How are these odds compared to other similar ventures full of uncertainty, such as start ups ? And if the odds are comparable then why is our culture viewing start ups positively but PhD negatively ?
Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
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Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#22Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on your position in the inter-document citation network.
Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee.
If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depressed sociopaths with Lamborghinis, then tenure-track postdocs are investment bankers with crappy bicycles.
Needless to say, I left academia 3 years ago and never looked back.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#23> 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.
Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think.
Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definitely in the top 15 percent of the field. It's certainly not that easy, but...you're not obviously worse than most of your classmates, you work on a hot topic and you work hard. What are your chances?
Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or discussion of their prospects. They should obviously think about this, but more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and frank assesments.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
From your [3] above, do theory PhD graduates usually have more or fewer publications? What would be your guesstimates of the mean/median number of first author publications of faculty candidates at a top school? "Number First Author Publications (excluding theory folks) Mean: 12.8±6.5 Median: 14.5 Range: 2 – 25"
In other areas of computer science, first author counts for a lot. It indicates a person did the majority of the implementation work, probably wrote the first draft of the paper, etc. Typically the last author is the PI that came up with the idea, mentored the first author, and funded the work. The contributions of those in the middle are less well defined. In CS theory (and math), they go by alphabetical author orde…
Thank you for the explanation!
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#25I always tell students in my field (molecular biology) to at the very least learn to code at a reasonable level and pick up some data science skills. Something transferable.
At any given time in my department, there'd be five times the amount of post-grad students to full-time staff. Maybe more. It has to be obvious that there likely isn't a job at any level at the end of it. Not just high-flying jobs on the path to professorship, but even low skill technical stuff.
As in other fields, women are at a significant disadvantage if they want to have kids (presuming they've made it though the initial cull). The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. Given every higher position is so competitive, they simple lose out due to the time taken off. Makes me quite to sad to see very very talented scientist friends passed over for this reason.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#26I am currently pursuing MS in Biological Sciences on animal behavior. I want to do Phd then Post-doc and then continue in the science field. But I am not very talented. Most probably I may get stuck after Phd or Post doc. I don't want job. But looking into these kinds of articles now and then, make me think "what are the alternatives ?" What about the people who do basic science like in theoretical physics or pure ma…
I’m doing a PhD in Theoretical Physics, I hedge the uncertainty of academia by finding small opportunities in other fields to do work in. Internships in science communication, teaching at the university, part time work for a tech start up. On their own, none of them are a safety net for jumping out of academia if you have to, but if you accumulate enough experience over the years, the hope is that transitioning to in…
Yeah. That's a good piece of advice. I usually spend time on data analysis, learning computer security, web designing or any tech related stuff but as hobby only. I know basic of these things but not a "pro" in one field. I guess better to keep learning new things, any time opportunities might pop up as you have said.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#27Data so absent that they have to draw an analogy to a different data set without any supporting evidence that such is valid. This is Nature not the daily Mail.
What is the statistic? How many PhD students have jobs in Academia 5 Years after being awarded? Surely they have /something/ that might be indicative they can publish that's better than footballers? Surely..?
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#28I am currently pursuing MS in Biological Sciences on animal behavior. I want to do Phd then Post-doc and then continue in the science field. But I am not very talented. Most probably I may get stuck after Phd or Post doc. I don't want job. But looking into these kinds of articles now and then, make me think "what are the alternatives ?" What about the people who do basic science like in theoretical physics or pure ma…
I hope you like kids. All my biology teachers in high school had done research degrees and found that there were not very many research jobs available.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#29The 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…
When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day(s). He made 100k+. Not to mention that there are some professors at my university who make close to or over 300k/year and do not teach, but they are much more rare and have fat CVs. The other side of the coin is that before you get tenure, you may be working a lot for very little and only when you're close to 40 (on average) will you be granted tenure.
Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
#30> 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.
These are usually people that have always been the best in their class through their academic careers. The idea that they might be the ones to not get a position, because they are not good enough for it may not be something they have experienced /consider possible for themselves.
They may consider the possibility, feel intense despair about it, and work to avoid thinking about it in order to avoid feeling the intense negative feelings that come with something they regard as catastrophic.