Science Career - is it financially rewarding?

In general, it is not financially rewarding. Scientific work is not understood and not valued, it is often not regarded as "core" work in industries that do employ scientists e.g. food production or the pharmaceutical industry. Many of the jobs will be in QC. Glorified technicians who are regarded as a necessary evil to keep regulators happy. I've encountered an attitude of "those QC fcukers don't MAKE anything they just FAIL product, they must be incompetent because our product is perfect Jeez". Similar to the attitude to H&S in the construction industry.

Some scientists do well enough and then spout about about how great it is - survivorship bias in other words. You'll get feel good stories from people working in environmental science who claim to love being out and about (while earning poor money). You'll get others working in cancer research who are passionate about the job, what you won't hear about is the career instability, emigration, financial struggles and difficulty in getting tenure in a university.

Have you seen my thread in the Jobs forum.

Ask yourself this - how many times have you heard of an accountant retraining to become a scientist? I'll bet that the answer is zero. Same for solicitors, civil engineers, pharmacists, vets, physicians, nurses, plumbers or anyone else with a qualification that leads to a specific career and/or with professional regulated status. OTOH, science graduates regularly retrain and leave science altogether.

Employment trajectories of STEM graduates, science vs engineering

https://mei.org.uk/app/uploads/2021/08/The-employment-trajectories-of-STEM-graduates-FINAL-REPORT-20180801.pdf

If you daughter is dead set on science, the best option would be one of the small number of degrees that are approved by CORU to work as a medical scientist in a hospital. She'll have a legally protected title and if it's a public hospital she'll have a union and collective bargaining etc. But even then there are problems, medical scientists have taken industrial action in recent years and here is a thread and post with me quoting a boards medical scientist describing the issues

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119114545/#Comment_119114545

Biology degrees in general? Read this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/16cpuea/why_do_people_regret_biology_majors/

Look on publicjobs.ie and filter for "science based", there won't be many jobs and last time I checked a few days ago they had competitions for pharmacists and librarians positions lumped in with science based. Best of luck getting a job as a pharmacist with a science degree/PhD. You can't.

Generally it’s not well paying.

Its hugely competitive too to even become a scientist, in academia at least, who has a permanent job.

What tends to happen is there is an over supply of PhDs and postdocs all vying for a very small pool of permanent positions.

In saying that it is very rewarding and if she is the type of person who really enjoys science then I wouldn’t necessarily dissuade her. I’d guess more scientists get more fulfilment from their jobs than accountants.

Other jobs like accounting may be more vulnerable to AI which is worth considering

The (non financial) rewarding part is very debatable. Let's say you are a postdoc working in cancer research. Your research relates to a protein/pathway/receptor that may be, but almost certainly won't be, a tiny part of the puzzle that could lead to an effective treatment decades down the line. In the meantime, you have no career stability and your earnings have been surpassed by everyone from plumbers to accountants.

I think young people are routinely misled by the hype about how "exciting" science is, we have Science Week, Science Festivals, Science Blast, Young Scientist and the media regularly reporting on scientific "breakthroughs". In reality, there are very, very few breakthroughs and the work in the lab is often tedious and frustrating.

Also, if you don't go into research and get a job as, say, a QC analyst, that work is drudgery and as I said, not valued.

Environmental technicans doing field work, grand during the summer when you're age 25 and living the life of a glorified student. Not so grand when you're 45, still earning fcuk all and doing field work in the depths of winter.

Just to add to the negativity …

Once upon a time, I would have been shouting 'science' from the rooftops. Then in 2009 I got a job in a government research institute in the UK. I did IT, so not direct science. I was shocked at the amount of time wasted chasing funding - going to conferences, filling in funding proposals and justifying stuff to 'stakeholders' … and this was in government funded place. I also thought it was funny that people with hard science PhDs were effectively doing middle management jobs. For example, my boss had a PhD in Astro-physics, yet his job was as an IT team leader. The department head, who had a PhD in particle physics seemed to spend all his time filling in forms and pushing paperwork (ie middle management stuff).

If your daughter really wants to do science, then try to push her towards the numerate stuff. Science often involves High Performance Computing and Data Mining. I have seen many people jump from research to commercial HPC and big data.

There's a few things to consider. The majority of degrees dont lead onto a lucrative profession and many dont lead onto anything except academia e.g. many Arts degrees.

A lot of companies have graduate entry programmes where they dont really care what degree you have - only that you got good results in a good university. So if science is her best subject, she's better getting a good science degree rather than a mediocre arts degree.

Ive a science degree, but work in senior management in an unrelated field, but originally got hired via graduate entry.

Ive a couple of friends doing well in the pharma industry who joined as scientists - with biology degrees. But after establishing themselves in the industry, they did some business/management couses part time while working e.g one did a MBA, to get promoted to senior management. Having both science and management qualifications gave them a big advantage at this level - especially over those with just business/management.

I have seen too many kids steered into courses and careers that their parents thought would be better paid options, only for the child to end up dropping out of the course, start a job and soon pack it in, or be totally miserable doing something they hated.

Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life.

There's so much more to a career than financial rewards.

Don't stifle your daughter's ambitions or talents, whatever you do.