Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
1–10 of 292 posts
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#2> Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know.
If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#3The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and technical sciences.
Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#4The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and technical sciences. Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).
> Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day)
Source? (Genuinely curious.)
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#5When deciding to do my PhD I did so under the assumption that I wouldn't work in academia afterward. I evaluated it like a any other job offer at the time and decided that the tax free pay, coupled with the freedom to run my project how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc.
Doing a PhD built a large array of skills that I didn't have from my undergrad and allowed me to learn practical skills in a fairly low risk environment and explore other avenues. It let me realise that I wanted to start a business, it taxed me mentally like nothing before, it prepared me to hold myself accountable and that if I don't do the work then it doesn't get done and gave me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do that my undergrad didn't.
As the article says, I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in academia, it can be an excellent bridge to industry if you are prepared for that at the end.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#6The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years.
When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wanted to punch me in the face. That said, she emailed me years later to tell me that she became a professor, despite those statistics. If you have a lot of tenacity (doing a postdoc), are willing to settle for a school that isn't top-50, and are reasonably productive (a few papers per year) it is doable. Every single one of my friends that graduated and still wanted to be a professor, is one now, but it took 3-5 years of additional work. This is true for my friends in psychology, computer science, EE, and neuroscience.
Of course, now all my other friends say, "Why the hell did you choose to be a professor where you work 80 hours per week and make less than most undergraduates with CS degrees, even when your area of expertise is AI?"
Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic. There are lots of great things to do with a PhD that aren't being a professor.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#7The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and technical sciences. Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).
> Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day) Source? (Genuinely curious.)
It is assumed due to the higher knowlege and specialisation level that the world has these days, but such moments of change does not come along very often, and people have always been confident about how there is no way their understanding of the world might be severly lacking in some way. So it might just be that all is as it always has been you just have to look at it using a large enough time frame.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#8The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wan…
If anyone is interested, here are my old blog posts on the requirements for getting an interview for a professorship at a top-50 school:
[1] http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/
[2] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-computer-science-pro...
[3] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-ucsds-computer-scien...
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#9Doing a PhD thesis these days doesn't necessarily makes you cut out to be a scientist. One can speculate if job prospects differs across disciplines.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#10The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and technical sciences. Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).
I think you've got it from the wrong end. Most academic research I've seen has been so tainted by corporate funding, publish-or-perish haste, over-formalization, misuse of statistics, egos run wild, or some mixture of them all. Then there have been cases where novel research has been stomped into the ground by professional groupthink, like in Yudkin's case. At the same time we had guys like Shulgin being incredibly productive all on their own.
Think of MDMA alone. If it really ends up being a useful treatment, you just know a pharma company would insist that it ran them billions of dollars to develop, and that they should have a God-given right to gouge for it, but it came for considerably less than that from a real expert puttering around in his shack.
Sometimes I wonder if the independent researcher is our only hope.