Why does anyone think science is a good job?:
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
- age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
- age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
- age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
- age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
- age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university (“denied tenure” is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn’t quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a “second rate has-been” label on his forehead.