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

nature.com

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

#71

Post by michaelt »

fergie wrote: post #54

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…

If you're pursuing pro football, don't you have to neglect your schooling to compete with the other players?

If so, doesn't that close more doors than the academic route, where you can take your degree/masters/phd to industry any time you like?

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

#72

Post by gravelc »

vixen99 wrote: post #60
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.

No doubt it's difficult, but what would help is to take something more than a person's Scopus index into account when picking applicants for interviews. The initial culling of hundreds of CVs to just a few is almost based solely on this (among the people who are actually qualified for the job and work in the advertised field).

Hiring the best person for the job is the solution IMO, but the system doesn't work that way. Does it really matter if person X has 3 Nature papers and person Y has 2? The real issue (in Australia, at least) is that publication is everything. It really shouldn't be, for a myriad of reasons.

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

#73

Post by rerx »

pks016 wrote: post #12

I 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…

> What about the people who do basic science like in theoretical physics or pure maths?

In my experience, those who did not do numerical work mostly look into positions in management consulting, finance, or insurance.

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

#74

Post by chestervonwinch »

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…

> 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.

Nonetheless, a good supervisor should understand and take into account what the student is ultimately trying to obtain out of the PhD.

If the student is aimed toward academia, then producing influential papers is priority. If the student is aimed toward industry, then the advisor can guide the student towards a less theoretical problem and encourage the student to produce results that showcase their ability to tackle and solve a problem that is both research-level and practical for industry.

Of course a poor advisor can disregard the students goals and use the student for whatever purpose that advances the advisor's standing in the field.

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

#75

Post by henrik_w »

I have an M.Sc. in computer science, and worked as a SW developer for 5 years before going back to do a Ph.D. I stayed with it for one year, but decided it wasn't for me. I really liked the idea of learning more, but realized working in industry was even better for me.

I found that a lot of Ph.D. projects are driven by what you can write papers on, not necessarily what somebody somewhere really needs. Also, you can learn without being at a university.

More here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-prog...

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

#76

Post by photoJ »

wiz21c wrote: post #56
yannis7 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Find the right advisor and anything is possible. Remember tho, that the department and the research community to which you will belong will also have a considerable say in if you are allowed to progress.

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

#77

Post by girvo »

danieltillett wrote: post #61
fergie wrote: post #54

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…

Very interesting observation. I should do the equivalent comparison for Australia.

For Rugby Union, the path to playing in Super Rugby is surprisingly short. I became a first-grade Union referee pretty much by accident, without really putting much time into it aside from the weekends.

The ARB actually asked me to become a professional referee, but didn't realise how young I was at the time. A shame that I never followed through on it, really.

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

#78

Post by ced »

fergie wrote: post #54

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…

True, but there's probably 10 times more young men who would like to be professional footballers than professors.

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

#79

Post by taway_1212 »

jtauber1 wrote: post #67
zucchini_head wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all. 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 particula…

Not a big fan of academia either, but I don't see how this is any different than upper management/leaderahip positions in industry.

It's true that you need to eat the same shit, but at least upper mgmt/leadership pays much better.

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

#80

Post by gjm11 »

disinterred wrote: post #29
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…

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 think you mean the amount of work you have to do. Tenured professors typically get that way by (1) being passionate about their subject and (2) working very hard -- as well as (3) being really good at it, of course -- and the amount of work they actually do may be a lot more than the amount they have to do.
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