So You Wanna be a Scientist? Funny, Satiric Career Advice From a Pharmaceutical Industry Insider

These are times of economic upheaval (or is it upchucking?) and uncertainty (like how long ‘til I’m wearing-a-barrel broke?).  Many intelligent, hard-working Americans are pondering which careers might be attractive in the days ahead (in hopes of avoiding having to live in a box under a bridge.)  To those who may be considering science as a way to make a living, I offer the following insider tidbits, thoughts, advice, and observations gleaned from my quarter-century-plus as a research chemist in corporate America.

1. Stay awake in math class.  You’ll eventually actually have to add, subtract, multiply, divide.  It’s amazing how frequently numbers rear their insidious heads.
2. Forget about being famous.  That’s reserved for TV, movie, and sports stars.  How many famous scientists can you name, besides Einstein?
3. Forget about being in with the cool and popular crowd.  Scientists wear explosion-proof safety glasses, steel-toed shoes, plain white lab coats with pocket protectors, and are loners who spend their days isolated in lab with their test tubes, Petri dishes, smelly chemicals, and multifunction calculators.
4. Expect to go to college and get a science degree.  While there you’ll spend your afternoons toiling in a pungent lab while the business majors are outside throwing Frisbees and drinking beer.
5. Plan also to go on to graduate school unless you only want to do science grunt work, like cleaning icky glassware or sweeping up monkey poop.  While there you’ll repeat #4 plus study every night until you fall asleep in your multitude of multi-kilogram textbooks instead of having a multi-fun social life.  You’ll only be expected to learn all there is to know about your field.
6. Forget about being rich.  See #2 for those who will.  Even those beer drinking, Frisbee throwing business majors will get better paying jobs than you.
7. Expect to become one of the most anal people around.  Doing science right requires paying the utmost, maximum attention to every last infinitesimally small, mind-numbing detail.
8. Always be inquisitive.  Like, “Woah!  What just happened here?” after your experiment just blew up half the lab.  The authorities will want answers.
9. Learn to get along well with others.  Piss off the wrong person and you may find something unpleasant in your morning coffee.
10. Develop a strong stomach and a weak nose.  It’s amazing how many experiments involve smelly, disgusting stuff which you’ll sometimes go home reeking of.  That’s why scientists tend to marry each other—they don’t notice the odor.
11. Learn to live with failure.  As Albert Einstein once said, “If scientists really knew what they were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
12. Perfect the art of doublespeak.  Your corporate bosses won’t ever want to hear negative results, so you need to be able to put a positive spin on anything.  Like “This unfortunate fire further supports our Chaos Theory.”
13. Keep playing with that chemistry set in your basement.  You may eventually get to blow stuff up on purpose.  At least you’ll get used to gagging on foul odors, and maybe attract a scientist mate.
14. Develop a thick skin and learn to accept criticism calmly.  You’ll be verbally beaten up regularly by management for mundane and often needless things.  Usually it’s because they’re having a bad day, so you might as well have one too.
15. Learn to love paperwork.  Serious science requires meticulous record-keeping and writing lots of long, tedious reports, scholarly articles, and patent applications full of tedious, infinitesimally small, mind-numbing details.  These tomes mostly serve to justify your existence to your bosses, and prove that you’ve been busy doing something at work every day.
16. Marry a rich spouse.  You’ll need a sugar mama or daddy after your job gets outsourced to Asia and you get laid off.  Corporations are too cheap to pay US salaries anymore.
17. Learn a foreign language.  Like Chinese, since that’s where your job is likely going, if you want to keep it.
18. Focus on medicine.  The good ol’ U.S. of A. will continue to supply lots of deteriorating, ailing bodies needing treatment right here.  It’s hard to outsource medicine across the ocean when the sick people are on this side.
19. Keep a positive attitude. With diligent, hard work, you are likely to have the occasional “Eureka!” moment which will give you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside and make it all seem worthwhile.  Maybe you’ll cure cancer or those unsightly wrinkles of aging, or learn how to convert body fat to power our cars as we sleep.  If you can stay employed.