A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn
"Why does anyone think science is a good job?<p>The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:<p>* age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college<p>* age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month<p>* age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year<p>* age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year<p>* age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s<p>This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a 'second rate has-been' label on his forehead."<p><a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science" rel="nofollow">http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science</a>