Flutterby™! : Career options 2010-06-15 14:28:09.454531+00

Career options

2010-06-15 14:28:09.454531+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Philip Greenspun: "The best way to discourage women in science may be writing about what it is like to be a scientist.".

The Real Science Gap:

“There is no scientist shortage,” declares Harvard economics professor Richard Freeman, a pre-eminent authority on the scientific work force. Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a leading demographer who is also a national authority on science training, cites the “profound irony” of crying shortage — as have many business leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates — while scores of thousands of young Ph.D.s labor in the nation’s university labs as low-paid, temporary workers, ostensibly training for permanent faculty positions that will never exist.

(Via MeFi)

At least more people want to go to law school now. (Via MeFi, which also points out that we have an oversupply of lawyers, as if you didn't know that already)

I was just telling my wife the other day that I should have gone to business school for an MBA instead of pursuing a PhD. I would have been done a couple years ago and probably make twice what I would as a university professor.

Oh yeah... something they don't advertise too highly is that professors in B- school, law school, and economics make considerably higher salaries than other departments. Engineering comes in fairly high. Some of the hard sciences, especially those closely related to med school are in the next tier. Way down near the bottom are disciplines like History, Philosophy and Literature. The primary factor is demand outside academia.

The other irony is that there are usually more faculty positions and greater turn- over in the better paying disciplines. People regularly cycle in and out of academic jobs for real jobs in business and law school. The bottom rung departments typically have only a handful of tenure-track positions which only open up post mortem.