Anyone impacted by the financial meltdown?
Corie Lok
Thursday, 09 October 2008 16:14 UTC
I’m wondering if anyone has any stories to share about how the credit and financial crisis is affecting science and research? Have any projects been slowed or halted? Hiring freezes? Any supplier companies or biotech companies suffering?
If you or someone you know has been directly or indirectly affected, those stories might make for good blog posts.
Here in Boston where I’m based, Boston University recently brought in a hiring freeze and a moratorium on new construction projects as a precautionary move. One of the reasons given: saving internal resources for a possible rise in demand for financial aid, now that student loans from banks have dried up.
Has anyone seen similar stories elsewhere? What sorts of impacts might we expect to see?
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I don’t anyone affected in science directly, but a friend of mine was laid off from a web development job a few weeks ago for money-saving purposes. He worked at a blog network site.
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Me and Mrs Gee know people in the construction trade who’ve already lost their jobs.
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I gather finances are tightening up in the pharma industry, even before the last couple of weeks. I would guess that the effects of the latest round of market skydiving will take a few weeks/months to filter through to scientists.
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A US friend of mine (a writer) whose husband is a scientist wrote yesterday that she had had 10 per cent wiped off her retirement fund and he’d had 30 per cent. I think these are the ways in which many people will be most affected (savings and pensions schemes) in the first instance. I dare not look at what has happened to the money I have been slowly putting by over the years for my children’s university education, if they go to university that is.
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The situation in Japan, though, is far worse than anyone anticipated. My friend David Langford tells me that the Bank of Origami has folded; Sumo Bank has gone belly-up, and even the highly respected Sushi Bank is beginning to smell fishy. Meanwhile the Bonsai Bank has had to prune many of its branches, and the CEO of the Bank Hara-Kiri says he’s absolutely gutted. Bucking the trend, however, is the Sudoku bank, which reports that it’s all square.
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We in the student category are worried whether there’ll even be jobs for us! hopefully the climate changes within a year!
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Thanks to global warming, it will.
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From a University viewpoint I can make the following predictions. The onset of a recession or economic downturn will lead to a greater interest in taking up a PhD position, if only to delay the search for work for three years. There will be less money for research from the public purse; most universities get the majority of their research income from the public purse even if it has been filtered through industry. Post-docs cost roughly 3x the annual cost of a student (note that is cost not salary). Hence, we will see an expansion in graduate positions and a reduction in post-doc employment.
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I agree with Brian’s analysis. As my wife works for Merrill Lynch, I have seen a direct impact on my own personal life, but little on my scientific life.
As a postdoc, I am less willing to give up a bad position at an unproductive lab now and keep the relative economic security.
This is what happens when we gamble-we sometimes loose. You might be interested in reading this article, which is very enlightening.
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A couple of weeks ago I applied for a job at a US university, and I heard last week that they now have a hirings freeze. I don’t know if it’s due to the financial meltdown, or if it’s because of something else.
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