2014年还学有机合成的，99%的祖宗八代子孙后代都要倒血霉 - 未名空间MITBBS历史存档

2014年还学有机合成的，99%的祖宗八代子孙后代都要倒血霉# Chemistry - 化学

e*c2014-08-09 07:08

1 楼

高考，第一场语文，我答的很快，提前交卷出来了.
三天考试结束，到教室里估分，遇到班主任（竟然是初中的班主任），我说考的不好，
她说没什么，我相信你会考好的.坐下来的时候，我突然问旁边的同学，今年的作文题
目是什么，他们说blah blah blah, 我完全没有印象，原来作文没有写。这时班主任下
来到我身边，说“你是不是作文忘了写啊，那就没办法了，之类的”
于是我很镇定的开始列举我从1999年到2009年每年都在做什么，试图想分析一下考砸之
后的出路是怎样，大脑里还晃过老板的头像，心想他要是知道我高考连作文都能忘记写
，恐怕也不会用我了吧... （我小心思还挺复杂）
最后好像也没得出个什么结论...
这破高考，都快十年了，还是阴魂不散...
估计我也是睡太多了，要少睡点...

f*c2014-08-09 07:08

2 楼

发信人: fjpc (haha), 信区: WaterWorld
标题: Re: 有机化学转专业，是对的选择吗？谢谢大家
发信站: BBS 未名空间站 (Sat Aug 9 17:32:32 2014, 美东)
现在学化学的，大概80%的祖孙三代要倒霉。
2007年以后才开始读博士的，如果学有机，已经是白痴。90%的祖宗八代子孙后代都倒
了血霉。
2014年还在学有机合成的，99.9%的祖宗八代子孙后代都要倒血霉。80年代的有机土博美
国制药工作N年，55岁回国挣大钱操小妞的（张江药谷的听说过没有？），不算，人家
那是80年代学的化学。
http://cen.acs.org/articles/90/i45/Barely-Hanging.html
Home > Volume 90 Issue 45 > Barely Hanging On
More On This Story
For Hire
Tepid Recovery Curtails Hiring
Barely Hanging On
ACS Launches New Resources For Unemployed Chemists
Carving Out A New Path: Unemployed Chemists Apply Their Skills And
Expertise
To Nontraditional Careers
ACS Member Support: Help For The Unemployed
Chemical Professionals Are Moving Away From Family To Find Job Prospects
[+]Enlarge
09045-cover3-opencxd
ALONE
Job loss can feel like a lonely journey.
Credit: Shutterstock/C&EN
Five years after the economic collapse began in the U.S., unemployed
chemists are still struggling to find jobs. The unemployment situation is
especially dire for mid- to late-career chemists who, instead of
anticipating a comfortable retirement, now face the possibility of
bankruptcy and financial ruin.
As their life savings evaporate, and their hope turns to desperation, these
chemists are beginning to question whether they can continue supporting a
field that can no longer support them.
In agreeing to share their stories with C&EN, chemists in these dire
circumstances requested anonymity to protect their job search prospects;
their names have been changed and some details about their situations have
been generalized. This article focuses on chemists who were laid off from
the pharmaceutical industry, because that’s one of the sectors where the
fallout from the Great Recession has been severe.
The impact of this recession has been unlike that of previous recessions. “
The fact is that the number of jobs has declined,” says Bassam Z.
Shakhashiri, president of the American Chemical Society. And the usual
methods for obtaining a new job aren’t working. “If the jobs aren’t
there
,” Shakhashiri says, “no matter how much you network, you’re not going
to
find them.”
“The situation today is a tragedy of national proportions,” says
Madeleine
Jacobs, ACS executive director and chief executive officer. “It’s
devastating to individual lives, and it’s devastating to this country.”
According to the 2012 Comprehensive Salary & Employment Survey of ACS
members, 4.2% of members in the U.S. are unemployed. Although this
percentage may seem small compared with the national unemployment rate of 7.
8%, there’s more to this statistic than meets the eye.
“I’m listed as employed,” says “Eric,” 46, who was laid off in 2007
from his position as a senior chemist at Johnson & Johnson and is now an
adjunct professor at three different colleges and universities. “I got
reemployed, but is this what employment should be like for someone at my
level?”
“The data that ACS has is for the most part self-reported, and that’s
always going to underreport the truth,” says Lee H. Latimer, a consultant
and longtime ACS volunteer, who was laid off from Elan in 2011. “Many may
have a job, which keeps them from collecting unemployment, but they’re not
working either in their field or in a position that comes anywhere close to
matching their previous income”—meaning, he says, that they’re
effectively underemployed.
“Jeff,” 59, a Ph.D. chemist in New Jersey, is in that boat. He was laid
off in 2008 from his position as an associate director for a major
pharmaceutical company, where he had worked for 22 years. He thought it
would only be a matter of months before he found a new job. “Normally you
figure three months, and with the economy going bad, I figured six months,”
he says. “I did not expect it would take this long.”
Although he’s had several adjunct teaching positions and temporary contract
jobs, Jeff has not had a permanent, full-time position since 2008. “It’s
frustrating at this point in a career when you’re at your highest earning
potential to suddenly not be earning or have greatly reduced earnings,” he
says. “You’ve put all this time and effort into an advanced degree, a
good
career, and worked hard for your company, and to suddenly be tossed out, it
’s disheartening.”
Read about chemists who found new careers, and member benefits for the
unemployed.
Since Jeff is the sole provider for his wife and their 12-year-old daughter
who is being homeschooled, he has had to tap into his savings and 401(k) to
make ends meet.
His family has had to cut back dramatically on expenses. They’ve canceled
their cable and lawn service, they’ve scaled back on their cell phone plan,
and they don’t eat out or take vacations. “At one point, we had a boat.
We’ve had to get rid of that,” Jeff says. “And there are repairs on the
house that really should be done that have been put off.
“I don’t think there’s a whole lot else that we can really do. You need
the phone, you need electricity, and you need health insurance,” he says.
“We’ve got to have the trash picked up, and we have to pay taxes.”
Jeff has considered selling his home, but in his neighborhood, “houses
simply aren’t selling, or if they do sell, prices are quite depressed,”
he
says.
“Alice,” 52, a Ph.D. organic chemist, had to make that trade-off when she
and her family downsized their home. Alice was laid off from Pharmacopeia
in
2008 and then from Merck & Co. in 2010. Her husband also lost his job at
Merck.
With their savings disappearing, the couple, who have a 12-year-old
daughter
, sold their home in an affluent suburb in New Jersey at a loss and bought
a
home half the size in another community. “We had to take money out of our
401(k)s to buy a smaller home,” she says.
file
Because she had to pay a hefty fine for tapping into her retirement account,
her savings have taken a big hit. “I used to have a lot of money in my 401
(k), and now I practically have nothing,” she says. “I went from $220,000
down to $30,000 in my 401(k).”
Eric has also had to make tough choices. He teaches as an adjunct professor
on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, splitting his time among three
colleges
and universities that are 50 to 70 miles apart. He leaves around 10 AM and
doesn’t get home until after 11 PM, leaving little time to spend with his
twin daughters, who are nine years old.
Because of the length of his commute and the high cost of gas, Eric sold
his
car and bought a used Suzuki with better gas mileage. “The previous car
was costing me about $1,000 a month in gas, and that was not sustainable,”
he says.
He has roughly $400 left in his 401(k). “Four hundred bucks is no 401(k);
it won’t buy you a plane ticket anywhere,” he says. But he’s not one to
dwell on his difficulties. “It’s tight financially, but the fact is we’
re
still surviving. It’s just a little harder, that’s all.”
Alice says that what’s more painful than losing her retirement savings is
having no money to send her daughter to college. Alice, who came to the U.S.
from Southeast Asia, says that getting an education was her ticket to a
better life. “I feel very sad. I went for a Ph.D. because I thought that
with a Ph.D., I should be able to have a good life and be able to give my
daughter a good life,” she says. “I never thought this would happen.”
Jeff is in a similar predicament. “There’s no way we can afford to put my
daughter through college now,” he says. “It’s discouraging, it’s
disheartening, it’s frustrating. You start to feel like a failure.”
For unemployed and underemployed chemists, life can be an emotional roller
coaster. “Some days you’re on top of the world. You’ve got interviews,
and something looks promising,” says Jeff. “The next day, the interview
fails and the world looks darker than the inside of a cave.”
“Michael,” a Ph.D. organic chemist in his 50s, living in California,
knows
just how unsettling this roller-coaster ride can be. Since he was laid off
from a biotech company in 2008, he has applied for more than 10,000 jobs,
some 7,000 related to the chemical sciences and 3,000 outside of science.
He has had 10 interviews and was offered three jobs. The first offer came
less than a year after he was laid off. The position was with a small start-
up company in California. But after he received the offer, the company was
bought out, and the offer fell through. “The person who was going to hire
me lost his own job the next day,” he says.
The second offer was in 2009 for a contract position at a large
pharmaceutical company in California, but the company notified him four
days
before his starting date that it had instituted a hiring freeze, “so they
stopped everything,” he says. “According to them, they had a computer for
me, a phone number, and everything was ready.”
The third offer came in 2010, and it was with a government agency near
Washington, D.C. “I was supposed to start working with them on Sept. 27,
2010, but because of the budget issue going on in Congress, they froze
everything,” he says.
Michael sold his condo in preparation for the move. “I put everything that
I had in storage, and I was in the process of moving, and I had a couple
days before I moved, so I said, ‘I’ll go stay with my friend in L.A.’
8201;”
It’s been two years, and Michael is still living with his friend, and his
belongings are still in storage. He can’t afford to pay for health
insurance, so he’s uninsured.
“I’m nearing retirement, and that’s very scary because as time goes by,
it’s difficult for me to get a job. And at the same time, I’m not earning
anything, so I’m not contributing to retirement,” he says.
Meanwhile, Michael has earned certifications in clinical trial design and
management, regulatory affairs, quality assurance and control, and project
management. But “by the time that I finished, not only did the number of
these jobs decrease, employers weren’t going to take anybody who doesn’t
have experience. The training is not enough for them,” he says. “I went
and retrained myself, but I still cannot get a job.
file
“I have applied to work for free just to be working, and I can’t do it,”
Michael says, noting liability issues in industry can prevent employers from
using workers not on the payroll. Even in academia, he’s approached
professors to work as a postdoc to get some experience in a new area. “But
they can’t do that because they hire postdocs and graduate students, and I
wouldn’t technically be considered a postdoc because I have more than 15
years of experience,” he says.
He’s even been turned down for jobs at local grocery stores, for positions
that pay less than $10 an hour. “When I was an undergraduate, I worked in
a
supermarket, so I have some experience,” he says. “But I can’t even get
a job in a supermarket. They say, ‘You don’t have the right skills.’ Or
they think, ‘Tomorrow he’s going to get a job, and he’s going to leave.’
”
The ups and downs of job searching can bring life to a screeching halt, as
“Tom,” who was laid off from Sanofi in 2011, has discovered. “I’m 50
years old, and I can’t make any long-term plans,” he says. “I can’t
look
at a new car, I can’t get the latest big-screen TV, I can’t get the
latest iPhone. I can’t look at that stuff because I just don’t know where
my next paycheck is coming from. I’m not starving, but I’m not advancing
either.”
Michael, who is single, has an even more pressing issue. “I can’t even ask
a woman out, because I’m unemployed and I don’t have a place,” he says.
“You can’t do very simple fundamental things in life. Your life is
completely on hold.”
Even everyday interactions can be awkward. At the exposition at an ACS
meeting, for instance, “when you walk around all those booths, people say
hi to you and ask you where you work. I say, ‘I’m unemployed,’ and the
person doesn’t know what to do with me,” says Michael.
The constant uphill battle can take a mental toll. “I think it’s cut me
down a couple of notches,” Jeff says. “The group I was part of for so
many
years was considered one of the top in the industry, so certainly it
impacts your pride.”
Tom, who has a master’s degree in chemistry, says he has come to terms with
his new reality. “There’s no room for pride here,” he says. “If I have
to stack lumber at Home Depot, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
In this unstable job market, even the elation of starting a new job can be
short-lived. Two-and-a-half years after being laid off from his previous
position, Jeff was offered a temporary contract position at Roche, in
Nutley
, N.J., that had potential to become permanent. Although the position pays
less than half of his previous salary, and he does not get any vacation
days
, sick time, or health benefits, Jeff says that was a godsend for him and
his family. But 11 months after he started, the company announced that the
entire facility would be shut down; he will be out of a job again in
December.
“I’m working at Roche, and there are people who mop the floors, and as I
walk by, I always say hello to them,” Jeff says. “But I’m thinking in
the
back of my mind, ‘In a few months, I may have to be doing this too.’
8201;”
This extreme hardship is causing chemists to question their faith in
chemistry. “My passion for chemistry is gone,” Tom says. “I used to read
C&EN for the newest trends and discoveries. I’ve lost interest in all that
because I don’t see a future in it.”
“I’m a chemist, I love chemistry, and I want to tell other people to go
ahead and study chemistry,” adds Michael. “But then I think about it—and
what kind of a future will they have?”
Alice says she worries about the next generation of students, who are losing
their interest in science. “I can see it in my daughter,” she says. “She
used to love chemistry, and she went to all the ACS meetings with me. Now,
I tell her to put her poster in the science fair, and it’s like pulling
teeth.”
Jeff, who volunteers as an ACS career consultant, says he’s conflicted as
to what to tell job seekers: “I’m looking at other chemists’ résumés,
with many people wanting to go into the pharmaceutical industry—which is
going through a major downsizing—and I’m wondering, ‘Is it fair to
encourage people to go into chemistry, and what do I tell people who are
looking for jobs?’
“I’d love to be able to wholeheartedly encourage people to go into
science
, to go into chemistry. It’s fascinating, it’s interesting, it used to be
a great career,” Jeff continues. “But now, I can’t promise that there
will be a reward for their hard work.”
Despite the lack of jobs, ACS’s Jacobs maintains that chemists and
chemistry are critical to the U.S.’s advancement. “I don’t want to
discourage the best and brightest students from entering the chemical
sciences, because there is no way to solve these great global challenges—
providing clean water, providing sustainable energy, providing enough food,
curing disease, protecting the homeland, and protecting the environment—
without chemists and chemical engineers.”