Rejection Season; Supporting Science

[rebeccmeister]

In the last week or two, I've gotten several of those emails that say, "Oh yeah, by the way, that job you applied for way back in September? Well...in case you couldn't read between the lines by now...we picked someone else."

Someone who had slightly better luck than me wrote an article that just got published about his experience job-hunting. I am hoping the detailed quantitative information that he tracked for his job application process will be helpful for people who haven't yet realized that this is how things now work within the biological sciences.* While the author provides the appropriate caveats (he's presenting his own anecdata), my conversations with other people who have recently been hired or who are currently on the job market suggest his experience is at least reasonably representative of the current norm.

The author applied for 60 jobs last fall, during the time when I struggled just to turn in 11 applications because of a grueling circadian research schedule, conference travel, and some concerns about not overburdening my letter-writers.

I don't mean for this to be a pity party, but my subconscious has other ideas. It keeps seeing fit to remind me that I don't know what I'm going to do next, and keeps suggesting that maybe I should have some sort of massive freakout or massive depressive episode. Meanwhile, I'd like to get data analyzed and manuscripts submitted, thankyouverymuch, and I'd like to carve out more time for working towards future prospects. A freakout won't help, but on the other hand, we don't exactly get to choose our emotions, and at least part of my emotional state has more to do with life circumstances outside of professional prospects anyway.**

-

Anyway, here is another thing to consider, from a very different angle: a detailed article on the sources and uses of US science funding. This is useful for perspective on what it means to support science in a substantive manner (as much fun as it is to march for science...).

In case you aren't immediately enticed to read the article, a couple elements to consider:

-The two main funding sources for basic research are the federal government and industry, which both vastly outpower state and local government spending (Figure 4).

-Industry spending has greatly outpaced government spending (Figure 4). However, if we examine total research spending as a percentage of GDP (Figure 2 in the article), it's apparent that there has actually been a general long-term increase in research spending since 1994.

-There are a lot of interesting shifts between different aspects of research - for example, between money devoted to "defense" versus "nondefense," or in totals devoted to things like medical research (big boost between 1998-2004) vs. space exploration (declining) vs. energy research (intermittent).

-If R&D expenditures are considered as a percentage of GDP, the US spends more than the EU as a whole, but less than Japan, South Korea, and China. The US also spends more based on several other comparison methods.

-The final section comments on the translation from these specific numbers to policy analysis, asking some important questions about social goals with research spending (basic research, applied research, development) and how various different goals should be balanced.


I think this article paints a useful picture that's different from what you might hear from a lot of scientists working in the trenches. As best I understand, competition for funding has gone up in the same manner as competition for academic jobs: more grant proposals submitted, fewer grants funded. I have to wonder if this side of things is partly due to pushes to increase STEM training. Anyway, from the vantage point of this article, for the moment the US is still looking pretty good in terms of its investment in science, which is some comfort. Obviously big changes to the federal budget could quickly alter the picture, but the longer-term view isn't so bad.



* I hope this audience includes at least one of my letter-writers.
** This isn't a super articulate sentence because this point isn't my main focus for this post and I don't want to elaborate right now.

Comments

[ivy]

Ooof, that job application article is grim. Thanks for sharing; I was thinking recently how fortunate I am to have a job where I have not had to go job hunting in quite some time, and what it would be like if I did have to get out there and interview again. Re: the second article, it would have been nice to have someone laying that out before the science march -- I like being well informed before going forth and yelling about an issue, heh. (It's still weird to be part of a mob. Talk about your cognitive dissonance!)

[rebeccmeister]

Heh, really, so many factors suggest I should just switch fields. But I *do* want to make sure my work up until this point gets out into the public body of knowledge, if nothing else. So back to writing.

And I totally agree with regards to the second article. I thought long and hard about my message for the march, and wound up with "Support science. For public good." I still agree with my message, but I'm struggling to reconcile the former issue (disproportionate scientists searching for work) with the latter.

[ivy]

I had the easy cop-out of "I'm pushing a wheelchair, I can't carry a sign", heh. Though the sign ideas I had were all much more in the "funny" category than in the "heartfelt message" category. One leading candidate was:

0x 57 6f 72 6b 20 74 6f 77 61 72 64 73 20 75 6e 64 65 72 73 74 61 6e 64 69 6e 67 20 74 68 65 20 75 6e 69 76 65 72 73 65 20 74 68 72 6f 75 67 68 20 73 63 69 65 6e 63 65 2e 

[annikusrex]

Interesting article re funding. I would be very interested to know how the pipeline is funded. Are any of these science PhDs paying their own way through grad school? (I think this is an actual problem in the humanities.) Has that changed over time? Have labs grown more dependent on post-docs and grad students, perhaps due to increased pressure to publish? (In the humanities, departments are heavily dependent on grad student teachers.) Basically, what are the roots of the oversupply, and to what extent are departments funneling funding to temporary research-workers and away from funding professor positions--or permanent research positions?

[rebeccmeister]

This is a really good set of questions, and I really don't know the answers. I do think there has been a long-term shift towards dependence on postdocs and grad students, accompanying increasing pressure to apply for and obtain external funding.

There's also the general switch away from tenure-track lines and towards renewable contracts, but again, I don't have specific numbers on that state of affairs now and how it's projected to change.