The title question is one asked by graduate students on a daily basis. Sure, there are those rare exceptions. You know the type—the students that are unwavering in happiness and seem to always have their professional and personal lives together. No matter how demeaning their advisor behaves or if their paper is rejected (yet again!) from another top tier journal, they always take life in stride. These rare individuals never question how or if they will arrive at full academic professorship. However, most graduate students tend to fall into another category—they silently suffer, telling no one that they are uncertain of their career path or are beginning to take their advisors harsh criticisms to heart. “Maybe it really is true that my hands are responsible for the failure of my advisor’s technically challenging, ridiculously complicated experimental design.” Myself, I fall somewhere in between the two categories. At times, I know exactly what I want and do not doubt myself for one minute—no matter what my advisor says or does. However, the uncertainty seeps into my core from time to time and I find myself searching the web for “alternative careers” when I should be reading research papers or writing a committee report. The funny thing is the longer I am a student, the more I learn that there are many careers besides academic research out there. Furthermore, talented scientists are leaving the bench by choice to purse these viable career paths. The moment I realized that, statistically, academic tenure track positions are the true “alternative” career (80% of us will not choose this path or make it if we try) is the moment I realized that I just might be in that 80%.

So, just how well is graduate school preparing us for the various careers we will choose? I’m not even sure it is feasible to address every possible career path imaginable in a single course of study, but an effort to train us for more than grant writing, publishing, and securing tenure would be helpful. Most graduate programs fail to even teach students how to write well or how to teach—two skills that are utilized extensively in academia. For those students on the alternative career path, the situation is even bleaker. There is absolutely no incentive for training programs to encourage a departure from the academic track, even if the student is vocal about their plans to pursue other interests. I think this is partially due to the fact that the reality of today’s generation of scientists is much different than those of our advisors. First, the competition today seems to be much more cut throat because too many PhD degrees are granted relative to the number of academic positions available. Second, the NIH training grants that many programs rely upon for funding value the number of graduating students remaining in academia over the course of their careers as a key indicator of worthiness to continue funding. Third, the demands of personal life have evolved. The demands on women scientists to balance work and family life only scratch the surface. It seems that my generation is more discontented than those before us when it comes to demanding compensation for our efforts. It is rare to find a young grad student that truly makes their career decisions without considering monetary remuneration. The financial, time, and intellectual rewards are equal competing factors in our decisions. No longer does doctoral study hold that “purity” of intellectual pursuit. Why stay in academia if we must work grueling hours for little pay? Well, if you are one of those students I mentioned at the beginning of my entry, the answer is simple: “Nothing else will satisfy my intellectual hunger. I can’t be happy doing anything else and money/family doesn’t take precedence. “ The second group of students would respond: “Hmmm…there’s some food for thought. Get paid equal/more, work less, have more family time. I really should investigate what else is out there.” So with these internal struggles over the pros and cons of academic and alternative careers, how is a graduate student supposed to go about getting an education that truly prepares them for their future? Especially when they may have no idea what that future career trajectory will be? We must clench onto our own desires and ignore the not so gentle nudges of our advising faculty as we try to answer, “What is the meaning of our graduate student life?” Every student must proactively seek those opportunities outside of their program requirements that offer them the experience they need to make an informed decision. No one can answer what the meaning of graduate life is for you. We are the masters of our own destiny.