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The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

theatlantic.com

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Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#71

Post by confluence »

matwood wrote: post #70
confluence wrote: post #48

The problem here is merely a misunderstanding of career statistics. The statistics for success in academia are thoroughly against any one Ph.D. The competition is too high, the rewards are too low, and the competitors are too desperate. This is not a place where you wish to compete - unless you have some kind of overwhelming advantage - aka really, really brilliant - you know who you are. For everyone else - look str…

The poker example is a great one. Years ago when I first started to learn to play a friend of mine told a similar story more succinctly. When you sit down at a table if you can't pick out the sucker, it's you. Pick your table, pick your game, do whatever you have to to slant the odds in your favor. If you're the sucker get up and move. Don't let your pride get in the way. Back when I started playing poker I could sit…

Ah but you see - there's too much competition for short, sharp comments!

I try and own the high value long comments. Although I relapse ever so often and move back towards the short/sharp side - winning a high volume competition is very alluring.

It's probably why reddit/stackoverflow/wikipedia/HN exist.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#72

Post by flatline »

confluence wrote: post #48

The problem here is merely a misunderstanding of career statistics. The statistics for success in academia are thoroughly against any one Ph.D. The competition is too high, the rewards are too low, and the competitors are too desperate. This is not a place where you wish to compete - unless you have some kind of overwhelming advantage - aka really, really brilliant - you know who you are. For everyone else - look str…

Nate Silver has a similar point[1], and claims that he has been successful by choosing fields that were not already saturated with excellent players. Baseball prediction was waiting to be cracked wide open with modern statistical techniques. It would now be much, much harder to make meaningful gains, you'd be competing with a host of competent firms who have years of experience and have long since claimed all the low-hanging fruit. The competition in online and even professional poker matches used to be much looser, until enough people started getting serious about it that the field narrowed to exclude merely above-average players.

To the OPs point, If you want to compete in a well-established academic field, you have to be really freaking good. Want to be an experimental physicist? You see the competition out there: they write books and appear on TV shows, or at least have tenure and get grant money. Are you really one of those guys or gals? On the other hand, there's interesting stuff out there that is just waiting for someone with a modicum of intellect and desire to revolutionize it. The challenge lies in finding (or creating) such a field and exploiting it at the right time. I think this can be done in academia or in business alike, business is just much more flexible and forgiving of mistakes.

[1] "The Signal and the Noise"

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#73

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jseliger wrote: post #7
zeteo wrote: post #5

It will no doubt be shocking news to Mr. Weissmann to find out that factors such as a desire to learn more or to make new contributions to human knowledge can motivate aspiring PhD candidates. It's also rather ironic to see such analyses promoted by someone who chose a career in the notoriously unprofitable field of journalism.

It will no doubt be shocking news to Mr. Weissmann to find out that factors such as a desire to learn more or to make new contributions to human knowledge can motivate aspiring PhD candidates. "A desire to learn" and "Make new contributions to human knowledge" are laudable goals that I admire. But, even leaving aside the important question of whether grad school as it is currently structured is a good way of pursuing…

it's frustrating to see your new contribution made when your buddy is working for Google and writing software that millions of people use every day—and getting paid well for it.

I don't think the average grad-student could work at Google instead. My personal experience is that Google keeps having its recruiters call me periodically, and then rejecting me for even internships after interviewing.

I don't even get the questions wrong anymore, so I feel like I just somehow suck, despite being a CS grad-student at a well-regarded institution.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#74

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jseliger wrote: post #38
zeteo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been to graduate school and disagree with your comment about expecting a tenure-track job. When you get to know them, PhD students are not poor deluded souls slaving away in the misguided expectation of a plush, secure position at the end. They are rather intelligent, motivated individuals, who choose to work on projects that are more interesting/important than optimal ad placement or crafty financial swaps, and…

I've been to graduate school and disagree with your comment about expecting a tenure-track job. When you get to know them, PhD students are not poor deluded souls slaving away in the misguided expectation of a plush, secure position at the end. I have too (see here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-kno... for some comments, mostly job-related), and I think most grad students—at least during th…

Ah, right, because doing anything financially sub-optimal is delaying adulthood.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#75

Post by yukoncornelius »

Xcelerate wrote: post #20

I am surprised that so many people are relating PhD's to the money you'll make. I hear (very frequently) that "the amount of time you spend doing your PhD will put you far behind the 4 years of having a job" or "if you want to get rich, go into ...", or "management is where all the money is; you need an MBA for that". Uh... I'm doing a PhD because I like scientific research and can't stand the thought of being a proc…

Do like writing grant proposals? Because in the biological sciences that is what you will be doing, and you will be competing against other smart folks which results in a 6% chance of a successful proposal. Then you can do some research while drafting journal articles, teaching undergraduates, and working for tenure by serving on a bunch of committees.

In short, there is very little research in the above Ph.D. in academia career.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#76

Post by mbreese »

javert wrote: post #65
aheilbut wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, the research that people are writing grants for and doing is dictated by what is fundable, which is not necessarily exactly what they'd choose to be doing were there no constraints.

I know tenured professors who don't apply for grants, and therefore don't have any money to pay students, but they still get paid a salary by the department. They can do whatever they want (research, or not), modulo teaching responsibilities. Some profs actually do very good research, without students. It's a reasonable way to go, once you have tenure. Problem is, you can't take that route to get tenure in the first…

Most places are redefining tenure though, so the only people that still have any meaningful resources are those that have extramural funding. Anymore, tenure means you get a closet for an office and a phone. And for new hires, if you don't have grant support, even with tenure, you can still lose your job.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#77

Post by zissou »

confluence wrote: post #48

The problem here is merely a misunderstanding of career statistics. The statistics for success in academia are thoroughly against any one Ph.D. The competition is too high, the rewards are too low, and the competitors are too desperate. This is not a place where you wish to compete - unless you have some kind of overwhelming advantage - aka really, really brilliant - you know who you are. For everyone else - look str…

Couldn't agree more! I'm an economics Ph.D. dropout who focused primarily on microeconomics and game theory (because like you said, current macro theory [see: DSGE] is completely bogus) and I think your points about finding monopolies is a great one. I left my Ph.D. early because it was a losing game as I wanted to be learning more computer science since it was a necessary skill to obtain in addition to a microeconomic/econometric education to master the "data science"-esk skills I wanted to in order to ensure I properly aligned myself for the future.

Although I haven't made the move to industry yet, I did recently get myself a nice little research gig doing big data work in a lab at one of those universities in Cambridge.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#78

Post by eli_gottlieb »

scarmig wrote: post #69
michaelochurch wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many PhDs have $40,000 to their name, as opposed to $4.00? How many MTV or NYC Google engineers have $400k to their name after 5 years, as opposed to $4,000 and a bunch of money torched on rent? Google pays well, but not as well as you seem to think. I'd say that (2) wins, if only because someone who sticks with Google for 5 years is probably one who made Real Googler and now has a fair amount of freedom. Google…

I don't want to veer into minutiae, but I think you underestimate how much someone can save in the amount of time it takes to get a PhD. Say, 5 years on the PhD, at $50k savings/year, gets you to $250k by itself. Add in investment earnings from that, and you top $300k. ($400k was a bit optimistic.) But that's aside from the actual point. It's not even about what the Googler does after they've done 5 years. That kind…

But his point, which I do want to reiterate, is that the vast majority of software engineers don't have that kind of saving/investing power. Sure, you might earn $80k/year out of college, but then you pay 1/3 of your income in taxes and another 20% in rent on a one-bedroom apartment and pretty soon you find you've got about $3300/month to pay all your bills, buy food, make student-loan payments, and basically live your life. In my experience, it came to a total saving power of a little less than half what you described.

Now admittedly, $20k/year is a hell of a lot to be able to save for normal Americans! But at the end of five years it leaves you with $100k of savings, not $250k. In the Boston area where I was, you couldn't even put a down-payment on a house with that little money. It was basically just lots and lots of beer money.

On the other hand, if you know a magical company in a magical land, perhaps adorned with pastel ponies, at which I can make enough money with a low enough cost of living to retire after five or ten years to become a self-funded gentleman scientist, I'll certainly take that over graduate school. I just don't think it actually exists, as you can probably tell by the sarcasm.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#79

Post by waterside81 »

jurassic wrote: post #55

Awareness of the opportunity cost and likely outcomes has been hitting me hard lately as I consider dropping out of my top-5 science (not CS) program 2 years in. I've gotten to a comfortable place with python/numpy/matplotlib and am wondering how hard it would be to break into web development as somebody who has only programmed in a scientific setting. Besides Python, I also know enough R and statistics to build line…

Hey jurassic, we (repustate.com) might have something for you. Send us an email if you'd like to hear more.

Re: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists

#80

Post by amirmansour »

hyperbovine wrote: post #54
scarmig wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's more likely to have physical and intellectual freedom: 1) A recent PhD with $40,000 to his name 2) A Google engineer who graduated from undergrad at the same time and has $400,000 to her name

The answer is 1), but anyways: 1) Most engineers do not work at Google, and 2) I have plenty of friends who do/did, and, guess what?: They still write code all day! Most of which does not do neat things like drive cars, but rather: increases AdWord click-through rates! Or: manages address book contacts. Fun! I don't care how much free pizza and foosball you offer me, nothing can match the freedom of pursuing my own i…

Could not have said it better myself.
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