Help Wanted: Science Manager
Kirsten A. Hubbard
Abbreviations: PSM, professional science master's; S&E, science and engineering
Kirsten A. Hubbard is a writer based in Newton, Massachusetts, United States of America. E-mail: motherhubbard@erols.com
Published January 18, 2005
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0030032
Copyright: © 2005 Kirsten A. Hubbard. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Citation: Hubbard KA (2005) Help Wanted: Science Manager. PLoS Biol 3(1): e32.
“I didn't want to be just another MBA,” says Pascal Herzer, one of the first recipients of a new graduate credential known as the professional science master's, or PSM. “Not many people have the ability to understand science and business, and [the PSM] program was designed for that very purpose.”
PSMs are two-year American master's degrees financed in large part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to cultivate science managers. Sloan's ultimate goal is to make science careers more attractive to talented young people like Herzer, a 2003 PSM graduate in Applied Biosciences from the University of Arizona, who believes his PSM makes him more marketable to science-based businesses. “I am at the true junction of science and business,” he says.
The Missing Degree
Fortunately for Herzer, the business of science is booming. Jobs for scientists and engineers grew four times faster than the United States national average since 1980, and should outpace the market until at least 2010. Surprisingly to many academics, most of these jobs are in industry. In 1999, the last year with complete data, two out of three employed science and engineering (S&E) graduates worked in industry, including the great majority of bachelor's and master's degree holders, and 40% of doctorates. In other words, industry, not academe, now drives American S&E employment, and will for the near future.
Like academia, industry needs scientifically literate personnel; unlike academia, industry wants employees with business savvy as well. However, in the past, graduate students received either science or business instruction, not both. “Industry simply hired regular master's-degreed people, or MBAs, or more likely PhDs, and just expected them to learn their weaknesses on the job,” says Eleanor L. Babco, Executive Director of the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, a nonprofit corporation with funding from the Sloan Foundation to assess PSM graduates.
For science-based businesses, then, the American S&E doctorate—viewed by many as the worldwide gold standard for science education—is too specialized for their needs (see Box 1). But a master's degree may be just right.
Till then, I have exams coming. And I have studied none!
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