Science and You
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Look2Me4Guidance
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Tell me more about your vocational exploits young man!
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No, I’m just disappointed
I'm a Nuclear Med tech by training but now I'm one of those dismal management bastards. Been off the tools for a few years now.
ppoiter
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Hello all, chemist here. Did my PhD on activity of surface-attached biomolecules (happy to expand on that if anyone is interested but Im generally averse to rambling about what I studied). Interested in most things chemistry, particularly systems you can characterise using neutron scattering.
Looking to move into data science as a career, which will require some improvement in my statistics and python/sql skills but Im getting there. Are there any data scientists here? I'd be interested to hear more about what you do
Looking to move into data science as a career, which will require some improvement in my statistics and python/sql skills but Im getting there. Are there any data scientists here? I'd be interested to hear more about what you do
Did my PhD in Pharmacology many years ago. Since then have worked in the US as a lecturer but have found my way back to Melbourne. Am now leading a research group in biomaterials/org. chem/nanotechnology/pharmacology/tissue engineering (it's interdisciplinary research).
My advice to people wanting to do a PhD - don't.
My advice to people wanting to do a PhD - don't.
sataris
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Could you elaborate why?
I'm thinking about it.. though will probably only end up doing a MS ..
Absolutely.
I guess I should have confined my advice to people who are looking to start a career in academia, whether it be research, teaching or both. If your quest for a PhD (or Masters) is one to better yourself, for the pursuit of knowledge or for sheer pleasure (painful if you ask me) then go for it. The reward at the end of your journey is well worth it.
If you wish to enter academia, I just could not be more blunt about this. Don't. It is not worth it. The current climate of funding is awful and not one that will change soon (despite all the empty rhetoric that has spewed from Uncle Malcolm's mouth of late). Fellowships are awarded based on who you know, where you have worked previously and not the merit of your proposed work. Applicants who may have labelled a PCR tube and found themselves on a Nature paper are considered more worthy than graduate students and ECRs who lead research teams to a bunch of solid papers.
You will need to work overseas. I quite liked the challenge of moving to the US and working there for a few years but some do struggle. I would advise anyone who wishes to go into academia to do a PhD at a US or UK university.
Mid-career fellowships are even harder to get. I've seen exceptional scientists in the 35-45 age bracket who don't even get an interview to a fellowship panel and have to leave academia or go lecturing at lesser universities and leave their research career behind. These are people with mortgages and young children, quite a stressful time to be looking for work.
Universities are ruthless. They are happy to employ young researchers who have funding from the ARC or NHMRC, but once that funding has come to an end, these same universities simply replace you for another 'Future Fellow' (commonly referred to in my department as a 'No future fellow') rather than support that young researcher to obtain more funding.
If you, or anyone, have ambitions for a life in research then feel free to shoot me a PM and i'll be happy to advise you on the best way forward. It can be an amazingly rewarding career, just be prepared for a challenge.
Largely agree with all of this.
If you're completely in love with your field of study and that is your sole (or at least main) focus in life, then a PhD and academia can be great: you get to move around the world and meet some really interesting people.
However if you want to maintain any sort of work-life balance academia is absolutely not the path to go down. You get almost no say on where you want to live (go to where the money/jobs are), it is quite a lonely career path, teaching/research/grant application crunch times can see you working 60+ hour weeks, and often you'll have to abandon a stream of research you are interested in to chase one that is currently attracting funding.
This is definitely true if you intend to be a high-flyer in academia.
If you're just happy to get by, it's actually a very cushy job once you get past the initial bit where you have to take whatever postdoc position you can scrounge up. You teach your classes, try to put out a couple of papers a year, throw together a token grant application every couple of years or so, and for the most part the most stressful part of the job is having to explain to undergrads why they failed their topic.
It's definitely a career where the amount of work to do is determined by your level of ambition, but if you're happy to remain at level B/C for your entire career, all you've really got to do is teach well enough to not get regular complaints, and churn out a couple of papers in reasonable journals each year.
The hardest part is definitely the bit at the start of your career where you are trying to actually find a continuing position while bouncing between postdoc positions wherever you can find them.
I'm not familiar with the academic landscape in SA but in VIC and NSW those academics that do the bare minimum are a thing of the past. To obtain a Level B/C position at a 'lesser' university like ACU/Vic Uni/Fed Uni you need to either have funding or be able to show that you can obtain funding. A number of universities are throwing large amounts of money at high profile academics and infrastructure in a bid to lure more research funding dollars which will hopefully one day translate to the big ticket item - more full fee-paying international students.
It will no doubt close the perceived gap between the Go8 and the rest.
sataris
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Thanks for the extremely detailed response. I personally have no interest in academia but just learning things is so rewarding.
Learning things is rewarding, although a PhD isn't just about learning things. You should view a PhD as being like an apprenticeship in how to be a researcher, complete with poor pay and the expectation of lots of unpaid hours of extra work. The actual research topic itself is likely to be super-focused and not all that broadly applicable. I had a principal in school who, from memory, did his PhD on the French rail system from the years 1900 to 1902. You're not taking a PhD to learn things, you're taking it to learn how to be a researcher, how to prepare papers, how to argue points in an academic way, how to apply for grants, how to deal with the frustration of dead ends, how to stick at something over a period of time, etc.
GreyCrow
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ppoiter
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This is how my supervisor does it. The laziest, smartest guy you'd ever meet, although I'd say his type is dying off
MSB ROYS
Brownlow Medallist
Hello all, chemist here. Did my PhD on activity of surface-attached biomolecules (happy to expand on that if anyone is interested but Im generally averse to rambling about what I studied). Interested in most things chemistry, particularly systems you can characterise using neutron scattering.
Looking to move into data science as a career, which will require some improvement in my statistics and python/sql skills but Im getting there. Are there any data scientists here? I'd be interested to hear more about what you do
Hi everyone,
Also a chemist here. Did my PhD in organic chemistry (natural products) at the University of Melbourne many years ago. Did a postdoc in the US and have worked in drug development and undertaken translationally-focused research ever since (including a 10 year stint in Singapore where I first joined bigfooty all of those years ago). I also have rearly finished an MBA and hope to start a company in the next year or maybe even chose a second career in management consultancy. Happy to answer any questions.
Mark
Hello,
I'm a metallurgical engineer/mineral processing engineer, that mostly means I work at minesites and sit on computers all day - well I used to do that, currently bludging away in a lab doing testing. Also have a grad dip in education and have done a few years of secondary school teaching.
I call myself a data scientist/ data analyst, but really I havent seen anyone do the sort of work that I do. I look at a lot of the "standard" data analysts out there (say machine learning, mathematical modelling, statisticians and dare I say it in here - PhD's) and to a degree, I would say that none of them understand data. As to why gets to be a long story and if I'm honest, I can't even really explain it to myself. The reason I claim to be such is that in mining, in a typical sized department, there is typically about 3000 analog and 3000 digital instruments, all being archived every 2 seconds or less, plus about 500 sample results per day. Someone has to make sense of all this data and because its on processes that operate in the real world, with a bottom line, there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide when it comes to performing. When I look at some of the computery data analysis stuff being done, its all of records, which I consider to be a funny subset of almost unrealistic data, there are far less (I would say basically zero) issues that I normally associate with data such as measurement error, incompleteness and an association with the real world. To be clear, I'm def not saying this is the case in all situations - a good example is all the work going on in climate/ weather. But a lot of it isn't like that. Also, I take a keen interest in education. I look at the PhD's advising the govt departments and I can just see rookie data analysis errors everywhere, not so much in the analysis itself, but in what they look at in the big picture - which they can't even see!
With my interest in data and being pretty proud of the level I'm at, I like to test myself by making predictions. I'm pretty happy with my track record at making calls in respect of the crows and as the other adelaide posters have seen I have a habit of putting up prediction threads in order to test myself. When everyone was saying Hilary had it in the bag, I was like wait a second, this is dead even. Call me absurd, but I still think that was even more accurate than predicting a Trump win, with the way it turned out and all, with Clinton actually getting more votes. I called that the libs were going to get belted around in the last election, also called an increasing movement away from the traditional parties.
I have keen interests in many areas related to science. I am a enthusiastic lightning and storm photographer, which in turn, got me interested in the science of weather phenomena. I am teaching myself programming, via Processing and Arduino mostly, have done heaps of electronics projects in Arduino, also use VB to automate things at work.
Huge interest in psychology and cognition. Do my own private research on the topic. Trying to come up with a good model of human cognition, have gone quite a way down this path, happy with the results so far, use some of the outputs to go into my data prediction exercises - like the US election. That one was actually kinda sad for me, I loved Sanders, but alas, my model gave him no chance. That's one thing that sucks about being a scientist, dunno about you guys, but a couple of times my work has proved my convictions to be wrong.
Have a great interest in economics. Being a lover of physics and determinism, I can't stand economics arbitrary-ness. So, much like with the cognition, I am using my obsessive compulsive dislike of things being vague, to drive myself to find a decent theory of economics, one with like a base theory and from that, all the other stuff falls out from a first principles like sense.
Also pretty keen on history and anthropology as they both drive so much of what we do today and so there is so much to learn from them. Take economics, its like everyone thinks that the modern economy is so complex it has no parallels with anything from the past. That's true at one level, but there are many, many things the current economy does share with the past and plenty of lessons to take from them and even if you only look at the work in Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st century, things are not looking good
.
Complex systems are another area of interest. Disappointed with the work being done here, so I'm writing the book on it. Same with philosophy, I swear, 90% of it is now irrelevant. By the way, I'm an INTJ personality type and we tend to think that everything is always done wrong and so we need to fix it up, but I doubt that you would say I'm like that having read this post
I'm a metallurgical engineer/mineral processing engineer, that mostly means I work at minesites and sit on computers all day - well I used to do that, currently bludging away in a lab doing testing. Also have a grad dip in education and have done a few years of secondary school teaching.
I call myself a data scientist/ data analyst, but really I havent seen anyone do the sort of work that I do. I look at a lot of the "standard" data analysts out there (say machine learning, mathematical modelling, statisticians and dare I say it in here - PhD's) and to a degree, I would say that none of them understand data. As to why gets to be a long story and if I'm honest, I can't even really explain it to myself
. The reason I claim to be such is that in mining, in a typical sized department, there is typically about 3000 analog and 3000 digital instruments, all being archived every 2 seconds or less, plus about 500 sample results per day. Someone has to make sense of all this data and because its on processes that operate in the real world, with a bottom line, there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide when it comes to performing. When I look at some of the computery data analysis stuff being done, its all of records, which I consider to be a funny subset of almost unrealistic data, there are far less (I would say basically zero) issues that I normally associate with data such as measurement error, incompleteness and an association with the real world. To be clear, I'm def not saying this is the case in all situations - a good example is all the work going on in climate/ weather. But a lot of it isn't like that. Also, I take a keen interest in education. I look at the PhD's advising the govt departments and I can just see rookie data analysis errors everywhere, not so much in the analysis itself, but in what they look at in the big picture - which they can't even see! With my interest in data and being pretty proud of the level I'm at, I like to test myself by making predictions. I'm pretty happy with my track record at making calls in respect of the crows and as the other adelaide posters have seen I have a habit of putting up prediction threads in order to test myself. When everyone was saying Hilary had it in the bag, I was like wait a second, this is dead even. Call me absurd, but I still think that was even more accurate than predicting a Trump win, with the way it turned out and all, with Clinton actually getting more votes. I called that the libs were going to get belted around in the last election, also called an increasing movement away from the traditional parties.
I have keen interests in many areas related to science. I am a enthusiastic lightning and storm photographer, which in turn, got me interested in the science of weather phenomena. I am teaching myself programming, via Processing and Arduino mostly, have done heaps of electronics projects in Arduino, also use VB to automate things at work.
Huge interest in psychology and cognition. Do my own private research on the topic. Trying to come up with a good model of human cognition, have gone quite a way down this path, happy with the results so far, use some of the outputs to go into my data prediction exercises - like the US election. That one was actually kinda sad for me, I loved Sanders, but alas, my model gave him no chance
. That's one thing that sucks about being a scientist, dunno about you guys, but a couple of times my work has proved my convictions to be wrong.Have a great interest in economics. Being a lover of physics and determinism, I can't stand economics arbitrary-ness. So, much like with the cognition, I am using my obsessive compulsive dislike of things being vague, to drive myself to find a decent theory of economics, one with like a base theory and from that, all the other stuff falls out from a first principles like sense.
Also pretty keen on history and anthropology as they both drive so much of what we do today and so there is so much to learn from them. Take economics, its like everyone thinks that the modern economy is so complex it has no parallels with anything from the past. That's true at one level, but there are many, many things the current economy does share with the past and plenty of lessons to take from them and even if you only look at the work in Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the 21st century, things are not looking good
.Complex systems are another area of interest. Disappointed with the work being done here, so I'm writing the book on it. Same with philosophy, I swear, 90% of it is now irrelevant. By the way, I'm an INTJ personality type and we tend to think that everything is always done wrong and so we need to fix it up, but I doubt that you would say I'm like that having read this post
ppoiter
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Thanks, interesting that you're thinking of heading into management consultancy, Im currently sending out applications for the same. Not having industry experience is probably a disadvantage but I'd be happy with something reasonably junior to start with. It seems like a more productive way to leverage my skills than doing a post-doc, everyone I know who did one found it to be pretty hard going for not much cash.
MSB ROYS
Brownlow Medallist
Interestingly, the money a postdoc earns in Australia is higher than most place with the exception being Switzerland.
Try and get into one of the big management consulting companies if you can - remember to write a very high quality cover letter (some of these companies read these first) and they may also ask for a one page CV. These 2 documents are often scanned by computer for keywords before seeing a person so you need to incorporate the keywords that they they looking for.
Yeah, I was shocked to learn how little assistant professors are paid in America. I've heard of contracts worth around $45K (USD obviously).
It's not huge money in Australia or anything but if you can wrangle a level B position you can pretty much walk into $90k with two pay rises a year for the first six years of your career taking you to around $120k.
Even if you come in right at the bottom of level A you're on $70k, again with two pay rises per year.
ppoiter
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I'm from New Zealand and its similar money there, although maybe not quite as much as Australia. I applied for a job at ANSTO when I was finishing up my PhD and they were offering something like 24% super, which seemed very generous to me. The problem in NZ is more the lack of positions and that they tend to dry up once you reach a certain age.
Regarding the management consultancies, thanks for the advice. I think I've written myself a pretty good template but they must receive a lot of high quality applications. I try to align whatever I send them with their 'mission statement' and the job description but who knows how much difference it makes
MSB ROYS
Brownlow Medallist
No problem. I also suggest trying to make some contacts inside each of the companies. If you don't know anybody, start enquiring about mentorships as you're very keen to work in this area etc - it's quite surprising how people will help and ironically it's usually the more senior people. Increasing you network outside science will be key to your success to break into the business world.
stewie griffen
Make me an Admin!
Oh indeed nz is pretty dire on the science positions
Morning all
Science nerd all my life, but it has really come to the fore in the last decade or so. 18 months ago, went back to Uni, working on my Psychology/Psychological Sciences double degree at UWA. Doing a lot better than I hoped/expected, so I'm actually considering sitting the GAMSAT, seeing how I go. I doubt I'll ever go into Clinical, I don't have the temperament for it, and we already have one mind-reader in the house (my fiancee is an I/O psych who will be looking to get her clinical accreditation shortly.) Failing the GAMSAT, I'll look to move to neuroscience or neurology. I'd like to get involved in Alzheimer's research.
Curiously, as I struggled initially, it was a Physics unit that really got me going, a subject I had trouble with at high school. I guess age, and spending 20 years running my family's engineering firm, finally counted for something!
Finding it more and more difficult to cope with the ever increasing anti-science, anti-intelligence mindset these days, to the point where I pretty much ignore 95% of mainstream and social media. Need to be wary of that preconceived bias tho!
Science nerd all my life, but it has really come to the fore in the last decade or so. 18 months ago, went back to Uni, working on my Psychology/Psychological Sciences double degree at UWA. Doing a lot better than I hoped/expected, so I'm actually considering sitting the GAMSAT, seeing how I go. I doubt I'll ever go into Clinical, I don't have the temperament for it, and we already have one mind-reader in the house (my fiancee is an I/O psych who will be looking to get her clinical accreditation shortly.) Failing the GAMSAT, I'll look to move to neuroscience or neurology. I'd like to get involved in Alzheimer's research.
Curiously, as I struggled initially, it was a Physics unit that really got me going, a subject I had trouble with at high school. I guess age, and spending 20 years running my family's engineering firm, finally counted for something!
Finding it more and more difficult to cope with the ever increasing anti-science, anti-intelligence mindset these days, to the point where I pretty much ignore 95% of mainstream and social media. Need to be wary of that preconceived bias tho!
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There are some pretty impressive credentials in this thread.
I studied applied biology/ biotechnology at RMIT and was particularly interested in botany/ horticulture. I ended up getting involved in horticulture for a bit but now use my horticultural skills attempting to grow really good tomatoes at home as I work in a totally unrelated field.
I studied applied biology/ biotechnology at RMIT and was particularly interested in botany/ horticulture. I ended up getting involved in horticulture for a bit but now use my horticultural skills attempting to grow really good tomatoes at home as I work in a totally unrelated field.
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Nothing beats home grown tomatoes. Actually, home grown potatoes are so good, too, and easily done.. There's a short Gardening Australia clip on YouTube on growing spuds... Too easy.
Keep up the good work
