Complications with a post-graduation “5-year plan”

Goggles and Gloves: Stereotypes of academic majors overlook students’ complexity

On February 15, an article in the Orient titled, “Gender and women’s studies majors deserve your respect” really got me going. Not because I disagreed with the authors’ argument, but because the story’s “grabber” grabbed me hard and I just couldn’t shake it.
“When you tell your friends that you’re a neuroscience major, they respect you. Although they might not actually understand what you’re learning, they recognize its worth.”
I couldn’t decipher my indignation immediately (I’ll remind you here that I am a neuroscience major), but I felt some inexplicable injustice.“How dare you respect me for being a neuro major!” I thought. “On what basis do I deserve ‘respect’ any more than other students here at this liberal arts institution where your major shouldn’t matter?”

Goggles and Gloves: Patent pending: Sizing up genetics

I’m enrolled in Biology 212 this semester. It’s called “Genetics.” It should be called “Unlocking life’s mysteries: An exploration of why you have blue eyes even though neither of your parents do, why you should care about fruit fly pigmentation and pea pod textures, why you shouldn’t commit a crime if your brother has been arrested before, and how to argue with Supreme Court justices about patent law.”
I’m still searching for the most fitting title though. Genetics, you see, is not just about Mendelian inheritance, or the probability that you will develop a rare disease that affected neither of your parents but ailed your great-grandmother. Genetics is not fully encompassed by the superpowers of bacteriophage viruses, which can insert their own genetic material into foreign DNA and might help us beat cancer some day, nor by the acrobatic feats that our DNA sequences—wrapped up in chromosomes—can perform within our cells.
Genetics, I’m beginning to see, is politics. Genetics is ethics. Genetics is philosophy. Before I go further, I have to give a shout-out to Professor Bateman, who has sparked my thinking on this by raising these issues alongside the relevant “hard science” during class lecture.

Goggles and Gloves

Complications with a post-graduation “5-year plan”

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Kacey Berry

Columnist

April 5, 2013

You might guess that I have spent some time thinking about job prospects after Bowdoin as a second-semester senior. You are right.

I’m not talking about immediate job prospects (though I have done a little of that, too—CPC shoutout!), I’m thinking long-term. I’m not satisfied to simply answer the question, “What will I do next year?” I’m jumping ahead, reaching for that five-year plan, craving a ten-year plan, daring myself look further. What will I, as a science major from an esteemed liberal arts school, make of my degree?

President Obama offered me some good news on Tuesday when he officially announced the “BRAIN initiative,” a pledge to devote $100 million in funding to brain research in 2014. Obama pitched the initiative as a means to characterize how the brain functions: how we think, learn, remember. Making analogies to the Human Genome Project (which aimed to map the entire human genome and was officially complete in April 2003) Obama spoke of the BRAIN initiative as an investment for the country, with real economic and technological benefits to be reaped in the future. Though Obama has only pledged one year of funding, it could take a decade or more to realize the initiative’s aims. Then, like the Human Genome Project, the funding fountain could keep flowing for a number of years.

I’m neuroscience major—I can claim some knowledge of the brain. I’d be down to work in labs that strive toward these goals. In a field where grants and funding can make you (and the absence of them, break you), I’m set!

But, there’s bad news, too: “the sequester” that took effect last month resulted in billions of dollars in spending cuts to science research. People estimate drastic reductions in the number of people who will be able to get grants. Without adequate funding, fellowships for undergraduates might dip, jobs for postgrads and postdocs may evaporate, tenure could become harder for associate professors to achieve and progress in already established labs could stagnate.

As one NPR Newshour article put it, “Scientists nationwide are bracing for the impacts of the sequestration cuts, which are poised to strike a fierce blow to research.”

On the other hand, why should I be griping about this in the first place, rather than considering the pros and cons for our national economic, intellectual and technological growth? I wonder whether many science majors feel entitled to a job immediately out of college in a way that other majors may not. Many other majors can’t find a job that directly corresponds to what they’ve been studying at school, whereas science people can move right on to a lab at a university, using the same techniques and concepts we mastered by the end of senior year. Already, I know I could get paid to go to graduate school in the sciences, whereas many PhD hopefuls in the humanities are far less lucky. So who am I to complain that it may get harder to make money pursuing science?

If anything, I now take comfort in the fact that I am a science major at a liberal arts school rather than somewhere else. This is where those distribution requirements work their magic, right? I would like to think that my time at Bowdoin has strengthened my flexibility and creativity, and my ability to engage in a number of fields. I would certainly be stretching it to say that I hope that a career in the sciences becomes monetarily riskier. Yet the fact that it may become so (and I get the sense that many research scientists and professors would argue that their jobs aren’t particularly plush as it is) dares me to think creatively about my career path, to think realistically about what that path may look like, and to understand more deeply why I choose to pursue whatever I choose to pursue.

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