What can I do if I want a career in neuroscience?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what I might want to do for a career. This is something I do regularly, but I’m especially focused on it now because I’m in the process of going back to college after dropping out and working in retail for a year (NEVER AGAIN!). I have so few credits at the moment that I’ll be essentially a first-semester freshman this fall, so I don’t really need to think about a career yet. But since I’m already thinking about it, I’d like to be able to realistically consider my options.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure I want to do something in neuroscience. It’s been a particular interest of mine since about seventh grade, when I wanted to be a neurologist. I no longer think being a medical doctor is for me (I don’t think I’d be good with patients, for one thing), but ever since I gave up that dream, I haven’t been able to come up with any other career ideas more specific than “something neuroscience-related.” I guess I just don’t know what’s out there. So I’m asking you–what are some examples of neuroscience careers? More specifically, for a given job, what sorts of tasks would I need to do? How much education would I need to get, and in what areas?

I want to mention that money is not very important to me–I’m not really materialistic, and I’d rather do something interesting than something that pays a lot if I have to choose between the two. Also, I’m generally not a people person (as I learned during my year of retail hell), but I do enjoy teaching, and other instances in which I can feel like I’m actually helping someone. So I don’t necessarily think I need to hide out in a lab or something, avoiding human contact forever. I just don’t handle it well when people take out their frustrations on me.

Anyway, thanks in advance for your help, and I hope this isn’t too incoherent!*

*Especially since I accidentally posted without previewing! Crap! :smack:

2

You have the name for it. I focused my undergraduate world on getting into a good Ph.D. program in behavioral neuroscience. Unfortunately (in some ways), I succeeded and went to graduate school at Dartmouth working under an assistant professor with inferiority issues in full panic mode to make tenor. I lasted a little less than two years and it was one of the most traumatic circumstances of my life. The classes were great and interesting but that isn’t what graduate school is about. I have never seen work environments in the corporate world that are anywhere near as hostile and backstabbing as those commonly found in academia. There are simply too many people in research sciences and the system is aggressively geared towards weeding them out at every single level all the way up to postdoctoral fellowships and professorships. Most don’t make it.

I don’t mean to completely dissuade you but everyone in your position needs to hear the cold truth before you proceed. A love of the field is a far cry from being what it takes. Aggressive personality traits combined with single-minded ambition have to come too.

What you need to do is very straightforward. Go back to school and then find a neuroscience professor to do a lab internship with. It doesn’t even have to be paid or even for credit in the beginning. Most of them aren’t even advertised. You just ask around and you may get to do something really cool right away or you may end up inventorying lab supplies. At your level of experience, everything should be interesting and educational if this is the right fit. You just prove yourself and take it from there. Volunteering to learn new things in a lab is really just a minor version of what the whole field is about so you should be able sense a fit right away.

3

Well, Shagnasty apparently made a go at graduate school in neuroscience, so he’ll know about it better than I do–but I have a bachelor’s in neuroscience that wasn’t at all what I had expected it to be. I got hooked on the subject in psychology courses about neuroanatomy etc; then I started the biology major and quickly discovered that it was just a specialization within cell biology. No neural networks, no brain structures, just protein synthesis and transport. Blech.

So be sure you know that what you’re getting into is actually what you want.

4

I arrived at my interest via psychology originally as well. Neuroscienece is a huge interdisciplinary field that literally spans from molecular biology to psychology to computer science. I know what you mean though. One thing that hit me right away was how primitive the general state of the science as a whole is. Really big name academics with huge staffs study some extraordinarily small things for decades. That is true for all research science but especially true in neuroscience. The topic is so huge that results come rapidly but they are such minor pieces of the puzzle that overall understanding seems to move at a glacial rate. Anyone that has an interest in academic neuroscience needs to figure out the best angle to approach it. Neuroscientists in molecular biology labs may never even deal directly with a living creature let alone a higher mammal. Neither may someone working on neural networks. OTOH, neuroscientists in psychology departments may have monkey poo flung at them on a daily basis. It is a very broad area of academic study.

5

That’s the price you pay for trying to muck about with the brain. :wink:

Neuroscience is incredibly complex, and compounding that, even the most simple phenomena can be very difficult to measure in comparison to even some of the more outlandish physical sciences like astronomy or quantum chemistry. My recommendation to the o.p. is to read Eric Kandel’s quasi-autobiography, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which describes his introduction to and research in neuroscience (in his case, the mechanisms that give rise to memory). Kandel actually started with an undergraduate liberal arts degree, then went to medical school and doctorial research in the neurosciences. He describes how some of his expectations, like wanting to figure out “consciousness” were too expansive, and how many of his eventual selection of research areas, particularly using the sea slug as a subject, were poo-pooed by advisors and some collegues but eventually produced the results that led to his Nobel Prize. He also describes the hardships of research, particularly having to run the same experiment over and over again for months on a living subject in marathon sessions until he could get any kind of result.

As far as preparing for a career in neurosciences, it depends on what you want to do. The psychology approachis, IMHO, something of a dead end, at least in terms of getting down to fundamental phenomena; it’s all very exciting in a high level and abstracted way, but as Sattua says, once you get down into the nuts and bolts of neurobiology it really doesn’t mean much; there are (at this point and for the foreseeable future) too many layers of complexity between observable events and the cognition phenomena that psychology deals with believe that you’re going to figure out the Big Mystery of Thought by looking at neuron firings. Which is okay; there are plenty of smaller but spectacular mysteries to research, especially on the biological end of things.

The big issue is, as with any research science, are you willing to focus to the point of being determinately single minded about researching a topic for years or decades on end? If not (and you don’t otherwise enjoy the questionable benefits of academia that Shagnasty so eloquently describes) then you should consider something else. I think Shagnasty’s advice about going back to school and taking some kind of internship in a lab is spot on; even if you end up just washing bottles and running inventories, you’ll be exposed to the environment of academic science research, and it may give you contacts. What you major in specifically is probably not such an issue as the skills you’re picking up; take some advanced statistics, a broad survey of biology and physiology, and some heavy math (partial differential equations, complex and nonlinear analysis, computational methods, et cetera) really wouldn’t hurt if you can cope with it. I’m always surprised by the number of molecular biologists and neuroscience folk who have no math beyond basic ordinary differential equations, if that; the biosciences cry out for the ability to model complex phenomena in quantitative fashion.

Good luck to you in whatever you decide to do.

Stranger

6

See, this is one thing I’m worried about. I hear a lot about how competitive academic research is, and I’m not confident I’d be able to thrive in that environment. I’m smart and I can do well in classes as long as I get the work done, but I’m also very shy and am not at all a risk-taker. I’m hoping I will overcome these things in time, but it will certainly be a challenge if I choose this particular path!

Overall, though, do you feel like your education was worth it? Do you use it at all in your current job?

Sattua, I think protein synthesis is interesting too, but I can see why you’d be disappointed if you were expecting to learn cool stuff about how the brain works! I’ve actually never heard of any undergrad neuroscience programs, though–may I ask where you went to school?

I attend community college right now, and I don’t think there are a lot of neuroscience courses here, if any. If there are, they have prerequisites I haven’t met yet. Right now I’m planning on taking as many biology and chemistry courses as I can, both to reacquaint myself with the material and to get used to the hands-on labs. Does this sound like a good plan? I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a lab assistant position here, but I’ll try, and I’m sure there will be more opportunities when I transfer to a four-year school.

I have another question, and you might not be able to answer it, but that’s okay: Do you think that medicine would be an easier or harder path to take than research, or would it be about the same?

7

Stranger, I just saw your post; I’ll check out that book, thanks for recommending it. As far as my studies go, I do plan on taking a good amount of math–it’s not my best subject, but I do okay, and I know it would be useful. And I’ll definitely be taking a lot of science courses.

Re: focusing a lot on one small issue, I don’t think that will be a problem. I find the entire subject fascinating (not just the psychological stuff), and if I can contribute even a small amount of knowledge to our understanding of what makes us work the way we do, it will be very satisfying for me. I know that the brain is ridiculously complex–of course we’re not going to figure it all out in my lifetime! Baby steps, right?

8

How important is it to you in terms of paying tuition? The reason I ask is that neuroscience, like most medical science degrees, is very expensive course of study but, again like most careers in medical fields, has many sources of “free money” funding, most with some strings attached. (How doable the strings are depend largely on your career goals.)

There’s an article in the May 2008 issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience that discusses various careers and trends in the field. You may want to get a copy of this from your nearest medical library or from the Interlibrary Loan dept of a college or public library. The info you need is below:

Article Title The Viewpoint: Choices in neuroscience careers
*Authors * Tamas Bartfai, Tom Insel, Gord Fishell and Nancy Rothwell
Periodical Nature Reviews Neuroscience (9, 401-405; May 2008).

9

Purdue. The biology major in the school of science has eight sub-specializations; neuroscience and animal physiology is one of them. You can get an unspecialized biology degree too–the specializations just put restrictions on which dual-level classes and which lab modules you have to take. They also require that you take one or two more classes and lab modules than you would have to take otherwise.

I would have been happier sticking with the biological psychology people in the psych department, I think. Oh well, never mind, I’m a linguist now!

Having not done medicine, and not even done grad school in biology, I don’t know how the difficulty of the two compares (if that question was directed at me). I suppose that for me, med school would be better, because you know exactly how you’ll progress year to year (right?) In research, as Shagnasty unfortunately experienced, there is a sad chance that you’ll get stuck with a wicked advisor who wants to keep you for cheap labor. I knew neuroscience grad students, mostly TAs for the dual-level classes, and there were many, many, many of them who were about to give up on getting a doctorate after six to eight years of grad school.

10

Oh, tuition. To be honest, I haven’t thought much about it at this point. I’m planning on getting my gen ed requirements done at a community college, so that will save me some money, but after that I don’t know what my plans are. My parents will help, but they’re probably only going to give me a set amount of money per year, and it’s not much. I have some other money that my grandparents saved for me, but again, it’s not much. I guess I’m planning on taking out loans for the rest. Can you tell me any more about those “free money” opportunities? What would I have to do to take advantage of them?

11

Ack! The medicine question was directed at everyone (anyone who’d be able to answer it, that is). Sorry for the confusion!

Thanks for your response, Sattua. I’d always assumed medicine would be more difficult, but I am starting to realize that success in research might be even harder to achieve than becoming a successful physician.

12

My father in law is a computational neuroscientist. He programs computer models of the brain. And he does it without a graduate degree. But he is also going on 60 years old and fell into it.

From what he says job opportunities in research are slim (he’s been freelancing for professors for a while because the lab he worked for lost all its grant money) and the graduate programs are HIGHLY competitive. Those free money programs are even more highly competitive than the grad school.

13

Professional medicine and research neuroscience are both highly competitive but their philosophical models are completely different. As noted, I tried the research science route but I also took many of the pre-med requirements as an undergraduate and I took some of the neuroscience medical school classes in graduate school.

The requirements to become a practicing physician are much more highly scripted than to become a research scientist. Potential doctors can major in whatever they want but they also have a checklist of classes they need to take to fulfill the minimum pre-med requirements. They also know generally how well they need to score on the MCAT exam and how the interviewing process works once they make it that far. Anyone can have bad luck but students that do well at the formula have a good chance of succeeding. Once accepted into medical school, it is still very difficult but the curricula is well defined and students are expected to graduate. Students are also paying customers and retention rates are important to the schools.

Research science is not like that. There is no real formula. You make your own connections and the same goal can be reached a variety of different ways. Research experience counts more than most other factors and some of that is luck as well if you work on an undergraduate project that yields important and publishable results. Most reputable Ph.D. programs in neuroscience have free tuition and usually a (modest) stipend for T.A. and research work. The huge downside is that you often get treated like a sub-minimum wage humanoid slave to serve the ambitions of the professor that you work under. Some are great. Many are not. None of them got their jobs by being push-overs with superior people skills.

It is possible to combine the two. There are ambitious MD/PhD programs that train students in both philosophies but the eventual career is supposed to end in research. These students generally don’t have to pay for either part of graduate training and they are qualified to lead clinical studies with human patients in traditional medical settings.

14

Your plan to take all the basic biology and chemistry coursework now is a good one. All of that stuff is certain to be prerequisites for any biology-related major anywhere. If you’re thinking of either grad school or med school, you might also want to consider taking the year of intro physics as well, which is a prerequisite for both.

Many colleges have neuroscience programs, but make sure you check out their actual course offerings before you enroll. My undergrad (Barnard) offered a program in ‘neuroscience,’ but at the time (six years ago), this meant that half your courses were in the psychology department, and half in the biology department, which offered a grand sum total of one real neuroscience class. Things may be different now, of course.

If you’re even kinda sorta thinking about graduate studies in a lab science, I will echo what other people have said about getting an internship in a lab. Aside from letting you know whether or not you’re actually interested in spending the large majority of your waking hours for years doing lab work, it’s a prerequisite for actually getting into grad school. I spent two summers full time (plus a semester part-time) working in labs before I applied to biology grad programs, which was probably the absolute minimum amount of time to make me admittable. Many of my eventual fellow grad students had spent a year or several after college working as lab techs.

I left my PhD program for a number of reasons that may or may not be relevant to you (mostly because I got sick and was unable to work for a while, which hopefully won’t be a problem for you!). However, one thing I always warn people about is that unlike any other educational setting you’ve ever been in, success in a biology PhD program is not defined by gaining a particular set of skills and knowledge. It’s purely about finding something publishable. You take some coursework in the beginning, but the courses are not the point; they’re educational hoops through which you need to jump. You choose a lab, and essentially are told, “Go discover something. Call us when you’re finished!” How long does it take you to discover something? Well, who knows? You can be brilliant and dedicated, but if you’re unlucky, you won’t graduate, even if you’ve become an excellent scientist along the way. You can spend literally years going down the wrong path, working incredibly hard only to come out with absolutely nothing to show for it, which is depressing and difficult in ways that I lack the words to communicate. When I switched to a master’s program in public health, one thing that really excited me was the fact that if I completed a specified list of requirements, I would be finished. The lack of definition is a very hard thing about a PhD program.

Also, don’t discard medicine as a field just because you don’t want to interact with patients - you can always become a neuroradiologist and stare at screens all day! Lab internships can be helpful for getting into med school as well, so you should still try one out.

15

I have to disagree with this. If you find a good lab advisor/mentor, you are not just left to muddle your way through on your own. A good advisor can and will help make sure you graduate in a respectable amount of time, even if your final work is not what you proposed at the beginning of your course of study. In my program, “chronic” graduate students are rare, and people who leave do so for personal reasons (getting married and moving for example), not because they haven’t made a groundbreaking discovery. Also, on a different topic, most graduate school is fully funded, either by the program or by fellowship/training grants, so tuition shouldn’t be a huge worry. Finally, doing research science does not have to be a cutthroat profession. If you are willing to work permanently in a non-tenure track position, you can make a nice life for yourself. I know a couple of “research associates” who have no interest in being professors or running their own lab, but who have happily worked for years in another PIs lab. They don’t make as much as professors, but are very happy with their lives. Also, I totally agree with those who recommend getting a part-time lab job. If you enjoy it, I also recommend working as a lab tech for a year before applying to grad school.

16

This seems to be highly variable based on the experiences of people I know. I just finished my PhD in neuroscience, and I can’t say enough wonderful things about the program I went through. The entire program was set up to minimize the number of people who quit, so our teaching requirements were modest (one semester total, and you needed permission from your adviser if you wanted to TA extra semesters for extra money), and the stipend was easily enough to support a single person with a modest lifestyle.

There’s a lot of good advice in this thread: make absolutely certain you get plenty of research experience (even if your undergrad institution doesn’t have much to choose from, you can often apply to other institutions for summer programs, or just find a lab that interests you and ask about opportunities), look for programs with rigorous coursework that closely relates to what you want to do, make sure you take enough math that the GREs (when you take them) don’t knock you on your ass; I served on the admissions committee for a year while I was in the program, and GRE scores are a huge boost to your application, as your funding depends on your program’s ability to sell you to the NIH.

I would strongly suggest, as others have mentioned, that you approach this from a computational, pharmacological, or molecular angle, rather than getting your undergrad training in psychology. Not only are there more psychology students to compete with later, but the psychology coursework doesn’t really prepare you for what you’ll learn in a neuroscience program. The people in my class who were psych majors struggled MUCH harder during their first two years than everyone else did.

17

Hmm, it sounds like research success requires a good amount of luck in addition to skill! To be honest, I’m not sure how well I’d handle that kind of uncertainty. I am capable of working hard, but I feel a lot more motivated if I have at least some assurance that my effort will pay off in the future. Of course, if I’m interested in my work, it’s a lot easier to get things done. I don’t necessarily think I should write off grad school completely–I’m only just getting started on my education, and I should probably get more experience before I make any serious judgments about what I can and cannot do, even if the process does seem intimidating from where I stand now.

It seems to me that for now, the best thing I can do is take a lot of science courses and get some lab experience. That way I’ll be able to make a more informed decision about whether I want to go into medicine or research or neither, and I’ll have given myself the necessary tools if I do choose one of those paths. Even if I choose something else entirely, I don’t think my effort will have been wasted, as I love science and I think it’s important to be interested in the things I study in college. I’ll probably go with my original plan and major in biology or chemistry, rather than trying to find a neuroscience-specific program–from Sattua and GilaB’s descriptions, it doesn’t sound like those are anything special. I will, of course, take any neuroscience classes I can find!

Anyway, thanks again for your advice, everyone. You’ve certainly given me some things to think about.

18

True that. I’ve known people who were much smarter than I am who had trouble getting any successful experiments done because their stuff just didn’t work (no fault of theirs- some experiments just don’t). When you’re doing new things all the time, some of them will turn out weirdly, even when you think you know what to expect, based on other data.

19

If you’re thinking about studying science, and especially if you’re thinking about going to graduate school in science, then you should seriously consider taking some computer science classes. At the very least, you’ll want the intro programming class; it would be great if you could take classes in numerical programming and data management systems as well.

20

An introductory programming course is probably a requirement for any technical major. I think Python is the most generally useful scripting and coding language for technical applications; it is sufficiently abstract to be platform independent and stay away from the ugly details of actual computing issues like memory allocation or thread sequencing, but extensible enough to create powerful and highly functional applications. A lot of commercial and open source software uses Python as the primary scripting language. Python is also free (that is, you can download the compiler) and there is a vast wealth of information available online including references and tutorials.

I suppose a data structures class or two wouldn’t hurt, but for the most part you can learn that sort of thing as you go. Numerical methods, on the other hand, are pretty useful, especially when it comes to handling iterative calculations like those involved in protein folding or finite difference approximations. However, unless you really get into the programming aspect, most of this can be taken care of with existing software and package libraries like SciPy and BioPython (in Python; other languages use different libraries). It’s useful to be able to sit down and read through code to get a gist of what it is doing, and it may be a valuable skill, but it isn’t necessarily imperative unless you get into a computationally-intensive area of research.

Stranger