Are you planing to do research all the time? What do you want from doing research, only for making story to get published?

The questions above were asked to me by a my very good friend. I think a while and then regard them as serious questions for deliberation. The key point in these two questions are about carrer plan. Before answering these questions directly, I want to share three stories from me and others.

Story One

A friend and senior fellow apprentice of mine has been being bothered to making decision about his carrer. He is an extraordinary bioinformatics engineer with outstanding skills and techniques. After his doctorial defense, he received three offers as postdoc fellow, one of which was from UThealth. He chose third one deliberately from a China top hospital. However, the hospital lab can not provide demanding resources and his project design is not suitable in that lab. After two months later, he received a new offer from a startup company where he can do what he was interested in, like cloud bioinformatics computing, blockchain et al. He tried to persuade his boss in hospital to quit postdoc, but not success. However his boss was very kind that let him join the startup and request him to do the lab assignment. Then, he left for Beijing in startup. About two years later, the promised investment to startup was terminated by various reasons, his startup capital chain ruptured. A few days ago, he came back and narrated the story above to us. He planned to finish his postdoc in hospital and go for academic pursuit. The story not end.

Story Two

About the same period of time, I got an excellent college classmate message that she is gonging to McKinsey & Company. She is one of the most outstanding girl in our class at that time, and she got repaid for her hard work and conscientious attitude to every thing. She joined a famous lab known for neuroscience in Yale after graduate. Five years later, I was astonished by accident seeing her google scholar list with awesome publications. I thought she would be one of the greatest scientists in the future, and come back to China with a lot of academic titles. She told me that scientific research is another kind of job. She had no sense of satisfaction, for the present, about repeated trivial experiments and low reward as a postdoc. Had long been in academic research feild, taking different carrer could be a new experience of life.

Scientific research is a job