Being a scientist sounded like a great idea, until I realized what it meant. Unlike some of my peers, who dropped out of grad school to pursue better careers, I stuck around. I got my Ph.D. I did a postdoc. I did a second postdoc. And I finally realized I was unhappy.

I’ve narrowed down my reasons for leaving:

  1. Lack of funding
  2. Lack of discovery
  3. Too much secrecy

LACK OF FUNDING

Funding for the NIH has dropped by 20% since 2004 [1]. With less money to go around, grants tend to be awarded to older professors because they have successful records which make them seem like “safer” bets. However, if you examine Nobel Prize winners, the age at which they come up with their breakthroughs is between 35 and 39 [2]. So, instead of getting their own grants, newly minted Ph.D.s end up doing multiple years of postdoctoral research, which means doing somebody else’s research for very little pay. (A postdoc job requires a Ph.D. and pays somewhere around $40,000 per year.) There are a few popular news stories that characterize the plight of postdocs [3, 4].

Lack of funding also means lack of jobs. One of the most disheartening things I read while still in grad school: that only 16% of Ph.D. grads had tenure-track professorships waiting for them [5].

LACK OF DISCOVERY

The promise of scientific research is that you will get to discover things. Things that were unknown before will become known, because your experiments would show them to be true. While this may have been true in the past, it’s not true now. In order to get grant funding, your research needs to be fool-proof, which means you tend to know the answers to your experiment before it even happens. Worse yet, you could be doing “characterization science”, which means measuring stuff. This tennis ball has a circumference, no matter what; therefore, the experiment to measure the circumference cannot possibly fail.

Discovery science still happens, but oftentimes it happens in a scientist’s “spare time” with resources purchased for the other experiments covered by grant money. It’s like you have to do the research before somebody will give you grant money to do it. (Then you’ll use that grant money on your next risky discovery-type experiment. It’s a vicious cycle.)

TOO MUCH SECRECY

As a scientist, I was always afraid of getting “scooped” — the technical term for having somebody else steal your research ideas and publish it before you. It occurred to me early on, because we had discussions about what we could and could not say to collaborators or people at conferences. Basically, if you had a far enough head-start such that nobody could catch up, then it was okay to say it. I found later that this sentiment also applied within labs.

Steps on soap box

A lot of this has to do with recognition, and recognition is based on number-of-papers-written. Paper-writing is an interesting game. People judge you by the number of first-author papers you have. Being “first author” means doing the calculations and writing it up. Being “last author” means verifying the integrity of the study, an honor usually given to the most senior person in the lab (the “PI”, or principal investigator). As a grad student, you get to be first-author a lot because grad students do what most of us would consider “science” — actually carrying out experiments. As a postdoc, you have to come up with ideas that you hand to the grad student who then gets to be first author. Then, you end up being second author, which probably doesn’t impress anybody when you’re looking for jobs.

Steps off soap box

I wanted to be a scientist because I wanted to learn about the natural world. I wanted to figure out things that people didn’t know before and I wanted to tell everybody about it. I didn’t want to worry about who-did-what, and who-got-credit-for-what. The scarcity of funding and jobs make it such that telling-everybody is not a wise thing to do.

SOLUTION

There were things I liked about scientific research, which I thought I could resurrect into a new career. I liked:

  1. solving problems
  2. teaching people
  3. telling people about things I learn

And then it occurred to me that software engineering would allow me to do these things. The telling-everybody part comes with a small caveat: you can tell everybody in the company, as long as you don’t tell anybody outside the company. It’s important to know why you like the things you like, so you minimize the things you dislike.

So far so good.

Signature

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/09/09/340716091/u-s-science-suffering-from-booms-and-busts-in-funding

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/opinion/young-brilliant-and-underfunded.html

[3] http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/09/16/343539024/too-few-university-jobs-for-americas-young-scientists

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/21/science/postdoc-trail-long-and-filled-with-pitfalls.html

[5] http://www.economist.com/node/17723223

P.S. Thanks to Rick for making me a clear whale signature!