All I understand is research scientists do some research and publish a paper. Do they get for the publishing? Or is it all grant based for wherever they are researching at? What about a philosophy major? Where would they even work, and get paid for what?
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they’re usually paid by the university they work at for research and teaching. said facility gets a cut off of prize money and patent royalty as well as publishing rights
that’s where my wild guesses i claim as knowledge end tho. maybe someone else has a more thorough explanation
Some are paid to do researches, some are paid to teach, some a struggling to work in their speciality and to earn money.
Researchers usually have to pay to have their papers published. When you buy a paper from sites like jstor the author/researcher gets no money. Scientists get money from grants, universities, private companies that want research conducted etc. i.e if you’re a plant physiologist a private cannabis company may hire you for research. Universities also get contracts this way (from private companies) and is often what grad students do their research and thesis on. Depending on what you do (like pollinator research or fish research) you can also get a job with the government
I can definitely explain how it works for scientists.
As you guessed, many scientists are grant-funded, and they often work for universities or research labs. The university or lab is their employer, so they get a guaranteed salary. However, as part of their job they’re expected to help apply for research grants, where someone gives them a lot of money in order to do their research. A single grant might be for millions of dollars and it might pay for the salaries and lab equipment for several researchers and additional staff.
Grants often come from the U.S. government, or from private companies that benefit from scientific research.
However, that’s only research scientists. Many scientists work directly for a company – using science to improve the company’s products or processes.
And of course many scientists teach, especially if they work at a university.
As for philosophy, I’ve never really heard of a career path other than becoming a philosophy professor and teaching more philosophy students. I’ve literally never seen a job ad that’s specifically looking for philosophy majors.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that a degree in philosophy is a bad idea. There are many people with philosophy degrees who are doing lots of amazing things in the world – it’s just that most of what they get paid to do isn’t “philosophy”. Philosophy is similar to other liberal arts degrees where the goal isn’t necessarily to teach someone a direct career path as much as to give them a well-rounded education.
I do think it’s a bad idea to go deeply into debt to major in philosophy and have no life plan. There’s no guarantee of a job just because you got a degree.
And that’s actually true for science, too – many science majors actually have a hard time finding jobs in their specific field. Physics is a classic example – there are a lot more people graduating with physics degrees than there are jobs for physicists right now. Many physics majors end up applying their knowledge to similar fields in science, technology, or engineering where there are more job openings.
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Philosophy is all about asking questions. Philosophy majors get paid to ask question like “Would you like fries with that?”
Jokes aside, philosophy is what we call a non-professional degree. That means that it doesn’t necessarily lead to any particular kind of job.
Depending on where you are in the world, a philosophy major can be a real asset, provided you have good grades.
Many large corporations recruit philosophy majors at graduate fairs.
I personally was offered jobs, when I graduated, by a government department, two business consulting services and a spy agency. I had a double major in philosophy and history with first class honours.
I graduated though with a lot of people who had very average grades. Their degree certainly didn’t help their careers at all and one of them did actually take a job at McDonald’s straight out of graduation. He went into their management program and did pretty well all things considered.
Most degrees in sciences are in specific fields like chemistry, biology, physics, *every engineering field*, forestry, fisheries, so those all have direct employment opportunities that line up with them. More “pure”/abstract science like pure math, particle physics, genetics, astronomy, tend to be less directly employable in “that exact thing they studied”, but the education is a proof of ability to apply *the scientific method* to specific situations or to do novel research for a company that does research and design.
Philosophy follows the same sort of “proof of ability to apply logic” to many situations. Quite a lot of lawyers started off with an undergraduate degree of philosophy. From there to money in the bank it can be a more difficult move, but it isn’t that hard.
There is an illustration somewhere of philosophy to engineering showing them all on the same spectrum of “pure logic” to “pure application” or something like that. I can’t quite put a finger on it or remember ehat it’s called, but maybe someone can help my memory and look it up
Something like logic is applied Philosophy and math is applied logic and physics is applied math and chemistry is applied physics and so on.
Most people who get degrees of any kind won’t go into the pure academic side. They’ll go do something related, perhaps in a corporate environment, or they’ll do something else entirely that either wants any degree or no degree. The latter seems to be common amongst philosophy graduates…
Research positions are usually paid corporate jobs, paid university jobs, or grant-funded. Researchers hardly ever make money from journal publications (often, you have to pay to *apply* for publication). Honestly from an ethical perspective, journals are pretty shaky, and a lot of people believe they take more from the industry than they give.
They make money the way most people make money. They have jobs
i know several people with phds in geological fields who work for oil companies. They analyze data to help determine where to spend billions of dollars on oil exploration. Pharma and biotech and petrochem and chip mfgs all hire scientists.
some will go into academia, but most will work in industry
Research scientists work either for a university, who pays them with the money they get from student fees, government spending, etc. Or they work for a private company who pays them to research something. Lots of medical research exists because drug companies paid for it. Which has its downsides–it tends to mean that negative results don’t get published. The ‘vaccines cause autism’ theory got popular because Andrew Wakefield was paid by a vaccine company to make a rival vaccine look bad, and he didn’t care about getting honest results.
Academics mostly don’t get paid for publishing their papers. It’s just part of their job–they get paid to research, and are expected to publish some of what they research. If they’re at a university they’ll also often be expected to take on teaching jobs. If you study for a science degree, your lecturers aren’t people who trained as teachers, they’re academics.
Same goes for philosophy–academic philosophers are paid by universities to work for the University, teach students, and write papers on philosophy.
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