Doing Research Part-Time is Great

Thoughts on doing casual physics research alongside my normal day job.

Disclaimer - I’m a part time research associate doing biophysics with a research group in the UK. But I have a day job in an unrelated field that pays the bills.

Whilst I’ve read many personal accounts of research from full time research students in the academic system, I haven’t heard as much from those pursing research part time - independently or otherwise.

I’ve always found this weird. Out of the set of people who are really interested in stuff, most people can’t, or don’t want, to go into academia full time. There are loads of valid reasons - financial, skill or geographical constraints. And so, doing unpaid research on the weekends seems like the only way for this kind of person to sate their interests meaningfully. And so I wonder why I haven’t read as much stuff by more people doing this kind of thing.

So as someone doing research part time, alongside their day job, I wanted to reflect a bit on my priors about likelihood of success, and about trying to do two things well.

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Background

For the past year, I’ve worked in finance whilst doing biophysics research part-time at a university. I work on spectroscopy.

It took me around four years to get in the place where I could comfortably hold a job in finance and also find a physics supervisor. After I graduated I worked for big corporations for several years. It got to a point until I could manage my working hours so that I could leave reliably around 5pm, giving a few hours in the day left to work on science. Whilst I was doing this, I published about physics, and continued to study it independently from textbooks. Then I cold emailed supervisors for around two years until a research group at a university was willing to spare me some time to teach me about a field and have me help out¹.

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So why part time?

First the obvious - I think that part-time scientific research could be a great setup for working people who are still interested in science, but don’t want the downsides of academia and vice versa. In terms of downsides, academia doesn’t give you as much money in white-collar type jobs (think tech, finance, consulting) on average, in comparatively, the problems in industry jobs can be more dull aesthetically. By doing both, you are hedging against the the non-naturalness of one field versus the material rewards of the other.

But here’s the novel part. I used to think that a part timer working on research maybe 20% of the time a full timer spends would only be 20% as effective. But actually, I’m willing to argue that this isn’t true and there are probably is a lot of unsaid ‘boost’ that jacks up their effectiveness much higher - my market for this is maybe (30%/90%). Wide range I know. But bear with me!

I actually think that you can get great results doing research as a hobby because

• it gives you loads of slack, which is freedom to do things without constraints. In this context, I think slack is valuable because it allows you to research things outside of the publishing mainstream.

• and less pressure.

I think these two things are crucial for success. The slack allows you to look at risky and niche ideas are more likely to yield better research rewards if they are true, since surprising results will trigger further questions.

Also, since you are more likely to do better at topics you enjoy, getting money from a day job allows you to actually purse your interests or deviate from your supervisor’s wishes. Conversely, it also allows you to give up when you’re not enjoying something.

On pressure, Richard Feynman has anecdotally said that pressure to do great work in a formal academic system was stifling, and it was the freedom to play with physics that really lead to results. When you’re working a day job, for the most part, you’re not pressured on funding. Considering that PhD stipends in the UK are well below median income, you’re probably more comfortable, are slightly happier because you’re not worried about money if you’re working a day job.

Then there’s the fact that before the 1900s, public science funding wasn’t even a thing at all, and a bunch of great science was basically just done by amateur enthusiasts like Darwin. Einstein part-timed it as well. I think this is summarised in a great comment by Anna Salomon on a LW post that was similar in sprit to this one

‘Maybe.  But a person following up on threads in their leisure time, and letting the threads slowly congeal until they turn out to turn into a hobby, is usually letting their interests lead them initially without worrying too much about "whether it's going anywhere," whereas when people try to "found" something they're often trying to make it big, trying to make it something that will be scalable and defensible.  I like that this post is giving credit to the first process, which IMO has been historically pretty useful pretty often.  I'd also point to the old tradition of "gentlemen scientists" back before the era of publicly funded science, who performed very well per capita; I would guess that high performance was at least partly because there was more low-hanging fruit back then, but my personal guess is that that wasn't the only cause. ‘

Still main drawback is that you get less time, which feels like a huge disadvantage. But is this really? Sometimes I wonder. Considering that most of modern quantum physics was discovered in a 6 month timespan by scientists mostly under the age of twenty five, I doubt that time is really a constraint here. Given that research is also mostly just pot shots, assuming that the likely hood of discovering something cool is very small, maybe the incremental probability of finding something cool changes from 0.001% to 0.1%. But that’s still really small in both cases! So what’s the difference?

This is all well and good, provided if it’s possible for someone to get a research job to do part time, and have enough spare time from their day job to have a solid go. But it kind of took a lot out of me to achieve that.

As for the doubts, I’ve often thought that it was suboptimal for me to split my time in two - hence the quote at the top of this page. As time has past though, I’ve started to doubt this. Provided you’re the type of person to get bored easily, and are willing to do both your work and research for a long period of time, you might up in a better spot long term!²

Crossovers

There’s also this weird effect where your impact can be multiplied because having a day job and a research role means that you’re likely at the intersection of different fields. This means that you might be able spot unique and interesting problems that others can’t.

Suppose that for your day job, that you are a developer looking at database architecture. Presumably this is quite a common day-jobish role because it’s in high demand economically, and most companies need it. But then suppose you’re creating a dataset of molecules or whatever in your research role. There’s probably not a lot of people who are able to do both, and so there’s an opportunity for impact by applying your database know-how to make your team more efficient by applying database architecture.

This is great because at suppose you’re bad at both your day job and your research. Not to despair, because the set of people doing both is quite small, and there might be a higher likelihood of success in the intersection between the two.

1. I also got this advice from reddit.

2. I have worried a lot that this setup is slightly suboptimal in terms of ‘being exceptional at something’. But for one - I think being exceptional is overrated. And even if you do want to go down that road, I actually think this is the best way to get good at things if you are the type to get bored easily.

Here’s why - whilst I agree that focusing on ‘one thing at a time’ (like the career you are in, or the sport you play) is generally a great strategy for results - I do think that the success of this strategy really hinges on the type of person you are. And I think people should be optimising conditional on who they are, not on what the average person needs.

Mathematically, I see a great argument for trying to not focus on one thing if you’re the type that gets bored easily. If the way to get good at something is to maximise the total hours doing it across your whole lifespan, then you want to have a strategy that lets you achieve that no matter how ugly it might look. So focusing a lot in the beginning might be a bad strategy, since you probably will burn out in a short time. Where as if you did slightly less everyday but kept at it for longer, then you are much more likely to rack up a lot more hours cumulatively doing that activity.

So you’ll get there, it just takes a bit more time.