Getting into STEM and academia is absolutely not worth it. The pay is terrible compared to what you are worth on the open market. The politics of academia often make the process of getting a promotion very difficult, unless you do foundwhoring and cuck yourself to your dpt. directors. Also, can’t swap jobs without usually having to relocate to a different city, or even country (most cities have at best 1-3 Universities, but they have 100’s of private companies). You usually have to teach classes, which mean you have less time for research. You will usually have to sit on committees and do administrative work, which means less research time. Also very boring. Your research will mostly be completed by PhD students, who take a long time to train and as soon as they are fully functional scientists, they graduate and leave. Basically, unless you are at one of the better universities, you are highly unlikely to be able to get the big grant funding. Which means you are less able to make a big and meaningful contribution to the field (Sciences in particular require huge funding to make big advances). The only way to get a position at a good university is to publish big papers in big journals. People who started out at the big universities already have a massive head start on you. Even if you DO make a major discovery that leads to a new drug or product. The university owns the idea and you will only ever see a % of the profit, if any. Academia is like wanting to be a professional athlete. Unless you are so good you are going to be the next Olympic Gold Medalist, you will make very little money and no one will care who you are. All that effort to be a dime-a-dozen nobody. Just learn a trade, get a wife, reproduce, die.