Good Careers In Science

[Photon Guy]

I was thinking, if you really enjoy science and you want a science career that you might really enjoy, you could teach. All too often people who go into science careers get boring jobs. A good friend of mine whose really smart and whose got a doctorate in chemical engineering is working for a technology company where he's coating microchips. He makes really good money doing that but its just the same thing over and over again day in and day out, coating chips, so he is a bit bored with his job. I was thinking though, teaching can be a really fun job where you actually learn something every day because, after all, you learn the most from teaching. So I would think, teaching science is a really good career that you can really enjoy if you enjoy science. 

[exchemist]

9 minutes ago, Photon Guy said:

I was thinking, if you really enjoy science and you want a science career that you might really enjoy, you could teach. All too often people who go into science careers get boring jobs. A good friend of mine whose really smart and whose got a doctorate in chemical engineering is working for a technology company where he's coating microchips. He makes really good money doing that but its just the same thing over and over again day in and day out, coating chips, so he is a bit bored with his job. I was thinking though, teaching can be a really fun job where you actually learn something every day because, after all, you learn the most from teaching. So I would think, teaching science is a really good career that you can really enjoy if you enjoy science. 

The issue with that is that it will be >50% teaching and <50% science. I mean, you really need to have a skill at communicating, and be able to handle a room full of kids and so on. That's a skill that not everyone has, by any means, and it is quite exhausting. Also it is notoriously poorly paid. But handing on the torch of knowledge to the next generation can be very rewarding. No one forgets an inspirational teacher. Or a really crap one, come to think of it........   

[Photon Guy]

10 hours ago, exchemist said:

The issue with that is that it will be >50% teaching and <50% science. I mean, you really need to have a skill at communicating, and be able to handle a room full of kids and so on. That's a skill that not everyone has, by any means, and it is quite exhausting. Also it is notoriously poorly paid. But handing on the torch of knowledge to the next generation can be very rewarding. No one forgets an inspirational teacher. Or a really crap one, come to think of it........   

That depends on what kind of teacher you are and who you're teaching. Im thinking along the lines of being a college professor. When you're a college professor you're teaching grown up students so you can do actual teaching instead of babysitting. And professors make good salaries too, a good professor can make over 100G a year and some professors make over a million a year so if I were to teach science I would want to be a college or graduate school professor. 

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, Photon Guy said:

When you're a college professor you're teaching grown up students so you can do actual teaching instead of babysitting.

I beg to differ. Or at least often it does not appear that way, especially with administration trying to pass everyone with a pulse. Other than that only in teaching universities, community colleges and similar institutions you do majority teaching (and often a ton of administrative work).  Typically, the salary in these institutions is lower. In other universities in order to obtain tenure you have develop and maintain a successful research program, which basically means you need to be successful in getting external funding. These positions also require a PhD and more often than not also requires you to severely restrict your private life (i.e. having family time or getting enough sleep) at least until you get tenure. By then you are so screwed up, you just continue like that.

Making a million a year is not possible by salary alone, most that are at least in striking range of that that level of income either run a successful business (e.g. consulting, medical practice, company) on the side. Salaries around 100k are realistic, but for instructors or community college teachers it is significantly lower.

Teaching has also become decidedly less fun as especially during financially demanding times there is often a huge pressure on grades. And it is not a lot of fun if students are not interested in the topic, but are laser-focused on selecting courses that gives them the best grades with the least effort. 

[exchemist]

8 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

That depends on what kind of teacher you are and who you're teaching. Im thinking along the lines of being a college professor. When you're a college professor you're teaching grown up students so you can do actual teaching instead of babysitting. And professors make good salaries too, a good professor can make over 100G a year and some professors make over a million a year so if I were to teach science I would want to be a college or graduate school professor. 

I don't know where you are, but in the UK university lecturers are as poor as church mice. And you have to do decent research as well, as @CharonY points out. People do it for love of the subject rather than for financial reward. But I take your point that university students don't require such a large amount of sheer teaching expertise as schoolteachers do. 

[Photon Guy]

11 hours ago, CharonY said:

I beg to differ. Or at least often it does not appear that way, especially with administration trying to pass everyone with a pulse. Other than that only in teaching universities, community colleges and similar institutions you do majority teaching (and often a ton of administrative work).  Typically, the salary in these institutions is lower. In other universities in order to obtain tenure you have develop and maintain a successful research program, which basically means you need to be successful in getting external funding. These positions also require a PhD and more often than not also requires you to severely restrict your private life (i.e. having family time or getting enough sleep) at least until you get tenure. By then you are so screwed up, you just continue like that.

Making a million a year is not possible by salary alone, most that are at least in striking range of that that level of income either run a successful business (e.g. consulting, medical practice, company) on the side. Salaries around 100k are realistic, but for instructors or community college teachers it is significantly lower.

Teaching has also become decidedly less fun as especially during financially demanding times there is often a huge pressure on grades. And it is not a lot of fun if students are not interested in the topic, but are laser-focused on selecting courses that gives them the best grades with the least effort. 

My dad was a tenure professor and he did teach science at a graduate school although he taught political science so its probably not the kind of science that would be talked about much on this forum, and he had more than enough family time. If you don't want students to select your class because they think they can get good grades with minimal effort than don't hand out As. 

The thing about teaching is that's how you learn the most, and there's always something new. You're not doing the same old thing over and over again like my friend who is coating microchips. And when you do work for a company, if you make a discovery or invention you don't get credit for it, not the least being financial credit. An example would be when the chemist Spencer Ferguson Silver III invented post-it notes he didn't get a penny for his invention, it all went to 3M, the company he worked for. If you're teaching at a university or graduate school and you discover or invent something Im not sure if it belongs to the university, or if you can make your own profit from it. 

4 hours ago, exchemist said:

I don't know where you are, but in the UK university lecturers are as poor as church mice. And you have to do decent research as well, as @CharonY points out. People do it for love of the subject rather than for financial reward. But I take your point that university students don't require such a large amount of sheer teaching expertise as schoolteachers do. 

Im in the USA and professors do quite well here, or at least they make decent livings. Research is fun as that's where all the action is, its not like you're just doing procedural stuff as you could be if you're working for a company. Professors do need good teaching expertise, what they don't need is babysitting expertise as schoolteachers do, particularly elementary school teachers. 

[CharonY]

2 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

If you don't want students to select your class because they think they can get good grades with minimal effort than don't hand out As. 

The issue is that nowadays there is big pressure on faculty to pass students to keep retainment high. If I applied the same criteria I did even a decade ago more than half the class would fail and that would create a lot of headaches. In the olden days when I was a student we typically had only about 20% of a given glass getting the degree (the rest would drop out or change their degree; in Germany there is a teaching track, for example). This would not be possible in the North American system. However, there are reasons for that. A big one is that feds and provincial/states have slashed support for universities. Thus, they are creating an environment where universities are supposed to run more like companies rather than educational institutes. This creates an incentive to basically have as many students as possible in their respective bracket. 

Failing students means losing money, so there is a conflict between faculty and administration over the balance between graduation rate and student quality.

2 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

The thing about teaching is that's how you learn the most, and there's always something new. You're not doing the same old thing over and over again like my friend who is coating microchips.

If you teach introductory classes most remains rather static. And while you can switch it up topic-wise in the 300 and upper classes, the pace in which you can introduce new stuff is mostly limited by the ability of students to absorb the info. I can almost guarantee that one of the most common questions in class nowadays is "is it going to be part of the exam". Especially during the online switch I found teaching more challenging than ever before. I think teaching can be intellectually rewarding, but I found it often not to be the case. There is a lot I could talk about student interactions, but I think the nature of it has changed over the years and I suppose we are not that well aligned anymore.

 

With regard to work-life balance, in natural sciences you have the added workload of running a lab (or equivalent). Which means you are basically running a mini-company, where you have to have a steady influx of funding in order to pay for experiments, graduate students, postdocs and technicians. This is not only highly competitive, but also takes a lot of time. This is on top of the teaching and administrative (committee) work that you also have to do. During semesters with teaching (depending on the load) there is rarely any time to do "proper" research or grant writing, so time is very squeezed. It may be different in liberal arts disciplines where grad students often are not paid and therefore research funding is less of a constraint.

2 hours ago, Photon Guy said:

Im in the USA and professors do quite well here, or at least they make decent livings. Research is fun as that's where all the action is, its not like you're just doing procedural stuff as you could be if you're working for a company.

Again, depends on the university (teaching colleges pay substantially less than 100k, for example, but then you could some of the courses with a MSc only). Research has a lot of what you would call procedural aspects to it. Especially as a prof you do not get to do the fun bits, your role is more coordinating and directing (and getting money in, and selling the research). 

I also think you are selling company work a bit short. It depends a lot on the role you have, the vast majority of the folks I started off doing a PhD ended up in companies and most have relatively diverse jobs to fulfil. It can be sales and directing new products, others develop new formulations for medication or vaccines, prototyping new products and so on. 

In all cases post-PhD level jobs tend to be more about coordination and management of projects and people, networking and doing the right pitches to the right people. Single-minded repetitive work is rather rare. Even folks that work in highly regulated jobs, such as quality control or product management tend to have more managerial duties. I.e. supervising the team that does the actual work. The only exception I can think of a industrial postdocs, which, for the most part (from what I have heard) are not a good place to be in.

That all being said, there is a big variation of jobs out there and I suggest that you read up on experiences and reports regarding jobs of the various fields. From the OP it appears to me that you mostly have drawn your view about these jobs from a handful of individuals but the jobs in related fields are quite diverse and reading about these different experiences is likely to give you a more three-dimensional view regarding how the day-to-day actually looks like.