Don't Become a Scientist (zz)

Don't Become a Scientist!

Jonathan I. Katz

Professor of Physics

Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.

[my last name]@wuphys.wustl.edu

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

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are
smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an
undergraduate. 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 not even
consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead:
medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which
appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from
following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have
changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no
longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in
science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing
scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and
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 jobs for
them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the price drops. In
the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes the form of many
years spent in ``holding pattern'' postdoctoral jobs. Permanent jobs don't pay
much less than they used to, but instead of obtaining a real job two years
after the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) most young scientists spend
five, ten, or more years as postdocs. They have no prospect of permanent
employment and often must obtain a new postdoctoral position and move every
two years. For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read
the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent Assistant
Professorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduate school
(he didn't get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinks is
brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was he
offered his first permanent job (that's not tenure, just the possibility of it
six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new job every
two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for another
Assistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctor
typically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at
31, 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 industrial demand makes it
sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence, ambition and
willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeed in any of
these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological
sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends
are less than half these figures). Can you support a family on that 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 and all 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 go to
medical or law school, even though a doctor or lawyer typically earns two to
three times as much as a scientist (one lucky enough to have a good
senior-level job). I made that choice too. I became a scientist in order to
have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probably won'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 independent collaborator.
Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of science entirely. You can get
a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not do this at 22, rather than
putting up with a decade of misery in the scientific job 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 in other fields.

Perhaps you are so talented that you can beat the postdoc trap; some
university (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 your proposals
are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must
spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather
than on solving the important scientific problems. They're not the same thing:
you cannot put your past successes in a proposal, because they are finished
work, and your new ideas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It
is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal;
because they have not yet been proved to work (after all, that is what you are
proposing to do) they can be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the
promised land, you find that it is not what you wanted after all.

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

If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try to
persuade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s. The glut of scientists is
entirely the consequence of funding policies (almost all graduate education is
paid for by federal grants). The funding agencies are bemoaning the scarcity
of young people interested in science when they themselves caused this
scarcity by destroying science as a career. They could 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 many years the NSF propagated a
dishonest prediction of a coming shortage of scientists, and most funding
agencies still act as if this were true). The result is that the best young
people, who should go into science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate
schools are filled with weak American students and with foreigners lured by
the American student visa.

Doc'd
Why a Ph.D. is a fast ticket to the unemployment line

By Paul Demoulin

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Ever since I can remember, I've been interested in math and science. In my
youth, my mother would wake me up to see astronomer Carl Sagan on "The Tonight
Show." In high school, my favorite subjects were calculus, physics, and
chemistry. I eventually earned a B.S. in physics and went on to get a
doctorate in electrical engineering from Purdue University. I finished up my
degree in 1988. Today, at age 41, I have not yet landed my first full-time
job.
I know what you're thinking: I'm a big loser. How else could an
American-trained scientist be so unemployable after a decade of continuous
economic growth? The thing is, if I'm a loser, I've got a lot of company.

For years, we've been hearing dire reports in the media about how American
universities aren't producing enough Ph.D.s in hard sciences and
engineering--so few, in fact, that we've had to import them from abroad. But
the truth is that universities, in their desire to exploit cheap labor (i.e.,
graduate students) have created a surplus of doctorates, particularly in my
field of engineering, leaving anywhere from a quarter to half of all
engineering doctorate recipients to follow a career path much like mine.

Bait And Hook

When I first considered working on a doctorate at Purdue University, I was
hesitant. If I had taken a job in private industry, I would have earned a
respectable salary; staying in school would make me a grad assistant, doing
research at a wage of $550 per month. (Unlike scholarship athletes, most grad
assistants must pay their own room and board.) Helping sway my decision,
though, were university administrators encouraging students to earn
doctorates.

The administrators' entreaties were reinforced by stories in the press
promoting the idea that a doctorate was a ticket to job security. For
instance, in 1983, the California State University system issued a report
predicting that 83 percent of its faculty would retire by the year 2003, and
that it would need to hire 11,000 new faculty members over the next 20 years.
University administrators predicted an increase in job opportunities for all
doctorates around the same time I would be finishing school.

So, with some reservation, in 1984, I entered one of the country's top-ranked
engineering doctorate programs. I wrote a thesis on "The Physics and Modeling
of Gallium Arsenide Solar Cells." The topic was interesting, but I discovered
that much of the research work towards my degree consisted of debugging
computer code, a very menial and noneducational task. My work was later used
by Eastman Kodak in laser technology for commercial applications. My only
compensation was the "training" I received from the university. Indeed, my job
as a doctoral candidate seemed designated as "education" simply to justify its
temporary status and lighter-than-air paycheck.

Entering my final year of school in 1987, I turned my attention to job
hunting, using the university's placement center, pursuing job ads, and
employing headhunters. Newspaper reports at the time suggested job hunting
should have been a cinch. In 1986, a New York Times headline had screamed
"Colleges scrambling to avert a possible faculty shortage," and the article
ominously warned that by the turn of the century at least 100,000 of the
nation's 450,000 full-time professors would be retiring. Columbia University
announced that it was starting aggressive recruiting for faculty, and it even
set aside special funds to provide young scientists with start-up research
support. College administrators expressed concern that they wouldn't be able
to compete with the higher salaries of the private sector.

My experience in the job market, however, proved vastly different. To my
dismay, company recruiters showed little interest in hiring doctorates.
Faculty openings, too, proved to be nearly nonexistent. After 10 years, I left
school frustrated and jobless. I was not alone. All the hype in the mid-'80s
about the dwindling number of American scientists had been effective in
swelling the ranks of the doctorates with people like me--as well as vast
numbers of foreign students taking advantage of American educational
opportunities. By 1987, an astonishing 80 percent of engineering doctorates
were foreign nationals on temporary visas.



Ironically, many of the "studies" claiming that the United States would be
facing a massive shortage of trained scientists assumed that foreign students
would return home when they finished their degrees. Of course, they didn't; at
least half of all foreign doctoral students remain in this country after

graduation. That fact, though, didn't seem to make much of an impression on
the media. Despite droves of students pouring into American doctoral programs,
university administrators were still making headlines warning of the coming
shortage of Ph.D.s, especially in the hard sciences and engineering.

In February 1989, Richard Atkinson, the chancellor of the University of
California at San Diego (UCSD), warned that the United States needed to invest
at least $300 million a year in additional scholarships for doctoral
candidates to avoid critical shortages of high-level scientists in the coming
years. He estimated that by the turn of the century, only 10,500 new
doctorates in natural science and engineering would be available to fill an
estimated 18,000 jobs. The National Science Foundation was predicting an
astounding shortfall of 80,000 doctorates by 2006.

In 1990, the Association of American Universities released a study called "The
Ph.D. Shortage: The Federal Role," which claimed faculty shortages in
engineering and other sciences would soon hamper the American economy and


required federal intervention. The feds were already starting to oblige. The
week before the report appeared, Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos made a
national appeal to increase the number of college grads pursuing doctorates in
hard sciences and engineering by 25 percent.

Post-Doc Blues

Even as all the world seemed to be warning of the coming shortage of
doctorates, I was becoming exasperated by the lack of job prospects for a
doctorate holder. I was trained as a research scientist and wished to pursue
work in the lab, but with reluctance, I began teaching part-time at Richland
Community College, hoping to eventually seize a full-time position when one
became available. After several years, I quit, disillusioned. Full-time
teaching positions were scarce, and no college would even grant me an
interview.

After fruitless attempts at finding a job in my field and an unsuccessful
attempt at screenwriting, I developed an eye condition which prevents me from
working at a computer terminal, making me even more unemployable. Today, I'm
bitter, depressed, and unemployed, the product of a university system that
espouses academics but has research business at its core.
Again, though, (except for the eye condition) my experience is not unique,
particularly among doctorate holders seeking full-time academic jobs. While
many of the earlier predictions about massive retirements of tenured
professors have indeed started to come true, university administrators have
seen the retirements as an opportunity, not a crisis. In a world where labor
costs account for 70 percent of their budgets, universities have simply
replaced tenured faculty with "adjunct" professors and other cheaper
alternatives, including graduate students. Between 1975 and 1995, the number
of full-time faculty positions in American universities declined, while the
use of part-time faculty more than doubled, according to the American
Association of University Professors.

The competition for those few jobs was fierce, too. Between 1991 and 1995, the
number of scientists and engineers in post-doctorate jobs--a kind of holding
pen for future scientists and professors--almost doubled, to 16,000. Combined
with the number of folks with full-time academic appointments but no faculty
rank--teaching associates and those in administrative jobs--there are nearly
40,000 people with doctorates in science and engineering scraping by in poorly
paid, dead-end jobs in academia.

Finally, someone in academia recognized that universities had gone a little
overboard producing doctorates. In 1995, Stanford University released a study


that found only 25 to 50 percent of all engineering doctorates ever get jobs
in their field, and that the country had churned out 25 percent more
engineering doctorates than the economy could absorb. Unlike previous studies,
the Stanford researchers actually included foreign students in their
estimates, assuming at least half would remain in the country.

William F. Massy, the Stanford professor who conducted the study, admitted
that graduate students were an inexpensive labor pool for universities.
"Faculty tend to be more focused on their needs and their department's needs
for doctorates than on the job market," he said.

Lab Rats

Despite the Stanford findings, armies of newly minted doctorates continue to
enter a slim job market. The number of new doctorates in science and
engineering remains high, with 26,823 conferred in 1999 compared with only
18,799 in 1975.

Why so many doctorates? U.S. universities were initially developed with
teaching in mind and the traditional view of universities as ivory towers
remained relatively unchanged until World War II, when professors were
recruited to work on military projects--the development of the atomic bomb,


radar, et al. Those professors discovered cutting-edge research was more
intellectually appealing than classroom instruction. What followed was a
Research Arms Race, which only escalated in 1980, when Congress passed the
Bayh-Dole Act, allowing universities to patent federally funded research and
license their discoveries to industry.

Additional research laboratories were built and grad students were "hired,"
all in an effort to achieve prestige, attract research grants, and make money
on the patented results. Greater emphasis on research did not mean professors
were doing the research, however. Gradually, they transformed themselves into
supervisors guiding grad students. (My professors, when they weren't
supervising the lab, usually taught one course a semester--three hours a week
of class time--and played a lot of racquetball.)

Because professors are handsomely rewarded for pulling in research dollars,
they employ throngs of doctoral students. But government support for
university research has fallen steadily over the past decade. To make up the
gap, universities have turned increasingly to the private sector, which
provided more than $2 billion in 1999 to universities, according to the
National Science Foundation. My alma mater, Purdue, sports a $255 million
research budget today, with $35 million coming from the private sector.

Private industry has found that it's cheaper to fund a university lab than to
set up its own. Last year, Novartis, the pharmaceutical giant, gave the
University of California at Berkeley $25 million for basic research--a pot of
money that made up nearly the entire research budget of an entire department.

While now allowed to keep the first rights to licenses on much of Berkeley's
scientific discoveries, Novartis also gets generous tax write-offs for its
grant to the nonprofit university. Plus, it can employ the services of
low-paid grad students, rather than company scientists who might demand such
things as minimum wage, health insurance, and pension plans. Such a system
only works, however, if there are enough students to do cheaply the menial lab
work as well as pick up the teaching load for the full-time professors
otherwise distracted with making money from their research.

It's no surprise that former UCSD Chancellor Richard Atkinson, who was crying
wolf about the lack of doctoral students entering the system 10 years ago, is
now leading the charge to bring academia more private research money. Since
Atkinson took over as president of the California University System in 1995,
according to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, industry-sponsored research at UC
has grown by 77 percent.



California Gov. Gray Davis also plans to build three Institutes for Science
and Innovation at several UC campuses. Davis hopes these biotech and telecom
research centers will stimulate the state economy. The centers will cost the
taxpayers $300 million, and will be supplemented with industry funds.
Naturally, they will be staffed by hordes of aspiring doctoral students who
will be directed towards research that financially benefits both the
university and its industry funders.

Doctoral students are easily exploited for such projects, in part because they
are held hostage by faculty advisors who dictate much of their work. Unlike
the predetermined schedule of courses leading to a bachelor's degree, doctoral
students conduct a research project marked by no clear finish. Faculty
advisors almost arbitrarily decide what constitutes a body of research
deserving of a Ph.D. This places doctoral candidates in precarious positions.
If their research output doesn't satisfy their advisors, they can be locked
into graduate school for many years. And quitting midway is not a viable
option; from the perspective of a future employer, a partial doctorate equals
no doctorate at all.

University, Inc.



It's evident that by awarding doctorates, administrators feel justified in
operating a research business. The next stage in the evolution of U.S.
universities is expansion into new industries. What's stopping them, say, from
entering the fast food business? They could build restaurants on campus,
employ food-science undergrads to flip hamburgers, pay less than minimum wage,
call it "education," and then plead for tax-exempt status. McDonald's would
protest.

U.S. universities have already conquered one industry unrelated to
academics--intercollegiate athletics. The parallels between doctoral
candidates and athletes abound. Underpaid student-employees are hired to
operate a research and sports business while supervisors--faculty and
coaches--are compensated with minuscule teaching loads and hefty salaries. The
analogy extends to outside income for supervisors. Through corporate funding,
professors act as entrepreneurs, pocketing outside earnings for research
sometimes conducted by their grad students. Martin Kenny, author of
Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex, explains: "In some cases
mentors are guiding students toward commercial research and in other cases
their ideas and research topics are being transferred to companies without
compensation for the students."

Likewise, basketball coaches are lavished with lucrative shoe endorsement
deals while the players--the true endorsers--actually wear the shoes. It gets
worse. Consider the coursework. Most doctorate-level classes have little
practical value, either because the course content is overly theoretical, or
too removed from the student's area of specialization. Analogously, to keep
athletes eligible, coaches steer them into frivolous courses that hardly
prepare them for mainstream jobs.

In each case, campus jocks and doctoral students sit in classrooms, sweating
out aimless lectures, not because it's worthwhile, but because it provides the
outward appearance that an educational mission is being fulfilled.

College sports aside, it was the campus research business that led me and
thousands of other unsuspecting folks who share my love of science to pursue
unmarketable degrees. So what's the remedy for this unfortunate situation?
U.S. universities should exit the research business, disassociate the labs
from the school, terminate doctorate degrees, and focus on classroom
instruction. Professors should be hired to teach, and researchers should be
hired to research. When a student earns a master's degree, she will have the
option of taking a job as a junior researcher (if one is available) and
working side-by-side with a senior scientist. Because research positions are
so rare, most master's-degree graduates will land non-research positions or
take jobs as university teachers. That way nobody will be overtrained.


Students, if not universities, seem to be getting the message. In 1999, the
number of doctoral degrees conferred dropped for the first time in 14 years,
according to the National Science Foundation, with the biggest declines coming
in engineering and physical sciences. It was the second-largest drop in 40
years. Naturally, the news set off a wave of hysteria from university
administrators and other scientific groups.
The headline in a February Washington Times story read, "Dip in doctoral
degrees seen as threat to science, defense." Stephen Director, dean of the
engineering program at the University of Michigan, claimed that engineering
faculties were already feeling the pinch of too few qualified professors, and
that private industry was struggling to find research staff. I can only hope
that students won't take the bait.

Research assistance provided by Catherine Dolinski

Paul DeMoulin has a doctorate in electrical engineering

老外写的, 今天看到给大家批判一下 :P

就算这么悲惨的工作,也不是我想做就能做的

Post by yuguo
老外写的, 今天看到给大家批判一下 :P

为啥要批判啊,我觉得还是很有道理的
如果有的选择,我决不会再选择去做这些基础科研

Post by wangqi5216
为啥要批判啊,我觉得还是很有道理的
如果有的选择,我决不会再选择去做这些基础科研

转这些怕被人扁

Ironically, many of the "studies" claiming that the United States would be
facing a massive shortage of trained scientists assumed that foreign students
would return home when they finished their degrees. Of course, they didn't; at
least half of all foreign doctoral students remain in this country after graduation. That fact, though, didn't seem to make much of an impression on
the media. Despite droves of students pouring into American doctoral programs,
university administrators were still making headlines warning of the coming
shortage of Ph.D.s, especially in the hard sciences and engineering.


是够讽刺的.

其实有种说法说书是越往上读,自己选择面就越窄.

但本人一直对所有的博士都心存敬意,尤其是学理工的.

感觉他们才是真正知道:mysteries of the nature and how the world works的人.而且偶发现很多政坛风云人物都是理工出身.