Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A mental health crisis in science

nature.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 212 posts

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#111

Post by kevviiinn »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #80
abhayhegde wrote: post #42

Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in ex…

Yeah, it's not a matter of the "culture" at all. It's just a matter of low pay, long hours, and minuscule chances of job security and advancement. (He says as he writes his thesis and prepares to start his postdoc.)

Honestly I would be happy if I just got paid as a 100% FTE. I'm literally in the lab all the time, this 50% nonsense is BS. They say it's because international students are restricted to 20 hours per week, so okay just double the pay then and still call it 50%. The salary for my current work is super low anyhow, I'd be making way more if I got a job at big pharma with my current degrees

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#112

Post by kevviiinn »

greenhearth wrote: post #82
abhayhegde wrote: post #42

Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in ex…

Can the institutions be blamed for trying to stay afloat? Where is this money coming from to pay the scientists? A collective decision has to be made to keep science healthy in a meaningful and productive way. I think academia (through its ethos of critical approach and peer review) may be the single social structure that keeps some kind of sanity.

I don't know, can the admins stay afloat without making 200k+ per year? Maybe give some of that to us grad students

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#113

Post by ke88y »

commandlinefan wrote: post #105
ke88y wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT > Stanford, MIT I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best. MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives…

> I know they can get a great education Too bad the people doing the hiring don't know that.

The unemployement rate is around 3%-4%, and at least 99% of people don't have degrees from elite universities.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#114

Post by autokad »

I worked in a research lab at a university for 10 years. It was grant funded, so my position could get canceled at any time, but so is working at at a private company. While the pay was about half of what I made a year after leaving and working at private companies, working in the research lab was WAAAAAAY easier.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#115

Post by currymj »

commandlinefan wrote: post #105
ke88y wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 19-year-old graduated valedictorian from his high school of 700 last year, did extracurriculars and scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT > Stanford, MIT I see this attitude often and... I just don't get it. It seems innumerate at best. MIT accepts around 500 students and Stanford accepts around 2,000 students. There's overlap between those two groups, but let's assume they are entirely disjoint. That gives…

> I know they can get a great education Too bad the people doing the hiring don't know that.

fyi at least in STEM type fields, the top students at one of the good state schools have pretty similar opportunities to Stanford MIT etc. you can go work for big tech, top HFT and finance firms, go to top grad schools, or whatever. unlike at Stanford/MIT/Ivy, it's not the default path, so it takes a little bit more scheming while you're there to make sure you stand out, but it's still quite common every year.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#116

Post by betaby »

RobotToaster wrote: post #98
dbcooper wrote: post #33

A part of this is that in academia there are often few positive career rewards. You're under pressure to publish frequently, in high impact factor journals, and that is to keep your job. You don't get pay rises or bonuses, or any other career improvements, and job security can be until your next contract, at best. If you don't make it to tenured professor, and have good grant funding, then you are staring down the ba…

If anything, with increasing automation we need more PhD students and more research being done. The problem is the gatekeepers such as journal corps profit from the artificial scarcity they create. There's no reason for them to only publish a certain number of "papers" in the paperless world.

Not sure about 'with increasing automation we need more PhD students', sizeable chunk of PhD papers are in categories 'I ran ping from the multiple cloud providers' and 'I've injected some BGP routes via multiple internet exchanges'.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#117

Post by AnimalMuppet »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #25
_fat_santa wrote: post #3

It seems like this is a symptom of a larger problem, rates of anxiety and depression have been going up in recent years in pretty much every facet. I always hear that social media is to blame, but I wonder if that is really the case? I feel like something else is going on, maybe it's just a totality of smaller issues rather than one big problem.

In a recent Ezra Klein show interview [1] with social scientist Jean Twenge on the documented rise in teenage depression, Twenge found it correlated with a rise in social media use, but also found that increasing social media use was correlated with fewer hours of in-person social interaction among teens than previous. While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her…

It's everything. Work from home. Self-check-out at the grocery store. Delivery of everything. Telemedicine. Cars instead of walkable neighborhoods or mass transit (or even bicycles). The decline of church attendance. I can't think of one social trend pushing us toward more face-to-face interactions.

If it's spanning this many different trends, I think there ought to be some larger thing driving it, but I can't put my finger on what it is.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#118

Post by contemporary343 »

Speaking as a tenured PI in the (applied) physical sciences, everything here is true but a lot of it boils down to a lack of perspective and imagination by many faculty running labs.

There are many positive examples out there of ensuring student career success in a supportive lab environment while also producing good research. These need to be amplified as role models.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#119

Post by BeetleB »

jamesash wrote: post #81
BeetleB wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup. The problem is you also see this behavior in well established lab, where the PI has very little to lose if he quits research altogether. In my experience, the correlation with whether the professor was an assistant professor seeking tenure vs a well established full professor and the amount of work they make PhD students do is almost nil. It's mostly purely dri…

It's pick your poison, like choosing a startup vs BigCorp. My observations pertain to organic chemistry specifically, I'm less familiar with other fields. With an assistant prof you will be asked to do unreasonably long hours on ideas that haven't been fully validated, but you get a lot of face-time with the PI (for better or worse) and have a chance to get on the ground floor of a potentially great research program.…

Yeah, it will vary with the discipline/major and possibly also the rank of the university. My point was that from what I've seen, the startup vs BigCorp dichotomy wasn't as clear cut as you describe. Also, there is the third category: Small business. Few grad students, and relatively low pressure.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#120

Post by extasia »

EatingWithForks wrote: post #79
nenrkkfn wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a tenured faculty position at an R1 university and left it in part because of a completely dysfunctional institutional environment with no insight. My best friends include full professors at well-known institutions, though, and I've continued to be involved with academics and research. I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that.…

I think I developed a similar conclusion that research as a whole is corrupted when there was that CS student that committed suicide due being affected by paper-approval collusion agreements involving nearly all the prominent researchers in the field. Nothing was done about it, even though it directly contributed to someone's death. I had so much disgust for the field since then.

I wasn't aware of this, do you have a link you could share?
Post reply on HN