In my last communiqué I expressed my frustration with the low pay associated with life as an average scientific researcher in academe. I was so dismayed I contemplated jumping from the ivory tower.
Since writing that first column, the fiduciary potential of my lottery-ticket retirement plan remains unfulfilled. The obvious course of action, -- a series of angry rants against overpaid "dot-commers," accompanied by fist-shaking and hand-wringing in front of an equally animated audience in the bathroom mirror -- has undeniable cathartic appeal (and long precedent.) Instead I've decided to actually do something. I'm going to try to get a job that pays more money. While moving to industry seems like the obvious answer, it isn't an easy decision.
There are a number of barriers for a scientist-in-training contemplating the shift to industry. Perhaps the hardest to overcome is the sense that one has failed.
When I was an undergraduate, I sat in on a few graduate-school courses in biology, and took some of the exams for my own edification. I remember one of the questions was framed with the statement "if you succeed in your experimental design, you will be on your way to a juicy N.I.H. grant and years of fruitful research; if you fail, you'll be a sales representative for Bio-Rad." While the overall tone was intended to be jocular, the underlying contempt for those who pursue careers in business was quite clear.
This contempt creates another barrier -- it makes me hesitant to discuss employment in industry with any of my usual scientific mentors. I haven't yet fully made up my mind to enter the private sector, and I don't want to burn any bridges to academe until I'm sure I want to leave. Many of my mentors are people who will write my letters of recommendation, and I'm not sure they would push hard to position me in academe if they knew that my commitment was questionable.
But the biggest barrier is more tangible. It's been almost impossible to find time to actually look for a job. Like most postdocs, I don't have a private office, or even a private phone. My work in the laboratory demands more than 10 hours a day. The lab is packed with other postdocs, so it is impossible for my job search to be clandestine. And I can't pursue a new position without very obviously compromising my current commitments. Nor do I particularly want to alarm my boss. I enjoy working with him, and he's often lamented that he can't pay me more. In some ways, the low pay is even more frustrating for the bosses than it is for the students. They are well aware that the pay is not competitive with industry, which makes them particularly sensitive to moves that look like job searches, placing them in a state of hyper-vigilance. It is almost as if one has to break with academe just to have the time to learn more about careers in industry.
What avenues are open to someone in my position? E-mail helps enormously, allowing me to network in a way that does not disrupt my work. "Alternative career" seminars are another source of information. Lastly, I've consulted this site, which has turned out to provide an amazingly broad range of useful advice.
Here's what I've learned so far:
One of my old classmates got her degree in cell biology, and is now a project manager who coordinates clinical trials with many local companies. This makes her an excellent contact. Her specialty is "high through-put quantitative screens." She told me that companies want future employees to bring skills that fill a void in existing operations. So, she said, it is important for me to emphasize my technical skills rather than discoveries that I made as a scientist.
While this is quite reasonable, it nevertheless comes as bit of a blow. I've spent a great deal of effort establishing my abilities and reputation as an independent thinker, publishing in the most prestigious journals I could so that people within the tiny purview of my field know who I am. In other words, establishing my name. Now, it seems, "who" I am is not important, it is what I can do that counts. "What about all those great first author papers I wrote? Each one was a major victory!" I asked in a wounded, unnaturally high-pitched voice. "Oh, you can't dwell on those," she responds, "the companies are in no position to evaluate your work critically." Oh well.
My friend also warned me not to rely on sending résumés. She said companies rarely have time to read résumés, and often don't believe what's written in them anyway. It's much better, she said, to give a job-talk at the place where you're interested in working. Lastly, she urged me not to mention salary until a firm offer is made by the employer. Apparently employers take a dim view of employees who appear too grasping. I'm sure they do, but it makes it hard for me, as salary is the only reason I'm considering leaving academe.
How can I intelligently choose a company if my main criterion is veiled? It also places the leverage in the hands of the employer. It's unfair, but all of the people I've spoken to have echoed my friend's advice, so for now I'll follow it. Oh, one pleasant surprise was that for scientists, attire in the corporate world need not be strictly formal for interviews. She suggested a nice oxford shirt and "Dockers."
My second source of information, the "alternative career" seminar, has been disappointing. All the representatives are from local companies that develop "high through-put quantitative screens" on silicon chips -- a technology that allows you to inexpensively and rapidly test the efficacy of many drugs. Few of them seemed to be concerned with whether their technologies cure disease. Instead they seemed obsessed with whether their technology was easier/faster/more efficient than a competitor's. They sounded more like entrepreneurs than scientists, often referring to their few discoveries with the rather dismissive term "product." They also referred to themselves using the royal "we," obscuring responsibility for ideas. That left me wondering if the speaker had invented the ideas presented, or if representing a company had subsumed his ego into the corporate culture. Interestingly, they all wore Dockers.
Even more demoralizing was the fact that the audience was a virtual who's who of singularly unimpressive postdocs. I was just looking over them ruefully and hoping that I could sneak out when the only speaker who seemed reasonably bright confessed that a lot of his work in industry is "dull," and warned us that his colleagues are not of the same caliber as those in academe. I was surprised by his candor, but it reminded me of one of the graduate students in my program who fled an extremely lucrative job in industry because he found it painfully dull. Every time I see him, he looks cheerful. When I ask him how it's going, he grins and says, "it beats working for a living!"
Lastly, I had an opportunity to network. I bumped into a fellow postdoc who was an adept neuroscientist/molecular biologist but who now works in industry. I asked him how he liked it. His eyes lit up. "It's great, it's great," his head nodding rapidly up and down in a remarkable imitation of the defensive posture of a Galapagos island iguana. "What do you do there?" I asked, thinking to myself, I'm going to be sick if he says "quantitative assay." "We've developed a new high through-put random screen bio-optical quantitative assay!" I managed to furrow my brow into a semblance of sage interest. "And we have a great system with a really neat twist, we use a BEAD instead of a chip! Imagine the increased surface area!" The mind boggles. He continued, "Yes, you should check us out." He gave me his card.
I had done it. My first act of "networking." But I couldn't help noticing how often he said "we" and "us." I looked down. He was wearing Dockers. They must issue them on initiation day at all biotech companies; the cult of the Dockers. I'm beginning to regard them as the emblem of compromise, the sublimation of self.
As I've talked to people, and tried to picture life in industry, I've noticed with increasing anxiety that I'm still not completely comfortable with the idea of relinquishing my identity as an independent, known scientist within my tiny field. Years of conditioning in graduate school have led me to want to desperately struggle for the grudging respect of my bitter and underpaid colleagues.
I realize that I probably need to be "deprogrammed," but I confess that I see the heroic culture of academic science in perhaps an overly romantic light. The culture is probably the same as most academic fields, but for those of you in the humanities, The Iliad provides a familiar and apt analogy for academic science. Like the heroes in Homer's epic, academic scientists are proud, territorial, and competitive. Competition for limited grant money throws them into constant conflict. Brief heroic deeds are followed by long speeches that underscore the importance of their discoveries. Instead of fighting over Helen, our scientific heroes fight over the precise role of nitric oxide synthase in erectile dysfunction, for example. One can see Agamemnon as a powerful but greedy department head, and Achilles as a superstar grant-winner. Instead of concubines, arable land, and gold, they now bicker over postdocs, lab space, and equipment. Indeed, self-determination, and the gratification of the ego are major lures of academic science. Why else would academic scientists work night and day running their own labs, however small, underfunded, and stressful, rather than yield ultimate responsibility to a company in return for a healthy paycheck, state-of-the-art facilities, and normal working hours?
It would seem that the credo for this band of individuals arises, in its most extreme form, from Milton's Paradise Lost: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."
Despite my reservations, my search for employment in the private sector continues. While my early brushes with industry haven't been encouraging, it's still very early in the process. It's clear that the local companies don't quite have a handle on how to present themselves in a way that fires the imagination, but there must be many companies with happy, intellectually engaged scientists. And when one considers what the private sector is reputed to offer -- state-of-the-art facilities, shorter work days, vacation time, stock options -- surely I'm due for a little "heaven," even if one's name isn't immortalized by heroic deeds.
In short, I'm keeping an open mind. After all, Achilles never wore Dockers, but he never had stock options either.
