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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.
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
This society needs more income equality and public services, so there's less panicked rushing from one sector of the labor market to another.
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.
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.
Economy be damned. We know how to fix it, we just choose to prioritize other things like tolerance for huge wealth inequality, low taxes, and lack of regulation.
Turning the issue around and looking at it from the other direction; it would be hard to make the case that our civilization would be worse off with more highly educated individuals, regardless of their "economic" usefulness. Man does not exist to serve the economy, the economy exists to serve man and enable the nobler pursuits of humanity beyond the daily struggle for mere existence.
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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.
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.
... 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."
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?"
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...
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!
Aye, we all want low taxes, but those who have the most to potentially "lose" want low taxes most of all. They've figured out they can use a fraction of their wealth to lobby for protection of the rest of it.
And I only start to care about other people having more wealth than I when so many have so much more that it starts to cause problems in my society. Some inequality is doubtless necessary as a motivating factor, but we are so far beyond what is necessary. The cost of maintaining our current levels of inequality are great.
The last and most ironic victim might be capitalism itself, if inequity is allowed to persist too long at too high a level. Every business needs customers, and customers need to have money to spend. Think of the implications of every year there being less customers with less money to spend because too much wealth has accumulated at the top. The entire system eventually becomes too top heavy to stand, and collapses. We're probably still a fair ways off from that happening, but I believe we're closer than most people are willing to admit.
We are certainly close enough that we should be having serious discussions on what to do about it, what the future economy might look like. We're not even doing that. No one is seriously discussing a possible future where selling your labor for money to live is the norm, despite the fact that every year it becomes harder and harder to do so.
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Forgive me for replying to my own post but I made a typo which completely changed the meaning of the last sentence. It should read,
No one is seriously discussing a possible future where selling your labor for money to live is not the norm, despite the fact that every year it becomes harder and harder to do so.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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.
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.
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
Psssht. You missed the latest conservatard meme that scientists are only doing it FOR TEH GRANTS. Haven't you heard that by grant-whoring you get to drive a Porsche with complimentary bitches to snort coke out of their navels? Or does that only apply to climatology? I am confused these days....
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
And this conversation, right here, is the perfect example of Poe's Law.
Be smart, help people!
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.
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
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.
Better than double-standard conservatives who want the "private sector" to solve every problem other people have, while the State solves your problem. Take the financial sector for instance, which went from "the Government should stay the hell out of our turf" to "waah waah bailout!" nearly overnight.
You conservatives should accept you are in the liberal West now; if you want conservative medieval politics, move to the Middle East.
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 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!
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.
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.
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 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.