To get kids into science, just do it
wsj.com
wsj.com
My dad had a 40-year career teaching science to 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. Think model rockets, aquariums, microscopes, chemistry sets, rock collections, and all the wide-eyed kids being exposed to that (myself included).
We'd play a card game called Space Race, and I had a really cool model of the spaceship from Space: 1999. It was all quite wonderful. My dad would bring home copies of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics from the school library at lunch (yes, we walked/rode our bikes to and from school and went home for lunch back then).
The chemistry sets were insanely cool and dangerous at the same time, and my dad would bring home vials of poorly-labeled powders for me to experiment with. I made gunpowder. I blew fuses in the basement by shorting a cobalt chloride-soaked cork in an electrical outlet (I don't know why I did that). Phenolphthalein came with my kit, as did an alcohol burner. At least half the stuff was carcinogenic. Needless to say, gloves and safety glasses were not in use in the basement :)
I was exposed to that at home, and I wanted nothing more than to be a chemistry professor from a very young age when I learned about the degrees and higher education.
So I earned an M.A. in geology and a Ph.D. in chemistry and was briefly a professor. The research years in academia leading up to that point were certainly the highlight of my working years. I published. I worked for and with brilliant people. I played with high explosives (Master's work) like HMX, RDX, and TNT. I had access to great facilities and instrumentation. I worked on a Cray Y-MP and every system that came along.
Anyway, just a walk down memory lane and a nod to the title of the post/article. I certainly had a predilection for science, but being thrown into it certainly pushed me in that direction.
Thanks dad (and mom, who tolerated this)!
For the past 18 years - since I left academia - I've been bouncing around as a "data scientist," working in many fields but not what I really want to do and/or am actually good at doing.
It's a weird time now with software eating everything and many science jobs asking for PhD in <our science branch> or Computer Science (!) as requirements. So I'd assume there's some angle in which your experience provides an advantage.
As for the adjacent niche bit, right again as you are about experience. My time as a so-called "data scientist" was never really the best fit, and I could never compete with the folks who do Kaggle competitions and have a real passion for AI/ML (which, to me, is one of the defining points of "data science" today).
However, I've logged a lot of time over the past 30+ years in front of the terminal, so fingers crossed!
The areas of study are going to be computational chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, cheminformatics, or something closely related to those. Whether you work in a lab or in front of a computer depends on what you study and whose lab you study it in. You can't go wrong with a Ph.D. from UCSF, I can tell you that (I was a postdoc there), so browse the faculty pages.
Have a look at some of the open positions at, say, Roche/Genentech. There are some great open source resources and some industry-dominant ones with which you'll be expected to have some experience in (Schrodinger's software is one of them). Domain knowledge, of course. QSAR/ADME and similar acronyms. Docking, free energy perturbation, bioinformatics. Python/R/SQL.
AI/ML is of course hot in pharma but not necessarily useful for all situations - I happen to not be much of an AI/ML guy and won't be penalized for that, which I cannot say about almost every job I've had or applied for.
What got my foot in the door with drug design was postdoctoral work on molecular dynamics simulations of large systems that are physiologically relevant - motor proteins - and I was teamed-up with experimentalists who were studying the same systems.
More than happy to share more, my contact info is in my profile.
Wish you success in your efforts to get back into the industry.
My friend in college had a mannerism that when he was about to give up on understanding something he was saying "it's for smart people to figure out". It always elicited visceral reaction from me "No, eff that. We are the smart people. We can figure this out."
I guess our upbringing was somewhat different.
- I wouldn't know, X person is way smarter than me
- (Try to discuss how something might work...) This was made by really smart people, I'll leave it to them!
- (learns you're doing an Engineering degree) Wow, you must be really smart!
- The "for science!!" trope"X person is by all measures more educated than me on this topic, but I did own research! (on Youtube and Facebook)"
I know professionals living in other countries who believe every silly conspiracy theory they see on youtube too. That part is a universal problem.
I chalk that up to immaturity. Or maybe the way labs were run back then; not sure.
In my first day at school and at school library I have asked some books about physics or chemistry. My ask was refused and all books I was allowed to take were fiction books for children.
Everything I remember growing up in the 90s was pretty dumbed down at best, and if you wanted to order any of the interesting chemicals or equipment, you needed a company or school letterhead with a PO account. Things got better in the 00s when eBay was still pretty open in terms of what you could find, but that seems to have been clamped down on more recently. Fear of litigation most likely.
I had sympathetic parents with chemistry degrees, and we were able to find ways to get the cool stuff when I was a teenager, but for the vast majority, it’s no surprise that kids lose interest in STEM fields as they reach their teens.
How wild is that?! Can’t imagine it happening today
In other words, you were able to access the cool stuff because someone in your life knew how to handle it. That is probably the way it should be. Now consider all of the families where the parents do not have chemistry degrees, do not work in industries where they regularly handle hazardous materials, or even have to take general workplace safety seriously. You pretty much have to hope the teenager instilled a sense of respect for safety in themselves.
Snark aside, where is the middle ground? Fizzing and food coloring is interesting to a 5 year old, but that’s about all you can get as a consumer these days. There’s likely a vast gulf of squandered opportunity between that and what can genuinely be done safely and still be inspiring.
A ten year old raised to understand danger can be capable of using bleach safely, operating a lawnmower, or carrying out fun exothermic reactions in the backyard.
well, yes.
I think it was much safer when kids in general were more well qualified across-the-board.
I was born in the early 80s and my older brother was born in the mid 70s, and I distinctly remember preferring to play with his old hand-me-down chemistry set rather than mine. One like his could not be found in stores anywhere by the time I was old enough to be interested in a chemistry set.
But I also never gave myself any horrible chemical burns playing with my own chemistry set. So it's probably a decent trade-off, all told.
To do chemistry with kids all one needs is a grocery store, an herb shoppe, and the right explanations for what’s going on.
But instead there’s bunch of waxing poetic about how the world has changed. It’s rather pathetic to think science should come neatly labeled in a box. The lack of individual creativity and imagination in our culture is stunning.
When you talk to people that had scientific experiences as a child, a significant component of the learning comes from tinkering with already built devices, seeing an experiment and thinking "what else would work in this," etc.
Science isn't neatly labeled in a box. However, a decent chunk of it is using previously done research to guide new questions, a process that is emulated on a smaller level by chemistry sets.
“Previously done research” like “these things taste good together” and “add this to cleaner to get a nice smell.” Sounds like riffing on the world right around them. You’re not going to get functionally fixed on when and where to use generic language like “previously done research” are you?
The rigor can come in when the work demands it. Kid’s chemistry sets are not saving lives or unlocking new truths. The industrial pipeline to produce them hardly seems worth it.
You do you. Personally, I prefer the path of least resistance for myself; buying less, dealing with less mess, and using the immediate environment to explore the same language and ideas. Of course it means having an imagination. Something adults often lack, seeing the path of least resistance as living in their memory, behaving literally in lock step with it.
Does it exist?
I think I heard a podcast interview with them that sounded like they were doing interesting work. Not sure if it's really aimed at kids.
STEM is pushed hard, but realistically, science and math dont have that great career prospects. For one thing, a PhD, and the 4-7 year opportunity cost that comes with it, is pretty much required to get anything more than a lab tech job.
After that PhD, where do you go? You can try for an insanely competitive tenure track faculty position. Or a very limited number of industry researcher jobs.
The E in STEM (traditional engineering) isn't exactly tech in terms of salaries and job availability, but it mostly guarantees paying the bills with a decent WLB after "just" a bachelor's.
The starting salary for a research scientist is $170 - $205K.
https://www.rentec.com/Careers.action?researchScientist=true
170k-200k is not that different from ordinary banks, I can't imagine it's all RT would pay.
Edit: had to look up the annual returns and they seem to be a bit different depending on where you look, so take those numbers with a grain of salt. In any case they're consistently the most profitable hedge fund out there.
Looking at my own motivations, one of the big draws of the position was that everyone I talked to at the firm was competent and pleasant, while in domains solving real problems (again for example healthcare and climate) 70% of people I've interacted with are stupid, petty, or both. But stepping back, isn't that state of affairs existentially horrifying? If that status quo persists, will we even survive as a species?
And I'm pretty surprised everyone you met was pleasant -- that was certainly not my experience at a hedge fund.
I do agree that there is little economic value in most Ph.D. programs.
> finance
You're not selling it.
I mean, we do have the RCMP and Bay Street, but I don't think it's comparable (in number of positions, salaries offered, etc) to NSA and Wall Street.
In addition, outside of the RCMP, various ministries of the Canadian government could need the skillset too (Statistics Canada being the one that first comes to mind, though any teams that do economic analyses could benefit from someone with the background).
And before you go about just curing symptoms, remember that many real cures would require gene modification and people aren’t all that interested in being a gmo. Ask RA sufferers about drugs like Humera re curing symptoms.
The "strategy" is to get your kid interested in science enough so that they make a strong resume to a good college and have a strong foundation, then sway them to learn CS and get a SWE job.
I'll encourage my kids towards science as much as needed and let their develop their thinking while they're at it, and congratulate them for the enlightenment when they come tell me that working as a scientist sucks. It's still really good for them to pursue that career early, if it's what they enjoy.
That said, I do think the salary mentioned is accurate as a starting salary in academia for a research faculty position (tenure track starting salary in USA is ~50% higher though), but academia pays much worse than industry. You give up salary for huge amounts of autonomy.
We should make sure that folks understand a modern career in science may look, from a salary and QoL perspective, quite like a doctor or other professional. High-stress, relatively low-pay, challenging from your late teens to late twenties, then a rapid increase in earning power and opportunity into your early thirties.
A lot of the focus on tenure track jobs comes from professors and academics who dedicate their life almost solely in academic environments (so in their view, it’s a rather unhealthy attitude of academic tenure or bust). I’m not sure how feasible this is, but perhaps a work-study private sector summer internship could be an encouraged part of certain PhD, to widen perspectives and help both students and professors better understand the possibilities out there, which someone can be motivated to strive for, rather than settle for.
Myself and colleagues are definitely trying to encourage our alma mater to have more support for externships other opportunities in industry. I think things will continue to change - for the better, for early career scientists - over the next 5-10 years. If only because there is a workforce crisis in my field where skills like AI and software engineering are in extremely high demand, but even 3-4 years ago we actively discouraged PhD students from pursuing this type of work!
I heard otherwise from a staff scientist at a university in biological sciences, though I’m not sure how representative his view is. He said that non-professors lack research autonomy, and even then, there are limitations of what one can fund due to grants (though I’m not sure how accurate this is, as I used to assume that academic grants generally had fairly flexible conditions for using the funding).
The "autonomy" is a facade in many instances. Professors have to do what can be funded. For a lot of professors that means doing what's trendy or what panders to moneyed interests rather than what they'd actually like to do and what would be more valuable.
Read chapter 4, titled "Assignable Curiosity", in the book Disciplined Minds for more detail.
https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/
(Note: There's a lot I disagree with in this book, but I think this particular chapter is accurate.)
However, what I was thinking about when I wrote that was that I control my schedule, calendar, research objectives, and have a yearly check in on my performance. In contrast, my experience in industry was VERY different across the board.
My experience is that the quoted situation is the exception in US academia. Despite paying a pittance, graduate students are expensive enough to make professors dependent on the approval of funders. And that's where the loss of autonomy comes from.
It seems to me that certain parts of academia that are more funded by teaching like pure math may be more immune to this, but STEM broadly seems accurately described by the chapter I recommended.
> However, what I was thinking about when I wrote that was that I control my schedule, calendar, research objectives, and have a yearly check in on my performance. In contrast, my experience in industry was VERY different across the board.
I agree with what you said, aside from that I don't think you have full autonomy over your research objectives. If you think you control your own research objectives, I recommend reading the chapter I mentioned. As far as I can tell, your interests are well aligned with what's supported. I looked you up, and was not surprised to see that you work in deep learning, one of the most supported and hyped fields around today. People (like myself) whose interests aren't aligned with what's supported often find academia to be quite hostile. The relative research autonomy you feel is real, but if you decide to move outside of deep learning, you may no longer find the same sense of research autonomy.
There are people earning $200k, $500k, and $1M+ in many fields.
The probability of getting there (and quality of life while getting there and after you get there), are the important bits of information.
For example, if you have to grind out my whole 20s (some of the best years for the human body) doing dissertations and working 80+ hour weeks for near minimum wage (per hour worked), only for a 10% chance to make it to $200k per year or more, maybe it is not worth it.
Especially if other options exist that provide much higher probabilities of attaining an income you want with similar levels of dedication.
At least for everyone I know, they all ended up with comfortable salaries after finishing their PhDs. Most people spend our best years spending the majority of our time working, and at least for me, scientific research makes it not feel like work. Not everything is about money and a professor can live well in many places on a $90K salary, speaking from past experience.
The biggest cost is probably the impact it has on trying to have a family since one doesn't typically have much salary or time until around age 35 with the typical trajectory.
Also 90k ain’t what it used to be. It’s probably equivalent to 60k 3-4 years ago.
https://www.medscape.com/slideshow/2022-compensation-overvie...
This has got to be some sort of satire.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...
Little money, long hours, effectively up or out pyramid where most people gonl out, expectation that you will move in few years and partner will follow.
I learned programming as a kid in 1981 and fell in love with it. I knew about the demand for programmers, as my mom was teaching programming at a nearby tech school.
My college internship was at a large computing facility, which employed a number of programmers. I formed the impression that programming as a job was incredibly repetitive, stressful, and boring. I majored in math and physics, and ended up with a PhD in physics.
I do plenty of programming today, but on my own terms. I work at a place that has a large programming department, and my opinion of programming as a job has not changed. On the other hand, if someone loves that kind of work, or can at least grind their way through it, they're welcome to the money.
It may have taken me a bit longer to reach a decent salary level. Today, I'm the highest ranking "technical track" worker in one division of a F500. Had I gone into programming, I might have reached a plateau, or burnt out.
The physical world is not going anywhere.
To pick an arbitrary example, word processing removed all sorts of even less "valuable" work from the world: mailing thing around, extra printing, photocopying, physical filing, transcription services, and all sorts of related rote secretarial duties. Those jobs are gone and people do other things now... maybe they work in healthcare.
If you really felt strongly about being a a chemical engineer or pharmacologist and benefitting society through that, the schoolwork being uninteresting doesn't sound like a big hurdle to overcome.
We can't expect "the system" to solve everything.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
So yeah, we Did Some Science. So can you. You can stop reading all these "experts recommend" stories about, e.g. not keeping your beans longer than two weeks, and just carry out a proper experiment on whether you can tell the difference. Who cares if the general population can tell if you can't?
"Doing science" means applying some basic techniques that anyone can learn. Especially the kids.
It was just about the perfect experiment for 11 year olds, probably. We could understand what we were trying to find out and it seemed something that might actually be worth knowing! At the end of the class, would our measurements correspond with the figures in the book? If not, why might they not? And the Bunsen burner gets to come out, too! Very exciting. I think it might have been the first time I realized, oh, I could actually determine this myself, if I had to, using a scientific approach.
Not always of course but this kind of thing can definitely be valuable.
There's nothing wrong with "infotainment". Some of the things which I experienced in elementary school which stuck with me the longest were when our gym teacher would play educational videos about human anatomy. A lot of these videos featured "Osmosis Jones"-style flythroughs of different organs. "Here's the stomach, it's filled with acid, etc." Netflix has The Magic Schoolbus right now. My wife and I were amusing ourselves by watching it for a few minutes last night, and I realized that the first episode (they visit each planet in the solar system on their bus, which had transformed into a space ship) had stuck with me almost verbatim, even though I haven't seen it in over 20 years. There are basic concepts that are quickly and easily imparted in this form (the sun is huge, the planets are very far apart, etc.) because of the visual format. Nothing wrong with this.
All this "infotainment" really helped develop my imagination and powers of visualization, both of which have paid dividends for me in the long run.
How "useful" a class is has as much to do with the instructor and the resources available to them as it does the particular pedagogical style. Should also be kept in mind that not everyone is going to become a scientist or use math on the job. The solution here isn't to eliminate "useless" subjects from school, but to focus on how to give people a broad education so that they can become informed and critical thinkers.