
Are Biology PhD students the most miserable? - PaulHoule
http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/2011/03/are_biology_graduate_students.php
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ccwu
As someone with a Bachelors in Biochemistry and Computer Science, my sense is
that the frustration comes not from the lack of transferable skills per se,
but that there is not a lot of self determination and opportunity.

The challenge with big bio science is that you need access to tremendous
resources to do anything interesting. Labs are expensive, equipment is
expensive so you need to get access through the gates before you can do
anything. Once you are in a lab, you have to manage aligned agendas between
your PI and yourself to move forward. Large bioscience is about resource
acquisition. The same is probably true of high energy particle physicists. The
lack of jobs and positions is a side effect that a lab just needs a lot of
resources. Ecologist and other field biologists seem less miserable. You can
do low cost field work as a field biologist.

Computing as another commented, in biostatistics allows a degree of able to do
the work directly. And in that area costs are getting cheaper. As a computer
person, I can do things without needing to get permission. Bio is still the
most interesting thing, hey we've never engineered life, open question. But
the age of gentleman biology is long gone.

There is a lot of good molecular bio to be done, but there are few
opportunities due to exogenous factors. Half the effort is getting the
opportunity and that is definitely miserable.

~~~
timr
I fell in love with the idea of biology research when I worked in a small lab
as an undergraduate. There was a sense of intellectual freedom and exploration
that was intoxicating, as well as a certain romance to working late nights in
the lab, working with obscure technology to chase an idea.

Then I went to graduate school, and it became clear to me that professional
research is a grinder -- just as political and bullshit-prone as any other job
(if not more so), but with lower stakes and crappy earning potential. The core
of what I loved was still there, but wrapped in seventeen layers of
bureaucracy and careerists and conflicted interests. Modern science is as much
about money and power as it is about ideas, and that really sucks.

The author is right that your advisor often wants you to do things that are
against your own long-term self interest: they're paying you to work on a
project, not spend time chasing rainbows. And you're right that the self-
determination and opportunity in professional science is almost completely
gone. You've got to be the PI of a lab if you want to have a career, but the
odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you.

At this point, I think that the true promise of science can only be realized
by the independently wealthy.

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robg
All true. We create a glut of specialized people while the market has been
shrinking. Universities aren't hiring.

One solution is trying to transition people into applied biology - i.e.
medicine. We could always use more doctors. What's crazy is you could have a
Ph.D. in biological sciences yet need to spend another few hundred grand to
get trained as a doctor. A general care practitioner needn't spend seven years
to get trained.

~~~
jinushaun
That's my problem with academia and university culture. They don't show how
their degree can translate to real jobs. So they graduate only to find out
they're only qualified to work in universities as a researcher! For example,
in biology you only have two options outside of research: law or medicine.

~~~
adrianN
I feel that it's not the primary purpose of a university to train the students
for some job.

~~~
maxharris
That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but it might be inconsistent
with the idea that a university education should be for everyone. (I don't
think it can ever be for everyone.)

Many people (if not most) just want a job.

~~~
adrianN
I think there should be special schools for people who just want a job. Most
of what you learn at a university isn't particularly important for anything
you do in the industry anyway. At least in CS it's like that, I can't speak
for other fields.

~~~
Paulomus
The problem is that a university degree has more prestige that a technical
school. So employers use it as a measure of the ability of the people they are
hiring, and then complain that their new hires don't have enough practical
skills. So the technical schools become universities and start offering
degrees in tourism, IT management, and financial planning.

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gilesc
I think this article is a bit sensationalist. Yes, there are niche techniques
in biology, but many -- Western blots, qPCR, cell culture, transfection -- are
transferable to almost any other biology lab.

The article's core advice -- make sure to acquire transferable skills -- is
certainly a good idea, though.

As a bioinformatics PhD student, life is great: I get to learn those
programming and math skills specifically mentioned by the article as being
transferable, along with some of the other more esoteric skills. (Moral of the
story: choose bioinformatics! :)

~~~
jinushaun
You're right about bioinformatics/biostatistics. That's my advice to anyone
that wants to major in biology and actually get a decent job out of it. You
can always fall back on being a code monkey if biology doesn't pan out...

~~~
robg
Who wants to be a code monkey?

~~~
apl
A postdoc without job prospects, for instance. If there's one thing less
desirable than churning out Java for an insurance company, then it's being a
_lab_ monkey with no realistic chance of getting a tenure track position.

So, yes, quite a few people want to be code monkeys.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Most biostats people I know wind up doing considerably better than code
monkey.

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jinushaun
I wouldn't call biology students the most miserable... But as someone with a
biochemistry degree (BS), I totally agree with the main point of the article:
A PhD in Biology does not guarantee a job. You spend all this time and money
on what seems, to a layperson, to be an amazing degree with amazing job
opportunities working on the cutting edge of technology cloning dinosaurs yada
yada yada.

Unfortunately, you graduate only to find out that you're only qualified to
work in a lab at a research university! All your computer science buddies are
now millionaires and they paid a quarter of the tuition you did. You're over
qualified for most jobs in the private sector and you most likely lack the
experience for private sector jobs that do require PhDs! You learn all these
advanced specialised skills that end up being worthless--they're either being
performed by machines or students/interns. The same can be said about other
"purely academic" majors such as economics, international studies, political
science, physics, mathematics, etc.

That's my biggest problem with academia and university culture. They only
exist to train a new generation of professors and other academics. They don't
seem to care about teaching their students more vocational skills relevant to
their major or highlight possible private sector career paths after they
graduate.

For example, Arabic and Chinese are hot topics right now, so as a student, you
figure you should get an international studies degree in one of these
cultures. You hear it all the time in the news how the defense industry is
starving for these people. You graduate and find out that no one wants someone
who can speak Arabic or Mandarin fluently unless they have a business,
statistics or computer science degree... You might as well have gone to a
vocational/technical college and learned Arabic on the side.

~~~
timwiseman
I can only speak to what I have seen so this is anecdotal, but I have not had
a problem getting a job with a degree in mathematics (bachelor's not PHD).
Now, it is true that those jobs tended to be in related areas (data analysis,
programming) rather than directly in mathematics, but the degree has still
served me well. I have also been turned down for jobs looking directly for
mathematicians because I currently only hold a bachelor's and they required at
least a masters.

The same goes for physics. I have friends with master's in physics that have
never had problems finding a job, though the jobs were rarely directly in
physics. Rather they got jobs working with engineers or in programming (or in
one case, pure management), but the degree still served them well.

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davi
A key problem is that the ratio of trainees (graduate students) to tenure
track positions is way out of whack. It's a pyramid. I've made this point here
in the past, with estimates of the numbers involved:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181>

~~~
Paulomus
Well it's essentially the same problem for actions. The dream appeals to many,
but the work is only available for a smaller number. The result is a lot of
struggling actors competing for the same work. The same goes for the vast
array of courses in translation, film-making, forensic science, creative
writing, game design or any number of appealing careers. There are always
going to be more people wanting to do these jobs than there are positions
available and educational institutions have no problem taking their money.

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VladRussian
with so much bio-engineering to be done, i was under impression that there is
a shortage of trained people. With vast public datasets, cheap computing and
sequencing resources, and with people doing bio-engineering as hobby and
school projects, one can only wonder what stops us in that path.

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known
If you're in school till you're 40, when will you make money?

~~~
gilesc
Well, first of all, a traditional student will be out by age 26-27 not 40.
Secondly, PhD students in the sciences are paid. Not much, admittedly -- about
$22k, on average -- but enough that you have positive cashflow.

~~~
infinite8s
That's true, although the average age for a scientist to land a tenure track
position is in their late 30s, after several postdocs (where you are barely
paid more than a graduate student). Ican't find the citation at the moment,
but I believe it came from the NIH.

~~~
hugh3
Postdocs nowadays tend to make something on the order of $50K (as compared to
maybe $25K for a grad student). It's not big face money, but it's a big step
up from grad student life.

