271–280 of 292 posts
I told my dad about it. He got his PhD in the 50s. His reply was: "Oh yeah, that was common knowledge when we got our degrees too."
He enjoyed a long career in industry, as have I, so far.
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Was your original plan to become a professor? If so, why did you change course?
When I entered grad school it was. Then the Soviet Union died, and the market, already awash in a large number of Ph.D.s in physics suddenly transformed into something that I could not effectively compete in. To some degree, you are measured, as a student/postdoc, by the number of highly rated papers in good journals that you produce, as well as citations, invitations to speak, etc. All of this factors into how high…
That's great advice, but how do you translate it into practice? Should someone considering grad school do a PhD in AI or in biomedical engineering or in finance or what?
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Are you serious? Can you share the school and department? This is an honest question -- I always thought 4-5 lecture or classroom hours was normal. That's what I had and that's what my friends had. Most of us never even used graders assigned as grading duties were light and it would often be more trouble to explain how you wanted it graded anyhow. I have never heard of a 20 hour TA load. Again, just wondering.
Every CS department I have ever heard of has a 20 hour TA load as standard.
I'd imagine my experience wasn't an uncommon one.
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They simply decided what they valued more between later academic career and current family life (as you can have kids later). That's their choice, there's nothing to be saddened about.
The 20s to early 30s is the healthiest time to have a child, for both the child and the mother. Now, you can have children in your late thirties and beyond, but that can get more difficult depending on the specific health situation of the parents. Also, there is a problem in parity for how having a child affects men vs women. It is easier for a man to become a parent and maintain a career than it is for the mother.
Some women manage to have top careers while bearing children. It's just that most prefer to focus on their family. I'm female, in a field which recently swapped from male to female dominance. The market is flooded with part time jobs (saturdays, or wednesday when school's off) and it's definitely causing some recruitment problems in the field (and on a deeper level, female are less likely to become partners because of responsibilities and work involved, many stay salaried and thus have lower revenues, etc). There has been numerous studies on this topic in my field and family is the biggest factor holding people back (although men also value their off time more than they used to so its partly a generational thing). At least there's work for motivated people, so I don't complain.
To me it's rather obvious that most women don't value their careers that much. Which is not a problem in itself, just stop pretending otherwise, no one's holding anyone back from careers but people themselves. (I guess most men don't either actually, but it doesn't show as much.) I also really don't get why it is such a punishable offense to assume in recruitment that a childless woman in her thirties will be on maternity leave soon as it's indeed a really strong probability. It's not like waiting for the end of probatory periodto get pregnant is a rare thing...
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Your adviser was right though. If there was an infinite amount of money then they'd have lecturers who are dedicated to lecturing. But there is never enough money so...what options are there but to do the things that will bring more in so that your role/group/department/university survives. I've seen it myself...groups whither and disappear due to lack of funds.
Do undergraduate fees contribute to a faculty's research funding? And if not why are student fees so high, if there is such a low (albeit understandable) emphasis on undergraduate teaching?
I'd suggest that faculty don't want there to be a low emphasis on teaching, it's just that there aren't enough resources to do the critical tasks first. This is bearing in mind that teaching duties are always fulfilled either way (just not to the satisfaction of some people).
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I have such a name -- doesn't particularly bother me. I understand how people can feel that way though, but my question is -- why is that feeling anything but obsessing over a vanity metric, and actually a useful mechanism for author evaluation?
It's important in the way papers are referenced. https://library.leeds.ac.uk/skills-citations-harvard#activat... > If a source has three or more authors, the name of the first author should be given, followed by the phrase "et al". It might be good if this wasn't the case, but since it is, it's a realistic concern for authors. Beyond that, really the reason will be that this is what people the people who decide your…
If you called "BCS" (superconductivity) "Bardeen et. al." it would take everyone a minute to figure out what you meant, and they'd wonder about your background.
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I like where your head is at. This is the type of math we should be doing.
On the other hand, someone has to do the PhDs in order to invent things like machine learning. That is also math we should be doing.
> That is also math we should be doing.
There are things that should not only be seen in narrow economic terms, though. If someone wants to run their own business, or increase the stock of knowledge, or seek enlightenment in meditation retreats, that's perfectly ok, even if they don't strictly optimise their expected monetary payoff.
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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…
As an old Russian saying goes, 'a great engineer would never be promoted'.
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Are you serious? Can you share the school and department? This is an honest question -- I always thought 4-5 lecture or classroom hours was normal. That's what I had and that's what my friends had. Most of us never even used graders assigned as grading duties were light and it would often be more trouble to explain how you wanted it graded anyhow. I have never heard of a 20 hour TA load. Again, just wondering.
Every CS department I have ever heard of has a 20 hour TA load as standard.
This is just a couple of data points, though. Maybe we were just lucky.
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I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status. My experience is in theoretical math/physics -- I got my PhD but decided not to stay in academia; there are pros and cons to both options. IME most tenured professors have to work significantly less than others for the same salary (those who work more mostly do it because they like working with grad students, not becaus…
I don't know about theoretical physics, but math professors usually have almost no burden to produce grant money. My observation is the same - they are very relaxed. In my school, the physics department was part of the College of Engineering. They had the usual 80 hour weeks because their evaluations depended on the amount of grant money they brought in.