Top Ten Reasons to Work in Industryby
You put in your time, you paid your dues, now it's time to reap your rewards. It would be nice to have a real life and expand your diet beyond the Ramen noodles and macaroni that sustained you throughout grad school and your postdoc.
Your friends will be much more impressed when you tell them that you are working on a cure for cancer, than when you try to explain to them the importance of fate mapping the central nervous system of the common garden slug.
Well, sort of. . . . That quarterly report is due next week, and you have to write up the trip report for the Keystone meeting you just went to, and your manager has been hounding you about getting that screen up and running. Maybe you'll work a little this weekend, just this once, just to get caught up.
You're not a greedy person, but hey, if they insist. . . .
You don't have to worry about tenure, unlike your old lab mates who looked down on you for "selling out." Ha! (Of course drug discovery is risky and biotech is unstable, and then there are those companies that have mergers and layoffs, but that would never happen to you.)
When you go to a meeting, you stay in a nice hotel, eat at good restaurants, and rent a luxury car. Of course, once you return you have to explain to your manager why that $250 dinner was necessary to your job performance and why you had to fly first class (there were no business class tickets left when you tried to purchase them the day before the flight). Then you hope he decides to sign your expense report rather than stick it to you. And you wonder how this will be reflected in your year-end review.
If you don't work in industry, you'll never be able to pay off your student loans. If no one was able to pay off their student loans, governmental cash flow would grind to a halt. No more student loans would be available, and the next generation wouldn't have access to a properly expensive education. In short, by going into industry you are helping make the world a better place for the next generation!
The other postdocs you know spent two to three years or more finding academic jobs. Your industrial job search only took one and a half years and about 500 applications to be successful.
How could you get anything done without that new $100K real-time PCR machine, or that $250K confocal microscope. And your computer needs to be upgraded every year just to keep pace. Besides, you're worth it!
Once in the abyss of middle management, you can continue to be underappreciated and overworked, but you get the added benefit of listening to others complain about being under-appreciated and overworked.
Linnea Hager is a developmental geneticist at Pfizer Inc.
Ross T. Smart is an artist and world traveler living in Michigan with his supergenius wife Jackie. When they are not busy avoiding pickpockets while traveling, they can be found taunting waterfowl in Ann Arbor.
