Are Biology PhD students the most miserable?
scienceblogs.com
scienceblogs.com
The challenge with big bio science is that you need access to tremendous resources to do anything interesting. Labs are expensive, equipment is expensive so you need to get access through the gates before you can do anything. Once you are in a lab, you have to manage aligned agendas between your PI and yourself to move forward. Large bioscience is about resource acquisition. The same is probably true of high energy particle physicists. The lack of jobs and positions is a side effect that a lab just needs a lot of resources. Ecologist and other field biologists seem less miserable. You can do low cost field work as a field biologist.
Computing as another commented, in biostatistics allows a degree of able to do the work directly. And in that area costs are getting cheaper. As a computer person, I can do things without needing to get permission. Bio is still the most interesting thing, hey we've never engineered life, open question. But the age of gentleman biology is long gone.
There is a lot of good molecular bio to be done, but there are few opportunities due to exogenous factors. Half the effort is getting the opportunity and that is definitely miserable.
Then I went to graduate school, and it became clear to me that professional research is a grinder -- just as political and bullshit-prone as any other job (if not more so), but with lower stakes and crappy earning potential. The core of what I loved was still there, but wrapped in seventeen layers of bureaucracy and careerists and conflicted interests. Modern science is as much about money and power as it is about ideas, and that really sucks.
The author is right that your advisor often wants you to do things that are against your own long-term self interest: they're paying you to work on a project, not spend time chasing rainbows. And you're right that the self-determination and opportunity in professional science is almost completely gone. You've got to be the PI of a lab if you want to have a career, but the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you.
At this point, I think that the true promise of science can only be realized by the independently wealthy.
One solution is trying to transition people into applied biology - i.e. medicine. We could always use more doctors. What's crazy is you could have a Ph.D. in biological sciences yet need to spend another few hundred grand to get trained as a doctor. A general care practitioner needn't spend seven years to get trained.
> after all, Europe manages to train doctors straight out
> of highschool in 3 years + internships/fellowships/etc.
> compared to North America's 4+ years + a bachelor's
> degree).
Not sure how professional organizations can keep a "tight grip" on med school slots when foreign medical school graduates (and osteopathic medical school grads) can take USMLE medical boards. The pass rates for foreign medical grads, including US students who study abroad, are about 15-20% lower than US medical grads. My point is that the choke point for future doctors isn't the number of medical school slots but the USMLE pass rate and possibly the number of residency slots.
That's why combined PhD/MD programs still take about 7 years - and that's not including residency and fellowships if you decide to actually practice medicine instead of becoming a scientist.
disclaimer - not a doctor, but did a biological PhD and have several family members who just completed their MDs.
Many people (if not most) just want a job.
With yet more years in education to get your teacher certificate, while your student debt accrues interest and grows, and which you will have to pay down in a career whose income potential has quite likely already peaked and is quite likely headed down over the next 20 years while you are competing for salary against people who don't need to pay down anywhere near as much debt and with additional qualifications that the schools don't care about at all.
Not to mention that there are magnet high schools that do very much like the perceived prestige of having PhD level instructors. Your typical public high school wouldn't care, of course.
That's not true everywhere. Where I live, there's nearly unlimited public school choice and school districts must reimburse each other at a state-mandated rate for transferred students. Especially in poorer districts, this rate is generally higher than the per-student funding the schools receive for in-district students. (I've heard it's up to $1500/year more.) Individual schools that can recruit students by offering specialized programs (languages, music, science, etc.) can increase their funding quite a bit.
Well, if you say so? Of course, it grossly oversimplifies reality. Job markets are complex; lack of success cannot always be traced back to bad choices. Also, you could level a very similar objection against health insurance. Personally, I'm not comfortable with that kind of senseless cut-throat capitalism.
Critical thinking, self-managing a senior research project, miscellaneous business classes, and diving into unknown knowledge areas help me today.
I'd bet that for a good chunk of what a general doctor does -- yup your ear is infected, here's an antibiotic; your wrist sure is broken, let me cast it; it hurts to pee -- uti or std; a full md is overkill. Living in SF, my gf who has had less complicated medical issues than me primarily sees a PA at One Medical Group, who by the way I would recommend. I recently tore ligaments in my ankle and broke my tibia plus fibula; even my orthopaedic surgeon has PAs helping her maximize efficiency.
The article's core advice -- make sure to acquire transferable skills -- is certainly a good idea, though.
As a bioinformatics PhD student, life is great: I get to learn those programming and math skills specifically mentioned by the article as being transferable, along with some of the other more esoteric skills. (Moral of the story: choose bioinformatics! :)
So, yes, quite a few people want to be code monkeys.
I should know, because I shared the same biased views until I had a job which required quick iterations of complicated computation of a large dataset with limited hardware. I never had really used perl before that, but when it started to save me literally weeks of work I came to love it.
There's a tool for every job.
I think I didn't like Perl before because the code looked hard to understand. But since then I found out first hand one can do shitty C or Python too.
I don't know how other Perl programs fare. Probably better. Though the syntax makes you cry. And treating things like lists of lists as an advanced topic, that's needs something special like `references'. Did I mention how functions get their parameters? The interpolation in strings can be handy, though.
And I agree about the possibility of bad code in Python and C. (I have some Python nightmare at hand, too.)
Unfortunately, you graduate only to find out that you're only qualified to work in a lab at a research university! All your computer science buddies are now millionaires and they paid a quarter of the tuition you did. You're over qualified for most jobs in the private sector and you most likely lack the experience for private sector jobs that do require PhDs! You learn all these advanced specialised skills that end up being worthless--they're either being performed by machines or students/interns. The same can be said about other "purely academic" majors such as economics, international studies, political science, physics, mathematics, etc.
That's my biggest problem with academia and university culture. They only exist to train a new generation of professors and other academics. They don't seem to care about teaching their students more vocational skills relevant to their major or highlight possible private sector career paths after they graduate.
For example, Arabic and Chinese are hot topics right now, so as a student, you figure you should get an international studies degree in one of these cultures. You hear it all the time in the news how the defense industry is starving for these people. You graduate and find out that no one wants someone who can speak Arabic or Mandarin fluently unless they have a business, statistics or computer science degree... You might as well have gone to a vocational/technical college and learned Arabic on the side.
The same goes for physics. I have friends with master's in physics that have never had problems finding a job, though the jobs were rarely directly in physics. Rather they got jobs working with engineers or in programming (or in one case, pure management), but the degree still served them well.
Industry asks, why hire a biomed when I can hire a mechanical engineer and a electrical engineer. Separate those two parts of the project and have a manager that understands the biology of the problem.
The hope for one of these engineers is to get past the usual resume screens and convince the people hiring that they are as good at electrical as the EE and/or as good at mechanics as the ME.
Luckily for any engineer, entrepreneurship is also an option.