111–120 of 250 posts
Is this actually a problem for society as a whole? Surely a lot of such people would be valuable in industry.
Sorry Sarcasm aside: considering the never ending list of unsolved problems, it should. Sadly, more money seems to get spend on games, ads and stupid juice presses than anything really helpful.
This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
Personally I think it's a warped system that takes advantage of cheap labor from developing countries. And it feeds itself. The more temporary research staff professors can hire, the less permanent research staff universities need.
Academia is one of those realms where I just wish things would collapse. Working conditions are terrible for the educational level they expect, yet there are always more and more graduate students and post-docs to exploit, so the wheels keep turning. A naive perspective is a glut of experts is a good thing because a society with more experts could produce more innovations and development but because of the peculariti…
I would have expected a higher percentage. Few openings and a high bar for whatever there is. It was tough to get an assistant professor job 30 years ago and I can't imagine what it must be like now.
This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
Not surprising. I quit after about a year. I could have stayed on but I realized that it just wasn't right for me. By then I had figured out that most research is done by post docs and phd students and it doesn't pay very well. Not that I cared about the money but I started thinking about what is next and did not like the perspective. Professors are basically there to manage the process and haggle for funding. They t…
Postdocs always seemed like a scam to me. Almost by definition, if you're doing a Postdoc in a STEM field, you're probably qualified for a relatively well-paying job in industry [1]. And it's not like universities don't know this, people have been complaining about it for forever. They know if they were to just hire a person with a relevant PhD to do work, they'd ask for a good wage, so instead they dangle this "mayb…
Be careful: many people who are great postdocs are rather overqualified (and thus rather not suitable) for many jobs in industry.
Getting well-payed in industry requires in my opinion skills that are opposite to those that make you a great postdoc:
In industry you must not be a truth-seeker who can deeply absorb himself in problems. Being a truth-seeker makes you an insanely fit in the brutal office politics.
Also, while I do insist that in graduate school you actually learn a lot about leadership (in the sense of being able to push people to do great things), the abrasive and highly demanding leadership style in graduate school and academia is commonly very undesired in industry (but in my opinion not bad: a very particular kind of people (who will love graduate school) flourishes in such an environment).
I didn't leave academia, but I did leave that lab. That's some sort of power-play I have no time for.
This is only surprising if you expect that every postdoc should stay in academia, or would want to. Being in academia is not the only way to do research, and is not a prerequisite to using your degree. The private sector is a thing, and postdocs leaving academia can do perfectly good work in their field while actually making a grown up salary.
My spouse is a molecular biologist pursuing her PhD in RNA therapy. She works ~2x longer and 10x harder than I do, with only a third of the yield. You can only sustain that for so long. She's in academia solely because she's good at it. However, there are a few things I've observed from the sidelines: - PIs can make your life absolutely miserable for no reason, and it's difficult to switch labs if you're otherwise ma…
Rather: because they deeply love doing research.