/sci/ - Science & Math

Hi /sci/. I posted this on /adv/ and didn't get much useful advice, so I thought I'd ask some people who are hopefully involved in this sort of field, maybe to weigh in on to what extent they've experienced this if at all.

I have a friend who's kind-of throwing his life away. He's involved in some high-end genetics research, he's pulling in grant money, he's been published in a second-tier journal and pushing for Nature, he's presented his work at conferences, he's really spearheading quite a lot of this, and so on, and he's still an undergrad.

He tells me that he wants to drop all of that and become an accountant, or a Wal-Mart manager, or something. He claims that
- his colleagues, advisors, professors and so on regularly deride him for his belief in God (he's Catholic, he's not a young-earth creationist or anything, they claim it's exclusively belief in God that prevents him from being a 'real' scientist)
- he's been to at least one other school where the same sentiment was (loosely) echoed
- he's read studies and surveys which loosely support his stereotype
- basically the only employment opportunities available to him would be in research, where he's convinced he'll run into this sort of culture
- he perceives his colleagues, advisors, professors, etc. to be rather miserable, bitter people, most of them single, never really seeming to enjoy their work, or life, and so on, and he claims that even if he wasn't Christian, he wouldn't want to become that sort of person