Chowe -
From my own experience - if you want to do a startup, do it early in your career. That being said, I'm not entirely sure I understand what your desired end state is. You were pretty explicit about some of the properties, but I'm not sure they're entirely feasible.
You clearly want a lot of freedom. Freedom in direction and freedom in schedule. In my experience, that freedom is earned over time. You are willing to sacrifice money to get that freedom - that's pretty reasonable and improves chances of success.
My sense is that you also would not enjoy startup life. You will have a lot of schedule freedom - i.e., you can work ANY 90 hours of the week you want to! But, you will have no freedom of direction. My experience at a startup was that we had to be 100% laser focused on our service. There was almost zero time for side projects.
Since everyone else has prognosticated suggestions one way or another and despite the fact that I'm not sure I understand your desired outcome, I'll still make a suggestion I haven't heard yet. Become a perma-postdoc (sometimes known as research faculty.)
You will have the most schedule freedom you can get outside of being independently wealthy (though if you are undisciplined, you will do poorly.) You will have the opportunity to either work on another professor's project that excites you or apply for funding on your own. If you work in the lab of a well-funded PI, then as long as you help him or her keep the funding tap flowing, you will always have a spot. Your cool side projects, especially if they spin out of the university, will be valued there. On the down side, you will sacrifice salary potential in this role (for reals) and since its a soft money position, if the chancellor of your university beats your NSF program manager at golf, you'll be out of a job. :) Also, you will do repetitive work. Lots of it. However, I don't think that's a big downside, because you'll do that in any of your choices. If you're looking for a job that doesn't have tedious, repetitive work, you need to give up on doing any kind of science research or development, because you will not do well at it. There comes a point in any research project where you will have to put your head down and just plow through the tedium and the 47th time that particular experiment caught on fire. (although I suspect that spontaneous combustion of experiments is less of a problem in biology than it is in physics or chemistry. :)
Good luck with your choice. This is a tough market to be a scientist in.
B
(full disclosure: Ph.D., physics. Currently a research manager at a mid-sized company.)
On Sun, Jun 8, 2014 at 11:52 PM, Matt Lawes <matt@insysx.com> wrote:
One way to get research experience as an undergrad is internships. This lets you try out the start up atmosphere if you can find one doing something that interests you. I have seen several interns turn their internships into jobs after graduating.>matt
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID
Chowe <chowe@bgsu.edu> wrote:
--
Awesome! Thanks for the great advice guys.
The startup atmosphere sounds very exciting, risky, emotional, character building, and an experience you can get nowhere else. Being younger I definitely see myself at least trying out the biotech startup scene and seeing where it takes me. I am leaning towards starting to work after college because I know graduate school can be a very big investment and sometime unnecessary. My only worry about starting work right away would be that I would be unqualified to do any significant research and would be stuck doing the boring and mundane technician jobs my whole career because I don't have any graduate experience.
Dakota - From you and your friends experiences are you guys glad that you started working right away or do you wish you would have continued to graduate school? Since they talk about how bored they get, do they want to get a higher degree or will they stick with the jobs they have?
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