Put Your Science to Work

The Take-Charge Career Guide for Scientists

Peter S. Fiske, Aaron Louie

• Publisher: American Geophysical Union
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118764411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geology & Earth Sciences

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Special Publications Series.

Whether you are a science undergraduate or graduate student, post-doc or senior scientist, you need practical career development advice. Put Your Science to Work: The Take-Charge Career Guide for Scientists can help you explore all your options and develop dynamite strategies for landing the job of your dreams. Completely revised and updated from the best-selling To Boldly Go: A Practical Career Guide for Scientists, this second edition offers expert help from networking to negotiating a job offer. This is the book you need to start moving your career in the right direction.

1

Beyond the Event Horizon

Science Employment Trends in the New Millennium

The size of the scientific enterprise, which began its expansion around 1700, has now begun to reach the limits imposed on it by the size of the human race.

David Goodstein

Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates
1993 Sigma Xi Forum

A decade ago, Richard Atkinson, then incoming president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), declared the supply of scientists and engineers in the United States a “national crisis in the making.” Atkinson was responding to projections by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of a looming shortage of new scientists. Subsequent investigation by young scientists and Congressional staffers revealed that the NSF’s projections were dead wrong. As a result, 5 years of science and engineering graduate students marched optimistically into one of the worst job markets for scientists in the past 40 years.

Predicting supply and demand in employment has always been a perilous activity. While near-term supply is fairly easy to judge given the number of students in the pipeline, estimating demand for newly trained scientists and engineers is a black art at best! Not only is it difficult to estimate future hiring trends in academia, industry, and government, but these estimates are predicated on economic and federal policy conditions that can change dramatically over the time frame of a single graduate student. Put simply, there is no way for entering graduate students to know what the job market will be like when they graduate.

This does not mean that graduate students must march into a black hole of uncertainty. While job supply may be difficult to gauge, it is possible to understand some of the macroscopic forces that affect science employment and think strategically about your career in science by asking some basic questions.

What will federal R&D support look like in my future?

As you know, money is the mother’s milk of science. Practically every measure of growth in science (number of Ph.D.s, number of publications) is highly correlated to the amount of research funding provided by the government. Most of the R&D money spent in the United States is spent by industry. Basic research—the land most academic Ph.D.s and researchers inhabit—represents only 15% of the total amount of R&D spending, but the federal government funds most of this.

Figure 1. Growth in R&D spending over the last 50 years. The private sector now accounts for two of every three dollars invested in R&D.

The AAAS has amassed figures and data on trends in R&D funding in the United States and abroad. The data, summarized in Figure 1, show that the federal government’s spending in R&D has been more or less constant over the past 25 years. Nearly all the growth in total R&D spending has been in the industrial sector. This investment ebbs and flows depending on the health of the economy and the health of particular sectors. “Rich” sectors, such as information technology and biotechnology, spend proportionately more on research while sectors that are highly competitive and have low profit margins, such as the steel industry, tend to shave their R&D investments.

So, in answer to your question, government spending on science and technology probably won’t grow much faster than the rate of inflation during your career. Most of the growth will be in industry.

Figure 2. The proportion of federal R&D funding to defense and non-defense areas has changed. Today, nearly half goes to non-defense R&D.

Are there important trends in how the U.S. government is investing in science and technology?

Indeed there are. The proportion of defense-related R&D has fallen substantially since 1990 (see Figure 2). This is due not only to the end of the Cold War but also to an increasing reliance on “Commercial Off The Shelf” (COTS) technology in new defense systems. The Defense Department has sub-stantially cut its basic science funding, relying on industry to come up with the innovations it will need for the future. The needs of the military are changing as well. The United States no longer faces a single, large, technologically comparable adversary. Today we live in a world of numerous small threats that include terrorist groups not aligned with any particular country. As a result, Defense R&D will likely continue to shift toward information technology; light, mobile, and precise weapons systems; and defense against weapons of mass destruction.

Figure 3. Trends in Federal R&D spending by field. Only health-related research has grown steadily.

In the non-defense part of federal R&D spending only one field of research has shown steady increases in funding year in and year out: Health. Other areas, such as space and energy, have waxed and waned as priorities shifted and crises passed. With the graying of the American electorate, and the huge direct costs borne by the government for health care, one can only expect the proportion of R&D funding for health to increase in the future.

So, in answer to your question, the life and health sciences appear to have the rosiest futures for federal funding. But, as we discussed earlier, the overall level of federal funding for science will not rise dramatically during your career.

But what about those calls in Congress for doubling of science funding?

It is true that in the last few years several members of Congress have called for a “doubling” of funding for science over the next 5 years. Science seems to enjoy popular bipartisan support these days, and many members of Congress believe that the federal investment in science has substantial economic rewards. However, before any of you young scientists get your hopes up, let me caution you that we have heard these words before. Congressional calls for more funding are just that: recommendations. But when it comes to slicing up the shrinking wedge of “discretionary spending”—those federal dollars that are not already committed to Social Security and other entitlement programs—science has to compete with all those other hungry mouths: education, transportation, housing, etc. While science may pay out big dividends in the long term, other “investments” pay far more handsomely in the short term, a.k.a. the Congressional term! Until R&D can compete better with these short-term issues it is likely that federal R&D spending will not get a substantially larger slice of the pie.

Will industrial R&D continue to grow?

Industrial funding of R&D as a whole has been growing for some time, and there is every indication that, as the economy grows, industrial R&D will grow as well. Some new industries, such as information technology and biotechnology, are R&D-intensive. As these grow they will draw in more scientific talent. Some in industry and government are worried that rapid growth in these industries will be limited not by funding but by a lack of technical professionals to fill new jobs.

However, it is important to realize that the bulk of industry’s R&D investment is in the “D” and not the “R”! A number of economists, science policy experts, and government leaders have noted a shift in industrial research away from long-term basic science and toward more applied, near-term areas. Many large industrial laboratories, such as Bell Labs, have been dismantled or restructured, and in nearly all of them, the era of basic “curiosity-driven” research appears to be over. Many in the science community have bemoaned this relentless pursuit of the short-term and lament that breakthrough technologies of the future may fail to emerge in such an environment.

However, along with the dismantling of their in-house basic research, many companies and industrial sectors are forging stronger ties with universities—the repositories of basic science and the source of new scientists. Companies are finding it more profitable and reliable to scour the world for breakthrough technologies in universities, smaller companies, and national laboratories, and then license those technologies, rather than rely on their staff of in-house researchers to produce all the breakthroughs they need. Thus, the trend away from big, centralized industrial labs is less of a retreat from long-term research and more a move to outsource the research function. Where once industrial R&D was vertically integrated—with every step from idea to product taking place under one roof— now industrial R&D is becoming distributed among numerous players. Basic science is becoming a commodity.

This trend has important implications for the careers of young scientists. In the past, a young scientist could look to a large company or a national laboratory for the best facilities and most secure employment. Today, many smaller companies and start-ups are leading the technological revolution. They are nimble, focused, and fast-paced. The rewards of working in a smaller company can be staggering, especially if the small company gets much bigger or is bought out by a large firm. For example, two out of three employees at Qualcomm, a telecommunications company, became millionaires in the course of a single year. However, the success rate for most technology ventures is not high. Many more stall before they reach a big pay-out. To thrive in such a dynamic environment, scientists must remain flexible, versatile, and well-connected.

I remain seriously interested in a career in academia. Are such careers possible today?

Absolutely! Academia remains one of the principal career goals of young scientists, even though most Ph.D. scientists do not end up there! In 1995, only, 46% of the Ph.D. scientists and engineers in the United States worked in academia. Today that number has fallen further. Furthermore, of those who do work in academia, only a small fraction have jobs in research universities. Many more work in a very diverse set of environments, from small liberal arts colleges to junior and community colleges. There will always be opportunities in academia, but the number may be highly field-specific.

Academic employment faced a number of pressures in the 1990s, and will continue to do so in the future. Mostly, this pressure is due to money. Colleges and universities continue to be under financial pressure to cut costs and slow tuition increases. The recent economic revival in some states has permitted funding increases to some state colleges and universities, but after years of budget freezes many schools find themselves using the new money to fill gaps created during the lean years. As a result, the number of full-time faculty positions for scientists and engineers has fallen slightly, from 173,000 in 1991 to 171,000 in 1995.

Tenure itself is under new pressures. Some schools have flirted with the abolition of tenure altogether, but most are reacting incrementally by hiring more adjunct and temporary faculty and fewer tenure-track faculty. If this trend continues, and there is every sign that it will, colleges and universities will be staffed by a few tenure-track professors and a sea of temporary or non-tenured staff.

There are also new mandates on institutes of higher education. State legislatures and boards of regents are requiring colleges and universities to increase their focus on teaching. As a result, some schools are moving away from a research-focused agenda and more toward one that balances the roles of knowledge production and dissemination...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Beyond the Event Horizon: Science Employment Trends in the New Millennium
• 2 Now the Good News: The World of Opportunity Open to Scientists
• 3 The Science of Change Let’s get one thing straight: nobody likes change.
• 4 The career Planning Process: How Do I Start?
• 5 Self-Assessment: Making Your Neuroses Work for You!
• 6 Beyond the Endless Frontier: Exploring the World of Work
• 7 Exploring a Career That You Know: Research Science
• 8 Focusing on Specific Opportunities
• 9 CVs and Resumes (There IS a Difference)
• 10 Six Resume Case Studies
• 11 Cover Letters: Going from Huh? to Wow!
• 12 The Interview and Beyond
• 13 Perceptions and Realities
• References and Resources
• Index