4 ms·
This is literally true. But I come out of experimental physics, semiconductor engineering, and biology, where "the necessary background to be able to do good r
by mechanical_fish 15y ago
This is literally true.
But I come out of experimental physics, semiconductor engineering, and biology, where "the necessary background to be able to do good research" generally translates to "you have the kind of lab skills training that you can only get by getting a Ph.D. in a lab just like ours, plus you know how to write (or at least contribute vital portions of) successful grants to pay for the equipment you'll be using and the reagents and parts and live animals that you'll be consuming as you work". The thing is, lab benches are expensive, outlandishly expensive in many cases, so you'll have to earn your spot at that lab bench by outcompeting whoever else might want it. The net result is that, yes, with a modicum of talent you can probably always be an unpaid research assistant, but the practical difference between that and a full-time career in research is just a few thousand dollars in salary. ;)
(Or you can learn to build scientific equipment out of hardware found on the side of the road. This can work well, if you choose your field carefully.)
Now, in a field like math or CS where adding you to a research group may require only the occasional spare chair to park you in and a modest 5% increase in the coffee budget: Absolutely, you can dabble in university research as much as you want. This is one of the charms of such fields. Didn't Erdös run his entire career out of spare chairs in other people's offices and apartments? And, of course, MIT is legendary for the excellent work done by people hanging around Tech Square snarfing up spare CPU cycles.
- cperciva 15y agoI think we're disagreeing mostly on what "getting into the labs" means. Sure, you can't walk into a lab filled with expensive equipment and start doing your own research; but you could absolutely walk into someone's lab and start helping to do their research. My father studies chemical reactions in supercritical water using a beam of spin-polarized muons from a cyclotron; there's many millions of dollars of equipment involved in his experiments -- yet he still hires undergraduate students, because there's always plenty of grunt work to be done.
- mechanical_fish 15y agoAh, okay, if you want to be an unpaid lab tech I agree that you can get that job pretty darned easily. It hadn't occurred to me, recently, to have such low standards for hanging around in a lab. ;) The novelty wears off, you see. EDIT: just to summarize for the audience, I believe cperciva and I are in agreement with Patrick that it's easy to flawlessly impersonate a university student for free; We are debating the extent to which one may also impersonate a junior professor. ;)
- cperciva 15y agoYes, "unpaid lab tech" is a pretty low standard. But if you hang around as an unpaid lab tech for long enough, you start picking up more useful skills and have a good chance of eventually getting paid. (No, I never did this. But I know people who have.) As for impersonating a junior professor: I wander into seminars and if anyone doesn't recognize me they just assume I'm from the university on the other side of town. Given my age they usually assume I'm a postdoc; but if I was ten years older I'm sure they'd assume I was a faculty member. Of course, "faculty member from a different institution" doesn't really get you very much.
- cageface 15y agoIt's been a long time since I was in graduate school, but, at least in chemistry, there were at least 20 highly qualified and ambitious people waiting for a shot at any seat in a top lab. There was no chance in hell of just walking in there and working for free. The time it would take people already in the lab to bring you up to speed wouldn't be worth it.