My problem with...education

So, by this time next week I will hopefully have passed the final hurdle to become a doctor. This is just about the end of the education chain in the this country and I've been thinking about all the problems it has. This is mostly coming from a science point of view, but it's probably very similar for other subjects. I was always told that staying in education would boost your options and get you onto the employment ladder at a higher level.

So anyway, I arrived at uni with a high A grade in chemistry. I was weary but at the same time confident that I'd be ok. At A-level it seemed like a single straight path towards the goal and as such progress was steady. A degree on the other hand is more akin to trying to get to the centre of a circle taking many different paths at once. Many different courses ran at the same time apparently bearing no relationship to each other in the least. Where as A-levels are designed to a national curriculum, degrees are made up of what each university decides is relevant and taught be people whose job isn't to teach. Lectures are just that: lectures. There is no effort to make sure the audience understood the content. It becomes so easy to get fixated on individual courses and forget what it all means. For example, most people will recognise the chemical structure of benzene - a hexagon whose vertices represent a carbon atom and the edges of which represent bonds. It's all too easy to forget that in reality these lines aren't really there - they are just a cloud of electrons that's holding the atoms together. In one course we learn how molecules in a fluid stretch, twist and concertina. Other course make no mention of this at all, but it still happens. All the courses are linked, but no one tells you that.

The biggest problem though is that, unlike subjects like maths and physics where it's entirely possible to get near-perfect marks, chemistry's questions can have very vague answers. It becomes a common struggle to keep getting decent grade. In other subjects you can cover up on or two bad modules and still get a high degree, but in chemistry it always felt like one mess up would drag you down. Nowhere was this felt more than in the practical classes. Arguably this is what chemistry is all about. All the courses simply showed reactions as being A + B goes to C with some explanation of how. What they didn't tell you was how to get A and B into the right states to interact and how to separate C from the mixture of A, B and other assorted crap. The reaction is the easy part - it's the separation and purification that causes all the headaches. I can still remember the fear that ran through lab sessions. People would go to demonstrators if their reaction was a slightly different colour from their friends', people would worry about which layer was the organic layer in extractions and absolutely no one knew how to work the vacuum pump trolleys. As the second year came it got worse - 2-day experiments brought the prospect of getting to the end of nearly 12 hours of lab work and then loosing your product at the end. There were good demonstrators and bad demonstrators. I remember one who told me that if we didn't operate the vacuum pumps correctly they would "blow up and take your legs off". Not really what you want to hear. Another demonstrator would quite happily wreck your experiment and then cheerfully proclaim "oh well, there's still time to start again." The grading system didn't exactly work wonders either. We got a memo from a lecturer saying it was actually against university policy to give grades as opposed to marks but they were going to do it anyway. Getting back a lab report with A+ initially seemed pretty good, but then you realised that was only 15/20 with absolutely no indication of where the last 25% had been dropped. In a subject like chemistry, every mark counts. Worse still, it now transpires that natural scientists can actually finish their degree (incorporating chemistry) without setting foot in a chemistry lab. How has that happened? When I started my PhD and went back into labs as a demonstrator I saw the fear again. I also tried to be helpful. I tried to explain to people why they were adding what they were adding. Once you know it makes sense and will help you with every other reaction, but there were still a lot of demonstrators who would simply fob the students off with non-committal answers.

My main beef though is with opportunities after university. Far too many people are lured into accountancy and other such mass graduate-employers. There always seems to be worries that not enough people are taking sciences, but I'm finding it pretty hard to get a decent job. The area I'm into is growing rapidly and there is a lot of money in it. Just apparently not in the UK though. One of my friends from my group recently left chemistry after a 3 year post-doc stint to take up teaching. I've got nothing against people teaching if they want to do it, but I get the feeling people are being driven to it by a lack of opportunities. My friend had basically reached the end of apparent career path in the UK and made the switch. The teaching adverts all about helping to develop the next generation of world-class students. But what happens when these world-class students reach the end of their education? What if they are forced back to teaching? How does that benefit anyone? It brings up a thought that sometimes keeps me awake. How many Einsteins and Schrodingers have not lived up to their potential cos they chose a different path from the one where their talents lay. Imagine if you yourself had done a different degree or taken a different job. Would you have changed the world? It's that kind of thinking that does your head in.