<p>My suggestion is to opt out of science grad school and go into a healthcare professional program like med, pharm, dental. Otherwise stay out of science all together. It isn’t worth 4 years of tough bachelor’s work, followed by 5-7 years of long hours in the lab in a PhD program earning as low $15k while often being exploited as cheap labor as a technician for a PI and a TA for the university, followed by as low as $35k post-docs at which point for many their career dead ends and they are stuck trying to do a career change arround age 40 having lost 15 of the best years of their life. The “pipeline” as it is often called has degerated into a pyramid scheme that exploits smart naive people and spits them out worn and depleted.</p>
<p>I am one of the few people I graduated with still in the field. Most went to healthcare, law, business, and even teaching high school was a better option than the terrible, unstable, low-paying jobs in the science field. I lucked out and found a small company that doesn’t treat their science staff like excrement. Before that I worked at one of the world’s most well known soft drink makers and food conglomerates in the world and let me tell you it was the most humiliating and demoralizing 3 years of my life and I’ve never fully recovered my passion for science after the grad program from H#ll and working for a typical sleazeball corporation that decides the way to make themselves more efficient is to screw over their science staff more and more. I’ve got dozens of stories from both that will make you want to vomit with disgust and I am not the only one which is why you have observed the large number of horror stories on the net about science careers and why more and more grad programs are populated by foreign students. Americans are not to stupid and lazy, they know a bad deal when they see it.</p>
<p>Whenever I see people giving a rosy picture on science it really upsets me. I understand many of them mean well and are often just hopeless idealists. However, to myself, that is like guiding a blind person in front of an oncoming truck. Reality is very harsh indeed for science grads in the USA.</p>