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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 th
by ccwu 16y ago
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 16y agoI 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.