Too much rain. Too little rain. Cold weather. Hot weather. Hail. Insects. Wind. While I was growing up, my aging grandfather and his sons decided that it was better to give over the family farm to someone else who would rent the land and farm it than to do it yourself. Farming is just too hard. Too little control over the many variables that make the difference between a good year and a bad year.
I was glad that my parents were committed from the beginning to giving me a good education. I was convinced that I could find a career free from the vagaries of weather and pests. From a fifth-grade science-fair project on soybean germination to a high-school molecular-biology project that I arranged at a local university, I was passionate about biology. I chose my undergraduate university in large part because I could begin work in a laboratory three months before the freshman year started.
At college, I was all about molecular biology. Involved with the biology club. Tutoring biology classes. Doing outreach workshops on biology in local elementary schools. I couldn't wait to apply to graduate schools. It was so exciting to fly from one institution to another, talking to scientists whose work I had previously known only through their publications. My undergraduate lab had been terrific, but the graduate schools I chose between were really the big time. It had been one good year after another, and I expected more.
I jumped into graduate school with great enthusiasm. My classes went well, and I joined a laboratory just as a new field was opening up. I've published nine papers in less than three years. I've published in two of the top three journals, and journal editors have solicited my research papers. This was exactly where I had thought I wanted to be.
But graduate school hasn't felt entirely good. My years there have been successful in many ways, but this success feels precarious. Our lab has been one of the top in its field, but everyone in the lab fears we are always close to toppling. My high-school and undergraduate work had been in labs that were in small, poorly supported subfields. Often, there were experiments I wanted to do that were just too expensive -- for us, even the most trivial supplies were carefully accounted for and worried over.
In my graduate-school lab, I can do any experiment I wish. But being at this level in a hot field also means frantically hitting "reload" on my Internet browser each Wednesday and Thursday afternoon when the tables of contents are posted by Nature and Science. Have we been scooped? It doesn't matter whether our work is better or more thorough; if some other lab has published a set of results before us it renders our efforts largely irrelevant to journal editors.
When I get a result, I immediately wonder who has gotten it before me, and how I can most quickly bring the work to the point of publication. Even when we thought we were doing something really original and creative, usually there were at least three other labs doing work along the same line.
It turns out that my frustration over the pressures to publish first has been analyzed in a report supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, "Careers and Rewards in Bio Sciences: the disconnect between scientific progress and career progression." The report found that the best description for academic bioscience was a tournament model, where many people with similar abilities and resources compete for a small number of "prizes." In academic bioscience, the prize is publication, necessary for grant support. And without grants, it's hard to do very many experiments.
This report's economic analysis of biology made me realize that I'd been wrong to think that I could avoid farming. Everything is like farming. My lab has insect problems only when someone leaves a window open, but in biology and probably any other career I could follow, there are always going to be factors beyond my control. I can't control whether other people's experiments are going to work (let alone whether mine will work!). What I can control is my decision about what path to follow after graduation.
The thought of jumping ship from academic science is heretical to my adviser and to many of the other people who run my fairly new Ph.D. program. A lab mate's brief query about jobs in industry elicited an hourlong tirade from our adviser. According to him, industry is a horrible, boring place. My lab mate and I think that there must be some reason people work there.
Many of the successful scientists at my institution seem to hope that they will produce more successful scientists exactly in their image, but I'm not convinced that I want to plant my field the same way they did.
I spend so much time at work I literally don't know what to do when I go home. (My adviser's thrice daily telephone calls and countless e-mail messages from his vacation spot suggest that he has the same problem.) I vaguely remember a time when I had hobbies, but when I'm not at work I feel like I should be there, that I'm only getting further behind. My apartment is littered with half-begun projects -- all put off until the next paper is in, which are then put off until we've dealt with the reviewer's comments, by which point it's time to move on to a new project.
Somehow, I want to find a balance of some sort. I want to be challenged by the work that I do, but I want to remember what books and friends and family are. I still want to do biology. I actually like the cold room (that's working in a walk-in refrigerator for those non-protein chemists out there). I just need to find a place where good years can feel good.
I'm leaning toward industry. I realize that this may be because I know very little about it. On the other hand, professors, friends, and even students who failed my chemistry lab class have insisted that I should most definitely become a teacher. So I'm not closing the door completely to academia. I'm just hoping that I can figure out what a good year will look like. Right after I reload the Science table of contents.
