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Working as staff at a major university, I get to interact with a lot of students in biology and often hear back from them once they graduate. At least for biolo
by whyenot 8y ago
Working as staff at a major university, I get to interact with a lot of students in biology and often hear back from them once they graduate. At least for biology, the job prospects are not great. With luck, you may make a living wage and have a full time job with job security by the time you reach middle age, but there are so many students that graduate and end up working at Whole Foods, or waitressing at the Cheesecake Factory, or being a personal fitness instructor at a private club. Those are all jobs recent MS degree graduates from my institution are currently working while they wait for something better to come along. Sometimes something better doesn't come along.
Of course, the situation isn't always that bad -- students graduate and can do quite well for themselves, but there is no guarantee of a good job if you graduate with a BS or MS in biology, and that is a little different from graduating with a degree in math or CS. At least, that's what it looks like from my vantage point.
- NotSammyHagar 8y agoInstead of grouping people together with stem we could have a categorization that species people who can reasonably get a job as software engineers and then all other stem. Because isn't that really it? Bio seems much harder to do dev work, but it's common for mech engr, ee, some physics and math.
- sgillen 8y agoI think job prospects for most engineering majors is still very good even if they don't want to do dev work.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoIn the UK CS is one of the least effective ways to be employed. The catch is that other grads will do terrible work like waiting on tables, while CS grads usually won't. So "employed" is a relative term. Stats for "gainfully directly employed in work that relies on their major" are harder to come by. Even so. Anyone who thinks they can do a CS degree here and walk into a well-paid job is deluding themselves.
- geomark 8y agoI am surprised to hear that. I have no personal experience with it, but anecdotally, the son of a friend who recently graduated in CS from Newcastle said he and all his classmates had multiple offers upon graduating. Although, he did say the work was not what he had hoped for. He was hoping for a position in game development or distributed systems and ended up at a company doing POS terminals software.
- ncmncm 8y agoJob prospects are good until they are bad. The most enduring experience for most engineers is periodic mass layoffs.
- isoskeles 8y ago> Sometimes something better doesn't come along. Things in life don’t just “come along.” Maybe this is their perspective, but they probably didn’t try hard enough.
- whyenot 8y agoUnfortunately, "just try harder" isn't always the solution to this problem. Sometimes it's better to fail, catch your breath, and then select a different path.
- danmaz74 8y agoDo you think that, if everybody tried hard enough, the number of available jobs would increase to match the number of job seekers?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- United857 8y agoAt least at my university (major well-known one), many if not most biology majors were intending to go on to medical school, rather than try to get a job after graduation. Bio was just a pragmatic and convenient choice as the course requirements for the bio major itself pretty much also fulfills all pre-med course requirements (bio, organic chemistry, etc...)
- systemBuilder 8y agoWow, whole foods jobs require an M.S. degree that's rough! I have heard you need 2 postdocs in biology before you are qualified for industrial research ...