{"id":475,"date":"2006-08-09T11:27:45","date_gmt":"2006-08-09T11:27:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/09\/more-jobs-in-science\/"},"modified":"2006-08-09T11:27:45","modified_gmt":"2006-08-09T11:27:45","slug":"more-jobs-in-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/09\/more-jobs-in-science\/","title":{"rendered":"More Jobs in Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest jobs in science post<\/a> has prompted a lot of responses, several of them arguing that we need to expand the definition of acceptable careers for Ph.D. scientists. For example, there’s Nicholas Condon in comments<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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When I hear this incessant handwringing about jobs in “science,” it seems like it frequently comes from people with two characteristics: they seem to believe that the only viable destination for a Ph.D. scientist is a professorship, and they who work in subfields that are oversupplied (biology) or have very limited non-academic employment opportunitites (HEP) and they mistake their situation for the state of the entirety of the scientific enterprise. There are lots and lots of Ph.D.s employed in both government and industry, and many of them are indeed working on the sorts of challenging, stimulating problems that attract people to science to begin with; just ask Derek Lowe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or Janet on her blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I see the situation in the sciences (where there are “too many” science Ph.D.s produced every year in the U.S. for the number of academic and industrial jobs that employ Ph.D. scientists) as one more argument for loosening the tight linkage between what one studies and what one does (or even who one is). Of course, it’s good to have doctors who have gone to medical school, lawyers who have gone to law school, and particle physicists who have earned advanced degrees in particle physics. But, I don’t believe that advanced degrees, by their nature, suck all the other useful skills out of a person. Nor should they close off a person’s career options.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’d agree with both of these, but I’d also go one step further: I think we should try to expand job opportunities in science for people below the Ph.D. level. (More below the fold.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is particularly important for physics, which has the unfortunate quirk of offering very few technician jobs. For whatever reason, physicists are expected to do a lot of things for themselves that scientists in other disciplines hire people to do for them– we prepare our own test samples, make our own stupid little electronic circuits, and debug our own code. Or at least, we make our students do those things, along with routine equipment maintenance and operation. <\/p>\n

As another commenter points out<\/a>, you can get a good job at a reasonable salary as a lab tech in biology or chemistry straight out of college. Those jobs aren’t as common in physics, where it’s sort of “Ph.D. or bust,” if you want to work in research.<\/p>\n

But it’s not just lab tech jobs that we need– it would be good to have more options for undergraduate physcis majors than grad school or leaving science. As countless people have noted, getting a Ph.D. is a huge committment– you’re talking at least four or five years (if you’re really lucky, and really smart) in grad school, at little more than subsistence wages. A lot of students– even very good students– aren’t prepared to make that kind of committment right out of college, but it’s hard to find other things for them to do. And there are some students who really shouldn’t go to grad school at all, who end up trying just because there’s no other clear career path.<\/p>\n

Some of the blame for this falls on undergraduate faculty– God knows, I don’t know as much about career options for people with Bachelors degrees in physics as I really ought to in order to advise students. And some of it falls on groups like the APS and AIP, that don’t do enough to encourage the development of non-academic career tracks, or publicize the ones that do exist.<\/p>\n

On a number of occasions when I’ve mentioned trying to increase the number of undergraduate majors in physics, I’ve had commenters chide me for irresponsibly increasing the Ph.D. glut, as if there’s nothing else for those students to do but go to grad school and help make it nearly impossible to land an academic job. To the extent that this is an accurate description, the problem isn’t so much with wanting undergraduate majors as it is with the system that doesn’t provide options for them. <\/p>\n

I’ll admit, though, that I’m not really sure how to fix this problem. Suggestions are welcome in the comments, and if you know anybody who’s hiring undergraduate physics majors into jobs that require some knowledge of physics (and not “you’re good at math, so become a Wall Street analyst”), I’d definitely like to hear more about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest jobs in science post has prompted a lot of responses, several of them arguing that we need to expand the definition of acceptable careers for Ph.D. scientists. For example, there’s Nicholas Condon in comments: When I hear this incessant handwringing about jobs in “science,” it seems like it frequently comes from people with… Continue reading More Jobs in Science<\/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":[8,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475","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=475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}