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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

#181

Post by crocowhile »

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…

Perhaps this is true in some countries. In the USA and Europe, the average professor works 61 hours a week and encounters very high levels of stress, linked to continuously having to obtain research funds.

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

#182

Post by jackpirate »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #117
hyperbovine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ... I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry. To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it st…

I met an amateur comedian recently who mentioned he's almost done with his PhD, but will never make back the lost earnings from the time he's invested. Whilst he talked, part of me was thinking 'man, if only your PhD were in machine learning'. I didn't say it out loud, though. It turned out he's about to complete a PhD in machine learning, but doesn't want to work in Silicon Valley, or for a big company, or in financ…

Doing a phd in machine learning and working at a high paying tech company is still a money losing competition due to the opportunity cost. Getting a masters and then working for 5 years gives you at least a half million dollar head start.

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

#183

Post by eli_gottlieb »

hyperbovine wrote: post #94
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…

> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ... I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry. To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it st…

>I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry.

Indeed! Why is the assumption always, "We all value money, so just switch to industry!"? It's like telling a public servant that if they wanted a living wage they'd learn Node.js. Not everyone wants to do industrial web-dev, and not everyone should have to. There are high-skill, high-impact contributions to society that don't involve corporate life, shouldn't involve corporate life, and instead need an institutional space for people to pursue them without the pressures and incentives of corporate life.

"Just switch to industry" is turning into the scholarly equivalent of, "just learn to code". Instead of all giving up on some people making the best impact they can, the impact they work desperately hard for, maybe we should just fix the academic labor system.

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

#184

Post by JepZ »

asafira wrote: post #154

Hey, so I'm a PhD student (in Physics) at Harvard that has been looking into these issues (as graduate council president in the department), and I really don't like the bickering that occurs between (roughly speaking) die-hard academia pursuers and the others that feel there is a lack in support for non-academic jobs. Here are by far the most compelling issues that I think need to be fixed that both sides should be a…

Well, I think there is a common misconception among academics: They think that theory must be pure and that people who work tend to muddle the theory.

What they seem to ignore is that theory is an abstraction within the human mind and that the real thing is something practical.

So in my opinion the academic path should be accompanied by a real/practical job (within the field of study). Apart from supporting the student with a salary it would bring alternative career paths much earlier to the table.

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

#185

Post by Ar-Curunir »

ptero wrote: post #111
chriskanan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree with this for science and engineering. All of my tenured colleagues work very hard. You have to if you want to keep running a lab, which is the main reason why people choose to become professors. If you stop working hard, you will stop getting funding and PhD students. The department will make you teach more and can make your life difficult if you are being a drag on the department, even if they…

Things are different for those doing theoretical science where the main instruments are pen and paper. External funding is often not required at all. This might not please the department, but the tenured professor would be just fine. When I did my PhD I worked in Math and CS (plus had friends in Physics with similar observations): many professors on the theoretical side had no need for and were not interested in gett…

You can't get students without grants. Most professors want students, because they like doing research, and so have to apply for grants.

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

#186

Post by santaclaus »

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…

> tax free pay

Wow what? Is the US? I def got taxed -- and audited because the funding agency screwed up some paperwork -- on my PhD income, while on federal fellowships no less.

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

#187

Post by jartelt »

eegilbert wrote: post #179
jartelt wrote: post #177

During my PhD studies, most students I talked to were aware of the lack of professorships available. The issue, however, was that certain departments/professors really frowned upon PhD students exploring jobs in industry (some departments were great though). I was in engineering and the professors were generally helpful with trying to connect you to people they knew in industry. Departments like Psychology were the o…

I agree with most of this. However, I might take issue with the motivation you ascribe to professors: "only car[ing] about increasing the number of academics who studied in their lab." Another explanation, one that I find myself feeling sometimes, is simply mismatched incentives. Practicing academics and students headed to industry simply have different incentives, and that can add friction to the relationship. I thi…

I get what you are saying, but the incentives do not have to be misaligned. It makes total sense for both the professor and student to be aligned in pursuing the goal of completing and publishing interesting and original research. It shouldn't matter what the student does after completing said research! But, some professors distribute their resources unequally and give the most time/money to the students who are trying to become professors.

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

#189

Post by ionforce »

jackpirate wrote: post #182
rahimnathwani wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met an amateur comedian recently who mentioned he's almost done with his PhD, but will never make back the lost earnings from the time he's invested. Whilst he talked, part of me was thinking 'man, if only your PhD were in machine learning'. I didn't say it out loud, though. It turned out he's about to complete a PhD in machine learning, but doesn't want to work in Silicon Valley, or for a big company, or in financ…

Doing a phd in machine learning and working at a high paying tech company is still a money losing competition due to the opportunity cost. Getting a masters and then working for 5 years gives you at least a half million dollar head start.

I like where your head is at. This is the type of math we should be doing.

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

#190

Post by eli_gottlieb »

neel_k wrote: post #58
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 -- an…

>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).

That sounds heavenly.

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