Re:The Least Stressful Job for 2013? A Real Look at Being a ...
by eli_gottlieb on Monday January 07, 2013 @06:26AM
(#5020505)
There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it.
The problem being that in most of the natural or social sciences, there are few job-options for researchers, or even for applied scientists, outside of the Academic-Governmental scientific complex.
Yes, yes, yes, everyone is about to point out their favorite example of a profitable industrial firm doing Real Science. Very nice for you at Microsoft Research or your chosen pharmaceutical company.
Problem is, those companies can only afford to do a small piece of the total research load every year, and only in subjects where research can translate into profits in the next 10 years or so.
So it becomes a decision of society's values: should scientific research be done without a prospect of profits in the next 10 years? And at the moment, most people hate being so much as confronted with a question like that, let alone actually paying taxes and engaging in the political-budgeting process to make sure allocations to science happen so that scientists can do their/our jobs.
The problem being that in most of the natural or social sciences, there are few job-options for researchers, or even for applied scientists, outside of the Academic-Governmental scientific complex.
Yes, yes, yes, everyone is about to point out their favorite example of a profitable industrial firm doing Real Science. Very nice for you at Microsoft Research or your chosen pharmaceutical company.
Problem is, those companies can only afford to do a small piece of the total research load every year, and only in subjects where research can translate into profits in the next 10 years or so.
So it becomes a decision of society's values: should scientific research be done without a prospect of profits in the next 10 years? And at the moment, most people hate being so much as confronted with a question like that, let alone actually paying taxes and engaging in the political-budgeting process to make sure allocations to science happen so that scientists can do their/our jobs.