"Alternative" career panel

Mid-day Saturday, I attended the American Society for Investigative Pathology's 13th Annual Workshop on Graduate Education in Pathology, "We can't all be PIs: preparing graduate students for alternative career paths".

I think panels like these are just wonderful (supporting evidence: this event was extremely well-attended), but I thought the title of the event could have been better.  It's true that we call can't be PIs (principle investigators, or the traditional science professor): in order for it to be sustainable, each PI would, over the course of his or her career, train exactly one replacement.  In fact, many more students and even postdocs are trained than faculty positions are available.  But then this is precisely why "alternative" is not a great word to use here.  People who end up as tenure-track faculty are, in fact, a tiny minority of science PhDs, so it's the academic track that really should be called "alternative".

But also: not everyone wants to be a PI, even if they could be one.  This can be hard for many scientists to imagine (even people who are not, themselves, PIs: I was once at a career fair where an industrial scientist justified his job as "well, being a professor is clearly the best job, but we can't all do that"), but, in fact, not everyone loves doing bench science.  Not everyone loves writing grants.  It's not just that we can't all be PIs: even if we could, not all science PhDs would be happy doing that.  In fact, I think the fact that these sorts of panels are, in my experience, always extremely well-attended, is itself evidence that these sorts of people pursuing PhDs in science, the sort who don't want to be professors, are not that uncommon.  There are many, many important ways science PhDs can contribute to society, but calling these careers "alternative" and saying "we can't all be PIs" doesn't do much to remove the stigma.

It was an admittedly small sample size, so I'm not sure what if anything we can conclude, but I did make the following observation.  The panel had four members, three female and one male.  All three female panel members mentioned that one major reason they chose their careers (over, say, the coveted "PI" role, or even an industrial bench science role) was "work-life balance".  Also, it turns out that all three of the female panelists were married to scientists, of the more "traditional" type (two faculty, one industrial).  Meanwhile, the one male panelist mentioned that after working for a year and a half at a law firm, he started law school at night, while still working full-time at the law firm, with three children.  I don't know what the male panelist's life partner does, but I suspect she's a housewife.

It made me wonder about the degree environment contributes to our "choices" when it comes to work-life balance.  The high school teacher panelist was clearly very happy with the career she had chosen.  But if she had a stay-at-home husband, she may have chosen differently, either because she would have more time to dedicate to a job that required more hours because she could rely on her husband to provide child care, or because she would need a job with a higher salary in order to support her family.  I've heard that the choice of a spouse is the single most important career decision you will make.  I do think one major challenge facing women in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] (and, therefore, everyone) is the fact that women in STEM are more likely to have spouses in STEM than men in STEM are.  "Traditional" careers in STEM (like most careers) are still built on the model of employing a breadwinner who has a homemaker at home to take care of things.  This model is not sustainable.