Research vs. Industry

The enticing factor about research in academia is that it holds a unique sense of accomplishment within it. It’s something that you and your team achieved that no other individual or team could achieve in the same way or with the same outcome. It is something that you can be truly proud of, because it is distinctly yours. When comparing research in academia to the scientific industry, both have an expanse of successes that are achievable. However, in industry, these feats aren’t necessarily individual in the same way. The next like-minded, intelligent and hardworking ‘Jane Citizen’ could come along and achieve the exact same thing. Because that is what is expected: reproducibility of someone else’s ‘research’. And yes, there is an element of this reproducibility in the research of academia that is vitally important to the scientific process as it is strongly associated with precision, reliability and durability of a method or finding. But research is always looking for something new, something unknown, something original. Now I’m not saying that one of research or industry is better than the other, because they co-exist, they need each other. One would not function properly without the other.

However, people do have preferences to one or the other. This might boil down to the fact that some of the scientific community is more practically based and leans towards the applied sciences. These people may not have been as traditionally ‘sciencey’ growing up and therefore have gone down a path that is less about the scientific theory and more about the process. Specially, in a chemistry environment, being known as ‘lab technicians’ rather than ‘chemists’. These are typically the people who will be drawn towards industry, sometimes because it’s easy, sometimes because it’s what their passion is.

On the other hand, you have the people who grew up as ‘nerds’, were usually rather intelligent and had a passion for learning. These are the people who are drawn, or pushed, towards a university path. This, conventionally, is supposed to have a major theoretical aspect and thus limited practical applications. The long-standing expectation is that after the completion of university, the scientists would typically go into an academia research position. For science, the role of university in this aspect has shifted. With an increasing societal expectation that attending university will increase and improve your socio-economic standing, earning capability and overall perception by society; the push for tertiary studies has never been greater. Parents want it for their children and schools want it for their students. And yes, I’m sure there are many other factors contributing to the increased attendance of university for the scientific community.

However, just by even attending university, many science students feel as though they are being pushed towards a career in academic research. And sometimes, this is because they are, because this is the traditional role of the university: to conduct research for the greater scientific community. However, many feel as though they are not cut out for research for various reasons. Some of these include financial incentives, the belief that they are not good at scientific writing, having a short attention span and thus being unable to picture themselves “researching one thing for the rest of their life”, the inability to find something that interests them and the high academic standard that some researchers are held to, particularly for Honours or PhD students.

This is not to say that research isn’t fantastic. Because it is. And that sense of achievement and pride is real. I’ve experienced it in a second-year research unit. Nonetheless, those who do enter a career in academic research need to be realistic. Know that you will have those bad days, weeks, months and even years where your research may be unsuccessful or not as you predicted. But it’s from those slumps that the new ideas come; a new method or finding that is discovered when something unexpected happens. And this isn’t always how it happens, but it’s the perseverance and resilience of those who do this work that makes it something to aspire to.

Now let’s talk about my own experience with research and industry, because that is, after all, what I am truly an ‘expert’ in. I come from what my family calls ‘a science/maths brain family’. That is: my dad works in IT, my mum is a chemist, my sister is studying dentistry, one of my brothers is an aeronautical engineer and the other is also a chemist. A science/math brain family. I always took an interest in biology and chemistry but for the last 4-5 years I have tended more towards the chemistry side of things. I was encouraged to go to university and somewhat ‘copied’ what my older brother (the chemist) had done. Given the opportunity to work in an immunology lab in my first year of university opened my eyes slightly to what the world of research in academia looked like.

This interpretation of academic research was further broadened when I decided to complete a second-year research project unit in chemistry. The small cohort that undertook this unit were given almost complete autonomy over who they worked with and what their project was. This freedom felt vastly different to anything that I had so far experienced in what I now call the ‘teaching labs’, i.e. the labs during your non-research science units. And the freedom was refreshing. It felt like the freedom that I had sought when I chose to complete a generic science degree rather than something slightly more restrictive such as biomedicine. The unit itself was wonderful. I had a great supervisor, a great group and a relatively accessible project for a second year to complete that also tested and expanded my limits in scientific knowledge and skills at the same time. And most importantly, I worked hard, put the effort and was effectively rewarded in terms of my overall unit grade: something that does not always occur in normal science unit.

Consequently, I went searching for the other main possible career path: industry. By attending an industry expo night, I stumbled across the large world that is industrial chemistry and all the graduate and internship positions that are available. Having applied for numerous of these, I finally got a summer internship at a mine in central Queensland as an undergraduate chemist.

Having almost completed the internship, here are a couple of things that I have learnt. Firstly, most people in the mine site laboratory are from an applied sciences background (i.e. lab technicians) and automatically consider me to know more things than I do because I am a chemist at uni. Being more proficient in the use of spreadsheets would’ve been helpful and saved lot of time as a fair bit of the work is data analysis. Industrial chemistry is very much governed by the commercial outcomes for the company and this can control much of the work that is completed as well as restrict the possibility of new techniques and instruments to be introduced as they may not be as commercially viable as the current ones are. There are also many more instruments and methods available for analytical chemistry than are taught at uni. A couple of examples of these are X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) and carbon/sulphur analysis (uses oxygen to extract the carbon and sulphur as their respective oxides). Lastly, due to the automation of analytical techniques and methods, there is a decreasing demand for industrial chemists, especially in the mining industry.

Something else that I have also noticed, is that industrial chemistry is barely taught at university, or at least at my own. Part of the reason does boil down to university aiming to deliver people in academic research rather than industry. But how does the regular student know what chemistry is like in the mining, food, agriculture, manufacturing and environmental industries? The closest my uni comes to this, at least at the second year level, is one analytical chemistry unit and one food chemistry unit. I only completed the analytical chemistry unit, but from an outside point of view, food chemistry is known as the ‘bludge’ subject: no exam, easy content and grades all relying on lab performance and reports. Something that is relatively easy as a chemistry student if the effort is put in. The larger issue I have is with the analytical chemistry unit. Due to previous versions of the unit, the analytical focus of the unit is based around forensic chemistry, a very niche aspect of analytical chemistry. I believe that the subject has the opportunity to explore all types of analytical chemistry within all types of industry. But instead, it frames all practical components around fake court cases where you conduct analyses of things like gunshot residue, illegal contamination of soils and spiking of wine with ethanol. All of which sound cool and are actually relatively interesting in class, but have very little future application to the majority of chemistry students. This also doesn’t appeal to very many of the students who take the course and thus decreases the incentive to go onto further study in analytical chemistry in third. Thus, there is no awareness of how the content in third year could be different and more useful for the students in their third year moving out into the workforce. Students, like myself, may be more inclined to continue their third year study in synthetic chemistry, something that is less useful from an industrial chemistry point of view.

Moving forward into my final years of study and further on in my chemistry career: do I know which of research or industry is right for me? At this stage, I have no clue. The summer internship has not helped definitively answer this question as well as I would’ve liked. I am currently going to rely on getting more experience in research labs during my third year of study and potentially also try to obtain another internship in a different field to the previous one. This is to try and help me make up my mind. However, I do have a feeling that I may bounce between the two at different times during my life.