When I got my PhD, it was a time when there were just no jobs for PhDs. Period. PhDs were getting the lowest paid technician jobs, if they were lucky, in any kind of science.

Lucid is recalling the mismatch between advanced training and labor-market demand at the time she completed her doctorate: even highly credentialed scientists could not count on professional roles and were often forced into underpaid technical work. The blunt repetition (“Period.”) underscores how structural and widespread the problem felt, not a matter of individual merit. In a broader sense, the remark functions as a caution against assuming linear career rewards for academic achievement and highlights the contingency of scientific careers on funding cycles, institutional hiring, and economic conditions. Coming from an astronaut-physiologist, it also implicitly reframes later success as perseverance through an unglamorous early career landscape.