Saturday, August 05, 2006

Physics: More damaging than drugs?

I just had this advice entitled unequivocally "Don't Become a Scientist!" taken from Jonathan I. Katz's website forwarded to me by a friend (who quit physics to work in the financial sector) - I wouldn't have thought it to be of general interest, but apparently it is interesting enough to become a forwarded email in certain circles. It is, of course, of interest here, where all advice to young researchers from one's elders is welcome, no matter how terrifying :( - it has been discussed elsewhere over a year-and-a-half ago by Stephen Hsu (part 1 and part 2) at his blog, Information Processing, and also at Sean Carroll's former blog incarnation, Preposterous Universe, (see 5th January, 2005) and there were some comments on it by the Quantum Pontiff as well, but perhaps, like me, you missed this before:

"Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the world works? Forget it!

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career.

American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the price drops. In the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes the form of many years spent in ``holding pattern'' postdoctoral jobs. Permanent jobs don't pay much less than they used to, but instead of obtaining a real job two years after the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) most young scientists spend five, ten, or more years as postdocs. They have no prospect of permanent employment and often must obtain a new postdoctoral position and move every two years. For many more details consult the Young Scientists' Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent Assistant Professorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduate school (he didn't get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinks is brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was he offered his first permanent job (that's not tenure, just the possibility of it six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new job every two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for another Assistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctor typically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at 31, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27 (computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence, ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeed in any of these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures). Can you support a family on that income? It suffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little prospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a house in a good school district and all the other necessities of ordinary middle class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.

Of course, you don't go into science to get rich. So you choose not to go to medical or law school, even though a doctor or lawyer typically earns two to three times as much as a scientist (one lucky enough to have a good senior-level job). I made that choice too. I became a scientist in order to have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probably won't get that freedom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else's ideas, and may be treated as a technician rather than as an independent collaborator. Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of science entirely. You can get a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not do this at 22, rather than putting up with a decade of misery in the scientific job market first? The longer you spend in science the harder you will find it to leave, and the less attractive you will be to prospective employers in other fields.

Perhaps you are so talented that you can beat the postdoc trap; some university (there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences) will be so impressed with you that you will be hired into a tenure track position two years out of graduate school. Maybe. But the general cheapening of scientific labor means that even the most talented stay on the postdoctoral treadmill for a very long time; consider the job candidates described above. And many who appear to be very talented, with grades and recommendations to match, later find that the competition of research is more difficult, or at least different, and that they must struggle with the rest.

Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professorship. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. They're not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in a proposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they can be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you find that it is not what you wanted after all.

What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career. This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations. Young Americans have generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence of a reasonable middle class career path in science and are deserting it. If you haven't yet, then join them. Leave graduate school to people from India and China, for whom the prospects at home are even worse. I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.

If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try to persuade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s. The glut of scientists is entirely the consequence of funding policies (almost all graduate education is paid for by federal grants). The funding agencies are bemoaning the scarcity of young people interested in science when they themselves caused this scarcity by destroying science as a career. They could reverse this situation by matching the number trained to the demand, but they refuse to do so, or even to discuss the problem seriously (for many years the NSF propagated a dishonest prediction of a coming shortage of scientists, and most funding agencies still act as if this were true). The result is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak American students and with foreigners lured by the American student visa."

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Caltech pays physics postdocs $48k. The APS survey puts academic postdoc salaries at a median $45k. Same survey says government physics postdocs pay median $55k.

Things are not all bad.

Anonymous said...

Oops, not that good! data here

Anonymous said...

There are never enough scientists, even though those whose thinking is based purely on short-term economic principles may not be able to see this.

As for "the real world", science IS the real world. Economy, art and law are mere games that humans are playing. Reality however, that wich is studied by science, exists independently of us.

Craig said...

On a slightly related note, in the UK, people with a maths PhD are "largely unemployable by British universities."

Cheeseburger Brown said...

Dear P.P. Cook:

Obviously the forward thinking researchers always have their feelers out to land a solid job with an evil super-villain.

Evil super-villains have not only the resources but the monomania that can be so critical to science. A motivated patron can make all the difference.

Failing that, various multinational evil super-corporations may serve the same end.

Failing that, take all of your scientific knowledge, enscribe it into a series of carefully indexed and duplicated stone tablets, and bury it deep down under the ground where the atomic monsters won't be able to get it after the fires of the Simpleton Era.

Love,
Cheeseburger Brown

sigfpe said...

I think that employers underestimate, to some extent, how useful mathematicians can be. And similarly, mathematicians themselves underestimate how much interesting and useful work there is out there that could benefit from a mathematician. Although I rarely make direct use of the specific part mathematics I studied for my PhD, I do make liberal use of the wide variety of mathematics I was exposed to during the time I spent working on it. Believe it or not, algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, Lie groups, analysis, number theory and a bunch of other disciplines have applications in the "real world" - and not just in quantitative finance. What's more - if you see an application for one of these disciplines, there are probably only going to be a handful of other people who can compete with you. So I think some of these "unemployable" PhDs need to start thinking creatively about how their skills could be used.

Anonymous said...

don't know that I would listen to what Herr katz says, after all, he has written a nice treatise on homophobia.

http://www.physics.wustl.edu/~katz/defense.html

MV said...

Will the pleasure of getting a heavy pay packet be as great as the thrill of exploring the mysteries of nature from the position of a good Physicist?
MV(physicsplus.blogspot.com)

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