What chemistry grads do in Academia

gravenewworld
Wed, 27 Apr 2011 00:30:25 +0000

The claim that you need a PhD in science in order to find a meaningful and satisfying career is a complete myth. There are steadily no jobs anymore for Phd, BS, and MS chemists. The field in the US is dying. R and D has been shipped overseas and isn’t coming back. The US has shot itself in the foot with terrible domestic policies and will never recover. Also, the point isn’t that BS/MS chemists want to be high earning managers, it’s just that we would like to make a livable wage doing meaningful work. The only thing left out there these days for BS/MS chemistry grads are terrible low paying QC/analytical jobs that pay $10-15/hr as permatemps. Even if you find a decent job listing, there’s likely 100 applicants. A PhD won’t gain you much traction either when there are a ton of applicants for a single job. New PhDs can have fun jumping all over the country from year to year pursuing low paying post-doc to low paying post-doc. It never used to be this way, 20 or 30 years ago, heck even around 10 years ago, BS/MS chemists could earn economically viable wages while not being stuck doing terribly monotonous jobs without healthcare benefits as a permatemp. The temp worker loophole is something more and more firms have been recently exploiting and is a relatively new phenomena (on this large of scale).

-Become a BS/MS chemist if you want a terrible $10-15 hr permatemp position with no health care doing crappy method development/analytical/QC

-Become a PhD chemist if you want to jump around and around to post doc to post doc, temp position to temp position, or from R and D firm to R and D firm with a job that only lasts 4-8 years max.

miller-mccune.com;

The Feb. monthly meeting of the San Antonio Section of the ACS features a speaker who is a past President of ACS. His topic?

Read it and weep…



The Chemistry Enterprise: Do We Have a Future, or What?

Presented by William F. Carroll, Jr. Ph.D. ACS President, 2005

The Chemistry Enterprise is globalizing, which means changes for chemistry in the US. Whether it relates to the shift in chemistry from small molecules to very large, the commoditization of specialty chemicals, or natural gas pricing, the next ten years will bring sea change to the chemical industry in the US. For colleges, the operating costs and sources of professors and students will drive the health of chemistry higher education. How do we prepare our current and future members–those who are employed or those who hope to be–for the future state of chemistry? The answer lies in our education, personal marketing and interaction with a simultaneously shrinking globe and expanding network.



Chemistry is dead. There are no feelings of entitlement here. There are only feelings of resentment at the fact that you were misled to believe that studying science, which this country ‘desperately needs’ according to the talking heads, would get you a mediocre and hopefully stable middle class living after many of us have taken out thousands of dollars in student loan debt studying to what is amounting to be a useless subject. Employers these days expect their drones to not only pay thousands of dollars in debt to become educated, they also want to pay them borderline poverty wages and benefits. The whole system here is a joke from the government and the universities to the employers. There are only a very small percentage making a killing in income off breaking the backs of the American middle class. Soon we are going to have the most educated, un/underemployed, working poor in the history of this country all swimming in thousands of dollars of student loan debt… There is no more middle class left. Welcome to 3rd world USA, we’ve now become Tunisia.