Some weeks ago Ivan Debono (The Sunday Times, October 14) asked us to consider the thesis that, right now, there is simply no reason for anyone to consider choosing science as a career option.
Unless, that is, their life-plan involves living on welfare (or, at least, suffering a fair amount of financial hardship). With all due respect to Dr Debono, I believe that his assertions and conclusions are at best misguided and at worst rather damaging to science in Malta.
The greatest misconception in Dr Debono’s article is that a PhD has one purpose: furthering the student’s education in their chosen niche.
This is utterly absurd. The UK Research Councils, which are responsible for funding the vast majority of science-oriented PhDs in the UK, are fond of promoting what they call ‘transferable skills’.
One of the wonders of reading for a science doctorate is to travel the world attending conferences in order to learn about new techniques and ideas as well as to announce your own.
For most of us the learning curve is quite steep, but after a few years we emerge with both a PhD and a treasure trove of presentation and inter-personal skills – skills that are necessary in today’s workplace, especially at the managerial level and above.
My second point of disagreement is that he seems to maintain that upon obtaining a science doctorate, one has two choices: either stick to their niche in science, or throw away their years of toil and apply for a non-scientific job. Once again, there is hardly a kernel of truth in Dr Debono’s arguments.
It is quite true that well-paid scientific jobs are few and far in-between; this is a process decided by the free market and there is very little one can do about it – one cannot expect the number of positions at this level of academia to match the number of graduates.
However, the situation is not nearly as bad as Dr Debono makes it out to be: the figures he quotes for a typical post-doctoral salary are far below my personal experience. Dr Debono also laments the fact that with typical (sic) post-doctoral salaries, one can hardly live a decent life. My reply is rather simple: if both members of his hypothetical couple earned such salaries, their life would not involve financial hardship.
Where I perhaps agree with Dr Debono is that these salaries do not allow the typical PhD graduate to live a life of opulent luxury. Nevertheless, the picture here is not nearly as bleak as Dr Debono paints it. There is, quite literally, a world of careers that awaits science PhD graduates. Mathematics and Physics PhDs, in particular, are highly sought after by the financial and information technology industries.
Few of us go into science for financial reasons. The real reason most of us who choose to read for a science PhD do so is out of love for the subject, and out of the belief that, no matter how small our individual contribution may be in real terms, its effect is to help us understand a little bit more about how the universe works.