Career in Science and Engineering - a road to misery, poverty, and suicide

2015-11-01T22:02:00.000+11:00

I will be dead by the time this post is published - I decided to kill myself after a long, fruitless and frustrating search for my first (and last) postdoctoral position. Sitting alone in my small apartment in a third-world shithole, receiving rejection after rejection, I began to slide into depression and misery.

You can cope with only so many rejections before you realise the bitter truth: the world just does not want you. You are either too smart, or overqualified, or not mature enough, or whatever reason they tell you to just kick you out. Being valued so little by the same world that qualified you so high is hard to endure.

I put so much effort into earning the Ph.D. degree, sacrificed so many things... and yet my best is still not good enough. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try - it just does not make any difference.

But I finally found my postdoc in Marseille (LAM), France. The academic post I wanted so much and which I looked for more than one and a half year - and here it is, a useless bureaucratic drag with endless meetings and management.

It was the most gruesome, dreadful and miserable experience in all my life. I had become bitterly disillusioned about research and academia, which was my dream and life's goal. I become mentally beaten after months of arguing with these ``research people'' that falsifying the data and faking the results is not the way to go. By now I'm emotionally distraught and miserable, and one day I just said ''ENOUGH''. Here is why.

The Plague of 20th century - brainless ``science'' administrators and managers

''Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.'' - Philip Greenspun

If you think that University is a place for thinking and solving hard but rewarding problems - you will be grossly disappointed. It is more or less an office - just like those cubicle farms for dreadful mediocrity and brainless bureaucrats.

Those smart but unfortunate people in universities are pressured by their clueless managers to pump out more and more articles - it does not matter that these articles are mostly useless, non-reproducible and ridiculously over-specialised. Everything is shallow, everything is short-term, short-sight, risk-aversion and stinks of Harvard-business-school.

Writing more articles instead of writing good articles is absurd: it is like forcing artists to paint more pictures, regardless of their quality and content. Surely Leonardo da Vinci was a looser, wasting years on Mona Lisa....

Nowadays the universities are turned into assembly-line factory, producing useless pseudo-science papers and awarding ''MS'' and ''PHD'' pieces of paper to chinese and indian dimwits. At the University of Newcastle, Australia, where I got my Ph.D. degree, the engineering students were asking me such outrageous questions about basic mathematics that I though they were joking. Once I went to a university in Melbourne (RMIT) to discuss a bogus (but published!) optimisation algorithm with a professor and his student - ending up lecturing a mathematics Ph.D. candidate about his own field of study. If there is something more depressing, it is the fact that when I'm invited to review articles, I mostly reject them due to their shockingly bad quality.

There is no drive to invent any more, no drive to be exceptional. You want to know why you think that we have too many engineers? Because we have too many business majors and managers. IBM is selling itself to chinese, Nokia was crushed by Elop and sold to Microsoft for peanuts, HP is a shell of its former self (thanks to female MBA Carly Fiorina), Bell labs are no more. There is little creativity left in science and engineering.

Things are getting even worse: thanks to scumbags from Wall Street, who destroyed the World's economy as we know it, there are no money even for postdocs, let alone tenured faculty positions. But even if you get lucky and secure a postdoc, it will pay you just above the poverty line in the US and UK. Someone with the same amount of luck, skill, and passion to become a tenured university professor could also without too much trouble become a managing director at an investment bank or a portfolio manager at a hedge fund and make $1m/year.

Tenured position and funding battle

"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it." -- [Albert Einstein]

You got lucky to have a tenure? Bad news: as Prof. Jonathan Katz rightfully pointed out, the struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems.

Read the sad story of Douglas C. Prasher who made a breakthrough discovery in genetics with Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP). He wrote a grant detailing how GFP could be used as a reporter to measure the levels of gene expression and track the localization of proteins in cells. Every geneticist and molecular biologist today uses GFP assays in their research. GFP revolutionized the field and allowed scientists to make rapid leaps forward. Not surprisingly, the work for GFP received the Nobel Prize. Only, Prasher did not win it: he was unable to find a job in science, his life savings had run out and that he was working as a courtesy shuttle bus driver for a Toyota dealership in Huntsville, Alabama, at $8.50 an hour.

A more recent example: in Australia, the Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt was rejected of funding from the ARC (Australian Research Council). He branded Australia's higher education funding system as ''crazy'' for giving incentives for teaching as many students as cheaply as possible. ''You get what you pay for in education; clever country, my ass,'' he said.

Yes, Australia, you have a shortage of skilled people, a shortage of engineers and scientists. With such an attitude I'm wondering why do you have these people at all. When you see this kind of attitude towards scientists and researchers, you wonder why people still enter postgraduate schools at universities. Well, they don't - not in the First World, at least. Back in Newcastle, Australia, the Electrical Engineering school consisted of iranians, chinese and indians. I was the only one European. Same story is in the USA. Young Americans have generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence of a reasonable middle class career path in science and are deserting it.

Being smart is a bad thing, is not needed, and is punished by a so called ''developed'' society. Every nerd and geek on the planet would agree with it from a personal experience.

Getting a Ph.D. - too late to turn back

''I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.'' -- Jonathan Katz

If you think that your misery is finally over - welcome to the quicksand of disappointment, frustration, and desperation. Those brainless politicians, bean-counters, lawyers and managers, who populate the governments of the ''developed'' world, seem to have figured out all the science they need and therefore routinely cut the funding for universities. As for industry, it has been almost completely destroyed by ''effective managers'' and shipped to china and india.

Becoming a scientist is possibly the worst decision a person can ever make. An american academic scientist earns less than an air-plane mechanic, has less job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer hours than a Bolivian silver miner.

I wish someone gave me this advice when I wanted to become a researcher - don't even try:

No jobs, no money, no thrill, no hope.

Now I've become a professional beggar for ever-dwindling grant money just like all my colleagues. I've got too far to turn back and it is too late to choose another career. I don't want it any more.

I'm tired, depressed, mentally beaten, lonely, bitterly disappointed, and miserable human being who run out of hope and purpose. If I had one wish, it would not be to have chosen a different career - it would be to have never been born.

All I want is to stop this worthless life. At least this final act will not be as painful and miserable as the rest of my useless life: thanks to the Exit Bag and available helium gas, one can end his life in a quick and painless manner.

I'm done, and I don't want to be a part of this screwed-up world any more.

Helium Bag Suicide

2015-10-12T20:19:00.000+11:00

The Steps to a Painless Self-Euthanization:

Read through the steps several times until you fully understand the procedures and exactly what you are doing.
Buy a plastic bag, like a oven bag for cooking. Oven roasting bag (19x24 Inch =45x60cm). Check the bag for holes or leaks. If you blow it with air you would be able to check in case it leaks.
Buy a helium canister, like a party balloon kit. Be aware, however, that some manufacturers intentionally dilute the helium up to 20% with air. Be sure that any 30-balloon tanks you purchase are marked thus on the box and tank:
NET CONTENTS 8.9 ft
HELIUM (.25 m).
If any size of tank or box (30 or 50-balloon) has the words:
HELIUM/AIR
These are unsuitable for self-deliverance. Do not use. An 8.8 cubic feet tank of helium should be enough to achieve this, although a bigger 14.9 cubic feet (0,42 m3) tank better.
Take off the plastic nozzle of the tank. (Use any type of pliers for this. You can also do it carefully with a carpet knife if you have trouble finding out what type of plier to use). Attach 4' plastic tubing (5/16th inch inner diameter; 7/16th inch outer diameter) to the nozzle that releases the helium. The tube must fit snugly.
Make your own exit bag, using the video "Doing this with Betty" or the original book "Final Exit"
Situate yourself comfortably in a chair or bed. Do not eat any food for sixteen hours prior to the self-euthanization. A light snack is exceptable about two hours before the passing. Eating increases the chances of vomitting so take some antacid beforehand. Only drink water if thirsty. Relieve your bladder and bowels prior to the event. You may use a particle mask so the bag will not touch your face.
Open the valve and close it immediately. That's for the first opening of the tank.
Place the bag on your head such that the margins of the bag cover only the ears and your forehead.
Now, the most important thing is to get the air out of the bag. If you have air there, you won't lose consciousness quickly. Most literature recommends doing it by squeezing the bag with both hands on your head to deplete the air. However, I suggest that this way there is a good option that air would be present. Alternatively, you can simply put the bag on a flat surface, roll it back and forth to get all the air out and then you may close it tight, while leaving long enough margins (after the place where you close the bag with your hand tight), for placing the bag with the band, back on your forehead and ears. By doing so, you are more likely to get rid of all the air.
Now, open the valve and let the bag inflate with helium. You should now be prepared to pull the margins of the bag with the band over your head. The rubber should not be too tight since you need to leave some room for the CO2 you exhale, to get out of the bag through the bottom.
Now, VERY IMPORTANT: exhale all the air in your lungs BEFORE pulling the bag over your head. There is logic here, since you need to get rid of all CO2 in your lungs. So you need now to make a big exhalation, then hold your breath, pull the inflated bag over your head with the band, and now, you should take a very deep breath(of the Helium in this inflated bag), when inside the bag.
Continue to breathe normally, unconsciousness should follow quite quickly.

For further knowledge and instruction, read "Final Exit" and "Peaceful Pill". All information and diagrams for this webpage, was collected from "Supplement to Final Exit." Humphry, Derek. Supplement to Final Exit. Denver: Norris Lane Press and ERGO, 2001

Disclaimer

The webpage is only a reference as to how someone might end their life. I am in no way encouraging people to commit suicide, only offering the knowledge of how to peacefully end one's life if terminally ill.

Based on this webpage.