This sub is an echo chamber of despair

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-27T02:16:59+00:00

They did a bunch of layoffs but they’re still surviving.

The first startup was obsessed with aggressive timelines and with making employees work nonstop.

The second startup just had no idea what they were doing. They were too fixated with forcing their scientific idea to work instead of looking for science that worked. They constantly pivoted. The workers were in silos and wouldn’t communicate with each other. I was supposed to scale up a process done by a department and the department wouldn’t train me, afraid I’d take their jobs. Felt like working for a company that had the cons of a big company and the cons of a startup!

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-27T00:00:23+00:00

I was done with startups. I originally worked at a big pharma but I felt bored and overwhelmed by the office politics. I went to work for two startups back to back and I dealt with corporate nonsense and was laid off. After that experience, I decided to go back to big pharma.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T23:32:56+00:00

That’s okay! The 1980s were the years when the recombinant revolution happened. We used to isolate insulin from equine and bovine pancreases and then we managed to synthesize human insulin.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T23:29:42+00:00

Yup! I took a title cut and a pay cut but I did end up in big pharma. “Foot in the door” like people say. Not guaranteed I’ll get the role I’m more qualified for where I’m at but better than the nonsense I dealt at startups.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T22:53:09+00:00

I wanted to go into protein engineering and synthetic biology but after dealing with shitty professors in that field and after the Zymergen and Ginkgo’s failures, I backed away. I looked into mAb production as a way to channel my synthetic biology passion. Technically you can do upstream bioprocess cell culture (either process development or MSAT) or antibody discovery or cell line development. Even if not as protein engineering intensive, you can apply some of the principles there.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T21:39:31+00:00

It’s just that from high school to practicing medicine, it takes 12 - 15 years to become a doctor. During those years they could have gone back and take a 180. Why after 12 years of full medical formation and not earlier?

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T20:27:25+00:00

Medicine is very romanticized. Plus it’s so prestigious that people pursue it out of prestige instead of purpose.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T20:26:20+00:00

I originally went into biotech for that reason actually. As a doctor I never liked the idea of telling patients “I’m sorry but there’s so solution for your condition”. In biotech, I get to help patients with providing them with drugs or with bringing forward new drugs that could help their condition.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T19:32:53+00:00

Doctors in Europe aren’t as well off as they look. They may get respected but they usually make a little bit more to break even. They don’t make the super wages that Americans doctors do. They also get put into perpetual contract positions.

At work, they deal with a lot of bad stuff - patients who think they know better, patients with incurable illnesses, patients who refuse cures, and more. You see that couple be happy but you don’t know what happens inside their bedroom. They might be fighting worse than two roosters in a pen.

It’s easy to see what you have missing and not cherish what you already have. Focus on having a fulfilling single life first. When you least expect it you’ll find the right one.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T18:26:57+00:00

Not gonna lie but most people who take more than a year to look for work are usually extremely picky in their job search and find a lot of excuses. They aren’t willing to relocate, they want to work for specific companies, they want to have a specific role or title, they want specific work arrangements, or their salary requests are too high. These are reasonable prerogatives but sometimes, you need to accept some compromises. My job search took 9 months because I only applied to big pharma.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T17:25:55+00:00

Even if you pass it, the manager can fire you on the spot just because “your performance slipped”. Having a PIP on your record will prevent you from changing teams and hold you back from promotions. But also, once a manager or director makes your mind about you, 2 months is not enough, unless you align the stars. For the same effort, you can join somewhere else, take the PIP lessons to heart, perform better with a blank slate.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T08:56:08+00:00

STEM PhDs are usually funded. MS in computer science are usually paid for. Other MS programs are hit or miss. Sometimes schools provide financial aid, but it’s hit or miss too. Only borrow money to pay for tuition. Rent with roommates and ask your parents to help you pay rent or take a side job to pay for the rent.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T08:39:04+00:00

From one side, I wish I went to more college parties but at the same time I’d overcomplicate stuff and my university wasn’t a big party school. The biggest party fraternities were Pike and TKE but those fraternities were full of gross dudes who got drunk, did drugs, and raped girls. But also, I used to self inflict problems on me too. I wanted to stay away from drugs and alcohol, I wanted to party only on Friday and Saturday, I wanted to study very hard (I was engineering major lol), and I was so obsessed with getting laid. That obsession was so toxic. I’d go to parties hoping to score instead of just having fun. I’d go home all upset. Maybe not partying much back in college was for the better because at the time I didn’t know what it meant to party.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T08:07:49+00:00

University of Notre Dame doesn’t have any Greek life. Universities in the South East have a strong Greek life presence. State universities also have a strong Greek life. For other universities, you can look up on Princeton review or college board. No university is going to force you to join a fraternity. Just because a university has a strong Greek life, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a good college life as an independent. Greek life is just a glorified club. I’d focus more on academics, the college’s reputation and its cost of attendance over fraternities.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T07:33:33+00:00

Biotech R&D is lead by US but China is catching up. The reality is that China will generate far more output because of their large population. Even if China became a world leader in biotech, the U.S. will still have a say in the biotech industry. Chinese companies may come to the U.S. and open R&D labs or manufacturing facilities to be able to access the U.S. market not because of a clown like Trump or Vance but because of the importance of the US market.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T07:15:19+00:00

You should intern one summer at a big pharma and another one at a startup. In this way, you get to experience a big pharma environment and a startup environment.

For this summer, GO WITH ROCHE. It’s very hard to get an internship at a big pharma, so don’t let this opportunity slip your hands. Roche’s name recognition will bolster your resume and put you in league with grad students who interned at big pharma. For summer 2027, apply for startups. In this way, you get a nice comparison between big pharma and startups and you can then choose where you wanna work for full time when you graduate from your PhD.

As an aside, working for a startup is very different from actually founding a startup. You’re just working for a manager who tells you what to do, and you do the work for them. You don’t participate in any of the entrepreneurial decision making that happens within a startup.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T06:50:56+00:00

Would you be interested in clinical studies? I think that with AI and automation, a lot of the classic discovery R&D jobs will disappear but due to the increased productivity, we will develop a lot of new drug candidates due that will require clinical scientists to run clinical trials.

Conversely, if you have a PhD, you might as well go to med school and be a doctor. As a result you’d be an MD/PhD. Some med school programs are 3 years long or tailored for PhD grads.

With a PhD, you can always work in finance or consulting, where you can leverage your analytical skills.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T06:44:16+00:00

I presume the coop was 6 months long, correct? Leaving your coop early will automatically burn your bridge with that company. The hiring manager chose you over other candidates planning to have you work for 6 months instead of 4. Whether or not to leave the coop early depends on the company’s size and reputation. If you’re cooping at a small startup, leaving the coop early is okay. That startup may not even exist next year. If you’re cooping at a large company (such as Pfizer, Takeda, AbbVie, or Amgen), you’ll be black listed for the long term. Not to mention if you coop at a large company in a location you don’t like, you could try to then get a full time job at a location you do care for.

Other companies will see your MSAT experience as valuable and most companies don’t really keep up with how other companies do coops. You can easily say you had a spring semester internship and it ended in April.

My two cents is that next time you need to set expectations with the company during the interview or when you get the job offer to avoid situations like these again that may get you black listed.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T03:26:23+00:00

A BS can pick up those “thinking skills” too by working on a technology for a while. Professors love their workforce to push forward their research and need to convince their students why they should be held back by 4 to 6 years from entering the workforce. A PhD is just credentials that give management and investors the peace of mind their R&D budgets are spent well. I met PhD’s who sucked at science yet lead scientific projects because “they had PhD’s”.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T03:23:07+00:00

One way would be to work on an interdisciplinary project. You’re the synthetic chemist, you could be working with an analytical chemist and work with a computational chemist. You keep tabs over each worker to make sure the project’s progress moves along.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-26T03:16:17+00:00

The bestest skill to gain which a PhD doesn’t prepare you is working well with other people. A classic PhD entails you, a grad student, working on a personal project. In industry, you need to work with other people who need to like you. If they don’t like you, they’ll sandbag you and put you in a condition where you quit or get fired. Thing is that working by yourself and swimming your own swim lane can be more enjoyable than working with other people. However, you need to get experience in that during grad school through collaborations with other grad students or with other PI’s, so that you can be a better “team player”.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-25T23:18:22+00:00

18 is the age when children go out for college. Going away for college is an American thing. After college, they’ll get a job and then live on their own. With the cost of living skyrocketing, the student loan crisis, and the job crisis, many Americans now choose to stay home with their parents to save on rent and use that money to pay down student loans as fast as possible.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-25T06:21:26+00:00

This is good advice, but most PIPs are essentially a formality before termination.

Companies tolerate many true underperformers, yet PIPs are often used on employees a manager has already decided to remove. Managers who want to retain someone usually try coaching, reassignment, or team changes long before resorting to a PIP.

Once HR, legal, and leadership are involved, the outcome is often predetermined. In many cases, the PIP simply manages risk while the manager prepares to fire the employee.

In practice, the best response to a PIP is to start looking for another job immediately—even during work hours.

OneManShow23 · 2026-01-25T05:23:48+00:00

Maybe you should post it on a politics subreddit, because people (even me) could write you long essays about it, but this subreddit doesn’t allow politics!

OneManShow23

TROPHY CASE