Happiness [edited. twice.]

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

Thank you for this link, Sandy!!
I cannot possibly happier that I am not majoring in science anymore! Seriously. That would have been pretty freaking crappy.
That whole thing makes a little teacher's salary really appealing.
There's another one I still have yet to look at, but I need to sleep, so I'll look tomorrow.
A few of my favorite points:
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
"The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year
age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s."
"The American academic scientist earns less than an airplane mechanic, has less job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer hours than a Bolivian silver miner."
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it." -- Albert Einstein [That one is my favorite]
"I [the author] took a 17-year-old Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus. She had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time to show her the possibilities in female nerddom. While walking around, we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro, probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT. What did the woman engineer say to the 17-year-old? "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all. There are only about 10 universities that hire people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than 800 applicants."
And that's engineering, which, thanks to its reputation for dullness and the demand from industrial employers, has a lot less competition for jobs than in science."