Biotechnology & career prospects
ABIRAMI MUTHUKRISHNAN
IT IS hot and happening. Biotechnology is the next `in' thing. Since the general opinion is that we are going to have a biotech boom in the country, all the educational institutions have been gearing up towards that exalted phenomenon. There are umpteen arts and science colleges offering Bachelor of Science degrees and government and self financing engineering colleges that offer Bachelor of Technology degrees in various aspects of biotechnology — Industrial Biotechnology, Medical Biotechnology, Plant/Animal Biotechnology, etc.
Current drawbacks
Because it is a new course, when it comes to the time when the degrees are handed out and the job hunting begins, it is something of a blind man's bluff.
The problem is this: there are not many jobs around for fresh graduates. This is because it is a mainly research-based field, and undergraduate degrees do not provide any sort of research methodology training. Ironically, students are taught about research in theory, but there is no hands-on training. Lab courses only teach technique, and as any professional in the field knows, just knowing the technique does not make one a researcher. There is a mandatory project in the final semester which is hardly the independent research it is paraded about as.
So the students, who were given high hopes about career prospects when they began four years earlier, get disillusioned when the placement time arrives. While their software counterparts start off with a 20K plus salary, they are given junior-research trainee positions with a measly stipend of a few thousands, the maximum going up to 10K. And there are only a handful of companies in the country which are prepared to take on graduates without any research experience.
The most noticeable result of this is in the number of Bio-Tech graduates shifting into the software field in search of jobs. As a result, all the trained manpower is drained from this field which will lack human resource when the boom does hit us. Which brings us to the question — Why study Biotechnology at all, if one is going to turn to codes later?
As much as it is exciting, well-paying jobs are not easy to come by in India in the near future, with just an undergraduate degree or even a postgraduate degree if the degree does not involve an extensive research criterion.
Another point to remember is that research jobs are not like regular 9 to 5 jobs. Even if one lands a job in India or in any other country, research is a vocation. It is a way of life. Research fellows and scientists live and sleep in their laboratories. This kind of job involves plenty of disappointing negative results and dead-end experiments, which would involve troubleshooting and re-planning entire sets of experiments. Unless one is committed to research, it can be mentally and emotionally draining.
At the same time, a career in biotechnology is highly rewarding if one is successful in research. Funds flow easily and as one publishes more and more research papers in prestigious journals, one's standing in the research community rises. Job satisfaction is high, as one works on one's own vision towards disease eradication, drug design and altogether better quality of human life.
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