We have more people going into Science than what the market demands.

[Infohawk]

I really like this thread. Even if I have a different perspective on certain topics I've appreciated everyone's take. Ultimately, we are all limited by their own experience in the labor market. Nobody has done every job and therefore it's very difficult for one person to compare all the professions out there taking into all the various factors that make a job "good" or not.

WhipperSnapper, like I said to nonlnear, I may have been unclear in that I've been thinking about the general labor market for scientists and engineers (even with BSes) as opposed to the likelihood of PhDs getting tenureships. In the end though, whether it's a bogus diploma mill or PhDs from reputable schools, I think we should let people learn what they want and let the market sort them out. (The government shouldn't be funding any mistakes though! We have to stop subsidizing waste-of-time degrees through cheap loans, etc. I think it was nonlnear who suggested the same thing.) WS, I agree with you completely that young people need to be warned about whatever path they take, including the pitfalls of PhD programs or even basic science careers.

I don't know if I agree with the go to med school advice though. That sounds like one-size-fits-all advice that many people give. It really depends on what OP enjoys, which you also suggested is important. Does OP like dealing with people? (If not, being an MD is probably not a great idea unless he wants to be a radiologist.) Does he like helping people? Can he tolerate blood and guts? Does he want to sacrifice a huge chunk of his life training to be an MD? Also, doctors have really been getting screwed lately. They are getting squeezed by the HMOs and doing more paper work than actual treatment. My favorite quote from the son of a doctor is that "being a doctor is a nice middle-class job these days" (explaining why he was not going into that field, then going into law which he decided he didn't like either.) I prefer your recommendation that people get some real world experience. Then they can test things out. They might even find that another degree wouldn't be helpful. A lot of smart successful people I know have had no use for anything beyond a bachelor's.

What I like about miniMUNCH and nonlnear's science experiences is that they truly seemed to enjoy it for its own sake. I think this is the key. I can't stand the people, and they exist in all professions/careers, who chose their path because their parents tell them to, or because they don't know what else to do, or because it's prestigious, or solely because they believe a path is lucrative. It takes spots away from the genuinely interested people. It also pisses me off that high school and even many universities these days are making it so easy for students to get good grades that the unworthy ones are not weeded out first.

One thing we all seem to agree on is that the world is a little disappointing at times. I too would prefer if scientists were higher paid than basketball players BUT I do think the free market is the best system we have. It doesn't surprise me that a specialized salesman with an associate's degree can make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than a highly intelligent scientist. But the answer is not for the scientist to try to become that schmoozing salesman. The true scientist would not be happy trying to sell something he didn't believe in. Sure, he might not have a second home or a BMW, but hopefully we all can agree that he's doing something more meaningful.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Its so sad to live in a society that rewards professional athletes and talentless artists and cocaine sniffing bankers and over payed delusional managers much higher than we reward scientists or medical personal and doctors. And now we wonder why the western world is going down the toilet?

Good one...

Oh, i adapted your post a bit ...

:hmm:

 

[jackace]

BUT I do think the free market is the best system we have. It doesn't surprise me that a specialized salesman with an associate's degree can make hundreds of thousands of dollars more than a highly intelligent scientist.

We don't have a free market and never have.

H1Bs are just one part of the problem with our "free" market. Then we have to consider all the government intervention in our markets and how those interventions effect industries, employers, education of our citizens, etc. All these interventions change markets and all the changes in these markets can greatly impact salaries people can expect to receive.

 

[rudder]

Its so sad to live in a society that rewards professional athletes much higher than we reward scientists. And now we wonder why the USA is going down the toilet?

Pro sports is a business. And when you look at it the actual number of pro players in any sport is miniscule to the amount of people participating in that sport on an advanced level. I've come across a few people who are doing quite well from the patents they received for their scientific inventions. There is just no Monday Night Patent Events on ESPN.

 

[nonlnear]

I find this enlightening. I was talking to my Indian friend awhile ago and he kind of explained it as his parents are going to help him through college and all the like and he has to help them through retirement. Is this accurate of the Indian model?

My limited understanding of the Indian model (which is probably a grossly inaccurate term as India is composed of many distinct cultures and even nations, but I don't know any better) is built around family wealth rather than personal wealth - much like western cultures were prior to the industrial revolution. The family stays together, and the ones of productive working age take care of those who are not: older and younger. There are advantages and disadvantages to be sure. I don't advocate a wholesale return to feudal social models, but certain aspects of them are worth reviving. For example the estate tax thread had people complaining about family businesses and farms. If those are structures that are worth preserving, then it is perhaps possible to create new kinds of business entities that accommodate them. Also the idea that all property is personal property is problematic when attempting to incorporate social structures that are actually predicated on ideas of communal property. If our laws didn't insist on viewing family businesses as personal property of the proprietors, but could see them as communally owned by the family then we wouldn't have the taxation issue of a transfer of wealth when a major "shareholder" dies. (Actually I suspect the existing co-op ownership model could work pretty well if people could get over the need to be "the owner" and didn't think of communal ownership as a communist idea.) But I digress...

 

[bamacre]

Its so sad to live in a society that rewards professional athletes much higher than we reward scientists. And now we wonder why the USA is going down the toilet?

Why stop at athletes? Surely there are plenty of other professions that generally create more wealth than scientists. I'm sure someone could find a list. Maybe, just maybe, scientists aren't actually on the bottom of it.

 

[Babbles]

I have a few thoughts on this. By way of background I have only a B.S. but I've been working as a scientist in the industry for ~ten years. At some point I was doing PhD level work with a B.S. - I was a Study Director or Principal Investigator (depending on the regulation) for bioanalytical studies. I did analytical method development and validation for primary pharma/biotech guys as well as esoteric industrial chemical development.

So my experience in two different states for a three different employers over ten years is that the science industry sucks big time.

Outside of the rare genius scientist that gets paid serious money, the average salary from a B.S. to a PhD essentially sucks. In many companies you need a PhD to do certain work even though it is not really PhD level work; it's a degree gatekeeper. That has really screwed up the system. Some schools, along with industry, are trying to develop a Professional Masters program to essentially replace the current MS and make the PhD not needed (because really it's not). Now with that being said what is interesting is that currently a Masters is hardly worth a thing in the industry. In fact most of the people who I found to be jackasses and idiots had masters degrees. Usually people with a B.S. or PhD were better to work with. However I don't agree with how the industry has set itself up with requiring a PhD for lots of work when, again, it is not really needed.

Anyhow, the scientific industry has laid off tens of thousands of people in the past couple of years. It is insane how many well qualified scientists are unemployed. The Biotech industry is just terrible (thank you Wall Street) letting many people go; tons of big pharma mergers have yielded tons of layoffs as well as industrial chemical guys (e.g. Dow). I am a member of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and reading the message boards for the organization is, at times, depressing.

I don't think the problem is a lack of students interested in science. Rather it is the lack of jobs and opportunities. The government can't cut funding to NASA, Sandia, Los Alamos, and other national research institutions and then be shocked that there is a declining interest of students wanting to pursue a career in science.

I love science, but I need job security, opportunities, and be able to pay my bills.

That's why I sold out and am getting a MBA.

 

[Circlenaut]

Wow I really like how this thread took off. You guys are offering some prime advice and insight here. I agree getting a PhD could be very fun and rewarding but as Babbles said we need to pay bills in the end.

I will work in the Biotech industry (hopefully) in the next few years and then pursue some medical profession. Frankly, as long as I'm working on SOMETHING biology related I'm happy. Again work is work. Also, no matter how much the market tanks there will ALWAYS be a need for Doctors. It's nice to think that you're skills will always be needed.

 

[Dissipate]

The university system is way out of date and totally broken. Universities are designed to feed big interests in government and corporations cookie cutter workers willing to put up with being treated like dog shit in order to be handed pieces of cheese in a rat race.

I only got a B.A. in math-computer science (thank god) and so I can't speak for grad school, but my experience in the university could be summed up as: interesting but uninspiring and mostly mechanical. Guess what programming language was hands down taught the most at my university? Java: A terrible language and suite of crap technologies owned by a major corporation called Oracle. One of the best languages, Python, was taught as an afterthought in a general course on programming languages.

Furthermore, the university largely only stressed only inputs and outputs or the 'correctness' of a student's programming assignment. They required comments and documentation, but none of the graders/T.A.s read it. They just checked if it was there. So best practices were completely non-existent as part of the curriculum.

The current company I am with hired a Russian guy awhile back. The guy was smart, had a PhD, and was very good at what I call 'hackathons'. He would just crap out a bunch of poorly formatted, completely undocumented, bug ridden code that appeared to fulfill the companies requirements. A couple months after he moves from Russia to the U.S. to work for the company on site, he quits due to a dispute over pay, leaving a large amount of undocumented, unmaintainable crap code. In the last meeting one of the senior engineers (the best one on our team) told our project manager that all of his code will have to be rewritten. Aside from the fact that my company let this guy code up a shit hack fest for several years is definitely one issue, but it also illustrates that having a PhD, or any other 'education' for that matter does not insure quality of work. Since universities are only checking for correctness, universities are irrelevant in terms of quality of work produced by graduates. It's a meat grinder to give industry check boxes for H.R. and government to tax like cattle.

Now, in order to undo the damage the university has done to my habits, I literally spend 2 to 3 hours a day of my own time to learn better software technologies and actually learn algorithms, not just programming languages to fulfill H.R.'s check boxes. The reason why is because I have a real passion for computer science and software, something a common university cannot satiate.

 

[Infohawk]

Now, in order to undo the damage the university has done to my habits, I literally spend 2 to 3 hours a day of my own time to learn better software technologies and actually learn algorithms, not just programming languages to fulfill H.R.'s check boxes. The reason why is because I have a real passion for computer science and software, something a common university cannot satiate.

A lot of educational programs don't really prepare anyone for the actual trade / profession they go into. In their defense, elite universities try to make their students well-rounded. When this happens many students complain that they are wasting their time and that they want more practical courses. (A big example is most big universities that don't offer business majors to the dismay of students.) But if you're not try to give a traditional "liberal arts" (as in classical well-rounded education, not English major) then what's the point of undergrad, besides like you say to satisfy an HR requirement? As you suggest you can learn the trade / technical stuff on the job.

 

[ShawnD1]

A lot of technical jobs are filled by people holding an H1b visa. This is your government at work here. Companies actually prefer to hire cheaper foreign workers. Companies get the government to offer more and more H1b visas then colleges and universities are unable to attract Americans because the companies will not hire you because the companies get the government to let them hire cheap people from overseas with an H1b Visa.

The whole premis is a scam and becomes self-fulfilling.

Welcome to the real world where the government does everything it can to ruin America.

Your first paragraph and the bolded conclusion seem to have nothing to do with each other. First you said the government is stepping aside to let the free market handle the labor situation. Companies see that the government will not get in their way, so they go ahead and ship people in from the Philippines to do engineering work. You then conclude that it's the government's fault because the government did something. On the contrary, if the government were doing something, they would be stepping in to say no. Stepping aside and saying "sure you can do that" is an example of the government not doing something.

A lot of educational programs don't really prepare anyone for the actual trade / profession they go into. In their defense, elite universities try to make their students well-rounded.

Indirect training at a university is so you become a better worker without being explicitly told what to do, and I can give an example. Let's say you took chemistry in high school and you took a few chemistry classes in university, but your job has nothing to do with chemistry. You are assigned the mundane task of cleaning a piece of equipment that has black stains on it from hot oil or grease being oxidized on the surface. How do you go about removing these stains? With absolutely no education, you'll just try random things. Water? Maybe soap? A different kind of soap? Mineral spirits? Methanol? Paint thinner? I've actually tried to clean that shit off my glassware and metal utensils before and I can tell you none of those will work. What works is a strong base like sodium hydroxide or ammonia. This is because oils often turn into acids when they are heated and the acid sticks to the metal. Ammonia will strip it off like nothing.

Knowing one basic thing about chemistry can save so much work. It sounds stupid but I've actually had to deal with a problem like this before. At one job, I wrote the receiving numbers of distilled water on the water jugs using a permanent felt marker. My boss got pissed off because he claimed we can't return the bottles and get the deposit back because that shit doesn't come off. I had to show him that a permanent felt pen could be erased with no effort at all just by spraying methanol on it. He had no idea you could do that. He probably would have ordered someone to scrub it with a brillo pad if I didn't wash it off for him. This is a perfect example of how being well rounded makes you more productive. I can remove felt pen in less than 5 seconds using science. How long do you think it takes to scrub it off using water and a towel?

 

[ichy]

The BS caps on med students is one reason medical expenses.

100% untrue. The number of doctors who can practice in the United State isn't limited by medical schools, it's limited by the number of residency training spots there are. We can (and do) import foreign med school graduates, but an MD must do his post-graduate training in the US to get a medical license. The number of residency slots is limited by how much funding is made available by the government.

Also, doctor's salaries are a small part of overall medical costs. A recent NY times article pointed out that it cost about $12,000 to get a pacemaker implanted. Of that, a little under $500 went to the physician performing the procedure. The rest went to the hospital & the medical device maker. If you're ever hospitalized or, even worse, in the ICU, you'll see that hospital fees dwarf physician's fees.