{"id":20480,"date":"2018-09-20T13:16:22","date_gmt":"2018-09-20T17:16:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=20480"},"modified":"2018-10-26T10:50:10","modified_gmt":"2018-10-26T14:50:10","slug":"75-percent-chance-of-career-failure-considered-in-a-positive-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2018\/09\/20\/75-percent-chance-of-career-failure-considered-in-a-positive-light\/","title":{"rendered":"75 percent chance of career failure considered in a positive light"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was chatting with a successful physicist the other day. I said that reading Losing the Nobel Prize<\/em><\/a> made me realize what a risky career choice science was. He scoffed at my timidity. “If you get into a top graduate school, you’re practically guaranteed a post-doc.” (i.e., a\u00a0$52,116 per year job after 5 years<\/a>; roughly at age 35 if the PhD program is started at 24 and it takes 6 years to earn the doctorate) What about after that? “You’d have a 1 in 4 chance of getting an assistant professorship.” Once on the tenure track, he considered actually earning tenure to be straightforward.<\/p>\n

If we define “success” in science as a long-term job as a scientist, he was saying that the chance of failure was a minimum of 75 percent (maybe closer to 90 percent if we consider the probabilities of not getting into a great graduate school, not getting a post-doc, and not getting tenure once on the “tenure track”). In his opinion this was only a minor detraction from the appeal of a career in science.<\/p>\n

Related:<\/p>\n