301–310 of 332 posts
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…
Sorry to sound elitist, but no reasonable phd graduate that wants to pursue academia would ever want to do their PhD at Clemson university. Only possible exception would be that PI has done Nobel prize level work or the candidate has personal reasons to be in South Carolina. For perspective postdocs, it’s not about money, job security, or job environment . It’s first and foremost potential to be a leader in their fie…
This is "saying the quiet part out loud" in academia. For engineering undergrad, your in-state university (ABET accredited) will usually be your best cost/benefit option (unless you're going to MIT, Stanford, or, for CS only, CMU). For grad school, I believe you'd want to think very carefully about the opportunity cost (and what you want your PhD for) before going anywhere outside of the top 20 (or even top 15) schoo…
Even within Harvard, the percentage of postdocs getting faculty positions is low.
One needs to calculate essentially how likely you will get a top publication in that lab.
The arithmetic is something like for a research group, what is the average number of top publications per year per postdoc. Many top labs at Harvard don’t do well with this metric because they have like 20 postdocs and 1 top paper a year.
Another metric is what fraction of postdocs end up in good faculty jobs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
"The dearth of Americans is even more pronounced in hot STEM fields like computer science, which serve as talent pipelines for the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft: About 64 percent of doctoral candidates and almost 68 percent in master’s programs last year were international students, according to an annual survey of American and Canadian universities by the Computing Research Association. In comparis…
Why are you interested in the percentage of foreign born PhD students? You realize that a lot of Americans are "foreign born". It seems like an archaic way of thinking about things.
"International student" should indeed exclude those who are permanent residents. Which means they have been living here permanently before becoming a student, likely grew up in America, or just waiting for the citizenship, etc. "International student" means someone who moved here to study.
I'm assuming good intentions, but want to make sure we're not intentionally trying to gatekeep what it means to be an American.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who needs a PhD for a "junior python developer role". Is it really necessary. This "python developer" idea sounds like it only applies to a small slice of PhD programs, notably the ones focused solely on computers. For example, what percentage of PhDs in molecular biology choose to become "junior python developer". When someone who believes a computer performing pattern recognition equates to a child having feelings…
People get PHD’s because they love the subject matter and can get loans etc. But they then have a PHD that might not actually be worth anything and still need to eat. Assuming just because you have a PHD means you need to use it is a sunk cost fallacy. Starting over can be a completely rational choice.
Perhaps the value of a PhD is not limited to its "market value". I hope that part of the intrinsic value of a degree is an ability to think critically, unlike the "senior software engineer" example I cited, for which the "market value" is probably quite high. Sometimes markets are not rational. Myself, I do not care what any job market suggests. To me, education has value, both for the individual and for society at large.
"Tech" companies are not well-known for fostering crtitical thinking ability. Most of the world is eating, and feeding families, without knowing how to program computers. It has been that way since the dawn of humankind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People get PHD’s because they love the subject matter and can get loans etc. But they then have a PHD that might not actually be worth anything and still need to eat. Assuming just because you have a PHD means you need to use it is a sunk cost fallacy. Starting over can be a completely rational choice.
Does sunk cost fallacy apply to an assumption that because one has an ability to program a computer one must use it, i.e., demand pay for time spent on programming, e.g., with the end goal of coercing people to surrender personal data and/or click on ads. Perhaps the value of a PhD is not limited to its "market value". I hope that part of the intrinsic value of a degree is an ability to think critically, unlike the "…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Industry solved it as many times as the academics have
Fermat's last theorem has been solved back in the 90s. But it's obviously just one example to illustrate the main point, it's not about whether it specifically has been solved or not.
Make it make sense. Offer Postdocs an actual career path not based on broken tenure and disposable adjunct professor roles, with hundreds if not thousands of applicants. Why would someone, with any field of study, be a "scum of the earth" post doc for 1/5th the salary and double the hours required as a junior python developer role? Moreso, post doc'ing for the wrong professor can ruin your career, why risk that eithe…