ucbalumnus

Berkeley answers the "What can I do with a major in...?" question with career surveys:
https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Major.stm

sschoe2

I prefer the truth realism over the see no evil speak no evil blind optimism that you and most of corporate america engage in. Hence the video.

RSA Animate - Smile or Die - YouTube

All day I hear politicians, professors, and the media give a ridiculously false positive spin on the career prospects for science and frankly it ticks me off. It is a huge lie that causes severe damage to anyone bright enough the get a science degree yet naive enough not to see that call for suckers for what it really is. The personally tragedy and lives ruined I have witnessed among myself and almost everyone I graduated with and worked with makes me very angry when people just dismiss them as exceptions, hacks who couldn't cut it in the field, not meant for science and blindly keep encouraging others to enter the field. That to me is the moral equivalent of offering to guide a blind person and leading them in front of an oncoming truck. I believe that video I posted sums up how I feel about the false optimism and speak no evil politically correct party line nonsense that pervades science career advice in most mainstream outlets.

I see nothing but more outsourcing, more chemical plant shutdowns, more offshoring by big pharma, more government research cuts in the future.

LakeClouds

Let's be clear, working in a micro lab doing routine testing or teaching is not what most students think they will be doing when they go into science. It seems like teaching in particular is touted as an option for bio/chem majors. Is this what students really want to do? Teaching may be fine for some but it's not what many students going into science are interesting in doing. If you want to teach, why not go to a teaching college?

-Lurker-

Pharma chemistry and biology jobs have been cut and will not be coming back - this doesn't effect BS grads as much but this makes for a lot of unemployed or underemployed PhD's. In its heyday, a PhD was the "green card" into the pharmaceutical industry and employed swaths of them ... but R&D did not pan out and it has all been outsourced to other countries.

LakeClouds

How does this effect the value of getting a PhD? Pharma/biotech was one of the large drivers of demand for these degrees. Without these jobs, they'll many more highly education cab drivers.

phosphorlyescenc

It is difficult to find a job in all fields. I think that the people who "hijack" threads saying that it is difficult to find a good job in the sciences are saying: Don't go into the sciences just because you think that it's a golden ticket to a good paycheck. If you are truly passionate, you will put in the time and resources necessary to succeed.

I am a molecular biology major at a top university. I hate it. I am majoring in it because my parents, who are convinced that a natural science education is the only way to go, will not pay for my school unless I major in biology. I am pursuing graduate school in the social science field that I love, even though I know that job prospects for social science PhD's are rough. I was a top biology student in high school - at one point, top 8 in the US (Biology Olympiad)

In the end, the only thing you can do is try. If you try to do what you love and fail, well, that's better than settling for something you're mediocre at because you think you'll earn more.

sschoe2

Yes it is difficult getting a job in most fields now a days but the extent to which businesses single out their science staff is appalling. The insanely specific requirement coupled with equally insanely low salaries and permatemp jobs with no benefits. I have not seen any other professional group so mistreated, not HR people, not IT, not accountants, not marketing, and not even most blue collar trades.

U.S. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there - The Washington Post

deervalley

Wow. I would say a little strongly worded. Some of the real problem is that the pure sciences, particularly astronomy and physics, are at this point highly specialized fields that advance relatively slowly. The laws of physics have hardly been revised since the 1930s. Astronomy continues to make headway, but cosmology, notwithstanding all the rage, remains somewhat elusive to experimental testing. To really make a contribution to either subject, you need to be pretty damn bright and pretty well educated. And by the latter I mean you need to know about as much math as a mathematician, know how to apply it to physics (which mathematicians don't know how to do), know a variety of programming languages, instrumentation, etc. This in all likelyhood means a PhD, and even with that you only can fit so many people at the top of the pyramid. You might well ask why many people in the military do not aspire to become fighter pilots. It isn't that fighter pilots are underpaid, or that their job lacks glory, or even that they have been outsourced, it is that the position is highly elitist and there is a high probability of washing out. You have to weigh your passion against your chances of truly ending up where you want to be and where you might end up if not in that position. The scale is going to tip differently for different people.

ucbalumnus

Why do they want you to major in biology (as opposed to a different science, or a non-science subject)?

Wheaty

So wait, I thought we were all supposed to be STEM majors.

mountaineerlove

I'm attending WVU in the fall, and I've actually noticed the opposite. I would say 70% of the students (incoming and current) I've talked to thus far are in some sort of science major. Maybe it's because WVU is known for its engineering, forensics, nursing, and speech pathology/audiology programs. I will say I haven't met one mathematics major, and the amount of pure science majors such as chemistry, physics, or biology has been low.

NeoDymium

It's pretty verifiable that the core lab sciences are doing quite poorly and doesn't require anecdotal evidence. Those that are posting poor prospects may very well be giving legitimately accurate advice, same as any other poster who is offering their experience as advice.
Tragic as it may be, it seems like science is really spiraling downward. It's foolish to think it's getting better on its own.
Notable chemists have talked about the decline of chemistry since the 1990s, and nothing has been done about it since. Bio is in a similar state.

iborpastan

The point deervalley makes about physics majors is something I worry about all the time. Regardless of how good or bad the job opportunities are and the general respect and acclaim that physicists receive, you need to be pretty darn bright to make it through and I'm not sure if I'm just plain smart enough from birth to be one.

sakky

Here's a question to which I still have yet to have heard a satisfactory answer: exactly why don't more of those science grads from top-ranked schools such as Berkeley become high school science teachers? Science teaching is apparently one subject enjoying relatively burgeoning demand, relative to most other high school subjects, in stark contrast to, say, the avalanche of English grads who want to teach high school English. Numerous high school science classes are currently taught by teachers who never majored in science themselves, and those schools would like to replace those teachers with ones actually trained in science. Indeed, the South Dakota state legislature is proposing to offer an $8000 incentive bonus to newly hired science teachers.

Such a career would seem to be especially amenable to the graduates of a top-ranked school such as Berkeley. I don't know what kind of high school anybody else here attended, but I can certainly tell you that mine was staffed by teachers who graduated almost exclusively from local 2nd or 3rd tier colleges at best. Yet my high school was nevertheless considered to be one of the better high schools in the state. If the college graduates from the local low-tier colleges can become high school teachers, surely a Berkeley graduate can do the same.

To be sure, a career as a high school teacher isn't for everybody. You'll never be rich, and you'll have to expend significant effort simply in maintaining control of the classroom. On the other hand, you enjoy summer vacations off, you usually enjoy a strong benefits package, and most school districts offer the possibility of tenure after a few years upon which you effectively become unfireable. Frankly, that's not a bad career - surely far better than $15 an hour with no benefits.

So why don't more of them do just that? Perhaps more importantly, why don't more universities help their graduates do that - particularly those universities (again, such as Berkeley) that have a top-ranked School of Education and could presumably easily design an (optional) program that allowed students to graduate with a science degree combined with a teaching credential?

NeoDymium

Plenty of people simply are not interested in the low pay of teaching. Not to mention teachers are quite unionized in many states, creating new barriers to entry for new teachers such as expensive education degrees.
In addition, it really isn't for everyone. Only some actually would enjoy the job of a teacher. Given any other reasonable choice, many would rather not teach low-level material to children who, for the most part, act like children.