I can kind of speak to some of this. I graduated from a liberal arts college, went straight into a Ph.D. program, and realized somewhere around year 4-5 that I wanted a more stable life than a postdoc or junior academic usually gets, I hated publishing (yes, I am keeping up with that kerfuffle, and if you want to talk about the serious limitations of the peer review process, ping me), and my social anxiety made teaching classes a miserable experience. By that time I was damn well going to finish what I started, but the last year was nerve-racking - people around me were lining up postdocs and applying to teaching jobs and nobody could offer any advice for how to get a job in the real world after jumping ship from academia, and I was also kind of messed up because I had put years and years of my life into preparing for an academic career and if I wasn't going to be a scientist, what the hell was I? I did get a job that kept me connected to science, but it required me to move 750 miles away from my family and 1450 miles away from the city where I'd gone to grad school and knew people. For the first 6 months I was here, I knew nobody. All my coworkers were older, married with kids, or both, and I didn't have any idea how to meet new nerd friends. I'm still not doing too great with that. I miss my group of grad school friends who would get together and play tabletop RPGs and watch bad sci-fi movies. I sympathize a lot is what I'm trying to say. Have a hug if you would like that? I'll post some advice later if I can get my words to cooperate.
I'm in an extremely similar situation, minus a research job - I've been applying to neuro jobs for a year and a half with little luck. I'm considering med school and becoming a surgeon, because the more I think about it, the more I realize that academia and research are just too unstable, reliant on grants, subject to publishing drive, etc for me to feel like it's a reasonable thing to do, plus I'm worried I just...won't like any of it. It's a mess, basically, and I don't have good advice because I'm mired in the same thoughts and fears as you. :/
I've hit my quarter-life crisis a little early, I think. I'm more than halfway through a degree in English Literature that I no longer enjoy or find meaningful. It's not as unemployable as its reputation, but... Everyone says "it's totally possible to get a job with a humanities degree -- you've just got to make connections and sell yourself to employers and communicate well" and, as I've learned, that's no real comfort to someone with the people skills of an alley cat. The personal fulfillment was all I was in it for and now that's gone. I sure as hell ain't going to grad school in this field: undergrad's been bad enough for my mental health. Also I haven't made any new friends in about a year. I've still got good connections with most of my old friends, though, which has been really helpful. @raydelblau What you said about your identity falling apart resonated with me. I have no advice but I offer my sympathy and best wishes. The same goes for the rest of you. I'm not in a science field myself but I have friends who are, and I know from them how difficult and unstable academia can be, even in STEM.
@WithAnH woah, crap, i was hoping that PhD programs were better prepared to help place their graduates in careers outside of academia. that they aren't prepared is an enormous problem, given that the vast majority of PhDs are LEAVING academia for industry because of the unstable life style and awful job prospects waiting for them as eternal postdocs. (and yeah, i would love to talk to you about the serious limitations of the peer review process. the system is honestly so broken that i can easily contemplate leaving science for that reason alone: what is good for researchers is not remotely what's good for science.) and that's another problem: i don't want to be so reliant on a job requiring my very narrow skill-set that i'll have to move to the one place that'll wind up accepting me. my mother is alone and sick, and i can't handle being further than a couple hours away by car. thankfully she lives on the east coast surrounded by relatively populous cities. a JD is a far more versatile degree that will allow me to choose where i'd be able to settle, presumably. i've actually begun looking at JD/PhD programs-- harvard's and columbia's in particular look like they would allow me to study both law and neuroscience without much trouble, and columbia is in new york (where my girlfriend will likely be living within a year). i'm just not sure how a law firm would react to a neuroscience PhD. is that particularly useful for IP law? are there any lawyers about who can offer any advice here? also: if you live in the DC area (as your profile suggests) you live near-ish to me (in baltimore). i am always looking for friends to do geeky things with, if you're interested in meeting up with random internet people.
@Greywing oh geez, a year and a half!? that's awful and terrifying and i'm sorry. have you tried applying to the NIH? they have a rolling program that usually picks up a ton of new assistants. i've been toying with the idea of med school, but not very seriously. the MCAT is seven hours long (fuck that shit) and i would have to enter a post-bacc program to take the pre-med classes that i gleefully skipped during college. that, and... while medicine is rewarding in the sense that you are (a) making a LOT of money and (b) helping a ton of people directly, it is also massively stressful and often dull on a day-to-day basis-- lots of paperwork, endless commitments, and a highly demanding and variable schedule that will leave you feeling like you don't have a life outside of your work. weirdly enough, that workload actually sounds desirable to me. i just want to spend more time thinking and writing and solving problems. i guess that's why i'm destined for law school.
@The Frood Abides ack. if you're in your sophomore year, i think it might still be feasible for you to switch majors. any idea which fields you prefer to the one you're in? at the risk of sounding dismissive and a bit envious, i must say: the fact that you're realizing this as an undergraduate is extremely useful, since you might have resources to help you figure out which direction to take. does your school have decent career services? if so, it might be a good idea to talk to one of those guys for a while. the counselors at my school were pretty decent at helping me find the positions that (at the time) i wanted to work in. you've also got your professors and major advisors and whatnot. do you think they'd be of any help? i'm sorry about the friend issue. that is really rough, and basically how my entire freshman year of college played out. best of luck. :(
@raydelblau Junior, actually. I have been doing my best to take advantage of career services and college/major advisers though, which has been helpful. The main problem is I don't really know what I'd prefer (I spent the last year trying to decide, including taking time off from school, finally settled on History, and then realized it had most of the same problems). And a lot of stuff is lodged behind prerequisites I didn't take because I was pretty complacent as an underclassman. don't worry, you don't sound dismissive. it's good to be reminded I'm not uniquely lost.
@raydelblau have you considered health fields that aren't MD? I'm working on applying to DPT programs, and that involves a lot of hanging out with physical therapists. They seem overall fairly unstressed, well-paid, and in demand. Also, the whole DPT only takes three years, and for specific pre-reqs it's just, like, anatomy and physiology with lab, and maybe exercise physio or kinesiology, depending on the program. My crisis goes the other direction: am I taking the easy way out and failing to live up to my potential by going into a field where I get to not make breakthroughs, and have a home life? My professors from undergrad keep saying things like, "But you'll do physical therapy research right? I just think you have so much to offer as a researcher." And then I also freak out because my partner is doing really cool biophysics work, and I worry I won't be able to keep up with understanding it, or I get mad because why does he get such amazing intellectual work to do? (The answer is 1. because he's brilliant and 2. because he's not getting paid, of course...) Most of these are late at night or after particularly stressful week thoughts, though, so just sort of inevitable worrying, I think.
@raydelblau I am actually slightly closer to Baltimore than DC! I would love to meet up sometime for geeky things. Out of curiosity, if you're okay with a stranger on the internet asking, do you work at Johns Hopkins? Maybe it's better at other universities (or even in other departments?), but it did seem like if you were looking to make the jump to industry, you were largely on your own. It also might have been that I was not and am not good at finding services and availing myself of them even if they exist. But you would think that some of the professors might at least have known who to talk to. :/ To be fair, when I went back for graduation, it seemed like none of the people in my department who had been trying to get non-academic jobs had had too much trouble. Most of them ended up in Silicon Valley. (This is physics and astronomy - I don't know what the prospects are in neuroscience.) I was very, very lucky. I am not great at networking, but my undergraduate advisor had kept in touch with one of his former students (who is now my boss), and when the company he works for was looking to hire, he (the advisor) put me in touch with him (the boss). I had been looking closer to Chicago where my family is, but I was okay with moving to take this job. It was something I hadn't even considered as a possibility because it seemed too close to a dream job to be real. (I work for a NASA contractor supporting laser altimeter missions. Next month I get to go to Chile to help with Antarctic ice measurements. I don't have to deal with the funding side at all, I sort of enjoy being one of the people who makes things work behind the scenes, and helping to quantify the effects of climate change fulfills my desire to do something important for the human race, even if it's often infuriating because of the bullshit politics.)
@WithAnH haha, yes, i am a research associate at a hopkins lab. (and you may be an stranger on the internet, but i trust kintsugians on principle. y'all are great.) i'd be up for any sort of shenanigan. board games, D&D, whatever the heck. do you work at the space telescope? one of the astronomers starting work there right now was in my graduating class. meh, your experience sounds unfortunate but typical (i've been bumming around online, which i probably shouldn't do, but there are so many science PhDs out there who are posting about their abysmal preparation for the world outside of the ivory tower.) i wasn't very good at finding resources during my time as an undergraduate either-- i only discovered career services my senior year, and i hadn't a clue of the tutoring or scholarship or research or ANY goddamn opportunities available to me. yet more regrets to kick myself over at one in the morning, i guess. argh. what sort of astronomy goes on in silicon valley? i didn't know there was much industry space-stuff over there. :U also, holy crap, your job sounds so cool. and yeah, important as HECK for the human race. i just had to look up what a laser altimeter is, and am happy about the neat things that humanity invents while i'm not looking. in science, i've found, networking and connections are absolutely everything. this terrifies me. my current PI is extremely well-connected within her field, but i doubt that'll do me very good if i do not wish to remain in brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience research. she has a very close neuroscience friend in the psychology department (and both neuroscience and law programs) at harvard, but i think that'll only be of use to me if i decide to go the PhD or JD/PhD route... and i'm leaning more and more towards a plain ol' JD, because oh my god i do not want to cross the streams and become one of those neurolaw advocates, aaagh. fuck neurolaw.
@raydelblau I had never heard of neurolaw until today. Huh. I learned a thing. I don't work on any of the space telescopes. I support one instrument that's flown on a plane (the one that's going to Chile) and there will be another that's going on the ISS in a few years. All my work now is Earth-facing - it's a big change from my PhD work. I used to study neutron stars. There isn't astronomy in Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley companies will sometimes hire astronomers, because astronomers may have experience with things like analyzing massive data sets, distributed computing, image processing, and machine learning. Same for physicists - I know a guy who used to work for CERN and now works for a tech startup. It's all about figuring out what transferable skills you learned along the way to your PhD. I know we've got a couple lawyers on here - rigorist is one and pixels had a law school hell thread in ITA. One of them might be able to answer your law school questions.
@WithAnH hijacking this thread to say thank you, ive been planning on majoring in physics/astrophysics/astronomy type stuff, but my mom's fed me enough doubt about it wrt "what the hell will you do with it afterwards though" that ive been considering either dual majoring with chem also or just majoring in chem so that med school can be an option. . . i am saving what you wrote though because man, there is a lot i can do with a major in physics! i just need to stop being weird about it and do some research :"D also you are seriously living the dream with that job, i envy you and hope that im lucky enough to fall in with similar well-connected people so i can get hooked up to such an excellent job p.s. talk neutron stars to me //swoons// if there isn't a Neat Astronomy Stuff thread yet there totally should be
