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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

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that wasn't the claim, that all work in science is interesting. It was that mine is. And it very clearly is about values. Your hypothetical job in industry that's 3/4 uninteresting sounds awful to me. I'd never want that. For any (realistic) amount of money.

What I meant by "values" is some kind of moral superiority that seems to be espoused by a lot of people I've met in academia. That somehow not pursuing academic research is "selling out". This idea is implicitly ingrained in a lot of graduate students when they enter the program. In my opinion, this is all to justify the shitty treatment. And I find this mentality very similar to organized religions where you are exp…

You know, I get the point you are making, and there is some truth to it. But overblown statements like "academia is just not about science these days" totally undermine the rest of your argument. It's unfortunate that you had a bad experience, but extrapolating that to an indictment of _all of science_ seems like sour grapes. A lot of people, the majority, are doing good work. It's not the caricature you make it out to be.

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

#292
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…

It's a trend in sales to hire retired professional athletes. Google famously hired a cohort of olympic athletes for their Adwords sales team.
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