This needs some more love. Consider the cycle of academic career: -Grad school for 5-8 years, averaging around 7 for most molecular and cellular biologists.

This needs some more love. Consider the cycle of academic career: -Grad school for 5-8 years, averaging around 7 for most molecular and cellular biologists. You make $23-28k a year depending on where you live. You steal whatever free food is lying around your department -Post graduation, you obtain a Post-Doc position for ~2 years (if everything goes well). This pays ~40k/year, again varying depending on region. -If you got lucky and had a successful Post-doc, skip to the next bullet. Otherwise, go back to the last bullet for another 2-8 years. -Get a junior professor tenure-track position. Salary is much better, probably around 60-80k. You have five years to prove you are awesome. At five years, go to the next bullet -Tenure review! How many awesome papers did you publish? ---Not enough? go try again at a different university...hopefully your family is willing to relocate or there is one nearby. If you fail tenure review twice, you get to be an adjunct professor (zero job security, crap salary) for the rest of your life. ---Well, you don't completely suck...so we are giving you another two years to prove tenure. Go back to the last bullet. ---Wow! You got tenure! Welcome to the elite minority that actually make tenure. You get a nice salary bump up to 100-150k, have total job security, do zero science anymore (glorified manager now) and are probably in your 40's. Feels good, huh? And people wonder why things are slow in biology? If this was a sales funnel, you would notice hideous conversion rates between all the steps. People burn out because of intense competition for few spots, crappy salary and crappy hours. If you work finance, you may work 90 hour weeks but at least you make lots of money. In biology...you work 70 hour weeks for food stamps and the hope of getting tenure when you are 40.