Hm. What next?

I got an email this morning telling me that representatives from a Very Big Company (Very-BC) want to take me and a few other grad students out for lunch tomorrow. Two PhD alums and Very-BC employees have been on campus all week conducting interviews. They've been doing on-campus interviews for several years, though this year they seem to be "recruiting" particularly hard because unlike in past years they have permission to hire 25 PhD-level scientists over the next year. So they've been interviewing grad students who've applied, and requesting resumes from other almost-ready-to-graduate students who didn't. It seems they do quite a bit of asking around as to whom they should be scouting/recruiting, because they've also assembled a list of slightly younger, not-quite-ready-to-graduate students to start talking to now. (This is the group I'm in - sadly, and at the same time thank goodness, I'm not that close to graduating.)

Even if I'm not terribly close to graduating, I'm close enough that it's not unreasonable for this company to be feeling me out while they're here, which begs the question, what do I want to do after grad school????

Last month when I was in StL for my college roommate's wedding, her brother asked what I wanted to do with my PhD. My response (literally): Um, do I need to know the answer to that? He laughed and replied that at some point I probably do. It's starting to look like that point is sooner rather than later. Crap.

For most of grad school, and during ungrad too honestly, I've given fairly glib responses to that question. Especially because people always seem to ask it insanely early, like asking what I want to do with my PhD before I'd even moved to Tucson. Especially since opinions and ideas are so likely to change with experience, I've never really seen a reason to have a big Master Plan. (Seriously, sometime I should write about applying to graduate school.) I kind of figured I could figure the next step out when I actually got there, and so far that's worked out pretty well for me. I'm not sure how well that approach would go over in an actual job interview. (Yes, the grad school admission process is sort of interview-ish, but uncertainty is much more tolerated in a culture where the liberals/wanderers/philosophers/curious seek shelter rather than a company with a bottom line and a product to get out the door.)

At this point you may be thinking I pulled a Peter Pan move and went to grad school to avoid growing up (or making any "real" decisions). Honestly there may be some truth to that, but it's certainly not the whole truth. In my undergrad research lab, there were some undergrads who were quite competent and worked independently on their own projects, and there were other undergrads who were, shall we say, less competent, and did monkey-work under the direct supervision of a grad student. I was well aware that I enjoyed being in the former category, and did NOT want to be an HPLC-monkey for the rest of my life (where many bachelor's level chemists end up). I'm sufficiently intelligent and opinionated that I want to be figuring out stuff myself.

So far, I've mostly narrowed the post-graduation options down to "not academia." I don't want to be an academic PI. Yes, academia totally has its advantages - among them being able research/study (almost) anything you want and a lot of flexibility in terms of schedule (which hours, not how many). But the cons...

• The longer I'm in academia, the crazier I think everybody here is, and the more certain I am that I don't want to be here forever. There's an absurd amount of politics, game-play, back-stabbing, and trash-talking. And I'm in a department with a really good reputation for how collegial, friendly, and collaborative it is. I'm sure "not academia" doesn't avoid this pitfall entirely, but in my 8th year at a university, I'm tired of all the crap. I guess I'm hoping different crap will annoy me less in its novelty.
  
• Despite a fair amount of progress, academia, especially in physical sciences, is still an incredibly difficult option for women who might like to have children someday. Like me. I know women who have had babies during graduate school, during a post-doc, or after making tenure. It seems like there is no "good" time to have a baby, but that these are the "less impossible" times. At this point, I'm unlikely to find myself otherwise situated to have children before finishing a post-doc, so that means I should wait until I can be classified as AMA to start trying to have children? Maybe I'm projecting too far and considering too many really big "ifs," but someday I do want to get married and have kids. I know that even in "not academia" that still puts me at a disadvantage career-wise, but at least it doesn't mean not making tenure and losing my job. (For reference, there are currently 6 female professors in my department of approximately 40 faculty. My advisor is the only one with a child. A child as in one child, that she had the same year she made tenure. Maybe this also reflects the "kind of person" it takes to survive in academia and not just the incompatibility of tenure and biological clocks.)
• For the most part, I enjoy lab work. I most certainly enjoy it more than reading and writing (as necessary as those parts are). There are relatively few professors, especially as they advance through the ranks, who spend any significant amount of time actually in the lab, doing experiments, and analyzing their own data. It drives me crazy sometimes how out of touch my advisor seems sometimes. Because she hasn't done these experiments in so many years, or in some cases, ever, she can have ridiculously skewed ideas about how long something takes, how difficult it is, or occasionally whether its even feasible. It's not that she's deliberately being difficult, I really think she's just forgotten what it's actually like. I don't want to spend all my time reading, writing, going to meetings, and telling other people how to do their science.
  
• The final big drawback is I see how insanely hard many of the professors work, only to never seem caught up. It's one thing to get the 11pm email from your advisor, or maybe the 5am email. But sometimes we get both (plus who knows how many one-line emails between meetings during the day). We're constantly pestering her to read something for us. We're the ones actually doing the labwork, data analysis, and even much of the writing, and yet she still never seems to have the time to stop working for a bit and just enjoy life. I don't want that. The assistant professor down the hall from me is here more than I am. And I'm here a lot. It's really, really rare that I'm at school and he's not. The sad part? He probably won't make tenure next year. And to sound not entirely naive, I know industry jobs are hard work, too. My dad (with a PhD in physics) has worked in industry my entire life, and he's worked hard my entire life, and sometimes had stuff to read or work on in the evenings or on weekends. But it never seemed all-consuming and soul-crushing like academia does (to me).
  

That more or less sums up why I don't want to work in academia. The sad thing is, if somebody asked me on an interview why I wanted to work in _____ ("not academia"), none of the reasons I described above are acceptable interview answers. It's not ok to say, because I'm tired of the petty bitches/assholes in academia, I want to have babies, and/or I don't want my job to take over my life. Having a career I enjoy and care about is important to me, but it's far from the be-all-end-all or how I want to look back on my life.

Part of why I think I'm so uncertain about what I want to do is I have no direct experience with chemistry or research outside of academia. I know why I don't want to be an academic, but I don't know why I do want to do ______. At this point I have are observations of my dad's job from growing up, and the data collected from the 118356 million questions I ask of almost everybody I can in various jobs. My mentor from when I started grad school (the senior student who trained me and whose project I took over) is now working for a pharmaceutical company, and I regularly quiz him about what he actually does, and what he likes and doesn't like about it. I'm not sure how to remedy this - other than to keep asking all sorts of people about their jobs (I really wish there were more appropriate and candid situations in which to do this!!) and trial and error (making the best decision I can, and possibly hating my job and having to figure it out all over again (with one more data point!)).

Ok, this is getting really long. I'll come back to this rambling another day.