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Career planning in an era of scientific disinvestment

Know not just the destination and the route, but all the other features on the map

Jun 4

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With structural divestment from scientific research, training, and higher education, any effort to do career planning just got a lot more difficult.

If you envision the path of career development as a “pipeline,” then you can imagine how f’ed we are when they’re working to drain fluid out of the pipeline (which is all of us), and narrowing the pipeline so that only white nationalist fluid fits through. (This is where the pipeline metaphor fails us.)

In this time of extraordinary dishevelment and disassembly, career planning for scientists is more important than ever. I think it’s going to help all of us to abandon the pipeline model. First, once you think of career pathways as a subway or a map, you’ll find there are multiple origins, many routes, and a great variety of destinations. Second, if we ever have the opportunity to rebuild our scientific training apparatus in this country, we should intentionally build it so that it’s not susceptible to pipeline failures, by creating a more diverse network that doesn’t rely on narrow points of pressure.

The “traditional” path to being a scientist is to attend a high school located in a zip code with a lot of wealth. This, along with effort, gets you into a prestigious and well-resourced university. There, you are able to get research experience as an undergraduate, which will then transition you into grad school. You then graduate, do a postdoc, and then transition into a professorship. Or, if we’re veering away from the ‘traditional’ route, then an industry role, or government agency, or NGO, or whatnot.

If that’s your career plan, then all of the concern and worry caused by the authoritarian takeover in the US must be amplified even more, because all their tactic to destroy science is to hit us at those transition points. They are making it harder to go to college, remove slots for grad students, defund postdocs, and then subtract not only publicly-funded career positions but even attacking those that are run by private organizations.

While this “traditional” career pipeline is often provided as an example by professors, and there are plenty of folks who seem to follow this route, but I’m not sure how common it really is now? Some folks might not go straight to college. Community college might be involved. Maybe work as a lab tech or somewhere else before choosing to go to grad school. Maybe move around because of partner issues, take time for parenting or or elder care. Maybe spending some time working in a congressional office on policy work, or maybe a whole career as an accountant or in sales before going to college to get a second Bachelors, in science. And how many folks take up an adjuncting gig and hope it’s temporary enough that they will land on the tenure track without having to move across the country, or out of the country? Life is complex. It’s not a pipeline, it’s a subway.

If you think of this as a pipeline, then you will always have the answer to the question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” and the answer will be very obviously drawn from the next stage in the pipeline. But what if you weren’t sticking yourself in the pipeline, but instead you looked at the map? Are there other routes that will take you to where you want to go? Maybe, just perhaps, once you familiarize yourself with the map, that you might realize there are some destinations that you might want to check out, or spend some time in? What would make for a good side trip along the way?

Another thing to keep in mind. What you perceive as an ideal career path at the moment will not be what you think of as an ideal career path ten or twenty years from now. Hopefully, you will grow as a person, and what are the odds with your personal growth that your priorities and goals haven’t shifted?

A Dream Job is inherently an ephemeral phenomenon because the job changes as the institution and its people change, and as you change. If you look at the job landscape as a map instead of a pipeline, then moving around this landscape is a lot easier.

It’s hard to recommend to anybody who wants to go into science in the US to just keep going along as they used to. Things are much, much harder. But if you’re in the game, or want to join us, then now’s a good time to look at the whole map and plan your route. Plan your routes, because some are getting cut off.

I would hope that as opportunity shrivels, that institutions are reconsidering their personal template for what success in scientific training looks like. They are so many pathways to becoming a talented and creative scientist. As funding for REUs gets cut, then I surely hope that we’re just not picking the students who can afford to spend their summers doing research for free. (Which is where the current administration is building towards.)

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