My Motivation

I've made 25 or so posts on this blog and I have managed to avoid directly stating why I am taking the time to apply to law school. I finally finished a draft of my personal statement that I am happy with, so I don't mind taking the time to lay out my rationale for adding three more years of schooling to the 8.5 years of post-secondary education that I have already acquired.

Last year I started reading books listed on the Personal MBA recommended reading list. (This is different than the list that I was using. Looking through it as I copied the link, I think I need to go back after I've finished this post and take a closer look at some of those books.) I could see that I needed something other than my research degree to really make a difference in the pharmaceutical industry. While all the senior managers in my building have Ph.D.'s, we answer to a corporate office up in New Jersey. That's where the real decisions are made. All of our activities are geared to meeting a deadline or providing a product that has been selected by a marketer or project planner in that corporate office. This would be fine, if they included us in the planning phases of these projects.

We get projects that are dead before we even do an experiment because there is some technical issue that we can never overcome. Inviting us to a meeting where these things are discussed would save the company millions in wasted resources. They choose to keep us out of the loop and when a project goes bust, who do you think gets the blame? The blame game is very popular in big corporations. Everybody is too caught up in their own agenda to just focus on getting the job done. If a mistake was made, identify what went wrong and move on. Nothing good comes from worrying about who to blame when a project goes south. Sometimes there is nobody to blame. We're trying to do something that has never been done before. There is always a risk when you're trying to make something innovative. If an idea doesn't work, oh well. Figure out what you learned in the process and see what you can do with that. Experiments might not always go the way you want in research, but unexpected results usually open doors to whole new ideas. A lab that is organized to take advantage of those new insights will be successful. That's my vision of a successful pharmaceutical lab anyway. I want to get up to the corporate office so I can speak for the laboratory. Somebody who has never worked in a lab has a hard time understanding what goes on there, but that knowledge is essential in an industry that relies on the lab to produce innovative new products. The mystery of what I have done in the lab will prevent me from reaching an executive position as a research scientist, but I think a law degree would overcome the bias against PhD's that seems to permeate corporate culture.

A productive research lab delivers tremendous value to a company, especially if given the freedom to pursue new product ideas. We do not have the freedom and I think it really hurts the company's performance. It doesn't have to be an open ended project, but one of two experiments to see if an approach to a new product is feasible could reap big rewards. The corporate office likes to make a point that every one has good ideas, but then they put up this burdensome system to make sure everything filters through them. Just put a few grand in the budget to fund some independent projects. I think they would like what they found.

So why law and not an MBA? That's a subject for a different post.