The Inner Ramblings of a Distracted (and transitioning) Scientist...
As I type this, the infamous Throne Room & Finale plays in my head (shout out to all my band geeks and Star Wars fans). So, let’s cut the bullshit and just jump straight into it. As academicians, specifically early career academicians, there is this culture of devaluing the PhD trainee. After pursuing years of education and acquiring insurmountable levels of debt, the financial reward for a doctoral level researcher in the academy is laughable. Lab techs with bachelor’s degrees sometimes make more than a postdoctoral trainee!
How is this fair?
I’ll tell you how! It’s because the academy is a pyramid scheme fueled by cheap labor and tax dollars where only a very small few at the top of the food chain reap the benefit of other people’s hard labor.
The American educational system is one of the biggest cash cows in the civilized world. RO1 institutions are pulling in funds from every direction, federal dollars, state dollars, government grants for individual research programs, and tuition dollars…. That isn’t even the exhaustive list.
On top of the various funding mechanisms, many of these institutions pay jack shit to the people doing most of the hard work. In the research lab, you get free labor from undergrads who desire training (they’re basically paying to work) you’ve got graduate students who do the bulk of the research, (they typically get fellowships to fund their education with a laughable stipend (19-24k on average). And finally the post-doc, who typically is tasked with managing the lab and carrying the PI’s vision forward who has spent at minimum 4-5 years, but likely more, struggling to achieve a terminal degree that may or may not lead to gainful employment, only earns on average 47-52k/ year. TF? The tenured PI, whose average salary is between 88-120k/ year basically pays their own salary through competitively won grants and in a more common than acceptable situation, could care less about student development.
All that to say the system is broken AF. We are continuously met with poop smelling roses of BS that attempt to shove some selfless philosophy in our faces, of the love of learning and pure curiosity that drives and motivates the scientist to be cheap labor because it’s for the good of humanity.
Fuck that (Not the good of humanity… but the selfless philosophy part).
The cost of living continues to go up while salaries remain stagnant, and you mean to tell me that not even going the extra mile to get a doctorate even qualifies me to live above the poverty line (or at least what feels like the poverty line lol)?
In 1989, my dad was earning 50,000 with an associate’s degree in computer science. After my parents divorced and my mom moved around, she finally landed a decent job in 2003 and started working at a call center (associate’s degree in general studies) starting at 38,000 and after 14 years with that company she was earning close to 65,000/year. In 2018, I graduated with my PhD in Cancer Biology, and the only ‘job’ I qualified for paid a measly 47,000/ year. I don’t think I need to go into inflation, cost of living and all the other finer details to make my point.
It’s like they’re saying shut up and take what we give you. You should be grateful to be able to train at such a prestigious institution. Pay your dues, suffer quietly, make us money, and DANCE, Puppet! DANCE!
They (the infamous ‘they’) make you feel like you’re a bad person for desiring to be paid anything above 60k, which results in some of the most educated folk in the world being paid a fraction of their actual worth.
I interviewed with a well-known pharmaceutical company recently, and when the topic of salary came up, I got incredibly nervous. I have attended several seminars talking about knowing your worth and what not, but I was still nervous to ask for the amount I asked for due to conditioning.
When I said my number, the HR rep said, “Oh, okay. That’s not bad.” I turned red. And when the offer letter came to my inbox, it was well over the amount I had requested!
Industry: Is it really the dark side, or have we been psychologically conditioned to gain pleasure from our suffering? Are we such masochists that the perception of betraying the Ivory Tower that has devalued us so, is so unfathomable that we avoid mentioning it to our mentors and tip toe into our 6 figure salaries, only to feel guilty for achieving financial independence?
After my 9-month stint in a post-doc barely making ends meet in the great city of Chicago… the ‘evil industry’ has never seemed so appealing. In all honesty, Big Pharma is not the devil. At least not the company I’m now working for. Several large biopharmaceutical companies are extremely philanthropic. They partner with their communities to help train young people, they give back through allowing their employees to use work hours to volunteer, they partner with hospitals and universities to conduct clinical trials and participate in the scientific peer review process. Their drugs are tightly regulated, and they have a mission to cure illness, and finally, they compensate well the people passionate enough to carry the mantel of the organization’s mission.
If you are a graduate student pursuing your PhD, make sure you’re informed. Be sure to talk to your advisor so you can do internships at companies during your summers. That way you can have a back door in, AND you don’t have to spend 5 years or more in a poorly paid post-doc fellowship position.
This isn’t to say that the academy is not a viable career path, but if you’re on this PhD journey into the academy for a tenure track position, you better be sure about it, you better be intentional early on, and you better not just be going with the flow to see where you land. And if you are, that’s okay. You’ve got your whole life to figure this mess out.
“Yo, Anakin! Where’d you get your Vader helmet? Did that come with the uniform?”
I’ll catch you all on the flip side… and if your curiosity is piqued…. come on over to the Dark Side with me.