Big jobs that pay badly

Now it's official: I make lowsy earnings... According to an article on the CNN website today, academic research scientists work subject to "...one of the most disproportionate ratios of training to pay..."

 

Here's an excerpt of the article:

A career with one of the most disproportionate ratios of training to pay is that of academic research scientist.

A Ph.D. program and dissertation are requirements for the job, which can take between six and eight years to complete. (See correction.) Add to that several years in the postdoctoral phase of one's career to qualify for much coveted tenure-track positions.

During the postdoc phase, you are likely to teach, run a lab with experiments that require you to check in at all hours, publish research and write grants – for a salary that may not exceed $43,000.

The length of the postdoc career has doubled in the past 10 years, said Phil Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University. "It's taking longer and longer to get there. You can't start a family. It's really tough."

And it's made tougher still by the fact that in many disciplines, there aren't nearly as many tenure-track positions as there are candidates.

So, to those who earn their MBAs in two years and snag six-figure jobs soon after graduation, your jobs may be hard, but maybe not quite as hard as you think.

Correction: An earlier version of this story understated the number of years it takes to get a PhD in the sciences. CNN/Money regrets the error.

 

Mmm... I guess I realy love my job...

 

Looking for a book?

Another of Google's good ideas... if you're looking for a book, and want to be able to have peek into the text, start looking here!

Chicago blues

During my stay in Chicago I made a lot of photo's and short film clips, with my Minolta D'image X. To inform the people at home about the awesome view I had every morning when walking to work at the University of Chicago at Illinois (UIC), and about the 'look-and-feel' of the neighborhood I lived in, I made the a short compilation of some of them. You can view the compilation with Windows Media Player (or any player that plays .wmv files): Chicago blues.

An Introduction to String Theory -- The title says it all.

I made some terribly kitschy photographs of sunsets in Amsterdam. You can view them here. If you click one of the images you will get a larger version.