Career advice is needed I feel I'm failing. - (Jan/02/2013 )

Hi, Goggi.......
I was looking around (sneaking for advices ), I saw your post and decided to write you....
How are you doing 6 months later?
I suppose your are less than 30, I see that your English is quite good and......you are in Great Germany.
If you don`t like science and feel disappointed, why don`t you start looking for a job in the farmaceutical industry? Like Clinical trial assistant or junior Clinical research associate? They don`t need PhD holders but young and energetic people.
If I only knew this few years ago.....I would not pass through the Hell named PhD.
However, I wouldn`t have met my future husband, too

Greetings!

Not any better then when I wrote the initial post.

I'm still at the same "place". Let's see if i could write something that looks like a "thesis". What I am doing? First of all, I'm trying to cope with the depression. It's quite a challenge! I'm simply tired of being depressed.
I call my PhD "a complete and undeniable failure". It's not something particularly bad. It is more a sum of unfortunate circumstances that completely melted me down. Just to point a few things... I was a member of so called EU "Initial Training Network" . I think the idea of I.T.N. is quite good in principle. Yet, I believe that such Initial Training more suits M.Sc. students that need orientation than research PhD's. Secondly, it was rather ill-organized. There were 10 or so partners, each of them had to organize a "workshop". Each workshop equals 1 week. I had to attend. I had to travel, I had to travel like "hell". Unfortunately, P.I. would like a prospective PostDoc to present papers and research breakthroughs, not a list of attended workshops! So for anybody reading this - beware of EU Initial Training Networks!
Is is quite amazing that during one of the meetings my P.I. told me that everybody admits the unnecessarily large amount of traveling and he will warn beforehand all future PhD applicants of him! Well, I am happy for the future PhD applicants, but what about me? Why didn't he warn me? The guy (the P.I.) is absolutely shameless! Add here the project that I had to start from scratch. Add no supervision. etc etc.
I tried to apply for some industry jobs, unfortunately, without success. Now I'm trying to get a postdoc position somewhere in Europe. So far, also w/o success.
I have a bunch of complications, like that I'm not an EU-citizen, I didn't manage to learn German (as I wanted to do). I believe my chances to get a job in bio-industry are 0. I'm monitoring the job ads and for most of jobs my skills simply don't match. For jobs like Clinical trial assistant or junior Clinical research associate you still need the corresponding education/experience.

Goggi on Fri Jun 21 21:21:38 2013 said:

I never understand difference between good decision from bad one & i guess never will. I guess you try to do best you can, if you can't you don't say i did wrong, say I did my best! .

I guess the topic could be re-named to "Advice on anti-depressants or alcohol is needed, I failed". speaking realistically , there is no valid career advice for me, specially in current economic situation.

Although this may sound like an empty phrase, but when I look around me I see people writing tons of applications and sometimes it takes years but then they get a job, so: Keep going !!
There are many people out there in the same situation, so don't think that you failed. (Incidentally I can somewhat relate to this feeling due to things that happened during my thesis, but really there is always a better time ahead.)

It's interesting to hear that Germany doesn't require PhD graduates to have a paper.
Even on our university (just a border east from Germany) the requirement for finishing a PhD is at least 3 papers, two of which has to be first author, two of which (not necessarily the same) has to be original papers (not reviews) and at least one in a journal with an impact factor. This also means that if your PI prefer to submit only as high impact as possible, you spend 7 years doing PhD, but that's a different story

Trof on Sat Jul 6 10:57:18 2013 said:

Pretty stupid that you need to have first author publications. And that your PI can keep you at the lab like that... a shame!

I don't think so. PhD here is defined also as ability to acomplish own project with tangible output. So you work on something that is mainly your work, so you logically have at least one first author paper. The second one usually is a review you write about subject into local peer-reviewed paper. Then you have paper or more from other projects you participate. I don't think it's such bad to require this, completion of at least one main project and participation on other.
And for the other part, that honestly not solely a fault of my PI, and more he doesn't want to stall papers, but.. he kind of does when he's waiting for enough complex data to be accepted in a better journal. Since both the financing of the department and even the student's reputation grow up with a higher-impact journal publication, it's really not a malevolence. And since I work mostly on clinical samples, this could create considerable delays, too. And when the work on main project depend almost exclusively on me, additional health and other issues for example can also prolong the overal time spend doing PhD.

Trof on Sat Jul 6 12:41:41 2013 said:

I am not saying that you should not publish anything, but stating that you need 3 papers and 2 first author- papers.. thats just a bit harsh. Keep in mind that sometimes things dont go as planned. You can be the best researcher out there, if you have bad luck , its possible you end up with 0 or perhaps 1 publication (and 1 review paper just to get an extra paper). 7 years for a PhD is just too long.... I also wonder what the fuzz is about those impact factors... People should start to realise that impact factors are not always a great thing or the best thing. What if you work in a field that is very specific and you can pretty much only publish in journals that have low impact factors because only a select group of scientists will read it? And what about nature: papers need to be so short that its pretty hard to publish anything in it that needs some more explenation/results etc...

Yes things don't go as planned. But there is this opinion, that PhD have to create someting, accomplish something. And that is usually proven by a paper.
They were telling us in college, you may do your masters thesis on something that failed, you just write there you could do it because... you are not required to have an actual accomplishment. That you tried, is enough for MSc. But..not for PhD.
If something fails and you have a bad luck.. well you need to try again, as part of the PhD title is an actual accomplishment. Not everyone will finish it, but not everyone need to finish it.

I think that the idea that somewhere in the line of a scientists growth you actually have to prove you are able to finish something meaningfull to get a title is not that bad.
If you are the best researcher there is, and you have bad luck, you will try again, it will take time and definitelly some people are forced to drop due to external factors they couldn't influence, but.. that's life.
And not every scientist need to be a PhD too, that doesn't makes him less.

And it's mostly not that harsh here, as the grave majority finish. And still there are differences, some institutes just want to produce PhDs (because they are payed for having them) so they finish within 3 years with papers needed, and written just to fullfill the requirements.
Our PI just doesn't want that, writing papers for papers, it takes a time to get a good paper, but it's better than to have a quick paper and we and colleagues are fine with this.
I would definitelly agree that 7 years is too much, it's also the last possible limit, even here I kind of stick out with that

And as for impact factors, there has been kind of conclusion reached widely, that it's not the best scientometrics.. even in the biology field where it was designed to fullfill it's function, but it's really difficult to find something else that would take this role. So far this is just a very easy way for goverment to compare the efficiency of the money they give out, eventhough it's a bad way.. there is still no other.
Of course IFs are always compared within the field of study, and it's not an absolute classification, there are more specialised journals and more broad ones, still IF stays at least as a general way to weight journal quality (eventhough I know about journals with high IF, that actually has a very variable content in regard to quality). And as for Nature.. it stays as a bit popular journal and a hallmark of belonging to "the top", usually you have a brief breakthrough paper in Nature and at the same time you publish the real detailed results in some normal journal.
Deciding on the "quality" of reseach is probably one of the most complex and complicated things nowadays.. but it needs to be adressed, because there is so much fields today and money is limited, that only those quality ones should be supported.. and then you need to chose which one is it. But that is probably a very wide topic for some other time.