Academia or Industry
In my opinion, the greatest challenge to pursue academia related jobs nowadays is the lack of such job positions and the relatively short period for which such jobs are offered.
Pursuing scientific work is not easy and requires full dedication. We, early career scientists spend a lot of effort and time dedicated to pursue masters, PhD, post-docs... The objective of obtaining a PhD is to have better working opportunities as well as to be able to develop a scientific career in academia. However a big part of our time we spend it worrying about getting a good salary or even being employed, particularly in Latin America. This is a great disadvantage when it comes to an effective work performance.
It is more and more common to find post-doc positions for only one year or even nine months. Not only that, in our first years as an early career scientists we are told to move countries and environments as much as possible so we enhance the visibility of our CVs.
Furthermore, within academia, there is a general view that you will become a “better” scientist the more your work, leading, sometimes, to almost slavery conditions in which we are asked to work day and night, and to put work related issue above everything else in our lives.
This is why it is common to see brilliant minds that have made the most of their academic life to go out of academia and pursue jobs in industry where life stability and conciliation is possible. In addition, it is common to hear about early career scientists being under highly stressful conditions even leading to mental disorders.
There is a complete lack of conciliation between life and work when it comes to academia, and this must be changed. Who would not like to have a permanent job and a location to settle down? For many of us that have travel continuously to pursue the so-called “better CV”, having a permanent, or long-term position and not think about moving to a different country or getting paid next month is just a dream.
But this should not just be a dream. With better working conditions (decent salary and future perspective), a more efficient work could be accomplished, as part of the stress would fade away. However, the reason behind the lack of such job positions lies on the little financial support given by the governments to enhance science and academia.
At this point there is not much early careers scientists can do to solve this issue, but to struggle as much as possible to let policy makers know about this situation. We can also encourage one another, particularly in very stressful moments. In addition, platforms such as the LAECESS network, encouraging and gathering all job opportunities can ease on the task of finding the “dream” job in academia. Hopefully, one day, our jobs will be better considered by policy-makers and this situation will change.
