<p>Sschoe2, I never said my kid was going to try to get a job with just an undergrad degree in a science field. Anyone who does any research at all on biology job prospects knows that some additional education is going to be required. Stop bashing everyone in this field… you are clearly bitter from your experience. Why don’t you go study accounting and go into one of those fields you think is better, and stop derailing every single thread with your negativity?</p>
<p>Here is your own quote from another thread:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Who do you think those “amoral…corporate execs” are? They are, of course, mostly MBAs.</p>
<p>Most of the [career</a> surveys](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys.html]career”>University Graduate Career Surveys - Career Opportunities & Internships - College Confidential Forums) at universities indicate that chemical engineering does better than materials engineering. The latter does appear to be a smaller field, though with fewer students, so that balances out, but it would at least mean a smaller selection of employers and jobs to work in the field.</p>
<p>I think one of the big distinctions between materials science and ChemE is that more MSE people seem to go on to graduate school versus ChemE since MSE tends towards more research-oriented careers. There aren’t a whole lot of steel mills left in the country, and lots of manufacturing in general has left, so materials people are becoming more specialized in the R&D side of things.</p>
<p>(Not to say they don’t go on to normal companies. I have friends that had offers with Ford, Bose, Johnson & Johnson, GE, Lockheed Martin, and Intel after graduating with just their BS.)</p>
<p>Fact of the matter is people are going to major in whatever they want despite what some anonymous person on the internet says. So this arguement about whether or not science is a good field to pursue can continue, but its going to be irrelevant.</p>
<p>this was hilarious. why does anyone study anything? for money? for happiness? does all of this really matter? people choose what they major in for a reason. Whether their reason is so that they may live a comfortable life or because it is the love of their life, its still their decision. Why do people study history? Why do people study set design? Set designers are not in demand by any means but they still manage to work in that field…I feel like I’m rambling.</p>
<p>Maybe but it will stop some people and make them think gee do I want to bust my butt for 6 years and pay $20k at least for a degree that leaves me worse off than when I graduated high school.</p>
<p>It is nice to study things that make you happy, but you have to earn a living. Heck I love bicycling. That doesn’t mean I’d consider working for minimum wage at a bike store.</p>
<p>lol, this forum make me chuckle. i think glasss and sschoe2 were somehow scarred in their childhoods by the physical sciences and now have dedicated their lives to the destruction of said fields :p</p>
<p>My experience in the sciences have made my life a mess. I find what is going on alarming. People get science degrees believing they are doing the right thing for the country and that they will earn a decent but not lavish living based on salary stats. They graduate, end up in complete crap jobs or unemployed and leave the field after their life is messed up and the cycle continues.</p>
<p>I think the truth should be out there and that companies should have their supply of suckers shut off. The only way conditions in science will start to improve is when companies can no longer get away with it.</p>
<p>It isn’t companies that are causing the oversupply of biology majors (that compete with chemistry majors for many of the same jobs). It is all of the students chasing the medical school dream, most of whom never get to the point of applying to medical school when they realize that their grades are too low to have any chance of admission.</p>
<p>It is companies crying shortage and hiring H1-b’s under the pretense of a shortage. Abbott labs head of HR was quoted as calling Americans basically idiots with useless degrees for not majoring in science enough.</p>
<p>The problem is Abbott themselves are notorious for using h1-b’s and keeping their science staff as permatemps via Manpower staffing agency.</p>
<p>I agree the med student nonadmits are also an issue, but there are people who genuinely want to work in science and not go to med school that are getting screwed because they think that it is a viable career</p>
<p>Maybe instead of issuing H1’s, the government can start a program where they can offer tax credits for labs and company’s that hire American born scientists. Because as it stands we’re actually rolling backwards in terms of the progression of mankind, especially in the United States. Other countries such as China, Korea, and even Russia are rapidly catching up and will surpass the United States in terms of scientific progression and that is bad. And if the government was serious about putting money into R&D, they would cut out spending money on Wall Street, who will continously put themselves into a cycle of going into bubbles and bursting them. We can’t keep outsourcing everything because eventually if everyone is out of a job, investment and consumer spending drops sharply, and these so called corporations flop. What then?</p>
<p>Chemistry is terrible. Stay away. At the BS/MS level you are going to find hordes and hordes of nothing more than temp jobs, jobs doing mundane analytical or QC work testing the same samples over and over again, or permanent decent jobs for companies that will, however, only last for 3 or 4 years before you’re thrown into the mix again in order to find another job.</p>
<p>Be a bs/ms chemist if:</p>
<p>-you want student loan debt</p>
<p>-stagnant wages in the $40-50k range</p>
<p>-a job that doesn’t last for more than 4 years</p>
<p>-don’t want to own a hope and rent for the rest of your life because you constantly need the ability to relocate to find a new job</p>
<p>-like doing more qc work</p>
<p>-like making money for companies like manpower, kelly services, etc that take a shave off the top of your earnings.</p>
<p>Just be safe…</p>
<p>Major in math and specialize in computer science…why?</p>
<p>1) You can still go for the Math jobs
2) You can always do the software thing as a backup plan
3) You don’t even have to be the best and because of supply/demand, employers will still give you a job.</p>
<p>There’s always the option of moving to Canada.</p>
<p>Canada is a great, peaceful country where the government neither tricks you nor monitors you like some certain other North American country. And it definitely would not be shamelessly promoting Bio.</p>
<p>I think as ucbalumnus said the major problem is all of the students who entered college as Biology majors thinking they would become medical doctors but graduate from college with a degree in Biology and never come close to becoming doctors. The 60% of actual applicants to medical school who do not receive a single offer of admission, about 25,000 people, is only the tip of the iceberg of one time aspiring physicians who end up with a BS in the Biosciences but do not go on to even apply to medical school because they realize with their statistics, the grueling task of applying through AAMCAS to medical schools would be an expensive exercise in futility. </p>
<p>High school students who do well in their courses in high school, and are constantly told by their families that they should become doctors since they are so smart, way overestimate their chances of actually being accepted into a medical school some day and reality does not really start to set in until they are juniors and seniors in college when they are pretty much committed to getting a Biology degree. You see it all the time on the pre-med site; some high school student or college freshman asking what he or she has to do to be sure they will get into a top ten medical school since any lower ranked medical school would be unthinkable for them when it is clear that the chances of them getting into any medical school are vanishingly small. As long as one in five college freshman are convinced that they will be doctors some day there is going to be a glut of Biology/Biochemistry/Chemistry majors who did not get into medical school and will be looking for any job they can get.</p>
<p>The major problem is that the US doesn’t manufacture anything anymore and it hardly does any R and D. R and D and investment is constantly under attack by budget hawks in DC trying to “control the deficit” (although the Pentagon is allowed to have a 700 billion dollar war chest). As a result, the US economy is now described as a services economy (according to the CIA world factbook). Everyone knows this and that’s why you have insane amounts of people all vying for high end serive jobs like physician, lawyer, pharmacist, etc. The only jobs left out there are crappy service jobs for scientists like doing QC/analytical/method development since it is a service economy. There is a never ending supply of idiots to fill these positions from all of the people that fail to get into medical school and that’s how companies can get away with a never ending cycle of permatemps. R and D is toast in this country. Too little funding from the govt, to high start up costs, too much red tape, and too much politics. Even if you get lucky and find a R and D job position that is open and that will pay you a decent living, there is likely an INSANE amount of competition. Young people these days have to compete with the hordes of laid off scientists with 20 years experience that also have publications out the wazoo. There’s nothing left for young scientists except horrible bottom of the barrel garbage all while you are swimming in student loan debt. R and D is done and is never coming back to this country. I’ve seriously thought about moving to somewhere like Singapore after I get out of grad school to pursue R and D interests. If this country doesn’t want to value innovation, cutting edge research, and wants to continue its decline into a services based economy while the rest of the world is catching up or exceeding us, then fine. I for one ,however, refuse to let my most productive years slip away into awful mediocrity doing temp services work or QC garbage. Ill be taking my innovation and high tech jobs that I’ll create along with it elsewhere to places like Singapore.</p>
<p>So… for those on this thread who are so negative about the job market, please provide some information that could add credibility to your complaints:</p>
<ul>
<li>Specifically what college(s) did you attend?</li>
<li>What was your major?</li>
<li>What was your overall GPA and GPA within your major?</li>
<li>What year did you graduate (just trying to get a feeling for your ages)?</li>
<li>What research experiences did you have during summers before college/during college?</li>
<li>What jobs have you held in your field since graduating?</li>
<li>Did you originally intend to go to med school? Did you actually apply to med schools – why or why not?</li>
</ul>
<p>Because here is the scoop. SOME graduates are having success in these fields. Maybe not as many as you would like to see. And maybe you are not among them. But it is hard to separate sour grapes from legitimate complaints without more info on your backgrounds. Thanks.</p>
<p>-won’t name univ for the sake of anonymity, but it was decent (college name doesn’t matter that much in industry though)
-major:chemistry, mathematics,and econ minor
-overall gpa 3.7, math gpa 3.98, chem gpa 3.89
-2005
-did computational chemistry research for a semester, independent studies in math for 3 semesters. Most research experience came from working though
-2004-2009 worked as a synthetic organic chemist doing medicinal chemistry
-2009-2010 lost job/unemployed, now make $20k less and do monotonous QC garbage because that’s all that is available outside temp work
-nope don’t care about med school at all.</p>
<p>Will however be a biomedical engineering grad student in the fall at a prestigious univ and plan on opening up my own company when I get out. Leaving chemistry in the distant past, it has no future. If I can’t find decent paying work that pays a fair wage then ill just have to create one. And I’ve seriously considered evntually moving off shores since R and D in this country is constantly under assault. Good bye jobs. The US is rapidly declining because of the massive shift towards a services economy. Service enomies don’t build REAL wealth and higher standards of living because they don’t produce anything. The real drivers of great economies are those who invent and build. The US, for some odd reason, seemes to by trying every way possible to drive innovators out of work by offering terrible jobs, temp work, low paying work, slashing investment spending, and making it difficult to bring technology to the market. Hello Singapore, here I come. There’s nothing left here for young scientists and engineers anymore except terrible low paying or unstable jobs. While all our greatest minds are busy applying to become servants in the law or physician field, countries like India, china, and Singapore are gathere vast armies of scientists and engineers and also investing in technology. 20 years from now we’ll all be their servants because that’s what we’ve built.</p>