link

Found in the comments on a post about choosing a college by Philip Greenspun:

Ersatz intellectuals in fields other than biology read The Selfish Gene or equivalent popular biology book and imagine biological research as witty British academes exchanging verbal jabs, unlocking the mysteries of life, and receiving millions of royalty pounds from their cloned maize patents . In reality biology is a windowless lab above the food court in Longwood, with 3 chinese guys, an indian, and a russian, packed into a 6×8 space, trying to do just enough work so that they don't lose funding and get deported. One autistic asian girl does all the wet lab for the entire department and a team of shell-shocked dot com losers are responsible for absorbing all the grant money still being allocated to various dead-end "informatics" programmes. The female doctoral candidates all decide to abandon ship and go to optometry school or manage a pet shop after their thesis defense whilst the male PhDs seem more inclined to waste even more life with endless journal clubs, data sharing, journal sharing, data clubs, and so forth for the rest of $20K/yr post-doc eternity.

Medical school is a (not much) duller , but far more fiscally sensible. If you get bored making $300K a year prescribing acne cream, you could always use your income to set up a lab in your basement. Even post docs have to figure out how to pay rent, so a lot of prime equipment ends up on ebay.

comment by half empty ⋅ 12/24/04; 12:28:44 AM

If you're under 60 and have problems mustering sufficient bitterness
in a variety of social situations, a Ph.D. may be the way to go.