My point is that near the end of graduate school, most people want to make money and mentally recover. Usually, mental recovery in a post-doc is not a real thing. The idea of wanting a stable 40 hour per week job with benefits and a big enough salary to go out to lunch every day and buy Starbucks lattes without going broke is a Rich Life to most graduate students. A bunch of students just want to make more money, it’s what I wanted, and while others might want to become professors and not care about anything else (good luck).My advice to the graduate students out there is that if they want to explore doing a start-up and they have a supportive thesis adviser and department then you should go for it. There are a few things you can do to attract investors’ capital.
I don't wish to turn this into a personal finance rant, but the thought of going out to lunch every day alarms my budget meter, but I still know what people mean. It's no fun eating the same pot of chili for the next week, and there are times when a coffee drink feels like an intense luxury. When I started my postdoc, it really felt like a financial weight was lifted off my shoulders (my postdoc salary was ~2X my grad student salary, because it was an industry postdoc).
Regarding startups, I think Tony is definitely leaning in the right direction - it makes you wonder if there should be a portion of candidate exams or proposal defenses where students can either turn a proposal into a grant application (for the academically-oriented) or a project proposal for a startup or an industrial project proposal...
I worked with a guy who got a $5 Starbucks drink EVERY DAY and also went out to eat at least once a day.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I live with a much more strict budget with intense focus on living cheaply after grad school vs my time in grad school somehow. I might have shifted to more "luxurious" foods like more beef and completely cutting out chicken breast, but I still never went out to eat and if I drank, it was never at a bar/restaurant (can make $10-20 bar priced drinks at home for $1.50-3.50 a piece). Realizing at nearly age 30 I had zero savings and zero money into retirement really shifted my priorities. A decade later, I am at max 401k and HSA contributions and have been lucky with personal investments to allow to put a sizeable down payment on a house without having to touch my Rainy Day savings. Never thought any of this was achievable a decade ago and honestly had anxiety over the possibility of never owning a house in my life if I wanted to retire.
Love the budgeting and congrats on getting the house. I'm near maxed 401k, maxed HSA, and maxed ROTH IRA myself while my wife is in graduate school. If graduate school teaches you anything its how to stretch a dollar.
DeleteOne thing I miss about working at "old-school" big chemical company R&D campuses was having a cafeteria where you could get a hot lunch quickly and inexpensively.
ReplyDeleteI would expect anyone who works for a few years between undergrad and grad school to have a difficult financial adjustment. I had no trouble living like a student in a cheap apartment with junky furniture, driving an old car, and thinking of fancy coffee as a luxury, but that would be hard to go back to after a few years of making professional money and living like a grown adult.
I had this for about four months until Covid-19 shut everything down. I felt like it was a real luxury that I even got to pay for it as opposed to all my friends in tech who get this for free.
DeleteConsider it a red flag if a company you're interviewing with has free food, free beer, etc. It usually means you'll be expected to work well past dinnertime.
DeletePostdoc is a low-paying apprentice research job that is supposed to improve your resume and provide endorsement from a big-name professor. The problem is when the famous professor turns out to be a douche. I have a colleague who is bright & motivated but was unlucky with the choice of the postdoc groups (Kobayashi) and ended up stuck, living in Tokyo without job and with a pretty shitty visa situation that made the job search difficult. Needless to say, it did not help financially.
ReplyDeleteI've also heard the Japanese visa situation is tough. I had a former lab mate also get stuck in Japan as a Canadian for awhile, but luckily he found a job pretty quickly in Montreal. Actually, all my chemist friends seem to get jobs in Montreal for some reason. Canada also seems to be a really nice place to live. I hear it's getting warmer too.
DeleteI was lucky enough to get a most expenses paid trip to Montreal and Ottawa while in grad school in NY for presentations and such. I really liked those cities a lot and was kind of bummed I only ever got to go up there once. I just really really dislike winters although Ottawa was beautiful when covered in snow.
DeleteMontreal has a burgeoning pharma / biotech start-up scene, emerging from the ashes of the Big Pharma R&D centre implosion of the mid-2000s (C&EN even had an article on it, a few years back).
DeleteIt's a great city, lots of culture and things to do. But you really need to speak French, or commit to learning it, to enjoy everything it has to offer, and it is somewhat less hospitable if you are from a visible religious minority. The climate is like Minnesota or Wisconsin but with slightly cooler summers, and much more snow in the winter.
Ottawa is a nice family-oriented city and great for outdoor stuff, but not a terribly exciting place if you're young and adventurous. It is a government town after all.
When I was a grad student, we were advised that doing an international postdoc would make it hard to job-hunt. A company might be willing to fly you from city A to B in the US for an interview, but they're not going to pay for a flight from Tokyo or Paris.
DeleteI wonder how viable an option this truly is to a nearly-minted PhD chemist/biologist. If you look at folks like Greg Verdine and Andy Myers, they've started companies based upon their research during their careers. Folks like Josh Boger rose high in Big Pharma before starting a company. Many folks from Ivy League schools or Big Pharma start their own companies at some point during their tenure. This would crowd out newly minted PhDs - wouldn't it? Be curious to know if there are any examples out there....
ReplyDeleteI think based on the sheer amount of money out there from VCs it's possibly easier than you might think. I think newly minted PhDs if they want to go into industry there are options out there, but probably not in places where they don't want to move such as Alabama or Ohio or something. I routinely recruiters pushing positions to go work in random places in the midwest.
DeleteGeoff Coates (Cornell Prof, Polymer chemist) I think just sold his company Novomer to another early stage company. One of my former undergrads just sold his solid lipid nanoparticles company that he founded from his PhD to Georgia Tech for millions to a larger company.
I think start-ups are not zero sum games, but rather trying to create a bigger board, I think there is enough room as long as there is enough VC money out there to fund it.
That was exactly my situation in grad school - I had anxiety that my friends' careers and lives were in fast-forward relative to mine (which seemed to be in pause for 7 years!). I just wanted to make some f*****g money after graduating, and I still feel that in my 30's, I'm still catching up to my friends who worked through their 20s instead of doing a PhD. I'm behind on lifetime earnings and savings relative to them.
ReplyDeleteSaying that PhD students should found companies strikes me as a bit ignorant though. Don't 99% of startups fail? Also, as others have said above, most startups in chemistry are founded by people with decades of experience, not fresh PhDs. Granted, there are a handful of PhD's who have startup companies (as can be seen in C&EN), I feel like those are the lucky exception, not the norm.
It could be to push aspiring grad students to seek research that are directly translatable, or try to push out patents instead of focusing on pure academia research that might be useful some years later. drug design is one, materials like OLED is one, peptide-based materials like mine won't go anywhere. TBH its very much a good advice nowadays to help students transition out of academia, or at least have the mindset doing so since most of the ~2k new chem phds every year wont be able to find faculty positions.
DeletePersonally I've seen some companies got founded and sold from my department, and our uni's technology transfer office is pushing hard to help academia labs to file for patents and start companies, with a 30-40% school cut of the profit of course. As for real success rates I can't tell, but most of my PI's patents ended up nowhere...
In addition to a supportive advisor and department, you need a supportive spouse / partner.
ReplyDeleteYou also need to consider your risk tolerance. The risk equation is different for everyone -- including for multiple people within the same organization (e.g., the fresh PhD starting a company vs. her PhD supervisor who is also involved and has a day job to fall back on)
The cynical side of me says someone who's a convincing public speaker could milk the hell out of this. I worked with a few guys who came from a failed biotech startup in my area, and they admitted to me that the owner was a P.T. Barnum who was great at getting grants and convincing investors to give him money, and they pretty much did nothing but play computer games all day long. It wasn't a deliberate con like Theranos; more like a legit concept that was oversold by a founder who was more interested in self-promotion than in getting work done.
ReplyDelete