31–40 of 292 posts
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 ?
The 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…
I 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…
I think it's really a black mark on the system that it should be OK for researchers to still not have a permanent position in their early 30s ten years after completing their undergraduate degree.
> 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, definit…
And they won't do it because they are a) biased due to survivorship bias, and b) they are disincentivized to do so as that would scare away their cheap labor.
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 ?
The 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).
Fast forward to today and you need a multi-billion-dollar orbital telescope or a massive array of radio telescopes to do new work...
I once had dreams of a career in academia and research. I'm a molecular biologist turned computer scientist turned software engineer in industry. I now have a very good salary, interesting challenges, plenty of work-life balance and good prospects for the future, and that's pretty much directly out of university.
In my opinion, I would have to give up on all of the aforementioned benefits (sans interesting challenges) for at least the next 10 years if I wanted to stay in academia, and on top of that, add the nice non-zero chance of just getting stuck and be forced out of the academic "track".
All my advisors told me it's a pretty bad time to go into academia, and I doubt it will get better, sadly, I might add.
Academia 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, depr…
Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.
The 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…
That said, for the liberal arts, history, etc., things may be different. They don't tend to have large labs and their goals are different. I honestly don't know.
> 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, definit…
If I were a PhD supervisor, I would probably find it ridiculous that one of my responsibilities would be "pointing people to the universities careers service". I'm also not sure why you would expect a supervisor to be able to give good career advice when some of them have only ever experienced academia themselves.