by Gary Cain

Created on: March 12, 2009   Last Updated: March 24, 2009

My life wasn't supposed to turn out this way. While growing up in a mid-sized town in the south during the 60s and 70s, we were told to study hard and get a good education, then get a good job, make money, and be happy and successful, the Great American Dream, most people's Plan A. Well, I did all that, and 25 years into my career, I thought I'd finally made it. Yet here I sit, January 2009, Ph.D. in hand, unemployed for a year, limping along, worried as heck that my wife will also become a layoff statistic. For us, and a multitude of others, the Great American Dream is in limbo.

From a young age, I was a solid, focused student, graduating in the top 10 of my high school class. Always being interested in science, I then entered a large, mid-Atlantic state university and earned a B.S. in Chemistry, an exciting field ripe with tremendous career potential. Great American Dream here I come.

After college, I moved far from home to take a stimulating job as a research chemist at a pharmaceutical company in the midwest. There I worked in a lab, mixing chemicals together, trying to help discover the next great drug for the benefit of all mankind. Happily, one of the compounds I worked on proved to be a quite promising antibiotic and went into further development. Exciting stuff. My salary, however, wasn't that good at the B.S. degree level, considering the college loans to be repaid and the expenses of living on my own for the first time. According to Plan A, I needed more education. So after working there for two years, off I went to graduate school in quest of a chemistry Ph.D. to enhance my move up the ladder toward wealth and success.

As anyone who ever took a college chemistry class can surely tell you, chemistry is not easy. And graduate level chemistry is enormously difficult, where one is expected to become a top-notch expert. After four years of near around-the-clock study and laboratory research, I emerged with that coveted Ph.D. on the wall. Surely an enriching, life-long science career was to follow.

Fortunately, I soon landed a challenging position with a leading science-based company on the east coast, again in pharmaceutical research, once more striving for a blockbuster new drug. By this time I was married with a kid, then soon another. With two children in day care, plus now graduate school loans to repay, the Ph.D. entry level salary didn't make for life on easy street, either. Still, by being frugal and saving as much as we could, within a few years

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