Education Needed to Become a Researcher
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Getting a job in the medical field is really hard to do. You have to go to or graduate school, which is really time consuming (it takes 6-7 years). After graduate school, you get your masters degree. That alone will take years to complete. After you complete your masters, you have to develop a theory and conduct many experiments to answer some unsolved questions and to prove your theory. At the end of your PhD, you basically write a giant book that states your thesis. Writing this book will take a long time too. From the acknowledgments (I've been in two of them!), to the actual thesis, to writing down every single person who helped you with your experiments (which is usually A LOT of people). But it doesn't end after your PhD.
Even after all this, your career has just only started. While you are getting your PhD and masters degree , you are most likely still a postdoc. Getting to the next level is really tough because it is very competitive. You have to get many grants, publish many papers, and conduct A LOT of experiments. Grants are hard to come by. You have to discover something that makes people think that you are worth investing in, so they grant you a certain amount of money to use it for your experiments. Publishing a paper is hard work too. You have to find something worth writing about that adds to knowledge. Then you send it to a journal. You always want to get into the really good journals, but they are very critical of your work and writing. If you do get into a good journal (like SCIENCE or NATURE) then you are likely to be funded for more experiments. Conducting all the experiments is probably the hardest part of it all though. Often you will have to go to work in the middle of the night and stay until dawn just to finish an experiment. Even after all that work, sometimes you still won't be placed in a faculty position. It often takes years and years.
Even after all this, your career has just only started. While you are getting your PhD and masters degree , you are most likely still a postdoc. Getting to the next level is really tough because it is very competitive. You have to get many grants, publish many papers, and conduct A LOT of experiments. Grants are hard to come by. You have to discover something that makes people think that you are worth investing in, so they grant you a certain amount of money to use it for your experiments. Publishing a paper is hard work too. You have to find something worth writing about that adds to knowledge. Then you send it to a journal. You always want to get into the really good journals, but they are very critical of your work and writing. If you do get into a good journal (like SCIENCE or NATURE) then you are likely to be funded for more experiments. Conducting all the experiments is probably the hardest part of it all though. Often you will have to go to work in the middle of the night and stay until dawn just to finish an experiment. Even after all that work, sometimes you still won't be placed in a faculty position. It often takes years and years.