Employment and Salary: MPH

Good day to you all

This is my last blog. It's been really fun being in D.C. and I'll miss it, but I'll also be happy to come back home, especially to see my dog.

Today will be the last installment of the absolutely riveting Employment and Salary series. We'll discuss the MPH, specifically the fields of Epidemiology and Healthcare Administration. So, without any more dilly-dallying, let's get started.

There are 5,100 epidemiologists in the country, according to the BLS, with 500 jobs being added every ten years. This is a growth rate about average for the job market. Because there isn't a single epidemiology degree, it's hard to chart how you'll fare when you graduate.

According to Salary.com, the epidemiologist salary spread is fairly tight, with a median of $84,493, a 25th percentile of $74,344, and a 75th percentile of $94,087. This is far below the other salaries we've talked about, but the tight spread means you at least know what to expect.

Next, the Heathcare Administrator

Medical and Health Services management is, right now, growing incredibly rapidly, with a growth rate of 23% between now and 2024. There are 315,000 jobs total with 73,500 expected to be added in the next ten years. 

According to Salary.com, Clinical Operations Manager (an example of healthcare administration which involves running clinical operations at a hospital), make a median salary of ~$120,000. The spread is quite a bit wider, with a middle 50% range from $103,000 to $146,000

That's all about that I have to say. Look forward (or don't) to the full presentation, coming sometime in may,

Employment and Salary: MBA

Hey

This is my final week here in D.C., and by extension, my final week of blogs. After tomorrow's final blog, I will cease updating this and instead begin finalizing a first draft of my Senior Research project presentation.

Today, I'll do for MBA's what I did last week for patent attorneys, and what I'll do tomorrow for MPH's--I'll look at employment numbers and salary distribution

I can not, unfortunately, mind many absolute numbers for MBA's and it's nearly impossible to find anything specific to science majors. But, for business majors employment seems to be very good. In the U.S.A, LinkedIn reports a 95% employment rate after graduation for people who hold MBA's, which is up from just 91% just a year prior. This is a lot better than the baseline rate for recent college graduates (92.1%) and way above the after-graduation rate for Ph.D.'s, which sits at a measly 65%. Of course, these rates climb as time goes on, with 96% of college graduates and 98.5% of Ph.D.'s eventually finding work, but solid work right after graduation is generally a good thing and a fantastic first step to a prosperous life.

Salarywise, the picture looks good. Here is an article from Bloomberg about salaries based on field and institution. What's most striking is how variable it all is. It really is dependent on what business school you choose and what field you go to work in, BUT the overall market looks to be fairly high-paying, with median salaries usually in the >$100,000 range

Employment and Salary: Patent Attorney

Hello all

In my last three blogs, I will be looking at employment statistics of the kind i've described over the last few posts for the three main fields I've been studying. As before, I'm going to start off today with patent law, which is the most likely field a scientist who gets a law degree would go into.

First up in our statistics is absolute number of jobs. According to the U.S. Patent Office, there are 41,800 patent attorneys on register. This is a vast over-estimate, as many of those registered are dead or retired. This patent law blog puts the number of active attorneys at a much lower figure of around 26,000, or possibly fewer. Compare this to the total number of lawyers, which the Bureau of Labor and Statistics puts at around 759,800, and you see just how relatively small a field IP law is and why patent and IP attorneys are in such high demand. In fact, since not all types of IP lawyers require a science degree, the actual number of those active attorneys WITH a science degree is even lower. This means that it's potentially quite easy to land a job as a patent attorney.

Next up is absolute job growth. For the overall field of law, the BLS puts the number of jobs added between 2012 and 2022 at ~74,800, with a field growth rate of around average speed.. However, over 40,000 law jobs are added per year, meaning that by 2022 there will be a massive surplus of law students and a massive shortage of jobs. As for patent law itself, I can't find many statistics, but the general impression I get is that growth is slow but not as slow as law in general.

Finally, salary breakdown

I couldn't find the exact sort of breakdown I described in the last post. But, I found a website which compiles estimates from many different firms. The best one of these estimates was from Salary.com and it is reproduced here

• Patent Attorney I (JD + 0-2 years of experience) – $80,683 (average); low 41K and high 128K
• Patent Attorney II (JD + 2-5 years of experience) – $123,276 (average); low 88K and high 179K.
• Patent Attorney III (JD + 5-8 years of experience) – $146,262 (average); low 115K and high 195K.
• Patent Attorney IV (JD + 8 years or more of experience) – $170,971 (average); low 140K and high 214K.
• Top Patent Attorney (JD + 15 or more years of experience) – $210,437 (average); low 145K and high 270K.
• Patent Agent II (Bachelors + 2-5 years of experience) – $84,509 (average); low 62K and high 118K.

So, while this doesn't list different salaries for those with a master's degree, it still provides a useful range  of salary info

Next time I'll do the same thing for business

Salary Statistics

Hey guys

This is my second-to-last week here in D.C. and my fourth-to-last blog. I'll be sad to leave the D.C. area but I'll be equally happy to come back home.

Today I'm going to talk about salary in the general sense, rather than a field-by-field sense. I'll talk about the different ways salary is reported and their uses.

So when you look for a job one of the first things you look for is the salary statistics. You want to know how much you're going to make! But, they can be misleading. There are two main ways salary is reported--Average Salary and Median Salary.

Averages take the sum of all salaries in the field and divide it by the number of people employed. In datasets with low variance, averages are a good way to look at...well...an average of a bunch of different things. But, averages are sensitive to extremes. If three people in a field are making $50,000 a year, and one person is making $200,000, the average salary is $87,500. This would give job-seekers the impression that they would make, on average, that much, when that is patently untrue.

Medians work differently. Median is the exact middle value of a set of data. In a dataset with large variance, like the one previously mentioned, medians tend to be more along the lines of what one could expect to find. Because medians are dependent only on the number of points, they're far less sensitive to extremes.

For a more complete picture of the salary field, you'd use a quartile system. You'd report the salaries of the bottom 25%, the middle 50% and the top 25%. You could use median or average in this. This shows the most accurate picture of the distribution of salaries in a field and provides someone with the best estimate of what they could expect to make.

FASEB Meeting

Hey guys.

This doesn't have a huge amount to do with my actual research project, but it's related to the internship and it was a highly interesting happening.

I've had an interest in science policy for quite a while, so I've been trying explore that avenue of interest a bit while I'm here. Last week, I met with the APS's science policy coordinator and discussed a bit about what it means to be involved in science policy. It was very interesting to me and I expressed an interest in learning more. Today, I attended a meeting of FASEB.

FASEB (Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology) is a federation of various biological scientific societies, coordinating and publishing several tens of journals in nearly every area of biological science. A large part of the research they do is what's known as "basic" research, meaning research that doesn't have an immediate clinical or medical value. Rather, it's research that's done with less care for practical applications. The APS is one of the founding societies of FASEB.

So, today I sat in on a meeting of all of the various science policy coordinators of FASEB's constituent societies. They discussed issues like funding for basic research, congressmen who signed onto promises which were then broken, distribution of fact sheets to legislators, and other such things. It was a little bit over an hour in length and provided a lot of valuable insight into the workings of a science policy unit.

Next time, I'll get back on topic

Employment and Job Statistics: Part 2--Only a Sith Deals in Absolutes

Hello all,

Last time, I talked about how a simple unemployment rate is often not useful in the overall job market and even less so for specific fields. This was because the unemployment rate is not a perfect picture of the economy and because it's hard to pin down what exactly the labor force IS for any field, making it next to impossible to derive an actual rate.

Today, I'll talk about a slightly more useful statistic--absolute numbers.

There are two important numbers. There's the absolute number of jobs available in the job market and the number of jobs added per annum. How can these numbers be useful? They can be compared to numbers and used as the raw materials for more complicated calculations.

For example, what if you wanted to figure out, like I am, how the job market for lawyers is receiving new graduates. You could try and find employment rates post-graduation for law school graduates from all the various institutes and try to put them together for a meaningful number, or you could take the absolute numbers for graduates and compare that to the absolute numbers of jobs added in a year and compare them. If the number of jobs added a year is far lower than the number of new law school graduates, you would know that something's and that maybe attending law school wasn't worth it. If it's higher, you know that there's a very high demand for lawyers and that jobs are plentiful.

Next time I'll talk about salary by percentile and its use.

Employment and Job Statistics: Part 1

After that brief interlude yesterday, today I'm going to be jumping right into the next large area for analysis: employment numbers and hiring statistics. These are just as, if not more important than all of the fields of analysis previously explored. After all, what do hours, salary, and job satisfaction matter if you can't find a job in the first place.

There are a few sub-categories in this field. There's the employment rate, the job growth statistics, the absolute number of jobs available, the absolute job growth, and (since I didn't do it in the pay section), salary distribution. This week, I'll talk about all of these statistics, what they mean, and how they are useful. Next week, I'll begin looking at numbers for specific fields.

The employment rate is a national number put out by the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. It's a description of the number of people working compared to the total number of people in the labor force. It's a general indicator of the state of the economy. It's not the end-all, be-all of employment statistics, though, and is very limited in its use. It doesn't take into account people who have stopped seeking work, or who are employed only partly through the year. Still, it can be useful. The trouble is that this is a national statistic and compiling a field-specific one is more difficult. This is simply because there is no reliable way to count the total labor force for that field, as people are capable of switching careers. An out-of-work mechanical engineer could give up looking for a mechanical engineering job and search instead for an aerospace job. It's very hard to gauge whether someone belongs to one labor force or another.

As such, the employment rate is useful for populations of all sizes, but only as long as they contain the entire population and its workforce, rather than a specific subset.

Conclusions

Hello, friends. Sorry for the lack of a third blog last week. I’ve been busy helping out my cousin before his hip replacement and doing a bunch of other stuff. I’ve been especially busy at work, where I usually do my blogging, as the APS has a conference coming up that they have a lot of work to do in order to prepare for.

Today, I’m going to say a few words about the sort of conclusion I’m hoping to reach at the end of this. We’ve done salary, we’ve done hours, and we’ve done employment satisfaction. We’ve been moving from simple topics to more complicated ones. It’s very easy to say that one field makes more than another on average, because that’s an objective statistic. It’s much harder and much less definitive and applicable to say that one field is happier than another, because there are so many factors that go into happiness and it’s so variable. It’s all dependent on the personal wants and needs of an individual person.

So, unfortunately, I won’t be able to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer as to whether you should or should not get a second degree with no qualifications. But, I’ll be able to give a helpful recommendation based on a few factors. I can say that you should take a certain course of action if you want to work fewer hours or longer hours or value money over satisfaction or something like that. It just won’t be unqualified.

Next time I’ll start getting into employment data.

Career Satisfaction: Health-Care Admin and Epidemiologist

So, the final degree I'm going to be talking about, as you know, is the Master of Public Health degree. This certifies you to do any number of things involving public health, but perhaps the two most common careers for someone with this degree are Healthcare Administration and Epidemiology.

Healthcare administrators manage public health, specifically those related to healthcare. This mostly involves hospital and hospital-system management. According to the College Foundation of North Carolina, the field commands high levels of job satisfaction, but is incredibly stressful. This suits itself well to a certain type of person, but if one does not deal well with stress, it might not be a great fit. Still, CNN Money awards it an "A" ranking for personal satisfaction, and a "B" for flexibility, so, with a fairly high average pay, it's definitely well-worth considering.

Epidemiologists work on understanding, predicting, and containing infectious disease outbreaks. This can be done in the field (for example, containing Ebola in Africa, or coordinating vaccination in Asia) or in the lab (manufacturing vaccines, understanding viral factors, predicting outbreak paths). They, too, report very high levels of personal satisfaction, with CNN Money awarding it an "A" for personal satisfaction, a "B" for flexibility and a "C" for low stress, with healthcare administration having a "D". For those who really want to make a difference in the world though, and to seriously improve public health in less-developed and developed parts of the world alike, Epidemiologist could be a very good choice.

Finally, if you like both of these ideas, there is the field of Healthcare Epidemiology. It's a subbranch of epidemiology that involves managing disease outbreaks in hospitals. Contrary to what you might think, hospitals have HUGE infection rates. Many, many people get sick in hospitals, and Healthcare Epidemiologists try to understand why and reduce the risk. It takes specialized training, though, and there aren't many statistics on the job satisfaction level, but it's definitely an option.

MBA problems

So, up until now, I've talked a lot about law degrees. This is, however, a research project that includes business degrees and public health degrees in addition to legal degrees. So, why haven't I, for example, listed statistics for employment satisfaction or average work hours for scientists possessing business degrees?

There don't seem to be any.

I can, and tomorrow will, link articles regaling you with first-hand experience and anecdotes of life after business degree. I can tell you all about employment and hiring and what employers want and all sorts of fun things, but for hours worked and employment satisfaction, the field of "business" is far too diverse for me to find any meaningful statistics.

The main problem here is that, while it can be the center of someone's degree portfolio, often an MBA is taken in addition. Companies often pay for their employees to take business degrees before promoting them to management. A business degree is, unlike a legal degree, which fairly reliably sends people down the path of being a lawyer, less inclined toward any specific career choice and more toward the incredibly nebulous field of "business".

What's business? It could be management, marketing, human resources, investing, evaluation, accounting and so much more. An MBA gives one an incredibly broad skillset, hence its value to employers. But, this makes it very hard for me to find statistics about how happy scientists with an MBA are. There isn't a single career i can search, like I did with patent lawyer, and like I will do with health care administrator and epidemiologist, and that complicates things substantially.

What really matters? Factors other than pay Part 3 -- How happy will you be?

Howdy

Last time we talked about work hour for lawyers. I was PLANNING to talk about the same thing for MBAs and MPH's, but I couldn't find any data on either. Instead, I'll skip ahead to what I was going to talk about next week--employment satisfaction.

Being happy and satisfied in your job is one of the main points of the American dream. Unfortunately, reality often intercedes and money takes precedence. As such, the employment satisfaction rate in the U.S. of A is an abysmal 19%.

Scientists in America tend to be substantially happier than their counterparts on other areas of the workforce. A study by Nature says that ~49% of scientists in America report being "very satisfied" with their work, even if only 17% report being satisfied with their pay.

What about patent lawyers? This article in The Scientist, a magazine focused on--you guessed it--scientists says that "Generally, scientists who move from the bench to the bar are satisfied with their decisions" but also reports that it's often difficult to return to research if one so desires because of the stigma associated with "selling out" to become a patent attorney and also because of the fast-paced advancement of science nowadays. But what about exact statistics? Well, according to this survey, 82% of IP attorneys (not just patent attorneys but also copyright and trademark lawyers, who do not require a science degree), report being satisfied and many (32%) make more $300,000 per year but that work is intensive and vacations scarce. Obviously, it varies based on location and what subfield you're in.

And business degrees? Since people who get MBAs are so diverse, it's hard, once again, to find good statistics. This survey says that MBAs are often much happier after the degree than before, mostly for reasons of self-development and hard, fulfilling work. But, those reasons were cited as reasons for scientists' happiness in the Nature article, so it's hard to understand whether this applies to scientist who later choose to go into business. 

Next time, I'll talk more about the conundrums associated with business degree statistics and finally some stuff about the MPH

What really matters? Factors other than pay Part 2 -- Career Breakdown

Howdy

So last time, I talked about the issue of hours and pay. Certainly, jobs with longer hours tend to pay more. Some people are comfortable with working over a hundred hours a week and raking in
$200,000--$400,000 per year. Others prefer to stick to 40 hours a week and make enough to live comfortably. Understanding what you want is crucial for choosing a career. With that, let's talk about lawyers.

As I said before, when you already have a science degree, the main reason you'd go to law school is to become a patent lawyer. These folks check out patent submissions in order to see whether or not they're truly original or innovative in some way. They also help arbitrate patent and intellectual property disputes. Patent lawyers are required to get a degree (at least a bachelor's) in a science or engineering field. They will then deal with patents that have something to do with their field of prior knowledge.

According to this, patent lawyers are sought after primarily because not many scientists or engineers have an interest in law. As a result, they can make more money, while working far less than most lawyers. The poster cites a figure of $150K for 1600 billable hours, or roughly 6.15 hours a day, which seems like an incredibly good deal, but billable hours are not on site or on call. Often, lawyers sit around waiting for work for weeks at a time, and get billed for none of it, and other times, they'll work 70-80 hours a week. So, it's hard to pin down actual hours worked for attorneys. The BLS puts the figure a little at $121,000 per year with no mention of hours worked.

Suffice it to say that, if you're going to be a lawyer, you have to be comfortable with long days for weeks on end punctuated by periods of nothing.

What really matters? Factors other than pay Part 1 -- How long do you want to work?

In choosing a career, pay is definitely important. But, it's often a factor that misleads or is given an undue influence in job selection. There are many other factors to consider. I don't know about you, but for me personally, I'd rather make a lower wage doing something i enjoy than a higher one doing something I hate or is incredibly tedious. It's important, then, that one weighs pay appropriately relative to the other components of a career.

Consider, for instance, the matter of overtime. In hourly positions, workers are paid “time and a half” (1.5x the normal rate) for any work done past the standard 40 hours a week. This is a fair means to ensure that employees are not overworked, and that, if they are, they’re compensated appropriately.

But, in more advanced positions (anything middle management or up, but also including things like teaching) this ceases to be the case. No longer can you simply leave your work in the office. Doing some work after one goes home, and working longer than 40 hours isn’t just acceptable—it’s normal and expected. You’re no longer being paid for the time you work but for the job getting done. But, in most cases, employees are paid a fixed annual salary with no consideration for overtime. This can be a turn-off for those potential promotees, who may refuse such a promotion in order to maintain a more robust social and family life. It also has the adverse effect of often simultaneously increasing absolute salary but decreasing hourly salary, at least at first. In essence, when one is first promoted, their time becomes less lucrative until they work their way up to a still-higher salary. This often comes with increased responsibilities, and thus, more work. It’s not hard to see how one gets from this to the stereotypical hardworking Wall Street salaryman working long hours and having no time for family while bringing home a 6-figure salary.

In the next part, I'll talk more about the complexities of this problem and look at possible changes being implemented on the federal level.

Why get a second degree? Part 3 -- MPH and MHCA

So over the last 2 days, I've gone over the two most common degrees that people take to supplement their already-graduate education. Law degrees provide prestige, Business degrees allow advancement, and both raise salaries. But what about other degrees? Are there other options?

Well, yes, there are. Another degree that can be taken alone or with another (usually life) science is a Masters of Public Health. Why take this degree? Well it allows one inroads into policy-making. Consider how important public health is--how often it comes up as a topic of debate in politics or in the media. Whether it's autism or vaccines, cholera in the water, child obesity, or the newest strain of SARS or H1N1, an MPH allows you to work with any threat to public health imaginable. They work at places like the CDC in Atlanta, or the NHS in Bethesda. They often go abroad to places like Africa to fight AIDS and provide clean drinking water. If you want to make a difference in the world's health, an MPH degree is very attractive.

So how does an MPH pay? The median salary for an epidemiologist is around $65,000 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. That's actually lower than the average for scientists and on par with that of a PhD microbiologist. Pay would probably be higher if one already possessed a graduate science degree, but money is often secondary to people who seek an MPH. Instead, an MPH allows one to make a real difference in the world and influence policy in a positive way.

What else is there? Well, there's a Masters of Health Care Administration, which allows you to do just what it sounds like. With an MHCA, you can run hospitals and things like that. There's a lot of overlap with an MPH, but this degree is more oriented toward management than policy. Many of the people who choose this degree become Medical and Health Service Managers, who make a median salary of around $89,000 per year and there is room for improvement. The field is growing fast, too--about twice as fast as average. So, for those looking for something in public health in the managerial side of things, this could be a good option.

There are other career choices, too, but few of them involve another degree.

Next week I'll begin looking at cost of and average indebtedness after school, as well as time costs for these degrees.

Until next time,

Thomas

Why get a second degree? Part 2 -- MBA

Last time I talked about some reasons why a law degree might seem enticing to someone less devoted to research and more devoted to money. Today, I'll talk about why a business degree seems even more enticing.

So what is a business degree?

Well, a business degree, officially known as a Master of Business Administration degree (or MBA for short), is a degree that proves that you know things about, well, business administration. This includes things from marketing to finance to accounting to hiring and firing. Obviously, you can go and get a specialist degree in any one of those fields, but despite the word "Master" in its title, an MBA certifies you as a sort of Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of person. It shows a certain knowledge of entrepreneurial and financial tasks that is often appealing to employers. 

"But Thomas", you say, I have no interest in business! I want to be a scientist!

Well the great thing about a business degree is it allows you to be promoted upward in almost ANY field. Almost no one (in the corporate world, at least) is going to put some laboratory scientist with little to no administrative experience in charge of anything more than a supply closet, some lab rats, and a few of his fellow scientists. A business degree shows a corporation that you have administrative know-how, without them having to take a risky chance on you, which could cost them a lot of money.

A business degree pays well, too. The median earnings for an American with a Masters' degree in any field is ~$59,000 per year. Not bad but not great. Compare that to a median salary of ~$110,000 for an MBA-holder, no matter the prior occupation. That's close to double. And despite the fact that salaries have been stagnant for a while, it's still a heck of a lot better than research science, where 38% of Ph.D's are unemployed. That's in stark contrast with a nearly 95% American MBA employment rate.

If you're working in industry, an added bonus of an MBA is that you can often get your company to pay for it. They WANT capable management. So, you go to school, get paid to do so, and walk away with better employment prospects and a better salary. Seems good to me.

But that's only one half of the equation for a lot of people. The really cool part about an MBA is that it can be taken in addition to any other degree, so you can keep working in a field you love, but in an administrative capacity.

Now this isn't to disparage research scientists. I'm just saying that, for some people, financials come over the ideal of scientific research.

Tomorrow I'll wrap up this preliminary research series with a discussion of other second degrees, such as the Master of Public Health.

Until next time,

Thomas

Why get a second degree? Part 1 -- Law Degree

Hey y'all. Since I'm technically living in the south right now, and since I'll be going to college in Texas, I figure I ought to use y'all more often.

Probably the most common response to when someone says they're going to get another degree on top of a graduate or even post-graduate degree is "Why?" Why would you want to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours getting another degree when you've a perfectly serviceable, well-paying job?

There are a couple reasons, in general, and specific to the sciences.

With a law degree, you get to, you know, be a lawyer. You get all of the prestige and respect (and bad jokes) that come with that. Even in our technological world, research scientist doesn't carry with it the same oomph, the same gravitas that lawyer does.

But, more importantly, lawyering pays better than science does. For all lawyers, across all types of law, the median salary is $113,000 per year, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. This is even higher for patent attorneys (the main field of law that scientists go into, as it requires a science degree), at $175,000 per year, according to CNN Money. Compare this to an average median salary of $74,000 for all graduate-level life and physical science professions and you begin to see the appeal. Combine that with the fact that after four years of undergrad, and at least 6 years of graduate education, you've spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars only to make $30,000 per year more than the median salary (around $40,000 as of 2010)  and it's understandable that a research scientist would want to take a gamble and move on up.

Finally, law degrees open doors. 38% of the members of the House of Representatives and 55% of the Senate hold law degrees. Barack Obama and 21 other presidents were lawyers. 9.2% of Fortune-500 company CEOs have law degrees, mostly from prestigious universities. Now let's look at scientists. Of the 43 presidents of the United States, only ONE has had any sort of STEM degree (this was Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer) and NONE were scientists. Of all of the 535 members of the United States Congress, only 6 have science degrees. It is easy to see why a scientists who has more on their mind than being in a lab or in academia for the rest of their natural life would see a law degree as a wonderful option.

Tomorrow I'll look at business degrees, and on Thursday, I'll look at other assorted post-graduate degrees, such as a Masters of Public Health.

Until next time, see y'all.

Thomas

Topic Acquired!

I had a meeting with Dr. Matyas yesterday, and I've decided my topic. My research question will be "Is a second degree worth it?" I'll look at whether or not getting a second degree (e.g. a law, business, or public health degree) on top of a graduate-level science degree, can pay off in the long run. I'll look at statistics of salary, career satisfaction, level of attainment, employment, and other such indicators of success, and weigh them against costs such as price of education, time, and familial stresses. I'll try to answer that question with regards to as many different degree and career choices as possible, in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the situation.

Why this topic? Well, the other topic, about the professional skills data, would only really have real-world implications within the American Physiological Society. This topic, on the other hand, has wide-reaching implications for a number of people in post-graduate education.

I'm still going to work on the data I have been, though, as my day job, and do research on the side. The APS has a lot of data with regard to biologists which I will be happy to use, and the professional skills data might come in handy somewhere down the line. But its use will be primarily in the workplace. I might get to be named an author on a paper detailing what I've found though, so that'd be cool.

Next blog will talk about the opening stages of my research and will include the first few items of my bibliography.

Until next time,

Thomas

Discussion

So, I met with Dr. Matyas on Thursday. She and I discussed a number of options for research questions. The Graduate Skills Workshop data is certainly looking to be the most promising one, but I have a few other options. When I went through the committee reports that Dr. Matyas gave me, I found a symposium titled "Should I Get Another Degree?" which discussed, as the name would suggest, whether obtaining a business degree or a law degree in addition to your science degree was a good idea. This was a very interesting subject and I think it might make another good research question. This, unlike the GSW data, allows me to look into something that has implications beyond the APS, which I think is highly valuable. There also might be some prior research on the subject, which will give me a bibliography, something which the GSW data lacks. But, the GSW data would allow me to do more original research, and maybe publish a paper. They both have their merits, and I'm going to have to think about which one I'll pick. 

So in the meeting, we narrowed down my options to these two questions. But, Dr. Matyas wants me to meet with the Science Policy department next week in order to see if anything strikes my fancy there. If not, I will make the final determination by the end of next week and start researching straightaway. That will give me some real content to fill up this blog with.

Until next time,

Thomas

Options

So yesterday I mentioned that I had several options in front of me for research questions. My work at the American Physiological society is, by and large, intern stuff. I file, scan, and shred documents. I sort a lot of files. Tedious as this may be, this gives me access to a lot of data that I can use. As such, my research project will be a bit more internally-oriented than most, probably focusing on some area of APS policy, rather than a general question in science. Still, given what I've got, and the small amount of time I've had to do it, it should serve.

To help me along this road, Dr. Matyas gave me five documents to peruse this week. They were reports from five of the APS's education committees, outlining their current programs and proposing changes. One program that interested me was a graduate Scientific Writing Workshop that the APS held in 2006. This workshop was, as the name says, designed to help new physiologists learn to write scientific papers effectively. The APS wants to know how the people who took the workshop have done since 2006. They want to compare publication numbers with a control group. I spent about 7 hours this week going through the list of the 312 attendees to the workshop and searching through PubMed to see what they'd published. On average, these people have published between 6 and 9 papers each. 33 people had not published anything (at least nothing available on PubMed). The next step would be to chase these people down and see if there have been name changes (in the case of marriage or otherwise) or publications not accessible in PubMed, so that the list can be more complete.

Another area I've looked at, though more cursorily than the last, is the Intel Science and Engineering Fair. The APS is the organization that awards prizes for the physiology and medicine category of this competition, and it'd be interesting to know what the winners have gone on to do.

Other possible areas include science policy, membership statistics, and women and minority inclusion in the sciences, but I have not yet had the chance to look into these very deeply.

On Tuesday, I meet with Dr. Matyas to discuss options. I'll blog then about what we've got. I think, though I'm not sure, that I can make a decision by next Thursday.

Until then, i'll be following the developing crisis in Ukraine. It's not looking pretty over there.

First Blog

Hey y’all.

Für meine erste Blog, werde ich auf Deutsch schreiben. Ich glaube, dass...

just kidding

I’ve been in D.C. for just under a week now and I’m having a great time. Twice, I had to walk a mile in the snow to the metro station, and it was 25 degrees and somehow sunny this whole week but I’ll get used to it. I even ate Ghanaian food on Tuesday. That was new.

But, this is supposed to be a senior project blog, not a vacation blog. As most of you know, my original senior project was to take place at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. I had written up a proposal and a research question and had a whole ton of citations and sources. I was all set and only had to do a bit of research when...

It fell through. In mid-January, we were informed that the institute could no longer take me on, and that all of that work was for naught. BUT, though Mr. Nishan’s wonderful contacts at the American Physiological Society in Bethesda, Maryland, I was able to get another internship lined up, just like that. I still get to go to Washington for two months and everything’s great, but...

I don’t have a research question, and it’s a bit late to formulate one. Fortunately, my supervisor at the APS is their director of education, Dr. Marsha Matyas. I had a phone conference with her a few weeks ago, and she assured me that they would do everything they could to help me find something to research. They have a lot of fingers in a lot of pots in science research, education, and policy, three areas which interest me greatly. So, I was to work there for a while and then come up with something.

Well, I’ve just had my first week working there (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from (9:15 AM to 4:15 PM), and I’m getting closer to a testable hypothesis. I am to meet with Dr. Matyas on Tuesday to discuss and possibly zero in on one of my many options.

What are those options? I’ll blog about those tomorrow.

Start

Hello. This will be my, Thomas Marks', SRP blog. What will that entail? Who knows!