It is time, once again, to talk about a job high school students have never heard of. This time, we are looking at research administrators. High school students have all heard about actual researchers. They have lab accidents that turn them into superheroes, work with nanotechnology, invent invisibility cloaks, and try to solve the problems of faster than light travel, curing cancer, or finding secret messages in DaVinci’s works of art. (Some of these things may or may not happen outside the world of fiction.)

But what about research administrators? Fiction and even articles in scientific journals rarely mention the people who make sure the researcher is able to do his job without running afoul of laws and regulations. They help researchers submit request for funding, monitor the budgets, make sure rent is paid on the lab space, and often interface with the outside world on behalf of the researchers.

My new position puts me in place to work with these research administrators- so much so, in fact, that my university is sending me to the National Council of University Research Administrators conference in Washington, DC, next month. In fact, I think an argument may even be able to be made that I am now a research administrator myself.

So what do you need to do this job? You will need a college degree. An MBA becomes common at the higher levels (department directors), but is not really a requirement. Mostly what you need are people and organizational skills.

The researchers you work with are going to be focused on their research. Some of them will be easy to work with; others will not. You will need to be confident in yourself and your abilities, and willing to adapt your style to what works best with each individual. And you will not be working (most likely) with just one researcher, you will be working with many of them. And each researcher may be working on multiple different projects, which, if funded by grants, will all have their own budgets that need to be kept straight.

And while you may be working with scientists, you do not need a STEM degree yourself. Some background in financial management (or at least the ability to understand budgets) is helpful, but anyone with good people and organizational skills can do the job.

The job pays pretty well, too. You would likely start as a specialist in pre-award or post-award administration, paying around $50k. But by the time you make it to director of a department (at least at a large university) you are looking in the six figure range.

Administration jobs are never the sexy, headline making positions. But if you want to be close to research without having the desire to be the one in the lab yourself, if you want a university job that pays well but you’re not a professor, and if you are good at working with people, even sometimes difficult people, this is something you might want to consider.