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Why do older grad students become bitter?

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Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#101

Post by Schroedingers2c »

Balgair wrote: post #86
Schroedingers2c wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a final year PhD student I wholeheartedly agree with this. That alone makes it very rough to keep up the high level of motivation. And then add the other quirks of academia on top of that.

Could you elucidate the other quirks for us? I'd be interested to know your experiences. Sorry if this comes off as gruff, I honestly do want to hear.

- Nepotism

- A high proportion of people from privileged backgrounds

- The academic publishing process (although this has gotten better over the years with more open access). But in traditional, and usually more "esteemed" journals, you pay to submit your work (want it open access? Please pay 9500€! That is no joke, this is Nature's open access fee.), you peer-review others' papers for free ("service to the academic community"), and then you pay to read articles (or your university does). The journals profit. With insane margins.

- It happens that you discuss the same problem, in the same way, saying almost the same sentences many times over the span of months/years. The feeling of running in circles is very common and I find it exhausting.

- Senior people can hold an extreme level of power over the careers of more junior people. You're so specialised that it can happen that there are just like 5 other places on the world where your kind of research happens. You don't want to move away, but still want tenure? You're at the complete mercy of your group leader.

- Being almost expected to move around every 1-3 years as a postdoc when you're in your late 20s / early 30s. This can be very enriching and you see the world and meet many diverse people, but can also be very isolating and depressing depending on your personality and how well your location fits you. And is very rough on relationships.

Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#102

Post by filoleg »

lapcat wrote: post #99
filoleg wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. > Tell that to the professional athletes. I think the point they were trying to make is that you should talk not to professional athletes, but to those who tried to become one. Those who became professional athletes is just a tiny subset of those who tried. And within that, there is an even smaller subset of those who…

It's not a question of advice. Of course take a wide variety of advice. The question is whether it's a "bad decision" to pursue a highly competitive field, despite knowing the odds are against you, if you think you might have the talent to make it. I'm not convinced that it's a bad decision. Risky? Yes. Bad? That's debatable. Did Brad Pitt make a bad decision? According to the logic that a big risk is never worth it,…

Thanks for elaborating, I actually fully agree with the points you've made here.

I am so tired of hearing people telling others "the safe ways" of moving forward. If you actually know the risk and knowingly take it, I respect it a lot, regardless off how it pans out.

And I believe that optimizing for entirely "risk-minimizing" choices is a path to mediocrity and feeling unsatisfied in the long-term (and, often enough, limiting your overall potential heavily), as well as missing out on tons of opportunities.

Mind you, there is nothing wrong with mediocrity, but a lot of people who end up going down that path end up there unwillingly and, commonly, due to having an almost zero-tolerance risk aversion.

Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#104

Post by lambdaloop »

rwalle wrote: post #2

> A decent STEM PhD student stipend in the US is about $40k. I don't know where that number comes from. In most universities you'd be looking at $20k-lower 30k, sometimes less. In fact, in public schools, salaries for teaching assistants/research assistants are public data and people can look them up.

That's true, I meant to write that it's on the upper end. I think my current stipend is about $36k for a neuroscience PhD in Seattle.

I've updated it to this: > A "good" STEM PhD student stipend in the US is about $35k. Note that many schools pay below this.

Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#105

Post by lambdaloop »

martopix wrote: post #51

overwork, bad salaries, competition, bad relationship with supervisors are often mentioned but I think this is not the whole picture. I would focus more on research itself. Research can be really shitty. It's extremely open ended, so you may be a brilliant student with exams, but feel clueless about what to do when there is no clear problem and no clear solution. Science is now extremely incremental compared to 50 ye…

That's a great point!

Honestly this was a quick post I wrote to practice writing and wrote it from my own personal experiences.

I agree with you about research being really open ended, which makes it hard. Several of us have dealt with depression after an experiment we worked on for 2 years abruptly failed.

I disagree about science being more incremental than 50 years ago. I think we tend to read only read the highlights from the past and it makes it feel like everything was revolutionary. There were incremental changes in the past and we have revolutions in the present.

In my field, Drosophila neuroscience, our methods have completely changed between when I started 5 years ago and now. We can now track all joints of a moving fly in 3D. The tools to image neural activity are literally 10x better (in terms of SNR and speed). We have the connectome for (half of) an adult fly brain and complete larval brain connectome, which is changing how we look at these circuits. We have identified all the motor neurons in the ventral nerve cord of the fly.

Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#106

Post by lambdaloop »

goethes_kind wrote: post #66

There is one aspect that was not touched on, which I find to be quite cruel to be honest. There is an obsession with forcing academics to move around. If you do your undergrad in one university, then you should pack your bags and move to another country to do your Ph.d at another university and then do it again for all your Post. docs. (I am not sure if this is more of an EU thing or if it is a worldwide phenomenon).…

Yes absolutely this! This is 100% a thing in the US as well. Moving around between undergrad and PhD has wrecked my social life. Many of the students in my program are not doing a postdoc because they don't want to move out of Seattle. And I mean, why should they?

In the US, the only places where you could reasonably stay in the same place and switch institutions are LA (and surrounding area), Boston, and New York. Anywhere else you're switching states and potentially leaving friends, family, and loved ones behind. It's really hard.

Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#107

Post by lambdaloop »

goodcanadian wrote: post #5

Only 15% of postdocs end up being tenure-track faculty. And what percentage of PhD graduates get postdoctoral positions? I saw a statistic somewhere (sorry, no source at the moment) that showed something like 2% of PhDs actually making it to a faculty position.

As I was told, pretty much any PhD graduate can get a postdoc somewhere. PhD -> postdoc transition is really about whether you want to stay in academia at all. From my rough impressions, maybe about 10% of the grad students I know are thinking of doing a postdoc, which would be 10% * 15% = 1.5% of PhDs making it to faculty. That roughly matches the statistic you have.

I think the 15% of postdocs becoming faculty statistic really sticks with me, because these are already preselected for wanting to become faculty and even within that pool, only 15% can make it. It's quite demoralizing.

Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#108

Post by asciii »

lambdaloop wrote: post #105
martopix wrote: post #51

overwork, bad salaries, competition, bad relationship with supervisors are often mentioned but I think this is not the whole picture. I would focus more on research itself. Research can be really shitty. It's extremely open ended, so you may be a brilliant student with exams, but feel clueless about what to do when there is no clear problem and no clear solution. Science is now extremely incremental compared to 50 ye…

That's a great point! Honestly this was a quick post I wrote to practice writing and wrote it from my own personal experiences. I agree with you about research being really open ended, which makes it hard. Several of us have dealt with depression after an experiment we worked on for 2 years abruptly failed. I disagree about science being more incremental than 50 years ago. I think we tend to read only read the highli…

> We can now track all joints of a moving fly in 3D. The tools to image neural activity are literally 10x better

This sounds like another blog post I’d dive into…

Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#109

Post by lambdaloop »

asciii wrote: post #108
lambdaloop wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great point! Honestly this was a quick post I wrote to practice writing and wrote it from my own personal experiences. I agree with you about research being really open ended, which makes it hard. Several of us have dealt with depression after an experiment we worked on for 2 years abruptly failed. I disagree about science being more incremental than 50 years ago. I think we tend to read only read the highli…

> We can now track all joints of a moving fly in 3D. The tools to image neural activity are literally 10x better This sounds like another blog post I’d dive into…

Ohh good idea. Will write it sometime.

If you're interested in the progress in animal tracking, I wrote a post summarizing some up and coming research here: https://writing.lambdaloop.com/posts/cv4animals-2021/

Re: Why do older grad students become bitter?

#110

Post by asciii »

lambdaloop wrote: post #109
asciii wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can now track all joints of a moving fly in 3D. The tools to image neural activity are literally 10x better This sounds like another blog post I’d dive into…

Ohh good idea. Will write it sometime. If you're interested in the progress in animal tracking, I wrote a post summarizing some up and coming research here: https://writing.lambdaloop.com/posts/cv4animals-2021/

I am, thanks for sharing!
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