Yep. I left without even really trying to make it work. Academia has its good points, but the path to success is very grind-y.
More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
131–140 of 250 posts
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#132Yep. I left without even really trying to make it work. Academia has its good points, but the path to success is very grind-y.
I think it might be still easier to get to assistant professor than down a single tech tree in War Thunder.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#133This 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.
You should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#134This 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.
I don't think I ever remember a time when the walls of the pyramid were shallow enough that the base could support all of the people at the top.
2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#135This 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.
You should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.
But how can we know that we picked the right person for the job if we aren't at the very least absolutely sure the alternatives were worse?
The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.
Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#136Of course. The number of professors in academia remains more or less constant. So each university professor should have, over the course of all their career, a single student that will end up in academia. All the other students have to quit at some point.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#137There are a lot of issues in academia, but that number (40%) is not one of them. Not everyone is suited for an academic job, and doing the PhD is not enough to understand what it is to do independent research/find your niche what you are good at/enjoy.
I think in many universities now there are career development programs that help people transition to industry. Also now it is more openly discussed that many people will not get an permanent position, so postdocs are more prepared and that is healthy.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#138This 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.
I don't think I ever remember a time when the walls of the pyramid were shallow enough that the base could support all of the people at the top. 2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective. A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will fina…
>2 out of 5 people getting all the way to the end and discovering that research or teaching are not them living their best life sounds either very sad or pretty good depending on your perspective.
Research and teaching can take place outside of academia.
>A lot of people convince themselves that what they aren't feeling now will finally come to them after one more milestone, and as long as there enough milestones ahead of them they can play for time until it happens. Or they hit Sunk Cost and feel like they can't tap out now because they'll look like idiots, ignoring how much bigger an idiot you look like for wasting X more years of your youth and saddling yourself with even more debt. Or existential crisis with much the same outcomes. "Who am I even if I'm not..."
Learning can exist for the sake of learning and doesn't necessarily need to be reflected in career choice or identity.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A 60% stay rate evokes scenarios of academic inbreeding and a total disconnect between the real world and the small bubble where research groups operate Why?
Academia's current structure rewards behaviors that don't necessarily create value. The "publish or perish" mentality encourages quantity over quality, leading to the replication crisis where many published findings can't be reproduced. The system tends to reward those who conform to existing academic paradigms while marginalizing innovative outsider perspectives that might bring valuable real-world insights. When ac…
"Publish or perish" is fundamentally a wrong diagnosis. Publishing is generally the good part of the academia. If you are interested in your work, you obviously want to tell about it to other people in the field. Some specific publication venues are tedious and bureaucratic, but the pressure to publish is generally internal, not external.
Moving directly from being students to faculty is rare. It mostly happens in fields where the demand for PhDs is unusually high. Because universities can't compete with salaries, they have to offer positions people may not be ready for if they want to attract top candidates.
The norm is doing PhD, postdoc, and the first faculty position in different institutes – precisely to avoid the echo chamber effect. And unless you are from a particularly large country, you are expected to do at least one of them outside your home country.
Success measures are what they are for two reasons: competition and long-term focus. Academic research is fundamentally interesting, and there are far more competent people trying to do it than funding. And because people can't afford to wait for decades to measure the real-world impact, the academia must base career progression on something that can be determined quickly enough. If you are doing the kind of research where practical applications can be expected in a few years, the industry is a better place for you. They have a lot more resources for research than the academia.
I'm currently doing research on a topic I started working on ~15 years ago. In that time, the topic has progressed from something interesting and potentially valuable to a mainstream idea with plenty of research funding. If the work is successful, we may start seeing measurable real-world impact in 5-10 years.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 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 tru…
It’s not exactly overqualification, more misqualification. If all you have to say for yourself is “I have completed 23rd grade, look at all these papers I wrote,” your skills and experience, no matter how deep, have diverged from the needs of almost any conceivable employer. I strongly encourage anybody thinking of doing a PhD to get a job in industry first, even if just for a year.