What's the point in becoming a scientist, really? It is totally thankless. I'm being serious here

What's the point in becoming a scientist, really? It is totally thankless. I'm being serious here.

>Only the people from the top prestigious schools get the interesting research or professorship
>You get paid like shit unless you are a tenured professor, again, better graduate from harvard to get one of those professorships because people only care about prestige rather than ability
>there simply are not enough positions, don't buy the "STEM shortage!" meme, people can barely get postdocs
>Business blue bloods with MBAs use your research you did basically for free, change it slightly, patent it, and make a killing while you are a lab monkey, or hire you for pennies to design their stuff, then get lauded for 'their contributions' and showered in millions or billions while you are slaving away: see elon musk, steve jobs, bill gates, others
>you will never make a really meaningful contribution to your field
>have to suckle at the teat for funding and betray your ethics and possibly engineer outcomes to get funding
>have to obey the consensus and never challenge the authorities or you get blackballed and your career is ruined
>the chinese and others from foreign countries steal your research and get credit for it
>peer review is a mere formality

It's time to stop glamorizing science. It fucking sucks as a career and you're basically a modern day slave using brain instead of brawn making nothing compared to what people stand to gain from you. You're a little bitch to big companies and people with more seniority. It really isn't all that meritocratic either.

>BUT MUH HELPING SOCIETY

Who fucking cares? You're really just lining the pockets of the businessman alpha chads that pushed you into lockers 20 years ago. Your research will 99% never help humanity. This reddit/neil degrasse tyson/rick and morty ideal of LE SCIENCE!!!! is fucking farcical.

Other urls found in this thread:

theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/programmers-should-not-call-themselves-engineers/414271/
water.usgs.gov/owq/topics.html
twitter.com/AnonBabble

>don't buy the "STEM shortage!" meme

When people say 'STEM shortage' the last thing they are talking about is research.

They are talking about fucking code monkey jobs... and even then they are wrong.

What should I do instead? Sweep the streets? Lay brick for a hundred dollars a day?

Even being an adjunct professor for like is pretty damn comfy all things considered.

People who hire STEM majors as fungible replaceable brain-slaves, and pocket the difference and make a shitload, become rich. STEM types are just too naive to understand that this doesn't mean THEM.

There is zero glamor in science, just working like a dog as a virgin loser to make Chad MBA richer.

Just do what you like or at least what you can tolerate doing. Human fulfillment is the only thing that matters. Live your life to the fullest that's humanly possible.
If that's research then do research. If research has too many drawbacks then look for something else or learn to accept it and try to get a position where you're (somewhat) comfortable.
It's as simple as that.

>What's the point in becoming a scientist, really? It is totally thankless. I'm being serious here.
>You get paid like shit
Usually people who do research either don't care for anything else and/or don't want to care for anything else; they're fine in their bubbles.

Most certainly there is more than one way to get fulfillment in life. Most people miss that.

> code monkey jobs
I fucking hate them. It's like they're new trained people for the new technologically advanced society. In the past we trained bricklayers, etc. now we train coders except that they're a lot less skilled than bricklayers.
True.

You obviously need to become a corrupt cigar puffing mogul.

You act like that doesn't exist?

These people don't understand science or engineering but they crack the whip on you and make you work to make THEM rich and successful.

The reason rich people and politicians are saying STEM STEM STEM WE NEED MORE STEM JOBS is so they can pay STEM people less. Because the profit margins are extremely high getting scientists and engineers to work for you.

You get them to produce millions of dollars in value for your company and pay them a paltry upper-middle class salary (80-120k) at the most which is a pittance compared to what the useless MBA pencil pushers do, who make more and are the ones rewarded for YOUR work.

This applies to engineering too. Engineers will never make a lot of money. Their salaries are piss compared to the hard work they do, never to mention real high paying careers like corporate lawyers or doctors.

>This applies to engineering too. Engineers will never make a lot of money. Their salaries are piss compared to the hard work they do, never to mention real high paying careers like corporate lawyers or doctors.
This. Many engineers have their own company though. I guess those guys realize that it's a whole lot better to be your own boss especially if you're an expert in something.

>Who fucking cares? You're really just lining the pockets of the businessman alpha chads that pushed you into lockers 20 years ago

projecting this hard

enjoy your work and you will never work a day in your life desu

yeah 80 hours a week that's nothing xDD as long as you enjoy it!!!

Scientists and engineers need to fucking unionize or start an association like the AMA. You know why surgeons make 400k? They make sure only the best and brightest get to medical school and that foreigners don't get hired over americans.

Right now scientists and engineers are worker slaves for businessmen and academia.

It is thankless. But every job, by definition is thankless, except that some jobs give you more money and distractions. In such jobs all you are really doing in your spare time is distracting yourself from your existence until you die. Science, although it sucks for the individual, at least advances the species.

Who would want to be a bitch to 'advance the species' though?

I wanted to make MONEY.

You fucking idiots told me STEM STEM STEM IT'S HOW YOU MAKE MONEY IT'S IN DEMAND

WHERE IS MY FUCKIN GMONEY

I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT "ADVANCING THE SPECIES" I WANT TO GET PAID A WAGE THAT'S DESERVING OF MY HARD WORK YOU FUCKING ASPIE

>I wanted to make MONEY.
Speak for yourself, I guess. I am thoroughly tired of distractions. None of them work for me anymore. Don't discount the possibility that you may become like me one day. (Some call this "the midlife crisis")

I won't be like you, sorry. I'm not a cuckold.

Oh you're a /pol/ack

I worked in IT consulting, having a rather good salary, but I fucking hated it. I hate coding actually, I took the job because I needed one at the time. Now I'm in research in university. I work just as much for a lesser pay but I like what I'm doing.

Most of what you say is actually right I guess, but I still like what I'm doing, I'm happy to wake up every morning (almost every morning) to go to my job, and nothing will change that.

Cuck a doodle fuck you tumblrino

i did it because i enjoy the flexibility and self-control over my workday that it gives me. i have a bunch of projects that I'm pushing forward, i choose what needs the most work today and how my time should be spent, and ultimately end up using my own abilities in a creative endeavor with a defined end-point and tangible output

>MFW most STEM memelords will make as much as I will with a BA Biological Anthropology
>MFW they will vehemently deny this 'til their last breath despite knowing the truth

>STEM = academic research
wew lad
Be a fucking engineer.
Also you can get a MBA a an engi you know, it's not an initial formation.

This is why I'm going the finance route now.

All of this it true
It's also an inherent and obvious result of the contradictions of capitalism
What are you doing to overthrow class rule, comrade?

Because as an MD-PhD, I can do whatever the hell I want.

Work in the clinic to make a sizable income, and use it to construct and conduct my own reaearch in my own automated lab.

MSTP? What were your grades/extracurriculars/mcat

Haven't even applied yet, that is just loosely my plan.

Long story short, I'm confident I can get in somewhere, predicated on how much my 4.0 over the last 2 two years makes up for my 3.7 overall.

Scientists can discover new and novel ways of recycling plastic materials into wood substitutes that carpenters can use.

That's why I got into science.

>Haven't even applied yet, that is just loosely my plan.

Fuck this is cringy as hell.

God fucking damn. This is the beginning of the Veeky Forums cringe meme.

>Makes a post that sounds like he solved the science dream and is now living the life

>Just an undergrad student who is probably mediocre who has retarded bloated dreams

Fuuuuuck the cringe hurts man.

At least you are not as bad as the guy who wrote a letter to a girl in his department though.

me too I'm studying econ instead of math

I don't care about Jew money I just want to hit a wall that I know I'll never get around so I can stop doing shit

Not my fault you read actualization into it, I didn't mean to convey as much.

Besides, MD-PhD isn't hard to enter if you aren't retarded. Surviving it is the real task.

>dumbfuck undergrad already presuming he will get accepted into not only medical school, but a fully funded MD-PHD which are some of the most competitive graduate programs in the entire world and live le science dream

you dumb nigger

I know, why don't you just get accepted to harvard on a full ride and then become an executive at JP Morgan? They make lots of money. That's my plan!!! It's easy dude!!

>This applies to engineering too. Engineers will never make a lot of money. Their salaries are piss compared to the hard work they do, never to mention real high paying careers like corporate lawyers or doctors.
Doctors graduate high school and continue doing school for 10-12 more years. Lawyers for 7-8 years. Both of these programs are highly selective and require you to work 40-60 hours a week at obscure times for a number of years after schooling before you land "muh 400k salary," which still will only happen for the best and brightest.

I am an engineer. I went to school for four years during which I didn't care too much about my GPA and partied a lot. I was offered a job at a large tech company before starting my senior year that would pay me 80k plus relocation and a number of other benefits. If I do well here, in two years I can get promoted to a senior position and get paid 150k+. I work 30-45 hours a week. Everybody above me in the company hierarchy except maybe the top level execs are engineers.

>Not being an engineer AND businessman.
kek. it's your loss m8

You must be quite the brainlet if you think it is actually that insurmountable, not like you can help it though.

>Got degree in Cell and Molecular Biology
>Get hired as government scientist
>Extremely Boring and repetitive
>Quit
>Become Database Developer

I wish I stuck with computer science

Because people have been tricked into sacrificing their personal happiness to the alter of some pseudo-religious conception of the value of scientific "progress."

capital exploits labor. what else is new?

this is also why i'm somewhat suspicious of the latest craze in "machine learning". what a coincidence that it became a hot research topic just as Facebook figured out it could use machine learning to pick your face out of a crowd and sell you more shit.

>Just an undergrad student who is probably mediocre who has retarded bloated dreams

This describes at least 90% of the posters on Veeky Forums

Yeah but 90% of Veeky Forums posters don't predict their own futures and proclaim they are going to get the literal best future.

>MD-PhD isn't hard to enter if you aren't retarded
>has a 3.7 GPA, just barely above the "intothetrash.jpg" threshold for med school
>no mention of extracurriculars

I'll be sure to look for the "med school is a jewish meme" Veeky Forums thread in a year or two.

don't bother, these lumpenproles want to be some engineer or scientist slave working under an MBA taskmaster under the opaque goal of "sick money brah" and "le science" even though most are too dumb to be able to and the money they would even get paid is paltry for the lifestyle (compared to the management)

the ones who aren't will be working under the whip of some middle management idiot "ideas person" hired from nepotism and prestige that works 10-3 and drives an m5 with 20 nerds doing the actual work beneath him while making one third his salary

that's capitalism

...

working on an optics degree so the proletariat has superior laser weapons

You're right to be suspect of ML, but for different reasons. ML is as hype as it is today because it's a step closer to AI as we've conceptualized it so far. And, while a highly useful technology, it has already exhibited that it is incredibly far from, and perhaps headed in the wrong direction from, a true AI realization.
It still has lucrative job opportunities if you know how to do it well and it isn't that hard to learn coming from any coding background. I would also add that IBM, Microsoft, and Google are much larger players in the ML field than Facebook.

Shows what you know, the average gpa of the receiving offers is only 3.75 for MD-PhD.

yes but that's including 50 northwest arkansas protestant bumfuck universities for every harvard or UCSF

you are not getting any good research position or good residency out of places like that unless you are the top 1% of the class

there are people on student doctor with 3.8s and 38 MCATs who had to go to the fucking carribbean... and you think you have an MSTP on lock and are going to live THE SCIENCE DREAM LIFE 500K A YEAR with a 3.7 LMAO

you are dumb as fuck bro. You are not getting in with a 3.7. It's just not happening unless you go to medical school in mexico.

I don't know what you think the average workweek of an engineer or scientist is, but I know from having worked as both that your perception of it is wrong.
For one, this person:
>middle management idiot "ideas person" hired from nepotism and prestige
doesn't exist if you work for a company that isn't total shit.

I got paid $38/hr as an entry level software engineer for a year before leaving for another company in a better location. On a really busy day I would write 200+ lines of code. Most days I lazily reviewed someone else's code and pointed out comment typos and edge-cases. The average day consisted of me modifying 6-10 lines of code and attending two meetings. No one knew when I showed up for work or when I left, and I logged my own hours at the end of the week. If that sounds like
>working under the whip
then I have some bad news for you.

It is painfully clear you know nothing about the subject save for cursory browsing of some forum. Anyway who had to go carribean with those stats literally had not one other thing on their app and probably an interview that should be on youtube.

Besides that, going to the literal worst med school in the US for MD-PhD would be perfectly acceptable to me, so your point is moot.

>going to the literal worst med school in the US for MD-PhD would be perfectly acceptable to me, so your point is moot.
Not even the guy you're replying to, but you really are dumb if you believe you can achieve what you said with that. US universities are pretty terrible by world standards expect for the few very good ones. If you're fine with going to the whichever-flyover state uni, you really are going nowhere.

I missed the part where I said I was trying to go anywhere at all, rather this conservation is plagued by assumptions.

I could make barely make 200k as a general surgeon and I'd still have sufficient income to build my own lab and accomplish my personal objectives given time.

It sucks but with certain fields there aint shit you can otherwise do. Either way you will never make as much as Elsevier etc off your work.

How do you think residency works? Performance on the USMLE means far more than institution. You sound like the people who say not to try to go into medicine if you don't have a 150+ IQ.

yikes OP sounds bitter

SO that you can get jizzed on regularly while other chads fuck your wife.

Who the fuck wants to be a scientist

>Performance on the USMLE means far more than institution

still believing the lies from SDN?

It's ok. I was like you once too, naive, immature, credulous.

If you come from a third tier toilet medical school you need at least a 260 to even have a CHANCE at matching any DECENT residency.

Do you guys think in an age of open access journals and online courses that people will be able to work and then pursue their intellectuak interests as a hobbyist?

Talking in the future here.

The main obstacle to this as far as I can see is the intense capital costs required to carry out certain types of laboratory science and certain types of fundamentla research (e.g. anything medical, particle physics, something requiring a supercomouter, etc.)

But certain low cost areas will likely democratize like crazy. I think we will live to see the return of patent clerks pursuing theory and such.

Didn't Yitang Zhang work at Subway for a little while (obviously not by choice, but have to wonder how much it hindered him if at all since it is not mentally taxing).

You're not one of those programmers that calls yourself a "software engineer". You're not a real engineer if that's the case, hate to break it to you.

Essentially, this. Which is why I never bothered with higher education and simply feed on the fruits of your labors in the form of final products, literature, novel techniques, while never have any intention to directly provide anything in return. I am a harvester, and you are my fields.

Yeah, given you have no proof, I consider those who have actually been there vastly more credible than some typical, jaded Veeky Forums memester.

All CS majors, software engineers, and programmers need to read this:
theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/programmers-should-not-call-themselves-engineers/414271/

Grad school is hella fun. I'm also in a bitchin project and field with lots of job opportunities because I checked that shit before dedicating the next 5 - 6 years of my life to research. So I don't know what you're talking about...

Nigga, just stop.

Why do you think collecting degrees and wasting time is going to be fulfilling. Doing MD PhD is straight retarded.

Wish I could start my own STEM business but I lack a marketable product/service.

OP makes a very valid point, the current climate for science employment is pretty bleak. There may be exceptions for if you have programming skills, they'll pay anyone with half a brain to do that. Engineering also has options but usually requires a lot more work.

Unlike most people who frequent this board, I have graduated from my undergrad and am currently working in a science related job. From what I've found, there is very little available if you're interested in pure research. Research does not pay, it relies on investment funding most of the time which is often hard to acquire and maintain over long periods (enough to establish a career of multiple years, if you're lucky you'll get a grant which may last 1-2 years), most well paying science jobs involve something other than research. For instance, product development, design, or quality assurance, or something along those lines. This includes manufacturing, even if what you manufacture is digital technology. If you want to do real research, you'll have to accept slave wages and less than desirable working conditions. Most actual science jobs are boring as hell, but we all tell ourselves we're better off than liberal arts majors who have to work at starbucks. Oh and it depends on the company, but having bosses that are idiots and make more than you is extremely common. The whole business world is people taking advantage of other people, we live in a capitalist society.

I think the coziest thing would be working a low stress job that pays the bills and affords a lot of free time which you can then use to tinker/read/study for fun.

No. Research is so advanced now it requires a large degree of specialization. Most people will need a PhD to be able to understand the research in their field because it's just so abstruse, as far as anything hard science or math related.

Just make your own business. You also don't have to produce anything innovative for any other company if you don't want to.

STEM workers never have unions. Why is that?

this is why you get the fucking engineering degree for your undergrad.

do your masters in your passion, get something that pays the bills first.

tfw I need this thread

gay

>compared to the hard work they do
>hard work

what?

i agree senpai

"no"

this is the exact reason i have EE with MBA, best of both worlds

I'm going into Hydrology. Right now people are using more water than we can replace, are getting sick from improper use of aquifers, and dumping chemical and dangerous minerals into publicly accessed water.

What am I supposed to do, nothing?

>and dumping chemical and dangerous minerals into publicly accessed water.
Such as?

It would scare you shitless.

Here, this might help
water.usgs.gov/owq/topics.html

I never drink city water.

Never bothered testing my drilled well either though. Could be drinking high levels of arsenic for all I know. It definitely is full of calcite, carbonate, or whatever the fug though.

I live in Los Angeles, what would be the purest water source for me to drink from?

Tapwater. It's processed before it gets to you because we fucked our water long ago.

This doesn't help much because you're exposed to water, soil, and air daily but you can pretend since at least what you drink is safe.

I call myself an electrical engineer. My company calls me an embedded software engineer, and I'm okay with that because my paycheck is larger than hardware engineers here.

It really doesn't matter what I call myself or what other people call me. I did STEM and I have found that, despite what OP likes to say, it is highly lucrative and comfortable. I don't answer to anybody with just a business degree and there is plenty of room for upward momentum if so choose to push myself.

Sure there might be a few idiots out there with biology degrees that are waiting in line for food stamps, but I guarantee that there are far more failed businessmen.

Buzzwords out today I guess

haahahhahahahahhhahahaha

underrated post

>user has drilled his own well
>muh fluoride crystals

can we draw attention to this for a second

pretty much, op.

>Only the people from the top prestigious schools get the interesting research or professorship
Well, then go to top 20 unis. The majority of them will over massive financial aid if you can get in. Like standard will pretty much pay for all of it as long as you get accepted, same with Cornell.

i know full well what a career in a scientific field entails yet I'm pursuing it anyway. Yes, it might not pay that great but hell, if you want money, go take up a cushy job in IT or something. Seriously, if all you care about is money in life, you're going to be miserable as fuck once you finally get it coz it aint all that. Do what interests you, and what interests me is science so feck orrfff ;)

That is why I'm getting a BA in Electrical/Electronics Technology and having a personal reasons for MA in Biomedical Engineering(Specializing in Genetic, Tissue, Neural)

>tfw programmer who calls himself software engineer
>I literally have an accredited software engineering degree
hehehehehehehhehehehe

Why not go for a real engineering degree? Penn State has satellite campuses all around Pennsylvania which only offer these '[x field] 'technology'' degrees. They honestly sound worthless to me.

Let's say I have two degrees in computer science (one focusing on systems, one focusing on theory) from a top-5 US university. Let's say I also hold the title of 'software engineer' at a big company like Google. Am I an engineer yet?

The accreditation of EET is merely a backup for practicality demand if my BME ventures aren't well-liked.

You missed one important sidenote

>You are doing what you love, and making a living doing it.

You don't have an engineering degree, but your job description probably includes engineer, the two are not the same thing though.

underrated post

You got meme'd hard kid!

Toppest of keks.

Yes, I have a drilled well, just like practically everyone else in rural areas.

What a moron.