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发信人: ohshajia (maverick), 信区: FDU_Life
标  题: zz Don't Become a Scientist!
发信站: 日月光华 (2008年07月23日00:34:00 星期三)

Don't Become a Scientist!

Jonathan I. Katz

Professor of Physics

Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.

[my last name]@wuphys.wustl.edu

Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries
 of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the wor
ld works? Forget it!

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are sma
rt, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate
. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to
 deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going
to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law
school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from follow
ing a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I r
eceived my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offe
rs a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in
the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using
 your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You
 will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose
 another career.

American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for
 them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the price drops. I
n the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes the form of many
years spent in ``holding pattern'' postdoctoral jobs. Permanent jobs don't pay
 much less than they used to, but instead of obtaining a real job two years af
ter the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) most young scientists spend five,
ten, or more years as postdocs. They have no prospect of permanent employment
and often must obtain a new postdoctoral position and move every two years. Fo
r many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account
in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent Assistant Pro
fessorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduate school (he
didn't get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinks is brilliant,
 was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was he offered his firs
t permanent job (that's not tenure, just the possibility of it six years later
, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new job every two years). The
latest example is a 39 year old candidate for another Assistant Professorship;
 he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctor typically enters private pr
actice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at 31, and a computer scientist
 with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27 (computer science and engineering are
the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). A
nyone with the intelligence, ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed
in science can also succeed in any of these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at ,000 annually in the biological scie
nces and about ,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are
 less than half these figures). Can you support a family on that income? It su
ffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist
 whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little pr
ospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a h
ouse in a good school district and all the other necessities of ordinary middl
e class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not
justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.

Of course, you don't go into science to get rich. So you choose not to go to m
edical or law school, even though a doctor or lawyer typically earns two to th
ree times as much as a scientist (one lucky enough to have a good senior-level
 job). I made that choice too. I became a scientist in order to have the freed
om to work on problems which interest me. But you probably won't get that free
dom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else's ideas, and may be treated as
 a technician rather than as an independent collaborator. Eventually, you will
 probably be squeezed out of science entirely. You can get a fine job as a com
puter programmer, but why not do this at 22, rather than putting up with a dec
ade of misery in the scientific job market first? The longer you spend in scie
nce the harder you will find it to leave, and the less attractive you will be
to prospective employers in other fields.

Perhaps you are so talented that you can beat the postdoc trap; some universit
y (there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences) will be so i
mpressed with you that you will be hired into a tenure track position two year
s out of graduate school. Maybe. But the general cheapening of scientific labo
r means that even the most talented stay on the postdoctoral treadmill for a v
ery long time; consider the job candidates described above. And many who appea
r to be very talented, with grades and recommendations to match, later find th
at the competition of research is more difficult, or at least different, and t
hat they must struggle with the rest.

Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professors
hip. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, a
nd again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing propos
als rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by yo
ur competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort an
d talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the
important scientific problems. They're not the same thing: you cannot put your
 past successes in a proposal, because they are finished work, and your new id
eas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that or
iginal ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet b
een proved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they can
be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you find tha
t it is not what you wanted after all.

What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who
 does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career.
This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations. Young Americans h
ave generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence of a reasonable middle
 class career path in science and are deserting it. If you haven't yet, then j
oin them. Leave graduate school to people from India and China, for whom the p
rospects at home are even worse. I have known more people whose lives have bee
n ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.

If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try to persu
ade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s. The glut of scientists is enti
rely the consequence of funding policies (almost all graduate education is pai
d for by federal grants). The funding agencies are bemoaning the scarcity of y
oung people interested in science when they themselves caused this scarcity by
 destroying science as a career. They could reverse this situation by matching
 the number trained to the demand, but they refuse to do so, or even to discus
s the problem seriously (for many years the NSF propagated a dishonest predict
ion of a coming shortage of scientists, and most funding agencies still act as
 if this were true). The result is that the best young people, who should go i
nto science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled wit
h weak American students and with foreigners lured by the American student vis
a.

From: http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html, May, 1999.