http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/article/oh-the-places-youll-go/
I am a wanna be scientist.
To make it clear, I have spent 6.5 years of my life at Universities, so far.
Including the 3 years at Higher Education where my "scientific madness" was born, let's say around 10 in total.
1 year belongs to undergraduate research thesis and internship training, 1 year goes to my research Master (split into 2 labs) and a half goes to the first period of my PhD.
And I am almost 24.
TOO MUCH OF SCHOOL & RESEARCH!
Getting back home after a quite tiring Monday in the lab (Mondays are awful by default, count also the fact that it happened to be one of those days that NOTHING works...) the above article caught my attention.
Lots and lots of people move from academia to the industry. I can't say wether the article is on the positive or negative side, but that's true.
It's common that students realise that they actually want something else and switch. Academic career is tough. And it becomes further tough given those statistics which show that the position availability trend doesn't follow such a dramatic increase as that one of the number of PhDs.
The research area is a demanding field that requires extreme effort and sacrifices sometimes. It's not that you have to do "a lot of work". Well, it's not only that!
You have to invest three quarters of your time to your work. You don't have a fixed working-hour plan. Usually, you are also working from home. Even your free time is occupied.
Again, it's not that simple!
You have to be there, concentrated, working hard, with both your brain and your hands the same time. You have to be a perfect calculator, a perfect organiser (keeping record before and after the experiment), a perfect analyser.
You have to be critical, to observe very carefully, to compare, to perform troubleshooting when something goes wrong, to be flexible.
You have to be good at working on your pc, as well as sitting upright when on the bench.
You have to own communicative skills, to be talkative, approachable and sociable. To build collaborations, to ask when you don't understand, to explore when you don't know.
You have to be able to suggest, to interpret, to be technically correct.
An inspiring talker, a succinct writer, always to the point, friendly but competitive!
All this sounds terrifying, but also challenging, isn't it?
Unfortunately, it remains hard.
A lot of people realise that investing so much, keeps them away from real life.
Quite often, though, they find themselves working hard, but without knowing why and what for.
It is when you feel that you have been transformed into a hard worker, not a scientist any more!
And this is far away from what you had imagined, obviously.
Losing the "big picture" by focusing on the detail of the detail, is really disappointing. And happens quite often!
In my opinion, this is the primary reason why people move to alternative careers, beyond research.
The need to communicate. The need to feel the magic of science by sharing, explaining in simple words to common people. The need to visualise again the "big picture". That picture they dreamt of when at school, when they attended the first Biology class, the first Chemistry class.
Remaining a lover of your PhD regardless the difficulties and keep seeing the "big picture"?
Very tricky!
But if you manage, the success is with you!
Miss M.
(trying every single day not to miss the big picture and then the whole research game...)
