Academic salaries: some numbers and graphs

The topic of academic salaries came up recently and I figured I'd look a little further. Where does chemistry stand? After all, jobs are scarce--how do academic positions pay compared to other disciplines?

Lots of resources exist for salary issues that are much more data-thorough, so take the following numbers with a grain of salt. For more in-depth info, a few resources include HigherEdJobs, The Chronicle of Higher Education, or a web search.

I took a (somewhat) random single institution (Bowling Green State University, Ohio) of medium size (ca. 15,000 undergraduates) that also offers graduate degrees (in chemistry, an M.S. in chemistry and a Ph.D in photochemical sciences are available). Ohio was chosen as an example state simply because of the ready availability of data.

Salary information (for a few years back) is available for all Ohio's higher ed institutions through the Buckeye Institute. I grabbed the 2010 info for the university and present below the averages for four standard academic ranks (lecturer/instructor, assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor) across 14 broad but somewhat arbitrarily chosen disciplines. Standard deviations aren't included and sample sizes were small in some cases, so caveat emptor and all that. (NB: click any chart for a larger view)

First, a graph of the disciplines ranked by associate professor salaries. It's quite interesting to me that chemistry is near the top--ahead of biology but also physics and geology. Moreover, associate professor salaries in chemistry rank a little short of computer science (by about $7,000) but above economics (by about $8,000). As would probably be expected, two business disciplines (management and accounting/M&IS) are way ahead. I don't know if that's endemic to the particular school or a general trend. Regardless (and probably again to no one's surprise), it looks like chemistry and the other sciences are pretty far ahead of the humanities by as much as business-related fields are ahead of science.

Ranking by full professor puts chemistry more in the middle of the pack:

Quite interestingly, though, are the salaries for assistant professor positions (typically the first 3-6 years of an academic appointment). Here the distribution is almost bimodal, with chemistry falling in a group ranging from  about $50,000 to $66,000. Then there's a $24,000 jump to the business disciplines and computer science, which compensate assistant professors on average from $89,000 up to a whopping $119,000! (For the math-challenged organic chemists, that's about double the chemistry salary for the first five years).

Why the giant divide? Market demand certainly plays a large role. Folks with graduate-level business and computer science skills are very, very employable, and generally aren't in markets plagued by the oversupply that science (and especially the humanities) face.

Lastly, check out the ranked salaries for instructors/lecturers. These are the teaching-only positions; for some disciplines this doesn't require a PhD. (For chemistry, I've seen very few lecturers without PhDs; many have postdoc or industrial experience).

Management here has the highest salary by far, but that's incidentally an n = 1 type scenario (there's only one lecturer in the management department, and they appear have an 'executive' position). Here the business gap disappears; average salaries range from $38,000 to $52,000. Interestingly, computer science ranks in at $61,000, which is probably indicative of its very high employability--you have to pay someone a lot to draw them away from an attractive industry job.

For fans of seeing-it-all, here's a ranked-by-associate graph including all four ranks.

Lastly, here's the average salaries for most of the public university chemistry departments in that particular state (Ohio) [note--data was not easily harvestable for Ohio University, Shawnee State, Central State, or Youngstown State].

This itself is somewhat interesting, as there's a wide distribution (assistant ranges from an average of $55,000 to $78,000; associate from $70,000 to $97,000; full professor from $101,000 to $131,000). Moreover, salary averages don't appear to correlate to institutional prestige (cf. Ohio State and University of Akron, for instance) nor to cost-of-living.

The ordering of schools even changes by faculty rank--Cleveland State tops out the assistant professor category, but Bowling Green wins for associate professor and University of Toledo for full professor. The only consistent element, it seems, is that Kent State pays the lowest for chemistry professors, across the board, of all the state schools shown.

Again, take all this data with a grain of salt; I just think it's interesting stuff.

#ChemMovieCarnival: Chocolate and chemical academia

It's time for the #ChemMovieCarnival, as organized by See Arr Oh (who posted this first day round-up). So far we've seen chemistry featured in Fight Club, Iron Man 2, The Great Escape, The Absent Minded Professor, G.I. Joe, Real Genius, and MacGyver, among others.

Some of the above examples highlight some pretty bad movie science. I thought I'd share a movie clip that was on the other end of the spectrum!

Everyone's familiar with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory--the 1971 musical film starring the immortal Gene Wilder. The film's protagonist is Charlie Bucket, a child from a poor family whose genuine heart leads him to success where several other spoiled/privileged children fail. Early on, we're shown Charlie's education, including the following chemistry demonstration. The clip is a little modified from the original at the end (it was the only one I could find!).



It's a remarkably accurate portrayal of life in chemical academia. After all, all the hallmarks are there:

• Disregard for proper PPE/lab safety.
• Intellectual snobbery/faculty egotism.
• Over-eager undergrads who don't know what they're doing.
• Secrecy and irreproducibility.

Just like life in the lab! (Of course, Pure Imagination is perhaps more apt to describe the pragmatism of many projects).

Stipends: A waste of funding?

A little while ago the subject of teaching assignments came up among some colleagues (as it is wont to do).  Specifically, we were discussing which PIs had habits of sticking their students on repeated teaching assignments and which PIs didn't have their students teach unless they really wanted to.

I was a little surprised that one of the very well-funded synthesis groups here had an abundance of TAs. One of the students (him/herself a TA) explained it thus: "We don't like to waste money on paying people." The point was that they viewed grant money as primarily for supplies and fancy instrumentation. For instance, they'd shelled out quite a bit of cash recently for some fancy chromatography and microscopy equipment.

It was an interesting perspective, and I'm not sure what to think of the philosophy.

I've seen PIs before who tended to put students on TA quite frequently -- for their entire PhD, in many cases. But those have typically been groups with little-to-no funding, where available grant money wouldn't even cover a meager grad student stipend.

I've also seen well-funded PIs who limit their students to two semesters of teaching (or whatever the departmental requirement happened to be), regardless of external fellowships available to the individuals in their lab. In those cases, a large portion of the available grant money is devoted to stipend/tuition expenses.

So a lab that has plenty of cash that it needs to burn and decides to burn it by buying valuable (but not essential) upgrades--that's different.

It might be a subdiscipline thing. I suspect that "hard" synthesis groups -- methodology and total synthesis -- tend to rely more on a TA culture (perhaps the funding situation is less predictable here?). In contrast, most biologically-oriented organic groups seem to find the funding (from training grants and other sources) to keep their lab RA-based. Additionally, some grants have specifications.

Even so--can personnel costs be considered a "waste"? The word I would suggest is "investment." But it might be because I think a well-trained, happy chemist with decent instrumentation/supplies is more valuable than a slightly nicer MPLC.

Tips for grad school recruiting weekends

It's the new year, which means over the next few months everyone who has applied to grad school in chemistry (and other fields... there are other fields, right?) should be receiving responses back from admissions committees. Acceptance letters generally contain salary information, program information, and an invitation to a visit weekend. In chemistry, these visits are almost always paid for by the department. Yep: free trip, food, and drinks. But why?

There are two ways to look the motivation behind visit weekends. Decide the veracity of either for yourself:

Rationalization 1: Most good chemistry departments don't want to waste their time and money.* An admitted student in a graduate program is expensive: stipend, research supplies, tuition, etc. are all paid for by the department and/or the student's adviser. So it's in everyone's best interest to make sure students are picking the appropriate school for them. Hosting a visit weekend allows prospective students to meet their possible classmates, their future advisors, and see if the grad program and facilities are appealing to them. That way there's a better chance they are happy where they go, leading to a better chance of graduation.

Rationalization 2: If you throw free stuff at students who have been paying for school, offer them money, and paint an inordinately sunny picture of your grad program, you'll get more students. The more students you get, the harder you can work students, and it won't matter as much if some leave. Cheap labor! 

Grad school visits can be fun. They differ from med school interviews, vet school interviews, and non-science grad school visitation weekends in one key way: you're already accepted. And the visit doesn't cost you anything financially.** Note the following figure, which illustrates the processes comparatively:

Overall, grad school visits are an important opportunity. Keep in mind a few things:

1. It's not an interview. You're not trying to impress the department. They're trying to convince you to make essentially minimum wage, working the equivalent of 1.5 to 2 full-time jobs for probably 6 years with minimal outside social contact or hobbies so that one person in your department can get approximately 5 more papers. Also you'll have to babysit undergrads. If you're going on a visitation weekend (except, I guess, at Scripps, which actually does hold interviews) that means you're in. You're guaranteed a spot. It's their job to impress you and convince you to attend.

That being said, don't dress like a slob; don't drink too much; don't deliberately offend anyone. Your professional career is beginning, and first impressions are kind of important. But it's not a med school interview or a corporate meeting: in grad school, getting work done is more important than showing off your suit and haircut. So relax and be yourself. Unless you happen to be an arrogant idiot.

2. Don't talk about yourself very much. Again, you're not trying to impress the admissions committee. You shouldn't be trying to impress any of the students there (they won't be impressed by you, no matter how many fifth-author Chem. Bioorg. Med. Chem. Lett. Eur. J. Int. Ed., Dalton Trans. papers you have)--it serves no point. Make the visit about listening and learning, not about boasting. You can boast after you succeed in chemistry and land a $40k job after ten years of school. Instead, observe the professors. Are they approachable? Arrogant? Distant? Humble? Listen to how the grad students talk. Do they brag? Are they competitive or easy-going? Can any of them talk about something besides chemistry? Are they trying to impress you? And very importantly, pay attention to the other prospective students on the visit. Do they all act like they have something to prove? Are they people you could get along with? Are they bragging about their seventeen fifth-author Chem. Bioorg. Med. Chem Lett. Eur. J. Int. Ed., Dalton Trans. papers? Are they fun to hang out with? (Being fun to hang out with is a legitimate concern; you'll see some of these people a lot).

3. Find the best and the worst about the program. Generally, admissions committees will carefully select which grad students host prospective students. They'll hand-pick the ones who still have their optimism; may the group that have just passed candidacy exams or who haven't had to TA in a while. Generally 2nd to 3rd year students.

It's important to listen to these students: you want to find out about the good parts of the program! But make sure you seek out the embittered, late-stage students as well. You want a spectrum of opinions. Find at least one student who doesn't really want to talk to you. Have a conversation like this:

You: "Hey, seventh-year grad student!" 

Student: "F@#* off." 

You: "Cool! What do you think of Professor Schmorey? His research is so cool! I want to be a PI! Do you like working for him?" 

Student: "F@#* off." 

You: "Awesome! Is teaching really fun or super fun?" 

Student: "F@#* off."

In short, you need to know what the possibilities are. No department is as rosy as the admissions people want you to think. Ascertain what the emotional arc will be on your grad school journey.

Also, be wary of how much or how little effort/money the school puts into recruitment. Too much effort: are they desperate for students? Too little effort: do they even care? It's a courtship. Try to distinguish genuine enthusiasm from mere marketing.

4. Ignore the stipend (but do look at cost of living). Yes, it's cool that they're going to be paying you. At least, it's cool for about four weeks, then it's depressing, because you could be managing a McDonald's and making more money than that, but that would only be a 40 hour work week, you'd get benefits, and hey, you'd get infinity fries if you wanted them.

Point is: you're not going to get rich in grad school. That's not the point.  If a school doesn't pay enough to live off of, that's a problem, but pretty much every school will. Ask grad students about it on your visit weekend. But it's not a good idea to make a "high" stipend an important part of your decision. You'll be poor either way.*** What's more important is choosing a school that will benefit you in the long run.

Also, don't ask other prospective students if they got additional fellowships or signing bonuses, or brag about yours. You'll either wind up sad or you'll annoy everyone.

5. Learn about departmental seminars. No one really says this, oddly. I guess I think it's important because I've seen schools with very bad seminars and schools with very good seminars. Seminars (sometimes called colloquiums) are when the department hosts a speaker (usually an academic scientist; occasionally an industrial chemist) who gives 1 or 2 free lectures to the department about their research. Often there's coffee, muffins, cookies, tea, etc. 

Departmental seminars can be very bad for several reasons: sometimes attendance is required; sometimes the material is boring; sometimes the speakers aren't engaging and the PowerPoints are weird and the artwork and data are definitely recycled from 1995, and who uses WordArt anyway? Usually this happens at lower-tier schools, where no money is available to pull in noteworthy scientists and so anyone within a walking radius is invited to lecture. In these cases, seminars can interfere with getting your labwork done, as you don't really gain anything from them.

But seminars can be very good. Ask current students about this! Some schools have fantastic speakers--Nobel prize winners,**** influential chemists, people whose names you've read or whose work you've learned about. These are great opportunities: you can network (important), you can hear interesting chemistry, and you can broaden your base of knowledge. In short, good invited speakers are an important, underrated factor you should consider in your decision. 

7. Don't make it all about the research. Your undergrad advisor will sit down and look you sternly in the eye. "Make sure you're choosing a school for the science," he'll say (or she'll say). That's what a lot of people will tell you: to make sure the science is something really interesting. That makes sense, doesn't it? It's a research program! You'll be doing research every day! Isn't that important?

Yes, it's obviously important. It would be absolute drudgery to be stuck for an indeterminate number of years doing a project you hated -- or worse, were ambivalent about. So it's critical to pick a program that has a couple interesting-sounding research areas. Ask students on your visit weekend about their research: do they seem excited by it? Often it's not the exact research itself but the people involved that make the work exciting--if you have an encouraging research advisor and helpful labmates but a good project you may easily end up more motivated than someone who has their lifelong dream project but a manipulative advisor and bitter labmates.

You'll probably change what you're interested in during your first semester. Additionally, very, very, very few people end up doing for their career what they do in grad school. Tenure-track positions are rare, and they almost always require one or two postdoc appointments beforehand, and they involve a change in research focus. Plus, many people go into industry or non-traditional careers completely unrelated to their dissertation topic. So don't worry about finding the 100% perfect research fit. It's vital to learn about things other than The Science on your visit. After all, you'll be living there too.

8. Meet the professors you want to work for. Some people don't think this is very important. But you're committing a lot to the program--more than half a decade. Shouldn't the person who will hold your fate in their hands at least show up to meet you?

There's a lot of professors who don't go to recruiting weekends, citing busy travel schedules. To an extent, that's understandable. But is the professor you want to work for more interested in promoting him/herself than serving as a mentor to you?

Meeting professors and groups will also show you that group webpages are deceiving. Some professors who seem crazy good on paper are kind of weird and creepy in real life. Conversely, some folks with lame webpages or research that didn't strike you as appealing are engaging and exciting to talk to.

9. Don't do homework at the hotel. It's just undergrad. Don't take it so seriously. Use the free coffeemaker! Hang out with other prospective students and current grad students! Seriously: take the opportunity to socialize on the visits, even if you're tired.

Overall, remember: in the worst case, your visit weekend will mean free food and a free trip. Unless, of course, the university loses the paperwork and doesn't reimburse you for the plane ticket, in which case you paid $600 for a trip to a weird town but didn't get to see anything except NMRs.

* Some departments do seem to want to waste money and time, but that's another matter. 

** There are exceptions, of course. Some schools don't have the budget to pay for prospective students to travel. Others only have enough money to pay for gas or meals. Some will make you arrange your own travel.

*** Obviously, extreme differences -- say $19k vs $25k for the same city -- might be worth considering. 

**** Actually, from experience: Nobel prize winners are, more often than not, terrible speakers. But it's nerd cred to hear them, I guess.

Reading assignments, vol. 8

Links and interesting topical stories from the week follow below.

Academia

• Scientific and writer DNLee of Scientific American gives a powerful account of the factors denying good STEM education to many students (namely, those of low socioeconomic status). It's a very important read, as it highlights many issues in science education (and education and science culture in general) that very often get ignored. 
• At Gene Expression, Razib Khan comments on affirmative action and science. He's largely dismissive of it, saying science doesn't need cultural diversity per se (with a caveat that such diversity is valuable from a social perspective). It's a worthwhile read; only the myopic would be reluctant to admit there is a rather skewed demographic makeup in science relative to the entire population.
• Derek Lowe has a commentary on an ACS Med. Chem. Lett. opinion piece regarding the role of academia in drug discovery. It's worth thinking about, especially to those interested in science funding or science policy. The case can really strongly be made that academia can not replace pharma as a productive drug production vehicle, but the decoupling from financial risk means academic labs can push innovations that are potentially high impact but not necessarily profitable.

Scientific representation and misrepresentation

• This Sceptical Chymist guest post by PhD student Fabian Carson about presentation skills for scientists is very relevant to the current state of chemistry talks (let's face it: most chemistry talks are terrible; even big-name speakers with high impact research can give eye-glazing accounts). The points are concise and should be common knowledge, but presentation skills aren't taught very much and so I'd bet that many scientists don't know this stuff or just don't care. One caveat: Carson recommends Prezi. I heartily encourage you to never, ever, ever touch Prezi. It's garish and terrible. Don't do it. 
• On a related note, Khalil Cassimally emphasizes the importance of communication to the general public and announces a very exciting-looking science communication workshop for grad students, titled "Communicating Science." The workshop will occur this June in Cambridge, MA, and registration is free!
• A couple posts here can be further sub-categorized to "responses to chemophobia":
• Professor Janet Stemwedel uses breadmaking as a vehicle to combat chemophobia. This is a good spin on chemicals and food, and it's particularly relevant given the quite explosively diarrheic chemophobia that tends to emit from the "foodie" community. 
• See Arr Oh gives his thoughts on some current negative media attention on brominated vegetable oil. As with any scary-sounding chemical, BVO has received some arguably warrantless attention from people who think they're health-conscious. 
• On his blog The Simple Candle, chemistry professor Stephen Prilliman encourages reclaiming the word "chemical" from its widespread negative connotations. He presents a Twitter strategy to do so.
• See Arr Oh also points out to us a very embarassing TOC graphic from MedChemComm. 
• In light of recent instances of scientific fraud and plagiarism, the finding that scientific fraud may have a male bias is interesting and relevant.

Chemistry job market

• Glen Ernst comments on a 1979 article from C&EN bemoaning an impending surplus of chemistry PhDs exceeding the number of available jobs. As Glen points out, "non-traditional" here meant not being a university professor. Today, the scope of "traditional" careers has broadened, but the employment outlook seems bleaker. Still, it's an interesting insight from the late 70s.
• I found this interview of ChemDraw wizard (and recently-hired Perkin Elmer employee) Pierre Morieux by Chemjobber quite interesting. It's a neat career path, and a cool story of how social media and online networking can land you a job. At the same time, comments imply that some chemists think it is overkill (and perhaps a telltale sign of the job market) that a long PhD and a competitive postdoc do not result in a "traditional" job. (I'd caution that non-"traditional" careers aren't  necessarily fallbacks and can be more rewarding than the big-name jobs; I'd also like to point out that many people in many professions change career paths many times!). 
• At Chemistry World, economist Paula Stephan has some perhaps-controversial, perhaps-obvious (depending who you ask) points on the PhD glut. She likens grad school to a pyramid scheme, where the focus of grad school has shifted from producing quality scientists to producing PI-promoting research. She has a series of thoughtful recommendations for improving graduate education. Derek Lowe notes the article and comments on the proposal to increase permanent lab staff (i.e. how to fund it?).
• Chemjobber has some commentary and depressing statistics on the job market and unemployment rate for chemists (spoiler: it's worse than the average rate for bachelor's degree holders).
• Don't miss See Arr Oh and Chemjobber's podcast on amusing interview stories.

Other

• This is a must-watch: several grad students from UC Berkeley do a eukaryotic microbe-based parody of Gotye's "Somebody I Used to Know." Be prepared to be singing it to yourself for a while.
• A lot of people have been writing about malodorous affairs this week. First, Derek Lowe compares and contrasts a massive mercaptan spill and a large-scale goat cheese fire. The Chemistry World Blog covers the matter as well. Then, Sarah Everts at  C&EN's Newscripts explores the history of deodorants and the biochemical basis for their need. Finally, at The Curious Wavefunction, Ashutosh Jogalekar describes the chemistry of smell and some fascinating anecdotes--read it! This post by Breanna Draxler at Discover talks about the biochemistry of odor recognition.
• Check out these videos of rotifers and other microorganisms. Really cool stuff! 
• Breanna Draxler writes about a paper published recently in Science in which researchers stored a little under a megabyte of hard drive data in DNA and retrieved it with perfect fidelity. It's been talked about for a while, and this instance happens to be faster and more accurate than previous attempts. It's a very, very cool thing---DNA is about as compact as you can get for reliable data storage! One might speculate, then, on the potential evolution of the first music-pirating bacteria.
• Keith Kloor has an important post commenting on another important post (Steven Novella). Both discuss why science is not persuasive; though data and statistics are logically compelling, we are fighting a reliance on heuristics and anecdotal evidence that is likely ingrained due to evolutionary advantage.