11–20 of 86 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business is perfectly willing to fund 10 ideas if one success will produce an outsized profit. Academia is not so kind.
Two enormous successes of academia are mapping the human genome and finding the higgs boson. Both were hugely speculative the time the projects were undertaken. If there's something comparable coming out of industry, I don't know about it.
This article articulates a whole slew of issues that I'm sure many hners with experience wrt graduate school or beyond have observed and / or experienced first hand. All I can say is this, jumping into industry, and spending my time on engineering and research of my own that'd be too risky for academia, and that would not have a clear payoff value for a big co R&D lab, its the sexiest, best, most exciting and amazing…
research of my own that'd be too risky for academia I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. Edit: I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying that they still manage to do resear…
The obvious answer is "more funding", but there's also cultural shifts, wherein academia is excorcised for not doing "Real World Work".
Is part of the solution to drive upward from K to PhD, focusing on critical thinking and humanities, educating more than training?
I don't know.
Okay, so there are issues with academia. How do those get solved? The obvious answer is "more funding", but there's also cultural shifts, wherein academia is excorcised for not doing "Real World Work". Is part of the solution to drive upward from K to PhD, focusing on critical thinking and humanities, educating more than training ? I don't know.
They don't. As far as I can tell, all the problems, bar those that stem directly from funding, have always been there. That's the nature of the institution.
What changed, for CS at least, is that Google provides much of what is attractive to academia, but has all the funding that is required to make the other roadblocks go away. Google is not like Xerox PARC or MERL or Microsoft Research or other industry research labs. It's a company that's built upon being a research lab. I can believe the hey-days of Sun and SGI were probably similar.
The easiest way I describe working at Google to my grad friends is "It's a giant grad lab, except grads are also the ones running it, and they're billionaires." Academia can't compete with that, and it never did. The open question is not how to fix academia (as it never will be), but whether the Google model is sustainable. For as long as the Google model does exist, you will always see a net loss of professors to industry, rather than the other way around.
As a physics PhD with two postdocs, this highlights almost perfectly my decision to leave for industry. When I defended the plan was to become faculty, but my first postdoc made it clear to me that goal was never going to make me happy, or allow for a balanced life. I would add to the list one other important factor: getting papers accepted at desirable journals feels less like success for me now than it did when I w…
Good luck!
[1] http://www.amazon.com/alternative-Career-Clinic-Jane-Ph-D/dp...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business is perfectly willing to fund 10 ideas if one success will produce an outsized profit. Academia is not so kind.
Two enormous successes of academia are mapping the human genome and finding the higgs boson. Both were hugely speculative the time the projects were undertaken. If there's something comparable coming out of industry, I don't know about it.
yeah i guess industry isnt really accomplishing much these days
(How are your examples actually useful?)
This article articulates a whole slew of issues that I'm sure many hners with experience wrt graduate school or beyond have observed and / or experienced first hand. All I can say is this, jumping into industry, and spending my time on engineering and research of my own that'd be too risky for academia, and that would not have a clear payoff value for a big co R&D lab, its the sexiest, best, most exciting and amazing…
research of my own that'd be too risky for academia I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. Edit: I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying that they still manage to do resear…
I get it. I recall specifically posing a promising, if not clear-cut, research topic to my grad school advisor and his response "that's high risk".
Academia is more concerned with the volume of publications rather than impact and unique ideas. There are tremendous disincentives in the system for innovation.
Okay, so there are issues with academia. How do those get solved? The obvious answer is "more funding", but there's also cultural shifts, wherein academia is excorcised for not doing "Real World Work". Is part of the solution to drive upward from K to PhD, focusing on critical thinking and humanities, educating more than training ? I don't know.
The idea, which was plausible, is that projects can then be judged on their merits, instead of one big slush fund that who knows what comes out of. But the unintended, if not unforeseeable side effect is that it adds a huge amount of extra overhead, and incentives to target only "fundable", aka "sellable" research. With NSF funding rates for projects currently running at 5-10% of proposals, and typical large research universities expecting you to have 1-3 of these 3-year grants going at any given time, you need to be submitting 10+ grant proposals a year! And ideally also working your networks to see if you can attract some corporate funding. That's a huge amount of overhead, and it also sucks a lot of the appeal from academia, since rather than the university setting giving you freedom, you're in some sense closer to an independent firm that has to bring in its own funding, constantly chasing the next round of financing lest your lab implode and students go hungry.
There are likely people who will thrive in that environment, but I think it's increasingly going to be people who are skilled at research management and sales. The #1 job is attracting external financing, and the #2 job is heading up a successful mini enterprise with that financing, ensuring the lab is operating well. This is becoming pretty close to explicit. One university I've been at now sends around an internal newsletter ranking faculty by number of dollars brought in so far this year! If that's what you're going to be judged on, why even be in academia?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Business is perfectly willing to fund 10 ideas if one success will produce an outsized profit. Academia is not so kind.
Two enormous successes of academia are mapping the human genome and finding the higgs boson. Both were hugely speculative the time the projects were undertaken. If there's something comparable coming out of industry, I don't know about it.
So, that probably isn't the best example to use.
The LHC on the other hand is one example of what the original post was worried about - the trend towards more consolidation, towards funding bigger projects (with fewer people), at the expense of many smaller labs.