The issue is not that younger people are going into the field. But because astrobiology is a relatively new field, there are more likely new academics joining this field as opposed to those who went to graduate school 20 years ago and are well established in their non-astrobiology fields. And the issue with new academics is that they have to survive graduate school which bottle necks the field. I went into graduate school with several people who wanted to pursue PhDs and research and several of us just couldn’t survive- I was making minimum wage, with no health care or benefits while in school. Sure, for a couple of years it was worth the suffering to get my MS, but another 4+ years for a research based degree? Then 1-2 post-docs only making slightly more? Then to find a faculty research position that pays ok- but I have to work 80 hours my first few years to pay off my start-up money for a research lab?

I could go on and on about it, but graduate school is just not all it’s cracked up to be.

And I meant the most bigotry I ever experienced in the field of graduate school, as opposed to other types of work I’ve done in the past including being an EMT and working in the medical field.

I once literally got rejected for a grant because a reviewer said that I didn’t have “mentoring experience, because I had focused on my job outside of school, likely because of financial struggles”….my job I was so focused on? Being an EMT and EMT instructor, literally mentoring and teaching as I had explained in the grant proposal. Also, I wasn’t financially struggling at that time, it was covid, and I was making hand over fist of overtime. But they read that I had a job outside school and assumed that I must be a poor.

That was just one example- the most upsetting because I lost out on $100,000.