living the questions

I mentioned a couple weeks ago how I was feeling a lot of frustration at work and how I planned to try improving things by getting into the lab more. Well, this week I’ve been helping with experiments every day. This means a few things: interacting with people! Chats with subjects ~ for this study, they are stroke patients, who tend to be older and always engage us in interesting conversations. And, getting to see “science in action” – which sounds hokey, but for these experiments I’ve been watching the recordings as we go, and can clearly see that they match the hypothesis. Even more fun is when the subjects notice the difference in their performance. It brings an immediacy to the scientific process that is rewarding.

I am happy to find my energy levels increasing at work as I spend more time in the lab. It feels really good to know that I can take charge and make some adjustments to make my work situation better. Unfortunately some underlying reasons for work frustration are going to be harder to address. Yesterday Steve sent me this article that discusses much of these reasons. It’s long, but once I started reading I got sucked in and finished the whole thing in one sitting. I really related to the issues it discusses, which are focused on the problems of the research structure in the US. Basically, the main career progression for science/engineering researchers in academia is: graduate student research, PhD defense, take a post-doc position in a lab, maybe work as a post-doc in another lab after that, and eventually get a faculty position at a university, where you work at bringing in as many grants as possible in hopes of achieving tenure. Unfortunately, only a very small percentage of PhD graduates will actually end up with the tenured faculty position, because there are just not that many jobs. This is one of the main reasons that I chose not to get my PhD ~ the whole process is very rigorous with low pay and small odds of actually succeeding. Plus, after seeing that the faculty jobs mainly consist of project management and the constant stress of trying to get highly competitive grants, it just didn’t seem worth it.

I don’t regret my decision to opt out of the PhD path, but it does leave me with a lot of questions about what to do with myself now. I’ve been thinking a lot about what type of job is really right for me, and I haven’t been able to figure it out yet. This uncertainty is disconcerting ~ I really thought I’d have a better idea by now! But talking to friends my age makes me realize how common this feeling is, so at least I’m not alone.

Turns out that even at work, I’m not alone. A month ago I started some conversations with a couple other research engineers at work, and it seems they have very similar concerns. The result of these discussions has been to form a group of the research engineers in the department to have some discussions of career options. It’s kind of crazy to me that verbalizing my internal questions has led to some serious conversations at work and attempts to put plans into place – including working with the department chair and HR to create a more defined structure of research engineer positions. I guess that having questions, and asking them, can be a really good thing! I will just keep telling myself that as I find more and more questions popping up in my life. Even if we can’t always see the answers, that process of asking questions can lead us to better places.