I went down to Occupy Boston Wednesday for the solidarity march for Occupy Oakland (and Scott Olsen). While the march was stopped in front of the Massachusetts Capitol Building a motorist caught up in traffic yelled "GET JOBS YOU FUCKING LOWLIFES!" As he was stopped in traffic I engaged him to explain that some of us, such as myself, have a "good" job, but are participating for a number of good reasons.
As one might expect, I was unable to successfully argue with this man. However, since that time I have not been able to let go of that conversation, as it started the gears in my mind a turning. That simple engagement (similar to others I have had in my time at Occupy Boston) has brought me to a new level of self realization about WHY I have engaged in the Occupy movement.
I have realized that the biggest reason I am participating is that I'm tired of endlessly chasing after an ever moving carrot (also known as the American Dream™). I have worked hard, gotten a fantastic education and still have little hope of getting to eat that carrot. In fact, I'm beginning to believe that the carrot itself is a mirage and I've really been chasing my tail all this time!
Follow me below the fancy squiggle for the long trail that I have trod in getting to this point. I apologize in advance for the length of this very personal story, I really want people to understand where I'm coming from.
I grew up in a small town in rural New York the eldest of three boys in a family of modest income (we were on food stamps when I was too little to remember and I rarely got new toys/clothes when I was young). My parents taught me from an early age that if I wanted something I needed to EARN money to get it. Thus, in the summer of 1991 at the ripe old age of 12 I started umpiring for the local Little League to earn money to buy food from the concession stand (that my mom oversaw the operations of). I liked having some money to play with, so that fall I took up refereeing soccer. During the summers for the rest of my teen years I continued umpiring and refereeing, and generally skipped out on hell-raising for these (and other) jobs to get what little $$ that came with them.
At the age of 14, I got my work permit and in addition to umpiring and refereeing I started working two other jobs. One was general maintenance of the grounds and sales room at the local cemetery monument dealer. The other was putting up hay at a farm run by friends of my father (a really difficult job for a scrawny 100 pound teenager but somehow I managed).
At 16, I was able to leave those "part-time" summer jobs to work for the Town's Highway Department. The next four summers generally consisted of shoveling stone (lots of stone!!), cutting brush, mowing, and weed-eating. During this time I worked my 40 hours for (near) minimum wage – $4.25/hr in 1995, $4.75/hr in 1996, $5.15/hr in 1997, and $5.25/ hr in 1998.
Surrounding these summers I found myself bored out of my mind at school (I could do nothing and get really good grades, so I did!). Thus, I started pushing the limits and getting into trouble. After one incident in the spring of my senior year of High School, my father pulled me aside and through tears told me that I was smart and could do anything I wanted to with my life. He warned me I was throwing it away and needed to buckle down enough to get a degree, as that would take me further in life than any car I could buy with the cash I got from my summer jobs. At 18, this was the first time I had ever seen my father cry, and it really made an impression on me.
After graduating High School in 1997, I left for college - paying for it by maxing out on student loans (Perkins and Stafford), federal work study aid, and working during the summer. My freshman year work study consisted of working in one of the campus dining halls (as a freshman you had to have a waiver to work elsewhere). The other three years, work study consisted of "tutoring" second graders from the New Orleans projects as part of the Reading Is Fundamental program (and by "tutoring" I mean trying to teach them to read, starting from the alphabet). Both of these jobs taught me a TON about privilege in this country, but that's for another diary.
I originally started college with the intent of becoming a medical doctor, so in my sophomore year I took an EMT-Basic class and got certified. The summer of 1999, I went back to NY and worked minimum wage jobs through a temp agency (in a Post-It factory, a recycling center, a beer distribution center, a warehouse, an other jobs) before landing a job as an EMT (at $7.50/hr).
The summer after my Junior year I stayed in New Orleans found a job as an EMT (at $7.00/hr), and worked 60-80+ hour weeks to get cash for college, but also the apartment I rented with a group of my friends. During my Senior year, in addition to the work study job I worked nights and weekends as an EMT, largely to pay for living off-campus.
I graduated in 2001 with a B.S. with dual majors in Biology and History. Having changed my mind from wanting to pursue an MD to being interested in research, I worked as an EMT while looking for a job as a laboratory technician. Unfortunately, following the Dot-Com bubble bursting, not many people were interested in hiring new college grads - including Federally funded scientists. After going on only a couple of interviews, and failing to find a research position that summer I decided to enroll in a newly established one-year Master's program offered through the Biology Department I had just graduated from. After pulling some strings and getting high scores on the GRE (that I blindly took) I was allowed to enroll in the program, even thought the deadline for this had passed.
As during my undergrad, I relied heavily on student loans to pay for tuition and fees. Also during this time, I continued to work nearly full-time hours on the nights and weekends in order to pay all of the other bills.
I graduated from this program with my M.S. in 2002, but still found it hard to find a job as a research technician - not surprising as this was still during the post-9/11 economic funk. So I continued to work as an EMT while applying to every job/fellowship/training program I could find in my field of interest (microbiology) that might help me get my foot in the door of a research laboratory.
Finally, in October of 2002 I was offered a position in a gene therapy lab at LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. While supposedly an hourly employee, I was hired on at a $25,000 yearly salary (I was told to fill in my time sheet with 8 hours whether I worked 8 or 16 hour days). While this was a low offer for someone with an M.S. degree, I was desperate to get my foot in the door and had the promise of a significant raise (to $30k) if I performed beyond expectations. Being as I wanted to advance my career, I worked the 16 hour days and managed to get my boss to approve the raise he had promised. However, before he was able to push the raise through, Louisiana implemented a state-wide no raise policy. My boss was nice and went to the mat for me in order to get an exemption for the maximal (minimal as far as I saw it) 2% raise allowed in the law for special circumstances.
Unfortunately for me, shortly after taking the research position I also found out that the days of ignoring the student loan debt were over. When the first bill came in for $600/mo I couldn't believe it, but I learned that there was a possibility of getting a portion of my Perkins loans forgiven based on my work as an EMT. However, I found that this only applies for full-time work spanning at least a full calendar year - so no luck for me as I was always considered a part-time employee, even when I was working 100+ hours during the summer months (yes, that is possible but not surprisingly exhausting). I did however, consolidate the student loans saving me a bit each month, but ultimately I realized I needed two jobs to pay for everything - so I kept working as an EMT primarily on the weekends.
While a technician at LSUHSC, many things happened 1) I met my future wife, 2) I discovered how much I love conducting research 3) I realized that I would not be able to advance very far in science without a PhD.
So, in the fall of 2004 I went back to school to get myself a PhD. My wife and I moved up to Atlanta, purchased a condo and I continued my education, which consisted mainly of doing lab work as I was doing at LSU, but for less money ($21,500 yearly) and no benefits. My wife who is also in science, but got her PhD in Poland before we met, largely supported our life in Atlanta. During this time, we remodeled our condo bought a decent car and started paying off my accumulated debt and in October of last year I finished my PhD. Of course, the economy also crashed. The tanking housing market left us with $60k tied up in our condo and $40k left to pay off of our mortgage on a condo now worth somewhere around $60k.
In the sciences it is traditional to leave the institution you obtained your PhD to do a post-doctoral training period (of indefinite time) before you are considered sufficiently ready to be considered ready for a professorship. This is what my wife was doing in New Orleans when I met her and what she continued in Atlanta during our time there, so it was time for her to find a professorship. This is not an easy proposition in good times, but in lean times such as now it's nearly impossible. Long story short, after over a year of looking she got extremely lucky in the fact that her boss in Atlanta was offered a departmental chair position at a university on Long Island and wanted to take her with him as a junior professor. Unfortunately, the university they moved to doesn't have research in my field and I was unable to find a position in NYC on the short notice required with this move. Instead, I took a position in Boston with a collaborator from my PhD studies and taking home less pay than the graduate students in the lab - hooray for paying FICA taxes, benefits, and 100% of the contributions to my 403B retirement plan.
On top of all this, I find myself entering research at a very unique time. During the Clinton (and into the early Bush) years the government placed an emphasis on biomedical research and doubled funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1998 and 2003. This lead to a boom in such research, a concomitant growth in University resources (buildings, recruiting researchers - often from overseas, etc.) devoted to this research, leading to more slots for new graduate students to study these fields (ie. people such as myself). However, since that time funding has only grown approximately 15% (in 7 years). In order for a post-doctoral researcher to move up the ladder and get a professorship it is almost mandatory that they obtain funding for their research, in my field the overwhelming majority of such funding is from the NIH. The economic downturn has had another side effect, many of the professors of the Baby Boom generation have lost a good portion of their retirement savings, so with less retirement money more of them are staying on longer in life and keeping their slice NIH funding. Combined, these things mean that it's becoming ever more difficult to work your way up the ladder. For these reasons I have a hard time thinking about the future beyond next week or month - I get worried that I may have to leave science or leave the country to stay in research (plus I get to missing my wife).
In pondering my discussion with the jackass at the Occupy Boston march, I slowly came to the realization that for over half of my life I have been doing everything my father had asked of me. I shaped up, focused on my education, found a wonderful wife, earned my degree(s), and bought a place of my own. But, all of these things haven't opened up the door to the American Dream™. In fact, I find myself over a hundred thousand dollars in debt, living in a different city than my wife, and facing tenuous prospects for my career and my sole investment - the condo. It took a bit of mental jostling, but I figured out that my facing the death of the American Dream™ is what had brought me to Occupy Boson. So, I'd like to say "thank you" to the businessman in the dark Mercedes - you opened my eyes, though I'm sure not in the way you intended!
Oddly enough, I wrote the bulk of this diary Friday but hesitated on publishing it then. In the time since, multiple other nobodies have touched on this very aspect of the Occupy movement - people such as Fareed Zakaria, Paul Krugman (whose article was converted to a diary here by DSWright), and Joseph Stiglitz (diaried here by Lefty Coaster). I suppose for what it's worth I'm not alone in my situation, not that this is terribly comforting!
8:23 PM PT: Off to bed for the night, I have to be up in 6 hours. I'll check back in tomorrow morning and answer comments then.