Many of the recent 'goodbye acadaemia' that I've come across seem to be from people in molecular biology, which has a reputation for being a particularly competitive field for funding. I wonder whether academics in other fields are dropping out at a similar rate..?
Goodbye Academia
41–50 of 217 posts
Re: Goodbye Academia
#42These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. The…
> I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job.
Underlying your comment is the assumption that every one wants the hedge fund (or other) job. One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research. You ignore that many people derive satisfaction from doing fundamental research that has the potential to be widely used across the research community (and possibly, for product development, e.g. industry labs, some government labs). It is simplistic to dismiss academia as a feudalistic system. There are merits, demerits, and other nuances.
Also, there are, figuratively speaking, thousands of academic fields, each with its own system and culture. For example, academic jobs are plentiful for PhD graduates in these areas (in my experience): information technology/information systems (as opposed to computer science), management, accounting, finance, organizational behavior, etc.
A summary dismissal of academia as 'feudal', especially when such an assessment underlies 'advice' is an unnecessary exaggeration.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#43These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. The…
I think you completely miss the point of why a lot of people do a PHD. The love of the subject.
Also, the pay after gaining a PHD in a certain field is most certainly worth it.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#44It's worth noting that this guy is running a kickstarter campaign re: "A free, up-to-date, crowdsourced protocol repository for the life sciences". If we are sending tons of traffic his way, maybe we should send some to his kickstarter too.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1881346585/protocolsio-...
Re: Goodbye Academia
#45Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their…
Surely you would consider at least some of Twitter's open source projects "creating technology": https://github.com/twitter
Re: Goodbye Academia
#46Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their…
Twitter is one of the main contributors to Storm:
Re: Goodbye Academia
#47Yet another worrying sign is that at my university (and I've heard similar stories from colleagues at others) is now deciding that instead of hiring 2 or 3 junior faculty positions (new academics straight out of a postdoc into their first faculty job), instead the priority is to spend the same money on one mid-career "poach" from a competing institution. Double the salary, and bigger startup package. Their rationale is that mid-career scientists will bring larger and more research grants (and will do so faster after arriving) than junior scientists. Essentially, let someone else take on the "risk" of the new faculty members and we poach the proven ones.
It's a jungle out there people. If you care about salary and upward mobility for god's sake don't go into academia.
PS I am a full professor at a large research oriented university in north america. Most of my contemporaries from high school and undergrad who have spent similar numbers of years amassing expertise in their chosen fields, but in the private sector, are now making approximately 5x to 7x my annual salary (not including their annual bonuses).
Re: Goodbye Academia
#48Not to sound like some crazy person with the word SOCIALIST written on the inside of my forehead in neon colors, but: It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax. That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
It's funny to me when people call companies like Twitter "tech companies". What technology has twitter invented? There are open source clones with 70% of the features in It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their…
"What technology has twitter invented?"
http://twitter.github.io/ currently lists 101 public repositories. Highlights include a SPDY library for iOS, Zipkin (a distributed tracing system), flockdb (a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database), Finagle (their own highly concurrent RPC system)... a TON of stuff.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#49These kinds of things are daily discussions in laboratories all over the world. Everyone knows there's no future in academia, and so everyone is looking for an exit plan. I actively discourage people from doing a PhD. Academia is a horrible feudalistic system that doesn't pay well enough to keep the bright minds it attracts. There is no sense in being a post-doc for life. Much better to take that hedge fund job. The…
I think you completely miss the point of why a lot of people do a PHD. The love of the subject. Also, the pay after gaining a PHD in a certain field is most certainly worth it.
The love of the subject is a given. The article states as much. The whole point of the article is that the rewards of an academic life are not presently commensurate with the risks and sacrificies it entails.
The pay "in a certain field" is irrelevant; the article is about pay and working conditions in academia.
Re: Goodbye Academia
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900. In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, curren…
The numbers make the problem clear Right, so the problem is that there are way too many students. Is the burden on the upcoming students to discontinue their track or on the universities (etc) to slow admissions and hiring postdocs?
Ensures too great a flexibility to the Organization and imposes too much precariousness and insecurity on the upcoming students.
In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.
Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff.
http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Artic...