Why are you working here...

...when you have a Ph.D.?" If I had a dollar for each time I've been asked this, well, money wouldn't be so tight. I can't hold it against someone to have such natural curiosity, but I've grown tired of 'splaining myself over and over and over...

Becoming a Ph.D. scientist was what Dr. Donald Clifton and Paula Nelson called a "misyearning" in their book, Soar with Your Strengths. Among the things that give rise to misyearnings are listening to others'"helpful" advice and ignoring your own heart and talent, or "going for the money" instead of answering your calling. In my case, I found a graduate fellowship that would pay me just enough to live on and give me an excuse to move out of my parent's house (Five-hundred mile
commutes (each way) just aren't doable). Moreover, I enjoyed my undergraduate years that led to a biology/chemistry degree and the pharmacology Ph.D. seemed a logical sequel.

I spent six years with a graduate advisor who is a very good scientist but not so adept at recognizing a misyearning. Instead, I got a lot of chiding about how I needed to develop initiative. The real problem was my heart wasn't really in it: I like my science the way it's presented in consumer drug books, Popular Science or on PBS. Through the 1990s, molecular biology and the Human Genome Project muscled their way into health science, and try as I might, I never quite "got" that field. Comprehending passages like, "In many black African populations, the capacity for CYP2D6-dependent drug metabolism is generally reduced. A specific variant of the CYP2D6 gene (CYP2D6*17) that carries three functional mutations (T107I, R296C, and S486T) ... (Oscarson et al, Molecular Pharmacology, Vol. 52, No. 6, 1034-1040, 1997)," was a hopeless ambition. I'm not disparaging this article or its authors. This is their area of strength, while my strengths lie elsewhere. Not to mention that the world of research can be a rat race wherein you're scrambling not to get "scooped."

Some people pooh-poohed my feelings as college stress. I didn't help myself by believing that as well. After a lot of soul-searching I concluded that I would rather be an architect (a childhood goal that faded to the background during undergrad school. But by that time, I was too close to the end to walk away without the degree.

The biggest mistake I made was to have no plan "B:" after a two-year postdoctoral stint near Washington, DC, I bailed out without having something else to get in to, and ended up working clerical jobs through a temp agency. It was hard enough to pay bills, to say nothing of spending money on AutoCAD training.

Yet, my education and experience provided plenty of skills that don't necessitate working at the bench. And designing buildings isn't the only thing that stirs my blood. When my first paper made it into a professional journal, I remember the rush I felt at the realization that "I'm an internationally published author." Nothing to make me famous, but just being in print was enough. Had I given it more thought
back then, I would have looked into freelance and other writing opportunities before my finances went down the toilet. That is the direction I'm looking at now.

The message to the reader is to look at what you enjoy doing now and can do well without having to go back to school. Don't just say, "I hate this and I want to be a ____." Above all be patient; I wasn't. Had I been willing to take a longer time to make the transition or come up with alternatives that would be partially satisfying, I probably would have been better off. The old cliché is right: hindsight is 20/20.