The key to your success is in your ideas, not the job postings.
We have all dreamt about landing a gig as a professor — inspiring young students in much the same way Robin Williams did in The Dead Poets Society, or coaching the incredible potential out of an unlikely genius like Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.
But let’s face it, becoming a professor is no easy feat. To illustrate that idea, how about an unsettling and quite depressing analogy courtesy of the folks over at Slate.com?
Comparing the odds of getting tenured to the 6% survival rate of small-cell lung cancer, author Rebecca Schuman asks, “…Would you smoke four packs a day with the specific intention of being in that 6 percent?”
Big thanks to Rebecca for driving the point home! It’s a great analogy because it gets the point across. It’s also a not so great analogy because, man, that is dark!
The good news is, there are a lot of other ways to apply yourself out there — be it in bioengineering, neuroscience, or whatever background you have. You just have to focus on the right things. Things like identifying which problems and which solutions you want to dedicate yourself to.
This is what Sam Molyneux did. A cancer genomics PhD. student now in his seventh year (okay, hand over one pack of those cigarettes) at the University Health Network in Ontario, Canada, Sam twisted his passion for problem solving into a start-up. In 2009, well before he was even close to finishing his doctorate, he co-founded Sciencescape.
Sam, who probably has no more then 15 minutes to brush his teeth and sleep each night, turned his greatest challenge in graduate school — keeping current with all the research relevant to genomics — and made it an opportunity, eventually teaming up with his sister, Amy, and co-founding the company.
What’s so great about Sciencescape? Aside from product itself, what's also brilliant is that it is a manifestation of Sam's idea to revolutionize the way scientists keep up with research.
Molyneux’s work, of course, reminds us at JoVE of the beginning of our story, which began with our CEO, Moshe Pritsker, deciding to leave his research in pursuit of an idea for a more effective means for scientists to communicate their work.
And we are certainly not saying you shouldn’t pursue work in academia. We just mean to encourage scientists out there to be inspired not by any particular job, but instead by their ideas and the potential for them to make a great impact in the world.
Sam, we'll let you finish this one off with some advice for all the lost or aspiring scientists out there:
My advice would be to seek big important problems. None of us live all that long or have careers as long as we might like to work on some of the hard problems that are out there. So seek important problems, because your time is valuable and you deserve to work on them. And don't worry so much about whether you're going to handle that problem in academia or in industry.
What do you think? Let us know with a comment below!
Special thanks to Dave McIlwain, post-doctoral fellow at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and Chief Scientist at Sciencescape Inc., for making this interview possible.