Drinking the KoolAid

Upton Sinclair famously declared that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Similarly, it can be difficult to get scientists-in-training to use common sense when they perceive that their future in science demands that they don't use it. For example: if every professor has, let's say, about ten "trainees", and all of them have the same goal of becoming professors themselves, common sense dictates that only a small portion of them will succeed (let's say, about one in ten).

Yet the "trainees" continue soldiering on, in pursuit of a goal that most of them will not achieve. So why do we do it? How does one become addicted to the particular brand of kool-aid that is today's science training, and why does one continue drinking it, sometimes for decades?

Step 1: Begin kool-aid diet

Ten years ago, as an undergrad, I first stepped into the world of academic research by joining a lab. Funding, grants, CV's, etc. were the last things on my mind-- I just wanted to pursue my project, which I was enjoying tremendously. I was surrounded by impressive older people like grad students, postdocs, and professors. Though they were doing interesting work, from many of them I could sense an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. Even in my young state, I understood the gist of it: their careers were stalling while their peers who had gone into other fields were making twice the income and having better opportunities for advancement. Yet even though I understood these things, I said to myself, "OK, so they have some concerns. But isn't it worth it? They get to spend their time reading and writing these interesting papers, talking to these interesting people, thinking about these interesting problems. Is it really such a big deal that they have less money and fewer job opportunities?" This is the very essence of the kool-aid. I had become an imbiber to the core.

Step 2: Become immersed in kool-aid

By the middle of graduate school, the idea that my future as a scientist was so important that it was worth any trade-off had become so ingrained that I no longer had to reflect on it. It was simply the lens through which I saw everything that happened. Once, it seemed I might miss out on one month of pay (while making <$20,000/year) when I went on a fellowship after being a TA. My advisor's response to this was, "Well, you're still eating, right?" At the time, I thought he had a point.

Step 3: Rediscover the idea of a kool-aid-free life.

A year before I finished graduate school, I was on the all-night shift at a national laboratory, finishing up those last experiments I needed for my dissertation. One other grad student, even nearer to finishing, was there with me. At about 3 a.m., we had the following conversation. "I used to want to be a professor, but not any more," he said. "They dangle the possibility of it in front of you at the start, but most of us will never make it. There are better opportunities in life." He then turned back to studying for his exam in business administration. In a few months he would be leaving the university with an MBA in addition to his PhD, and he seemed more excited about the former. "How interesting," I thought to myself; "this man appears to have stopped drinking the kool-aid. He has weighed his options and decided that a career in academic science no longer offers him the best deal. And his logic makes perfect sense. Not only has he thought it over, he has taken concrete steps to build a career outside of traditional science. Maybe I could do that too." That was five years ago. Remembering those vaguely dissatisfied colleagues from my earliest days in research, I was beginning to question the kool-aid. Yet I was still an imbiber: over the next few years, despite growing dissatisfaction with science "training", I did very little beyond take the next steps in the standard pipeline. I was still hanging on to the idea that I was going to "make it", that if I just continued to be smart and hard-working the system would reward me.

Step 4: Wean yourself off of kool-aid.

Even after becoming able to see the downside of the kool-aid, it can take a while to wean yourself off of it. Are you truly weaned? Here's a simple test. Repeat these three phrases to yourself, at least ten times: "I will never get tenure." "I will never have another first-authored publication." "I will never have my own lab." Now how do you feel? If you've said these things and you feel calm and at peace with the world, then congratulations, you've successfully weaned yourself off the kool-aid. If you find yourself thinking, "but wait, no... I'm smart... I could still get a PNAS paper..." then you are not weaned yet. You will continue to ignore any avenue leading away from being a famous scientist, even when common sense suggests that you do otherwise.