The Academic Layer Cake
One of my favorite scenes from the 2004 crime thriller Layer Cake comes near the end, when Eddie Temple gives Daniel Craig’s character what he calls “the facts of life.” The speech is considerably more colorful than anything I would normally put on a career-development slide, but the message is simple: life is a pyramid. As Temple puts it: “You’re born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit.” You climb higher, take less of it, until eventually you reach the “rarefied atmosphere” and have “forgotten what shit even looks like.” Welcome to the layer cake.
Years ago, a Dartmouth professor gave me a much more positive version of essentially the same idea. Think about how many people start high school. Fewer graduate. Fewer go to college. Fewer pursue graduate degrees. And if we narrow the discussion specifically to academia, fewer PhDs become postdocs, fewer postdocs become faculty, and fewer faculty establish independently funded research programs. Academia is a pyramid. That isn't meant to be discouraging. It's simply useful to understand the structure of the system if you're thinking about climbing it.
For many young scientists, becoming a principal investigator looks like the top of that pyramid. I certainly viewed it that way for much of my training. But once you get there, you quickly realize the layer cake keeps going. There are established investigators running larger programs, center and institute directors, department chairs, deans, provosts, university presidents, and other positions occupied by progressively fewer people. PI isn't the pinnacle of academia; it is simply one particularly visible, and difficult-to-reach, layer. And reaching one layer doesn't mean you should automatically want the next one. At some point, climbing becomes a deliberate choice about what kind of scientist, mentor, leader, and person you actually want to be.
One reality we sometimes avoid discussing is that we train far more PhDs than there will ever be PI positions. But I don't think that means we're training too many PhDs. A PhD is training in how to think. You learn to solve difficult problems, evaluate evidence, communicate complicated ideas, tolerate failure, and figure things out when nobody knows the answer. Those skills are enormously valuable in biotechnology, pharma, government, consulting, investing, scientific communication, administration, and countless other careers. Becoming a PI is one possible use of that training, not its ultimate validation. And most of those careers have layer cakes of their own.
For those who do want to climb the academic version, however, it helps to go into it with open eyes. The higher you climb, the narrower it gets. There are relatively more structured opportunities for support early in your training, training grants, fellowships, career development awards, than there are mechanisms capable of sustaining an independent research program indefinitely. The expectations increase. The competition changes. Eventually, you're no longer responsible only for your own experiments or career. You're responsible for salaries, trainees, projects, and increasingly the careers developing around you. Hard work and talent matter enormously, but so do mentorship, relationships, timing, opportunity, and some amount of luck.
There is also a powerful survivorship bias among those of us who made it through the earlier layers. We become surrounded by other people who made it too. Looking around that room, it can become easy to convince ourselves that the path was inevitable: work hard, publish papers, get grants, become a PI. It wasn't. We all know outstanding scientists who took different paths, whether by choice or circumstance, and many of them have built extraordinary careers. The point isn't that academia is impossible or that leaving it represents failure. Quite the opposite. The point is that those of us who survived the climb shouldn't pretend the path was wider or more predictable than it actually was.
And if climbing this particular pyramid is what you want, my strongest advice is simple: never become complacent. I believe complacency kills careers. There is no permanent point at which you've “made it.” The PhD gets you to another layer. So does the postdoc. So does the faculty position. So does the first grant. Becoming a PI doesn't magically end the climb either. Yesterday's success buys an opportunity; it doesn't guarantee tomorrow's. The science has to evolve. You have to keep learning. You have to keep adapting. And you have to keep finding ways to become better at what you do.
That doesn't mean endlessly chasing the next title or living your life staring at the layer above you. Celebrate the wins. Take care of your team. Enjoy the layer you're on. Maybe your ambition is to run a laboratory. Maybe it's to chair a department or run a university. Maybe the skills you develop along the way take you to industry, government, biotech, or somewhere you never anticipated when you started graduate school. Success isn't reaching some universal top of the pyramid. It's understanding the mountain you're climbing, deciding where you want to go, and knowing what it will take to get there.
Go into it with your eyes open. Keep climbing if you want to climb. Take care of the people climbing with you. And never confuse reaching one layer with having arrived.
