The Mark 2010

The lack of alternative careers in science means society isn't taking advantage of its talent. The system of academic apprenticeship is leaving too many scientists without work.

While some picture graduate studies as a quest for knowledge pursued in the idyllic world of an academic environment, the reality tends to be quite different. Graduate students and their future selves, postdoctoral fellows, inhabit a world that is often profoundly uncertain. While I have met a wide array of committed and successful aspiring scientists in graduate school, there are legions of others who, often through no fault of their own, fail to achieve success in their field. These people often end up leaving not only academia, but science entirely, even after years and sometimes decades spent as a scientific trainee. After spending the better part of their life involved in the scientific pursuit of knowledge, why would someone abandon it? The answers to this question vary, but prime among them is the lack of available academic positions. To me, this speaks to a different and more profound problem in today’s graduate training, which is the deficit of exposure to, and preparation for, so-called “alternative careers” in science.

Historically, graduate study adhered to an apprenticeship model, in which the student apprentice worked as a trainee until they were deemed to have sufficient knowledge in their particular field, at which point they would rise to the professional ranks. Occasionally, after finishing their doctoral work, a student would take a postdoctoral fellowship position for a year or so before becoming a professor, but such positions were seen as optional and generally not necessary for career progression.

Recent scientific progress is largely due to the hard work and subsequent advances made by many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Meanwhile, scientists at the professor level are living longer and retiring later, and new faculty positions are not opening as fast as graduate enrollments are increasing. This has led to the proliferation of postdoctoral fellow positions available to those with doctoral degrees who wish (or increasingly are required) to continue to work in academic labs to improve their training, all the while awaiting a chance for an elusive tenure-track position. A postdoctoral fellow faces a difficult life, and recent data suggests that less than 20 per cent of postdoctoral fellows end up in tenure-track positions at the end of their training.

Wouldn’t an abundance of highly educated people who have demonstrated their ability to follow through, work independently, and produce a thesis of original material on a particular topic be a welcome boon to any society, or company wishing to employ highly qualified personnel? Too often, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are limited by their own prejudices, lacking confidence that they can achieve outside their area of intensive training. Perhaps they feel this way because their graduate existence is predicated on the fact that they should desire to become what their mentors, advisors and supervisors had succeeded in becoming: namely, a professor.

There is a strong prejudice that failure is anything but the achievement of a tenure-track academic position, but this closed-minded thinking is outdated. Present and future generations of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows must have exposure to non-academic career paths, so that they can see how their skills could be applied outside of an academic environment. Furthermore, academic institutions need to do a better job of reaching out to potential employers and integrating training that future employers may be looking for, to best prepare their graduates for possible non-academic careers.

Some pioneering programs, such as the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) Canadian research network, which links graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with businesses, government and non-profit institutions for a research internship, offer one such promising outlet, allowing both graduate students exposure to real-world applications, as well as allowing these companies exposure to a pool of talent in the academic sector. The Science Careers portion of the online journal Science provides many useful articles on the how, why and what to do for aspiring alternative career-seekers. Particular attention needs to be paid to postdoctoral fellows, who often fall off the radar of academic institutions and miss out not only on benefits and institutional perks, but also on career development assistance. This assistance is often critical for future success either in academic or non-academic pursuits.

An increasing number of graduate and postdoctoral associations are initiating some of these processes, and advocate on behalf of their constituents to the appropriate institutions. The Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS) is one such professional organization formed in recent years to advocate on behalf of this critical research population. Ultimately, however, the change needs to take several forms, including in particular a newfound willingness on the part of institutions and companies in areas not typically frequented by graduate and postdoctoral trainees to begin hiring these highly trained personnel.