Hi! I have a professional question if you're okay with answering stuff like that, and sorry if not! I'm a student planning to go into a pretty niche field for a career in academia (developmental biology), and the job market and everything is of course very rocky right now. I still have a few years, but I'm wondering if this is a good idea at all. I know you're a herpetologist, which is pretty different from my field, but it's also a niche academic area. I wanted to ask, is it sustainable? Are you able to keep working in this for years, without the work getting exhausting due to financial issues or lack of opportunity? Basically, do you like what you chose and would you recommend a similar life for students like me, too?
Firstly, Developmental Biology is one of the most important biological fields, and if I had not gone in the evolutionary direction, I would also have gone in the direction of developmental biology. It is the coolest shit, especially with modern methods. It has extremely broad relevance, and the employment prospects are, I think, much better than many other fields. In evolutionary biology we are often making hypotheses but not satisfactorily able to test them. In developmental biology, you can test hypotheses directly, giving concrete results than can have major implications in many other fields. Consequently, many breakthrough papers of our age are coming from teams that have developmental biologists prominent among their author lists. I strongly recommend Stephen Jay Gould's 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny' for a little perspective on why development is critical to our understanding of evolution. But also read some of the hot new shit, like this fucking bonkers paper that established the developmental basis of patagium formation in sugargliders and other gliding mammals.
Secondly, you asked 'Is it sustainable? Are you able to keep working in this for years, without the work getting exhausting due to financial issues or lack of opportunity?'
This is such a tough question to answer. Fair warning: I am going to be brutally honest here, because I think you need to hear it from somewhere.
You are surely familiar with the Mark Twain line 'Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.' But this has a corollary: if your job is what you love, you will always be working. I don't know many successful academics that have a healthy relationship with work hours, or can sustain themselves on a 9–5. It can be straining on personal relationships, families, and your own health.
It can be exhausting, and frustrating when you are up against the funding machine. And that machine is brutal, especially in the current political climate—if you are in the US, the future is extremely uncertain; even well established colleagues of mine in the US have lost funding for their labs, have lost their own fellowships, and have even lost their jobs. But even in Europe, it takes a lot to break through and make it sustainable. Permanent jobs are extremely rare, and this can lead to it being cutthroat at times, and heartbreaking at others. This leads to a lot of employment anxiety, which for foreigners like me, can also lead to existential anxiety about your residence status, when it is dependent on your having a job.
Additionally, if you are working on academically interesting things with no obvious benefit to humans or society, you will always be questioned as to why your work should be supported, and the battle for funding will be especially hard. I face this all the time, because in Denmark, the same pot of money that funds basic science, also funds e.g. Alzheimer's research. I myself would find it hard to justify why they should fund research on tiny frogs, when they could be working on therapies that could save lives. I have to add relevance to human-related topics to my grant applications, even when I am *deeply* disinterested in that relevance—for me, it is the pursuit of knowledge and curiosity-driven investigation that motivates me, and not e.g. the bullshit about innovations in biorobotics that I sometimes have to add to my funding proposals for them to have a shot at getting funded.
So do I recommend a similar life for students? That's a tough one. If you are burning for this subject, do it. Academia was always the direction I wanted to go; since I was a tiny kid all I knew was that I wanted to have a PhD and to work in herpetology. I didn't see myself as having any other choice. And because I have this singular hyperfixation, I am convinced I would be absolutely useless in all other capacities in society. If you are just interested in having a 9–5, and living outside of work, then I am not sure it is the right thing to do. But if you want to figure out how and why Life is the way it is—if this gets your mind whirring, and you are burning to break into the field, academic pursuit of developmental biology may be for you.
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