Alternate Careers for Young Scientists in Trump's America

Are you a young scientist about to graduate into a world where EPA scientists can't discuss their findings, climate change "isn't real", federal hiring is frozen, and NSF funding has been called into question a number of times and is undoubtedly going to be decapitated?

Why, you must be a bit worried about your career prospects, huh?

Don't worry, young graduates. We have some career pathways for you that we'd like to call "Alternative Service Post-Docs" that we think you'd be perfectly cut out for. Someone with your background in logic, reasoning, and (probably) statistics skills will be perfect for these jobs. They offer benefits, flexible hours, and are offered in all 50 states so you can mostly live where you want to - fantastic, huh? There's a bit of paperwork involved, but not as much as you'd think (and from what we've seen, some people in these positions get away without much reading at all). Without further ado, here's our list of top 10 jobs for upcoming science graduates!

Grant Writing Playlist

Shit's been real serious on this blog as of late, and we think it's time to be a little more ridiculous for a bit. But it's still the tail end of grant-writing season. Like always. So since some of us need motivation (you), and others of us needed reasons for procrastination (us) and it looked like we hadn't actually written anything in a while (whaaaaaaa) we have rewritten two of our favorite grant-writing songs to make them more specific ear-worms for your proposal writing needs. 

You're welcome.

Teach Your Kids About Imposter Syndrome

Confidence can be a particularly hard thing to have in science where so much emphasis is placed on natural brilliance. Failures, no matter how small, are easy to consider a failure of your own intelligence.

 

Frankly... that's bullshit. And this bullshit mentality of "ruh-roh Major Revisions? I AM ALL THE STUPID" is something that strikes women particularly hard, and may be partially to blame for low female and minority involvement in STEM fields. 

Many of the undergraduate students Meaghan interacts with (including ones in her lab) shy away from grant writing, publications and school applications on the basis of not being "Good Enough." Meaghan has overheard more than just a handful of comments along the lines of "that's just so intimidating!" and "but my GPA isn't that high" or "but so-and-so did this and they're so much more accomplished than me." She decided that for the lab meeting she was running this term, the lab would sit down and talk about the perils of interpersonal comparison and low confidence. The lab was pretty interesting, and hopefully at least a little helpful, so we are presenting this lesson plan here for our readers as well as their friends, students, and coworkers. 

How To Drink and Write Grant Proposals

Amy and Meaghan are experts on writing grant proposals.

It takes lots of grants to fund these pimpin' gold chains.

No really, we are. We've written dozens of grants and scholarship applications, from tiny 100$ travel grants to enormous grants that provide funding for several years. We've also even received several of these grants - Amy received both the Goldwater Scholarship and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and Meaghan has received grants from the Field Museum of Natural History, American Museum of Natural History, Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and others. But this isn't going to be a post on how to make your proposal great, because honestly that's the least difficult part of actually writing a grant proposal (strange though it may seem). The very hardest part is actually vomiting that shit out on paper so you have something to get started with. That's what we're going to talk about today: paper brain vomit.