifying trends, inefficiencies and recommends important solutions. Unfortunately the bulk of them cannot be implemented while maintaining US biomedical research excellence without a greater infusion of funds from Congress -- the system is the way it is partly because the research community is already being seriously squeezed for funding. If the Repubs/Romney have their way (Mitt has talked about a 20-30% slashing of NIH funding), then it really doesn't matter, as the whole system is headed for collapse and the US will truly fall behind and lose a decade or two at the least. The report is correct in looking at trends that span a decade, but even 4 years of a slashed budget would seriously cripple the system and drive away top talent. It is already happen even with the current NIH funding situation (very poor, less than 10% chance for any grant application to be funded).
Within the umbrella of biomedicine, there are vastly different job outlooks. Some areas can't hire post-docs and staff scientists fast enough. Others can't afford to pay anyone other than a grad student (who works for less than minimum wage in most cases).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Seriously, H1-b visas are being used to bring over more scientist.
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
These grants should be mostly for Americans.
This is true for most professions today in the U.S.. When the U.S. exported its manufacturing industry, vaporizing millions of well-paying blue collar jobs in the U.S., the middle class was told that these jobs would be replaced by even higher paying white collar or "creative" jobs for everyone--you just had to educate yourself. Well, people listened, and they educated themselves, and now they're finding out that they were sold a big fat bucket of bullshit. Just ask any recent law grad, or architecture grad, or marketing grad, or, yeah, bio-med grad. There just aren't enough of these professional jobs to replace the ones we've lost. There never was and there never will be.
I'm assuming that most will agree that there are a lot of "feelgood, will pay" degrees given to otherwise unemployable individuals.
BSs, sure. MSs, sometimes. Not PhDs, if for no other reason than that, at least in the sciences, it's almost universally the case that the school pays you to get the degree, not the other way around. And while it's true that the money for a lot of grad student stipends come from external sources (NIH and NSF particularly, in the US) so there's some incentive for schools to get and graduate as many students as possible, it's also true that the granting agencies look at what happens to students down the road as one of their major criteria for renewal. Any training-grant-funded program that produces a lot of unemployable graduates is in big trouble.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Can you eludicate?
Thanks for good information...
Masters or PhD? There's a big difference. Biomedical science and engineering usually require advanced degrees and as much experience as possible. This is something that a PhD does a lot better than a Master's. It's not like computer science or mechanical engineering where you can just get a Master's and get a regular job. There just aren't that many jobs like that in the biomedical field (at least as far as I know, maybe someone can confirm or correct me).
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
are nearly entirely made by people who don't know what they are talking about?
This is a real problem in all of the sciences. The biomedical sciences have had the best money for a long time, and if they are beginning to have problems, it isn't good.
For those not in the know: grad students are slave labor. postdocs are a notch better, but only barely. Remember how Gordon Freeman was treated in the intro to half-life? Consider that a documentary.
semantics are everything!
While this is also true, the current system is completely unsustainable unless the funding basically increases exponentially, which is never going to happen. The problem is that for each faculty (each lab), you typically have ~4 postdocs and ~4 PhD students at a time... so after 5 years, you've gone from needing 1 faculty position to 5. If they each get jobs, after another 5 years you're up to 25 positions... unless funding (and, equally as importantly, university positions/space) is going to increase exponentially, it eventually falls apart.
It's exactly the same training problem as other fields (law, medicine) in that you're constantly training more people than there are current positions... except that in those fields if you really can't find a position, you can go open your own practice. In biomedicine, that's nearly impossible - any serious research lab is going to require a significant amount of funding and resources that you basically can't get outside the university/grant system, and it's very difficult to do a biomedical startup without having a prototype already existing (since it's biology, and the failure rate is high simply because we don't understand enough about most systems yet to know what will work and what won't without actually testing it).
As the boyfriend of a neuroscience postdoc I'm often baffled at how broken this system has become. Many scientific reports are false or suffer serious problems that are never revealed because the level of competition created by the squeezed grant funding has made a an incorrect hypothesis a career ending disaster. The work load is really high too. Labs have Saturday mandatory work hours and 11-12 hour work days during the week. All this with a 40k salary and limited benefits. Surely the brain is poorly enough understood that there's plenty of room for research. The system as it is, with so much bad research out there by scientists who were afraid of abandoning their hypothesis and watching their career disintegrate, is fully rotten. I'm convinced radical changes are necessary for it to offer any benefit to society at all.
In general, at the Bachelor's level, the material is extremely dense compared to the humanities, and the lecturers are selected based on their research value, not their didactic ability. I have rarely heard of someone switching into biology or medicine because they felt some other discipline was too hard. Since many of these degree programs require organic chemistry, getting through them with a decent average is a real trial by fire. Some of the graduates may not have the greatest critical reasoning skills, but surviving in such a program most definitely requires significant determination and dedication.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Right, but a PhD in something, even if they're a 'teacher' is really on a 40/40/20 contract or similar. 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% administrative. There are only so many places it's worth trying to build any research program and course selection, so you can only absorb so many graduates. A professor isn't a 'teacher' like a high school or public school teacher, you teach a handful of classes a year and the rest of the time do research. Whereas a teacher is teaching, or preparing for teaching or marking from teaching full time.
Strictly speaking comp sci would have the same problem, we graduate as many PhD's as we have faculty/researchers - and that's every year were it not for the massive industry sink of 'go make software for a living'. So we'd be over supplied for faculty positions by about a factor of 30, though smaller schools can't grant PhDs so it's harder to do the math and be sure. Either way. If you don't have research grant money for faculty there's no point in training future faculty.
Now the question with biomedical research I would think is why aren't there industry jobs, and what's been happening to the graduates? It's possible this 'problem' is fabricated, and the US is just serving as the worlds training centre for biomedical science and that they're just going back to home countries or are going into non reporting areas (where they do broadly biomedical work but not specifically talked to by the NIH). From the looks of the report there's a 5 year backlog between getting a PhD and getting a faculty position, that's a problem by itself, but it's not clear if that's getting worse or better from the report. It's also possible that industry is just not doing biomedical research in the US (are the graduates being given bad skillsets, overpriced etc?), and I would think the other option is that there just isn't the money to support this many grads anywhere, and they should cut back. That's unfortunate, but better to tell people 'go do something else' sooner rather than later.
1. We need to train a lot less PhDs in biomedical sciences. Reducing the training period will only mean that we will train more PhDs not less. There aren't enough jobs to absorb all the PhD's trained in US. Most of the graduates that stay in the field compete for jobs that would require only MSc degree. Quite a large number of graduates end up with jobs that have little to do heir training (sales reps, etc).The whole biomedical jobs field is a pyramid with a broad base of grad students and post docs and veri narrow tip of academic and high skill industry jobs.
2. Putting artificial limits on the training period will reduce the quality of the training. The reason why a PhD degree takes 6,7 or more years is that it requires peer review journal publications and the bar on these has rapidly risen in the past years. Such publications require in depth studies, often involving animal models or clinical data that take years to generate and analyze.
It would make more sense to re-purpose graduate programs to training MSc and then offer the opportunity to those students who are passionate about science to pursue PhDs. Strangely, I don't see any estimates in the report on the projected numbers of jobs requiring PhDs or the carriers undertaken by PhD graduates.
In reality there is not enough biomedical research funding, because there are still hundreds of thousands of diseases which do not currently have cures.
There is currently a surplus in insurance sales people and their support staff (actuaries, etc). If the billions of dollars spent each year on funding the medical insurance business could be diverted to curing diseases then this would be a win-win situation for the biomedical field and for patients. Of course if this happened then the insurance people would not be able to maintain their lifestyles, so you can expect the lobbyists will ensure that the medical industry is always under-funded.
at a large research university, with a strong biomedical engineering program, I've seen first-hand, that our biomed students remove biomedical engineering from their CVs and just go with their traditional major (mechanical, electrical, etc.), to find jobs. At our institution, biomed is a very prestigious and highly selective program, with significant additional coursework requirements. The field is heavily promoted to idealistic young scholars, basically so that researchers can get free labor in mandatory research internship semesters. AC for obvious reasons.
I'm attending school right now for microbiology, and I was hoping to get into researching pathogens in a medical setting. Is this something I should maybe avoid, or is there a decent job market I could look forward to entering in a couple of years?
THANK YOU!
Every time I read another article or book about how we need more STEM education in schools I want to pull my hair out and scream "HOW ABOUT SOME FUCKING JOBS THAT PAY?"
Let's be honest, getting a degree in the sciences, math, or technology is hard. It takes dedication right from an early age in school where science and math studies are bastardized by political interests that insist on BS like "teaching the controversy", and even if you can get a good education, those interests play second fiddle to athletics and prom night.
Then you go into college where you get weed-out classes and tons of labs that cost a lot of additional money over tuition, books, and room and board.
After *that*, if you have the dedication, you do graduate work for an advanced degree and possibly post-doc work.
After all that, *if* you can find a job, you get paid for a year's work about what a Wall Street broker makes during the time he's sitting on the toilet taking a dump, and forget about tenure-track educational positions, those are rarer than hen's teeth in the 21st century.
I'm not done yet -- if you do manage to go though all that, you end up a field where the very basis of your work - the scientific method and things like evolution and global warming - are just punching bags to idiot politicians who won't hesitate to destroy your reputation and career if your findings don't square with their personal fantasies.
If the US is serious about science, math and technology, they'll stop harping about needing more education and start paying attention to revitalizing the field's job prospects and respectability.
Internships are such a fuzzy concept for most people. Among I.T. folks in particular, I've seen quite the battle cry lately for unpaid internships to be made flat-out illegal. That would be a foolish thing to do and here's why.
Unpaid internships were originally conceived by universities so that the student could come into a company, get a bit of training, and see how the business works from the inside. The company is supposed to derive no benefit from having the intern there. I've worked in places that did this and this kind of experience is very valuable for the student because it gives them a glimpse of the "real world" and hopefully informs their career choices.
Paid internships, in contrast, do have the intern doing real entry-level work and, for the most part, has all of the responsibilities of an employee.
Any company which brings in unpaid interns and has them doing actual work which directly or indirectly benefits the company is probably operating outside the law in most states. Any states which do not expressly prohibit this need to have their citizens stand up and make it so, but with the reason and clear-mindedness to not just make all unpaid internships flat-out illegal as you would propose.
That is what graduate school is like for a lot of science and engineering fields: you get paid to attend and work in a lab gaining real job skills. The only caveat is the job skills can be biased toward certain work that may or may not be that applicable outside of research work. Depending on the field and the team the student chooses to join, that work experience might be even narrower, e.g. specific to only academia environment.
... a backlash against education. Schools have been training too many people for certain disciplines for decades, but it seems as though they are now training too many people for all disciplines. In some cases, there are 10 people holding a degree in a field for every job opening. Not only are those other 9 people looking for work out of their field, they are often stuck with minimum wage jobs, over four years of lost income, and their career is set back over four years.
So what are these graduates going to end up telling their children?
The crux of the issue with allowing unpaid internships that provide nothing of value to the company and paid internships which do is this: prove the intern's work provided value. If a record company or Hollywood studio can bill a blockbuster success as somehow a multi-million dollar loss, you can bet that any company that wants to exploit unpaid interns will easily be able to "prove" that they got nothing of value.
The distinction between the two works just fine in an environment with mature adults, but the business world is a bunch of two-year-olds screaming "mine!".
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
for someone with an MS in one of the biomedical sciences, what are the job prospects in industry - as bad as for PHD holders? or are masters degree holders more likely to get those jobs b/c employers don't want to pay the premium for someone with a doctorate?
In reality there is not enough biomedical research funding, because there are still hundreds of thousands of diseases which do not currently have cures.
At the very least, there are thousands and thousands of genes which have not been studied in any real detail. There's plenty of biomedical research to do that's fairly routine (i.e. doesn't require an absolute best-fo-the-best superstar Einstein). I mean, just go through all the 20,000 or so genes in the human genome and, for each gene that's not already well studied, assign a team of a hundred or so people to studied that particular gene. You'd need a million or so researchers - so the cost might be comparable to the cost of the Iraq war (i.e. easily within the budget of a country like the USA).
Nobody wants to admit it but slashing funding for postdocs is the right answer. Right now it's so easy to get a postdoc job that professors consider themselves a success if their students get a postdoc position. meanwhile, if you're supervising a postdoc who can't get a tenure-track appointment, it's considered "moving on to the industry" and no big deal.
If we cut funding for postdocs, this has several benefits. 1) the bottleneck is moved to the grad student level, and fewer grad students will apply; 2) those who would have left academia after their 3rd postdoc wind up wasting less of their life at low pay; 3) the lack of slave labor will cause us professors to actually do the fucking research ourselves rather than being remote grant writing machines as some of my esteemed colleagues have become; 4) more tenure-track jobs will be created from the savings if the grant system adapts by turning into UK style block grants which fund entire departments rather than (often competing) individuals.
There are clearly too few jobs for the STEM field majors who graduate, but those who want cheaper labor have a much louder mouthpiece for their viewpoint. The media loves to compare the scores of every single 12th grader in the US to those select few in other countries who are going on to an engineering school, and then talk about how terrible we are doing in math. The comparisons are ridiculous.
Some of the graduates may not have the greatest critical reasoning skills, but surviving in such a program most definitely requires significant determination and dedication.
Equally advantageous: extreme mismanagement at all levels.
I spent five years in one of the most prestigious biomedical science graduate programs and somehow managed to get a PhD (I say this not to brag, but to make the point that they'll give just about any asshole a degree). I have seen countless graduate students and postdocs coast along for years with no results to show for it, without any action from the supervisors. Sometimes bad luck is a factor - even the most talented scientist can be helpless when faced with an intractable experiment - but a good manager knows when to cut his/her losses. A good manager also knows when to say, "perhaps grad school isn't a good environment for you. Maybe you should quit now with an MS and go do something more useful with your life." A good manager realizes that when someone stops showing up for months on end, it's time to fire his sorry ass and hire someone useful, or buy more equipment. An HPLC never shows up at 3pm because it overslept after eating too many pot brownies. (True story!)
What makes this really depressing: most of the people I went to school with were far above average intelligence and capable of doing excellent work with the proper motivation and management. There are lots of exceptionally bright men and women in their 20s slaving away in laboratories on soul-crushing projects, supervised by an odd mix of micromanagers, passive-aggressives, and absentee landlords (for lack of a better term). Most of us are utterly unsuited for graduate school, either in theory or in practice. Only a fraction are cut out to be full research faculty, and even some of these I wonder if they'd be happier doing something different. (The remainder, I seriously wonder whether they'll be fucking up their grad students' lives in 20 years.) Most of us go to grad school because that seemed like the logical route at the time, and we enjoyed learning and experimenting. After 5-6 years of largely wasted effort, almost none of us would still recommend grad school to our younger selves. I still feel bad about a few of the younger students who didn't get the brutally honest advice they deserved, because we didn't want to hurt their feelings.
There are probably a few sub-fields where it is possible to stay on the cutting edge and be employable for years after graduation - next-gen sequencing, perhaps. But I get depressed every time I go to meetings and meet students and postdocs with IQs well above 120 slaving away on projects that are probably useful but certainly not world-changing, and who will probably end up with one or two papers in Journal of Molecular Biology, and eventually need to find jobs in their chosen fields. What jobs? Even if you're the most badass electron microscopist in all of New England, what does that prepare you to do other than perpetuate the cycle of mismanagement at another research institution? Assuming you can even get the job, of course; even a top-tier journal publication doesn't automatically get you anything when you're competing with several hundred other postdocs.
Sadly, I still haven't figured out what to do with the degree that took most of my youth and nearly all of my sanity. I never had any ambitions towards faculty posts, fortunately, but there aren't a ton of jobs in industry in my field either. I still work in the same field in academia in a full-time researcher position, which is relatively stable if you ignore the fact that my employer is $14 trillion in the red and counting. I'm probably marginally more employable because I managed to pick up very good programming skills along the way, but still, if I want to move into software engineering I'm either going to be competing with CS PhDs, or settling for bachelors-level jobs. Every time I read my alumni newsletter from college I cringe, and think "Jesus Christ, why didn't I just sell out like everyone with a brain?"
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Biomedical Engineering is one of the fastest growing occupations and has a median income of over $80,000. I think that this NIH study, which was run mainly by people in academia, doesn't fully account for the jobs in industry.
Any training-grant-funded program that produces a lot of unemployable graduates is in big trouble.
It depends how far down the road you're looking. Any idiot can find a postdoc position; look at science job sites (like Nature Jobs) and you'll see no shortage of openings in most fields. A very large fraction of biomedical grad students - the few who are ambitious and capable enough to succeed in an academic career path, and the majority who are too clueless to cut their losses while they can still salvage their dignity - will end up postdoc job shortly after graduation. I really doubt that the granting agencies track them beyond this point. Whether any of these poor souls are "employable" after spending several years as postdocs is debatable - and to whatever extent this is the case, it's largely because the more senior researchers expect that everyone else endure the same bullshit they had to put up with.
so if the goal is reducing trainees, fine, slash way. But if you actually want research RESULTS and productivity, you need to insure a healthy and plentiful stream of well-trained postdocs.
if anything, the LEAST effective people in the chain are the SENIOR faculty, they are the most expensive and do the least research. Cut there if you want to cut something... (which I don't, I'd rather cut bombs and missles... its ridiculous that the monies we are talking about saving and slashing amount to a couple of bombs and missles...)
- rec to reduce or prohibit grad student funding on research grants, shifting them to training grants. There is NO WAY that the numbers of slots on training grants, even if you quadrupled those grants, would amount to even just 5% of the numbers of grad students paid off of research grants. This rec would slashing the numbers of grad students (and graduate programs), by at least 80%.
- rec to pay postdocs more, ok but HOW, where does the money come from? The rec amounts to a 30-50% increase in the COST of a postdoc, once you add in the benefits packages proposed. This rec simply means reducing the numbers of postdocs by 30-50% (there isn't more money available anywhere). And this reduction in postdoc slots would in turn reduce the numbers of grad students. Not to mention that it is a stupid recommendation because postdocs are the MOST productive members of any decent lab.
- rec to increase staff scientists (nevermind the question of how to pay for them since such positions costs 4-5X as much as a grad student). This rec also would directly reduce the numbers of grad students since the point is to have staff scientists do the lab work that grad students now do.
All these proposals not only reduce the numbers of grad students trained, but, more importantly, would INCREASE the cost of doing research (or reduce the amount of results given the same funding levels), all at a time when NIH funding is flat and may well be slashed (as Romney is proposing). All bad moves in my view...
What we need to do is stop pouring so much money into the military... the monies that all these proposals affect amount to just a few bombs and missles...
Perform biomedical experiments on them. Then they get a paid a salary, and citizen graduates can perform their research ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
I must admit I'm on a bit of a high horse, as my life's passion has always been bioinformatics. I'm a better software engineer than most software engineers I know, and I fulfilled part of my Bachelor's general education requirement with a third-year course in physical biochemistry taught by the same professors as my mandatory third-year proteins-and-enzymes biochemistry course. (They weren't exactly picky.) I'll also be honest in that I'm just entering my Master's in the fall, and can't really comment on the realities of the job market with anything but wide-eyed hope.
My advice is that you may actually want to consider computing more seriously. Research hospitals pay out their rear ends for bioinformaticians just with masters' degrees, and that's in a field where only a handful of institutions really offer dedicated programs, doing applied work (i.e., not a lot of code review.) Software engineering ability really is not actually a prerequisite, as most of the code turned out by computational biologists is utter garbage by engineering standards (and people with wetlab experience are uniformly way better at writing papers.) I'd also imagine grants are relatively easy to get, if you wanted to keep to a more biochemical circle, given that even popular science magazines are aware of the "[too much] data problem," but, well, I'm no lab head. :)
The truth is that there are very few CS people with an interest in molecular biology or biochemistry. Out of the 14 students graduating this year from my program in our computational biology-and-medicine concentration, I was the only student who definitely professed an interest in genomics rather than robot-aided surgery. (It wasn't the largest CS department, but I've got another anecdote—a friend looking at prospective supervisors at Notre Dame sparked interest just by mentioning that she knew "a bioinformatician.") On the whole, the amount of knowledge in genetics and chemistry required to be an effective molecular biologist just doesn't fit into the learning approach of most people who seek out post-undergrad education in computer science; they have a certain whimsy to them that you'd recognize mostly in philosophy or literature majors. They're just not detail-oriented enough to get all the way into it.
So... don't despair. Not yet, anyway.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Internships are such a fuzzy concept for most people. Among I.T. folks in particular, I've seen quite the battle cry lately for unpaid internships to be made flat-out illegal. That would be a foolish thing to do and here's why.
Unpaid internships were originally conceived by universities so that the student could come into a company, get a bit of training, and see how the business works from the inside. The company is supposed to derive no benefit from having the intern there. I've worked in places that did this and this kind of experience is very valuable for the student because it gives them a glimpse of the "real world" and hopefully informs their career choices.
Paid internships, in contrast, do have the intern doing real entry-level work and, for the most part, has all of the responsibilities of an employee.
Any company which brings in unpaid interns and has them doing actual work which directly or indirectly benefits the company is probably operating outside the law in most states. Any states which do not expressly prohibit this need to have their citizens stand up and make it so, but with the reason and clear-mindedness to not just make all unpaid internships flat-out illegal as you would propose.
When I was an undergrad I had a well paid internship at the company that's now my employer. There were several things that the company did right. First of all, the internship was open ended. I could continue to be an intern as long as I maintained full time college enrollment. They started me at a respectable entry level wage for someone without a college degree or a lot of experience in the field. Every semester that passed, I got a raise up to the maximum rate. I finished my internship making over $18.00/hr. I would have never considered an unpaid internship. It's amusing that people want to make them illegal, I'd flat out refuse to take one.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Why do you continually praise that which cannot be comprehended by one such as you?
you can bet that any company that wants to exploit unpaid interns will easily be able to "prove" that they got nothing of value.
Hang on... if the unpaid intern provided nothing of value; it would be irrational for the company to have brought them on in the first place.
Obviously companies do get something value. Free contributions to anything that the company does, or free contribution to development of anything the company will use is a benefit.
It makes perfect sense for the governmetn prohibit not paying interns at least a minimum wage for any time during which they are requested to provide a service to the company or doing any kind of work for the company.
If they are receiving instruction, then it makes sense anything they were paid would not include time they were receiving instruction or demonstration but not doing any work or executing the performance of any task.
Any idiot can find a postdoc position; look at science job sites (like Nature Jobs) and you'll see no shortage of openings in most fields.
It's worth noting that there's an increasing trend toward limiting post-doc positions to fresh PhDs (within five years of graduation). One can debate whether that's good or bad. But the practical consequence is that it's becoming more and more difficult to string post-doc positions together into an ad-hoc permanent staff scientist career - either you claw your way into a faculty position within about 10 years of graduation or you're out on the street.
While this is also true, the current system is completely unsustainable unless the funding basically increases exponentially, which is never going to happen. The problem is that for each faculty (each lab), you typically have ~4 postdocs and ~4 PhD students at a time... so after 5 years, you've gone from needing 1 faculty position to 5. If they each get jobs, after another 5 years you're up to 25 positions... unless funding (and, equally as importantly, university positions/space) is going to increase exponentially, it eventually falls apart.
It's exactly the same training problem as other fields (law, medicine) in that you're constantly training more people than there are current positions... except that in those fields if you really can't find a position, you can go open your own practice. In biomedicine, that's nearly impossible - any serious research lab is going to require a significant amount of funding and resources that you basically can't get outside the university/grant system, and it's very difficult to do a biomedical startup without having a prototype already existing (since it's biology, and the failure rate is high simply because we don't understand enough about most systems yet to know what will work and what won't without actually testing it).
There is a flaw in your argument - the population of United States is growing much more slowly. So at some point everyone will be trained. Wouldn't that be nice ?
Hm, I have a PhD in biochemistry to my name, but I think you are overexaggerating the differences to the humanities here. Yes, the degree was hard, we got tested to the limits of our intellectual capacities, but then again, I hang around with a lot of history and linguistics guys - if I listen to their musings I feel slightly inadequate... That stuff *can* be hard, too, if you do not treat it as a feel-good degree....
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I would have never considered an unpaid internship. It's amusing that people want to make them illegal, I'd flat out refuse to take one.
However, there are people that do take them. And in some cases unpaid interns do constitute competition against paid entry-level applicants, resulting in smaller supply of entry-level jobs available, and therefore, lower wages / less-advantageous hiring terms for professional entry-level applicants who want to be paid.
Oh, to tie this to the topic at hand - I did not get a job in research, despite a good publication history in Biochemistry, Journal of Virology and JACS... I am doing the good old patent lawyering thing now... Go figure.... The whole field of research is swamped with graduates... :P
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Maybe these smart, hardworking people should think of going into business then, instead of working for someone else. There seems to be no shortage of investment money available for people with ideas.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I think with a focus on bioinformatics, you are set up well. I was more of a spectroscopy guy back then, mostly NMR, and that seems slightly problematic these days.Others I studied with, people with a focus on proteomics and transcriptomics with a solid bioinformatic background immediately got good research jobs with the industry. I won't cite my only bioinformatics paper here, as it is too embarassing.... Some genetic algorithm stuff on optimizing the tendency of sequences to adopt helical structures. But hey, it got published :P
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
You sound like a more bitter version of me. Did you like your PIs? My parents are scientists so I've always sort of known that the science world is as you describe, and I had the big advantage when starting grad school to know that it was critical to pick a PI that personally cared and took their mentorship responsibility seriously. I frankly didn't even really care about what kind of work they did, or wether they were renown. I knew I'd do good work in the right environment, and everyone would win. As a result, all the PIs I worked with until graduating were top-notch, and are still looking out for my best interests. Unfortunately, like you, I had little interest in academia, and got into programming in a big way. This has derailed me a bit, as making this jump ain't easy. CS people don't care about good publication records in prestigious journals. And while I have some pretty good programming and algorithm skills (I smoked the other CS undergrads and grads in the few CS courses I took while doing my bio PhD), at the end of the day, my degree isn't just the wrong one, but it's a bit of a red flag. Don't sell out, but if any of those friends are in good places to affect hiring, then get over the imposter syndrome, swallow the pride, and start pushing them to hook you up with a job. I used to think that it was a problem that the world works this way instead of by merit, but I've since come to accept, even appreciate, that perhaps it's all about the human connection anyways: when it comes to the workplace, a brilliant asshole is mostly just an asshole. I did end up finding a job that I find pretty interesting, leverages my unusual education, pays well, and is giving me the chance to build some demonstrable bragging rights if I ever want to pursue a more software-centric career. All I had to do was ask, and be a bit shameless.
Go work for Google they are doing lots of computational biology things.
Any company which brings in unpaid interns and has them doing actual work which directly or indirectly benefits the company is probably operating outside the law in most states
Its also against IRS regulations and the IRS is much more likely to take action on reported violations tan some State Attorney General.
Vitamin D deficiency is a hazard of indoors work, and contributes to why academia in general is messed up (along with other parts of the industrialized world). Likewise for people not getting enough good nutrition from omega 3s and vegetables -- poor health just makes people messed up. Other ideas I've collected on improving health:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Here are some links I put together for context about current academia:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
See especially:
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein, Vice Provost, Caltech
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
And one other that is not there:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
Good luck.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
also get rid of unpiad and college only internships (paid or unpaid) We need to get rid of the idea of pay to work / work for free and pay full price for Credits.
Hmm. I work in an accounting practice, we occasionally get "interns" of two kinds.
Firstly, people who are in the break between high school and university, or who are considering a career change. The folks are mainly looking to see what it's like. There's also an element of being able to put study into some context and have an edge in future interviews. Employers feel like they're taking a gamble on someone who has no idea what the work is like, or what they're getting into, so it's a significant advantage. They are what I consider an internship is supposed to be about.
These folks are usually in for about a month and it's unpaid. It does feel like a tough month of hard work for them, because it's all new and we give them a taste of a range of things. The firm's pretty good about that actually; at the time it's daunting for the intern but it is exactly what they were hoping for and need.
What they're not doing though is producing anything of value. Sure they'll complete things, like a bank reconciliation, but they'll take maybe a day to do it. As the senior it'd take me about an hour to do the same thing myself, and I'll have spent at least that hour showing them what to do and then another hour checking it and bringing it up to standard for the file. Yes, per unit of productivity, interms end up a hell of a lot more expensive than seniors. It looks like work, feels like work, but it isn't contributing anything. What they're doing is basically a college exercise, just in a practical setting and without having to pay for the one-to-one tuition. It would actually be more efficient for the firm to treat it more explicitly like that i.e. give them photocopies and put what they do in the trash while I do the real work for the file, but it's important to convey the sense that they're contributing to the file, to a real-world thing that has importance, ramifications, standards, is part of a larger project... After all they didn't come here to do an exercise out of a textbook.
Unpaid interns are very expensive in my time. They get a very good return for their time investment. That's probably why all the interns I've seen have either been kids of clients, or someone making a career change who would be an obvious asset if they do decide the work is for them and join the firm. To be fair, that's probably also the reason the interns are getting such good value, I have heard of other firms who basically sit them down and make them do the photocopying or churn through bank recs non-stop, so they are producing value and overall saving time/cost of paid staff whilst getting very little of value from it.
The second kind were university students in the summer break. We've not done these for a few years now. They're paid not that much less than the juniors and for their 4-6 weeks they'll basically be new juniors. In other words horribly inefficient. Unlike juniors though, they go back to uni well before they become productive enough to return the training investment. It's basically a write off for the firm just on the prospect that maybe they'll come back after graduation, maybe if they go into industry they'll maybe put our name down when their employer tenders for a new accountant. I suspect the partners also used to think they were kind of getting some temps in during the busy season, but have cottoned on to the reality that they're a time-sink with a net burden on staff when things are already insanely busy. Maybe if they were unpaid and thus had a zero chargeout rate they might just about be worth it, but I doubt it and the partners do not consider that to be acceptable behaviour.
There's one thing that makes me certain in my assessment above. When we do get an intern, if we're in the off-season folks who aren't busy are interested in the interns, it's fun being tutor. But if busy, all the seniors and
It's exactly the same training problem as other fields (law, medicine) in that you're constantly training more people than there are current positions...
But that's how the market for labor works: When a job pays well, relative to the effort required to get and maintain that job, people shift into that field. This makes it easier to find highly qualified people at lower wage rates, forces incompetent people out of the field, and generally assures that society allocates its resources optimally. Jobs like teaching and research that provide a lot of non-monetary reward are going to have a lower wage scale to begin with, because there will always be some people willing to pay to do that work (such as grad students and interns).
Remember, for capitalism to work, you have to be willing to kill off large swaths of your own population if they're too hidebound or stupid to leave a career when someone else can do it better or cheaper. Capitalism only works if you use the stick of starvation as ruthlessly as you use the carrot of unlimited wealth.
Wow, sounds like your "prestigious" grad program sucked. Mine was awesome. I really felt the faculty in my program wanted to make me into the best scientist I could possibly be.
I know _exactly_ where you're coming from. After years of passive aggressive mismanagement I finally decided to cut my losses, take my MS (ABD), and pursue an alternate career. I start law school in the fall, plan to do patent law, and I'm so much happier for it.
but for IT students could come into a company with out having to be part of a universities open it to all / tech schools / ETC.
AS CS is not IT and 4 years is a long time in the class room for IT work when it should be a apprenticeship.
But some places want to have Information Technology Internships with up to 12 weeks long full time with NO PAY.
Many companies use unpaid interns as a recruiting tool. Often they have them work on 'fake' projects but still manage them like what there doing has value. Then after graduation they offer say ~2/3 of them an actual job, but with a far more accurate salary estimate having worked with them in the past.
It also side steps the old, just offer them more money problem when recruiting from a top tier university. The intern has 'worked' with these people before, so even if their offer is in line with everything else they are far more likely to accept.
Wow, sounds like your "prestigious" grad program sucked. Mine was awesome. I really felt the faculty in my program wanted to make me into the best scientist I could possibly be.
And I am certain that there were a few people in my program who felt the same way. In fact, a few really did thrive, partly because the stars were in perfect alignment whenever they had to deal with faculty, and partly because they were simply better suited, temperamentally speaking, for the organized chaos of grad school.
There are probably a handful of students in every program who are so awesome that no amount of mismanagement can keep them down; all they need from senior scientists is a lab bench, adequate funding, and someone to bounce ideas off of. We should of course be encouraging these people to pursue scientific careers. But the average science grad student is not quite this awesome. Most of us are more than capable of understanding the material and performing the experiments, and even having good ideas on our own, but our success (and intellectual growth) really does depend on proper management, and genuinely poor management leaves us really helpless.
I came from an academic family - my dad has a PhD in Genetics from a fancy New England university.
He made it very clear to me that selecting that route would be a life of poverty and to only do it if that was very clear in my head.. (this was in the 80's).
I have a BSc. in Electrical Engineering; it was the most practical way in and out of academia I could find that would leave me with a long-term credible degree. Multivariable complex calculus isn't getting any easier. My entire career I set aside my own time to spend networking with the public and private sector so I've got opportunities, and I've made sure to build a solid track record along the way.
If you've got a problem finding work, do you put as much effort into networking and working with people who risk capital as you do in the lab? Do you watch for trends in your field you can capitalize on? If you don't, you're headed for trouble.
My $0.02.
..don't panic
Nah, it's the cachet aspect to it.
A few years ago my daughter got into Purdue Engineering. We went down for the "women in engineering" orientation, which met in a big auditorium. Then they split the girls up by group and sent each off to their field-specific info.
"And now all the biomedical engineers stand up..." and over half stood up, at least 70.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
In the 1990s, there was still demand for biology PhDs in the private sector, which has significantly dried up since. It's not GONE, but it's greatly reduced. That's why the emergency-of-people-whining (because couldn't get professorships, had to work in industry) is now an emergency-of-people-in-serious-trouble (because can't get JOBS AT ALL.) For the balance, I'll be using the terms Pharma, Biotech and Industry interchangeably - they're not exactly the same thing but the basic argument applies whether the company is making drugs or medical devices or developing new diagnostic biomarkers or whatever they do employing PhDs in the life sciences.
On top of this, the research that the biotech companies are doing is mostly me-too research which doesn't benefit the public. In spite of this, industry is continuing to milk the public of their subsidy from patent protection on products that were ~50% developed at public expense anyway. The solution to this is a fairly simple reallocation:
* End patent protections for medical technologies. Because of capitalism, and markets, and other realities which sensible people accept, this will drive prices through the floor.
* Take the savings to the rest of the economy, and raise people's taxes (should be balance-sheet-neutral on average for the general population)
* Give the extra tax revenue to the NIH, and expand the NIH mission to include drug development, medical device development, etc. as needed to bring such to market.
To be blunt, I do not respect the opinion of people who defend drug patents at this point, especially since such people are generally ideologically committed (as opposed to persuaded on relative merits, no the same thing), to "capitalism". The commitment of "capitalists" to intellectual property protection (instead of market competition) shows them to be craven, deceptive and fraudulent: they're really committed to oligarchy and to the preservation of privilege, not to the market as an instrument of efficient allocation of economic resources. Such people are deeply shameful and depraved - they are not worthy of respect out of any need to promote ideological balance.
Anyway, even during the 90s, the price paid by the public for patented medical treatments was not really justified given the amount that the Pharma industry spent on R&D:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/cepr-releases-report-on-prescription-drug-research/
Now a days, with drug expenditures being a larger share of GNP, and pharmaceutical R&D being a smaller share of GNP, the cost:benefit relationship is even more drastic. To put it another way - biotechnology patents, generally speaking, do not meet the constitutional test of being beneficial to the public or of promoting the useful arts. So they should be done away with, and the public sector (which is far more efficient at funding scientific research than the private sector, due primarily to the better information available to the people making decisions) should simply assume that function, producing a significant cost savings for the general public as well as accelerating the pace of research and finding useful employment for our best and brightest.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
As I see things right now, I think I have been quite spoiled by my experience at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).
WPI had a club called the Lens And Lights Club. The Lens And Lights Club (L&LC did all stage lighting and sound on campus. That includes plays, films, concerts; no matter what.
All of the work; including equipment maintenance, operation, selection, evaluation; you name it; was performed by students.
This was a great experience and when I was there, I had made an assumption that this was the way things were at all other universities. It made total sense. It gave the students 'ownership' of the entire process and it was a very good real life experience of essentially running a lighting, sound, and movie projection business.
Then I came to find out that many universities, including the University of Washington in Seattle, use union labor for much of the lighting and sound in its theaters. That means hands off for everyone else.
This, in my opinion, is a very serious mistake. They are denying the students a valuable education and experience.
The members of the L&LC were not paid. However, they got a priceless education over and above their lecture and lab work.
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
Right. You don't get people switching to Biology because it is too hard, what you do get is a ton of Biology students that have no real interest in Biology and just want to "become a doctor" (note that they do not really want to practice medicine).
Actually, (even with no evidence) I believe that at least a third of these people have no real interest in biomedical research, they are just doing it as a graduate student because there are almost no other options available. They did not make it into Medical school (or could not afford it) and have no other option with an undergraduate degree in Biology.
Not going to medical school and with no real idea of what to do in the 'real world' with their biology degree and an advisor talking about grant money, they are encouraged to apply to graduate work in biomedical research or something similar. They don't really care about it though, they are just failed doctoral students.
Call me biased, but too many freshman level advisors tell people to study Biology.
Exactly. And also of note that biology and life science degrees are also considered to be easier than the physical sciences and engineering disciplines due mainly to the lack of advanced mathematical concepts and rigor. It is turtles all the way down (or up?) though, and if people are being condescending to others studying humanities, or what is contrived to be an easier/less rigorous field, you should take a minute to look at the people studying electrical engineering, who have no time to be condescending! :-)
As for settling for bachelors-level jobs, CS is a very different world from science where work experience matters much more than degrees. But a bachelors in CS and 2 years work experience is probably worth as much as your PhD. Demand does not really match difficulty of the degree, but how replaceable you are.
My background is fairly similar, but I skipped out at the Masters level to work in industry. In science, PhD really would help get an interview though. HR would have screened out my resume through official channels...
What we need to do is stop pouring so much money into the military... the monies that all these proposals affect amount to just a few bombs and missles...
Interestingly, just as a side note, the military funds a fair portion of research. DoD has a highly sought after graduate student fellowship award and it provides lots of funding for things like prostate cancer research.
I opted-out of moderation (not enough time), but this post should have a Plus 5. Nicely done, gnat.
I think you may need to elaborate for your troll to be successful. Pray tell, what do I praise that I cannot comprehend?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
+10 for parent comment, s'il vous plait.
I have, actually, met the sort of person you're describing, although they're generally called pre-med or life sciences students. They certainly don't have any interest in research, nor medicine, which is why they invariably wash out of the med school application process. Usually the blame belongs on the parents, who idolize specialist MDs for no reason other than wealth. (There's even a mildly offensive meme about it.)
The trick, though, is that the moment their dreams shatter, only a handful of them stay on to do research in physiology. A pre-med bachelor's degree does not prepare you to do general biochemistry, so your options when you get to your fourth year are already really obvious to you: either find "one of those jobs" that just requires a bachelor's degree as proof of trial-by-fire, or commit to spending the next eight years doing something that barely pays and requires an immense love of the material you were just skimming anyway. Graduate school is not an attractive option for them; it goes against their (rather materialistic) personal objectives. Instead they usually about-face and either switch majors to a commerce or economics degree when the going gets tough, or just quietly enter the world of business afterwards.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I certainly didn't mean to imply that the material is easier to do well at, only that it's possible to scrape through more easily in some disciplines. Linguistics is certainly not a field where good performance is trivial, nor is history. (And I should know, having hobbyist interests in both. I have more dictionaries in my possession than genetics books.) They are, however, more forgiving for most students, because more emphasis is placed on essays as a form of communication, and the language required therefor is generally less formal than the highly-stylized language found in biochemistry. (Even computing papers move at a much more relaxed pace.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I believe the most profound sympathies usually go to chemical engineers, who are essentially battle-hardened physical chemists. Calculus all day, Lewis dot structures all night.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Well... do you like it, at least?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I have more dictionaries in my possession than genetics books
Welcome to the club. English, French and Latin down as a native German speaker, working on Swedish and Japanese now. Considering Arabic, but what dialect.... :D
When it comes to genetics, I only find Lewin's Genes in my bookshelf...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I do, to some degree. Intellectually, patent lawyering can be quite stimulating and it is a diverse field. I'd prefer to do original research, but that train left the station years ago, I guess...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The work for the company compensates for the costs of their training. In many cases, I suspect that training costs outweigh direct benefits for the company. The reason many companies have these programs is for recruiting purposes - they'd have to do the same training for a new hire, and so it saves them money to hire a former intern. Similarly, it allows them to reject someone who wasn't up to their standards without actually firing them as a new hire.
My advice is that you may actually want to consider computing more seriously.
Way ahead of you; I am effectively a full-time software engineer at this point, writing production code used by other researchers. (For reasons mostly unrelated to my rant above, I also turned out to be temperamentally unsuited for bench work.) The problem is that this is still pretty much a dead end, career-wise. My options are either to stay in academia making pretty much the same salary forever and groveling to the NIH for funding every few years, try to land one of the very few industry positions suitable for someone with my background, or leave science altogether and apply my technical skills elsewhere. The latter is starting to look increasingly appealing - much as I'd hate to give up on science, I'm starting to feel stupid working unpaid overtime to keep up with our competitors when the only reward is continued employment at a considerably lower salary than everyone I know in the private sector.
I recently inherited a few shelves of older genetics books, actually, from a retired professor. My favourite is still The Genetic Code by Woese; it starts off describing (in detail) the state-of-the-art leading up to Watson and Crick, and ends up introducing the RNA world hypothesis (for the first time) in the later chapters. For a couple of years I fancied myself a bit of an antiquarian, so my pride and joy is either my 1726 Democritus (a very tiny book printed with hundreds of Greek scribal ligatures that only a handful of people can read), or my badly-beaten 1898 Webster's, which is something like 3000 pages long and is an incredible wealth of old meanings.
...guiltily, though, I haven't really taken the time to learn as many languages as I should; I was bitten by the conlang bug at a very early age and spend most of my free time deriving new words from my own rules rather than studying the ones that surround me.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Well, I'm hardly a sensible person to go to for career advice, but perhaps you'll find some amusement in this twisted imitation of "out of the mouths of babes."
I must admit that you sound, on the whole, rather disillusioned with research in general. If your work is just about competing with other groups tackling the same problem, it seems like whatever you're doing just isn't giving you the satisfaction that academia is supposed to. At least in theory, mediocre pay is the sacrifice one must make to be on the forefront of discovery, and everything you've said has been... well, it's been in tune with the plight you described in your first post; there's really no need to repeat all that.
If you could invent a structural or institutional change to try and prevent people from ending up where you are, what would you do?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Welcome to my world. Beautiful place, ain't it? From my position, I can only give you one tip: If you sell out, sell out big. Get into patent lawyering. Alternatively suck cocks for crack. Same thing, only one pays better ;)
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Just in case you do not already know it - have a look at this. Should also take care of you conlang needs - there are always some discussions on that subject. I think you'd fit right in :D
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
In my field of Pharmacology, most graduate students enter our program, not with the expectation of becoming an academic researcher, but with the goal of going into industry. While there has been some contraction in the industry, our students are still highly successful in finding industry jobs. Our program is old enough that it is not uncommon to see recent graduates hired by students who graduated from our program several years back. We've also also seen students go into related areas that take advantage of their expertise, such as working for the FDA or for venture capital firms that invest in biotechnology.
The problem is not fabricated. There is not a five-year backlog to getting a faculty position. At a top-50 research institution there will be 200-300 applicants for every professorship. Trimming the list to the top 30 or so is pretty easy, you look for Science/Nature/Cell papers, high impact/high number of publications, a pedigree that includes top labs (National Academy, Nobel Laureate, etc.) at top schools, and of course you look to make sure they got their own grants--no small accomplishment when the grant success rate is little better than the odds of winning the lottery. So to make it into that top-30 list you are required to have 5-10 years of post-PhD experience. Someone fresh out of grad school just cannot compete in the job market for professors, and even if they could they would not last long as a professor since they would not be able to bring in an R01 grant (basic NIH grant for professors) because they couldn't compete against their new-found peers. This is particularly true as the competition for grant dollars has never been more intense and failure more likely.
Industry is not hiring. Pharma finally stopped the biweekly 1,000-person mass firings about six months ago. This is after the carnage of 2010 and 2011 where layoffs were five times worse than any previous year, which is saying a lot since they laid off 300,000 in the 2000's. Not only does no one expect those jobs to come back, every year we graduate an increasing number of life science PhDs. Naturally as supply (and unemployment) goes up, wages fall. A new Scientist II gets paid the same dollar amount as a Scientist I did ten years ago. You can find temporary positions in the bay area requiring a PhD, five years experience, and they'll pay you $20 an hour. No relocation. No benefits. And the position lasts six months. Scientists are viewed by companies as merely "expensive" cogs that are interchangeable and disposable. The trend of the future is one of no permanent jobs, only temps and contractors. Work three months to two years, then off to the next position (or back to unemployment). Introducing the PhD migrant worker: no wage too low.
So why doesn't it change? Academia is utterly dependent on cheap and disposable workers: the PhD student and the postdoc. There aren't grant dollars to pay anybody more than a pittance. Actually there aren't enough grant dollars to pay everybody anymore so studies like the one in the TFA will generate a little bit of hand wringing and nothing more. Meanwhile pharma and biotech are as happy as pigs in shit: not only are their new hires vastly more experienced than they were ten years ago they cost much less too. These days we all know that who has the dollars runs everything, the corporations, the media, the legal system, the government. So when the CEO shrieks about a "shortage" of STEM workers, it's repeated by the politicians and the news media. Since scientists are a tiny minority that very few ever interact with there's nobody to rebut the lie so people believe it's true. Hell even the trade media and professional societies repeat the lie: everything's just fine, become a scientist says the American Chemical Society . So our universities continue to spew out thousands of life sciences PhDs at an ever increasing rate, and the machine merrily chews them up and shits them out.
I just looked on Google for what careers are in demand. This article: http://www.moneycrashers.com/5-great-career-fields-for-the-future/
says "Biomedical engineers will see job growth at a whopping 72%."
Remember, for capitalism to work
You have to have private ownership of capital. That's it. The bikini-wearing extraterrestrials are not a side affect, I swear.
I'll keep it bookmarked! But to be honest it's mostly a problem of free time. Somehow I got involved in two part-time research positions and a startup this summer, and it's probably only going to get more ridiculous as time goes on.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I must admit that you sound, on the whole, rather disillusioned with research in general.
Yes, although this goes well beyond institutional flaws. Part of my frustration is that it's very difficult to do anything truly revolutionary - not because of supposed scientific conservatism/closed-mindedness, but because everyone is so specialized and the low-hanging fruit is already picked. There are many "grand challenges" that will probably be addressed in the next few decades, but they're going to involve painstaking gruntwork by legions of people like me, most of whom will go unrecognized. Of course the same is true of most human endeavors, but when you're deliberately sacrificing youth and fortune in pursuit of knowledge, it's depressing to realize the inherent limitations of your work. I'm just barely starting to establish a reputation for myself in my chosen field, and while I'm thrilled that this is even possible, it's maybe a few tens of thousands of specialists at most who will ever be affected by my work.
If your work is just about competing with other groups tackling the same problem, it seems like whatever you're doing just isn't giving you the satisfaction that academia is supposed to.
It's not just about competing with other groups, but the competition in the biomedical sciences is ferocious. This is partly by design: the NIH funds competing proposals all the time (there will be differences in details, of course, but the broader scope and impact is often duplicated). Postdocs may be willing to work 60 hours a week if they think there's a faculty job and the end of the rainbow, but they'll work 80 hours if they think someone else might get there first, and their P.I. is cracking the whip to get a paper out ASAP so they can publish in Nature instead of Biochemistry. Since I'm a methods developer my goals are somewhat different, but it comes down to the same problem. The competition forces us all to work harder, but sometimes I have to wonder what the point is.
If you could invent a structural or institutional change to try and prevent people from ending up where you are, what would you do?
Admit fewer grad students. Honestly, I have no bright ideas, but I feel nauseous every time I come across some idiot suggesting that we need to increase enrollment in the basic sciences.
I disagree
I got my MS in biomedical engineering and then promptly went to medical school and now am an orthopaedic surgeon. Clearly not the route for everyone, but I do still use my engineering background in ongoing research, plus it made it easier to get into medical school and then get into one of the most competitive specialties. All my friends that stayed in engineering are doing ok - but we trained at a very well regarded program. If you don't have that going for you its only going to get harder. Of note, I would guess at least half the people in my undergrad biomed engineering class went to or at least tried to go to medical school. Its the new biology or chemistry major stepping stone into medicine.
Please note: this is the INDUSTRY that's complaining. I work in actual government funded research and we have a major shortage of qualified biomed graduates. The industry is complaining that after we're done (usually they start during their PhD program and stay a couple of years after until they get to secure better jobs) with them and they want to move on, they would have to pay them increasingly more to get them to move from their current location and work for them with less job security than academia provides. We pay them ~$50k/year salary + moving costs.
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My PhD (Molecular Bio) was 6 years post BS. I was fast (2.5 years below the median)and worked my tail off. Most of my fellow grad students, however, were hardly early risers or late night workers. Nonetheless, the analytic thinking that I received is terrific and probably a part of every PhD which should make them great employees in a variety of fields where clear, logical thinking is essential. The job hunting problem is that there is not a concrete skill that comes with PhD training. Why not have PhD/MBA or other practical degrees? It is ironic that hands on professional schools (Law, MBA, Medical) all have dual program as a recognition of the varied career trajectories. Why not add one in for PhD?
LOL, this guy is completely right. I go to a top 5 school in bio. before i got here, i thought it would be awesome to be surrounded by brilliant people. but so many of them coast through grad school without doing anything useful! they are good at executing projects and learning difficult material, but developing their own science and tackling big problems? Don't get me started. Fact is, most science isn't world changing, or if it is, it's tied up in a huge collaboration that could use robots to accomplish the same thing. I am amazed that people will spend their 20s and 30s pursuing this kind of science. OH. There is another kind of useless science that pervades academia: competing against other labs to finish a project! The project is going to get finished no matter what, so why spend your time working on it? This does not advance scientific knowledge, but is more of an ego trip for people who lack perspective... Oh god, I could go on and on and on and on
I don't think this is true at all. There is just a system set up to make people believe such things then take advantage of them.
If the government is going to fund grad student stipends they also need to fund the R & D jobs later. Since no one knows which R & D will lead to something useful (especially not committees of scientists turned into bureaucrats), it causes a glut. There is widespread dissatisfaction amongst both researchers and the public with the current system.
IMO the systemic change needed is to develop an interface between the public and scientists so that individual projects that are important to people (who may benefit from the results) can be funded directly. It is at least worth a try.
Most PhD's just coast and do what they are told... the system is set up to encourage this. It turns intelligent, creative people into automata who just want to advance their careers by "discovering something new". The journals are filled with worthless, poorly controlled, poorly analyzed reports. This is the true problem. A large proportion of researchers are not producing anything of value and even those who do get caught up in publish or perish.
Sounds like another "housing bubble" problem created by the government spending money the only way it knows how -> like morons. This problem and most problems will go away if we cut government down by %50 or more so these stupid bureaucrats have barely enough money to pay for the basic essential government functions and no money left over for them to tinker and play with designing society and leading us around by the nose. The markets will figure all this out on its own. Don't think so? Then how did America grow up to be so big and strong between 1800 and 1950?
Well, where's the money to come from, then? Certainly in some areas that's apparent (cancer research, for example), but most academic work is too tangential and takes too long to come to fruition for the bean-counters to understand its utility. Money is the currency of the living present, not the unborn future; it may not be capital-R Right that this is so, but it's probably the best you can squeeze out of the human species without rewiring the whole survival instinct.
Personally, I find the smugness that comes from implying bean-counters are mindless, instinctual animals to be more than enough job satisfaction to make up the monetary constraint. But at any rate, one should not walk into academia expecting this situation to have changed; surely people have complained for millennia that thinking ahead will always be undervalued.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
There is another kind of useless science that pervades academia: competing against other labs to finish a project! The project is going to get finished no matter what, so why spend your time working on it? This does not advance scientific knowledge, but is more of an ego trip for people who lack perspective...
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding human nature, and how the academic scientific enterprise functions. We're not just in it for the knowledge; there have to be other incentives too, and while we're used to the relatively low pay, ego still plays a big part. People compete against other labs to finish a project because whoever finishes successfully, and first, will accrue most of the credit and prestige. The professor whose lab wins gets a cover article in a prestigious journal, gets invited to be keynote speaker at meetings, gets cited more, gets his/her postdocs into good faculty jobs, and maybe - many years down the line - ends up in the running for a Nobel prize. Oh, and the NIH will undoubtedly look favorably on future grant proposals.
It's easy to get on a high horse and say, "well, they should just be in it for the knowledge and good of humanity." Bullshit. Human beings (most of us, anyway) simply don't function that way; we're willing to make some sacrifices if we think it's in a good cause, but personal satisfaction and advancement is paramount. On the other hand, if you can harness all of that self-interest and ego in the interests of advancing human knowledge, you'll get far more accomplished than would otherwise be possible. If you want to motivate an exceptionally bright postdoc - someone capable of making tens of thousands more in a real job - to work 80 hours a week for $50,000 a year, which of these two arguments do you think will be more convincing?
1. "Just think of how enriched the field will be by this research! Someone might use it to cure cancer in twenty years! And everyone in the lab will know that you did the work!"
2. "We need to finish this experiment because my evil counterpart at Bastard U. is trying to scoop us, and if that happens, you'll never get that faculty job."
Now, it can be argued (quite fairly) that (2) has a tendency to lead to sloppy science and hand-waving, but there are trade-offs in any situation, and the solution isn't to rely more on the selfless motives of the scientists involved, but other institutional reforms to make this more difficult.
I meant it differently. There is far too much money in biomed research right now. As someone in the field I will tell you that most studies end up being near worthless, wasting huge amounts of money in the process. Most researchers are not actually on the forefront of discovery, but have instead been turned into (as you say) mindless, instinctual animals because they don't have time to do things properly. On average, this produces little of value and society is rewarding this behavior appropriately. Further, universities and drug companies then take any of the good research that does result from this system and reap the rewards.
If you really are on the forefront of discovery, figure out a way to use this info and get out of academia.
Get rid of the tenure system, so faculty that haven't been productive can get out of the way for younger scientists.
I should say that I don't mean to discourage you at all. Doing research is the most rewarding job ever if you like that type of thing.
Biomed just needs more people who are so enthusiastic about what they do that they ignore the rules (publish x papers, etc). There is a strong core of scientists who will do the best possible job and accept nothing less from those they review. Just know that this is the minority, and that, unless you are lucky or exceptionally astute, you really won't be able to tell who is in which group until 4th or 5th year of grad school or later.
Ha, thanks. I will keep that in mind. And good luck with your own endeavours! My point, though, was more about fundamental research that no one can see the application for (yet)—it can very well be on the forefront of discovery, and yet have no apparent use whatsoever; as someone who got caused heads to turn for choosing evolutionary genomics over medical bioinformatics several times, there's a great deal of very important material that's no more economically justifiable than philosophy or history. At a certain point it's necessary, I think, that one accepts that funding and research value may very well always be perpendicular questions. (That's what we have science fiction for, I guess.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I think we need to go to the source and get rid of people who think it's okay to have 14 kids. After two, mandatory tube-tying for both parents.
Evolutionary genomics has a huge application in GMO foods, etc. Most basic science is like this and could just as well be seen as high risk, high potential reward side projects that spin off those that could provide some immediate benefit, so in that case you should expect limited funding.