There’s an article in the 19 September 2008 issue of Science (“And Then There Was One”) [1] that catches up with many of the 30 men and women who made up the incoming class of 1991 in the molecular biophysics and biochemistry (MB&B) Ph.D. program at Yale University. The article raises lots of interesting questions, including what counts as a successful career in science. (Not surprisingly, it depends who you ask.) The whole article is well worth a read no matter what stage of the science career pipeline you’re at (although it’s behind a paywall, so you may have to track it down at your local library).
Because there’s so much going on in the article, rather than try to distill it in a single blog post, I thought I would point out a few thought-provoking comments contained in it:
About early attrition in the entering class of 1991:
Four class members left within the first year of the program, one after an internal investigation into allegations of scientific misconduct. (1623)
I cannot help but wonder what kind of misconduct a person can (allegedly) get into in one’s first year of grad school that is serious enough to trigger an internal investigation. I’m especially wondering what kind of supervision and mentoring this first year student was getting.
About this graduate cohort’s efforts to organize a speaker series featuring graduates of the program who had pursued alternative scientific careers:
[Athena] Nagi said the group wrestled with the definition of an alternative career and decided that the answer was, in essence, “anything that didn’t involve teaching at a major research university.” (1626)
How much of this perspective do we get from the professors who teach us how to be scientists? And would graduate students in science be happier and better-adjusted if they found out sooner, rather than later, that there is scientific life outside of the academy?
From entering class of 1991 member Peter Kosa, about the experience of being a graduate student:
At the beginning, they are paying you to go to school, and you think, ‘Wow, what could be better?’But by the end, it just seems like a low-paying job. (1627)
Boy, does this sound familiar! Those hours in the lab seem exciting at first, but a few years in they can start to wear you down. (Of course, that it feels like a low-paying job can sometimes be a significant incentive to finish up and get out.)
From entering class of 1991 member Tammy Spain, about her experience in her second postdoctoral fellowship:
I was developing preliminary data that I hoped to use to write up an R01 application. But the person I was working under had run into funding problems, and the lab was limping along with only one NIH grant. So he decided to incorporate my work in his next application. I don’t really fault him. What else could he do? (1627)
The boundaries between postdoc and advisor, between being mentored and being independent, between being responsible for the ideas and results and being responsible for the funding and infrastructure that lets research happen — those lines can be pretty fuzzy. Sometimes negotiable boundaries let a team negotiate, being flexible and working things out in a way that makes sense in each case. Sometimes, however, they can leave you pretty vulnerable.
From entering class of 1991 member Nobuyuki Ota, about his experiences working in industry versus academia:
In academia, some of the papers are not reliable and the findings are not reproducible. In industry, if you don’t make a very good antibody, there are tests that can prove it doesn’t work. So you have to be honest. (1628)
This advantage of research in industry seems not to be talked about much in Ph.D. programs. Seeing as how these programs are nestled in academia, maybe this has to do with certain blindspots about the ivory tower.
Lots of food for thought here (and really, just an appetizer — the whole article is a feast).
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[1] Jeffrey Mervis, “And Then There Was One,” Science (19 September 2008) Vol. 321. no. 5896,1622 – 1628.
First year stuff is usually plagiarizing or cheating on take home exams etc.
Those numbers are quite sobering, because that program is tops, and they likely have even more students every year now. I also like the understated themes of people having to move because of family, etc. and how it makes the careers difficult, and how junior faculty were/are at extreme disadvantages. The job is not the light at the end of the tunnel.
> And would graduate students in science be happier
> and better-adjusted if they found out sooner,
> rather than later, that there is scientific life
> outside of the academy?
At Caltech, they try to resolve this in-house, so to speak. They have a PhD/Postdoc Career Conference annually where Caltech PhD grads who wound up not working in academia come back for a symposium on “alternative” careers.
The attendance is always high, but it has occurred to me that the attendees are usually close to their defense, as opposed to just starting…
Those numbers are quite sobering, because that program is tops, and they likely have even more students every year now.
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If I am not mistaken, that year was unusual for MB&B at Yale (i.e. much larger than norm). Usually they have about 15 students in an entering class. Looking at the most recent directory on the department’s website, I count 14 first-years listed. The 1991 class is a snapshot that may not be representative of a usual class. What I found most interesting (distressing) is the lack of data MB&B had of where students ended up. Shouldn’t departments have this info readily available? Would be useful for grad students to establish contacts about career options especially for students working in lab’s of junior faculty members.
I was actually really interested that they had so many of their entering class graduate, and in a reasonably quick fashion.
One of my classmates in grad school was kicked out during our 2nd year for plagiarizing entire passages from textbooks in a take-home qualifying exam. Needless to say, the take home format was abolished the following year.
(Of course, that it feels like a low-paying job can sometimes be a significant incentive to finish up and get out.)
Yes. OTOH, I was just comfortable enough that I was able to spend my last year doing side projects on loose ends, giving presentations, building up my teaching portfolio, and doing a lot of other professional/personal development that took time that might have otherwise been spent writing up ASAP. I think I benefited tremendously from that fairly low-pressure final year. OK, some of my support came from teaching rather than research, making me slightly less dependent on my advisor, but, yeah, not having the “Get done ASAP!” pressure on me was helpful. If I had buckled down I could have been out 6 months earlier. I don’t know if I would have gotten the best postdoc and the personal/professional growth that made it possible for me to get a tenure-track job.
To be blunt, I find most American college students, graduate students and postdocs to be spoiled whiners who are not willing to work hard, especially under pressure, to achieve their career goals. Foreign college students, graduate students and postdocs who come to America for their education usually cherish every moment of the opportunity given to them here to reach their goals. They do not whine, they work hard and they, in general, are more successful in their careers than their American counterparts.
I am a recent Yale bio PhD. Yale MB&B has had a very high attrition rate recently as well, for a variety of reasons. And I can personally assure you that the overall message given by the professors is ‘Aren’t you all going to be professors too?’
They also lie to the incoming students about the average time-to-degree. The university keeps very good statistics, which don’t match up.
#6: They learned well from their parents and their society. Why do you expect people to spend lots of time and money to work towards a career that doesn’t exist, doesn’t (in lots of cases) entail respect, and doesn’t pay well? Business and people tend to want to invest their time and money where they can get a return – either in money, or (for people) happiness and utility. The jobs for chemists and biologists, either in academics or in industry, aren’t going to make up the costs (opportunity, since there are not yet many direct costs) of the education needed to qualify for them – in some cases, the jobs don’t exist. (In the extreme comparison, the return time for a Stanford MBA – including tuition and living costs – is five years.) Working long hours to learn neat things is interesting for a short time, but makes it hard to achieve other things that people usually want to do with their lives (families, for example, though obviously that isn’t a blockade), and if that labor doesn’t get them anywhere else, it becomes substantially less interesting. If the light at the end of the tunnel of graduate school/postdocs is an oncoming train, I don’t see why expecting people to apply themselves to that end is rational. (For a description, there was a Science article in August(?) discussing the effect of NIH funding on the biomedical community.) It sounds too much like “Be a hero. Be a teacher.” – if society asks people to sacrifice themselves for what it could purchase (but won’t), I don’t see the purpose in assisting society in doing so.
People from other places may be less selfish and self-centered than we are, and that would be at least in part based on societal differences. However, they are being rational as well – what they can get in the US (or at home, if the jobs come to them) is better than they could have gotten otherwise, and the supply of qualified people is smaller than the jobs available. The willingness of people to work when there are not so many jobs available (or when the ratio of qualified people to jobs is significantly greater than 1) is less clear. People work hard when they think it will get them somewhere, and not so much when they don’t need to or don’t believe that it will get them anywhere. Expecting them to continue to work hard for a behalf that is disproportionately yours is not rational.
The Science article referred to in the previous comment is “Structural Disequilibria in Biomedical Research”, Science, 2008, pp. 644 -645 (1 August 2008).