Now that you're about to enter
the job market, the ink on your diploma still
a tad wet, what's next? Your typical options:
stay with the familiar, like going on to grad
school, or entering the workforce right away.
One of the most telling trends
of the 1990s was a change in post-graduation plans
of bachelor's degree-holders. Traditionally, about
one-third went to work, one-third to graduate
school, and one-third to other graduate programs.
A new set of programs, some
recently established and some in the proposal
stages, aim to give you another set of choices.
Enter the professional MS degree, a hybrid of
these traditional choices that blends training
in both research expertise and business skills.
The largest of these efforts
is the Science
Masters program, supported by the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation, based in New York, N.Y. Sloan's
approach is to establish choices outside the traditional
PhD terminal degree in eight disciplines: bioinformatics,
biotechnology, chemistry, computational sciences,
environmental science, mathematics, medical-related,
and physics. Given the interdisciplinary nature
of chemistry, someone with a chemistry BS could
pursue many of the 27 fields of study in the Science
Masters program.
Another MS program at the
Stevens
Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. prepares
students for research-oriented careers in pharmaceutical
firms. The program is a result of a close partnership
between Schering-Plough
Corp., Merck
& Co., and Stevens to produce highly skilled
chemists at the pre-PhD level.
What these programs grapple
with is trying to answer how someone with these
degrees could fit in the research world. "We
believe that theoretically among other things
they could be liaisons between the people who
are fully prepared to do research-the PhDs-and
areas like intellectual property rights, regulatory
affairs and other realms," says Sheila Tobias,
a consultant and writer based in Tucson, Ariz.
and the outreach and dissemination coordinator
for the Sloan Science Master's Outreach Initiative.
A new MS program proposed
by Andrew Barron, the Charles W. Duncan-Welch
Chair of chemistry and a professor of material
science at Rice
University in Houston, Texas, aims to do just
that. Barron has submitted his program in chemical
catalysis to Sloan for next year's round of funding.
Students would be trained in skills across the
entire field of catalysis applications-from petroleum
cracking to bulk chemicals to biocatalysis, as
well as in business and communications. The program
isn't designed to address what PhD programs do,
such as developing new catalysts, but would be
involved in applications such as industrial scale-up,
chemical engineering, bioengineering, and environmentally
friendly, or "green," catalysts.
Letters of support for the
new program have been provided by Akzo
Nobel, the largest Dutch chemical company;
Kellogg,
Brown and Root, an engineering firm; SABIC,
a Saudi Arabian oil company; and Union
Carbide, all of whom have a major presence
in the Houston area. They are also helping in
terms of curriculum guidance, identifying what
skills are useful to them, and setting up an internship
program. Outside of technological skills, these
firms have said that that honing oral and written
skills, management know-how, entrepreneurship,
and familiarity with intellectual property rights,
product development and marketing, even how to
use PowerPoint are high on their list of desired
nontechnical skills. Eventually these workers
will be able to "talk the language of multiple
stages of a product," says Barron.
Will jobs be available for
these types of trainees? "Yes," says
Barron, industry would hire people with these
skills, noting only if industry is in a hiring
phase, since the private sector is cyclic in its
upscaling and downsizing practices.
Sloan is also sponsoring a
two-year professional MS program in biosciences
at the Keck Graduate
Institute in Claremont, Calif to train students
to work in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry.
The first class of 28 started this fall, with
a little over half of the students coming in with
biology and biochemistry degrees and three with
chemistry BS degrees.
The courses will cover science
and technology as well as business, management,
and communications. "The idea is to train
generalists rather than research scientists,"
says Greg Dewey, a physical chemist by training
and a professor at Keck.
In many bioscience industrial
settings the emphasis is on high throughput technologies,
he explains, biology on a chip as it were. "Chemists
are one of the best trained to move into this
area," notes Dewey. As with most of these
programs, students will do summer industry-sponsored
internships between their first and second years,
as well as a thesis project.
Marc Doble, a member of Keck's first crop of students,
graduated with a BA in chemistry three years ago
and immediately went to work in an academic lab
in Boston. "I was trying to decide whether
I wanted to go to medical school or go into biotech,"
remembers Doble. "One of my professors from
school mentioned the program to me. I was impressed
with its new approach to combining cutting-edge
science and business."
Doble says that it was the
hybrid nature of the program that attracted him
in the first place: "I couldn't find another
program that integrates these two areas more thoroughly,
if at all. Often there are PhDs who have little
or no business training, or MBAs who have little
or no exposure to science. I think the program
at Keck is trying to fill that need."
The whole point of these new
and proposed programs is to create novel options
for baccalaureate degree holders. "We don't
think the BS person has many," says Tobias.
"We think that an ambitious student going
out into the world of work with a BS, unless it's
in computer science, is probably going to have
a low ceiling in the long run and in the short
run will probably be a techie."
But will these new MS degrees
be viewed as a consolation prize to not obtaining
a doctorate, and perhaps more importantly, will
this thinking be a sticking point to enticing
students to enroll? "Yes and no," says
Tobias. "I would speculate that the answer
to that is generational [among chemistry faculty].
My observation is that younger faculty are very
interested in these programs. One, because they
realize that the world has turned and a lot of
the older faculty don't want to believe that.
And, they fully expect the research funds, especially
in biosciences and maybe chemistry, to come from
the private sector in the future."
It's too soon to determine
whether these programs are creating a niche for
themselves because the first class will be out
on the job market in 2002. "Success will
really depend on the programs' ability to get
to hiring managers, not human resources specialists,"
says Tobias. The challenge, she says, will be
to get hiring managers to tell HR: 'I'm looking
for someone with advanced training in chemistry,
not necessarily to the PhD, and who also has a
good understanding of financial statements, regulatory
arrangements, property rights, has learned communication
skills and teamwork experience, and isn't an engineer."
James Harrison, a professor of chemistry at Michigan
State University in East Lansing and creator of
the MS
program in computational chemistry there,
mentions two other groups necessary for success.
It's a matter of getting to two audiences: BS
and BA students and those students' advisors.
"Chemists are a traditional lot," says
Harrison, adding that as a group they're not likely
to quickly jump on the next educational bandwagon.
Michigan State's program,
which also couples computational courses with
business management and communications, started
about a year ago, with two students potentially
planning to start next fall. "That's where
it stands," he says. "We've been slow
to recruit." Harrison attributes this to
the strong economy in that BS chemistry degree
holders are going after jobs right after graduation,
but he is confident that it will catch on. Industrial
sponsors are behind it.
The story behind Michigan
State's program reflects the real need for these
new hybrid degrees. Harrison, who says he falls
into the traditional chemist lot at times, remembers
that at first he was reluctant to bring in the
business courses, but some of his former PhD students
who now work in industry convinced him to add
them. The former students recalled that they had
to learn the nonscience component of their jobs
"the hard way," by trial and error on
the job. "This was very telling to me,"
he concludes. Potential students in Harrison's
program may choose to complete a Certificate Program
in Business Management and Communication.
Karen Young Kreeger is
a freelance science writer based in Ridley Park,
PA.
|