As someone with a Bachelors in Biochemistry and Computer Science, my sense is that the frustration comes not from the lack of transferable skills per se, but that there is not a lot of self determination and opportunity.
The challenge with big bio science is that you need access to tremendous resources to do anything interesting. Labs are expensive, equipment is expensive so you need to get access through the gates before you can do anything. Once you are in a lab, you have to manage aligned agendas between your PI and yourself to move forward. Large bioscience is about resource acquisition. The same is probably true of high energy particle physicists. The lack of jobs and positions is a side effect that a lab just needs a lot of resources. Ecologist and other field biologists seem less miserable. You can do low cost field work as a field biologist.
Computing as another commented, in biostatistics allows a degree of able to do the work directly. And in that area costs are getting cheaper. As a computer person, I can do things without needing to get permission. Bio is still the most interesting thing, hey we've never engineered life, open question. But the age of gentleman biology is long gone.
There is a lot of good molecular bio to be done, but there are few opportunities due to exogenous factors. Half the effort is getting the opportunity and that is definitely miserable.
I fell in love with the idea of biology research when I worked in a small lab as an undergraduate. There was a sense of intellectual freedom and exploration that was intoxicating, as well as a certain romance to working late nights in the lab, working with obscure technology to chase an idea.
Then I went to graduate school, and it became clear to me that professional research is a grinder -- just as political and bullshit-prone as any other job (if not more so), but with lower stakes and crappy earning potential. The core of what I loved was still there, but wrapped in seventeen layers of bureaucracy and careerists and conflicted interests. Modern science is as much about money and power as it is about ideas, and that really sucks.
The author is right that your advisor often wants you to do things that are against your own long-term self interest: they're paying you to work on a project, not spend time chasing rainbows. And you're right that the self-determination and opportunity in professional science is almost completely gone. You've got to be the PI of a lab if you want to have a career, but the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you.
At this point, I think that the true promise of science can only be realized by the independently wealthy.
All true. We create a glut of specialized people while the market has been shrinking. Universities aren't hiring.
One solution is trying to transition people into applied biology - i.e. medicine. We could always use more doctors. What's crazy is you could have a Ph.D. in biological sciences yet need to spend another few hundred grand to get trained as a doctor. A general care practitioner needn't spend seven years to get trained.
I was under the impression that the professional organizations kept a pretty tight grip on the number of medical school students allowed to graduate every year - the reason we could use more doctors is that doctors enjoy the job security that comes with this enforced scarcity. It's certainly not the case that you really need to have both a perfect 4.0 GPA and have gone to the moon to be capable of performing as a doctor (as the application process for med schools would have you believe... after all, Europe manages to train doctors straight out of highschool in 3 years + internships/fellowships/etc. compared to North America's 4+ years + a bachelor's degree).
> after all, Europe manages to train doctors straight out
> of highschool in 3 years + internships/fellowships/etc.
> compared to North America's 4+ years + a bachelor's
> degree).
It's at least six years of med school in Germany, France and the UK, although I can't vouch for any other European states. But I do agree with your basic point: the selectivity isn't due to doctors having to be much more skilled than, say, (real) engineers.
Eastern Europe here, Romania more specifically - the standard is 5 years plus internship, more for certain specializations. I never heard of (nor would I trust) 3 year medical schools...
I think relatively few medical students had a perfect 4.0 GPA in college. Even places like Harvard Med School have entering students averaging 3.8.
Not sure how professional organizations can keep a "tight grip" on med school slots when foreign medical school graduates (and osteopathic medical school grads) can take USMLE medical boards. The pass rates for foreign medical grads, including US students who study abroad, are about 15-20% lower than US medical grads. My point is that the choke point for future doctors isn't the number of medical school slots but the USMLE pass rate and possibly the number of residency slots.
A Ph.D in most biological sciences would only teach you enough to get through the first year of medical school (although in far more detail than you need for medicine). The last 2 years of medical school are a practical application of your coursework as you work with residents and more senior doctors to diagnose and treat patients. Medical school still follows the old guild model where you do some initial learning and then a long period of apprenticeship before you are allowed to go off on your own.
That's why combined PhD/MD programs still take about 7 years - and that's not including residency and fellowships if you decide to actually practice medicine instead of becoming a scientist.
disclaimer - not a doctor, but did a biological PhD and have several family members who just completed their MDs.
That's my problem with academia and university culture. They don't show how their degree can translate to real jobs. So they graduate only to find out they're only qualified to work in universities as a researcher! For example, in biology you only have two options outside of research: law or medicine.
That's a perfectly reasonable position to hold, but it might be inconsistent with the idea that a university education should be for everyone. (I don't think it can ever be for everyone.)
I think there should be special schools for people who just want a job. Most of what you learn at a university isn't particularly important for anything you do in the industry anyway. At least in CS it's like that, I can't speak for other fields.
The problem is that a university degree has more prestige that a technical school. So employers use it as a measure of the ability of the people they are hiring, and then complain that their new hires don't have enough practical skills. So the technical schools become universities and start offering degrees in tourism, IT management, and financial planning.
That's a remarkably blinkered view of the world and I can probably call about about 200 examples where this is incorrect, especially today when biologist could mean someone with expertise in Bayesian analysis.
To be fair, there are also private research foundations and private sector companies -- i.e., drug or medical device companies that also hire biologists. You can also pivot somewhat easily into public health and work for e.g., the Department of Health. And if all else fails, teach high school or lower biology.
"And if all else fails, teach high school or lower biology."
With yet more years in education to get your teacher certificate, while your student debt accrues interest and grows, and which you will have to pay down in a career whose income potential has quite likely already peaked and is quite likely headed down over the next 20 years while you are competing for salary against people who don't need to pay down anywhere near as much debt and with additional qualifications that the schools don't care about at all.
In the US, PhD students in biology are paid tuition plus salary. So assuming his undergraduate student loans were subsidized, a PhD who decided to teach high school would not be in a much different financial position than a recently graduated Science B.Ed.
Not to mention that there are magnet high schools that do very much like the perceived prestige of having PhD level instructors. Your typical public high school wouldn't care, of course.
Not to mention that there are magnet high schools that do very much like the perceived prestige of having PhD level instructors. Your typical public high school wouldn't care, of course.
That's not true everywhere. Where I live, there's nearly unlimited public school choice and school districts must reimburse each other at a state-mandated rate for transferred students. Especially in poorer districts, this rate is generally higher than the per-student funding the schools receive for in-district students. (I've heard it's up to $1500/year more.) Individual schools that can recruit students by offering specialized programs (languages, music, science, etc.) can increase their funding quite a bit.
I assume the rationale is that it's the student's fault if he chooses a major (e.g., sociology) that doesn't cover interest afterwards.
Well, if you say so? Of course, it grossly oversimplifies reality. Job markets are complex; lack of success cannot always be traced back to bad choices. Also, you could level a very similar objection against health insurance. Personally, I'm not comfortable with that kind of senseless cut-throat capitalism.
In the EU, I assume the OP was alluding to the fact that everyone else is forced to pay (most of) your college costs. Therefore, you owe very little debt upon graduation. Private gains, socialized losses.
Hence physician assistants. Stanford's program takes 1.5 years post ba. They can do most/all of what doctors and surgeons can do, but they may require a doctor to sign off on what they do; this varies by state. See http://www.princetonreview.com/Careers.aspx?cid=181
I'd bet that for a good chunk of what a general doctor does -- yup your ear is infected, here's an antibiotic; your wrist sure is broken, let me cast it; it hurts to pee -- uti or std; a full md is overkill. Living in SF, my gf who has had less complicated medical issues than me primarily sees a PA at One Medical Group, who by the way I would recommend. I recently tore ligaments in my ankle and broke my tibia plus fibula; even my orthopaedic surgeon has PAs helping her maximize efficiency.
I think this article is a bit sensationalist. Yes, there are niche techniques in biology, but many -- Western blots, qPCR, cell culture, transfection -- are transferable to almost any other biology lab.
The article's core advice -- make sure to acquire transferable skills -- is certainly a good idea, though.
As a bioinformatics PhD student, life is great: I get to learn those programming and math skills specifically mentioned by the article as being transferable, along with some of the other more esoteric skills. (Moral of the story: choose bioinformatics! :)
You're right about bioinformatics/biostatistics. That's my advice to anyone that wants to major in biology and actually get a decent job out of it. You can always fall back on being a code monkey if biology doesn't pan out...
In my case, I have an BA in Biology and MS in Env. Science/Biology and that led me into software for that discipline (GIS). So, for the past 10+ years I've been a software developer but with specialized environmental knowledge.
A postdoc without job prospects, for instance. If there's one thing less desirable than churning out Java for an insurance company, then it's being a lab monkey with no realistic chance of getting a tenure track position.
So, yes, quite a few people want to be code monkeys.
Why so much prejudice against Perl on Hacker News??!!
I should know, because I shared the same biased views until I had a job which required quick iterations of complicated computation of a large dataset with limited hardware. I never had really used perl before that, but when it started to save me literally weeks of work I came to love it.
There's a tool for every job.
I think I didn't like Perl before because the code looked hard to understand. But since then I found out first hand one can do shitty C or Python too.
Sorry, I just had to suffer some Perl plus Bash and Makefiles big-ball-of-mud at work. Just makes you disgruntled. (We're re-writing that piece in Haskell.)
I don't know how other Perl programs fare. Probably better. Though the syntax makes you cry. And treating things like lists of lists as an advanced topic, that's needs something special like `references'. Did I mention how functions get their parameters? The interpolation in strings can be handy, though.
And I agree about the possibility of bad code in Python and C. (I have some Python nightmare at hand, too.)
Well, bioinformaticians are far from uniform in terms of language usage (my mentor staunchly defends his use of VB6, for instance...), but this link shows people using Python for structural bioinformatics as early as 2001: http://mgl.scripps.edu/people/sanner/html/talks/PSB2001talk....
I wouldn't call biology students the most miserable... But as someone with a biochemistry degree (BS), I totally agree with the main point of the article: A PhD in Biology does not guarantee a job. You spend all this time and money on what seems, to a layperson, to be an amazing degree with amazing job opportunities working on the cutting edge of technology cloning dinosaurs yada yada yada.
Unfortunately, you graduate only to find out that you're only qualified to work in a lab at a research university! All your computer science buddies are now millionaires and they paid a quarter of the tuition you did. You're over qualified for most jobs in the private sector and you most likely lack the experience for private sector jobs that do require PhDs! You learn all these advanced specialised skills that end up being worthless--they're either being performed by machines or students/interns. The same can be said about other "purely academic" majors such as economics, international studies, political science, physics, mathematics, etc.
That's my biggest problem with academia and university culture. They only exist to train a new generation of professors and other academics. They don't seem to care about teaching their students more vocational skills relevant to their major or highlight possible private sector career paths after they graduate.
For example, Arabic and Chinese are hot topics right now, so as a student, you figure you should get an international studies degree in one of these cultures. You hear it all the time in the news how the defense industry is starving for these people. You graduate and find out that no one wants someone who can speak Arabic or Mandarin fluently unless they have a business, statistics or computer science degree... You might as well have gone to a vocational/technical college and learned Arabic on the side.
I can only speak to what I have seen so this is anecdotal, but I have not had a problem getting a job with a degree in mathematics (bachelor's not PHD). Now, it is true that those jobs tended to be in related areas (data analysis, programming) rather than directly in mathematics, but the degree has still served me well. I have also been turned down for jobs looking directly for mathematicians because I currently only hold a bachelor's and they required at least a masters.
The same goes for physics. I have friends with master's in physics that have never had problems finding a job, though the jobs were rarely directly in physics. Rather they got jobs working with engineers or in programming (or in one case, pure management), but the degree still served them well.
It took me a while to figure out that Biomedical Engineering degree tracks were made in response to a need for grad students in this area and not a need in the industry.
Industry asks, why hire a biomed when I can hire a mechanical engineer and a electrical engineer. Separate those two parts of the project and have a manager that understands the biology of the problem.
The hope for one of these engineers is to get past the usual resume screens and convince the people hiring that they are as good at electrical as the EE and/or as good at mechanics as the ME.
Luckily for any engineer, entrepreneurship is also an option.
A key problem is that the ratio of trainees (graduate students) to tenure track positions is way out of whack. It's a pyramid. I've made this point here in the past, with estimates of the numbers involved:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470181
Well it's essentially the same problem for actions. The dream appeals to many, but the work is only available for a smaller number. The result is a lot of struggling actors competing for the same work. The same goes for the vast array of courses in translation, film-making, forensic science, creative writing, game design or any number of appealing careers. There are always going to be more people wanting to do these jobs than there are positions available and educational institutions have no problem taking their money.
with so much bio-engineering to be done, i was under impression that there is a shortage of trained people. With vast public datasets, cheap computing and sequencing resources, and with people doing bio-engineering as hobby and school projects, one can only wonder what stops us in that path.
Well, first of all, a traditional student will be out by age 26-27 not 40. Secondly, PhD students in the sciences are paid. Not much, admittedly -- about $22k, on average -- but enough that you have positive cashflow.
That's true, although the average age for a scientist to land a tenure track position is in their late 30s, after several postdocs (where you are barely paid more than a graduate student). Ican't find the citation at the moment, but I believe it came from the NIH.
Postdocs nowadays tend to make something on the order of $50K (as compared to maybe $25K for a grad student). It's not big face money, but it's a big step up from grad student life.
The challenge with big bio science is that you need access to tremendous resources to do anything interesting. Labs are expensive, equipment is expensive so you need to get access through the gates before you can do anything. Once you are in a lab, you have to manage aligned agendas between your PI and yourself to move forward. Large bioscience is about resource acquisition. The same is probably true of high energy particle physicists. The lack of jobs and positions is a side effect that a lab just needs a lot of resources. Ecologist and other field biologists seem less miserable. You can do low cost field work as a field biologist.
Computing as another commented, in biostatistics allows a degree of able to do the work directly. And in that area costs are getting cheaper. As a computer person, I can do things without needing to get permission. Bio is still the most interesting thing, hey we've never engineered life, open question. But the age of gentleman biology is long gone.
There is a lot of good molecular bio to be done, but there are few opportunities due to exogenous factors. Half the effort is getting the opportunity and that is definitely miserable.