How I decided Bench Science was not my career path
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| Title: | How I decided Bench Science was not my career path | |
| Author: | Nick Zagorski, PhD | |
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Like many graduate students in the sciences, I had my share of ups and downs during my doctoral research, and during some of those downs—an extended period of negative results or failed approaches, panicking as my qualifying exam approached—I had passing thoughts that I couldn’t cut it as a bench scientist. Still, it wasn’t until near the end, ironically enough as I was writing up my dissertation and confident that I could go on to the next step, that I realized that I didn’t want to keep going in laboratory research.
I remember that I had planned to finish all of my experiments by the beginning of summer, and then I could just spend the summer months writing up my dissertation and not worry about doing both at the same time and having to update my methods and results (also, this would also make it easier to leave my workspace should I desire to enjoy the summer air for a few minutes). Shortly after I started writing, though, I felt a sense of…comfort. It was certainly a strange feeling; it was more than just relief that I had finished my experiments, but more of a sense that I was glad that I wasn’t doing them anymore. That might be considered a fine line, and it took some more time to hash it around in my brain, but I soon found that, yes, I was quite happy not dealing with research anymore, and it wasn’t what I wanted to keep doing in the future.
Of course, reaching this epiphany just a few months before I was set to finish grad school produced one quick thought: did I just waste six years of my life? I was not the first who had second thoughts about bench work; in fact, two of my classmates had dropped out within the first two years, and I had known others who had done the same. However, it seemed that the people who knew that grad school wasn’t right for them left early and those that stayed on had a good handle of what they wanted to do. However, resolving this matter involved separating out distinctive factors. Bench work and graduate school were not one and the same, and just because I didn’t want to continue with the former didn’t mean the latter was useless.
(In retrospect, though, if there was one complaint about how my graduate program was run it was that there was not enough emphasis, or any for that matter, on alternative careers for PhDs. I came in believing that some sort of lab work, be it academic or industry, and/or teaching were the only available routes, and that may have influenced the lateness with which I considered another route.)
Like any education, graduate school in biology offered other valuable tools: problem solving, independent thought, public presentation skills, and naturally, scientific knowledge (not to mention living on a tight budget). Overall, the experience was positive, and the important aspect was figuring out how I was going to best apply all that I had learned in graduate school in my next career step. It was fairly easy for me, since I was in the process of writing, and that was what I found I enjoyed best. Of course, maybe this is how it works in many cases; it’s not so much that people decide they don’t want to go into bench science, but rather they find what it is they want to do and realize that it’s not a strict research career.
There is certainly a lot of discovery in graduate school, and not all of it comes at the bench. For me, as for many others, it was that the traditional path of student, postdoc, assistant professor, professor was not the one I should take. I think it’s crucial that whenever someone else may reach this point, they think about the positive and what they want as opposed to simply what they don’t like; otherwise they may let external pressures such as frustrating results or a bad lab environment cloud their beliefs. In addition, let the decision arrive and not be forced by time; I don’t think there’s any right or wrong time to know what you want. If you realize too soon you may think you haven’t given enough time to make an accurate decision; if you are a late bloomer like me, (although I’ve met others who traveled even longer than I before the switch was made), you may fret that you’ve wasted time traveling down a dead-end path. In the end though, the main point is that you have found the path that you should follow. |
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Nick Zagorski, PhD is currently a science writer for the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). After receiving his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Cornell University in 2003, he decided to try his hand at writing, and after enrolling in the Science Writing program at Johns Hopkins University he has not looked back. |
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Copyright, 2006, Nick Zagorski, PhD Published with permission |
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