Working my way through faculty applications one again, and I am afraid I have to do this with a bottle of wine, because it is the only way I can keep from screaming. There are so many great people in the pile, people who dedicated all of their twenties and often half of
their thirties to science, at poverty wages, when I know that very few of them will get an academic job, because there is so damn many of them. Science is eating its young. Chemistry being better than many other areas is still not good enough. They deserve better. They deserve
to have had a real job working for themselves or working their way up in a company five years ago. This is wrong, and each year it gets worse. This makes achieving diversity harder and harder - one has to have every advantage to be able to work so hard for so long, for the
main profit of someone else, just to be in a position to get rejected for jobs at an age where 40 years ago people reached Full Professor. Fuck
Later: We should not blame the victims but a little career advice: after one year as a PD, ask your PD advisor and PhD mentor if you should still pursue an academic job. If they aren’t instantly enthusiastic, there is a big world of other opportunities out there.
