Why Grad School Still Matters

Maybe now more than ever

Disinformation is running rampant and it’s not by accident - the largest companies on the planet actively incentivize its spread. “Belief” in science appears to have splintered post-COVID-19. Meanwhile the cost of living is ridiculous.

Yeah, I can’t blame anybody for questioning the value of pursuing grad school or becoming a scientist under these circumstances. But make no mistake - the value is there, and it’s real.

Today, Adele from Adele’s Science Corner and Avi from Sleeper Build Science are partnering up to discuss why we are grad students and why we think it’s important. We are actually classmates in U of T’s Department of Molecular Genetics, with Avi pursuing a PhD while Adele pursues her M.Sc.

Why the heck does Grad School matter anyway?

Avi:

“Someone has to do it” and “if not now, then when?” If I distill my motivations for returning to graduate school when I did, under the circumstances that I did, in the world that I did - that’ll do it. Those two mantras.

I’ve detailed parts of my journey to grad school on Sleeper Build Science before. Long story short, I had been gunning for a PhD since high school, pulled myself through undergrad to get into U of T’s Department of Biochemistry, and ended up making the agonizing decision to “master out” a year and a half into my career as a grad student. I was burnt out. I didn’t see promise or feel meaning in what I was doing. I knew that continuing, reclassing into the PhD program, would be the path of least resistance justified by sunk-cost thinking, and that wasn’t good enough for me.

So when people decry PhDs as a poor life choice, a bad investment or an unworthy pursuit, I think I’m uniquely qualified to evaluate their claims. And yeah, even still, I returned - not with my tail tucked between my legs, but with renewed interest. Vigor. Heck, maybe a little hope.

Adele:

Becoming a graduate student was just a ton of cards falling into place. Luck and timing, a bit of hard work, and mostly just being at the right place at the right time. After volunteering at hospitals throughout high school I realized I couldn’t be the doctor to deliver diagnosis and give the treatments (although they are superheros).

I wanted to be creating new treatments, discovering new mechanisms of disease, and directly improving people’s lives. At the same time, I loved molecular biology. The processes behind our bodies, what makes us live and breathe and when things can go awry. After my first experience working at a university lab, I was hooked. I loved working with my hands, discussing experiments, and reading papers. When the semester was over I would catch up on reading academic papers just for fun.

Why did you decide to pursue graduate studies?

Avi:

My primary motivation for returning to academia was wanting to do cancer research. I was affected pretty deeply by a diagnosis in an immediate family member - it recontextualized the significance of my training as a molecular biologist and prompted me to reassess what I chose to do with my time on this planet. Cancer picked a fight with my family and I’m eager to punch back.

Doing a PhD felt like the best possible method of punching back because I like research and teaching. “Someone has to do it.” There are some weird people who enjoy reading scientific papers and talking about science. I enjoy both, a lot. And I missed them after leaving - the intellectual stimulation offered by academia is like very little else. It’s absolutely not for everybody, and there are plenty of days I wish I liked accounting or engineering the way I like biology, but that’s the whole point, right? “Someone has to do it.” Why not me? And as for how long it’ll take, well, “if not now, then when?” The years will pass anyway.

Maybe more controversially - I’m pursuing grad school as a career move. Many folks will brand PhDs as a terrible financial decision. Compared to someone climbing a corporate ladder or someone working as a doctor, lawyer or engineer, there’s a great argument to be made here. But the way I see it, being paid to build high leverage skills in data analysis and subject matter expertise in oncology is a high bang-for-buck move, especially when my specific career goals entail being an intellectual leader and doing work that helps fight cancer - whether it’s in a lecture hall, a laboratory, or a pharma company’s boardroom. By no means is this a road I would broadly recommend (it is a difficult gamble with no guarantees), but intellectual leadership is a career path I believe in.

Live footage of me talking to my cells.

Adele:

There are a lot of sentiments that Avi mentioned that I want to echo. First, the environment of academic labs and the opportunities that are presented to grad students. I have been blessed by having amazing scientific mentors with passion and enthusiasm that is extremely contagious. These kinds of professors lead their labs in a way that attracts the same kind of students. Thus, you’re in a room full of intelligent and enthusiastic students that can bounce ideas off of each other, help each other learn and grow into independent scientists.

Being at the bench and finally (finally, after months) getting a result that I wanted or establishing the first parts of a model to mimic human disease is so gratifying. There is nothing quite like the feeling of knowing that work from your hands, your mind and your soul created something new that can hopefully lead to discoveries that benefit human health. That rare feeling is why I’m drawn back to science every time an experiment fails. And I’ll keep chasing it while I’m in grad school.

To me, this is why grad school still matters. Creating something of my own that can help improve the lives of others is the ultimate dream. Graduate school is the safest place to do so (largely stable funding in Canada, won’t be laid off next week, can make mistakes and still have a (measly) salary) and allows me to keep learning.

Sure, maybe Chat GPT can do some of the things for you that a M.Sc. or Ph.D. could do too. But the whole point of being alive is to do challenging things. I don’t want a frictionless life. I want to think really hard, work pretty hard, and create something out of my days that can help people.

What is one thing you wish you could change about academia?

Avi:

I wish it provided academics with a more stable life! There are a lots of days where I genuinely wish someone had levelled with 10-year old Avi and told him that being a scientist was not a Real Job - or rather, was about as real as being a musician or painter (I say this as a guitarist and producer). Underpaid, stressful, and a tough path to full-time gainful employment. You’ll notice I didn’t mention a specific, one-track dream of professorship when I discussed my career goals earlier - that’s because, as abstract and high-minded as some of my motivations may seem, I’m still not completely delusional.

An amusing aside: Goldman-Sachs once pointed out that curing diseases is not a good business model - and sure, I agree! But it’s a sorry state of affairs when the value of a human pursuit is contingent on its capacity to generate capital. I don’t intend to mirror this thinking when asking for more stability in academia. What I do want to see is institutions and programs acknowledge this harsh reality for PhDs (that academic careers are vanishingly difficult to attain, and that scientific research is often undervalued in industry) and offer significantly more robust career training in response. Motivated students can and will take matters into their own hands, and a PhD will never (and probably should never) be a professional degree, that’s fine - but there’s a middle-ground between being a myopic Goldman-Sachs rep (bad, exploitative) and trusting academics to be happy with low wages and precarious work just because they’re in it for the love of the game (also bad, also exploitative).

Adele:

What is a good academic? Someone who has published in multiple high-tier journals hopefully once a year, someone who sacrifices everything for their work, and someone who is always “chasing the next discovery”. It is easy to fall into the trap of working so hard in a lab that you forget you have your own life.

The main problem with academia, to me, is that it rewards this behaviour. Sometimes, I feel guilty for not coming into the lab over the weekend to work. The “publish or perish” mentality leads to overworking and competitiveness that is not conducive to collaboration.

Luckily, a lot of newer leaders in academia are talking about mental health and striking a balance between life and work. I’m hopeful that new researchers can break the cycle.

What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments!