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As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

science.org

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Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#71

Post by coldpie »

arethuza wrote: post #5
baka367 wrote: post #3

I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high. Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since. Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me. I also sti…

I stopped doing a PhD after about 5 years - I was a Research Associate in a UK university so I actually got a salary which wasn't too bad but quite a bit below the going rate (I had a few job offers during that time). I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was "hyper cynical" (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the "publish or perish" game. I l…

> I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.

Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.

Yeah, no thanks.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#72

Post by quantumwannabe »

chrisseaton wrote: post #28
jonsen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shortage of qualified people does not imply shortage of PhDs.

A PhD is the most common way to gain the experience and context needed to work professionally on compilers. If there aren't many PhDs, then the supply of people with the experience needed in practice is going to be low, even if there are also people without PhDs who can do it.

No university class teaches modern compilers and the state of the art is in open source projects. If someone is interested in compilers, they don’t need to get a PhD in order to learn. Many major companies that maintain programming languages do not require PhDs in order to work on their compiler teams; they are willing to train you on the job. The supply of people interested is just low in general, and if you are biased towards people with PhDs and preexisting experience for junior hires, of course you will find a shortage of workers.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#73

Post by analog31 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #53
sseagull wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the trivialization of this. The solution is not obvious. Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress. So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (…

>Paying more/longer requires more money. Where does that money come from? Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, man…

Or train people to do research while in grad school. There are plenty of fields where people don't do post-docs before applying for faculty positions, e.g., all of the fields where there's no money for post-docs, and "hot" fields where people have better job prospects. I know two CS professors at a major research university, who went straight to faculty positions from their PhDs.

The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#74

Post by vpb »

persedes wrote: post #62
bjourne wrote: post #55

I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration. Few natives would accept the low pay/high workload combination that is a postdoc, but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be an amazing opportunity. Same reason most fruit and berry pickers also are immigrants.

Don't even know where to begin...but according to this [1] less than 5% of students in the US are international students. 1 - https://www.fwd.us/news/international-students/

"And even though they make up only 5% of the total student population, international students earned nearly half of all Master’s and Doctor’s STEM degrees awarded in 2019, a total of 117,000 degrees."

That's an interesting stat which might be the source of the parent post assertion.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#75

Post by EEBio »

kmmlng wrote: post #35
baka367 wrote: post #3

I spent 4 + 1 (extra year) going for the PhD. Getting funding for anything was nothing short of nightmare and the workload was (obviously) very high. Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since. Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me. I also sti…

A PhD can mean a lot of different things. Personally, I'm employed as a research associate while doing a PhD, which in theory means I should do the PhD as part of my job. In practice, I do not get to do any actual research during the job and the PhD is relegated to weekends. What I find curious: I get paid to do lots of things which are clearly complete nonsense, but the funding comes with the requirement that these…

What are the nonsensical activities you get paid to do?

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#78

Post by WkndTriathlete »

sseagull wrote: post #49
InefficientRed wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the helplessness of this. You have agency. You also have responsibility. You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed. I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had…

> Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector. I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines. I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But th…

> This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.

That's actually a really bad analysis and entirely misses the point.

Fundamentally (in the US) too many postdocs are being funded from a fixed grant pool NIH/NSF/etc. has to offer. Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Too few postdocs have a career path because so few faculty positions are available after completing their postdoc.

Yes, not all science is interesting to the private sector. But that doesn't mean that publicly-funded science has to proceed at its current rate with its unsustainable model of employing postdoctoral slaves.

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#79

Post by bmitc »

persedes wrote: post #62
bjourne wrote: post #55

I think Western academia is mostly reliant on immigration. Few natives would accept the low pay/high workload combination that is a postdoc, but for an immigrant from a third world country it might be an amazing opportunity. Same reason most fruit and berry pickers also are immigrants.

Don't even know where to begin...but according to this [1] less than 5% of students in the US are international students. 1 - https://www.fwd.us/news/international-students/

That is either for undergraduates or total enrollment. The percentages for international students in graduate schools basically range from 50% upwards, depending on the field.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/08/19/inter...

Re: As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia

#80

Post by dagw »

chrisseaton wrote: post #68
RhysU wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't ABD status the time from successfully proposing a dissertation to a specific committee until successfully defending that dissertation in front of that committee? The former step is intended to clearly define what is sufficient work. In effect, it is the contract that eliminates some of the risk of the advisor's whim.

Some people say ABD is 'all but defended' as in you wrote your thesis you just didn't do a defence, some people say ABD is 'all but dissertation' in that you didn't get the point of writing the thesis. That's a pretty big difference. The former is you basically did your entire PhD, the latter is you didn't really start it.

the latter is you didn't really start it.

That seems unfair. By the time many people get started on their dissertation they have often done years of research and have gotten several papers published. Starting your dissertation basically means that you're 'done' with your PhD and ready to summerize what you've discovered.

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