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Asked by alexck678 to Mark, Matthew, Mike, Paul, Sabina on 7 Mar 2014.
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Matthew Malek answered on 7 Mar 2014:
I got my first “real job”, as a postdoctoral research assistant, directly after finishing my PhD. I was 28 at the time. (PhDs in the United States take a bit longer than they do in the UK)
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Paul Coxon answered on 7 Mar 2014:
I finished my PhD at 28, then started in my first research post as a postdoc immediately after. As an experimentalist, my PhD took slightly longer than those of my theorist friends, as they were never troubled by equipment failures or waiting for data to be collected.
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Sabina Hatch answered on 7 Mar 2014:
I was 29 when I started my research job. This is older than some but relatively common. My PhD took around 3 years, but before that I did a few jobs that were not science related. It took me a while before I realised I wanted to have a career in science.
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Mark Jackson answered on 7 Mar 2014:
When I was 10 years old I became good friends with the school busdriver. He was an amazingly skilled computer programmer, but for reasons unknown to me drove the school bus.
He encouraged me to write a version of the computer game “Snake” in which you are a snake that must keep moving forward. You can choose the direction the head moves and the body will follow. Hitting the edge of the screen, or your own body, ends the game. You gain points by eating food, but this also makes your body grow, and thus the game gets harder. After a while your body might cover most of the screen, making it very difficult to navigate around!
Writing this program was my first “major” project in computer programming, taking about a month for me to write in BASIC on an Apple IIe. As a reward, he bought me a few candy bars. He also suggested I try to sell it to the school for use in their computer lab. They only paid me $1, but what I remember was how proud I felt watching the other kids play my game. So I think that qualifies as my first “job in science.”
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Mike Lee answered on 8 Mar 2014:
I do think of a PhD as a job! I started when I was 22. I’ve never had a “real” job.
Comments
lumiereclair commented on :
OMG, I used to love playing Snake on my phone!
On a more serious not, it seems like the average age for getting a ‘proper science job’ after getting a PhD is 28 years old. Which is a long time to be studying for. Just goes to show how much there is to science…
lumiereclair commented on :
And thank-you to everybody for the great answers!
alexck678 commented on :
thanks for answering:)