The upside of academia

I have an awesome summerstudent (the same as last year) who is trying to decide whether to go to grad school or med school. And every time we (the disgruntled postdocs in the lab) talk about science, about how little we get paid and how dire the funding situation is and how hard it is for us to transfer to an independent position, he leans more toward med school. Without realizing it, we’re creating a disgruntled summerstudent… So today we listed all the things that are pretty great about academia and about going to grad school now. I thought I’d share them here too:

- the relative flexibility of academia is great. My friend who is a pediatrician has an awful time when her daughter is sick and she has to go to work. She needs an enormous network around her to be able to combine the demands of her job and caring for her daughter. Whereas in academia, whether you have children that are sick or parents that need extra care, it is a lot easier to take a day or even some time off to do that. I understand that this is different when you’re teaching, but right now this is one of the aspects I really enjoy. 

- it’s good to start grad school during lean times. When I started grad school (in 2005), the times were great. There was a lot of funding and the lab that I was in grew exponentially for a couple of years. Now, when I’m at the point where I should transfer to an independent position, the times are tough. If you start grad school now, chances are that in 8-10 years, when you’re at this point in your career that I’m at now, the times are going to be better. And instead of being used to all that wealth in the lab (as I was), you’re used to lean times and things can only get better.

- you come out of grad school without additional debt: going to med school in many cases means getting in a ton of debt, whereas in grad school you get paid to go to school. And even though MDs probably end up making more, the looming liability lawsuit or even a very unfortunate accident that renders you unable to work can leave you in huge debt for the rest of your life. 

What do you think is great about being in academia or going to grad school?

A little slice of heaven

You know when you're writing something in Word and all of a sudden there's this weird formatting going on? And you have no clue how to fix it, because even copying-and-pasting text that is formatted correctly somewhere else jumps into weird format when you put it in that specific spot? Today I accidentally moused over the button that changed all of this. Word has a "Clear Formatting" button!! This may literally save years of my life from frustration and time to fix weird formatting. The picture on the right shows where it is in my version (Word 2007). Like @TellDrTell called it: "A little slice of heaven".

What is an acceptable page-for-money ratio?

Currently, I am working on a grant for European money to work in the homecountry. This grant asks for a ridiculous number of pages where you have to tell them all about the proposal (in a variety of different ways) (7 pages), your own competence (5 pages), something called implementation (4 pages) and impact (5 pages). All this work is required for 4 years of about half a senior post-doc salary. Half! So not even an entire salary, or extra money for consumables, travel or another person. Still, I’m doing it because any extra money is good and there is only a limited option in terms of which grants to apply for. However, I do think it’s a pretty ridiculous amount of money when you look at what you get, especially compared to another foundation grant I applied for that is a similar amount of money but only asked for a 2-page proposal and your biosketch.

So my question for this afternoon: what ratio of pages/money is acceptable and when would you decide not even to bother? (I understand that the percentage that is funded is also a factor in deciding whether to apply but that’s for another time).

The home of the free toilets

Whenever we go back to the homecountry, I’m excited about all the things I can eat there that are hard to find here in the US. However, some things are not that great in the homecountry, for example the availability of bathrooms. And for someone who is pregnant and needs to pee at least once every half hour, this is quite an issue. What I love about the US is that everywhere you go, there’s a bathroom that you can use for free. This might sound weird if you live here, but for example in the homecountry there are no toilets in parks (not even porter potties), there are no bathrooms in supermarkets, and some trains don’t even have toilets in them. Also, whenever there are bathrooms, like in the train station, in a department store or in a gas station, you usually have to pay for them. It usually costs 50 eurocents (~$0.60) to use the bathroom. So for the remaining time we will live here, I will certainly appreciate that this country is the home of the free toilets.

Like a deer in the headlights

I often think about what kind of qualities a scientist should have. I think a scientist should be curious, adventurous (science-wise, not necessarily bungee-jump-wise) and inventive. But lately, it also seems like an important part is to be resilient to stress about having an insecure job. As I said before, whether or not I will have the position I want in the homecountry depends on whether I get a grant (any grant) before next year when we are moving back. This type of insecurity, that I know almost every scientist faces, does not make me work better. To be honest, it stresses me to the point that when I have to write a grant, I can’t because I keep thinking: ‘this has to be awesome, or else’. I think some people excel under pressure, but I’m currently not one of those.

You have to understand that I was raised in a country that has a lot of social security. Everybody has healthcare - and with that I mean real healthcare, not the one where you have to co-pay 20%, leaving you bankrupt after an expensive procedure – and it’s a lot harder for employers to fire people with a contract than in the US. Deep down, I did not envision being older than 30, not knowing where I would work next year or whether I would be able to afford a house.

You also have to understand that wanting to get a grant funded to secure a position seems to be my type of nesting. Being pregnant has amplified these feelings enormously, because I seem to want to imagine what life will look like when this prospective baby is born, and moving countries when he or she is only 5 or 6 months does not really help in this process.

It would help if Dr. BrownEyes would have be a millionaire, or at least have a job that we would know he could keep and that would bring in money, but he doesn’t, because he’s also a scientist. This is great, and his enthusiasm for science is one of the things I like about him, but it doesn’t help in my anxiety about getting a job.

So does this make me a bad scientist? It did for a while, because I really felt like a deer in the headlights trying to write grants and papers, but now that I know that I can at least get bread on the table doing another post-doc that gives me some room to breathe, and to be good and creative while writing grants again. But why aren’t there more scientist-jobs for people who don’t love insecurity about grants and their future (and the future of those in their labs)??

Will science for money

Last week we were in the homecountry to visit family, eat yummy food and talk to the professor I’m writing a bunch of grants with to return there. Due to the sad funding situation, he (or the department) won’t be able to hire me, unless one of the grants gets funded. We are planning to move back in a year (also because the lab that I’m in will be closing by then), so there’s still some time to get grants funded. But I’m starting to get a little panicky about it every now and then. Sure I’m applying to other places, but we also have this two-body-problem and this city and university would just be the top one choice for various reasons.

So the professor I talked to also set me up to talk to another professor who just got this big European grant. This professor had heard of me and was impressed by my skill set (literal quote:”you would be a great person to have in our department because of that”. Yay! So what could he offer me? A post-doc position for five years for which I would have to officially interview. On the one hand I don’t really want to be a post-doc for 10 years (!) but I also don’t want to work at the local grocery store when none of the grants I’m writing is funded (or when I’m applying for other jobs). So we came to the conclusion that until anything else materializes this would be a good back-up plan.

So I’m sort of happy about the prospect of at least being someone’s post-doc for a while, who would have thought that would happen? Or is this the moment when you decide to leave academia…?

Source. Hire me! I actually have more papers than him.