So I’ve hit middle age, and am starting to get that ‘crisis’ feeling. I’ve become an office drone and want to contribute more to the world.
House is nearly paid off, got some stash in the bank. I can’t quite retire yet, but I think I can afford a pay cut. I’m a Ph.D. chemist, with a masters in science education.
what are my options, what can I do to fully utilize my training and education? I expect teaching is the obvious answer, but I think I want to do something else than walk into a classroom everyday. (I did it before, and found it surprisingly unsatisfying; with all the BS administrative, extra duties, discipline issues).
It would be nice to not have to permanently move, and I would like it to be long term, so I don’t have to be looking for a new job in 2 years.
Here are some of my ideas; but I’m looking for new things that I haven’t considered
Do you belong to any professional associations in your field? Maybe you could start networking with members to see if any of them are doing work that would suit your desires. Are you specialized in any area of chemistry in which really new stuff is happening? Maybe you would feel more fulfilled working for a startup company.
Teaching at a community college might personally rewarding. There’s a good chance that you might get to help a few students move on to much better things. If my experience attending a CC is any guide, you will have to deal with quite a few unprepared or unmotivated students to find the gems, but it might be worth it.
My daughter used to work for a company, Educate, Inc., that provided one-on-one tutoring to school systems. The teachers work by appointment with students who are having difficulty. That might be a rewarding gig for you.
I think you should go to the local organic garden and teach. Teach pH and buffer capacity to organic gardeners. Explain Paracelsus’ Dosis sola facit venenum.
Or, “Chemistry for Organic Gardeners” at the local community college.
I took 2nd year math in a community college one summer. As far as I could tell, for the instructor droning to a classroom full of less-than-brilliant people about material that nobody present would ever use and also battling their cell use “the most rewarding moment was when (they) gave me the money”.
If you are not looking for that money, why join the club?
If you are not a gaia cultist, why join the religious exercise called “organic garden”? You think they wouldn’t figure out the pH issue without your help? When famine hit Cuba, everybody figured out “organoponicos” with minimal PhD assistance. If our government engineers a similar famine, they will figure it out here too.
For a significant subset of the sort of people that you seem to belong to the answer to life’s meaning ends up being “what can I do or discover that would be appreciated by many people and would be interesting to work on while I am working on it”. Can you conceive a project to do or discover something new and useful about chemistry? Or about teaching chemistry to people who actually do need to learn it? Or about a non-trivial application of chemistry to a new topic, i.e. a useful invention of a product that people need but at present don’t have?
Then again, historically some innovators undertook projects outside their field of education and job description.
Obviously not everybody is capable of conceiving such projects. And of the people capable of conceiving them, not everybody is capable of implementing them, in part because people work best in groups whereas a single innovator is usually unable to recruit others to work with him “for free” whereas he is also unable to hire them to work for money for lack of money.
Incidentally, if you were a prof at a research university, the above problem would have evaporated. A prof has people (grad students) to work for him on his projects, so if he and his team are not actually producing anything of value, then he truly has nobody but his own intellectual ability to blame. Which also admits an easy fix - listen to advice from smarter people (yeah right, try that on a real life college prof ).
It may be a bigger commitment than what you are looking for, but Peace Corps would love you.
Qualified science professors are a scarce commodity in some countries, and yet these fields are absolutely essential to their development. You would almost certainly get a job teaching at a key university or providing direct advising to critical ministries and industries. If you are in a classroom, foreign teachers generally do not have to deal with any of the “BS” that surrounds teaching. You might also look into a Fulbright. Lots of Africa is desperate for hard scientists.
In fact a teaching appointment in a fast-developing country (China would probably be the best candidate but India would pose less of a language barrier) is probably the single biggest impact you can make on the world. They are beginning to have the resources to pull themselves up from poverty, but lack the kind of technical know-how that takes generations to develop. This would be a highly leveraged way to put your knowledge just where it can be of greatest use. And since they are heavily seeking Western talent, your position there would be well-regarded enough that culture shock will be manageable. (You’re not going to be camping out in the sticks.)
By comparison, as Code Grey points out, the teaching field in the US is much more saturated and the marginal teacher doesn’t have much impact.
Buy a trap and start doing Trap Test Neutor Release on the neighborhood cats. You will meet new and interesting people, you will save the world for one cat at a time and its something you can do while posting online. (except for taking cats to the vet, of course)
There is a great book by Dale Carnegie, called How To Stop Worrying and Start Living and it’s worth a read. I’m not a fan of self help books, in general, but this one is an oldie but goodie. And you can find it in your library in all likelihood.
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