{"id":446,"date":"2006-08-01T12:58:18","date_gmt":"2006-08-01T12:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/01\/science-is-not-a-path-to-riche\/"},"modified":"2006-08-01T12:58:18","modified_gmt":"2006-08-01T12:58:18","slug":"science-is-not-a-path-to-riche","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/01\/science-is-not-a-path-to-riche\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Is Not a Path to Riches"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard<\/a> post over the last several days, and I’ve been trying to come up with something to say about them. This is the second of two posts responding to comments by some of my fellow ScienceBloggers.<\/p>\n

Turning to Steinn’s first post on the subject<\/a>, I actually hadn’t intended to link the “Science Is Hard” post to the “Why They’re Leaving<\/a>” post. Those two subjects just happened to catch my eye on the same day. Their juxtaposition was not meant to imply that students leave science because science is hard– in fact, the particular difficulties I was talking about are not things that most students encounter in science classes<\/strong> at all.<\/p>\n

Steinn has a pretty good explanation in his post, where he writes of science majors that:<\/p>\n

\n

The competition is professional degrees: medicine, law, business and others – there the work is hard and technically challenging, but the probability of someone getting through the hoops actually getting a job directly in their field is much higher. Perception is that promotion is rapid and assured and that there is a realistic possibility of high pay and choice of location.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A career in research science is not a path to riches, or even stable employment. Anyone who thinks so is sadly deluded, and if sure promotion and a fat paycheck are your primary goal (and you’re good at math), you should become an actuary or an accountant or something in that vein. A career in research science can be very rewarding, but the rewards are not necessarily financial (though I hasten to add, I’m not making a bad living, either).<\/p>\n

(Disagreement below the fold.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Of course, at the level that they were talking about in the Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> piece<\/a> I was citing in the “Why They’re Leaving” post, I don’t think that career prospects really enter in, either. While there are some exceptional students who come in knowing exactly what they want to do with their lives, and having a clear and accurate picture of what they can expect from that career track, there aren’t many of them (and, frankly, they kind of creep me out). Most students, in my experience (both as a student and as a professor), sort of wander into a college major based on classes they happen to like or dislike, and get to their junior or senior years with only the haziest idea of their career options, let alone career prospects.<\/p>\n

The students the Inside Higher Ed<\/cite> piece was discussing leave science well before that point– a factoid I picked up at an AAPT meeting a few years back is that only something like 3% of students who take introductory physics take another course in the discipline. They’re not getting out based on a rational assessment of career possibilities, they’re getting out because they don’t like the first class or two that they take. By the time they find out about the lousy career possibilities, they’re too far in to change majors…<\/p>\n

(This is not to say that we don’t need to work on informing students about their options, and improving the range of those options. We should do much more than we do, on both of those fronts.)<\/p>\n

I also want to object to a apssing remark near the end of Steinn’s post:<\/p>\n

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Addendum: I Am Not A Lawyer, but… my cousin is, and three of my close relatives are MDs.
\nMy perception of work in the professions, is that they do indeed work very hard, and most likely worked harder through university than I did. BUT, the work was mostly rote – it was learning stuff that was already out there – precedents and principles, binary tree decision making and information dumps on which to make decisions, experiential stuff.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’m not a lawyer either, but I’m married to one, and I think this is a little unfair to lawyers. Saying that law is all about precedents and principles is a little like saying that physics is all about multiplication and addition– while it’s strictly true that most physics problems come down to fairly simple math, the hard work comes in getting the problem to the point where you can just plug in numbers. This is the biggest sticking point for most of my intro students– I’ve heard dozens of them say “I can do the math just fine, but…”<\/p>\n

In the same way, most of the work in lawyering appears to be in framing the issues in such a way as to allow the application of precedents and principles. If it were all rote, we wouldn’t need people to do the job– a look-up table would suffice. The hard part is getting a complicated situation boiled down to where you can apply the rote learning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard post over the last several days, and I’ve been trying to come up with something to say about them. This is the second of two posts responding to comments by some of my fellow ScienceBloggers. Turning to Steinn’s first post on the subject,… Continue reading Science Is Not a Path to Riches<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}