Originally Posted by
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What, in your opinion, are the dis/advantages of being a Marine Biologist?
If you could do it all over again, would you have chosen this field? Why?
What do you find the most satisfying part of this field?
What do marine biologists make as a salary?
What do I need to do to become a marine biologist? (schooling, courses, etc.)
How demanding and stressful is this field of work?
What happens during a day of a marine biologist's life?
It could be all BS for all I care, as long as it looks legit as if a real marine biologist/ someone in that type of field answered it, hehe. Care to answer some questions ophiura? :cheer:
Well, when I was in school, and I finished graduate school about 17 years ago, LOTs of prople wanted to become marine biologists of the "flipper" variety - meaning that they wanted to work with "cool" animals, preferably dolphins, whales, seals, sharks etc. (Few wanted to work with serpulid tube worms, for example.) Most of these folks were interested in the life of a biologist as it was always portrayed on TV. You know, lots of adventure, getting paid to get a tan, and diving on tropical reefs with Jaques Cousteau...
Those folks had to pay for graduate school, and very few of them are employed doing anything even remotely remunerative or similar to what they imagined when they were in school.
What's it take? Good grades, good GRE scores, some personality, lots of patience, and plenty of time. It's four years to a B.S. degree in Biology or Chemistry, and
at least four more to earn a PhD - and that is the basic minimum education level if you wish to make a career in science. (You can bail out with a Master's degree if you only wish to be a technician, or teach at the high-school/junior college level.) The life of a grad student is, generally, fun. There isn't much money, but it's a pretty rich, good quality of life. The nature of the work depends on the lab in which you work.
Lots of marine biologists work almost entirely in the lab - working on things like hemoglobin binding efficiency or something similarly narrow in focus. For folks like that, the average day is quite similar to any other office job, except they're going to the lab, not the office. I worked in a lab for about a year, and I found it lonely and tedius. I was ready to move on. (The big project was very interesting, but the piece by piece data collection was painfully slow, boring, and mechanical.)
Grad students earn diddly. When I was in school I got about $700 per month - but the tuition is FREE :happy: . Post-docs earn diddly too, but it's the first thing that seems like a real job. If you want to do research and teach, and you've done great independent research published in a good journal, you might just land a job as a professor - making somewhere between $60K to 150K plus, usually, great benefits and LOTS of time off. If your field of study is of interest to a pharmaceutical manufacturer, you might be able to double those salaries - but that depends on how unusual, how good, and how "necessary" your research was.
On the stress front: That's a pretty subjective thing. The Safeway cashier thinks she's got a stressful job. In fact, I know very, very few people who don't think they have a stressful life. I guess if the upper limits are defined by Neuro-surgeons, District Attorneys who prosecute capital murder cases, combat fighters and pilots, marine biologists probably score pretty low on the stress-o-meter.
Least satisfying: #1) You know how ecosystems work and what needs to be done to protect them, but the dum-dums making policy have other plans, #2) You don't earn enough money 3#) The job is characterized by LONG periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of excitement.
Most satisfying: #1) Working on things that can better the world, #2) Working with great people with similar concerns and interests, #3) Low stress, relaxed attire, less formal lifestyle #4) There is little controversy...people don't "hate" biologists. You can't say that about all the above-listed, high-stress professions: With lots of recognized responsibility comes lots of grumpy people who resent the authority/responsibility/power. Biologists have none of the above - at least in the popular view - so they have few automatic grumps out to get them
You can take all of this with several POUNDS of salt, as I am a biologist who chose another path while in grad school. (I bailed in the doctoral program with an MS in Quantitative Genetics, a sub-field in Population Biology/Ecology; I also taught Molecular Genetics and Biochemistry to pre-med students...yuck
)
It was a positive experience, like most working experiences in life, but I do not think I would do it again. Maybe somebody who stuck with it might feel differently. They'd also be a more competent source ...but at leat you have SOMETHING to write...
