Science not seen as good career choice

The image of the lab coat nerdy professor in horn-rimmed glasses persists, it seems. A survey conducted by the Science Council (UK) found that only 28% of British 16- to 18-year-olds think that science is relevant.

Students are steering clear of science, technology, engineering and math subjects for a variety of reasons. 30% of pupils said they were "too difficult," 27% thought they were "not interesting or enjoyable enough," and a further 23% responded that pursuing science would "limit career options."

OK, finding science boring and hard, I can empathize with -- although not relate to -- to a certain extent. But I'm shocked that nearly a quarter of these teenagers are worried about finding jobs in science. At the same time, many governments around the world, including Britain's, are pleading for more science and engineering graduates to fill increasing numbers of job vacancies. Why the disconnect between the job-makers and the would-be job-fillers?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/nov/07/science-careers-hamilton

Elie Dolgin, Associate Editor, The Scientist

There is a real disconnect here. I am an American post-doc in a lab in the U.S. I hear all the time that we need more emphasis on science to produce more scientists. And as the only American post-doc in a lab of twenty-some post-docs, it appears true that American science training is not measuring up to international training. But while I will be fairly well published when I am done with my post-doc, I am not sure where I will get a job, as I have not had the 'sucess' required to land an academic job (at least not one where I can be confident about future funding) and industry is anything but certain in an economic downturn.

And as all of my friends have been making at least 2-times what I make since our graduation from college, and some are on to buying vacation houses in addition to first houses, while I pay a hefty rent and own an old car, it sure seems to have been a bad choice.

If the governmant wants to make more people into scientists, it should create jobs for those that do well, but not well enough (whether there is any real determination of science ability during this process is up for debate) to enter academia. Science is fun. So much so that you don't need to pay people who love it to do it for long hours with little in the way of positive feedback. But if you just turn your back on those that don't 'make it', it is a waste of talent and training, and is liklely to continue to turn people away from making such a committment.

Science is rarely in the headlines (sports and entertainment have entire newspaper sections unto themselves) as it often requires a lengthy attention span. Even if you do make an interesting advancement in science, it is not the bench worker that makes the news but rather the MBA/CEO that oversees them that goes out to the public. "Limiting" may be a choice word for careers in science so long as they are seen as underpaid and rarely acknowledged.

I completely agree with JONATHAN195832.
If I knew what was going to happen with my career 10-15 years ago I would never go beyond PhD. I would probably even consider different path- just to mention that these days I don't even show my PhD title- it looks not very appealing.

Some observations:

1. When was the last time a poll of this type showed a positive response from 16- to 18-year-olds? Polls I recall showed a wildly optimistic percentage planned to be professional athletes or rock stars. On the other hand, what's the point of being 16 if you can't dream?

2. I believe you should work in a field that you find interesting, challenging, and fun, or eventually you will regret it. A secure job at good pay is very nice, but if those are your only criteria, you have an income, not a career. I don't know any top-flight scientists who cut short their time in the lab so that they can play more golf.

3. Someday sombody should track down the teens polled above after 20 years and ask them how their non-scientific careers and job satisfaction turned out. It may be that the percentage of people who work to make money vs. have a career is quite high regardless of the field.

In a few fields, like Fisheries, there are jobs. Some Entomology PhDs are getting solid professorship offers before finishing their degree.

But for most? It's a rotten choice, and getting worse.

1. The pay is awful. It is roughly that of a someone with a high school education. Groundskeeper is a better paying job.

2. The politics are awful. Unfortunately, many scientists are not very nice people. Some are, but quite a few are not. And most are traumatized by their experiences in graduate school (in the biosciences, particularly medical) by the time they are 10 to 15 years down the road.

3. Corruption has become a very serious problem and it is only getting worse. Behavior that in any other profession would put you in prison is ignored, condoned and winked at. Some examples just from California:

A. Medical school requesting the university cops to run fingerprints on dead homeless people. They then stole the bodies of those without family, and sold them as cadavers. All hushed up. After that was closed down, another school in another part of the same state tried to do the same thing! (I guess they thought it was a good idea and zero risk.)

B. Medical school systematically over-harvested eggs from women coming in for fertility procedures. Then they sold the fertilized embryo implants for $30,000 to infertile couples for cash. When some RN's refused to do the procedures anymore, the head of the school tried to get them fired. The only reason they weren't fired is that they had an attorney and a reporter sitting outside the door, and brought them in.

C. Professor solicited for a collaborative grant. One part came back scored high. (Not his.) So, he took everyone else's name off the grant and submitted the high scoring part only. He got a $5MM R01. Flat out plagiarism and fraud.

D. A group of physicians at a medical school received kickbacks from a vendor for requesting branded equipment. They had more than $150,000 in a drawer in the hospital in cash when it was finally investigated. The story put out by the university was that this was just a little bit of money for parties, and the amount wasn't mentioned. There is darn good reason to believe that the amount of kickback cash was in 7 figures, and that most of it had gone into bank accounts and such. The group had spent huge amounts of money on junkets and parties, in the six figures per.

E. A highly placed physician at a teaching hospital simply disappeared for periods. When some asked where he had been, after someone saw him drunk in a club with a bunch of girls, he filed a police report saying that he had been kidnapped by drug dealers and forced into houses of prostitution. The Chancellor requested that the police chief write the man a letter of apology for accusing him of engaging in these acts of his own volition. The chief took the matter to a municipal police department and said it was a false police report, they took over. The physician kept his job when it was all over.

F. A professor made a deal with a commercial company for which technology transfer contracts were drawn up. The deal would give him hundreds of thousands of dollars, and probably a million or more. (He was having trouble.) Somehow he did not inform the professor whose NSF funded work was being sold off. The deal fell through ultimately, because the professor whose work it was refused to go along, and informed the university that the contract was illegal. That professor has since been framed in a misconduct matter and is leaving for another country.

G. A professor X hired a post-doc who did excellent work for a couple of years. He presented his research results to professor X, showing him a manuscript. 2 Months later, all the research results were submitted for publication by another professor Y and his post-doc Y. And, in that case, I happened to be in the lab when the two from Y lab came around about 3 weeks before they published, trying to get a vial of the virus. They never found it. And yet, somehow they had perfect gels that duplicated his work? The professor Y then supported through contacts, Professor A to get a big grant. That grant was in an entirely new area that had little to do with Professor A's experience.

I could go on and on and on. These are just a few egregiously awful cases. I won't even start on the cases where someone found a scientific fraud (made up data, problem with an instrument for published work, problem with diagnostic, etcetera) and was retaliated against or hounded out of science altogether. (Usually, it's one of the top graduate students that happens to.) And we are talking about department chairs and deans engaging in this activity and covering for it after the fact.

The point is that the science enterprise has become rotten at the core, and the rot is in the chancellors offices at campuses around the country. The rot is in faculty, because those who lie, cheat and defraud make it more easily than those who don't, and they support each other. Professors and staff will be protected, as long as the university gets its cut, from felony prosecution for fraud, theft, graft and other corruption. The university system has become a massive RICO case with chancellors and administrators approving.

Believe me, undergrads are getting wind of this stuff through the grapevine. It affects their attitude toward education and what it means to know that their "mentors" are "just a bunch of gang-bangers." (That's a quote.) No, it's not 100% true, but would we accept a 70% honesty rate in a police force? Is science somehow less than that?

Unfortunately getting a Ph.D. in science seems to be a very poor career choice indeed. I'll relate my own experience below.

I graduated with a B.S. at age 22 from an american Tier I research university. Worked as a laboratory technician for a couple of years (long enough to pay for my first car) and discovered I really like doing science. I'm very good in the lab, have lots of good ideas, contribute to lots of papers, and I think I am as smart as the Ph.D.s around me.

I decided: I'll go to graduate school. I have an excellent undergraduate GPA, I ace the GREs, and I am accepted into all the top american Ph.D. programs: I decide to get a Ph.D. at a top Ivy League school. I am awarded a NSF fellowship for the first three years of graduate school. The NSF fellowship pays a little bit more than the average stipend so I make a little bit more than my fellow students. Still, I am making much less money than I was making as a laboratory technician. But I still love doing science and it's a lot of fun.

Five years later my new car is five years old and I am ready to start making some money at science. What?? An NIH post-doctoral fellow still makes less money than a bachelors-level lab technician??? Guess I'll try a job in industry. I find that while I have been toiling away as a graduate student, many of the bachelor's degree lab technicians have become millionaires by cashing out their stock options. Oops! I missed that boat. But I still like science and I'm still doing great with major discoveries and publications. It's still a lot of fun.

Next I take another job in industry. Finally, I start to make a little money. But not that much: it does not even begin to make up for the eight years of sub-standard wages doing a Ph.D and post-doctoral fellowship. I still have no job security and don't feel comfortable buying a house in the area. I have already seen that company reorganizations mean your job might be moved across the country any time -- or worse that your job might be eliminated altogether. I next decide to have a baby...unfortunately, my taking a maternity leave puts me into the Bull's Eye for layoffs when the company restructures.

Next, I become a principal investigator, earn an NIH grant, and then another NIH grant award. The NIH budget doubles, then enters a long period of flat funding. Only about 10% of grants are being funded. It often takes three submissions to get a grant funded. I do not get a timely renewal of my five year NIH grant and my lab runs out of money. Because my salary comes from the NIH grant, I lose my job. Now I am a middle-aged and unemployed Ph.D. The competition for jobs is fierce and I am unemployed in one of the worse recessions ever.

Conclusion, science is a very seductive career and it can be a lot of fun when you are young, childless, and don't care about owning a home or settling down. But, with 20/20 hindsight, I would have to say that science is not a good career choice.

Gin and Jonathan have it precisely right. And I agree with what Ellen said. Science is a great career if EVERYTHING goes exactly right for you every step of the way, but in any other case, you're up poverty creek without a paddle, not to mention the very real pain of watching everyone around you make big steps forward financially throughout their best years while you become poorer and poorer for your age bracket less and less employable (fact is, nobody wants to hire a PhD, especially one who's stayed in academia their whole careers, and nobody in academia wants to discuss, much less support, the concept of alternative career paths). Fact is, everyone I know who dropped out with their MS or even their bachelor's is making far more and is far more advanced in their careers than 98% of the PhDs I know. It's like a temperature inversion, and the PhDs are stuck at too-high an altitude. By the time you're in your 30s, it really does hurt. Those who do succeed apparently do so more or less completely by chance (and they enjoy far less job security than those "below" them or their peers who took other paths (any other paths)). And nothing is apparently being done to fix this problem. Sure, we ask for more and more scientists, but we offer them fewer and fewer actual opportunities, and success becomes its own punishment as soon as one little thing goes wrong (one bad advisor, one bad career move, or one bad reagent/tool can and will sink your career permanently). If I had one piece of advice to give those 16-18 year olds, to all but the most aggressive and ingenious, I'd say: "Don't do it. It's not worth it." It's a lot of punishment for, in the end, as much edification as you could have gotten yourself in your free time while earning far more money and stability in the "real world."

Most have already said it her, and the teenager are completely right:

Science is a BAD CAREER choice

, because:

- uncertainty of job
- low payments compared to job investment (training hard work)
- bad career development due to the pyramid in scientific institutes and limited development of transferable skills
- the sooner you get out of science the better it is for your career

In the Netherlands we have a society for biomedical scientist: www.vmwo.nl

Why I choose science (postdoc, jobless and other jobs since 2001):
Simply because I love it

, it is fun, and as long as it is a hobby and a pleasure and occasionally get paid, it is not too bad

John

To quote a recent politician.... "Seems like we have become a nation of whiners". All the reasons stated above are valid and true...been there done that. But does everyone believe that most other career choices don't have problems also? Consider how you define success... is it a large salary, expensive things, more stuff or the ability to (within reason) do, explore what you feel is important? The granting agencies decide if you get the dollars, not if your proposal is important for you. Like any process, politics are involved - makes no difference if you are in Science or business. It's important to recognize this and decide if you want to play or not.

Things come in cycles, this is a down time - we will recover and jobs will be plentiful and meaningful for those prepared. I know, as an elderly Scientist I have seen this trend at least 3x, typically every 7-8 years.

Be passionate about what you do - that's important. Get the experience in one area (Science) before you decide that it sucks. What you see around you is real, but controlled by individuals with their own agendas. Continue on the path and resolve to either make a change or leave.

And Wayne brings it full circle to make it clear why scientists are patsies for the corrupt, our ranks are filled with corruption and scientists accept terrible job prospects.

No problem is so large that denying it or ignoring it won't work for me!

Call'em a buncha whiners. Oh. Very insightful Wayne. You really are a gem, aren't you? When a platter of felonies is pushed in your face, you can only say, "whiners!"

Since we are bandying quotes about, how about this one?
"...because I agree with Dante,
that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who,
in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
There comes a time when silence is betrayal." - Martin Luther King

The elder scientist quotes former Senator Phil Gram, who was talking about the current economic crisis and was specifically refering to those people who were starting to lose homes to bad mortgage decisions. Their fault? The mortgage industry's fault? Probably both. But whether those involved were whining or not, there was and is a major economic crisis. And whether I am whining or not, there are problems in science. The view from the sucessful sunshine on the other side is quite different from the view from inside the darkness of the tunnel. Perhaps science is different now, or it's easy to reminisce fondly in hindsight in the style of Aeneas, or maybe, as Wayne suggests, we all just need a lesson in stoicism from our mentors. Either way, I hope I'm in this game in 7 or 8 years from now to continue the conversation.

Since gaining my doctorate in physiology in 1982, I have seen these cycles of "we need more scientists and engineers" resurrect their ugly heads every once in a while. There appears to be a really big one floating around right now. The truth does come out, however, regarding jobs in those fields, and the fact is that time and again it has been shown by competent studies that there is never ever a balance between all of those seeking degrees in science and engineering and those obtaining careers in such.

While the reality of this situation does need to be explained to anyone thinking about going into science, we do need to counsel those going into science about just what the real world looks like.

On one hand you will be bored, underpaid if paid at all, stressed, frustrated to no end, and unattractive to the opposite sex, and on the other hand you will have extremely rare, fleeting moments of pure exhilaration when an experiment the very first time goes exactly how you hypothesized it to go...discovering how God did it. No fame, no money, no glory, no nothing...just one or two moments of pure ecstacy per year is all that most individuals will ever get out of a scientific career.

Still, this last point is what instinctively drives people to go into science, because real scientists are born, not made. And so, as scientists, responsible scientists, we must responsively explain the true career reality to anyone who is thinking about becoming a scientist; that sick, sad, incredible, inevitable imbalance...and we will still have way way more than enough people driven to aspire.

One of the real issues faced by prospective science students is simply this: A scientist and an engineer with idential degrees, let's say BS/BA doing virtually identical work, will not be paid the same salary. For a young person contemplating a technical career, it simply doesn't make much sense to put the effort into earning a degree in, let's say, chemistry, when you know that companies place a higher value on someone with a degree in chemical engineering.

I am a teenager and I found this website through my biology teacher. I am very interested in science as I want to be a neurologist later on. I do think that there is a lack of information on carreer options in the science department. Many of us don't know what our options are, especially when it comes to specializing in a specific science. Maybe that's where the problem is. More education on possibilities!

Lisa is quite correct. How many science teachers actually educate their students in class on the topic of possibilities in science and engineering? I'd probably guess close to none. That's the saddest state of affairs for the real introduction of science.

Still Lisa, read carefully what everyone is saying in this post stream, and if you continue to have that drive in your gut, then I say, "Go, girl!"

Science is a good career. Industry, government and politics are not good to scientists' paychecks. Take the environment and green chemistry, sampling is large for pollutant detection but a friend of a connection politically will lower the corporate fine. Nothing is ever said about the 10-12 hour days to prepare environmental samples for analyses then the length of the automated run before the results can be crunched using the standard curve and mid and final standards, control and spiked values. Moreso nothing is ever said about the low salaries handed to overtime worked environmental chemists.

Does the corporate person remember his environmental chemist when he orders that $15 martini for the politician that had the charges minimized for his company. Does the corporate person realize that the environmental chemist will forego dinner to catch up on sleep.

Take the pharmaceutical industry and the big push for $4 prescriptions or asking pharmaceutical companies to offer free prescriptions. Politcally the candidate is saving all indigent taxpayers a bundle with low priced pharmaceuticals. What about the chemists supporting drug discovery and the glory of a curing drug candidate when the results are in. A successful drug discovery is greater than a seven year work process before the clinical trials even begin. Glory and money are not in the same wallet of all those in the chain that produced the prescribed medicine that is sold at the local drugstore franchise. Do the groups that protest for lower priced pharmaceuticals realize that bench chemists in drug discovery accept lower pay each time they complain?

Do these same price protesters campaign equally for an affordable health insurance plan nationwide? I'd go for less paycheck deducted for my group health insurance plan.

All chemists are present and accounted for when there is a drug(s) shortage; upfront pay will be questionable and how much overtime is announced to be unpredictable. How many pharmaceutical price protesters realize the SILENT sacrifice for the common good?

I think the delusion that all scientists are rich should be cleared up immediately.

Hey, I'm a 16-year old at the moment, and I'm in the middle of the usual career choice crisis. I can definitely empathise with the excitement of discovery you can only get in a scientific career - a feeling which staged experiments in school can only simulate - but from my perspective, that joy is getting serious competition from the sight of *piles of cash*.

From what I read in this thread, the only consistent way to get those piles of cash in a science career is if you get lucky, and that luck can be pretty much the only thing that makes the difference between barely having a pot to piss in and insulating your many houses with $100 bills... So to speak.

I don't like depending on luck, and it seems that my ability to think both methodically and nonlinearly at the same time would be better spent in starting my own business (and I dont mean starting a supermarket, I mean the sort of thing that generates piles of cash), and handing myself my own paycheck.

And then theres careers in computer systems, and engineering, and design, which I also find fascinating; but the sight of piles of cash comes to those who specialise, so I must make my choice and stick to it. I need to know if science is a good choice for me, and if it is, It would be great to have personal advice to go along with it, as to what I can do now, to get started...

And I'm not a stranger to moving around a bit (a lot), either.

I am a fresh Biotech student in an undergrad progam at a local junior college. I have a year before I transfer into a 4 year institution and I'm very passionate about science. But after researching job opportunities and projected income, i have to be honest, Im considering changing my major. I mean, I may finish out my degree and get my BS but Im thinking of going to med school or even become a PA.

I look at it as simply as this. If you can't pay the bills or live the lifestyle that compliments the amount of work you put in, whats the point? As superficial as it may sound, money does make people happy, and you need that balance. For instance, I don't understand why Medical Technologist get paid crappy wages when they're responsible for almost 80% of a doctors diagnosis.

I see wrestlers, rappers and idiot football players like Plaxico Burress who just shot himself in the leg, waste money everyday. I just don't understand how this country can afford so many luxuries but can't compensate the people who really matter.

For Maurice:

Concerning your last sentence, I understand you, Brother. Therefore, with this as an absolute given, choose your career wisely, and then don't complain about money and lifestyle if you become a real scientist if those things are first on your list of what is most important to you in life, because you will only have yourself to blame.

Hence, for Everyone:

Choose science only only ONLY because you are driven to live and breathe it until the day you die.