Academic Science: Not A Care Bears Fucking Tea Party

Academia, like many professional career enterprises in the United States, is structured in a winner-takes-all format. Many people enter the enterprise at the bottom level, trickle their way upwards, until a relative few make it to the top and enjoy the spoils of true scientific independence. This kind of system is common to academia, professional sports, law, medicine, performing arts, entertainment, comedy, business, entrepreneurialism, journalism, engineering, and most other professional career enterprises.

We Americans have a real love-hate relationship with highly-competitive winner-take-all type systems like this.
Americans are obsessively enamored with professional sports–where literally millions of youngsters work their tails off thinking that some day they will be a professional athlete in the “big leagues”, and maybe a few thousand make it in one sport or another. Americans can’t get enough of “reality teevee”, where thousands and thousands of people apply to be on these shows, and then a couple dozen get on the show, and then through a merciless process of personal and public humiliation, they get winnowed down to a single “winner”. Americans are obsessed with extreme wealth and celebrity, thinking that if only things were just *slightly* different, they’d be in the back of the limo sipping Cristal with Paris, Trump, and P Diddy.
But when it comes to the mundane reality of ordinary life, schools, jobs, hobbies, etc, all of a sudden, people are no longer interested in this kind of pyramidal “meritocracy” (real or otherwise), and want *everyone* to be able to *win*, so long as they “put in the effort”. Schools are encouraged to “build self-esteem” rather than teach children to “compete to succeed”. Post-docs complain because there are simply no guarantees that if you just work hard, you will some day become a PI. Students complain when they fail courses and are not given degrees, because they “tried really hard” and “really need the grade/degree”.
This is a manifestation of a duality present at the core of our national being, one that leads to all sorts of denial of reality. On the one hand, Americans love the idea that there are elite international institutions like Yale and Harvard with exceedingly high academic and social standards, where the societal elite naturally go, but were “normal people” can also go if they just “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”. But on the other hand, Americans also love the idea that *anyone* can go to some college or another and get a degree if they can pony up a little cash.
We want there to be elite statuses and institutions in this country, but we want everyone to be able to obtain and enter them, respectively. Rail against the “system” of academic science all you want, but it is just one manifestation among many of an attitude towards professionalism, careers, and social status that completely permeates American society.
Our purpose here at DrugMonkey is to try to help people identify and cultivate the tools required to succeed within the system of academic science as it currently exists. We did not create this system, and we are not in a position to to “take it down”. We do the best we can to help the people we train in our own labs to succeed within this system, and we try to share some of our insights here at the blog.
In a winner-take-all system like this, there will always be people who do not succeed through no fault of their own. People who are smart, talented, dedicated, hard-working, articulate, persuasive, and who do all the right things sometimes still fail. This is the nature of a winner-take-all system: there is an intrinsic randomness that influences to some extent who succeeds and who fails. It is the same in professional sports, law, medicine, performing arts, entertainment, comedy, business, entrepreneurialism, journalism, engineering, and most other professional career enterprises.
Many of us may not like this situation, but this is how things currently work. Academic science is not a fucking Care Bears tea party, and wishing that it were is not going to make it so.
One available personal choice in the face of this reality is to try to do everything in one’s power to maximize the likelihood of success, while accepting that failure might still be the outcome. Our intended audience consists of people making this particular choice.
This does not mean that other choices do not exist, or are invalid. But we are not in a position to address people making those other choices, because, frankly, we have no way to be helpful. But we can be helpful to people who make the choice to work within the system in an attempt at finding professional fulfillment.