Students in the sciences need to learn entrepreneurial skills

The career path into management for physicists and engineers, as Douglas Arion wrote in his August 2013 article , has been proposed many times, as if it would lead to some kind of promised land. More often than not, it would lead instead to unhappiness for a person who values science above all and relishes participating in it.

Typically, physicists, and many engineers too, are drawn to their disciplines by the idea of an exciting life of scientific discovery rather than by the money. Therefore, it is not unusual for researchers to see a promotion into management as a step downward.

I was particularly disappointed in Arion’s long list of administrative duties. Granted, such duties cannot be ignored, but my experience suggests that administration should be minimized. Early on as an independent principal investigator, I discerned that over-administration at best leads to excessive expense and at worst stifles progress.

Much has to do with motivations. My own R&D service and consulting company, Innovative Mechanics, is not an entrepreneurial company as served up in Arion’s article. Instead, I established it to have a way to do frontier research without being encumbered by management from above. I suggest that entrepreneurially inclined people start out in a business major and take significant technological courses in math, physics, biology, and so on at the sophomore or higher level. It sure beats making reluctant entrepreneurs of people who could become good scientists.