Tag: science careers

Boring, soul-crushing routine tasks are unavoidable in science

Aspiring scientists need to know that a science career is not an exception to the universal requirement for routine drudgery that applies to all real jobs:

Back in my freshman year of college, I was planning to be a biochemist. I spent hours and hours of time in the lab: mixing chemicals in test tubes, putting samples in different machines, and analyzing results. Over time, I grew frustrated because I found myself spending weeks in the lab doing manual work and just a few minutes planning experiments or analyzing results. After a year, I gave up on chemistry and became a computer scientist, thinking that I would spend less time on preparation and testing and more time on analysis. Continue reading “Boring, soul-crushing routine tasks are unavoidable in science”

Keep the Thread

The Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 1987, By Mary Ellen Mark

I got a notice in my inbox the other day that the NIH was implementing a pilot program for us intramural fellows called “Keep the Thread”. The program will be tested first for labs on the NIH campus and depending on the outcomes, it may be recommended to all institutions who employ post-doctoral fellows.  In a nutshell, it is a program to offer flexibility to post-doctoral fellows if they need to take time away from the lab for a variety of reasons (new child, care for a family member, personal emergency etc.). It is not to replace the normal 8 weeks of leave for a new child. It will offer a variety of options like telework, flexible scheduling or temporary effort reduction. Both women and men will be eligible for the program. While trying to create a solution for a well-known problem, this program raises a lot of questions. Continue reading “Keep the Thread”

Pursue ignorance, learn science

Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person’s mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well. – Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner

Dr. Stewart Firestein, a Columbia University neurobiologist is a scientist after my own heart. A former actor and theater manager, he went to graduate school in his mid-thirties, and despite the late start, has pursued a successful career understanding olfaction. He teaches a class on ignorance in science, and he’s written a book based on the ideas in the class, Ignorance: How It drives Science.

The basic message of the book is that facts are boring, while ignorance is (or can be) interesting, and we need to teach and practice science with this in mind. In this brief, genial book, Firestein gives advice on how to have an interesting conversation with a scientist – ask any of the following questions:

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This is terrible career advice:

From Stewart Firestein’s Ignorance: How It Drives Science:

The poet John Keats hit upon an ideal state of mind for the literary psyche that he called Negative Capability – “that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without an irritable reaching after fact and reason”…Scientists do reach after fact and reason, but it is when they are most uncertain that the reaching is most imaginative. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the great philosopher-scientists, says, “In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period”… Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome.

Continue reading “This is terrible career advice:”

Economics does shape science

Some final observations from Paula Stephan’s provocative book, How Economics Shapes Science (Harvard University Press, 2012):

1) The current incentive structure is creating an inefficient system. The job market for biomedical PhDs has been generally poor for some time now, and it has been getting worse. From the perspective of Deans and established investigators, the system is working beautifully because established scientists are highly productive. But from an economic perspective (and from the perspective of newly trained PhDs), this is a highly inefficient system that relies on cheap, temporary, highly skilled workers with future job prospects that are unlikely to repay the opportunity costs of PhD and postdoc training.

The university research system has a tendency to produce more scientists end engineers than can possibly find jobs as independent researchers. In most fields, the the percentage of recently trained PhDs holding faculty positions is half or less than what it was thirty-three years ago; the percentage holding postdoc positions and non-tenure-track positions (including staff scientists) has more than doubled. In the biological sciences it has more than tripled. Industry has been slow to absorb the excess. A growing percentage of new PhDs find themselves unemployed, out of the labor force, or working part time.

Continue reading “Economics does shape science”