FIRST PERSION

Work for the Enemy or Work for Us?

The choice between a job in industry or in academic science would be easy if it really were a binary decision

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By CLAUDIA MILLER

"If I wanted to be a prostitute, I wouldn't have gone to graduate school first."

That's always been my stock reply when people ask if I would take a job at an oil company. Sure, it would pay extremely well, but I am a scientist. We define ourselves by our utter distaste for popular culture, our jargon-filled research articles, and our moral superiority. The last of those is extremely comforting when you have been working on the same subtle mathematical argument for two months with no end in sight.

Moral superiority has some pernicious side effects: low pay, self-righteousness, and terrible, terrible taste in clothing. This superior state of being was handed to me as an unexpected bonus of graduate school. When I began my study of the earth's climate, people would ask me things like whether it would rain tomorrow. Now when I mention my field, the response is usually respect for my eco-superiority. Scientists are the heroes of the global-warming passion play — beloved at music festivals and lauded on National Public Radio.

Earth scientists have always had a choice between industry and academe, and I am facing that choice now. I expect to earn my Ph.D. in 2009. If I'd wanted a career that would offer me wealth, I wouldn't have majored in environmental science as an undergraduate. I would have skipped that philosophy minor as well. Instead, I would have followed the advice of just about everyone who has ever known me, and gone into law, where I could have argued until I was hoarse.

But I chose science because I didn't want to just win the argument. I wanted to be right. A few years on my college debate team showed me that superior debaters will always win, even if they are arguing against their own deeply held beliefs. Scientists don't dazzle with wit and clever argument; we overwhelm with well-crafted cases and mathematically supported hypotheses. What our arguments lack in glamour they make up for in understated elegance. (Perhaps that explains why so many of us perform poorly in debates against antiscience skeptics.)

The ivory tower has been my home for so long that I can't quite imagine life down below. That should make a career choice easy for me, right? I should stay inside where it's safe.

But what to make of all the old-timers who tell me that academic science was much more fun and productive back in the day? Back in the day, all that mattered was the research. Back in the day, there was none of this nonsense of filling out endless forms. Back in the day, you didn't have to re-apply for grant money every six months. Back in the day, you could actually fail students who failed your tests.

Is that just nostalgia? Or is the culture of science changing? I don't think I want to know, because the science I love is a pursuit of the mind, unencumbered by quotidian concerns. The choice between a job in industry or academe would be easy if it were the binary decision that I've always thought it was: Work for the enemy or work for us.

It was a sad day when I noticed that the job market is not, in fact, divided into good jobs and evil jobs. That day came when I realized that major financial and government institutions tend to get their science from privately prepared reports and not from the scientific literature; and that journalists, not scientists, are the ones who decide what the public gets to know about new research.

The people who control the flow of information are not in science or industry. They are not oil-company shills (who, when you talk with them, tend to be rather pleasant people). They are not scientists. They are consultants who teach companies how to measure their carbon footprints, they are entrepreneurs who bring environmentally friendly consumer goods to the market; they're financial analysts who persuade banks to finance alternative-energy companies. Could I ever join their ranks?

Even if I wanted to leave academe, I wouldn't know how to do it. My adviser, who is both my harshest critic and my most tireless supporter, knows nothing about the outside world. Even if he did know enough to help me, he would view any job I took outside of academe as a defection.

At least, I think he would. It's not as if I've had the courage to broach the subject with him. Our student-mentor relationship was not built to withstand the student's rejection of the mentor's career.

My university has a career center, but nobody I know goes there. Our jobs come to us by word of mouth — via e-mail messages from friends, administrators, and colleagues we've bonded with through that ancient rite known as fieldwork. It's that fieldwork that defines us and gives us something to brag about.

You went on trip to an exotic locale? Oh, how nice. I work in places that you only dream about. I have circumnavigated the globe in the lofty pursuit of my research — and generally find time to take a tropical vacation while I'm at it. A graduate student's salary may be embarrassingly low, but enviable vacations become affordable when you do research in third-world countries and a government grant pays the airfare. The fieldwork that I do is undeniably tough. We work long days in uncomfortable, physically demanding, and sometimes dangerous settings; but it's field-based science that defines who I am and how I want to be seen.

I've always been a scientist. I am logical to a fault. Math makes me happy. Physics makes me positively giddy. Computer programming is both a job requirement and a hobby for me. Could I leave all of that behind in return for the possibility of people actually reading and using my work? Worst of all, could I bear to tell people that I was anything other than a scientist?

Every physicist's favorite physicist, Richard Feynman, famously asked "What do you care what other people think?"

I don't have an answer yet. Lucky for me, I have a liberal-arts education on which to fall back. Instead of quoting Feynman, I can quote a muse from my days of doing technical theater (you can laugh, but wiring is wiring, and my experience with temperamental electronics and tight deadlines has proved quite valuable in the field). Specifically, let me quote Stephen Sondheim:

Then from out of the blue,

And without any guide

You know what your decision is

Which is not to decide.

I find myself agreeing. I will not decide. I will write my dissertation. I will finish the course work hanging over my head. And I will, in good faith, apply to jobs wherever I may find them.

Claudia Miller is the pseudonym of a Ph.D. candidate in earth sciences at a university in the East. She will be chronicling her job search this academic year.