Don't Become a Scientist.

The reason I was brought in was because in addition to the research paperwork, the grants I worked on required some software artifact to be produced. The grad students and post-docs working on the project were unable to write software, so I was the hired gun. What I produced was crap, but I'm not sure that mattered. It just had to survive a demo at the end of the year and get to the grant renewal stage (in startup speak, 'next funding round.')

I'm not sure if the other researchers were actually unable to write software, or if they were just uninterested in doing so. It was strange to me, since the department I worked for was pretty much 'bioinformatics' - the point of which was to design software tools for biological research. It seemed like people should want to know how to make software, since it was...uh... kind of important to what they were doing.

The day to day environment was much like "The Office", only it was in a "lab", and it was seldom funny. The lab had a laboratory area, with test tubes and fume hoods and whatnot. The main workspace, however, was essentially a cube farm, except instead of out in an office park somewhere, it was above the university hospital's food court.

Most of the people working there were like people working at any big, lame bureaucratic institution, only they had or were obtaining PhDs. Most of their time was spent surfing the web, sending email, and attending meetings. I have never worked anywhere else where people attended so many meetings. I once worked at a giant megacorp for a year, and would lose my mind when I had to go to three meetings a week. At the research lab, they had on average three meetings per day. Journal club, data sharing, data club, journal sharing, guest lecture, team status report meeting, department status report meeting, grant status report meeting, etc. I'm familiar with the horror stories about post-docs working 100 hours a week, but if other programs are similar to the one I worked for, 40 of those hours are spent in meetings, 20 hours are spent wasting time on the internet, 10 hours are typical office chatting, 15 hours of going to classes and lectures, and then maybe 15 hours of actual work... but I'm skeptical that anyone spent 15 additional hours doing work. Normally everything was queued up until the very last moment, then people would spend a couple feverish days slapping something together before a presentation.

I shuffled around between a few different projects and was able to do most of my work offsite. I learned about some cool ideas, but didn't really feel like I was contributing to much of anything. On the last project I spent more time at the lab, simply because I was tired of working at home. Aside from a couple strange aspergy maniacs, most of the people seemed very depressed. One woman finished up her PhD and was planning on moving back to Europe to run her parent's bed and breakfast. Two others were really hoping to get into dental school.

I'm not sure what the people were being trained to do. The wet lab work was supposed to be done by PhDs, but could have easily been handled by undergraduates. Indeed, anything that required advanced knowledge actually WAS done by a young indian female undergraduate who seemed quite harried after being stuck in the lab while her post-doc and grad-student peers were off at another journal sharing. The software work simply wasn't done by anyone in the lab at all - it was all done by hired contractors like myself. It seemed that the only practical training that people received was in reading journals and applying for grants. The most 'successful' guy in the program was hired for $90,000 by a pharmaceutical firm where his job was to read and organize various journal articles...

I could go on and on about this, but the longwinded 'point' I wanted to make was that I agree with the article. I worked in a hot field at the time with a lot of grant money, and it was very bleak and depressing. And, before I get the chorus of people telling me that things are different at good universities, all of this work was done at that other university in Cambridge, the one down the street from MIT with a square named after it.

The "wasting time on the Internet" factor should not be underestimated. Remember, the only reason we're all here is that Tim Berners-Lee spent a lot of his time fiddling around with the Internet instead of doing his physics research.

It is probably easier to start a company on the side as a grad student than to wait until you graduate. Grad student salary sucks, but the flip side is that it can be a pretty awesome day job. The guy who pointed out that 50% of the average grad student's 60-hour week is spend playing WoW is pretty much on the money. You can go months at a time doing only 20 hours of research a week, or even 10, and still not get fired.

Of course, you're not getting paid much, but you're surrounded by lots of other smart young people who aren't getting paid much either, so it's kind of fun. And you certainly aren't going to graduate if you don't do a lot of work -- but if your preferred exit plan is to found a startup and drop out, who cares about that?

It's actually rather hard to fire a grad student. The adviser pays the student very little, but in return (s)he is expected to graduate the student. A student who is fired by Professor X three or four years into a Ph.D. program is well and truly screwed. They might sue. They will certainly tell every grad student they know, and they in turn might tell all the first-year students, who will avoid working for Professor X like he had the plague. So, once you've gotten established as a student in a research group, it's not so hard to spend six months or a year doing only 20 hours worth of work per week. Your adviser will roll her eyes a lot, but she's not likely to take action until you've accumulated a really solid, long-term record as a slacker.