Careers similar to ecologist/physical therapist.

[Toby Warren]

Does anyone know of any careers in science that offer services to people (e.g. being presented with a problem and having to find solutions to solve that problem) whilst needing little equipment to offer the services, so it would be relatively easy to become self-employed with that career (e.g. engineers offer services to people and problem solve but they need a lot of equipment to do this so it seems like it would be hard to become self-employed as you would need to open a large work shop and purchase various machines).

The only two careers I’ve found at the moment that match this are a physical therapist and ecologist as they both offer services to people (e.g. treating patients with injuries/ conducting surveys and impact assessments on a piece of land for clients) with little equipment needed and it seems that within these careers you can transition from working for a company to working for yourself easily. I would really appreciate any advice of careers that people know of that are
•To do with science
•Offer services to people/companies
•Easily able to transition from working for someone to self employed

[Dave Walker]

Hi Toby,

Your question may be a little outside of our expertise on this forum, which focuses on the science industry as a whole: life sciences, biology, chemistry, physics, and jobs supporting those. When you say you are looking for a job that has something "to do with science" what do you mean by that, exactly?

I am also interest as to why you have put such constraints on this question. Are you already in graduate school, or planning ahead for the future?

To strictly answer your question from experience, the only real "self-employed" jobs in the Science Industry are those that can be outsourced to one person, i.e. there are no freelance scientists (though there are contract workers, and temp agencies of course). The biggest would be consulting, with expertise in some field that is of use to a company, like marketing, setting up a lab or getting drug approval.

And FYI, a physical therapist usually needs a "practice" similar to any doctorate-level job in medicine. They also need equipment, and in my experience it can be quite expensive, or at least voluminous :)

[Bright B.]

Toxicologist consultants are in demand and require only a computer to do the work

Environmental Scientists/Consultants are in the same bucket