Undergrad's over... what now?

April 6, 2013 1:45 PM

I wanted to go into academia but I don't have the balls. Now I'm at the cusp of graduation and unsure of what my options are. I'll be finishing up my undergrad at the end of the month barring any unfortunate surprises. I will graduate with a fairly high GPA (although nothing too special) from McGill with a bachelors in Biology. I've always loved the idea of academia, but for the last year I've been reading articles that practically plead for me to stay away. My past considerations have focused around research, but med school and bio/biotech industry have also crossed my mind. There's also a whole world outside of science that I've never really considered. I've dabbled in graphic design in high school. It was really fun, but I always figured that I would make a better academic. I'd imagine most jobs I'd be interested in would involve reading/learning, information analysis, and stuff like that. I think I'm fairly well versed at communication, both written and spoken, but probably rusty in both in non-academic contexts. Honestly I do care about money. I expect to work hard, and I expect to be paid well for what I do. I'd also like to be paid for my expertise, not just for 'doing things.'

Med school is appealing because I'll get to help people in a more direct manner than academic research, plus the money is probably the best I could expect make in any field (on the other hand, the money is a lot of work). Industry involves science and research, but I'd also be working for the man, man and I don't know what private research entails. Besides those options I'm completely blindsighted. MD/PhD sounds great, theoretically, but I'm not sure it's any better than either the MD or the PhD.

So far my only job experience has been in academic labs (plus a restaurant or two and a graphic design firm before university), I am going to hit 20 months (12 of which are full-time) of lab experience before I leave McGill. I've enjoyed my time in lab, but the chances of me reaching my goal of tenured professor seem terrifyingly slim. I'm willing to put the work into a PhD, but only if I feel more confident about where it will leave me career-wise. My (current) research interests include general molecular biology (I love learning about all the pieces in the molecular puzzle of a biological function), epidemiology, virology, oncology, and pharmacology.

So now I am feeling pretty lost. I know that I enjoy science, that I love learning, and that I'm fairly good at school. But I'm not sure what to do with this knowledge. I'd love to hear your thoughts, comments, and possibly condolences. I'm freaking out a little and would love some guidance from those more experienced!

posted by Strass to Work & Money (14 answers total)

Response by poster: Oh, I forgot to mention. I'm also extremely interested in moving overseas. I loved living in Canada for university, and I'd aim for Scandinavia next, should I go back to school. Will his help or hinder my job search?
posted by Strass at 2:17 PM on April 6, 2013

I think you might benefit by going and getting a job. Use your talents and science background in an industry setting for a while. Med school and/or grad school (and the debt or lost years of earnings) will always be out there, but that will be a more informed decision if you have a better idea what it's like to work a normal job.
posted by J. Wilson at 2:25 PM on April 6, 2013 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Even though you don't want to go the academic route right now, you might find yourself coming back around to it. At this point you're already going to be away from school for a year, and unless you start applications in a few months it'll be two years. So that's a good amount of time to think about what you want, try something new, and re-evaluate. The timeline will probably be roughly the same for med school as well. If I were you I would take that time try something new and different. You may not be paid well, or you might not like the work you end up doing (or both), but those experiences help you find what you do want to do. If you like graphic design, maybe put together a portfolio and look around for internships. The job market is probably tough for that, but all you can do is try, and in a year from now or next summer take a deep breath and ask yourself if you like the path you're on or if you'd rather apply to medical school or PhD programs, or...

An oft-repeated and very valuable piece of advice is to talk to as many people as possible. Find people who do the things you're interested in maybe doing and ask them how they got there, if they like what they do, what they wish they had known, etc. Just finding people and getting to have those conversations is a lot of work in itself but I promise that they will be helpful.
posted by silvergoat at 2:36 PM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

The field of bioinformatics may be interesting to you, given your interests. As J. Wilson says, getting a job in any field of potential interest is a good first step to help you decide whether it is/isn't a potential career direction. It will also help you decide if you need an advanced degree and, if so, in what area.
posted by maxim0512 at 2:43 PM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

Based on my experience, the people who do well in med school are the ones who wanted (and worked for it) for many, many years before graduating. They were certain they wanted a career as a physician and they focused on it. I'm not saying med school is a bad idea for you, but it sounds like currently you are lacking the focus necessary for it. The last thing you want is to start med school and then realize you don't like it. You also mention a potential good compensation as a benefit of going to med school. Have you considered the costs of going to med school as well on top of long work hours?

It might be a good idea for you to take some time to analyze your options before you make a decision.
posted by helloworlditsme at 2:43 PM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Step one: get a job, pay the bills - What were plans for this?
Step two: take some time figure out further schooling. Where can you go and pay the least to get the most
What about getting a PharmD and doing drug research? Or becoming a clinical pharmacologist?
Going to Scandanavia would depend on what career you followed.
posted by SyraCarol at 3:33 PM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

Get a research assistant/lab tech job. This will be a practical introduction as to what research in a wet lab is really like. You will make slightly more money than a graduate student would, though not nearly as much as your friends in engineering majors.

Even working part time is not the same as being a full time non-student lab employee expected to produce and contribute. What you've been previously is closer to an intern. Now you will make the buffers and you will make them right or everyone will suffer.
posted by maryr at 3:37 PM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: maryr: "Get a research assistant/lab tech job. This will be a practical introduction as to what research in a wet lab is really like. You will make slightly more money than a graduate student would, though not nearly as much as your friends in engineering majors.

Even working part time is not the same as being a full time non-student lab employee expected to produce and contribute. What you've been previously is closer to an intern. Now you will make the buffers and you will make them right or everyone will suffer."

I've spent 8 months working full time at the Jackson Labs and another 4 months full time at McGill (followed by 8 months of part time). The full time was when I was not a student. I've made all the buffers, and was considered a research assistant.
posted by Strass at 3:57 PM on April 6, 2013

Best answer: You don't have to stay in academia to be a PI. It sounds like your interests are in the lab end of biology: cell bio, biotech, biochem? Well lucky you because there is a TON of industry bio research of that sort going on world wide.

If you think you want to do want to do research I would do this: get an industry job either in a lab or doing something else you're interested in at a company that does significant original research (technical writing maybe?). Don't get too comfy, you're not staying. When you are looking for this job make it your mission to use the time to see if you want to pursue research or not, throw yourself into that world in other words. Give yourself an end date for this experiment, 2 years is good, and have something lined up for when you leave. Grad school is the easiest way to move to Europe if you're American and also the easiest way to transition to another career if you decide research is not for you. At that point you'll have so much good experience you'll be a shoo in.

Most importantly: save all your pennies and don't accumulate ANY new debt. It gives you flexibility that you need in your 20s to pursue a career.
posted by fshgrl at 4:32 PM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm also extremely interested in moving overseas. I loved living in Canada for university, and I'd aim for Scandinavia next, should I go back to school. Will his help or hinder my job search?

If you plan to work in Canada outside of academia, it might well hinder your search*. In my experience, Canadian HR types (east of Alberta) prefer known quantities, meaning 1) Canadian qualifications and/or 2) evidence of a clear, linear career path referencing job titles that make sense in a Canadian context. I have a feeling there's more rigidity about this here than in other places, but wonder what other canucks think.

*unless you intended to do an applied/professional masters (engineering, health professions). You'd still have to deal with licensure issues in that case, but I'd think that sort of thing would take you further than an academic qualification from anywhere other than the most famous European universities. (I have a friend who struggled with a masters from the Sorbonne.) American ones are probably more welcome.
posted by nelljie at 4:34 PM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: OK great. These have been really constructive so far.

This will be my first job search. Are there better places for me to look than the generic "job search/listing" websites (Monster, LinkedIn) specifically targeted towards private research/industry jobs?
posted by Strass at 4:40 PM on April 6, 2013

Best answer: While you seem to be going in a different direction this is still very much worth stating,

DON'T PAY FOR A PH.D. IN THE SCIENCES. DON'T DO IT, THERE IS NEVER A GOOD REASON TO, NEVER, AND PLEASE TELL ANYONE WHO SAYS OTHERWISE TO KISS YOUR YOUNG AND STILL FINANCIALLY VIABLE ASS. I DON'T MEAN THAT FIGURATIVELY, PLEASE TELL THEM THEY CAN KISS YOUR ASS.

If you ever get an letter from an institution offering you a PhD, at home or abroad, but not enough funding for BOTH tuition and a plausibly livable stipend, that is not an acceptance letter it is an advertisement, and the product is shitty. In addition to driving yourself into unsustainable debt you will be an exploited stooge, and while people might feel sorry for you, no one respects an exploited stooge. An adviser who is desperate enough to take their failure to thrive out of the asses of their graduate students is an adviser who does not give a shit about you and a department that is craven enough to do the same also does not give a shit about you. A science PhD without funding is a lot more pain, but it will also inevitably result in a lot less reward. Not all PhDs are created equal and an adviser who cannot get their shit together enough to pay you will be an adviser who is not taken seriously by their colleagues, cannot be reasonably expected to help you publish in a significant way, or be reasonably expected to train you in a viable skill set, much less help you prepare a career more successful than their own.

A PhD you have to pay for or go into debt of any kind for is a trap, don't fall for it.

That said, if you do plan on doing academic type things either in Canada or abroad your first priority really should be finding something to do for immediately after you graduate to fill the gap that would exist between graduation and the start of your new academic thing. You would have some time before the next application season to figure out where to go, but you would want to fill that time with something that could help you like a research internship.

That said getting funding for graduate work in Europe as a Canadian can be pretty difficult, there are a few countries like Belgium that see an advantage in pretty much paying the way of talented foreign undergrads for a year or two on a large scale, with a fondness for North Americans even, but that doesn't really extend to graduate work. Graduate funding here is divorced from graduate positions in a way that is weird for us to get used to, but its important to understand that positions, generally, mean very little - its the funding thats important. Funding for graduate students in the sciences tends to come from either big EU initiatives, various multicountry initiatives, or national things that typically exclude all non-EU citizens or all non-EU citizens barring colonial exceptions, which sucks for us. Not all of them do though and there may be Canadian sources of funding that could help, McGill should have a career office that could help you look. If you have a grandparent who had what would now be EU citizenship it would be really worthwhile to look into what that could mean for altering your citizenship status, particularly if Irish or German.

"I think you might benefit by going and getting a job. Use your talents and science background in an industry setting for a while. Med school and/or grad school (and the debt or lost years of earnings) will always be out there, but that will be a more informed decision if you have a better idea what it's like to work a normal job."

I know many people who've done this and while there are a bunch that don't regret it they are in the minority. If you want those letters after your name now is really the best time to get them while you are still young, without a spouse much less kids, and perfectly able to saunter off to Europe for a while without anyone relying on you. Also eating ramen now is easy, eating ramen after you've had a real career with a real salary for a few years is hard.
posted by Blasdelb at 5:15 AM on April 7, 2013 [3 favorites]

Sorry, Strass, I misinterpreted your experience. I was guarding against things like our summer student who came bragging about all the techniques she knew, but couldn't pour an agarose gel.

(Our McGill summer student, on the other hand, was pretty awesome. ^_^)
posted by maryr at 12:17 PM on April 7, 2013

Best answer: I think it's a good idea to get a job for a year or two to learn about a different field / career type and pick up a new skill set and perspective. In my experience, grad students (PhDs or MD/PhDs) who've worked at companies before grad school tend to be efficient / self-disciplined / goal-oriented / product-driven, which are very useful characteristics for grad school where it's super easy to flounder about and waste a lot of time (ask me how I know). If I could go back to my pre-grad school years, I would ideally work for a year or two in a company where I'm part of a team responsible for developing a product under a substantial amount of time pressure.

Regarding MD or MD/PhD: I don't know about Canada or Europe, but for the US, MD and MD/PhD programs want to see a certain bundle of evidence that you're committed to the track. The last thing programs (esp. funded MD/PhD programs) want is to invest money and time in you and have you drop out mid-way through the program, so they really want to see that you love research and medicine. Taking time away from research to do something different (even radically different) is OK as long as you provide evidence that you really went all in to try out your alternative career path, and then realized that you actually do want to do MD or MD/PhD. Have you shadowed doctors or gotten some sort of clinical exposure? If you haven't you want to do that both for applications and (more importantly) to inform your career decisions.

If you do want to keep the the MD or MD/PhD option open, I would be careful about making sure that whatever you choose to do in the next 1 or 2 years, you have a plan and rough timeline for how you will apply to med schools. e.g. Ask for rec letters from your undergrad profs and Jackson Labs PIs NOW rather than having to hunt your letter writers down in a couple years (you can always ask them to update the letters just before you apply, which will be easy for them). Add to your clinical experiences somehow - ideally the experience will be interesting and educational for you but also low-key (if you'll have a full time job) and if you stick with it for a while you should aim to get a rec letter out of it. (I don't mean to come off as a careerist going on about rec letters, but it's easy to forget that recommendations are crucial for applications since they are basically letters from people vouching that you did indeed do what you said you did).

I agree with the posters above that talking to people can be extremely useful. Talk to them and ask how they figured out their career path. For MD/PhD stuff, this SDN subforum is great.
posted by nemutdero at 1:17 PM on April 7, 2013