Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

#171

Post by valarauko » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #165

valarauko wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fresh postdoc able to secure an academic job joins as an "Assistant Professor". Fresh Assistant Professors usually cannot recruit PhD students, have limited funds to establish their lab, and no job security. It takes several grades and 15+ years to reach the position of "Professor", which comes with tenure.

Who told you assistant profs can’t recruit PhD students?

They can, just not right away. An Assistant Prof. in Philadelphia I had interviewed with for a postdoc position told me that since his lab is new, the school won't let him recruit PhD students for the first year. He can take postdocs and trainees, though.

I think there's also a practical problem in attracting students to a new lab. Another Assistant Prof I'd interviewed with at a premier research institute in New York had established her lab over 3 years ago, and still hadn't managed to recruit either a PhD student or any postdocs. She may be an outlier, of course.

Re: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

#172

Post by valarauko » Mon, Dec 21, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

cowsandmilk wrote: post #70

valarauko wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the case in my field - biomedical. The hiring manager at a large pharmaceutical company told an audience of postdocs & graduate students at a career event a few weeks ago that they prefer to see a postdoc of at least 2-4 years to be considered for a senior scientist position.

Whether you have senior in your title is just nomenclature at pharma companies. Plenty do have it in your title just after PhD, reserving Scientist roles for those coming out of BS who are doing grunt work. That said, other companies have those as “technician” and PhD (maybe masters) is start of Scientist. Getting hung up on title in Pharma is not a good move. It isn’t uniform at all.

I agree that nomenclature is just jargon. There's also the context of the parent, that senior jobs are typically available right out of university. I do not know the field the parent is in, though. In my experience of the biomedical field, this isn't the case. I'm a postdoc at a good medical school in the US, and most of the postdocs I've interacted with would happily take an industry job if they could manage it - there just aren't enough jobs to go around. The prospects for fresh Phds are even more grim.

Re: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

#173

Post by selimthegrim » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 4:31 AM UTC

valarauko wrote: post #171

selimthegrim wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who told you assistant profs can’t recruit PhD students?

They can, just not right away. An Assistant Prof. in Philadelphia I had interviewed with for a postdoc position told me that since his lab is new, the school won't let him recruit PhD students for the first year. He can take postdocs and trainees, though. I think there's also a practical problem in attracting students to a new lab. Another Assistant Prof I'd interviewed with at a premier research institute in New Yor…

I really wish Tulane had enforced that on the two starting assistant profs I tried to work for before they took their NSF CAREER awards and ran as far away from New Orleans as their legs could take them. You were in biomedical research or math?

Re: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

#174

Post by ebg13 » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 4:57 AM UTC

sudosteph wrote: post #56

ebg13 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why don't you quit I did after several years. I, luckily, was in CS and landed on my feet. My partner and many friends did not quit. They, unluckily, were not in CS. So I have the displeasure of seeing it from both ends of the degree and many angles. > Is it just sunk-cost fallacy? Some but not all. You have to realize that the entire world is gaslighting kids every day into thinking that the hole-in-one once-in-a-…

I'm glad to hear you did get out and did well for yourself. Thanks for explaining it from your perspective. As much as you were personally influenced by the people surrounding you - it was probably the exact same dynamic, but opposite (the people around me taught me was that academia was a debt-trap or a luxury for elites who didn't want to be demeaned by real jobs) and that is likely the source of my bewilderment an…

Thanks. It's hard to express how literally almost everyone who enters a PhD program is coming right out of undergrad and is still in many ways a child. There are no good decisions because making good decisions depends on having good insight and information and guidance, and the only people who can give good insight to the next set of children are either in therapy or quit, but the only people who get asked for guidance are the small fraction who made it.

And the entire system depends on funneling more children into the meat grinder so they have the most perverse incentive to just keep lying about everything. Graduate students are used and abused for a huge amount of lecturing, guiding, and grading so that schools don't have to pay for professors, so that they can have more millionaire administrators and football coaches and replace the flowers in the quad every week and other weirdly expensive stupid shit instead of providing basic healthcare or a decent wage for their lecturers. And then people are surprised to hear that the same schools that have grad students doing a ton of the work for peanuts don't have professor positions available at the end.

Re: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

#175

Post by valarauko » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

selimthegrim wrote: post #173

valarauko wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can, just not right away. An Assistant Prof. in Philadelphia I had interviewed with for a postdoc position told me that since his lab is new, the school won't let him recruit PhD students for the first year. He can take postdocs and trainees, though. I think there's also a practical problem in attracting students to a new lab. Another Assistant Prof I'd interviewed with at a premier research institute in New Yor…

I really wish Tulane had enforced that on the two starting assistant profs I tried to work for before they took their NSF CAREER awards and ran as far away from New Orleans as their legs could take them. You were in biomedical research or math?

Bioinformatics

Re: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

#176

Post by angrais » Tue, Dec 22, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

concreteblock wrote: post #162

angrais wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An appendum: I acknowledge "thriving" is not the ideal word to use. However, bullying within academia exists and is increasingly more common than people release. Often because it's something that goes unsaid and unreported, in part out of fear of repercussions for the reporter rather than the bully because the academy protects the latter.

> bullying ... is increasingly more common than people release. How can you make this statement if it’s unsaid and unreported?

Great point. Through observations and field work in multiple institutions, over an extended period of time (years).

Re: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

#177

Post by tome » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 11:49 AM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #21

michaelhoffman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not at all the case in the fields I work in. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be a professor than a postdoc but it is way, way more stressful.

As a professor isn't your chair funded and guaranteed? What are you stressing about? Retaining the chair?

The confusion seems to be arising because in the UK the levels are named "lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor" and in the US the levels are named "assistant professor, associate professor, (full) professor". In the UK "professor" is a very high ranking position that most academics don't attain. In the US "professor" just means that you teach, basically.

Re: Postdocs under pressure: ‘Can I even do this any more?’

#178

Post by foldr » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 3:34 PM UTC

concreteblock wrote: post #163

foldr wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Academia is hard because it's extremely competitive, The issue isn't the level of competitiveness but the cost of losing. Now that I'm outside academia, there's plenty of competition. For example, getting a good job at Google is just as competitive as getting a tenure-track position. The difference is that I can easily get a respectable job that pays the bills if I don't make the cut for Google. A nice side effect o…

> getting a good job at Google is just as competitive as getting a tenure-track position. From my experience this is not true. I personally know about 10 classmates who either dropped out of the (pure math) PhD or left academia immediately afterwards and ended up at FAANG as generic SWE. They all said that a few months of DS and alg prep was enough.

I know about 10 classmates who got tenure track jobs. I'm not sure what that shows.