Career thoughts and also, cake

Well, it's now the weekend and time for my twice-a-week verbal diarrhea. Though we'll see how this goes since I'm currently STILL in lab, and my timer informs me I have 19min and 23 seconds left (and then it's a bunch of short incubations and trip down to the vivarium to visit my mice).

The title recapitulates my thoughts for the day fairly accurately. The former is a joint combination between Wendy's graduation and application for a very specific program that's only available in two places (or so it seems) on the west coast, a bunch of places on the east coast, and a few lonely spots in central US of A (though she's not going to go for the latter because she has a husband and a one year old -- east coast is a probability because of relatives, but west coast is still ideal for obvious reasons), the sudden rush of thesis defenses scheduled in the next four weeks (if you want to walk in the spring commencement you have to graduate NOW) and the flurry of publications in journals such as ...oh, Nature explaining how the job prospects of PhDs is really suffering in the recent years.

The last can be summed up thus:
1. government believes advancement in science = improvement in society
2. recent years = increase in PhD program funding
3. labs like PhD students, in the lab hierarchy we are the cheapest source of labor outside of undergrads, who have neither the same level of skill nor the time commitment
4. increase in funding + cheap labor >> lots more PhD students
5. lots of PhD students >> lots of PhDs
6. there are very few slots open in the academia for tenure track positions
7. PIs like the encourage their students to compete for the "prestige" of tenure track positions
8. CONCLUSION: recent flux of PhDs of unequal quality (depending on where your program is) who are ill equipped for any career outside of academia, who are over-qualified for normal B.S/ M.S. jobs (PhDs generally require higher starting salary which companies don't like), who can't all fill faculty positions because there are too few positions open.

Then you add into the mix the recent deal of what sounds like cuts in research funds but not PhD program funds and ...that actually will increase PhD students enrolled because we are cheap and my God what a mess.

So...there is a week-long course next week on careers in biomedical science (every other year is general topic, the rest of the time it's focused on pharmaceutical sciences) and I enrolled and was encouraged by my PI to attend. It's interesting how much my view regarding what it's like doing research has changed since I started graduate school. While during high school age my plans were nothing more concrete than "be a scientist", my undergraduate resolve to apply for graduate school was sadly not more specific than "be qualified to have and run my own project / experiments". Upon graduate school (I am a third year, soon to be a forth year, so I'm reasonably sure that I now have enough experience to start forming some sort of opinion), however, I find that the pragmatic and the idealistic must be reconciled, and soon. Got to live, got to eat to live, got to work to eat, got to find work, and finding work... well saying that doing what you love is all well and good, but doing what you love, even if it's doing research, turns out to be more complicated than I expected.

From what I've seen of the syllabus for next week, if I am intend to remain in the field of research, my options are industry or academia was I originally surmised, nearly a year ago. (There are other career options, such as law & policy, writing, consulting &c.) The industry, from what people tell me (I've been discretely polling post-docs) has the advantage that they only use systems that are already developed (so no spending 90% of your time trying to troubleshoot experiments) and no hair-pulling over grant writing and renewal. And possibly better hours -- though that depends on the company and the experiment -- if you got something hot going on, you're still going to be plotting your life around your experiments, regardless. The academia, in contrast, has the grants and the truly INSANE amount of troubleshooting (also, my fish in situ did not work again this week -- why does it not work?), but you'd have the advantage of pursuing your interest, whereas industry will force you to pick on what the directors say will most likely earn a handsome profit. In addition, there's less issue about copyright / withholding information -- for the most part (some fields are more generous about sharing data and reagents than others) it's all very delightfully "information wants to be free! :D" here. In either case there is going to be lab / inter-lab / inter-departmental / workplace politics & drama. In either case there's probably going to be some sort of teaching / mentoring involved (I was told that if you have a PhD you tend to end up heading a research group in the industry). So.

I still do believe that the roles of a scientist is to a) advance knowledge and b) aid humanity. The fact that I continue to doggedly believe this despite of my age, experience, and knowledge is probably indicative of some sort of gross character flaw. Nevertheless, while I continue to believe this I think I will, against all odds, stick with academia for research and cast my net of opportunity for that 0.3% chance of success. Except that isn't necessarily so either.

Let me explain: when people (by which I mean graduate students and post-docs) say they are going to hack it in the academia, it's expect that they reach a tenure-track position as a appointed professor as their end point. I'm not sure if I want to be a professor.

... ...

Well that answers the question of timing. I'm now at home. My day went lab, groceries, lab, and I need to do laundry, but where was I? Oh yes.

I have determined that I don't particularly want to be professor. On top of the teaching requirements, it seem to require piles upon piles of paperwork and meetings to deal with the responsibilities of an entire lab and its role in the department. My PI is enthusiastic about his job and he has tried to explain to me how rewarding it is. I mostly failed to comprehend. Especially given that he has to do class plans and contact collaborators and give talks and write proposals -- all things that I don't really like doing and deal with only because I have to -- and he doesn't even get to run any experiments at all, because he simply has no time between all the writing and talking. "I have resigned myself to the fact that these days I can do more for the field of science writing and talking than running experiments," he told me a few months ago, and possibly slavers at the chance to run a PCR. No one should be that excited to run a PCR, unless it's your first time doing it, maybe.

Then as of this...Wednesday? Thursday? I have discovered there's another alternative.

As I've mentioned, PIs like grad students because of cheap labor. The same is true (though to a lesser degree, because they do get paid more than us) for post-docs. Project-scientists are what people become after their five-year maximum allotment for post-doctoral fellowships. They are rare because a lot of people start to drop out at that point because of discouragement from the last of available faculty positions, but also because they costs more, still, and PIs don't like to hire them because with the same amount of money they can get almost the same amount of work out of grad students and post-docs.

The discovery I've made is that it's possible to be a project scientist with your own project and independent funding From what I understand, the trade off is this: you affiliate yourself with a lab and get to use the lab equipment and reagents (necessary: most lab equipments in my fields costs as much or more than a car) and use people in their as sounding boards with the lab's built-in social-network (which I guess might necessarily be a good thing, depending on the lab, but that aside...), you get to run your own project and share animal space in the vivarium and publish your own papers. In return you have to pay attention to the lab's PI, train the occasional labmate in techniques, and the PI gets the spot of honor at the end of the author's list on all your publications. Your appeal as a hireling increases because you come with your own funding. You still get to pick and run your own projects. You don't have to deal with the responsibility of running a lab and can avoid most of the teaching & department requirements. I know this is possible because I found a lady in the lab next door who does just this.

Although I have no idea how much easier / harder it is to get a grant to fund one project instead of an entire lab, and I suspect my parents would still like the prestige of the title of a professor if possible, this...well, it's still a possible and concrete goal for me to aspire towards. After the post-doc, because you can't get hired at all after PhD without post-doctoral experience. So: that's my goal for now. The added benefit of this is, if the appeal of a scientist with her own funding for her project is true, the need for bench-scientists (what we call those of us who run experiments) far out-trips the need for faculty, and I'll have a much better pick of where I work in terms of location as well, which is infinitely preferred since I still plan to "settle down" (or at least my version thereof) in the bay area in the long run, no matter where I end up in between now and then. (I still plan to adopt some day. The lady has two children and a working husband. I'm still trying to work out the logistics.)

Then, upon finding myself working out the "what am I going to do with myself in life" step much sooner than my upperclassmen and that I need to go into lab BOTH DAYS AGAIN I got myself cake. To celebrate, you see. It's the Pepperidge one from the freezer and it's got chocolate on it and I finally got around to loading the photos I took from that walk a couple weeks ago and no those two thoughts are not really related. I don't plan to upload the photos to the internet, since most of them are of private residence and I'm using them as references for designs only. My predilection for wrought-iron things is clearly apparent, especially when coupled with glass and climbing ivy, though I appear to be quite fond of ceramic tiles as well. I also apparently took a slightly out of focus photo of that ridiculous peach-colored house I saw, with the rococo molding and the most pretentious topiaries I've ever seen. It would not have been out of place as a small art gallery / museum.

Have a slight headache now. I'm trying out things that can put me to sleep even when the neighbors are loud or when I'm stuck on a plane for over ten hours next to complete strangers. Benadryl appears to only work if coupled with Zyrtec. Given how well the cold med the past winter took me out, it's possible that Benadryl might work well on its own as well if I coupled it with a small amount of alcohol. However, I'm unwilling to buy a entire container of alcohol for the two tablespoons I'll need for this experiment, so that won't do. Zyrtec by itself doesn't work. Tylenol doesn't work. I don't want to deal with solely alcohol for various reasons, but I might look into what CVS offers in terms of melatonin-type things and see how that goes.

Cake!