Early Career Scientist
Some thoughts and interest in the moniker
Hey There,
Apparently there are 5 Tuesdays in March and I’m out of things to write about this month based on the structure I’ve been operating on since late last year. I find that structure really helps me hone in on specific topics. I think about this stuff when I’m not writing and the cycle keeps me honest and interested. Perhaps this is how I’ve been able to keep this up for so long, but I realized that with over a year of consistent writing and publishing I’m actually building out quite a bit of written work. It feels good when I write it, but maybe not as useful as a scattered collection in this newsletter.
This issue of the newsletter is sponsored by:
I started this newsletter from a desire to produce what I wish existed when I was working on my undergraduate degree, when I was working with a BS in chemistry, when I was in graduate school, and when I entered the chemical industry with my PhD. I’m trying to show the importance of the chemical and polymer industries to the world, but I also want to try and offer-up what I’ve learned so far to everyone that reads this and who might eventually want it as they progress through their own careers.
I know chemists and scientists have existed in the chemical industry way before I did and I want to know their best practices, tips, and thoughts on how the industry is changing. Where is it headed? What’s the future of being a chemist? (Hint: It’s going to be pretty much the same, maybe more computer help).
Early Career Scientist
I’ve been thinking and writing about my own career and I’ve been interviewing others about their careers. This has made me think about how much more time I’ll be working in my own career. I’m 34 now (35 in November) and if I work till I’m 65 (I hope I don’t have to, but that I want to) I’ve got about 31 years left. If we think about our “careers” starting when we are about 21 and working till we are 65 then it’s a total of about 44 years and if we divide by three it’s split up into ~14 year segments. I’m essentially in year 14 now and I get a sense that I’m starting to exit my early career phase and enter my mid-career phase.
When it comes to being an early career scientist I think I have a somewhat good idea of how to succeed and the options that are typically available. I’ve worked 4 different jobs (1 pre-PhD, 3 post-PhD) since I was 21. I’ve developed products in medical devices, industrial polymers, consumer apparel, and construction products. I’ve worked with chemical operators at 4 AM on scale-ups. I’ve been in south east Asia looking at how an adhesive is applied to a shoe outsole and I’ve been out at job sites witnessing how construction products get used.
I’ve also been writing about product development as I’ve experienced it as a polymer chemist, but I think there are some similarities across industries. What works in one end market likely works in another and the problems of one company are often the problems in another. Supply chain problems might look different in each market, but a problem being experienced in the oil and gas sector eventually makes its way through the supply chain. Six Sigma might be annoying now, but when all hell breaks loose it’s a life raft you can cling to and the tools and principles can help you find your way to shore.
Being an early career scientist is definitely involves being a good scientist, but it’s maybe only 20-30% of your actual day job (at least in my experience).
Who Do I Look To For Help?
As I start to enter the mid-career phase of being a scientist I think, “who can I read to help me out here?” So far, I think the only relevant resource that is essentially public is Chemjobber. I’ve also had the benefit of being able to talk to some amazing coworkers who offer up a lot of great advice that just lives in my head and perhaps makes its way out in this newsletter, but it’s typically not intentional.
If I just Google: “early career scientist” and “book” and/or “resource” I get websites and books and books about how to be an early career researcher from an academic point of view. The fundamental problem with this is that academia is a very narrow audience. Most of the scientists that hold a bachelor’s, masters, or doctoral degree will not go into academia. Instead, these scientists often venture off into the for-profit industry, non-profit research centers, or do science related work not in a lab.
The National Science Foundation has some great data on earned doctorates from 1958-2020 in the United States and if we take the summation of the last 14 years (of the data set) we should get an idea of PhD holders in some stage of their early career (perhaps mid-career too), which is about 776,878 people. You do not need a PhD to be a scientist to be “early career,” and the data around BS and MS graduates is more opaque than PhDs. At a minimum let’s say there are over a million early career scientists out there at any given time in the “early career scientist” stage with hundreds of thousands being added every year.
When I was nearing the end of graduate school I really just wanted a good basic guide on how to get a job in the chemical industry, which I eventually wrote. Once you get that elusive industry job, what do you do next? You might find yourself being very capable compared to your coworkers and this can be good, but it may also be a burden. You might also be at a point in your career when you think, where can I go from here? These are just some of the questions I’ve been trying to answer for myself and they are somewhat personal, but I don’t see these questions being asked or answers even being proposed in the current literature about being an early career scientist.
If you’ve got some good resources let me know.
I think I got really lucky with my first job post-PhD and I had some great coworkers who I developed great friendships with and provided different views on similar problems. Some of these coworkers were mid-career or late-career themselves and sometimes a quick 5-10 minute conversation with one of them reaffirms everything I’ve thought. Not everyone gets to have the experiences I’ve had though.
A Message From My Sponsor
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Book Proposal Idea (Am I Crazy?) - The Ask
Anyway, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m trying to get Voice Of The Customer (VoC, not volatile organic compounds) feedback here. If I were to put together a book in the next few years about being an early career scientist would there be an audience that would want to buy it? What would you want to see in this book? Let me know by responding to this email.
The first stage of the process is to write a book proposal and this ask of the audience is part of the process. Any feedback here would be useful for an actual proposal to a real publisher. I don’t want to self publish a book on Amazon and sell it for $5 unless it’s a necessity and I’ve already got the book written. The editing and structuring the book alone would be a nightmare for me and for the readers.
I don’t want to write a self-help book. The book I would want to read would be somewhere between advice, memoir, and showing what it means to be an early career scientist through my own experiences and interviews with other people. I’m really just frustrated with the fact that there aren’t a lot of resources out there at all for a profession that is based on the first word in STEM.
If we want a significant amount of our population to go into science because as a society we recognize that these people will help enable our future then why is there little to no information about being an actual scientist? The top results around this are in Quora!?
I figure I have 2 more years left for being an early career scientist (by my own definition) because I don’t think you need to have a PhD to be a scientist. Having a PhD is useful, it gives you confidence, but I don’t think it’s a requirement. A roommate of mine once asked me a question as we were about to graduate from the University of Maryland:
Roommate: Why are you so anxious about graduation?
Me: I haven’t found a job yet. I’m not sure what I’m going to do next.
Roommate: So you’re going to have a degree in chemistry right?
Me: Yeah so?
Roommate: You’re going to be a chemist. That’s awesome. I’m going to be an accountant, which is like meh.
So to those of you who are reading this and you are either in school, know someone in school, or are in the early career stage yourself send me your questions, give me your feedback, and other than great high paying jobs let me know what you want out of your career too. Reply to this email or if you are reading this on the website just email me at: polymerist@substack.com
Thank you for reading,
It's an interesting idea, but I wonder if the experience of "early career scientists" is too different in different fields, and different types of company (e.g., startups vs. mid-size vs. multinational vs. gov't labs etc.) to generalize.