Tuesday, 12 August 2014

On Becoming a Professional Scientist

MY BACKGROUND
I am an Irish scientist trained and educated to perform research. I also live and work in Dublin. This may not seem remarkable, but I can assure you it is! I am a professional scientist, by which I mean, I make my living by performing scientific research, as opposed to having a science qualification which allows me to earn my living in an unrelated field such as banking or marketing. For those who wonder how you become a research scientist this is my experience. Keep in mind I love what I do. I loved studying science, I think it's an extremely worthwhile pursuit, and we as a society need successful scientists. 

STEP 1 - BECOMING AWARE THAT SCIENCE IS A THING
It's actually difficult to determine when I developed an interest in science, which could also be interpreted as meaning I was always interested in science. As an adult I am still fascinated by the advances and achievements of medical science. My interest was initially nurtured by TV. We didn't have the discovery channel when I was a kid, no-one did. We had six TV stations when I was growing up, my parents had no books on science, psychology, skeptical thinking, religion, philosophy, or history. I didn't know that it was common for people to have entire book cases in their houses on all of these topics. That meant that TV was the major entertainment medium, and thankfully, some of that TV included educational shows made in the UK. I remember watching cartoon called Once Upon a Time as a kid, and loving it! It was designed to teach kids about the human body, and it did a pretty good job. Although I'm not sure what's going on here in this scene!


As a kid it was the most exciting show I could get my hands on, and there was nothing even close to it on Irish TV. At best we might get to see a children's TV show which included a trip to the zoo to see some animals looking angry in cages, amazing!

As I got older UK programming continued to provide very high quality shows for those interested in science. There were two main documentary shows, Horizon, and Cutting Edge. There was also a great TV series called Tomorrows World, which introduced the latest advances in technology, I know it seems laughable now, but as a kid in the 80's-90's this was amazing! There were also a handful of other great shows, notably Rough Science, and The Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. So by the time I started secondary school I knew science was a thing you do, a profession. And I liked it.

STEP 2 - SCIENCE IN SCHOOL
I began my science education at the age of 13. My school provided a class simply called science, which included physics, biology, and chemistry, although interestingly, not some key areas of mathematics such as calculus, and algebra. There was also nothing about computer science. My experience of science education in school was poor to say the least. It's a syllabus based on learning definitions and formulas, and while that can be useful sometimes, it's not what working scientists spend their time doing. My teachers did not understand the topics, and did not encourage scientific debate. Nevertheless after six years of secondary school science education I was pretty convinced I wanted to study science in college, and was looking forward to be able to devote all my time to it.

STEP 3 - SCIENCE IN UNIVERSITY
I studied general science in UCD (pictured below) as I felt this would give me the best exposure to every subject, and allow me to decide which route I wanted to take later on. The UCD course was well designed, you study 4 subjects in first year, 3 subjects in second, and either 1 or 2 in your third and fourth years. I graduated with a degree in biochemistry, which I loved. UCD has ploughed a lot of money into its infrastructure in recent years, so the campus facilities are impressive.

Both UCD and Trinity College Dublin educate primarily for research. That is, graduates come out with a lot more theoretical knowledge than practical. Whether you consider this to be a good thing or not depends on what you want out of your education. DIT and DCU provide a lot more exposure to work experience and practical knowledge. Both systems of education have their place, but it helps to know what kind of work you would like to do when you graduate. I was pretty keen on becoming a full time academic, so for me this meant pursuing a Ph.D.

STEP 4 - ACADEMIC RESEARCH
I graduated with my degree in biochemistry in 2005. Afterwards I worked for a short time in the private sector and it was pretty good having both money and time for the first time. However, by 2006, government funding for Ph.D. study in science was looking pretty healthy, so I decided pursue a Ph.D. with the aim of becoming a professional research scientist.

THE RESEARCH TOPIC
To do this I first had to find a topic that interested me, and this is often the hardest part. There's a lot of interesting research that needs to be done, choosing just one topic to devote your efforts to is difficult. I recommend just talking to a lot of different researchers. No-one is better at selling what they do than them, and ultimately you want to work with a supervisor who is enthusiastic about what they do, and how they do it. Once you have a feel for what you would like to work on the next step is deciding who you would like to work with, again, this is a difficult process. For me I wanted a research group that was well established, but also young enough to think of doing things in a way that had not been done before. Ultimately I found this and completed my Ph.D. in biochemistry in 2011.

WORKING CONDITIONS
It is important to know how the research group does what it does. How well does the lab function on a day to day basis? How are supplies ordered? How is data generated and processed? This sounds very OCD, but it's the number one piece of advice I would give to anyone looking to pursue a Ph.D. I know of instances where the main way of collecting data is to work at 3am, over weekends, and public holidays, because the demand for that piece of equipment is less at those times. You need to know if you will be okay with this "arrangement". The experience of doing a Ph.D is different for everyone. Personally, I learned a lot, not just about my research topic, but about myself, and what my strengths and weaknesses were.


Overall, I have mixed feelings about having done it. I'm glad I've completed it, but I'm still not sure it was the best decision for me personally. By the time I'd finished my Ph.D. I had spent 15 years of my life being educated in science, half my life! What I didn't fully appreciate was that only now could my professional career begin. Until you complete your Ph.D. you are essentially still considered a student in training. It's not entirely inaccurate, but it's not particularly fair either. By the time you are a final year Ph.D. student you have spent an extensive period time in the lab, managed your own research projects, and often have extensive undergraduate teaching experience. In other words, you are useful.

STEP 5 - THE JOB SEARCH
I have written about this before here. However, it's worth adding a little more. Lets get one thing straight first however. I never expected to be rich from being a scientist, but I never expected to be scraping a living either. Especially after a decade of education, and experience. My experience of job adverts in my field have had salaries of between €12,000 and ~€35,000 attached to them. Outside of academia the salary €12,000 salary would be illegal, this was the wage proposed for a graduate research assistant, worth at least €25,000 in the real world.

This €12,000 salary amounted to €5.60 an hour at a time the minimum wage was €8.65, and it assumes a typical working week of 8 hours a day. Academic supervisors often demand a lot more than this, and they get away with it by promising to look after you at a later date. Whether they do or not is entirely up to the personality of the supervisor. A post-doc salary is ~€38,000, this is not a bad wage. However, the average contract length is about 24 months. If you are lucky, you will get a second 24 month contract, but after that forget about it. You are expected to branch out on your own, and you are too expensive to hire, compared to a Ph.D student, or new Ph.D graduate.

What's my point here? Well, educated academics are treated very differently in academia than they are in the private sector. There are far less checks and balances in place in academia to ensure that no exploitation is occurring, and I would go so far as to say it's normal for Ph.D. and post-docs to be treated badly. I would even say this bad treatment is seen as an obstacle to overcome in order to show you have what it takes. In my opinion this is a juvenile attitude that needs to be addressed.

In the end, for me it came down to luck and perseverance. I ended up accepting an internship which led to a 9 month contract, which ultimately led to a permanent contract. Without this internship I found it impossible to get my foot in the door, and I would not have the job I have now. I did need to interview for the position a total of 3 times in about 18 months, which is rough going, but now I have a job I enjoy in the city I live in, and would like to continue living in. I know a lot of my peers are not so lucky. For a lot of them their futures are far from stable, and while I understand no-one is owed a job, I think the state should be working hard to create an environment that means people can conceivably get a job that is related to what they are trained and educated to do. For a lot of research scientists this is not the case. There is simply nowhere for them to go.

There is a strong expectation in science that you will spend a significant amount of time abroad, and I'm sure it's a valuable experience, as well as career making. However, shouldn't there be the option to live and work in the country that invested in you? Whenever I encounter the argument for emigration there's a small part of me that remembers the Eamon De Valera quote “No longer shall our children, like our cattle, be brought up for export”. Yes, of course we can send our graduates around the world, and of course many of the them will thrive and prosper. Many will even come back, but I'm not comfortable with it being expected of you as the only way to make it.

CONCLUSION
Science can be a very exciting career. You will learn a lot of interesting things, you will definitely get to travel the world if that's what you want, scientific conferences are often in great locations, you will meet interesting people, and you will enjoy understanding more about how the world around you works. I graduated with a lot of other talented scientists, very capable, enthusiastic, and hard working scientists who have not been able to find a place for themselves in Ireland, or who have opted out of such an aggressive and punishing academic system because it requires too much from you.

By the time you finish a Ph.D. you are ~30 years of age. If you want a home and a family this is a bit of a problem. For example, banks won't give you a mortgage on the basis of a 24 month contract, even if you are getting a decent wage for it. Consequently, an academic career is a punishing prospect, and a lot to ask after having already spent close to a decade of sacrifice to get there.


Ireland needs to re-evaluate how and why we train scientists. We keep hearing about Ireland's knowledge based economy, but really what this refers to is our manufacturing economy. We manufacture a lot of medical devices and drugs in Ireland. But this does not call for the kind of graduates we are producing. Manufacturing is an important sector in any economy, but so is research and development, and we could be a world leader in this area.


We have the energy, our university staff are young, motivated, and love what they do. We also have pretty good infrastructure in our universities, with modern research facilities, and equipment. However, our research activities are too diffuse. Within a single small building there could be 20 different areas of research. It's not feasible. Why not select a a single area of research, an institute of 100 scientists working on the same area, sharing the resources, inspiring and learning from each other. We could have a single institute in every university that was a world leader in neuroscience research, or diabetes research, or cancer research, instead we support all of these activities, to the detriment of all of these activities.

We have some amazing scientists in Ireland, it excites me to think what we could do if we were structured in such a way that we all pulled in the same direction. Just think what it would mean to add a layer of hard working, enthusiastic post docs to the mix, with some job security, and the means to make a living.

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