Becoming a scientist

I'm not sure if you can read this without a subscription to Nature Jobs, but if you can read it, please do so.

This is an essay written by a post-doctoral fellow in neuroscience named Thomas Schofield. He was tragically killed in a bus accident in 2010.

This brief essay on becoming a scientist is very insightful and may help others to shed some misconceptions about a career in science.

Post-docs and individual exploitation

There's a wonderful interview in this week's Science Careers of Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist and policy expert at the University of Washington. The interview is about careers in computer science, especially at the PhD level. I encourage you to read it if you are in or considering entering any STEM field. I think it is foretelling of a very important trend in both science and career fields.

One particular response that stood out in the interview addressed a question concerning the numbers of individuals presently earning PhD's in computer science. The end of his reply to this question was

I do think we need to be cautious. We need to avoid the overproduction—and, honestly, exploitation—that characterizes other fields. Hopefully we'll be smart enough to learn from their behavior.

What's interesting is that Lazowska has identified the overproduction of PhD's in some STEM fields with exploitation. I believe he's claiming that other fields use the competition for limited faculty and industrial positions to obtain cheap labor, such as in the form of the post-doctoral position.

In other words, the culture of a particular field may dictate that one must perform multiple post-docs as the way to get a faculty position. However, this is just exploitation in disguise: promise someone a faculty position, but only if they work for you and for lousy pay and benefits.

One important thing to do if you are a PhD student is to realize this attitude early. I'm not saying that you shouldn't try for a faculty position if you really want one, but realize that the motives behind the establishment known as a post-doc position may well be more than just to help you gain experience.

I for one am currently applying to post-doc positions, since they are a good fit for me. Ultimately, it comes down to critically thinking about the best position for yourself and what would make you happiest.

Considering the value of a PhD... now that I almost have one

I've lately been looking into reasons for people getting PhD's, job placements and outlooks, income levels, etc. I'm doing this partly as a response to the question of "what have I done with my life these past five and a half years?" I'm also just curious what other people think on the topic.

Here is a nice discussion of a PhD holder and academic on his blog about getting a PhD in physics. His advice: get a PhD in physics because you want to be a graduate student for five or six years.

Well, this is advice I've never heard before.

To specialize or not to specialize

Well, I am finally back from a long break at home in Ohio. I saw my sister get married, ate lots of cookies, and visited with my entertaining inlaws-to-be. I feel that the break from thinking about science has done me quite a bit of good and given me some new perspectives on things. Now, as I settle into work on completing my dissertation, I still plan on taking time to write here since it is a nice break from the slow, boring work of drilling away in Word on an endless technical document. Besides, I've gained so much from writing this blog that I don't think that I will ever let it go.

I don't have much to say for today, but I do want to put into words something I've thought about previously. Namely, it seems that the degree of specialization varies between research groups and what this means for individuals looking to enter graduate school or change jobs. By degree of specialization, I'm referring to the extent to which a researcher's problems encompass a number of different academic fields. A high degree of specialization will involve problems that do not utilize concepts from other fields and vice-versa.

**The following lists are my opinions only. I realize that some statements may be regarded as contentious. However, these opinions are based on my experiences and to me, at least, carry a degree of truth.**

Characteristics of a highly specialized field are:

1. There are many unsolved problems; these often involve refinements to simpler models
2. One does not need to maintain a wide breadth of knowledge across other fields
3. One's skills may be extremely marketable, but in a field of limited size
4. One may control the direction of his or her field more easily since there are fewer competing researchers and ideas to contend with

Characteristics of a less-specialized field are:

1. You can apply to many different jobs, though you may not usually be the best candidate
2. Solutions to problems make a large impact since the problems apply to many settings
3. It is more difficult to read a majority of research articles that one finds since one is not as well-versed in the details
4. One's research is more likely to be attacked by those more specialized if you neglect some newer and precise models (I often find that this is the case, even if the more precise models do not weigh upon the problem I am solving)

When I'm on this line of thought, I can never escape the line "Specialization is for insects."

CREOL Seminar - Becoming a Faculty Member

Today Dr. Mercedeh Khajavikhan gave a brief seminar to the CREOL students about her experiences with finding a job in academia. Though I'd already heard a lot of the information she presented, some points stuck out.

The following are a few notes I made during the talk. Keep in mind that they are her ideas that I've paraphrased (so if I misinterpreted them, then I'm sorry :)

• Considering that a post-doc position is a time to build your CV and publish, a post-doc offering research problems that can easily turn into publications within a year or two would be highly desirable.
• Apply to schools where there is not much overlap between your research and that of the existing faculty. This will minimize competition for valuable resources and money within your own department.
• Related to the point above, consider emphasizing how your strengths can help other faculty while applying. This will make you appear more valuable to the committee considering you for a job.
• Letters of reference are invaluable in the job search. (I need to work on building relationships with more faculty members!)

Online career path guidance for science PhD's

I saw a link to myIDP this morning from the Condensed Concepts blog. myIDP (IDP is short for individual development plan) is a free service for assisting individuals who have science PhD's with finding careers that fit their skills and interests. The service presents and discusses a list of possible career routes, including many that lie outside of academia.

I am quickly approaching graduation, so I took a look at the site and filled out a few of the questionnaires. The three primary questionnaires for evaluating my career options considered my interests, skills sets, and values. I was pleased to see that many skills that I consider myself to be strong in (writing, communicating, and presenting, for example) were included in the survey. I was also pleased that "traditional" graduate student and scientific skills (performing experiments, processing data, etc.) filled only a small fraction of the possible skill sets that might be considered important.

myIDP goes further than simply displaying a percentage for how well a career field correlates with my responses to the questionnaires. It listed several questions that were based on my responses that I am to ask myself concerning these fields and my values. The questions relate to my highest rated values and serve as a guide while establishing my goals. For example, I responded that a good work location was very important to me. The questions I need to consider are whether there are geographic clusters for a specific field and whether these  areas would fulfill my lifestyle requirements.

The inclusion of many different career possibilities in myIDP has been very reassuring. I became concerned about two years ago that my original choice of career path, a faculty research and teaching position, did not correlate well with my values. I also realized that my institution and advisor are poorly equipped to place students into non-traditional science jobs. All of this led to some anxiety on my part because I was beginning to suspect that I had taken a wrong career path. Fortunately, I've learned that there are many options for me and that I shouldn't necessarily compromise on my interests and values just to maintain a sort of status quo for scientific careers.

Thoughts on Trends in PhD's in Physics

There's an interesting article on The Back Page of APS News (Vol. 21, No. 4) written by Dr. Geoff Potvin from Clemson University. The article discusses the current plight of physics PhD's—trends in graduation rate, factors for success, and inherent biases against women and minorities. I'm not offering a full analysis here, just jotting down the first things that came to my head as I read the article.

Dr. Potvin states that the growth in the number of PhD's in physics is stagnant and that this is a problem for the US as it tries to remain scientifically competitive in an increasingly global community. However, other STEM fields have grown at much faster rates. Claiming that the stagnant growth in PhD's awarded in physics is bad for US technological competitiveness seems to be a weak argument for enhancing physics graduate education. After all, the number of independent STEM fields has grown enormously (for example I am working on my degree in optics), so any argument along these lines should look at the total trend in all STEM fields.

Dr. Potvin's research has shown that students' motivations for attending graduate school often determine their level of success as measured by publication rates and funding. All too often, graduate advisors assume that their students inherently possess the interest and motivation to perform research. However, the interests and goals of the advisor and student often differ. Dr. Potvin suggests that proper attention paid to graduate students' motivations would enhance their productivity.

There is an inverse relationship between doctoral completion time and future salary for men; higher pay goes to those who took less time to complete their PhD. Unfortunately, completion time is almost entirely uncorrelated with factors that students can control, and is instead determined by things such as the riskiness of research topics or becoming involved in multi-group projects. The pay for women PhD's is uncorrelated to almost all factors in their graduate education and is lower than their male counterparts, on average.

Faculty mentors tend to replicate their graduate school experiences. In my opinion, this keeps them out of touch with their students since they do not adapt to changing attitudes towards work, social life, and career choices for their students. As managers of new work-force members, it would behoove the greater community to adapt their advising style towards these new attitudes.

CV's and résumés—when am I an expert?

I'm never quite certain when it's appropriate to add a particular skill or specialty to my CV or Linkedin profile. For example, I've been working on stochastic differential equations lately and can now simulate them for a few special cases. Does this mean that I can honestly state that I have experience with stochastic differential equations on my CV?

Logically speaking, I do have some experience, so the answer to the above question is "yes." However, I still have some reservations since I'm only familiar with such a small portion of the subject that I feel it would be dishonest to claim them as a job skill. The issue, then, is whether I possess a degree of competency with the subject that allows me to ethically place it as a specialty area on my CV.

I can think of a few ways to justify doing so. The first—and I know that this is a fallacious argument—is that many people add skill sets to their résumés or CV's that they are not entirely proficient in. If I am to compete against others for a job, then I should play by the same rules. Though this argument is logically flawed and morally questionable, it is simply one rule of the game.

Second, and much more sound, is that some areas of expertise, like stochastic differential equations, contain so much material that few people can claim that they are intimate with all of this knowledge. I could argue that my brief exposure to them has provided me with the resources to respond appropriately to a problem, i.e. I am now able to research its solution in a collection of references that I've already compiled. Without the prior experience, I would not have these resources and so I'm justified in claiming this subject as a skill. To put it another way, it's not so much the content of the subject matter but rather the ability to find appropriate solutions within its toolbox that counts. Of course, this detracts from individuals who really are experts in the subject matter, so this argument is morally questionable as well.

One final solution is simply to sort my skills in degrees of competency, such as expert, proficient, and familiar. This lessens any moral ambiguities because I may still add skills that I have limited experience with. On my CV, I have taken this approach and feel quite satisfied with it.

I'm not the only one with these suspicions...

“I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.” - Dr. Jonathan Katz

This quote, by way of this article, is a bit distressing. Still, the article reaffirms several thoughts I've had recently about the prospects of obtaining a job in academia. Academia is simply too saturated with workers. This article is a great summary of some recent data and opinion pieces and I think should be read by anyone who is planning to obtain their PhD in a scientific field in the near future.

http://promega.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/the-ph-d-glut-do-we-have-too-many-ph-d-s/

What a timely survey

Nature Jobs posted an article last week that summarizes the results of a survey conducted on graduate students in the sciences about their satisfaction with graduate school. Here are some of the more interesting points:

1. 78.8% of first year PhD students responded that they were "very" or "quite" likely to continue on to a university research position after graduate school.  In comparison 62% of fifth years answered the same.
2. Competition is the biggest factor in steering students away from academic careers.
3. 44.6% of students thought about post-school career options before entering graduate school.
4. 71.6% of European-based students reported that they were somewhat or very satisfied with their overall graduate school experience, compared to just 57.1% in the US and 62.3% in Japan.

This last point is interesting because I recently had a discussion about it with my advisor (who is Romanian). He claims that the reason for the significant difference between US and European students concerning the level of satisfaction with  their graduate studies is the perception of education in the two cultures. Education is held in high esteem in many European countries and professors carry a highly-valued social status.

In contrast, scientific jobs often carry a certain stigma with them in the US. Amusingly, I had a travel buddy--an engineer for an aerospace company--once explain to me what lengths he went to to hide the fact that he studied engineering when hitting on girls in college.

I'm not certain that being an intellectual is a turn-off, however. Consider the tech industry (Google, etc.) and the fairly well-received social status that its employees enjoy despite their aptitude for computers and technology. The real substance here is that they also enjoy good incomes and a stable job. So, the point is that intelligence is not socially undesirable; rather, it's that a good career and income is more highly valued.

The survey's findings seem to corroborate my recent conclusions about life as a graduate student. I must admit that I'm a little jealous of my engineer friends who went to work immediately after school. They're making much more money, have more free time, and are generally moving forward with their lives at a comfortable pace. And since we came from the same educational background, it's sometimes demoralizing to consider where I'm at with my life and find that I'm lagging them in these respects due to my role as a graduate student.

But I'll be damned if a job in industry can elicit the same oh-so-sweet feeling when an experiment works, the results fit neatly within the model, and one little mystery of nature finds itself tamed by my own cognitive exertions that is rewarded by a career in science.

What I wish I had known about academia (before I entered graduate school)

I'm entering my fifth year of graduate school this upcoming semester and, accordingly, have been increasingly thinking about my life afterward. Moments of reflection and talks with other students have revealed that there are a good number of things that I was unaware of concerning a career in academia when I began my graduate studies. Most of these things have taken me a long time to learn because the points were subtle or I was too naive to honestly assess the matter. Though these thoughts may not be true by the actual numbers (e. g. I haven't looked at the availability of teaching positions or the average income of post-docs), they certainly have found other voices, such as a few of the authors in this April Nature issue. And since the thought of a large number of people holds a good deal of influence regardless of its validity, I will take these thoughts to be true and offer them as advice to those who are considering a career in academia.

Career Point Number One: A career in academia—specifically in science—requires more hard work and dedication than most careers. This is due to a number of reasons, including a saturation of workers in the field, competition over resources, and a career trajectory that is difficult to advance through. Too many people within academia could be considered the cause of the competition over resources, but it's significant in its own right since it dilutes the quality of work being done. And as for a difficult career trajectory: a colleague told me the scariest thing one could do of all career moves is enter upon an assistant professorship with a family and mortgage with no guarantee of tenure.


CPN Two: Teaching positions are sparse (this was a surprise to me!). Many tenured professors or industry veterans enjoy retiring into academic teaching positions. There will not be much leverage for new graduates in obtaining a desired teaching position against those more experienced in the field.

CPN Three: No matter how amiable your advisor, it is not in their personal interest to graduate students. Losing experienced and knowledgeable students hurts their ability to publish, obtain funding, and generally proceed through their own academic career paths.

CPN Four: A post-doc may not be the best option for advancing a scientific/academic career. Many advisors interpret the post-doc role as one similar to a graduate student's but unencumbered by educational burdens such as attending class. A move to industry following graduation, however, may provide better networking opportunities and more chances to evolve one's professional skill set. One can always return to academia.

CP Five: One need not work in academia to retain one's interest in science. This was in no way obvious to me from the start. After having identified my interest in physics, I proceeded through my education with the idea that physics would be my career. But herein lies the most important distinction of all: science is not a career.

Science is the pursuit of truth and the delight in discovering new things through experimentation. It need not be grand in scale or require a large amount of resources. It is an unfortunate development that a career in academia and science have assumed the same position in most people's minds.

I admit that this assessment may appear a bit bleak at first, but for me it is rather liberating. I'm OK finding a career that is not centered squarely within academia because the requirements of such a job are too demanding given my other interests. This in no way means that my life or work can not contribute significantly to science. But to conclude that academia alone is the only way to significantly impact science is to commit a fallacy that could launch one onto a difficult and unsatisfying career path.