41–50 of 144 posts
I work as a researcher in a grant funded lab, I can see where this post is coming from. There is a lot of needless politics in academia, and often the right things are not rewarded. However no matter what set of actions you choose to reward, people will find a way to game that system. The criticism in this post, while at least partly true, is too cynical to make a difference in any way. Sure, there are a lot of poor…
Posts like this (and there are many of them) scare me. I'm in the latter half of a PhD. I love it. I work insane hours entirely out of my own choice, because it is the most rewarding and enjoyable thing I've ever been a part of. The idea that I've found something that I love, that is challenging, that (I hope) I'm relatively good at, and that has a definite net positive good for us as a species/society, yet I may not…
I think most grad students towards the end go through a self-examination phase where they really think about whether their motivation for wanting to do this is internal or whether they were just caught up in the popular perception of the monk scientist who nobly advance human knowledge.
Another possible (unspoken) reason why Gariépy is resigning is presumably that he's been a postdoc[0] for the last 3-4 years[1]. Unfortunately, the nature of modern biomedical research is such that you need an army of researchers to do the mechanical grunt work at the lab bench that leads to papers. This has led to a glut of postdocs, who are underpaid, overworked, and have little hope of ever obtaining a permanent a…
I am sure his reason for leaving academia is multi-faceted. His publication record (it's not that bad really. Maybe not competitive enough for a tenure track position) and his other scientific communication activities probably are part of it. But I don't think it detracts from his complaints about academia.
Oh, absolutely. Another reason that I didn't include in my OP is that he got his Green Card on August 3rd[0], which probably opened up a lot of options that he didn't have before, at least if he wanted to stay in the country. Many postdocs do not have the luxury of a Green Card and its attendant freedom.
0: https://www.facebook.com/jfgariepyneuro/posts/45540339129802...
Another possible (unspoken) reason why Gariépy is resigning is presumably that he's been a postdoc[0] for the last 3-4 years[1]. Unfortunately, the nature of modern biomedical research is such that you need an army of researchers to do the mechanical grunt work at the lab bench that leads to papers. This has led to a glut of postdocs, who are underpaid, overworked, and have little hope of ever obtaining a permanent a…
You can say that. But, he's still right.
Grant writing is a very painful form of writing and I have relatives that have made good money by being good at it[1]. I do believe it would be tough to do research and put the time in to be an acceptable grant writer. Something has got to give.
1) for those writing grant to certain government agencies, yeah, there is an old-boys/girls-club and using an "out" word in your grant is a killer (I've drank a lot of beer over the evolution of the word 'empowerment'). One tip my aunt told me is to volunteer to be a grant reader in DC. You see what everyone else is writing, know why things got accepted, and meet the people in charge.
As a lay person, it was pretty ridiculous and slightly horrifying to learn how much time and effort my scientist friends have to put into fulfilling irrelevant academic criteria just to be allowed to work on the research they are incredibly passionate about. In 'Scientific Progress Goes "Boink!"', Calvin and Hobbes build a duplicator machine out of a cardboard box. If they were researchers, they'd first have to go to…
The real question is how do we solve it? I've seen tons of people complain about the state of academia (myself included), but I have yet to see a workable solution to the problem.
I absolutely agree with everything in this post. When I was a post doctoral fellow, my principal investigator would publish at least one paper a month. She was celebrated in the department. (a) The papers were published in journals like - Journal of Green Donkey Testicles, Journal of differentiation of dying mouse ... Journals that I had never heard of, had no impact and every tiny bit of an experiment that was condu…
Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?
The CS field gets a lot of bashing for gravitating a lot around conferences rather than journals. Because, you know, journals are supposed to be the serious venue for the grown-ups. But actually, CS conferences (at least the ones I've published in) have a double-blind review system that feels much fairer than the single-blind in the top journals. Of course it's far from perfect (more often than not the reviewers can…
I absolutely agree with everything in this post. When I was a post doctoral fellow, my principal investigator would publish at least one paper a month. She was celebrated in the department. (a) The papers were published in journals like - Journal of Green Donkey Testicles, Journal of differentiation of dying mouse ... Journals that I had never heard of, had no impact and every tiny bit of an experiment that was condu…
Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?
The only annoyance is that the 1/3rd comes from the University's profits, not revenue. The costs of the patent application, including the tech-transfer office salaries, are subtracted first.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that mean a lack of funding can't catalyze the issue? Edit: Just for transparency (topical!) I did not downvote you, and totally agree that cronyism is a major (and yeah maybe causative) issue, but I also think the decision on how to fund is basically an entirely separate problem which really doesn't have an obviously good solution (in my mind).
Make the companies that profit from the research do the research themselves, in house, and pay for it and direct it themselves. That's the only way. You can't set up academia as a soviet-style bureaucracy and expect it to perform any differently from a soviet-style bureaucracy.