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A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

theguardian.com

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Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#151

Post by andreyk »

bradhoffman wrote: post #136
andreyk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same route as you (Master's first, then starting on my PhD right now). It's a great route! In general, the best route is to try and join an ongoing project where you can be guided/mentored by a Post doc or senior PhD. This is easiest is larger labs, though in a smaller lab the professor might interact with you more (unlikely you will meet with prof much in larger lab). For your application two things matter…

What if the research options available are not something you're too interested in? I had a professor tell me I could work with him, but he said I had to work on what he has decided. That doesn't seem very attractive to me.

That is one of the subtler points of the PhD - you can't just do what you want, and certainly not at first. The ideal is to find a professor who has a project that aligns with your own interests. If your hope is to find a professor who will back a wholly new project you thought up, that's kinda hard to do during a Master's.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#152

Post by pc86 »

roel_v wrote: post #83
pytyper2 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hoping that the degree will mask a lack of actual skills. I encounter this often, 'guy has phd but struggles with the decisions to make actual progress in practical terms'. Is it possible to attain a phd and rely mostly on rote memorization? Are all phd candidates required to make an original contribution to their respective field?

"Is it possible to attain a phd and rely mostly on rote memorization?" No, but it's possible to just be a research serf to the professor, and the professor will carry you more or less to completion - very little indepenent thought needed. You do need to be able to do lots of (well defined, but tedious) work.

It's a shame that completing a mountain of well-defined, but tedious work with little independent thought is considered an original contribution to the field.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#153

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

From the comments, one of the "Guardian picks":

I strongly, strongly disagree. A PhD should be about science. Not about utility for society. I am pretty sure that Max Planck did not think about the utility of computers when he proposed this completely absurd, little mathematical trick of discretising energy. Still, without quantum theory: no computer, no laser, no magnetic resonance imaging...and I could go on forever.

Progress in science is necessarily chaotic - if you disallow incoherence, absurdity, non-applicability, you will kill science. The author is conceptualizing "science" (maybe he talks about engineering and not science?) only as a tool of problem solving for the society - that is actual the role of science in Orwell's "1984" and that was the role of science to a certain extent in socialism. By making science teleological, one makes science ready for totalitarian abuse. Thank you very much!

By the way, comparing PhD systems from different countries is absolutely rubbish. In Germany, it is already rubbish to compare PhDs from different faculties from the same university....

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#154

Post by tsumnia »

bjourne wrote: post #146
apo wrote: post #14

When you look at the stats, it’s hard not to conclude that the current PhD system is fundamentally broken. Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The high level of dropouts is similarly worrying – and possibly another symptom of the same problem. Research suggests that on average 50% of PhD students leave gradu…

> A newly-minted bachelor's student without research experience has no preparation for the frustration, isolation, and sense of futility that real researchers face. Don't you need a master's degree to be eligible for a doctorate program? > If you're an undergraduate and harbor the slightest ambition to get a PhD, drop what you're doing right now and start looking for a research group to join. How does undergraduates…

> Don't you need a master's degree to be eligible for a doctorate program?

Can't speak for all schools, but NC State accepts bachelors into their Masters and PhD program. While getting your PhD, you have the option to earn an MS "en route".

> How does undergraduates find a research groups to join?

For larger, research-oriented schools, this is as easy as visiting each professor's website. Most will have a link to their current or archived projects and their recent publications. Similar to the joke that you can get any academic paper for free by emailing the professor, the same can happen with research. Ask them about it and if you can join in on any of the on-going projects.

For teaching-oriented schools, this can be a little more difficult. My bachelors program only had 1 (maybe 2) labs, so if that wasn't your interest good luck. You can still do the same process, find a professor in a research area you're interested in and speak to them. There may not be funding, but you could be the spark under that prof's butt to start applying for some grants.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#155

Post by vkou »

WalterSear wrote: post #88
dagw wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that STEM research doesn't attract more "freaks" and free-thinking people. At least when I was at university, those people generally didn't have the focus to graduate with good grades (or graduate at all for that matter). It's one thing to sit around and talk about all the 'out there' implications of quantum physics. It's an entirely different thing to get your quantum physics course work in on time and…

I think I'm one of the freaks in question. I'm not one to sit around pipe dreaming, but I've found a vastly better fit writing code at startups than I ever did in grad school. I get to invent, experiment, learn, and at a vastly faster pace. I'm even working in the same field, solving similar problems to the ones I worked on in school.

This is great if the problems you want to solve have direct business applications with a turnaround time of tomorrow.

There aren't very many startups funding basic research, though.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#156

Post by drb91 »

chengiz wrote: post #101
drb91 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a monolithic motivation for students. Well, there is chasing funding. In your area of the universe, does the money follow worthwhile problems?

Funding is simple. It's all about experience and prior use. Funders fund what they did before, what the fundees did before, and did they use up the funds from last time.

My question stands. :)

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#157

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

drb91 wrote: post #43
wuliwong wrote: post #36

>This new PhD would see students go out into the field and talk to practitioners from day one of their research I don't think this applies well to all fields of study. I have my Ph.D. in physics and there are loads of people researching problems that don't really have counterparts "in the field." I'm assuming "in the field" means industry or possibly a government service. I would think the same is true for mathematic…

> I certainly have gripes with academia but I don't think there is a monolithic motivation for students. Well, there is chasing funding. In your area of the universe, does the money follow worthwhile problems?

During a PhD you don't have to chase funding- either you have funding (via a scholarship etc) at which point it normally lasts for the three or four years you're expected to finish your PhD, or you don't, in which case you probably don't start at all- unless you can pay the PhD fees and your expenses out of your own budget... in which case you don't need "funding" (in the sense of funds given to you from some source specifically to do research).

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#159

Post by btrettel »

close04 wrote: post #131
btrettel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Norbert Wiener's book "Invention" is another on a similar topic. He argues that research should be driven more by the interests of individual researchers rather than managers and bureaucrats.

Research will always be driven by the interests of whoever is financing it. It just happens that it's almost never the researchers themselves. And one thing to consider: a researcher's mind is an inquisitive mind that will "dig" even in directions nobody really cares about, don't help humanity, etc. The one upside of someone else giving the direction is that you can be sure that there will be some concrete benefit fr…

> The one upside of someone else giving the direction is that you can be sure that there will be some concrete benefit from it.

Wiener argues that this often is not true, because the people with the money often have a poor understanding of what's actually important.

To give an example, in my own area of research, my impression is that most industrial folks hate math. They consistently deny the benefit of it. As a theorist who tries hard to do practical work, I find it very irritating for my work to be written off by industry for a bad reason. I went to a conference a few weeks ago, and it was clear that industry folks won't attend my talks, but when I spoke with some of them in private they seemed much more interested in what I knew. It may be mostly an advertising problem, but I still have the math barrier to break through. My mantra now is "math is cheap", which seems to resonate with people who are used to paying tons of money for new experiments which usually don't give you useful information. At the very least I can tell them what sort of experiments would be valuable based on my theoretical understanding.

Ultimately, we need a balance of input from those with money and those with more detailed knowledge. This is what I strive for. At the moment I'd say the vast majority of research is directed from above, so I'd agree with Wiener that we need to move in an individualistic direction.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#160

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

fullshark wrote: post #142
shoguning wrote: post #111

I disagree totally. A PhD should be about curiosity and asking the most interesting scientific questions you can think of, also known as 'basic research'. You have the rest of your career to have as much impact on society and commerce as you want. Unfortunately, the social impact factor has been creeping in, in the form of more 'applied research' funding which is not fundamental and does not move scientific knowledge…

Who is paying to support you while you explore some curiosity of yours? A PhD program is not a summer camp, it's a social tool and the public is paying money in order to grow the human knowledge base. I don't get this attitude, appreciate the fact that the public is giving you grants and funding because the alternative is you get nothing.

>> A PhD program is not a summer camp, it's a social tool and the public is paying money in order to grow the human knowledge base.

"letting scientists chase down interesting things" as per the OP's comment is how the "human knowledge base" grows in the first place.

Besides, who would decide what research is useful to pursue, other than the experts in a given field? If you don't really understand a research subject, how can you figure out whether it's useful or not?

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