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Thank you for posting such helpful advice. I think the last part of your advice is the most helpful - that you need to really do wet lab benchwork, something I'

by cowmoo 18y ago

Thank you for posting such helpful advice. I think the last part of your advice is the most helpful - that you need to really do wet lab benchwork, something I've tried to avoid during my undergrad, thinking that computers are the way of future and lab work is for suckers. But alas, in the realm of biology, the micropipetters and mice-killers win again. But I appreciate you for also being very adamant about the "dark side" of academia; it would have deterred me if someone else didn't also warn me once about the "dark side" of going corporate (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66390 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66390). I appreciate again your advice and will think it over very carefully when I decide as to what exactly I am going to do next.

timr 18y ago
Glad to help. I was being a little tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but I meant what I said. The job market is very bad for biologists of all disciplines right now, and computational biology isn't the discipline with the greatest demand. If you decide to go on, being able to work at the bench is essential to your career. But don't take my word as proof -- the Science Magazine Career forums are literally filled with sad stories of PhDs and post-docs in the biological sciences who can't get jobs. I wish it had existed when I started my program: http://scforum.aaas.org/ http://scforum.aaas.org/ (One more thing: I just read the link to the other comments, and I don't disagree with what they wrote. Most software jobs suck, too. But the key insight here is that most jobs suck -- there is no magic bullet to career happiness. The corollary to that insight is that you need to fail fast; you must quickly work through the things that suck, and find the things that don't. Because a PhD ties you to one thing for so long, it is almost the antithesis of failing fast. For this reason, I would not recommend a PhD to anyone, unless they explicitly wanted to become a professor, and knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. It's not the kind of decision that rewards indecisiveness.)
davi 18y ago
"...computers are the way of future and lab work is for suckers. But alas, in the realm of biology, the micropipetters and mice-killers win again." Doing biology is the only way to develop biological intuition. Sometimes this means pipetting and killing mice. Ernst Mayr speaks to this: "About two years ago, three years ago, for maybe the 20th time I went over the whole business of the species concept. What is a species? I looked at the major figures in the evolutionary synthesis, and I looked at Robzhansky and myself, and Huxley and Stebbins, all of us had reasonable species concepts, and the only person that had a species concept that I thought was quite absurd was the paleontologist G.G. Simpson. And then I said to myself, "Well, he can't have been a naturalist in his youth if he had such a peculiar, unworkable species concept." So I went to Simpson's biography and what did I find? I found that in college he was an English major. He had never been a naturalist as a youngster. He never collected anything, and he discovered geology in his senior year in college, and from there he went to stratigraphy and finally to paleontology. Not surprisingly, not having been a naturalist, he has no idea what a species is and he never had. I argued with him about the species concept year after year, but lacking that background, he was unable to see it, and that is the thing. Being a naturalist -- having had that background of being a naturalist -- gives you a view of nature that cannot be acquired just learning from books." (Go to bottom of http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/may1int-5 http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/may1int-5 for a video of him saying it while sitting next to E. O. Wilson.)

by cowmoo 18y ago

timr 18y ago

Glad to help. I was being a little tongue-in-cheek, obviously, but I meant what I said. The job market is very bad for biologists of all disciplines right now, and computational biology isn't the discipline with the greatest demand. If you decide to go on, being able to work at the bench is essential to your career. But don't take my word as proof -- the Science Magazine Career forums are literally filled with sad stories of PhDs and post-docs in the biological sciences who can't get jobs. I wish it had existed when I started my program: http://scforum.aaas.org/ http://scforum.aaas.org/ (One more thing: I just read the link to the other comments, and I don't disagree with what they wrote. Most software jobs suck, too. But the key insight here is that most jobs suck -- there is no magic bullet to career happiness. The corollary to that insight is that you need to fail fast; you must quickly work through the things that suck, and find the things that don't. Because a PhD ties you to one thing for so long, it is almost the antithesis of failing fast. For this reason, I would not recommend a PhD to anyone, unless they explicitly wanted to become a professor, and knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. It's not the kind of decision that rewards indecisiveness.)

davi 18y ago

"...computers are the way of future and lab work is for suckers. But alas, in the realm of biology, the micropipetters and mice-killers win again." Doing biology is the only way to develop biological intuition. Sometimes this means pipetting and killing mice. Ernst Mayr speaks to this: "About two years ago, three years ago, for maybe the 20th time I went over the whole business of the species concept. What is a species? I looked at the major figures in the evolutionary synthesis, and I looked at Robzhansky and myself, and Huxley and Stebbins, all of us had reasonable species concepts, and the only person that had a species concept that I thought was quite absurd was the paleontologist G.G. Simpson. And then I said to myself, "Well, he can't have been a naturalist in his youth if he had such a peculiar, unworkable species concept." So I went to Simpson's biography and what did I find? I found that in college he was an English major. He had never been a naturalist as a youngster. He never collected anything, and he discovered geology in his senior year in college, and from there he went to stratigraphy and finally to paleontology. Not surprisingly, not having been a naturalist, he has no idea what a species is and he never had. I argued with him about the species concept year after year, but lacking that background, he was unable to see it, and that is the thing. Being a naturalist -- having had that background of being a naturalist -- gives you a view of nature that cannot be acquired just learning from books." (Go to bottom of http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/may1int-5 http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/may1int-5 for a video of him saying it while sitting next to E. O. Wilson.)