Lab Funding Outlook: Time to Move Forward or Pull the Ripcord?

Last week’s poll on the future of lab funding was less than positive.  In fact, the optimists must have been busy congratulating eachother on future successes because it seems they missed the poll altogether.  In truth, a negative forecast is to be expected from time to time in a naturally cyclic economy, so the results themselves should not be cause for alarm.  However, responsible scientists – looking at the data – may conclude otherwise.

In choosing a profession, there are at least two major categories most of us consider at some level.  First, what is our passion – What do we love to do? While finding your passion may be a lifetime’s work, at a basic level we gravitate towards things we like doing.  This is balanced by the second question – How will our lives be affected by our decision to follow our passion? This includes many of the logistical considerations of a career such as salary, hours, location, flexibility, and autonomy – each of which will paint a picture of what we can expect from life.

The decision to pursue a career path is a balance of these two questions.  Does our chosen career path offer us a vision of the life we desire?  For example, if our passions are “sleeping all day” and “procrastinating”, we should get comfortable with a lifestyle that includes “living in our car” and “getting fired a lot”.

In light of the lab funding poll, we may expect that over the next several years we will see increased competition for grant funding and tighter lab operating budgets.  As a practical consequence, newly minted PIs might spend more time writing grants to support smaller labs.

As we discussed, there is always a natural ebb and flow in an economy and we certainly hope good times are not far off.  Yet, many senior graduate students and postdocs are now looking ahead to their next career steps and weighing their passions versus lifestyles.  In this process, is the lab funding outlook affecting young scientists’ decisions to pursue a career in research?  What if we could be certain funding was going to deteriorate for the next 10 years?

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Have any reasons why the lab funding outlook should or shouldn’t impact our career decisions?

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