Not Enough Vacancies in Academia?

What can you do with a PhD today? Discussions revolving around this topic occur on a near weekly basis at major academic institutions. You would be hard pressed to find a scientific conference that didn’t have a session devoted to applying this question to its particular field. I have found that the answer to this question can be especially frustrating for the curious individual with research ambitions. With tenure track research positions as rare as they come and the lucky winners of these positions occupying them until they expire, it’s not hard to understand that many potential researchers get redirected from their intellectual pursuits. In this post I would like to discuss two novel and alternative routes that can end in a fruitful research career. These routes are best suited for theoretical and computational researchers, but can potentially benefit experimental researchers as well. Before exploring these avenues, I would like to put the current academic research environment under a microscope. If you were one of the lucky few who could get a tenured research position, would you even want to take it?

It is no secret that scientific research is done differently than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. Whether is it is for better or worse is an important question to debate. Leaders of major research institutions will likely state that there are now more scientific publications per year than at any other time in history. They will claim productivity, but this is likely the debased modern version of productivity. Diving deeper into the lives of the researchers gives insights into what is actually going on. Cal Newport, a theoretical computer scientist at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, states that knowledge workers use up to 60% percent of their time to answer emails. This severely interferes with long uninterrupted blocks of time necessary to accomplish meaningful research. The academic environment takes professionals with years of research training and turns them into human internet routers, conduits for worthless digital information. Add in the busy work required by the administration and you have a bunch of time poor professors with no mental bandwidth left for scientific exploration. The quote of famed Theoretical Physicist Peter Higgs rings truer than ever. “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.” This was in reference to his discovery of the Higgs Boson. The origin of this time poverty issue, which is best described by the adult cartoon Rick and Morty, will be discussed at the end of this post. Now I will explore the alternative routes to a scientific research career that attempt to provide a solution to the time and focus poverty of the career scientist.

My first solution would be to get an academic job outside the developed western world, particularly in South East Asia, South America and possibly Africa. This is because they are not as rigid and bureaucratic as world ranked universities. They cannot afford to be this way so there is likely less competition for spots. After spending a year in an up-and-coming country, I got the impression that they would gladly welcome foreign trained academics at their universities. With an elite western education, all the students would benefit from having a good teacher. The university would benefit from having a researcher that can publish in highly ranked journals. And I would imagine that it would be simpler to negotiate the necessary time one needs and to keep busy work away. Everyone benefits from this situation. There is even the possibility that you could guide administrations away from this madness the western world calls research. This path doesn’t offer the prestige of being a western tenure track academic, but prestige is vanity. As the Bowery King famously says, “Everyone know that shit gets done under the table.”

 

I anticipate language as being a major counterargument to this path being feasible. Don’t most countries use their primary language in higher education? The answer is decreasingly yes. In Vietnam, I found universities that teaching their entire undergraduate curriculums in English. I don’t want to overgeneralize, but I imagine this is happening in other up-and-coming countries as well. The world is undergoing globalization at a rapid pace and no one wants to be left out. There are many scientific education programs taught in English, you just have to do some digging to find them. Alternatively, one can just learn the language. If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are multilingual so it should be no problem for you to get another language. If you don’t have another language yet, you can read about my experience of learning a second language in my mid-twenties here.

The second alternative I offer is to become a freelance scientific researcher. This is the way many sectors are headed, so why not science? This entails building enough income to support your lifestyle without being associated with an academic institution. Science may not be the best way to pay the bills anyway. Since living off of passive income in a developed country is a lofty and time-consuming goal, this path would best be coupled with living in a country with a lower cost of living. To start down this path, I would recommend building income through crowdsourced real estate, which you can read a bit about here. You could even start and then outsource a small company, which is also accomplished with less hassle in a country with lower cost of living. This path requires some financial jerry-rigging and lifestyle design which is discussed in other posts on this blog. As long as you have a PhD and publication or two in your field, this is enough to do research. If you are a theoretical or computational researcher, time trumps funding. Covering your financial bases in this manner opens the door to fruitful research. It is not hard for me to imagine that this may be a more frequented path in the future, even becoming the envy of traditional researchers operating within the bounds of bureaucratic academic institutions.  

While I didn’t dive too deeply into the problematic structure of how research is done, I hope you don’t think that everything is all as it should be. The issues became apparent to me during my undergraduate studies, but I wasn’t aware that there were other options until I did some world traveling. It was after considering the undesirable research environment and extreme imbalance in supply and demand for researchers in the developed world that led me to these alternative paths. In summary, the first alternative path is just going to a place where your skills are appreciated and you are given the time to use them. The second alternative path is simply considering the lifestyle you require to be content and taking the path of financial least resistance to arrive at this lifestyle. I will likely use a combination of these strategies in my professional endeavors. I hope that you share these ideas with your peers and coworkers and even consider using them yourselves. Even if you are more of an experimental researcher, still consider looking outside the developed western world. The world is changing very vast and there are many new opportunities to take advantage of.

As promised earlier, the root issue of research institution problems is displayed in Season 3 Episode 8 of Rick and Morty. I find the Citadel of Ricks to be a potent metaphor of academia, particularly institutions in the US. Spoiler alert, at the end of the episode we learn the Citadel is in control by a singular Morty. This tends to be the case in universities as well. At the apex of these top-down bureaucracies are always a Morty. Either by birth or a devolved and degenerate Rick turned Morty. It’s not so obvious from the perspective of the fledgling scientists looking up to the pseudo-Rick archetypes that instruct them. But they are definitively there. These Mortys are generally more motivated by video games and dates with Jessica than quality research. The Rickest thing to do is to cut ties with the Citadel and become a rogue, irrational and passionate scientist that trailblazes your way towards scientific breakthrough.