Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 292 posts

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#51

Post by raister »

chriskanan wrote: post #20
nopinsight wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

This is changing, thankfully. First authors should be the ones leading the paper, according to contributions. Some journals are asking for the actual contributions performed by each author, which I think is very good.

Alphabetical order should be banned, period.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#52

Post by yannis7 »

wiz21c wrote: post #50

What about starting a PhD at 45 ? I mean, just for the fun of being a student again, the fun of working on your own little project . Does it open possibilities, in the sense of a career reboot ? (I'm totally OK with earning much less money than I do right now)

it will definitely be fun, both being a student + working on your own project.

From my experience, for some reason PhD advisors tend to work well/really like mature students. No hard data on this, just an empirical observation across 3-4 labs I've worked in before I left academia.

With regards to career prospects (outside academia ofc), you definitely gain respect but anything more than that largely depends on your area of research. Which one is it, if I may ask?

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#53

Post by DrNuke »

In 2017 the research path in computer-heavy subjects is not academy-bound anymore. There may be early problems in getting credit within the learned circles, but a couple of good papers and one good presentation at a good conference under your own ltd umbrella solve this for good.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#54

Post by fergie »

Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids.

In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades.

The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to those positions for a lifetime.

So there are more professors than footballers at any one time, but due to football's higher turnover, and shorter tenure, many more people will be a footballer than a professor over the course of their career.

The bottom line is that professional football is actually a relatively attainable goal for young British men, and should probably be more encouraged as a realistic career option.

...and when you do put in your application to Oxford, Cambridge, Google, or Facebook, your long-gone 3 year stint as a utility midfielder at Dundee United is only going to make it more interesting.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#55

Post by hycaria »

hobofan wrote: post #40
mattkrause wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The average age of a PhD student is 33 years and even at normal speed, no breaks/hurdles and starting right out of high-school, you are 25(?). Something about applying this babysitting attitude of "somebody needs to tell them" to highly educated individuals of that age just doesn't sit right with me. If I were a PhD supervisor, I would probably find it ridiculous that one of my responsibilities would be "pointing peo…

That's higher than I thought, but I guess that's US numbers. Are they starting it way later (and if so what are they doing in between) ? Or is it simply a long time spent in PhD ?

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#56

Post by wiz21c »

yannis7 wrote: post #52
wiz21c wrote: post #50

What about starting a PhD at 45 ? I mean, just for the fun of being a student again, the fun of working on your own little project . Does it open possibilities, in the sense of a career reboot ? (I'm totally OK with earning much less money than I do right now)

it will definitely be fun, both being a student + working on your own project. From my experience, for some reason PhD advisors tend to work well/really like mature students. No hard data on this, just an empirical observation across 3-4 labs I've worked in before I left academia. With regards to career prospects (outside academia ofc), you definitely gain respect but anything more than that largely depends on your a…

I'm looking at anything involving computational geometry; and if I have spare time, ethics :-)

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#57

Post by singhrac »

bhnmmhmd wrote: post #15
chriskanan wrote: post #6

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…

I'm really interested in applications of technology (including AI, ML, etc.) in business. But the only way I can get into any US university is by doing a Ph.D. (I live abroad). Is it at all possible for a person doing Operations/MIS/Quant_marketing - whose main job is econometrics and ML - to not end up in academia after completing his Ph.D.?

Of course, there are plenty of jobs in the industry for PhDs. Another option you might want to consider if you don't enjoy doing research is a Master's program in the US - which gives you some extra training, access to recruiters, a network, etc.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#58

Post by neel_k »

simonbarker87 wrote: post #5

When 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 s…

This is basically the same thing I did, except that I worked as a programmer at a startup before going back to school for a PhD.

It was better than doing a startup by a stupidly huge margin. Startups are all about risk-minimization and risk-mitigation, since risky things mostly fail, and so use up your runway without moving you closer to success. So in a startup you are highly incentivized not to take big risks -- and research is always a risk. So you are driven to take an engineering mindset, where the apex of skill is to solve a new problem using only old, entirely proven techniques.

In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid confronting them).

Basically a PhD puts you in an environment where you can take on big, poorly-understood and poorly-defined problems and attack them over and over again. Going from a blank sheet of paper to a solution (or clear failure) in six months 10 times over is an amazing way of improving your skills, and IME it's really hard to get this experience in industry (even though it's really valuable to have this experience in industry).

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#59

Post by ForHackernews »

bhnmmhmd wrote: post #15
chriskanan wrote: post #6

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…

I'm really interested in applications of technology (including AI, ML, etc.) in business. But the only way I can get into any US university is by doing a Ph.D. (I live abroad). Is it at all possible for a person doing Operations/MIS/Quant_marketing - whose main job is econometrics and ML - to not end up in academia after completing his Ph.D.?

Not just possible, extremely likely. That's the whole point of the article: even if you wanted to stay in academia, you would struggle to do so.

Re: Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

#60

Post by vixen99 »

gravelc wrote: post #25

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…

So what's the solution? Hold a position for a woman and then kick out whoever fills it when the woman returns? Everyone has to make choices and this is one of them. If there's a way round this conundrum, a very very talented woman will find it.
Post reply on HN