There was a chemist in Ellicott City, Maryland, the ecstasy capital of the east coast back in the early 2000s. He and his wife got caught for manufacturing and distribution. I believe they found close to 5 million pills at the bust.

I think he was living pretty well up until the bust.

Living better through chemistry

my experience with a bachelor's degree is basically what screaminasian said. my wife had an unrelated degree but began working as an entry level chemist in some lab. pay was ~<15/hr and the job wasn't great. she switched jobs and had the same experience. she changed fields.

i do know as you got higher up there were better jobs (75-100k+) but you needed better education, and some were for like cigarette companies which i think can be complicated deciding if you want to work for.

Tuma,

It depends on whether you're willing to work for the Cartel.

Check out "In the Pipeline" - blog by a medical chemist - all sorts of info.

MM MD

not really true, it's a big leg up to have a PhD to be sure but there are plenty of directors in pharma with just a bachelor's degree.

Leading the research and manufacturing groups?

In my experience, at least 95% of directors responsible for research groups and CMC have a PhD.

There are plenty of directors without a PhD leading groups such as Clinical Operations or Marketing or Supply Chain, but you only need minimal chemistry (if any) for that stuff.

hmmm, just texted my buddy with a BS in biology and minor in chemistry who is a director leading a manufacturing group and he confirms that he is a unique snowflake. That manufacturing is marginally possible for someone with a BS but research is lol no.

edit: and he clarifies that someone with a BS degree can have a nice career in pharma and make six figures within ten years.

A big question is whether you're super passionate about science and research and having that advanced degree to your name or whether you mostly just want good steady work.

You definitely see engineers (often with BS in Engineering and an MBA) as directors in some of the manufacturing groups, but yeah research is tough without a PhD. I personally know only two directors leading research groups without a PhD, and one of the groups is more focused on automation, but still it is technically a chemistry research group.

The companies I've worked for treat BS and MS level chemists/biologists like dirt. Low six figures is easy for them within a few years, but hard to climb the ladder from there. They would rather hire Chinese/Indian scientists instead of non PhD scientists when they're looking for cheaper labor.

tl;dr.

Right now I’m not passionate about anything. As a kid I really enjoyed science and had a knack for it. Then I got sick, dropped out, and didn’t lift a finger for 10 years. Now I’m 30, healthy as can be, and desiring to throw my mind into something. I’m planning to live alone indefinetely and have zero emotional attachment to money. Fancy titles are not of interest to me either.

Steady work, intellectual challenge, opportunities to surpass my peers (even if intensely competitive), and developing working relationships are the main things I’m after. Organic Chemistry was my second best subject in college, first being micro economics.

Thanks Hobbes for the blog link, and to everyone else responding. It’ll be a few months before I figure this out. Most likely this will involve some self study at a college library.

(couldn’t find a good spot above to drop-in ‘basic’, my best posting days are ldo behind me )

Tuma,

You are forever young.

Yours truly,

All-inMcMuffin

I think you are already living well if you can make a contraption that brews a perfect coffee every morning.

BS industrial microbiologist here. Thankfully came up at a time when the PhD wasn’t essential. Served at group director level for past 10 years before becoming an independent consultant recently. I joke that a couple of my career projects earned me an honorary doctorate.

BS chemists and biologists really struggle out of school right now. Crappy temp positions. If you have a flair for people leadership you could manage a testing lab but probably will be frustrated going up the technical ladder. Have some friends that moved into scientific sales and have done very well. Otherwise plan on getting an mba or something to broaden your horizons. Moving into regulatory or safety is an option but I’d rather boil myself in acid.

Basic advice — if you are honest with yourself and find that you are just average in what you do, then find something new, something where you are well above average. Otherwise you will hate life and eventually the business world will toss you overboard as you age.

"Cheaper" labor is accurate, but not the right word.

30 years ago stuff needed to be mixed so people were paid to mix it. Now, stuff still needs to be mixed but there are robots to mix things and Asians to mix things and it's cheaper to mix things in India and then ship white powders around the world than to mix it here.

So one way to look at it is that robots and foreigners are taking your job.

The other way is to sigh with relief because the boring, monotonous stuff that chemists had to do 30 years ago is being done by someone else. American chemists are now free to focus on bigger picture questions and expect compounds to magically appear on their desk aftwr they shoot off an Email.

All of this is kind of a long winded explanation for why PhDs are increasingly required (and why BS/MS* chemists aren't really held in high esteem). Ask yourself what you can do that nobody else can, or, if that'a too esoteric, what you can do that an Indian chemist can't. If the answer is nothing, you're simply going to have a tough time. The most successful people are the ones who can add something on top - not just synthesizing a nanomolar inhibitor, but conjugating it to a monoclonal antibody, or doing it in half the tries, or doing it with a scalable synthetic route from the beginning, or choosing the right target to inhibit in the first place, or using a reaction nobody else can run to access a structure nobody thoight was possible.

Whenever you think of examples or counterexamples, always note what age people are. There are a lot of C-suite executives who worked their way up from mail boy or whatever, and they have it in their minds that all you need is a ten in your hand and a gleam in your eye. But the reality is that nowadays everything is more competitive and if you look at internship programs, you don't find a bunch of go-git-um history majors, you find people with technical majors AND at top 25 colleges AND with lab experience. Because only having two out of those three will get your application rejected. There are chemistry directors without PhDs but I haven't met one under 50 and those that I have met are real overachievers. And like someone pointed out above, they tend to be in CMC or analytical or other fields where experience (especially of regulatory affairs) trumps knowledge.

Nobody intends to treat non-PhDs like dirt. But for those of us who have to supervise both American and Indian/Chinese chemists, there's a certain frustration if we have to babysit the American chemists as much as the others. The output may be the same (American non-PhDs and Indian PhDs are roughly equivalent in terms of productivity and price) but I don't have to deal with HR bull**** or lab safety bull**** if they're on the other side of the world.

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* BS and MS chemists, at least for synthetic organic chemistry, are more or less trwated the same. There are very few terminal MS programs, so MS chemists are ones that either dropped out of a PhD program before they did any original research or they've taken a few extra classes. Both are expected to report to a scientist-level position and be closely supervised. An MS with 0 years of experience is probably marginally better thab a BS with 0 years of experience but if both have 2 years experience it's probably not even noted whether they have an MS or not.

Ah, the "gentlemen's master" (in yesterday's sexist terms). Some of the dumbest people I know have PhDs, not that they are necessarily more stupid, but they are given such deference and high position based on those letters vs their actual skill/accomplishments. (Of course, there are many many wicked smart Phudss as I call them.

My first cousin is a chemist who works in cancer drug research at Eli Lilly. He travels the world like most people might go to the lake for the weekend. He also seems to have a zen-like contentment so in my experience the answer is yes.

Here between between €50,000 and €100,000.

A good way to screen out people way too enamored with their PhDs is to address them by their name and show the door to anyone who insists you call them "Doctor." (Unless they are an MD/PhD.)

my room mates father is a chemist. Besides being one of the coolest person I have ever met he did fine for himself.

He had a very stable path though. He got the army to pay for his doctorate, and then gave them 5 years of his life with no combat. Then he was a teacher for 30 years. He chose a relatively modest path, but had/has a good life from what I know