What's ridiculous is the amounts of these basic grants that beginning scientists are trying to get are tiny- basically 1 person-year salary.
Somehow that feels worse? Like a heroin dealer giving the first shot at a discount?
Glad I got out. I'm still hell bent on finding a way to do research (garage lab? Startup?) But f*k academia and universities. No way in hell I'm going to tacitly condone their ways by being part of it whether I can be successful or not.
Every other expenses after getting that set up is trivial (in comparison) for an individual researcher, though national lab style shared analytical equipment is nice. That can come later though...
It's really hard. It's much simpler to set up a machine shop or similar, but then it's just a new hackerspace that there are good models for already.
Partner with a hazardous material testing lab, or another type of operation where they use lots of hazardous material similar to yours and end up turning a bit of it into waste themselves.
Not necessarily an environmental lab where they actually test waste, better an industrial lab that tests material.
Some better opportunities can even be with material or waste handlers who have no lab at all.
Hazardous material does not become hazardous waste if you can legitimately sell/ship it off the site as a worthwhile product instead. Otherwise if you need to truly discard excess (even prime chemical assets then become a liability) you need to not only usually pay, but bump your paperwork and liability up from merely dangerous goods to full waste documentation requirements.
Ideally, as a scientific consultant (giving free advice only) once you get on the toxic site where yours is a drop in the bucket by comparison, you will be able to identify recycling opportunities worth way more to them than the cost of properly disposing of your paltry amount by the established registered professionals, according to the specific arcane regulations in place which you value their expertise for. They will love you.
So you can get the best deal possible.
Don't just recycle the equipment, recycle the chemicals.
This is what I meant. For a small organization I would expect a lot of small volume experimental products that are not exactly known in composition combined with perhaps some rinse acetone or other solvents.
Have you encountered an example where this works? I've done consulting for startups in exchange for a fume hood before, so I guess it's not that out there. It's much harder to imagine doing this for a big hazardous waste site, but maybe?
Thanks for the idea, I definitely won't be trying to do that but maybe there could be a symbiotic thing going on there. Probably a lot easier to do that with a university somehow? A national lab will be too stuck up to accept hazardous waste or advice, but maybe a university would hire you part time to work for them while letting you use the space for your own project.
I'll be able to maintain a good relationship with them and if I do go back into private practice nearby they will be able to handle the few liters a month I would expect to generate single-handedly.
Which is a drop in the bucket of their few drums, which are a drop in the bucket of the EPA waste hauler's truckloads.
Unknowns-R-Us.
OTOH the only time I went without a lab I built, was 2013 and I was tempted to try and operate in some vacant small-university space in my late father's retirement location, but I did not have the resources to _branch out_ while I still had my main lab in mothballs.
Things were also very uncertain plus one of the surplus spaces had already been unfavorably occupied by a not-very-well liked commercial EPA testing lab that I think failed just a year or two earlier and left everyone involved with a bad impression.
Now after recovering a bit from natural disaster, I'm going to check out UH where they took over the old Schlumberger facility as part of their energy effort a number of years ago. It still seems not fully occupied but I'll find out for sure eventually. Before the internet I sure spent a lot of time in the UH library.
When it comes to an actual university operation though, about half the time when I check out a chem department's equipment it looks like they sure could use some help from someone with more than just a few years on the gear, and often so underequipped I could bring in & restore the surplus electonics to double their capabilities within a year not much differently than at a commercial lab. Also without a PhD there are actually some long-term employment or career positions already funded which could be conformed creatively to this effort. If I did this I would want to hit successive universities since I am very fast, but I am mainly retiring from employment more so than my present employer's facility which I expect to routinely continue to visit as long as I am in their areas, to our mutual advantage.
I started out as a teenage businessman anyway so I'm not worried about going forward with only a briefcase again.
This is basically my part time job now, I help maintain a university lab including things like repairing ancient equipment, training grad student TAs, helping the lecturers plan and run their experiments, and then just random grad students and professors drop in for advice and help. It's pretty fun.
What I don't do is take advantage of the fact that I have a chem lab attached for any personal work, I've never actually thought to ask. I have asked about setting up a catalyst test reactor lab to collaborate with the college of computing to see if we can build a testing lab for anyone creating new catalysts to analyze the results and invent new types. There were too many professors with a vested interest in doing that kind of project so they had no interest in supporting it.
It was very disappointing to see, I'd have been happy to run a test facility for all the professors to work with as a shared experimental facility but they all wanted to be the one to get the papers first. The minor consideration to me of being able to do some of my own research projects with the setup and a salary is all I'd have wanted out of it, I love mentoring students and would have loved to provide deep expertise to students working on such projects...
Could have made three departments able to produce high quality research in a field that no one here seems to actually be good at (i.e. traditional heterogeneous catalysts) with ChemE, MatSci, and CompSci all benefiting from the ability to generate large reliable datasets of how new catalytic materials behave in traditional chemical reactors. So cheap to set up too... just such a shame that I cannot do such a project at the place I work despite having been the director of chemical process development and specifically catalyst development at previous jobs. Ostensibly because professors are already doing it in their labs, but like, why would you not take advantage of expertise like mine to make these projects work?
So bizarre but I just don't have the stamina to push them on it, I probably literally just have to switch job titles for them to even notice that I am in fact a world class expert on catalysts and chemical processing. Instead I'm repairing oscilloscopes which is super fun but I sure miss doing actual research that matters.
We're tackling the question of where to live, too. I find it useful to identify my values & then to use that to filter my options. Choosing based on availability of resources tends to lead to all kinds of blindspots in my experience. We're also trying to figure out how the community model can work without moving and what the process looks like for building it out where anyone is. The approach I'm going for right now is to identify the exact spaces and ways of relating to them I want, creating an absurdly long organization name with all those words in the name, and a mission of "evolve the name" or something similar, short, and simple.
So I always wanted (always did) have my lab in a heavy industrial area.
For biotech the US area of New Jersey and Connecticut has a high concentration of pharma giants and their many satellite contractors.
One business model has been to become enough of a contractor yourself to pay the bills, then research all you want and own it all yourself.
https://www.instructables.com/How-to-Get-a-Free-Yacht/
I love this one.
On the face of it, it's also a less risky choice. In academia, you're always fighting over scraps of funding, and you're always just one grant application away from a career failure. Just one rejected publication or failed experiment can end you if it causes you to fail to get more funding. While I wasn't a PI, I was made redundant after our group lost some of its funding, and I put some of that down to a paper rejected on utterly ridiculous grounds by a competitor lab. Petty academic politics. In industry, it seems that companies are much better at managing and mitigating risk. Projects are initiated with the expectation that they will have a high chance of failure, but that useful knowledge will be gained. Project managers will give projects a certain amount of runway and then make a go/no-go decision for continuation at defined points. You might run several projects in parallel and know that some will work out and some won't. Being on a "failed" project isn't a career-limiting move in that situation--you'll try your best doing some very cutting-edge stuff and your efforts will still be valued. Rather than being fired, you'll move onto another project and continue doing interesting stuff. It's much less stressful even though I likely work harder! And if the company stops being interesting, there are plenty of others to go to.
I ended up doing fine in software development though. Also, the Wright Brothers didn't need a research lab to invent flight. Biology-focused hacker spaces are on the rise so there are still ways to do research.
I'm a senior software engineer. My wife has a PhD in biochemistry from a top university. When she graduated she could not get a job anywhere. We both agreed she should choose a different path and she started a business in a totally unrelated field.
Meanwhile someone like me...I'm literally turning away interviews. I have no doubt she'd be able to be success in the IT industry amongst the many roles offered if she had chosen the path. And many of her peers have self studied, dropped their grad programs and get hired by the likes of Facebook, Microsoft.
Pragmatically, the smartest one would never get into fields with limited jobs and pay. I'd rather pick a field so I can feed my family, than to save the world.
The US will get leapfrogged in R&D as the brain drain goes towards generating ad revenue (For the record I do not work for a company that relies on generating ads)
How do you manage that? I've been a software developer for over 20 years now, and every time I lose my job it's a SLOG to find another one, with anywhere from a few months to a year in between. I can't even remember the last time a recruiter contacted me (perhaps 5-6 times in my entire career).
It's not like my technical skills are lacking. I've worked professionally with most popular languages and technologies, have dozens of popular open source projects under my belt, many of which you're probably even using at work in some fashion. I've even been called a "miracle worker" a few times for the projects I've saved from ruin, or terrible processes I've optimized.
I'm friendly with everyone, not badmouthing, staying out of politics, treating everyone professionally and expecting the same.
But then whenever there are layoffs or there's an opportunity to push someone out, I'm in the first wave to go (they never say why). I've even been fired for "not stepping up enough." And then I spend another few months slinging resumes all over, spending my days doing coding challenges in the hopes of getting an interview. Then another year of employment and the cycle starts all over again. I have to constantly prove myself again and again, as if I were fresh out of college or something.
You may want to ask someone who you are on good terms with what's going on.
Forgive me, but I'm not even sure what I should be asking these people... "Why haven't you contacted me" sounds too abrasive...
I work at a huge company and have been on many teams and projects. Every few days, weeks - I'd ping people just to see what's up and strike a conversation. I don't do it annoyingly...there's a fine balance. You also need to be able to tell who is social and who is not. If you can read that someone has a social personality I'll talk to them more, be friend them...talk to things besides work. There are those who only like to talk about work, and that's fine. Then we just talk about work. I go out of my way to help them out with any problems at work or outside of work.
For example someone is a first time home buyer...so I gave advice (I've bought 2 homes in my young career). Another, a manager...his son is in med school, I gave advice (my roommates in grad school were in med school). Another had problems with implementing PGP...so I stayed late one night to help her out.
If you're not experiencing this, you really can't ask anyone else anything, but you can ask yourself what's wrong. It might just be that you haven't made friends with people who have hiring influence; that said, most people can at least refer folks. More likely is that you aren't getting personally close enough with people at work, so they are not thinking of you. Spend more time interacting on a human level with non-engineers, who are way more often to be influential re: hiring at future jobs.
It's also possible that you're not considered a solid worker, or you don't get along with people, but in my experience that's a lot less common than merely not making friends with people who are likely to have jobs to offer in the future. Learning to find and befriet those people is a key career skill.
If nobody is making the jump into good work acquaintance, where you enjoy hanging out casually without needing an explicit work reason, something is amiss. I don't try to form connections, it just happens similar to how you make friends in class. Work is class. If nobody talks to you after the project is over something isn't right.
You can't ask people who aren't close directly why they aren't close, but maybe family members / non-work friends. "Is there something about me that makes it difficult to make connections?" It's quite hard to get explicit feedback on this type of thing.
Yes! I've done exactly this, and the result is always the same: They can't believe that I'm having problems in this area. "I can't understand how ANYONE could dislike you!" is what my dad said.
Fuck... now this is making me sad.
* These connections are easier when you're in your 20s, single, have time to kill. The company culture may encourage/discourage this too.
* If you're a developer, you may be among a less-extroverted cohort, and have to make efforts to reach out vs. being reached-out-to.
* These are the hard-to-teach-explicitly items, but is every interaction with coworkers purely about the project? Hobbies, shared interests, movies they've seen, games they play, trips they've done/are going to do, etc.? With a (non-work) shared interest it's hard not to have casual conversations that build a work repoire over time.
* There are intangible social signals about willingness to connect (person is overly polite/formal/rigid, facial expressions/body language, warmth of tone and language, etc.). Basically when you sit down next to someone on an airplane, you can tell if they want to chat without having to ask them. Being actively disliked is rarely the issue. You don't dislike the cashier at the grocery store, but the relationship is purely transactional, we can be friendly but let's just get this over with. For some reason, your coworkers may see things this way.
Working somewhere for decades and not being in touch with a single colleague is not normal. Imagine hearing "I didn't keep in touch with a single person from my 16 years of primary + university education after school ended."
Sorry, but your assumption about how the world works / should work isn't applicable to everyone. Some people don't have the capacity to do so.
If you aren't making connections you are unfortunately at a severe disadvantage. To the extent you're self-aware to realize this, you may be able to correct it. Otherwise, like anything else, you learn to adapt.
Your tone also comes off as incredibly patronizing, as though you know my life better than I do.
Rest assured, not keeping in touch with old contacts has not caused me to miss any opportunities that I would be otherwise interested in.
I work for a big company... It's not a FAANG, but it's recognizable world wide. Even though it's not a tech company, I believe the name recognition gives some credibility to recruiters.
I'm lucky to have worked at a previous company that had a lot of well connected software engineers and management. It was a mid size company so I was 2 levels from the CTO. They are my connections on LinkedIn so I think that adds credibility.
I'm a java developer. Despite the hmm...'hate' for Java on HN, if you go to dice.com and put in various languages...Java is very high ranking. Having years of experience in a technology with a lot of jobs help.
Some alluded to keeping in touch with old coworkers. I'd have to strongly agree to that. Strongly. I have your back, you have my back. Right? I hate interviewing. HATE. I've been fortunate in the last several years to have had 4 former colleagues ask if I want to join their team/company. I seriously considered each one, but declined for various reason.
At one point, my company was having layoffs. I knew I should have a backup plan in case my name was on the list. But I hate interviewing...all it took was a phone call to an old colleague of mine (he's now a director) and I was given an open job offer. I enjoy where I currently work {enough} that I'll stay for a while longer.
I've had my resume looked at and tweaked over and over. I never send a cover letter without having someone else proofread and offer suggestions. I've lived and worked in many tech-hub places, including San Francisco for 6 years.
I just don't know... I think it's got to be socially related, but I have a hard time examining that aspect because I'm autistic. But I always make a concerted effort not to offend people, to make sure everyone gets their say and can contribute. People even say I'm a really nice guy, so then I'm left wondering what exactly "it" is that's tanking me...
It always happens the same way:
- I get a job and everyone is super friendly. Some inevitable technical hiccups getting set up for the first month, but no big deal.
- Everything goes swimmingly for the next 6 months to a year. People seem happy with me, performance reviews are fine, 1-on-1 with the boss is fine. I even make a point of asking if they're unhappy with anything about me, and they say "no, everything's fine".
Then one day things go bad (or maybe they've been bad and I didn't see). People start being rude to me, start shutting me out of conversations, start being extra harsh or petty in code reviews etc. In some cases they start name-calling. No higher-ups step in so I try to avoid the people doing this and not antagonize them.
Eventually my boss brings me in for the "it's not working out" talk. They can never give me a solid reason why, and often they resort to roundabout firing methods because it's technically illegal otherwise. There's never a warning, never a list of things to improve upon. I spend most of my days at a company wondering when I'll get "the call". The worst one happened on Dec 23rd.
So yeah... Probably nothing that anyone on HN could help with, because the feedback mechanism I'm subjected to is so vague. But it's frustrating nonetheless, and even today I have constant stress spikes whenever my boss asks to talk to me for a minute about something, wondering if this is it.
There you have it. It's brutally unfair, but autism, if strong enough to be perceivable, sounds like the most likely cause: you're different, and people don't like you because of it.
Even worse, I believe that people on the autism spectrum don't even perceive they're different. I personally have no idea whether I'm on that spectrum, or how far. Still: my own Mom once stated the "obvious": that I must notice that I'm not like others. I had to tell her that I don't. At 35.
So. People perceive you're different. It's obvious enough that they expect you to perceive that difference, even though you may not. So when you fail to conform to the obscure (to you) group norm, they end up rejecting you. Perhaps even rationalising that you're doing it on purpose (remember, the difference is obvious to them). Then you're out of the group.
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There may be other factors as well. Folks tend to be kinder, more forgiving, of pretty people, so if you can improve that in any way, try to do so (one habit at a time though, take it easy). The easiest thing to go for, I think, is clothing: try having someone you trust chose your clothes for you. Pay explicit attention to the dress code at your workplace, emulate it a little (but don't buy the exact same clothes either!). Also consider light makeup if you're a woman (and maybe get counsel about that too).
Much harder is taking good care of your health. If you're fat, unfit, or otherwise unhealthy, try to work on that. Sleeping well, eating well, and exercising properly is surprisingly hard when you're not used to it, but it's a must.
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Edit: also consider telling your colleagues about your autism. I expect it's not easy, and it may not even be a good idea, but there's a chance that people knew why you are the way you are, they'd tolerate it better.
Well the coworker stuff is a separate issue because recruiters don't usually know you, probably you need to address the two issues separately.
As for improving your interactions with coworkers, I'll just throw a few ideas because who knows, maybe the answer will come from a random source like me:
- read 'How to win friends and influence people', maybe some stuff by Mark Manson.
- Try to learn from your successful relationships what you're good at/comfortable with
- Actively choose the environment you aim work in to fit your social strengths e.g. team size, people types. ( This one depends a bit on solving the jobsearch issues first )
A 2.97 in bioengineering could represent someone who simply took more challenging courses, and got lower grades because the courses were truly difficult.
A straight bio major might have a 3.8, but never had to work through a year-long Pchem sequence, instead padding with softer, more grade-inflated courses.
So imagine me, a 18 year old jumping immediately into fairly difficult courses my freshman year...adapting to college. Whilst my peers are taking English 101 and inflating their GPA. I did not receive internships offers my early years in college and I feel this had a big part of it.
Have you checked outside the US?
In the EU there are plenty of universities that offer grad programs without the crazy access requirements of US universities. Tuition is free or at a token price in many countries. And it's reasonably easy to get a paid PhD studentship where you get paid a real salary, not slave wages (probably this is not that easy to get when you're straight out of your Master's with a mediocre GPA, but once you have shown ability to do research successfully and have a couple of papers under your belt, it shouldn't be hard in most places).
Sure, EU universities don't give you the clout of Ivy League, but many do perfectly fine research, you may even learn more as the 3rd PhD student of a professor than as the 27th PhD student of a superstar professor that talks to you five minutes once a month, and can advance your career path just fine.
I'm talking about the EU because it's where I am and can talk more or less confidently about, but this is probably true of many other countries and regions outside the US.
It's crazy to see how many people don't even consider this. I remember an Iranian researcher I was going to hire for a PhD position, she ended up going to the US because you know, it's the US... she faced the Trump ban and the PhD student tax hikes (here she would have a salary allowing her a middle-class lifestyle and without all those threats), and to this day she has significantly fewer papers than the person who had the second best CV and interview and I hired instead. Seriously, there is life outside the US!
I think you should look at what specific research you want to do and then check what labs are publishing interesting papers on that specific thing.
To keep it short, how do I even find what I want to look for? Any tactics that you would want to suggest?
This is just an explanation of how admissions offices work: Bio programs of any flavor at most halfway decent schools are so over-subscribed that there are far more people who exceed the minimum requirements than there are spots for them. Admissions offices have very limited resources to review enormous #'s of applications. 3.0 is a pretty good low-pass filter that eliminates a lot of those applications while still retaining applications from students who, from a probability standpoint, are most likely to succeed in the programs. Extra curriculars & volunteer work at labs show that you're willing to work hard, but not the quality of that work, so those become distinguishing factors only for students that already jumped the GPA hurdle. Academic success from someone with < 3.0 GPA would represent an outlier, and there are no good ways identify who those outliers are, and finding them isn't important when there are plenty of qualified applicants who are easier to identify.
There's probably lots of students in your boat who would have contributed well to the body of scientific knowledge. But for every one of them-- and I have literally seen these students-- there are dozens upon dozens that are let into more lenient programs, unable to do the work & burdened with $100k+ in debt & nothing to show for it.
I am very interested in this concept. Are you thinking of any in particular? I really wish people invested in public spaces people could go do science, particularly chemistry.
In the bay area I also know of CounterCulture [2] which I've only heard high praise of but I've never visited. I've since moved to Baltimore and found some places I wanted to check out but unfortunately because of Covid I've been stuck at home.
[1] https://biocurious.org/ [2] https://www.counterculturelabs.org/
When I moved here I made a list of hacker spaces that were both general and biology-focused. I thought I had found more that were focused on bio but unfortunately I think you're right, for biosciences it's only Baltimore Underground Science Space.
That's only because all the low hanging fruits were still not picked, right? Many discoveries during that time and in the centuries before were done by individuals rather than institutions.
There's plenty of low hanging fruit as the industry grows wide.
While any given industry is subject to the asymptotic curve of progress, innovations in human biology have been incredibly slow due to bureaucracy and IRB slowdowns + grant model.
Human-powered flight wasn't considered a really good idea at the time of the Wright Brothers either, and many people died in the decades following it. It's only in hindsight these ideas seem obvious.
I know things I could've done or could do now if I wanted to go back, but I think I'm more interested at the moment in how to make the research I want to do more accessible.
Your application was most likely reviewed by real people, not just automated filters. People with GPAs below 3 do get into competitive grad programs (and med school). An upward trend is the key.
That doesn't change the OPs point that this is an uphill battle. If they didn't have the above, or they could only get into the right program then it still leaves them with better alternatives elsewhere. Harvard almost certainly filters all candidates with a GPA less than 3.0. Unfortunately academic grades have a poor correlation with future career or research performance.
I agree that the academic world is broken, but this narrative that success -- in any field -- isn't dependent on your ability to sell yourself is problematic.
I left academia behind because I saw that it was a brutal, improbable grind, sure, but mainly because I could see that the same skills needed for success as a professor had a much higher expected value elsewhere. In academia or otherwise, disproportionate success comes to those who combine ability with self-promotion. The people who put their heads down and focus on obscure problems will always be at the mercy of the winds.
Some people make fantastic researchers and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. It seems like a bad deal for everyone if these people are blocked from making contributions to science.
Moreover you're trying to do this for generally very smart people, so obviously they adapt their behaviour to those metrics (they game the system is a less favourable way of saying this). So the only thing you have achieved that the academics change their work to maximize those metrics. We have seen this with grants as well, to be successful you essentially have to write lots of grant (a period without grants can be career ending), so academics spend up to 50% of their time on grant writing and reviewing. At this point I'm not convinced a lottery would not be a better way of distributing money (and I say that as someone who has been fairly successful at getting grants)
Grants are one of the least bad means of evaluating a researcher, because the decisions are not made lightly. Getting funded usually implies that experts have spent a nontrivial amount of time judging the merits of the applicant and their ideas and found them particularly worthy.
Sure...lots of people make fantastic technical workers, and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. I'm not denying their existence. I'm saying that academia is an organization made up of humans, and as such, has the same bias toward self-promotion and social skills as any other field. At the end of the day, people make the decision of who get to be professors, get grants, and so on. Success in an academic discipline, for most people, is about being known, liked and respected amongst the small circle of colleagues who dominate that discipline.
The mythology I am combatting here is that academia was ever this magical unicorn land where introverts and brilliant weirdos can prosper. It happens more often than some fields, I guess, but mostly the same social dynamics apply. It's kind of the same wishful thinking you see from brilliant engineers who can't work on a team -- they invariably stop progressing, and wonder why they don't get promoted up the technical ladder. They can still contribute in the area of their greatest skill, but they're limited in the long run by their social abilities.
It's really common to see brilliant people with no interpersonal skills wash out in grad school. It's almost a cliché. The ones who do make it, rarely advance to a professorship -- they'll get stuck at postdoc or staff scientist or something like that, because some professor is more than willing to keep them around, hidden in the lab, for their exceptional technical skill.
On the other...there is no other hand.
How could this work? If you have more grant money you have more resources to write papers.
Would work simply: fund students directly. If faculty contribute training or ideas students can grant authorship. Faculty/postdocs still peer review papers.
I guess there’s still a need for bigger grants because some labs cost more than others to run, but those grants could cover the cost of equipment and materials without having to directly cover student salaries.
I don't know a particularly good way to get around this issue and still reward faculty for collaboration with students, but, in this situation, faculty are just going to pressure students to 'recognise' their (the faculty's) contributions with an authorship—say, by threatening to withhold a recommendation letter.
I totally agree with your diagnosis of the problem, but I don't see how your proposed solution would solve anything.
First of all, grants are needed to do any meaningful research and advance one's careers in most fields, authorship or no authorship. So the incentive to spend a disproportionate amount of time selling oneself would still be there.
Second, as you yourself imply, the reasons why young faculty don't take a more active role in research are (mostly) not voluntary, it's because they are forced into the grant treadmill. I don't see why they deserve punishment (in the form of fewer authorships) on top of that. They're already overworked getting the grants and you want them to spend more hours in the lab to get authorships in addition?
Third, how do you even police authorships? Especially when a person has a position of power due to having the funding with which other people in the lab are hired. There are already guidelines from scientific societies that in theory don't allow people who just obtained the funding to claim authorship, but people do it anyway. Even if someone complained, they can claim that they actually contributed (e.g. by going through the paper, checking and polishing for correctness) and it's very hard to disprove.
I think the solution has to be to the tune of (1) funding purely based on past CV, not projects (spare us all the effort of convincing reviewers that what we're going to do is the bee's knees, and drawing fictional Gantt charts when in research it's practically impossible to predict anything. If we have produced relevant results in the past, we will probably keep producing them); (2) flatter funding (reward better CVs with better funding, but keep decent enough funding for everyone to keep feedback loops at bay and not throw people that got unlucky with experiments under the bus); and (3) individual funding for everyone instead of a large chunk of funding that goes to the head of the lab.
I dunno. I'm about where you are I guess. Stuff is either too junior or the stuff I want to do is just enough outside my field that it's hard to figure out who to talk to. It's depressing, even moreso now where you have to really work at it to "run into people".
The best I've ever figured out is to take the thing I'm really good at, and find places that happen to need that but also do the thing I want to learn. It doesn't work great. I guess I suggest conferences but I wouldn't go to one during COVID... I'm bad at this I guess though.
It just didn't seem like a job that one could do for decades without ruining their health. I'm amazed by the people who do manage to do it, but I'm confident that my decision was the right one.
Instead, someone else will be the person to study how to use ML to develop new catalyst types, and I'm sad that all the thought and effort I've put into figuring it out will probably just never be of use to anyone. I'm not a good enough programmer for Google, so basically what other option would I have other than academia or a national lab? The problem isn't going to be solved in five years, but the rewards... maybe not mRNA vaccine level but reducing energy and resource waste with more efficient conversion technologies across the entirety of modern civilization seems worthwhile.
I don't even mind writing grants that much and have gotten lots of them for industry research. And I absolutely love mentoring. But I just know from what I saw that I have no desire to try to handle that much entirely unnecessary extra stress, even though it means that I do mostly straightforward electrical engineering despite having invented entirely new catalyst design technologies being used in industrial facilities.
Would I love to still be working in chemicals and energy more directly? Absolutely! Am I willing to do it for a third the salary with 80 hour work weeks having to scramble desperately to network in order to gain enough mindshare to get people to even listen to my proposals? I wish I had that kind of stamina.
Which is to say, ultimately, that I have no interest in academic politics. I want to solve these problems, and no longer have the energy to pursue another startup.
Maybe in another five years when there are more companies finally doing it I can just get a job there. Sadly I can guess that they will instead just get ML researchers and assume teaching them catalyst science will be easier than teaching me ML tools because ML didn't exist when I was in grad school as much of a thing yet so by sheer misfortune of timing I didn't learn it until my 30s.
It's just sad to me that I see no realistic way to get involved even though it's my honest life passion to fix this problem and it's such a stupid struggle to get support. It would have been really nice to feel supported in doing such work inside of academia.
I work in this field at a national lab, but in my experience there are a lot of industry players trying to figure out how to grow in this area
Edit: take a look at what the technical societies are doing. MRS and TMS have been rolling out educational programming targeted towards industry members. I’m not in the catalyst field really, but I’m sure ACS and AICHE have similar programming, and following that thread is probably a good way to figure out who’s interested
I do see more and more educational opportunities and attempts to be forward looking with this. They just always seem super undercooked like setting up an institute to encourage collaborating (but good luck working there at an early stage unless you're already a professor somewhere). Or more often only really open to current PhD students or postdocs if you're not already a professor.
I'll figure it out eventually, I just wish it didn't feel like I have to bootstrap the whole thing to get anything to happen.
I'm just sad that now that it might finally be possible for anyone to lead such an effort I don't have the stamina to do it.
With all that said...the amount of academic freedom even within this flawed system is still greater than most other places I know of. Perhaps if you are a distinguished researcher working on your own terms and funded by one of the big tech companies things are better.
I am also supposed to have finished it months ago, but I really have no idea what I should write there. The current grant from my PI expires in two weeks, and then I have no funding
I'd say we've bureaucratized science to death.