In Germany, a professional chemist once told me to have a "career" in chemistry, you pretty much need to get your PHD (that alone is highly selective), which me

In Germany, a professional chemist once told me to have a "career" in chemistry, you pretty much need to get your PHD (that alone is highly selective), which means you enter the workforce at age 35 on average - which sets you back ten years of life income (which you are unlikely to recoup. The alternative is lab assistant (still usually holding Master's degrees for doing essentially the same experiment over and over and over again for different batches of the same product, which means relatively low pay) and chemical workers (there's a reason there's a worker's rights song about them [1]). Doing experiments and learning new stuff in the process is fun. But to make a career of that you have to spend a lot of your life and your life's earnings - or go into industry, which is essentially factory work (which is not about experiments or learning new stuff) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Z8xryXylY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9Z8xryXylY