Wow, where to begin?
To tell you the truth, I've become more set on a specific career path in just
the last three weeks than I've ever been in my whole life. That career path is
most decidedly medical, and, if such an aspiration does not discredit itself as
being too prematurely specific, I'd like to find myself in the white coat of a
pediatric specialist ten or twelve years from now. Unfortunately, however, the
justifications behind this swerve in career intention are more feeling-based
than rational.
Three weeks ago, I shadowed a doctor (namely
a pediatric oncologist/hematologist) for the first time. And. It. Was. Awesome--or rather, I
should say that
she was awesome; I've always been a sucker
for personal charisma. In any case, a day's work in the long, white, dreary, and
hopeless passages of a hospital never seemed quite so cool. For one, this was
at UCSF, and the modern Moffitt/Long Hospital was by no means dreary. Bustling
with "life" (even the poor, lifeless, sleep-deprived residents) at
all hours of the day and decorated quite artistically for a hospital, I found
myself quite lost among the constant stream of visitors and staff milling about
the lobby and all fifteen floors of the massive teaching hospital. Regarding
the doctor's work itself, I was amazed at how much of it was science and how
much of it was
education, something I've really found myself
enjoying, albeit on a level between close friends. Rather than the strictly-timed
visits of a male, impassive doctor that the more jaded of us may associate with
medicine, this amazing woman worked with a close team of nurses, social
workers, and trainee doctors (fellows and residents) to mete out the best care
possible to the young patients and their very, very worried families. She
certainly had a skill for identifying fears and remedying them with sound
medical knowledge. While I'd always thought that doctors had only a superficial
and generalized knowledge of the mechanistic biology that underlies the
diseases they treated, I only then realized how insultingly wrong my stance had
been. In summary, this was simply the amazing synthesis of education (of both
patients and students), empathy, and science that I'd ever seen. I'm really
thankful that she, her students, and her patients were all very accepting toward
my shadowing. And, so it doesn't linger unanswered in your minds: why
pediatrics? Well, I don't think I'll have any children... so what better outlet
for my maternal tendencies? ;D
Now, I suppose I can't gush
any more about how awesome an experience this was without mentioning the
opportunity costs of the interests and related careers I'd be missing out on. Of
these, I think the most prominent would be a career in field (ecological)
biology and a career in laboratory-based (molecular or cellular) basic science.
Regarding field biology, I've long since decided that such a career was not for
me. I certainly enjoy learning about the natural history of vertebrate animals,
and little can match my genuine excitement when I find a lizard or snake hiding
underneath a rock, or when I get a clear shot of a cool bird through my
binoculars. However, an interest and a hobby do not always translate to a
career. I think that if I were to
have to go out into the
field on a daily basis, to make a living, the magic would be gone. I learned
this the hard way when I took a very intensive class on vertebrate natural
history. If you remember from my old account, I had to do a field project for
this class, and my project ended up focusing on animal tracking. As I worked on
my project and looked at other projects as well as published papers in the
field, it struck me that the questions being asked were not interesting to me. Even
the question I ultimately decided to base my project around--the rather mundane
question of whether raccoons tend to congregate more on the half of campus
nearer the hills or nearer the city--was totally uninteresting. So these two
factors combined really doomed the prospect of a career in field biology for me.
The
second possibility--a career in laboratory research--really assesses my
capacity for rigorous research. In spite of my heavily warped self-opinion, I'll
have to tell you that the rigor and patience needed for laboratory research are
really deficient in my personality; more succinctly, I'm terrible at it! I've
always read that compared to research, medicine is instant gratification. In my
experience, this trite little statement couldn't be truer. With just my own two
mediocre research experiences as "evidence," I can tell you that an
entire summer's worth of "research" can often translate into nothing
but a sand grain's equivalent of progress in the scientific world. In my
research experience immediately following freshman year, my experiments that
entire summer were plagued by inexplicable flaws inherent to the procedure that
unfortunately couldn't be rectified by the time my internship was over. Though
the treatment I added to our cell culture wasn't supposed to kill the cells,
for some reason--contamination? pleiotropy of the knocked-out protein? recruitment
of alternate pathways?--it did. The research I'm doing now at Berkeley is a similar case. Despite my best
efforts (and I'm pretty damn clumsy, mind you), our cell staining/fixation protocols
are just not quite presentable yet. There are so many uncontrolled variables
that we can never quite pinpoint the cause, but something always goes wrong! By
no means am I an expert in the institution of modern scientific research, but
it seems to me that many scientific papers are published with somewhat
selective results. While the papers must be rigorous enough to get past the
extensive review process, oftentimes the authors neglect describing an
experiment or data that could argue against the claims they are trying to make.
In any case, the frustrations and failures and long-term thinking of lab
research are just not quick enough for me!
Another problem
is that I don't want "either" of the two classical jobs available to
a PhD graduate. While a professor's work in educating his students may be as
rewarding as the doctor's, the rest of the job strikes me as an uninteresting
burden I'd rather not have. Both of the professors I've worked for (sample size
of 2, yes, but I don't think they're atypical) have tenure, but they still have
to slave hours and hours and hours over grant applications for the funding that
runs their labs. While the single-minded pursuit of knowledge may ground a
romantic view of science, in modern reality such a noble endeavor is entirely
impossible without a constant stream of public money. Both of these professors
spent most of their time confined to the office--answering phones, making
calls, reading papers, and writing grants. Occasionally, they'd attend
conferences, or check in on their students, but it is not out of the ordinary
for a day to be without significant interpersonal contact. And while I've
always considered myself antisocial, this job just seems way too stressful and competitive
for me.
The
other "classical" job is to work in industry, an area that is
potentially far more financially-rewarding than either medicine or basic science.
However, the prospect of working for a powerful but profit-driven corporation is
too depressing for my naive mind. I've also heard that your academic freedoms
are greatly limited; your project may be deemed unprofitable and cut by the
higher-ups without so little as a consultation. I haven't interned in a
pharmaceutical or biotech company, so what I have to share is based purely on
hearsay. But one thing is for sure, and that's the thought that I wouldn't
enjoy working at something for which the ability to "help people" is
so intangible.
Whew! Almost done. This has come to be an
enormously long mega-post--not what I had intended. But one last job deserves
mention here, and that is the job of an educator, whether a high school teacher
or a college lecturer. My parents and friends seem to both look down on these
options, so that already discourages me from choosing to explore them further. I
have, however, spent 25 hours as a teaching assistant at Berkeley High School,
a little more than a year ago. I went into that assignment with some pretty
romantic ideas, and let me tell you that they were all shot down on the first
day. My personal vision of a rewarding career in education would be more of
what real educators deride as "the sage on the stage" (henceforth "SOTS").
As opposed to "the guide on the side," the SOTS is an educational
archetype that is
described
as, among other negative qualities, "professor-dominated," "passive"
(i.e. passive learning), "unreflective echoing of professor." Well, I
suppose that only I have the warped ego necessary to not only
be
your classic SOTS, but to romanticize it as well! But that's not entirely it
either (also, for anyone who's never read any of my posts, I actually I have a
really low self-esteem). I just think I have a skill for identifying relevant
information (for a class), synthesizing it into an easily presentable format,
and identifying ways to reinforce that information. While I normally try not to
make authoritatively self-praising statements, I think I'm definitely better at
this than some of my professors, and there certainly have been horrible ones.
Anyway, whew! As I was saying, Berkeley
High School shot down my
romantic notions of SOTS in just that first visit. Some of the students in the
anatomy class I assisted in were no doubt on elementary-level reading, reading comprehension,
writing, AND math skills. But I'd like to think that that's not something that
would turn me away, normally. What drove me away from further interest in teaching
high school was the complete apathy of many of the students. While I recognize
that many students had social problems in their lives and influences that trump
the apparent value of their high school educations, I personally just do not
want to teach those who are so apathetic to learning. I know that's a copout--motivation
is known to be a huge issue in today's education system--but I don't think I
have any skills in motivation, as opposed to actually teaching.
Well,
I suppose that sums up my opinions on several unrelated fields that I know very
little about but am still willing to express strong opinions about! Here's a
summary (if you read to here, I am honestly
AMAZED):
Medicine- Good
mix of teaching, science, and humanitarianism
- "Instant
gratification"
- Emotionally charged (i.e. when patient
dies)
- Long education
- Stressful, long
workdays
- Good pay, but often an uncontrollable lifestyle
Field
research- Questions asked not interesting
to me
- Very, very, very distant from advances in human
health (unless you were working on environmental epidemiology or disease
pathogenesis, or something like that)
- Presumably low pay
(pay isn't that important to me, but it's worth a mention) and more limited job
mobility
Basic biomedical research
(academia)- Can be exciting, but also incredibly
frustrating
- Slow progress, VERY delayed gratification
- Great
distance between research breakthrough and medical advance/"helping people"
- Pinnacle
job (professor) is very stressful and competitive
Industry- Good
pay, but limited academic freedom
- Perhaps personally
unrewarding (daily grind, like my parents, who work in the tech industry)
Education
(high school)- Low pay
- You
have to take a lot of shit from your students, who may not even appreciate your
best efforts
- Can be the most rewarding job there is, or can
crush your spirit and make you want to hide under your desk, in fetal position
Education
(college lecturer/non-research professor)- Relatively
low pay
- Many advisors will discourage you from "wasting
your talents" and your degree
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