Overview
Research Science, Med School & Engineering
I was always fascinated with Science. The Why and How intrigue me. As a child, I would sit and watch toy mechanisms to draw out how they function and would disassemble broken toys before discarding them to see what they contained. The research scientists with their white lab coats and pipettes were an image I often romanticized.
I knew at a very early age that I’d be a researcher, to the disappointment of my parents who like most other arab parents, prefered professions like Medicine or Engineering. I had the perfect profile for Med. School: I was a top student (always within the top 5% of any system I walked into). I had top scholarships (NSERC, CIHR, FRSQ and OGS, Vanier…), and I had co-authored manuscripts early on. What I really lacked was any interest in Med School and a terrible memory that was more suited for problem solving than memorization. I failed to see the fun in a profession where people come to you when they have health issues, some of which are not curable…
More importantly though, I viewed scientific research as ‘Ground 0’ for knowledge. Doctors and engineers use knowledge discovered and documented by research scientist to do their jobs; ‘Oompa Loompas of Science’ as Sheldon Cooper put it in The Big Bang Theory. I wanted to be at the source of knowledge. So I pursued a PhD in NeuroScience and Brain Cancer at McGill University.
Dreams though don’t pay the rent; I was quickly confronted with how little society appreciates research scientists. They are one of the smartest and most hard working breed of people I’ve known, yet one of the least appreciated and least paid. A postdoctoral fellow, having pursued a Bachelor’s degree, a Masters and a PhD - a combined timeline spanning 6 to 10 years, averages around 45K CAD. A Doctor or Engineer makes at least double that in a worse case scenario. The lack of appreciation and the low pay made me reconsider; I quickly moved into bioinformatics and genomics. I went back to classes and took basic computer science courses at McGill (COMP201, COMP206, COMP250, COMP310…). Today, I work at McGill University as a Bioinformatics Specialist, a research scientist of sorts with slightly better pay and better benefits than a Life Science reseacher. It is a balance between my childhood dreams and the world’s reality.
I do hope that with COVID-19 and the rush back to basic research for answers about the virus, that society realizes that research is Gound 0, and that even though basic knowledge has ways to go before it becomes lucrative or potentially useful, cutting funding to basic research is detrimental to all fields that feed off it, like medicine and engineering.
UPDATE
In September 2020, faced with personal circumstances, I decided to leave McGill University and the research world and venture into industry to work as a Software Developer for a young Montreal team “Local Logic”. While I am excited for the new adventure, I have defined myself as a research scientist for most of my life. So with the new job, comes some identity confusion…
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