<p>I am intending to pursue PhD in the life sciences and I am still wondering which path should I go more into; industry or academia. </p>
<p>It's common knowledge that in academia the salary is low, read somewhere that postdoc gets paid the same wage as a bus driver. Just thinking of this point makes me shudder, imagine living near poverty after advanced education. On the other hand, industry scientists makes more money and works regular office hours, however they are not focused on publishing papers but making profit for the company.</p>
<p>The NIH postdoc payscale (which many institutions use) starts at $37,740 for a brand-new postdoc and goes up to $52,068 for a seventh-year postdoc. This is nowhere near the poverty level, which is $22,350 for a family of four.</p>
<p>My advice would be to leave your options open at this point and see whether you like your lifestyle in graduate school or are itching to get out of academia. Even if you want to eventually work in industry, you will often need to do an academic postdoc.</p>
<p>Don’t plan on working in academia as a life scientist. Jobs in academia are basically nonexistent. People talk about the postdoc cycle for life scientists with disdain, but they are right. You WILL wind up in the postdoc loop, waiting for years to begin your academic career, and you might never make it! </p>
<p>Plan on going into industry. If you work in industry you might be more capable of transitioning back into academia later, especially if you’ve made a name for yourself while working in industry.</p>
<p>It isn’t wrong, denizen. Most post-docs that I have seen make in the mid-$30K range, and I don’t know how obligated a lab is to adjust to the NIH scale if the post-doc isn’t bringing in sufficient funding.</p>
<p>You won’t be a post-doc forever, denizen. Also, most schools do adhere to that pay scale so you probably won’t be making any less (if that helps). The only time I saw a slight decrease was with a private foundation grant (and I suppose the department didn’t have established guidelines about it).</p>
<p>I don’t know much about industry, only what I have gathered from two post-docs I knew who were thinking about that option. I guess what you need to do following your PhD depends on the type of position you are interested in. The senior scientist positions (that they were applying for) seemed to require additional experience following a PhD, but I don’t think they specified what type it had to be. Since you work in industry now, you could always ask your colleagues about it.</p>
<p>I too am rather shocked and dismayed at the notion that there are apparently enough people who serve postdocs for seven years that the NIH had to implement a distinct pay category for them. One would think that after at the very most 4-5 years postdoc work without a faculty job placement, come on, you should know that academia is probably not in your future and it’s time to reassess your career strategy and move on with your life. </p>
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<p>What can I say, denizen? That’s how a career in science academia works - the vast majority of PhD’s have to serve postdocs to have any reasonable opportunity for a tenure-track position. </p>
<p>On the other hand, consider the ultimate prize in the academic career path: the opportunity for tenure, which essentially provides *lifetime job security<a href=“other%20than%20truly%20exceptional%20cases%20of%20proven%20misconduct%20or%20the%20closing%20of%20your%20entire%20department”>/i</a>. In contrast, private-sector employees can be terminated at any time, for any reason, or often times for no reason at all. Merck recently announced the reduction of an additional 13k jobs on top of the 11k already lost in 2010. Astra-Zeneca is cutting 15k jobs, and Pfizer is cutting 19k. Companies don’t care how long you’ve been working for the company - indeed, your length of time working for the company may actually may be correlated with an increase in your likelihood of losing your job as you are probably then making a higher salary which the company would prefer to not have to pay.</p>
<p>At my company, we are hosting post-docs for a period of one year, and if you do well, you are hired on as a PhD chemist. In fact, many companies are starting to host post-docs. During this time, they are paid PhD scale for our company ($90,000), but you work on the problems that are only valuable to the company. So you could go for the money, but you may be working on a project in which you have no interest. So it is a double edged sword, and you can’t have it both ways. You could take less pay, and work on something you are interested in; or, make more money, and work on projects you have no interest in. I worked with a post-doc who spent his whole post-doc year doing NMR experiments in which he had no interest, and which were not connected to his dissertation research by any stretch of the imagination. Another post-doc spent her year doing research characterizing raw materials. She constantly had battles with her supervising PhD chemist on how to do experiments, and how to perform her work; although, I feel that there was some jealously on the part of the supervisor. </p>
<p>We have not hired one post-doc during this little experiment, because the problems we work on are not real problems (from a scientific, and engineering standpoint). No engineers are setting up unit ops at a new plant, we use contract manufacturers for that. We are not working on any hard scientific, or engineering project, we are rehashing the same hackneyed ideas. In fact, we use technology that is about 10-15 years behind academia, so it is sort of like being in a time warp. I wanted to use a CE for an experiement, but we don’t have one in the building, and I work for a Fortune 500 company.</p>
In biomedical sciences, a three- to five-year postdoc is completely typical, and a star postdoc in a high-powered lab might not even start looking for an academic placement until the fifth year – it takes a lot of time to acquire enough data for, and then publish, one or more top-journal papers, which is obviously what a university hiring committee will expect. This has been the case in my experience, both with postdocs leaving my lab (and getting tenure-track positions at top R01 institutions) and with faculty candidates in my department at Harvard.</p>
<p>Seven or eight years is, of course, too much, but that’s the point at which a biologist might start reality-checking him- or herself, not five years.</p>
<p>I have the same question myself. And one of the things that I think affects my choice is the chance to make it big…to make big money or become really famous…I don’t want my only source of income to be the salary of a monotonous job for the rest of my life…which track is more likely for this? academia or industry? and how might one do so in each track??</p>
<p>Then, with apologies to you, mollie, in advance, for saying something you probably don’t want to hear, frankly, I feel sad for the biomedical sciences. Contrast that with the field of, say, economics, where star researchers rarely if ever have to serve more than 1-2 years of postdocs, with most such stars able to obtain tenure-track faculty positions immediately right out of graduate school. For example, in 2011 placement cycle, the overwhelming majority of Harvard economics PhD graduates, including the sister programs of business economics, political economy and government, and public policy, were able to skip the post-doc step and jumped directly to tenure-track assistant professorships, and even of those few who did take postdoc appointments, none were greater than one year in length and each of them already had a secured faculty position in place once their appointments were completed. {For example, Eduard Morales already has an agreement to join the faculty of Columbia in 2012 once his post-doc at Princeton is completed.}</p>
<p>What makes the situation all the more sadder is that the biomedical science research produces tremendous value-add to society, whereas it’s not entirely clear that economics research does. Biomedical innovation produces a bevy of cures and treatments for diseases and ailments, whereas much of the latest economics ‘innovation’ seemingly consists of a litany of financial securities and fiscal/monetary policies of dubious reliability that have torn the world’s economy asunder and undermined the credit-worthiness of numerous nations, including the US. {For those economists who would disagree, I would ask: name an economics innovation that is as profound as the cure for smallpox or polio.}</p>
<p>@Brahmin: you’re unlikely to make it “big” on either track. Your best chance for doing that is to start your own company, with your own intellectual property, although you also have to assume much higher risk of failure when you do that.</p>
<p>Think of it this way: in industry, you have a larger salary, but the company owns everything you do. You might get a $1000 or so bonus for a successful patent, but other than having your name on it, that’s it. The company owns the license. In academia, you are not generally working on research that will result in a patent because you will be concentrating on more scholarly issues. (This isn’t always true, however. A new chemistry building at Princeton was funded largely through a donation by a Princeton professor from his royalties for a drug discovery. But this is highly unusual in academia.)</p>
<p>Becoming a “star” in academia depends on your field, your home institution, and luck. Academics are allowed to consult one day a week or in the summer if they aren’t drawing a summer salary, and this can be lucrative; however, you need to have the right connections and credentials to find a side job like that. Some professors at the most famous institutions of higher learning become talking heads. When something happens, the media gives them a call, and they appear (for free) on TV or radio to discuss the issue. That’s fame, academy-style.</p>
<p>No apologies necessary, sakky. I mean, to be honest, it doesn’t bother me very much, because that’s just the way things are in the biological sciences. Being a postdoc in a biology lab isn’t such a raw deal, after all – you can take on a risky project and do something crazy, because it’s not your grant money/startup package/tenure decision at stake. </p>
<p>Not to mention that becoming a faculty member generally means the cessation of your personal research activities in favor of writing grants and otherwise fundraising. Being a postdoc means being free to do benchwork, which is what biologists do for fun. :)</p>
<p>There are a very (very) small number of really brilliant people who go directly from PhD to faculty position in biology. I can think of two, one at Harvard and one at MIT, and both of whom were astounding innovators in top labs for their PhDs. But that’s once-in-a-decade stuff, and of course it’s considered exceedingly risky.</p>
<p>It’s funny you bring up starting your own company…because not so recently ago I saw a flyer in a university for a lecture given by a faculty member on transitioning to research to entrepreneurship. He used to work in the university (and still does) but now has started his start up company…so I guess this is a possibility from the academia track to make it big…this is very rare though huh?</p>
<p>And why did you bring up consulting? Is it because academics who consult get paid a lot of money? I know research scientists (people who work in the university but don’t teach at all) do work for companies who come to universities with problems to solve…you are saying these guys are paid much higher than professors (who do scholarly research and teach)??</p>
<p>And a question directed to all of you…It’s been repeated several times that people in the industry get paid much higher…what difference are we talking about…</p>
<p>comparing a tenured professor to someone who has been in the industry for say 10 years</p>
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