Graduate and postdoctoral programs resemble high school and college basketball programs, with a tenured job at a major research university being the equivalent of an NBA offer. The low to vanishing probability of either the professorship or the starting position is known to coaches and directors of training grants alike, and both manage to avoid telling the quantitative truth to the young. It is rare to find an example of a mid-career, tenured university scientist who gives students a reasonable estimate of their chance of becoming tenured university scientists in turn. The mix that works for me involves writing, teaching, consulting, and advising. These books have both been exercises in seeing patterns from insufficient data, and in that sense they are much like the science I used to do.
Teaching is an obvious place for someone who no longer runs a lab.
Any serious undergraduate quickly learns that a certain fraction of her professors will be bitter and often sadly uninformed. Graduate students in a good department have no such problem, because such faculty are rigorously kept away from graduate students, except when they serve as teaching assistants, in which case the contact is perfunctory. Cynicism toward undergraduate teaching is so pervasive among funded scientists in this country that embracing such teaching in my life was perhaps the most radical decision I made. I have used the obligation to teach as a chance to learn, and this notion seems to have resonated with the Ford Foundation , whose recent grant enables me to convene a faculty seminar representing medicine, law, public health, the humanities, and the arts. Advising, the last of my four laboratory-surrogates, is the least structured aspect of my professional life, but it is the part that most clearly reconstitutes the humane context I missed as a lab scientist.