"Don't Become a Scientist!"

This is an article I came across elsewhere in the forum. It's about early academic career, one of unsecure, unstable, and underpaid. Worse, reresearch budget cuts are coming. Even worse, there are traditionally fewer vacancies in social sciences than science.

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Don't Become a Scientist!
Jonathan I. Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.


Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover themysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learnhow the world works? Forget it!


Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you aresmart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as anundergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation,you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should noteven consider going to graduate school in science. Do something elseinstead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or somethingelse which appeals to you.


Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you fromfollowing a career path which was successful for me? Because times havechanged (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American scienceno longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school inscience it is in the expectation of spending your working life doingscientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve importantand interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed,probably when it is too late to choose another career.

American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobsfor them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the pricedrops. In the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes theform of many years spent in ``holding pattern'' postdoctoral jobs.Permanent jobs don't pay much less than they used to, but instead of obtaininga real job two years after the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) mostyoung scientists spend five, ten, or more years as postdocs. They have noprospect of permanent employment and often must obtain a new postdoctoralposition and move every two years. For many more details consult the YoungScientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of theWashington Monthly.

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent AssistantProfessorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduateschool (he didn't get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinksis brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was heoffered his first permanent job (that's not tenure, just the possibility ofit six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new jobevery two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for anotherAssistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctortypically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at31, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27(computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrialdemand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence,ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeedin any of these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biologicalsciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate studentstipends are less than half these figures). Can you support a family onthat income? It suffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little prospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a house in a good school district andall the other necessities of ordinary middle class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.

Of course, you don't go into science to get rich. So you choose not to goto medical or law school, even though a doctor or lawyer typically earns twoto three times as much as a scientist (one lucky enough to have a goodsenior-level job). I made that choice too. I became a scientist in orderto have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probablywon't get that freedom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else's ideas,and may be treated as a technician rather than as an independentcollaborator. Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of scienceentirely. You can get a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not dothis at 22, rather than putting up with a decade of misery in the scientificjob market first? The longer you spend in science the harder you will find it to leave, and the less attractive you will be to prospective employers inother fields.
Perhaps you are so talented that you can beat the postdoc trap; someuniversity (there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences)will be so impressed with you that you will be hired into a tenure track position two years out of graduate school. Maybe. But the general cheapening of scientific labor means that even the most talented stay on the postdoctoral treadmill for a very long time; consider the job candidates described above. And many who appear to be very talented, with grades and recommendations to match, later find that the competition of research is more difficult, or at least different, and that they must struggle with the rest.

Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professorship. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because yourproposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity,but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflectingcriticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems.They're not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in aproposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, howeveroriginal and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that originalideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet beenproved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they canbe, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you findthat it is not what you wanted after all.

What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyonewho does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue anothercareer. This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations.Young Americans have generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence ofa reasonable middle class career path in science and are deserting it.If you haven't yet, then join them. Leave graduate school to people fromIndia and China, for whom the prospects at home are even worse. I haveknown more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physicsthan by drugs.

If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try topersuade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s. The glut of scientistsis entirely the consequence of funding policies (almost all graduateeducation is paid for by federal grants). The funding agencies arebemoaning the scarcity of young people interested in science when theythemselves caused this scarcity by destroying science as a career. Theycould reverse this situation by matching the number trained to the demand,but they refuse to do so, or even to discuss the problem seriously (for manyyears the NSF propagated a dishonest prediction of a coming shortage ofscientists, and most funding agencies still act as if this were true). Theresult is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensiblyrefuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak Americanstudents and with foreigners lured by the American student visa.


Source is here:

http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html