How to build a better PhD

How to build a better PhD
nature.com

That environment no longer exists. Tenure is highly fought for and there are very few positions. And even if you get tenure, you really don't have the luxury to work on anything you wish because of funding. A good portion of your days as an academic consist of teaching, another good portion is writing grants. If you don't do the popular thing, you don't get grants. If you don't get grants you don't get students.

And sadly, without students that means that you don't get to do much research because the majority of your time is teaching and dealing with grants and other bureaucracy. As my former supervisor put it: you get time to do research yourself when you get home after work.

So you have time, but not much. Most profs use this time, but it's just not enough without grants and students.

Ok, so let's go to industry. You get paid a lot more. You get to do primarily research. But it's not public. It's mostly locked up and directed to ultimately lame purposes like targeting ads or making trades. These help no one and don't help society, so it's really not very enticing to an academic hopeful.

And yes, these researchers do fall off the radar because they stop publishing. They may file patents, but the only people who read those are lawyers. This is because patents are not papers. Their primary purpose is law, and they don't contain any of the information an academic would be interested in. You generally can't reproduce a work from a patent, and patents don't include any requirements of proving your invention works, which is the primary requirement of science.

To make matters worse, the patent office typically patents extremely simple things that aren't even worth the attention of someone trying to achieve state of the art. Essentially patents are a huge joke, so nobody looks at them, either in academia nor industry engineers.

TLDR: people go into academia to make the world a better place and do novel research that gets published to the world for free. Academia is increasingly a bad way to achieve this and industry doesn't achieve this at all. Though industry does get you paid so ends up being the fall back, even if you fall off the map.

Not in my experience. It might be true in subjects like english, history and the social sciences where jobs in industry are rare, but and certainly not in the technical engineering fields. Most people I know getting a PhD did so with the intention of moving on to the private sector.

And I don't know what industry you are in, but lots of companies publish papers and present their research at conferences.

I told my dad about it. He's a PhD scientist, and spent his career in industry. He told me that the "birth control problem" was already known in the 1950s, and that it was never a slam dunk that a PhD would get into a decent academic research career.

There are pervasive claims both by prominent scientists and politicians in both parties that there is shortage of scientists (Google STEM shortage) going back at least to the 1950's. Many people even to this day starting a Ph.D. program are unaware of the long odds against getting a permanent research job.

Most Ph.D.'s in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields who leave academia find jobs as some sort of software developer, an often high paying but highly unstable and often short lived career. There are not a lot of jobs for scientific research in private industry; many research labs such as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC established in the post Sputnik 1960's period have been closed or substantially shrunk. Microsoft Research and similar outfits are not nearly as large as the Bell Labs, HP Labs, Xerox PARC of the past.

The vast majority of STEM Ph.D. students are funded through grants and contracts from funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) which by policy chooses to fund far more Ph.D. graduate students than there are long term positions. In most cases, the funding agencies promote the false idea that there is a current or future shortage of scientists. The funding agencies could by policy limit the number of funded graduate students to some reasonable multiplier of retirements of senior researchers each year, taking into account that some graduate students will reasonably decide to pursue other careers after completing their Ph.D.

The extremely long odds of a permanent position, most of which pay no more than a software developer with a few years of experience or an associate at a top tier corporate law firm ensure that a high fraction of the "best and brightest" will not pursue a career in research, tackling problems like curing cancer or better energy sources. The present system hopes that quantity and regimentation -- an army of easily abused indentured servants from India and other "third world" nations -- will win over quality and individual creativity. In many fields, like cancer research, over forty years of this approach has failed unequivocally.