Tuesday, September 25, 2012 // Issue 17, Volume 78 /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
THE DAILY COUGAR
T H E
O F F I C I A L
S T U D E N T
N E W S P A P E R
O F T H E
U N I V E R S I T Y
O F
H O U S T O N
Metro makes a stop at Austin
S I N C E
1 9 3 4
OPINION
Christopher Shelton Assistant sport editor
AUSTIN — Though UH students have been inconvenienced and distressed by construction to expand Metro’s light rail, a three-person panel at The Texas Tribune Festival on Saturday on trade and transportation entitled “Is light rail the answer” said the benefits outweigh the costs. Manager of Rail Passenger Research at Texas A&M John Sedlak, Austin Councilman Mike Martinez and Deputy Executive Director of Dallas Area Rapid Transit Jesse Oliver served on the panel to discuss the future of light rails in Texas. Sedlak, a former Metro employee responsible for the development of their first light rail line, said it’s a process that affects businesses and consumers. “It’s like trying to do a heart transplant, you’ve got to keep the patient alive and keep the functioning,” Sedlak said. “It’s a really tough situation to come into dense urban centers and make changes to all the utilities that are going to be impacted.” “The answer to a growing
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President Renu Khator and the SGA went to Austin for the festival. | David Haydon/The Daily Cougar population and increased traffic is multi-faceted,” Martinez said. “Light rail is only part of the solution, and Austin should improve their roads and increase the amount of bike paths and sidewalks.” Martinez said he would like Austin to follow the same path that Houston
has taken by connecting UH and TSU with the light-rail system. “In my opinion it can’t happen soon enough,” Martinez said. “We have to have as many options available to us in terms of public transportation. I would love to see Austin take that step towards an urban
rail circulation system but it is very expensive and it will take some time. Even if we were to pass it in the next few year it wouldn’t be up and running until 2020.” Oliver said there has always
Trader Joes goes local SPORTS
METRO continues on page 3
ACADEMIA
Science doctorates still deemed useful With the growing demand for an educated workforce and most jobs requiring degrees, a college education is considered one of the most valuable assets a person can obtain to ensure a promising future. Considering the rapidly increasing cost of tuition for doctorates — $48,400 a year for a public university and $60,000 a year for a private university, according to Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics — coupled with a high unemployment rate of 8.3 percent according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, students on the doctoral track might be reevaluating their plans. Despite the risk of financial loss that accompanies earning any degree, working towards a doctorate will ultimately pay off. “It is almost universally true that a Ph.D. in the sciences ensures a higher starting salary and a more rapid rise towards greater responsibility in most companies,” said Mark Smith,
dean of College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. For a newly graduated doctoral recipient, the starting salary is roughly $85,000 a year, according to Chemical & Engineering News. However, recent studies that analyze the success of science doctorates falsely assume that most doctorates graduates enter the world of academia upon employment. “In my experience, the bulk of the industrial team leaders and research managers have Ph.D.s and are typically directing employees with Ph.D.s, or (Master’s in science) and (Bachelor’s in science) degrees,” Smith said. “The training obtained in Ph.D. studies regarding independent thinking, creativity and independent performance certainly aids individuals as they step into the job market.” In a recent American Chemical Society poll, 13 percent of respondents claimed to be unemployed and to be actively looking for work,
according to C&EN. “Eight-point-three percent were newly minted bachelor’s degree holders, 6 percent held new master’s degrees, and 11 percent had just completed a Ph.D.,” C&EN said on their website. “At the Ph.D. level, 19 percent earned a chemical engineering degree; 17 percent, a physical chemistry degree; and 15 percent, an organic chemistry degree.” After Smith earned his doctorate, he was able to work in laboratories around the world and credits his doctorate for allowing him to do so. “This is what makes a career in science exciting; to make individual discoveries of importance while sharing ideas with really smart people across the globe,” Smith said. “The level at which this can be done is so much more limited without the Ph.D. degree and the doors it opens.” In the world outside of academia, having a doctorate places someone at the top of any corporate ladder,
said Ricardo Azevedo, UH Associate Chair of Graduate Affairs for NSM. “That is definitely the case when it comes to pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies,” said Azevedo. “I worked at an agrochemical company and saw first hand the differences in the potential for career advancement between scientists with bachelor’s, masters’ or doctorate degrees. Some very skilled, knowledgeable scientists with only Bachelor’s degrees were limited as to how far they could be promoted within the company.” While C&EN stated in 2012 that 13 percent of respondents on a science-career track were unemployed, the National Science Foundation found in a 2008 survey that of about 662,600 work-ready science doctorate graduates in the U.S., only 11,400 were unemployed — translating into an unemployment rate of only 1.7 percent. DOCTOR continues on page 3
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