Did I sell these kids a pipe dream? It is hard to know, and I take solace that my motives were noble. Recently, however, I wonder if my words have led people down a road to nowhere. This path to no definite destination is a place I have grown much more acquainted with in recent months, feeling uncertain about the scientific ecosystem that awaits me after the culmination of my PhD program.
Growing up during the rise of the STEM era, my formative years were shaped by the messaging of the future of innovation. The vision of the American Dream was shifting from climbing the corporate ladder of Wall Street to launching a biotech startup in any coastal mid-sized city of choice.
I took the bait: hook, line and sinker. My niche was agriculture, so I enrolled in various plant science and biology courses. By my sophomore year of high school, I was heavily involved in a leadership organization for students taking agricultural education courses. The group was amazing: The community was rich, and learning was deep. I found the state and national conventions especially compelling. My takeaway message from such events was clear: I can have a meaningful career in agriculture.
Soon enough, it was me up on the stage at workshops and conferences espousing the same message to impressionable young ears. Over my time in leadership, I facilitated content to over 5000 students across the nation. It was a beautiful time of my life; I can name so many positive impacts that were sparked by those students and that organization.
Now, having progressed through three years of a PhD program here at Cornell, I have taken steps that my younger self felt were essential milestones towards a career with meaning. I stand at the precipice of this long-awaited career in STEM, yet the job market appears bleak at best.
The recent gutting of the federal scientific workforce and infrastructure, as well as the dissolution of grant funding from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, has left me feeling a range of emotions. Though I have spent hours with beloved colleagues processing what to do upon losing research funding, the selfish part of me has spent more time grieving the loss of a career that I never had. In some ways, I feel tricked — robbed of an anticipated outcome that I convinced myself was owed to me. Before I even got my chance, a meaningful career slipped through my fingers.
Rapid disruptions to longstanding systems are often meant to confuse and destabilize. This has been super effective on me recently. I feel scared for how the students I led in workshops and conferences, most of whom are now also out in the workforce, may be responding to the chaos. Are they feeling this weight, too? However, in the moments where I can think past the histrionic self-pitying state I am often in, I am starting to examine more carefully why these events have stirred up such a big reaction in me.
There is danger in staking personal meaning in systems that seem impenetrable but, in reality, are extremely fragile. Clearly, career has taken a position in my life that it has no place occupying. A career is meaningful because it is occupied by a human being who has innate meaning. I bring the meaning to a career, not vice versa. Unemployment rates or partisan budget debates do not reindex my inherent meaning as a person, but they sure can change my career trajectory in a snap. Where in our lives do we stake unfounded meaning in things of impermanence? Is there something bigger we should be looking to?
This is a foundational paradigm shift in how we need to instruct young people to view the role of a career in their internal value structure. The principles I was taught through STEM education were successful in motivating me to strive for big goals, but they did not effectively prepare me for this present crisis. How can we holistically develop young people to be grounded and well-rounded thinkers?
The messaging we give to students about what they should strive for has profound impacts on what they believe to be possible for themselves. I wonder how the messaging others received — those not from a middle-class white family in a well-funded suburban public school district like mine — is impacting the way people are processing this current political moment. What needs to be said to every young person to instill in them their innate meaning that they bring to this world?
So now, after all these years, if I found myself back on one of those stages, delivering a keynote to another room packed with students, I’d offer them a very different message. Instead of telling them to build leadership skills or a résumé to chase success, I’d urge them to build themselves. Science — and the world — needs thinkers who lean into what makes us human. I’m still working through all of this myself, so my speech might be a little unpolished. But that’s okay. It’s not the words or the platform that would make it matter. It’s me.
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Tim Mulderrig is a fourth year PhD student at Cornell in Plant Breeding and Genetics. He can be reached at tm639@cornell.edu.
