Reddit Chemistry Jobs FAQ, part 3: Does your Ph.D. granting institution matter?

It's time for another portion of the Reddit Chemistry Jobs FAQ. Here's part 1 and part 2. Today's questions:

czechychicky: How important is a PhD supervisor vs. university at which the degree was obtained? 

chemistress: How much does the graduate school you attend matter? Will I seriously be hurting my future job prospects if I receive my PhD from a (much) lower-ranked school?

The old adage is that your terminal degree/experience should be the best one possible. There's a lot of caveats there, but I think that's it is broadly true.

If you want a classic Ph.D. chemistry job, the conventional wisdom is that your institution matters a lot. For Ph.D.-level jobs in the US chemical/pharmaceutical industry, it might even be true that the Ph.D. supervisor matters more than the institution itself.* I don't know about other fields in chemistry; it's possible that they are not nearly as exclusive. (I should hope not.)

Here's how I look at the difference between an adviser and the institution when it comes to jobs: your institution will help your CV (the "prestige" factor, networking, potential internships with nearby employers, other professors to be your references, facilities), while the interaction between you and your adviser is what makes your thesis and makes your job talk. Which is more important in getting your job? I would hope it's your science and your skills, but let's not be too naive. It's probably best to maximize both.

Will you be hurting your job prospects if you get your Ph.D. from a lower-ranked** school? I don't really know, but there is probably a wide gulf in the distribution of job offers and salaries between graduates of, say, the top 5 or 10 institutions (the Harvards and the Caltechs of the world) and everyone else. Is there a big difference in salaries and lifetime earnings between the 50th ranked school and the 100th ranked school? Possibly, but again, I don't really know. It is also quite possible that if you get a Ph.D. from a lower-ranked school, you're probably increasing your chances that you might need a postdoctoral stay at a higher-ranked school to polish your CV.

[If you haven't noticed, I keep saying "I don't know, because there's no good data." This is basically the story of the paths in our field. While individual groups/professors can be quite good at keeping track of their alumni, neither universities, employers or employees (or the American Chemical Society, for that matter) seem to be interested in gathering, synthesizing or divulging data in an attempt to inform younger people. Why that might be is left as an exercise to the reader.]

There's something that I haven't mentioned yet, which is success. It's a really difficult thing to define, but it will probably mean 1) publishing a lot of good, well-regarded science and 2) learning to be a high-quality, independent scientist. I think that's hard to do anywhere, but some institutions and professors fit you and your personality more than others. So that's going to be my spin on the above adage: you should go to the best school that will help you be the most successful.

*UPDATE: Experienced commenters disagree with me and seem to agree that in industry, the school matters more than the adviser name.

**Whose rankings are we going to use, for that matter? 

Reddit Chemistry Jobs FAQ, part 2: getting a job in industry

In part two of the Reddit Chemistry Jobs FAQ (part 1 is here), a set of classic questions about jobs in industry. From stathicus:

Realistically, can you get a job in industry with just a B.S in chemistry in this economy? How difficult is it to find jobs in industry? Is it super competitive? 

Also, what are the chances of getting a job working for a company that would pay for graduate school? I know quite a few people who graduated with physics and engineering degrees and are now working for companies that are paying for them to persue master degrees but I haven't heard many stories about chemists getting the same deal.

From gunbladelh: "Is it easier to find a job in industry with an M.S or a Ph.D?"

From deathbyentropy: "I'm worried that I will get an Ph.D. entry level position and be worked to the point that I hate it. Are there many Ph.D. positions that only require the 9-5 +/- a few hours?"

Let's go with the numbers (as we have them*) first:

• For all ACS members in 2012, unemployment decreases with degree level (B.S.: 5.9%, M.S.: 5.4%, Ph.D.: 3.4%). 
• For ACS members that graduated in 2011, the percentage that were employed full-time did not really correlate to degree level (B.S.: 33%, M.S.: 48%, Ph.D.: 38%). (Note that a high percentage progressed further to graduate education or a postdoc.) 
• For ACS members that graduated in 2011, the percentage that were unemployed also did not correlate to degree level (B.S.: 17%, M.S.: 23%, Ph.D.: 12%).

These numbers suggest that, to understate, it is difficult to get a job in industry with just a B.S. in this economy. I believe that it can be done; I have seen it myself. What I believe has changed from five or ten years ago is the amount of effort it takes to find a job out of college. 

I worked as a B.S. analytical chemist/formulator in the late 1990s for a year; I applied to a scant number of positions with my not-particularly-impressive credentials (B.S. in biochemistry, about a year of working in a laboratory during the school year, nothing special**). Applying in January or February of my senior year (just a few months before graduation), I was able to get a full-time job doing bench science at a drug delivery company fairly easily. I don't think that's much the case anymore. I suspect that most B.S. entrants into the job market have, like a recent post of mine mentioned, been spending their summers and off hours in the laboratory getting direct work experience, either through REU-style academic internships or industrial internships. In other words, doing well at your coursework is insufficient. 

I don't think it's "super-competitive", like medical school, where it seems like the interviews have only gotten more complicated and the necessary grades and test scores have only seemed to increase over time. But I really think that some effort and planning between your sophomore and senior years is required. 

As for paying for graduate school, I think that it is relatively uncommon for companies to do this. For the most part, they want to hire you after the schooling, not before. You typically get paid to go to graduate school in the sciences; either you get a fellowship (no teaching requirement), you teach to earn your keep (teaching assistantship) or a professor pays your stipend (research assistantship.) Sometimes companies will pay for part-time or online master's programs, but I think the pool of master's students is deep enough that there's no real incentive for this. 

It has long been a truism that "master's chemists are the most employable." To a great extent, I believe that. However, I don't think there's very much outside of intuition to support that. Certainly, the numbers up above don't really show that; Ph.D. chemists have had the lowest unemployment rates of the different degree levels. I think that it is true that master's chemists have more flexibility to be hired into entry-level positions -- there are a lot of lab associate-type positions that are essentially closed to Ph.D.s. 

Finally, entry-level Ph.D. positions are not exactly 9-to-5 (more like 7-to-5), but are not the "round-the-clock and weekend" hours that you might be used to in graduate school. Industrial hours are usually somewhere around 8-to-5 (especially at the larger corporations), and weekend work is relatively rare (or even sometimes forbidden, from a safety perspective.) You're low person on the totem pole, and so you'll be expected to put in your hours, but, compared to graduate school, it's relatively relaxed (emphasis on "relatively.") (UPDATE: See Arr Oh and The Aqueous Layer add their wisdom, basically cautioning that while you won't be worked to death, but you will still want to work hard.)

More questions to be answered next week! 

*ACS surveys have statistical issues; they're surveys of the members (not all chemists are members) and the response rates can be quite low (for example, the response rate of the Starting Salary Survey was 17%, so the fuzziness of those numbers is high.) 

**Outside of class-required labs, I had 2 summers of molecular biology-oriented laboratory experience and 1.5 academic years of undergrad research under my belt. Hard to say if that's a lot or a little, but I didn't have a ton of papers to show for it. 

Reddit Chemistry Jobs FAQ, part 1: Alternative careers

A long time ago, I volunteered to write a chemistry jobs "frequently asked questions" section for the Chemistry Reddit. It's about darn time for me to do so, so I'm starting today. Since Tuesday is my "academic" day, I'll basically be devoting a post most Tuesdays to working on this FAQ. I've asked for questions on Reddit and as of this morning, the most upvoted question was on alternative careers for chemistry:

Avoidingbadsubs: What other non-traditional jobs are there out there for those with a chemistry degree?

That's a great question and one that gets asked a lot -- what can I do with my chemistry degree, other than chemistry? I really dislike answers that start with "Anything!" because it's too vague. Noting that Jerry Buss (the late owner of the Los Angeles Lakers) and Angela Merkel (current chancellor of Germany) were Ph.D. chemists isn't particularly useful, especially since Dr. Buss left chemistry to become a wildly successful real estate investor and Dr. Merkel happened to get involved in the founding of political parties in the newly democratic and newly reunited Germany.*

It is probable that just a bare minimum of B.S. chemistry degree holders end up doing chemistry after they graduate. The best statistical data is referenced in this report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce; they find that, of every 19 STEM degree holders, only 10 will hold jobs related to their degree early in their career. (Granted, this statistic came from the 1993-2003 time period, a time that was very different than our own.) After 10 years, of those 10 STEM degree holders, only 8 will be still working in STEM. So I think that it is reasonable and potentially even prudent to be thinking about fields outside of traditional bench-oriented chemistry.

I think the question should be answered thusly: Where have people with chemistry degrees gone? Unfortunately, there is not clear statistical tracking as to where chemists have gone, so we're left with the world of anecdotal evidence, for which there is a ton.

The best collection of those anecdotes (in my opinion) is Dr. Lisa Balbes' book "Non-traditional Careers in Chemistry"; I've summarized a lot of these chapters on my blog and you can see the table of contents of the book here. The typical alternative careers are covered: teaching, writing, working with computers, the legal and regulatory fields in great detail with in-depth interviews. (Here's another list of potential careers Dr. Balbes' compiled; here's a helpful set of questions to ask yourself about alternative careers that she wrote up.) Another great resource is the Just Another Electron Pusher blog, which has profiled many different people with very different careers in chemistry. My favorite were the flavor chemist and the actor, but there are a lot of "practical" careers there as well. Finally, I was not aware until today of the blog "The Road Less Traveled" about alternative careers in chemistry; there's 81 entries over there as well.

In 2010, noted chemistry blogger Derek Lowe asked his very experienced pharma-oriented readership about what they did after if they had left chemistry. The result was a 196-comment thread; I summarized 160 of those comments with the 35 different career transfers from chemistry to something else as follows:

Computer-related work (computational science, programming, etc.): 9 (26%)
Other: 8 (23%)
Business (MBA, business development): 4 (11%)
Intellectual property law (patent attorney, agent): 4 (11%)
Regulatory affairs: 4 (11%)
Pharmacy-related stuff: 3 (9%)
Teaching (high school, tutoring): 3 (9%)

After looking at all these piles of anecdotes, alternative careers in chemistry seem to fall under a few general categories:

• Non-traditional teaching (high school, tutoring)
• Working with computers somehow
• Being a writer/editor
• Working on the business side of chemistry (legal, regulatory, sales, marketing, etc.) 
• Something else that's not easily defined

I hope that I've managed to practically express the breadth and depth of available resources on this important question. As with all careers, you have to start somewhere; there's likely a path to follow (with attendant grunt work and learning curve) and there are people who have blazed a trail in front of you. And even then, there's nothing stopping you from blazing a trail of your own.

My very best wishes to you all -- talk to you next Tuesday and beyond.

*So all you need to do with your Ph.D. in chemistry to become a national leader is have a historical collapse of a decades-old undemocratic state!