Reply To: “I’m Angry About My Future Financial Situation”

For additional context: his field is similar to ornithology but isn’t exactly that. Jobs want 4 years of directly related experience or a PhD to pay anything (and the jobs that don’t need a PhD have PhDs applying to them anyways, it’s so competitive), and while he’s working in his field, it probably isn’t going to be the type of direct experience employers are looking for in order to pay those 60-80k positions in three years. I’m not exactly a conservation biologist specifically, but a huge problem in the natural sciences is even getting to a permanent position no matter how low the pay is (temp jobs are common in the field, we’re exploited, yes I found out too late. My parents & everyone else mentoring me growing up had no idea these particular STEM fields pay so terribly and the shift to more temp jobs only happened in the last few years as far as I know). To make matters worse, these average percentile calculations for my field ALWAYS include upper management/director salaries, which just isn’t representative of how much the average employee makes. Probably not qualified for any biotech jobs given my field but I did take Biotechnology 1010 as a freshman in college. I have lived in multiple states (Oregon, Florida, Texas, etc) and they all pay crap. I make only about four dollars less an hour than someone in my field would make with the best and most well known employers in California, and I have no idea how anyone in my field survives living in California. Also my mom raised multiple kids and bought a home off a single school teacher salary so I thought a salary similar to hers would be just fine growing up… obviously this ended up not being the case.