Comment by macintux
2 years ago
Abandoning one’s livelihood to spend years in poverty studying advanced science at university in the distant hope that in a few decades you might contribute to a cure is a little different from taking a few weekends, or even a few months of weekends, to scratch a programming itch.
Also it's absurdly difficult to be an academic with a chronic disability, speaking as someone with a chronic disability (MS) who was diagnosed in grad school and who left the sector because of it.
Moving multiple times, as is usually necessary during the post-doc years, means moving away from your support system and interrupting your continuity of medical care. Your activities of daily living require more time: You can't spend 12+ hours a day in a lab if you need to sleep for 12 hours a day. You aren't usually paid enough to pay for all the little extras that make life easier as a disabled person: No delivery services, no supplements, no helpful but extra costing medical services like massages/PT/etc. And stress usually worsens your prognosis: Academia's reliance on competition and stressing out post-docs combined with stress being associated with relapses was one thing that made me nope out. I'm not risking my ability to walk for your institution's prestige.
I have MS and am in grad school. It is very hard.
I was 'lucky' in that I had my first relapse in the last semester of my Master's program, so I could limp along and finish the degree and decide not to pursue a PhD. An academic career was right out, especially as a first-generation student.
4 replies →
Indeed, the path to a research career — necessary for the grants and facilities you’ll need to test your hypotheses — involves such high barriers that you would almost need to already be on that path by your freshman year in undergrad.
I was on the biochem track in undergrad. I was particularly interested in disease metabolics and cloning.
I switched to tech and entrepreneurship because it scratched more itches, provided substantially more money, didn't come with the stresses of academia, and could conceivably put me on a path to returning to biochem with loads of resources and full research independence.
I see biochem companies getting venture funding now, but that wasn't always the case. And they're still unfavorable relative to tech ventures.
I still don't think the grad school + academia path is comfortable enough for those that take it. It's a real labor of love, and I admire those that stick with it.
Plenty of alternatives to academia, but then you're working on a company's projects. And yeah, the cost of equipment, not to mention consumables, is prohibitive.
[dead]
GP does have something right, though. Throwing more money at a problem does not always yield a faster or improved solution. This is well-known in software, but maybe not in other fields.
Money needs to go to educating and recruiting more people to the field. It is not as accessible as programming, and so is harder, but the same concept applies.
"Money needs to go to employing more people in the field."
Provide the employment (at decent wages) and the people will get the training. Provide the education and recruitment without the decent employment and you'll have a lot of ex-job people in other jobs.
> Throwing more money at a problem does not always yield a faster or improved solution.
This cliché probably holds if you are increasing the funding of a single group - doubling Firefox’s income would not improve Firefox.
If you are funding independent groups, chasing different paths and solutions, then more money likely helps. Kind of like VC funding.
Of course having independent groups all chasing a single solution is also a single point-of-failure problem - the dominant amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's springs to mind as an example of a lack of diversity.