What's Your Job IRL?

I work in copywriting, though you wouldn't be able to tell from my posts here.

 

I can empathize with @ilikebananafudge. I have a PhD in Neurobiology and was researching the cellular basis of Alzheimer's disease and genetically-linked learning disorders as a post-doc before switching careers.

 

Chatting w/strangers at a dinner party once, asked the next guy what he did for a living. He replied, "I'm an inorganic chemist."

I nodded sagely and thought to myself, "This dude is made of silicon."

 

Maybe inorganic chemistry is less stressful?

Joking aside, though...

I'm not an academic. Far from it, due to laziness and subsequent exam failure I never even got to university, and if I had I probably wouldn't have prioritized the work but I find it sad to hear of people doing potentially world-benefiting work leaving it. And it is a lousy payback to someone who has given ten or twenty years of their life to something.

 

No longer a public school teacher. After some adventures following quitting that job in 2017 I am now pursuing a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics with TESOL emphasis and teaching English as a Second Language to adults part time until I finish my degree.

 

Yeah, I think it's sad, too. I still believe that doing basic research is a beautiful thing, but I couldn't keep dealing with all of the crap surrounding it. There are too few resources given the number of people in the field, and it leads to high competition for those resources. There are other problems, but it seems to me like the high anxiety generated by the competition underlies a lot of those other problems.

 

I loved Organic chemistry when I was preparing for Engineering entrance test

 

Publish or perish. These days, postdocs appear to be in short supply (in academia): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02781-x

This was a long time coming. While the number of awarded STEM PhDs dipped slightly in 2021, a slight drop would not explain the alarmist headline in the article. Rather, as mentioned in the article, it seems that academia is losing its luster among newly minted PhD graduates, so they pivot towards industry or other opportunities. Over a year ago, I met up with a friend from grad school, now a big pharma director, and she was shocked at the starting salaries for some of these new PhDs at local biotech startups, even without post-doc experience (we are talking about ~110-125K here). Of course, biotech was flush with pandemic cash at that time and things have changed considerably since then.

 

My IRL described here is coming to an end. After 38+ years with this company, 50+ years in medical device R&D and 56 years of employment, I am closing the chapter on corporate life.

 

I am an engineering/metallurgist PhD flunkee. Now I spend my days designing heating and ventilation systems for schools, and coincidentally also moonlight running a nonprofit in children's education.

 

I work as the UK equivalent of associate prof in finance. Yes, there are shit parts of the job (teaching and marking if you get a bad group of students can be painful, as is admin) but overall I wouldn't change it for anything and that includes private sector finance for double the salary.

I think how much academia sucks depends a lot on the department/subject, university and country. I have friends in academia in physical sciences (engineering, virology, etc.) who are constantly forced to compete for external funding because otherwise they cannot progress. In finance/economics, yes sometimes you need specialist datasets that can cost a bit of money, but in my case I already have everything I need for for 99% of projects: laptop, MATLAB and access to the university HPC cluster for more computationally demanding projects. For us research funding is generally either for teaching buyout or to hire an RA.

Right or wrong, my perception is that the US is a much tougher academic environment, especially for junior faculty dealing with tenure etc. Excluding the top few UK universities that try to compete directly with the US, the workload and expectations here are more humane. There is enough pressure to make you get off your ass and do something, but not so much that it is unbearable. That said, UK academic salaries are typically waaaaay lower than the US (at least in finance/econ - I assume it's true elsewhere?) so there is a tradeoff. For me the extra flexibility and family time is more valuable than the money, but as always YMMV.

 

Old but golden...



The ball of string and the lint roller are my favourite moments

For real this time? Enjoy...

 

Retired attorney / judge

 

Asst. Professorships here are little more than legalized slavery. Well, not entirely true--you can leave one of these jobs. You just can't get benefits or professional advancement.

IMO this is one of the many "broken on purpose" features of our "free economy" (ie, free for the wealthy & entitled, but hugely expensive for the rest).

 

As of mid-2019, happily retired from a career* in the geosciences in NZ and Canada - the first half in research & teaching at academic and government institutions, the second in industry (petroleum exploration). The main difference I experienced between the two was that for research in academia & govt there was a lot of time but little money; in industry, a lot of money but little time. These days part of my time is spent trying to get the sound that pleases me the most at the cheapest possible price

*Being most fitting in the sense of 'to move rapidly in an uncontrolled way', especially downhill.

 

I'm a mining engineer who retired in 2016 and spent almost all of my career with a software/hardware company that developed a real-time optimization system for open pit and underground mines. Managed the development of the supervisory control system for autonomous/unmanned mining trucks (320 ton class) that are now used at mines around the world. First trip with no driver on-board was in 2001; just think of the state of technology back then!

 

I finally retired from my 3rd career, freelance writing (mostly medical, some humor). I loved the work, but the pandemic wiped out most of the work, so I reluctantly pulled the plug.

In a key way, it hardly matters--I still write constantly. Have 18 short horror stories completed and a 19th on the way.

No regrets. My 3rd career was the one that really mattered...I had a very good run in it.

 

Here's an early-career photo I found on a trip back to NZ last year: me doing some sedimentology under the patient eye of my then advisor (aka mother - who would have turned 100 today).

 

Up until now, I've been an embedded software developer ("embedded" meaning software inside electronic devices rather than running on general-purpose computers). You've all probably interacted with my code in one product or another.

But my current employer has recently been sharpening its focus by, inter alia, laying off nearly my entire team. So it may be time to make a change. Could go to one of the other companies on my very short list and keep doing the same sort of work, could go back into business for myself, could do something completely different. Might just do nothing. Dunno yet.