Quitting, Part 3: Grad School

Looking back on it, I'm not sure I was science grad school material. After 16 years of constant schooling (K-college), I maybe should have taken a break. The dull repetition of sitting in lecture/discussion, taking tests, and jumping through hoops was taking it's toll. I was ready to have a job and enter society, and thought (hoped?) graduate school was just a short stop along the way. I was planning to go and breeze through classes and then get to the hands-on research, but I had deluded myself. It was hard. (I know! Well, duh, right? ;-) ) I didn't have enough hours in the day to study and do all the other stuff I wanted to do, like ski, climb, hike, play the piano, and spend time with friends. Synthetic chemistry wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be, though maybe still interesting enough to pursue a career doing it. But I think the real reason I went was because I was unsure what else to do besides continue to go to school. That and they were paying me to go, a relatively novel concept as far as I was concerned. Fear of the unknown kept me there; I'll be more specific soon.

As my research started, I noticed that the grad students did not all come with the same levels of preparation. Some had done much more research than I had (even though I did a summer internship at the University of Wyoming and some undergrad research at the College of Idaho), and some had even come to CSU the summer before to pick an advisor and project. I showed up at 8 am on the Monday after the end of classes, ready to start my work. I realized fairly quickly that my group mates had 1) been there since 6:30 am, 2) come in on the Saturday and Sunday before rather than going climbing, hiking, mountain biking or drinking (which is what I did), 3) had projects that they'd been thinking about for months (I think I had barely picked a project at that point), 4) didn't try out for the CSU jazz ensemble (I ended up as the back-up piano player, and I learned a lot that one semester!), and 5) were generally in our research advisor's good graces (which I was not, and it would take 18 months for me to get there). I don't know if they were all just that ambitious or if they got better advice than I did, or if I missed some memo that said "show up early for the best projects and to not look like a loser." Appearances mattered, apparently. My first two thoughts that morning were "what the hell?" and "holy sh*t!"

In short, I had some issues that were mine to solve. To this day, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about quitting grad school and what it's meant for me, career-wise. I'll never know if I'd be happier or better off as "Dr. Anderson" (though I do enjoy it when vendors and job applicants call me Dr. Anderson without knowing that I don't have a Ph.D.), but I've had a fulfilling, interesting, and productive life and career so far. What more could I ask for?

But this is a Blog, so (insert snicker here) you also get to read my opinions and some observations I've made about education and industry against the backdrop of a 14-year chemistry career. If you don't care about higher education in America, skip to the last paragraph. But I implore you to think about what education prepares a person to do. (As a father of young kids, I think about this topic A LOT.)


Graduate school--despite many peoples' best intentions--is part of a system, the system of taking smart people and turning them into parts of an Industrial Complex, albeit skewed toward leadership roles. The idea (circa 1997) was this: go to college, go to grad school, do a post-doc, get a job in industry or pharma and you'll be set. If you get a Ph.D. you'll get a job as a professor or mid-level employee, and work your way up to become a manager. One unstated caveat was this: employers really mean "finish your Ph.D. and a postdoc or 2, and then we'll talk." Another caveat (more relevant here): not getting a Ph.D. means that you have to take orders from other people, and that you'll never get to be "the boss." There was a general disdain for non-Ph.Ds. within the chemistry graduate school culture. The folks who "opt out" of grad school were "sell-outs" or "chicken" or "too dumb to hack it" or "settling for the booby prize." Some folks were all of those things, sure, but I would say that most people are NONE of those things when they choose to opt out of a given system. The only "pass" you'd get from the Ph.D.-bound peanut gallery for getting an MS was if you were leaving Chemistry to go do something else, like Law. 

After all that strange psychology, and after I did indeed earn a Master's Degree in Chemistry from Colorado State University, I have to ask the question: why is getting a Master's Degree instead of a Ph.D. considered "chickening out" or "quitting" or "settling for the booby prize?" Is it because we place such a high standard on having a terminal degree? College endowments are often based on what percentage of their faculty have terminal degrees in their field. Most 4-year colleges and universities don't hire folks with Master's Degrees to teach. Never mind that earning a Ph.D. does not necessarily make you a good teacher. It might make you good at problem solving in your particular field of expertise, good at applying chemical tools. But there were no courses in grad school about education, or a variety of other topics we regularly encounter: troubleshooting electronics, glassblowing, tube fitting, getting along with other people, ethics, or scientific writing (though there are writing requirements in proposals and theses). These are all skills I've learned on the job. My "shop skills" (the ability and desire to actually pick up a wrench or screwdriver and fix something) came from my summer employment at a submersible pump and electric motor company during my college years, not from my graduate education. The teaching skills came from, well, teaching.

I'm not the only one who has noticed this narrow approach, either. A well-written report was drafted and submitted to the president of the American Chemical Society, which outlined many of the shortcomings of chemical graduate education. They point out that our current system of graduate education was set up just after World War II, you know, 70 years ago. Here's the understatement of the day: a lot has changed since then. We are not narrowly focused in our jobs and career paths anymore. Regarding science, the interesting, meaningful, and high-impact research happens at interfaces; for example, biodetection, the field I work in, sits at the interfaces between optics, surface chemistry, molecular biology, and engineering with a dash of theoretical biology and theoretical physics thrown in.

I wonder, too, if the number of folks who stick it out in graduate school truly reflects the desire of those folks to pursue scientific careers. Does peer pressure simply make graduate students "stick it out?" "Everyone else is doing it" seemed like the reason a lot of folks stayed in graduate school, at least when I was there. It took a lot of time, thought, and preparation to screw up the courage to tell my advisor I wanted to quit grad school and go get a job. Fortunately, he beat me to initiating that conversation because he noticed that I wasn't that crazy about it. (I should also point out that I met my wife at that time, so I was a bit distracted, and it showed. What can I say? Love is a many splendored thing!) I was ready to be done with school, ready to get a job, and ready spend as much time as I could outdoors. (I should also point out that I left a couple of good friends when I left graduate school, one of whom I still see now and then. I missed them immediately, and think on them often.)

What did I get with my MS in Chemistry?
- decent income & good benefits
- regular hours
- AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, TIME to do other things (outdoor activities, music, woodworking, renovating a home, etc.)

Other things, like respect from my co-workers, I still had to earn. 

Since I graduated with MS in 1999, the job market has had ups and downs, twists and turns. There are fewer industry jobs than there used to be, and certainly far fewer jobs than qualified candidates. The job market is such that, not only do you have to know someone, you have to "connect" with them before you can even get an interview. With that glut of scientific experts in mind, I think back to some of the advice I received when considering the Master's: "stick it out" and "an MS has limited potential" and "only extenuating circumstances make smart people leave Ph.D. programs" and so on. This bias is pervasive; even in my current job, during a performance appraisal, one of my bosses wrote "family issues forced Aaron to get his MS rather than finishing the PhD," to which I had to reply to him, personally, "NO! this choice was all mine. Nothing "forced" me to do anything." I worked hard to get where I am. To the well-meaning advice givers, I would argue that I've had a successful career, even becoming a Research Scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. So, in this instance, and using our typical metrics for success, quitting graduate school early and earning a Master's degree was a good career move for me. I didn't need a terminal degree to prove myself smart and successful.

The last point I'd like to make is the "leadership" potential of Ph.D. vs MS, at least as far as I've observed. It's true that in most companies, the leaders have Ph.D.s. Out of the 5-6 supervisors I've had since 1999, I've only worked for one person who didn't have a Ph.D. The last company I worked at spelled out what level you could expect to achieve with a certain degree and a certain level of experience, and the glass ceiling for non-Ph.D.s was pretty obvious. Rather than resent it, I appreciated their honesty. But any bench chemist, regardless of degree, is doing work that someone else wants done to make someone else rich, pure and simple. To say that just because you didn't get a doctorate you'll be someone's lackey is a bit short-sighted. Everyone who works for any company is someone's lackey. We all have a supervisor, who reports to another supervisor, who reports to the CEO or director, who reports to some sort of investor (or tax payer). So everyone who is working for a company is working for "the man." I hope that we can all find interesting, fulfilling jobs to offset this bitter truth.

I also hope that if you're in graduate school, you're not demoralized; if you are headed to graduate school, I don't mean to dash your dreams; if you have a Ph.D., you don't think I automatically hate or disrespect you. On the contrary. I admire the tenacity and focus required to work 12+ hour days for 5+ years for <$25K/yr and little respect, with hopes for a career that may or may not pan out. The world still needs innovative problem solvers to lead us as we continue to face scientific, social, and economic challenges on an ever-increasing scale. Like I've told my own student interns: all of the easy problems have already been solved. And honestly, I've considered, more than once, going back for my doctorate. For now, it's not in the cards, and I guess this little essay is part of the process of letting go of that immediate possibility. But who knows! I once met a man who went back for his Ph.D. in NMR spectroscopy in his 50s. It happens.

Regardless of your educational and career path, I implore you to think carefully about your motivation, and keep an open mind about changes and choices. Keep in mind, also, that outside-the-box thinking required to solve difficult, emerging problems will probably require outside-the-box education, perhaps even outside-the-box companies with novel business models. I am sure the one-size-fits-all, macro-scale paradigm that society has adopted will not work. The report I cited earlier, in its 60+ pages, agrees with me.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!