Apparently.
So yeah, I can see why you're reading this post- the title sound jazzy, kind of
positive and well-informed. That's exactly why I got sucked into going to a
presentation 30 minutes away from work at 5.30 pm on a cold Thursday night with this exact
title recently. I'm now a bit (probably disproportionately) pissed off.
I should start by saying that the two professors that spoke at this seminar for
postgraduates were really good speakers, they were engaging and positive and
they were giving up their time after work to speak to mis-guided post
docs who might (horror of horrors) be thinking about leaving research. Or as
they called it 'science'.
That was my first bug-bear really. The fact that for
them 'science' is (exclusively) synonymous with 'academic research'. They didn't even mention
industry, never mind all the people who work in science but around the
periphery of research. When it was brought up by an audience member that
perhaps not all scientists want to do research, the first speaker just assumed
that the question was about technician jobs and said that there were less and
less about as things are now mostly automated.
'Automated' - kind of how I felt during the presentations, actually - although it was no fault of the
speakers who did their very best to paint a rosy picture of life in academic research. Maybe I'm being unfair and I'm definitely quite tired (read 'jaded') but, as a
PostDoc who's being looking for a job for nearly two years, outside of
academia, it's really frustrating to here 'there are jobs out there if you're
willing to go after them'. I thought and hoped that the presentation was going to be about careers in science and not 'here's how I became an academic'. For most people in academia, there is not a scarcity of people to talk to about this - our bosses, colleagues and their bosses and colleagues, I was hoping for something different.
To be fair, this blog is supposed to be about careers for scientists outside of the lab and most academics are rarely seen in a lab, unless they are looking for someone they couldn't find in the office or they've forgotten to tell you about the immiment arrival of a new student (or six). So I suppose I have a duty to sum-up this career choice too.
How do you start?
Once you've completed your PhD or Post-Doc, there may be an area of research that you'd like to investigate further - Something your boss isn't interested in researching or they don't have the funding to research. This is when you say to yourself 'Maybe I could research it?'
From here you can go down the heady road of applying for (very competitive) academic positions at universities where you tell them what you'd like to research and they might give you a year or two of funding until you can prove to the funding bodies that you have the nous to pull this off and they give you some more money (usually for another couple of years) or, alternatively, you can apply for (even more competitive) fellowships where the situation is much the same but you get more autonomy and prestige. The pain in the arse here is that you will 'lather, rinse and repeat' this step for the rest of your career. One set of funding or another will always be running down, running out or running away from you. The upside is that you get to do the most important thing in the world to you, your ideal job - that of an academic researcher. All academics bemoan the funding system but I think they all (at least, the ones I know) really love what they do.
So, back to this presentation: Both talks had the common theme of the requirements of hard work and luck. T o ensure the science theme, one even quoted Pasteur with 'Chance favours the prepared mind'. In other words, you need to be bloody lucky in this game, but a bit of nose-to-the-grind-working-until-4am hard work won't do you any harm. What made all this hard work so worthwhile
is that they don"t mind reading papers at the weekends and staying in the
lab until 8 pm (or 10 pm) because they're so obsessed with the work, because they honestly love
it so much. And they genuinely seemed to.
In the interest of completeness and giving this a 'fair test', I'll add their
pros and cons of their career choices, I stress, these are 'lifted', with only a little rewording for clarity, from their presentations:
Downsides:
- You go into this job because of the science, but, increasingly, the job is administration.
- You end up getting worse at the technical stuff (see above)
- You have increasingly little control over the experiments (see above the above)
- Frustrating negative results (regardless of the hours put in)
- Agonisingly slow progress (regardless of the hours put in)
- Endless rejections (regardless of the hours put in)
- Lack of grant funding (regardless of the hours put in)
- Career insecurity (regardless of the hours put in)
- The work never finishes (regardless of the hours put in)
- Are you really making a difference? (regardless of the hours put in)
- The constant, aforementioned, begging for money
- Due to the above, there are not always the resources to do what you want.
- The financial buck stops with you: YOU need to find the money!
For those for whom this is their correct career path, so many things can make it worthwhile...
Upsides:
- You get to do your hobby for a job
- You are fascinated by your work (genuinely - not just on your CV)
- You get to show off (what you've done and the fact that you did it)
- The field is rapidly evolving
- Getting things right and getting things to work is really satisfying
- A new discovery is thrilling
- You feel (however unlikely it might be) that there IS a chance you could make a difference
- A university is actually a pretty nice place to work - it's got a young, usually international atmosphere and people are pretty friendly (most of the time - not when grants have just been refused)]
- It's rewarding to teach and communicate your work to other people (not all researchers actually like this bit)
- There's a lot of opportunity to travel if you can fit it in to your schedule
- You get a lot of independence (eventually)
- You get paid well (eventually)
- SOMETHING is usually working, so the failures get 'diluted'
-You get pretty much all the glory and recognition for others' lab work (honestly not my words!)
- No career can compete with complete freedom for discovery
Perspective is important
One of the presenters was also a doctor, a 'real' one (the kind that is actually useful on a plane or as a relative to show a rash to. You can show a PhD a rash but generally all you're going to get is 'Urgh' or 'Oh, yeah, Mike in genetics had that once'). Anyway, I digress, she was a clinician, as we say, so she had a really good sense of perspective. She basically said that she could much more easily see the point of her reseach when she met patients struggling with a disease she was trying to understand, or, she didn't find herself too bogged down in depression when an experiment failed for the seventeenth time when she has to deal with someone terminally ill. I think this is something that is really hard to do. You need to care about your research enough to put in all your hard work, but not be completely depressed when your three weeks of work come to nothing.
The overall message from one of the professors was that you need to know what
you want to do if you expect to get far. This was great advice for life in general, I suppose, but
when someone from the floor asked 'What if we don't?' There was much shrugging of shoulders. Fundamentally I think if you want to be an academic researcher,
you probably already know, you're probably already on your way to being one. In my opinion, which I've previuosly suggested may be completely wrong (but it's all I have) I
don't think this is an area people need to be or should be convinced to do - if your not taking your research home (like I'm not) and you're not
happy to be in the lab until 10 pm (which I'm not-more on that below) then
becoming an academic is probably not for you. I'm certain, no more than ever,
that it's not for me.
I feel like I should comment on the fact that I'm actually not happy to work on weekends and until 10 pm
and the fact that I feel I need to justify that feeling tells you a lot about
academia and a lot about me. I feel I work hard and I like to have that
recognised (rightly or wrongly) and if not recognised, then at least not made
to feel like a slacker if I want to leave after a meagre 9-10 hour day and this
is how I feel academic research is. That's fine and admirable if you love it and it probably is those completely dedicated people who should go for (and get) these jobs, but I feel I paid my 'dues' during my PhD and now, whilst I'm happy to work hard, it should probably be on something I enjoy.
I'll try and wrap up with a positive and say that if you're passionate and if you're resilient, you'll probably make it in this field. There are support schemes and fellowships open to help early researchers but a mentor will help. Ask around, who in your department do you admire? They'll probably be really busy but everyone loves being told they're great and giving advice, so ask them for pointers. In academia, I think people can be afraid of asking for help because we're all supposed to be experts. I think we should be experts at asking questions. If that question is 'How do I get to be you?', then you're likely to at least get an answer!
If you get a rejection, particularly for a grant or fellowship, follow up, call them or e-mail them, and tell them why they've made a terrible mistake. The worst they're going to do is think you're arrogant or a bit rude but they just refused to give you any money to further your career, so what do you care if they like you? You'll notice I haven't included links to the grants or funding bodies for academic reserach - this is because there are loads and they're often very field specific. If you don't know who best to speak to about this, ask your departmental secretary. Like most things, it's not really their job to help you with this, but they're so busy and over-worked that it's quicker to just tell you who you need to ask than to berate you for asking them in the first place.
Something you should probably be aware of in academias is the general trend towards men in this environment - particularly the higher up you go. One slide in particular that stood out depicted the number of female professors in the major London universities, as well as some places in the countryside - it was pretty obvious that professorships are mostly male-dominated but there is a drive to change this. I don't mean that you'll get a job if you're crap if you also happen to be a woman, but you might find that the consious or unconcious bias that has lead to such complete under-representation is starting to get better. Oh yeah, if you're a potential male academic, keep applying - the stats say you're much better at showing confidence on your CV so that you can shine in person at the intervew, so genuine kudos for that one.
The seminar started to get a bit lost towards the end with off-topic talk of open-access, peer-review and maternity leave for Post-Docs, which there simply wasn't time to get into. As we inevitably veered into the rights and wrongs of competition in science and the best way to combat this I'm honestly not paraphrasing (much) when I wrap up with a quote from one of the professors with:
'There need to be sacrifices on the altar of science and to hell with everyone
else'.
