Abolish the PhD (2016) • Hacker News Board

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#121

Post by xavxav » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:16 PM UTC

light_hue_1 wrote: post #8

This identifies a problem: PhD students are treated badly both in terms of working conditions and pay. The solution isn't to abolish the PhD. It's to have better working conditions and pay! PhD students should be employees with all of the protections this gives them. They should have unions (I have been both at union and non-union shops, you want to be in a graduate student union). PhD students should benefit from th…

In France, you normally can't apply for a thesis without funding (it may vary on field though). And the moment you have funding that makes you an employee, with the protections accorded. Since most theses are funded using public money, you become a state employee with all the additional protections that implies.

That said, PhD students (and researchers) are still poorly paid (though PhD stipends are being raised over the next few years), and though France has a legal 35 hour work week, informal pressure of academia means that tends to be thrown out the window.

There are legal requirements on graduate schools that help protect students from abusive advisors or other abuse within their laboratories, of course since the research world is small, it remains to see how effective they can be.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#122

Post by Balgair » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:21 PM UTC

KindAndFriendly wrote: post #37

I thoroughly enjoyed my time as a PhD student. Imho it might be the only time in your career when you are truly, 100% your own boss. You own your PhD thesis. While your professor/advisors give input and feedback you ultimately decide what goes in there and what not. You have the freedom to explore anything you deem as relevant and there are no customers/co-workers/VCs etc who tell you otherwise.

It sounds like you had a really good advisor.

My limited world view saw that nearly all grad students had to work on the projects that their PI got funding for. Their own research was never financially possible unless they got significant funding from outside their lab. Even my SO, who got grad school fully paid for by a smaller government agency, couldn't work on individual research and had to do what the PI said.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#123

Post by whatever1 » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

We should instead make mandatory a couple of years of research for everyone.

1. You learn that you know nothing, even for the slimmest slice of science

2. You learn that a search on the internet, twitter whatever will not help

3. You learn that you have to put the work to start understanding

4. You learn how to learn in depth

5. You learn how cope with failure and yes how to learn from it

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#124

Post by empyrrhicist » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #105

empyrrhicist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not have a graduate student union?

Ours just did nonsense like run a cafe.

Are you thinking of "union" in the sense of a building or common area? That's different. I mean an actual union chapter.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#125

Post by kergonath » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:37 PM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #6

"Problem is, “graduate students” are not students. They are workers." Graduate students are both . My students benefit heavily from me not necessarily treating them to the same standards as I would treat a full time research employee. And while they are the primary workhorses of research, there are large swathes of their graduate student careers where they are not particularly (or often negatively) productive. I will…

> But they are students.

They are trainees or apprentices. Our job as supervisors is to show them how the thing is done, and then provide them conditions to do it themselves. Like with any trainee, it is true that productivity is initially not great, because they need training and experience.

Apprenticeships are sometimes looked down upon because they tend to be associated with professions considered unglamorous, but that’s what a PhD is.

They have a student status with the implicit acknowledgment that they would not be as productive as accomplished professionals but their job is not to study as in high school or undergrad, it’s to learn the job by doing it supervised.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#126

Post by cashsterling » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

I got my PhD in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. - I was paid a stipend that actually covered all basic living expenses for my wife and I. - there was a 5 year limit for finishing PHD research, after which both the student and professor have to sign that they want to continue and the department would only allow that for about another year. - I was treated very fairly and respectfully by my advisor at all times and I would say most of the other PhD candidates felt the same way. - The chemical engineering department built a great environment for student-student and student professor collaboration. I learned so much from my fellow student colleagues and professors during my PhD and after finishing all graduate coursework.

... my positive experiences were all stated goals that department purposely worked really hard to bring about. I rate my experience a strong 9+ out of 10 and would do it again.

I do know other folks who had horrible, abusive PhD experiences at other universities. But that is the fault of the university for not creating a good environment.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#127

Post by chrisseaton » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:44 PM UTC

empyrrhicist wrote: post #124

chrisseaton wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ours just did nonsense like run a cafe.

Are you thinking of "union" in the sense of a building or common area? That's different. I mean an actual union chapter.

The National Union of Students is a pretty big and active union in the UK. I don't know what qualifies something as an 'actual union chapter' or not.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#128

Post by MontyCarloHall » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

psi75 wrote: post #103

ModernMech wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it expected that a junior employee will remain as such for 5-10 years? Of course not. Junior employees are promoted and given more responsibility, or they are fired quickly if they are not performing well. Do companies let junior employees work on whatever they want? Manage their time as they want? No, one of the key indicators of an employee status is that their time and work is managed by their employer. If a ju…

What's notable here is not that academia is so great, but that becoming an employee has become so bad. In the Bell Labs days, before our economy got taken over by criminals, smart employees really were treated as researchers-in-residence who could mostly pick and choose their projects. They didn't have as much freedom as tenured professors--they still had to work on things the company cared about--but they had a leve…

You cannot generalize how good working conditions were in the “good old days” by using Bell Labs, which was literally exceptional, as a point of comparison.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#129

Post by gh02t » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:51 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #104

fruffy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why do you want to work for someone else, on their hours, answerable to them, doing their research and teaching their classes Well, you are still forced to do all that. After all, you often depend on your advisor's funding or expectations. They can make or break you. You get "freedom", but with that freedom 1) you do not have an actual contract listing your hours or any sort of vacation policy. 2) vacations in gener…

I don’t disbelieve your post, I’m sure you’re speaking from experience, but this is a YMMV kind of deal. 1) I did have a contract listing hours, and the vacation policy was the academic calendar: a week in the fall, 5 weeks in the winter, a week in the spring, 3 months in the summer. 2) I didn’t experience any work whatsoever during Christmas 3) Didn’t have a pension plan, but the University did offer reasonable heal…

Yeah, I fully believe OPs experience as I have heard horror stories but similarly my experience with an engineering PhD was that we were treated well. We had contracts, semi-reasonable pay, vacation, healthcare etc.

Re: Abolish the PhD (2016)

#130

Post by walnutclosefarm » Wed, Aug 03, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

psi75 wrote: post #91

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #89

It seems the author is taking the experience of Science PhDs, and realistically, a specific kind of Science Phd, and tarring the entire notion of a doctoral degree on that basis. US Universities grant PhDs in a wide range of academic disciplines across the Humanities and Sciences, and quite a few professions (Engineering and Education come immediately to mind). My children both have PhDs and academic careers (one as…

As someone in his late 30s who's doing a Master's degree and likely to go on for a PhD, I agree. It should be reformed, not abolished. What should be abolished are 97 percent of postdoc positions. Postdocs used to be a rare, prestigious opportunity to do something different one might not want to do for one's whole life, like work for IAS in Princeton or for the government doing cryptography. What they became is somet…

Yes, most post-docs exist for the purpose of getting cheap, highly trained and specific expertise in a way that does not threaten the hierarchy of authority and prestige. Like medical internships, they institutionalize exploitative labor practice, but are even worse, because unlike internships, where physicians at least do learn skills and the reality of how medicine is practiced, they are almost purely for the purpose of augmenting the master's portfolio of work.