Fourth year is starting in two days, and the progress meter is at a standstill. While there are day-to-day frustrations with experiments and strange results, the sudden (or not-so-sudden) realization that we're a little closer to graduation (hopefully) and finding a real job can be jarring. I heard more stories of people leaving their PhD programs in the past year; they decided the pressures experienced in academic research weren't worth the end product of having the degree. Even amongst the people who stay, I find that more are struggling to figure out what the next step is going to be.
For instance, one of my friends is experiencing a few funding issues in his lab. We were talking about the pros and cons of a career in academia, and came to the conclusion that we might not be as well-prepared for such a career as we once thought. Nobody enjoys the grant-writing process, and I have limited patience when it comes to teaching. At the end of it, he said "industry doesn't look so bad now, does it?" He might as well have said it to himself as to me, since when we started grad school, he was vehemently anti-industry and didn't like the idea of science for profit's sake. Now that we've spent a bit more time here, we're both wondering what we might and might not be cut out for.
Being in industry has its own problems, and even people in that field may be rethinking what they want to do. Someone I know who is currently an industry postdoc is considering a career switch. It seems to be that there are more freedoms in academia than in industry; there's no well-defined end result in academia, whereas in industry all the time and resources are poured into drug development or disease therapy. That's not to say that all of academic research is purely for knowledge, but from my own basic science perspective, the line between academics and industry is much more pronounced.
Looking back at the past few years, I feel like I just stumbled into grad school. The story begins much earlier that college, however. In high school, my counselor highly suggested taking AP biology as prep for the college premed track; taking this class was enough for me to major in biology in college, and even though I started out premed (like everyone else), the further I went along in my college career, the more I realized that I didn't want to pursue medicine. A series of dev bio classes, a certain GSI, and a string of lab rotations helped me carve out what I wanted to do in grad school...and here I am, working on a project I enjoy that borders development and evolution.
My biggest problem now is that I can't "stumble into" the next step. I'm having some doubts about staying academia after graduation (when that happens), but so far I know that I want to remain close to the science.
