With the explosion of NGsequencing there's no shortage of data or data-magician positions, and there's many challenges with social impact
That said, I'm also having hard time separating academic work that helps things from that which just adds to the noise - grant-chasing, paper-generating studies. Any advice on that?
Why does this noise bother you? Besides, keep in mind that the grant-chasing doesn't happen because of greed, it happens because people want to continue doing science and that's the only way to maintain an active lab.
I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.
I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"
The noise bothers me for two reasons. One, because grant-chasing to keep the lights on means you end up having to prioritize busy work over important problems, which wastes lives of researchers and slows the scientific endeavour. Two, because high noise makes it more difficult to find interesting/important results of other people's research.
Maybe I'm just wishing for unachievable perfection in this space.
> I could shit on the state of academic publishing for days, but at the end of the day, there is an overall positive direction in this 'academic endeavor': the creation of knowledge.
That I agree with, and I definitely complain more about the private market than scientific research because of that :).
> I find this direction much lighter on my consciousness than "generate value for the shareholders"
True, I feel the same.
I'm very interesting in knowing what are your motivations to switch towards "something less altruistic". Could you share some more details? Maybe it really is that no matter what you do, no matter how meaningful, it'll always become a boring chore? Maybe I didn't have an meaningful job yet, so I'm not disillusioned?
* top-tier peer-reviewed conference.
* paper abstract and introduction.
If I am not convinced that the problem is interesting by introduciton, I will skip it.
