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A mental health crisis in science

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Re: A mental health crisis in science

#171

Post by ke88y »

DrThunder wrote: post #138
commandlinefan wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know they can get a great education Too bad the people doing the hiring don't know that.

Huh? You believe people that don't go to Ive League schools are just living in squalor? I don't know of any jobs that require a degree from those schools. MIT is even more silly because most tech sector jobs don't care where your degree is from. I'm sure there's some weird pompous elitist corporation out there that only pulls from those schools but no one NEEDS to work at those places. If you're basing your success o…

> If you're basing your success off of gaining entry into those schools I have to guess you grew up in a very closed off, extremely wealthy area.

Either that or a middle income/upper middle income immigrant community. Often the intersection of the two.

But, yeah. Having worked at several and in the orbit of basically of them: I'm an extreme skeptic of undergraduate prestige factories.

Go to a school with decent resources. That's a MUCH better way to think about it than "decent school", which could mean anything. Want does that mean? Depends on your major.

Once there, be curious. Be voracious. Advocate for yourself. Major it whatever you want. But also make sure at least one of your majors has a lower-risk career track to fall back on. Never, ever accept "prestige" in lieu of either opportunities to grow or earn cold hard $$$. Always remember you live in a capital-ist society. People and institutions say they value a lot of things -- knowledge, God, country. But in a Capital-ism, power and comfort flow from people who have access to capital to whomever those people please.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#172

Post by mnky9800n »

tptacek wrote: post #56
bioemerl wrote: post #53

Science as a whole has died a hard death. All reward and prestige of being a researcher has been lost and the people in the study have a slim chance of being able to work with their degree. Which I understand is about the opposite of what this article wants, but you shouldn't trust the people who have broken science to fix it. Research itself gets locked behind tightly walled journals and are written with obscure and…

I've heard a lot of complaints from a lot of different people working in lab science (in my case, my interest was in bio & chem) and none of them were about "tightly walled journals" (working academic researchers generally have institutional access, and when the logins are annoying to manage they just sci-hub like everyone else) or IRBs. Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a…

I had a friend who made a big board with switches and knobs on it that changed lights and other stuff. It connected to nothing. But sometimes the professor would come to the lab to "be helpful". So they would point to the board and say turn that switch when I ask. Or rotate that knob or whatever. And the professor would get bored and leave after a while. But I guess he was good at getting money so that's all that matters in some places.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#173

Post by jamesash »

BeetleB wrote: post #119
jamesash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pick your poison, like choosing a startup vs BigCorp. My observations pertain to organic chemistry specifically, I'm less familiar with other fields. With an assistant prof you will be asked to do unreasonably long hours on ideas that haven't been fully validated, but you get a lot of face-time with the PI (for better or worse) and have a chance to get on the ground floor of a potentially great research program.…

Yeah, it will vary with the discipline/major and possibly also the rank of the university. My point was that from what I've seen, the startup vs BigCorp dichotomy wasn't as clear cut as you describe. Also, there is the third category: Small business. Few grad students, and relatively low pressure.

>Also, there is the third category: Small business. Few grad students, and relatively low pressure.

These can be the saddest cases in my opinion. Lower downside, but lower upside too. You work your butt off and knock the ball out of the park with your project: who notices? A few experts, in a very narrow field, may recognize the significance of what you've done. Can be lonely.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#174

Post by [deleted] »

jebarker wrote: post #166
fatnoah wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income Early in my career, I considered (with an MS in Electrical Engineering, but with 4 years of professional programming experience) a switch into law. Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school. When I join…

> Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school. I've never heard this before. What job title would you search for?

[deleted]

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#175

Post by ke88y »

mnky9800n wrote: post #170
spamizbad wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of what contributes to this is the "brainwashing" that takes place in PhD programs that discourages applicants from transitioning out of academia into "the industry". Academia has tons of extremely smart, hard-working individuals, most of whom would have excellent white collar careers with half the work and 2-10x the pay. There are a handful of academics who are truly built for working in academia and wouldn't b…

I really don't understand this mentality either. I left academia to work in a company where my job is still doing research and writing papers but I get paid more money. I even write grants! And I get treated way better by the system in place, I have private health insurance, I get a performance bonus, I even get a company paid ski week! There's a regular story told in physics departments that if you leave you can't g…

> There's a regular story told in physics departments that if you leave you can't get back in.

At least in CS, becoming a Professor of Practice is both higher prestige and a much lower barrier to entry than becoming an Associate Professor with Tenure. The job security of the Professor of Practice is de jure weaker but de facto much stronger. (Tenure doesn't mean shit these days, especially in the USA.)

> But in my experience, maybe people leave and don't want to go back.

Bingo. And it becomes way more extreme by the year.

After a couple decades in the tech industry with a modest lifestyle, 4.3% on your entirely post-tax brokerage account comes damn close to paying a full professor's salary. Retirement at 45 ain't a bad gig.

Get bored? No problem. Move somewhere nice close to a good-but-not-top-10-R1 university.

Teaching can be fun. You can always ad junct if and only you get the bug. Most departments are extremely happy because the customers LOVE being taught by people who did the real thing.

Research is similar: if you find a student you really enjoy working with or an idea you really want to pursue, you can opt to write a grant or take an industry gig for a bit. Student's choice -- chill poverty or same work but with weekly standups and more meetings and 5x comp. Again, the customers LOVE being able to tell Congress they are funding real stuff.

And you don't have to sit in faculty meetings where a bunch of people pretend that their grant agencies and students aren't customers, or that their department chair and dean aren't their line manager and skip line manager, or that their PhD students aren't criminally underpaid direct reports.

Overall, it's nice to be able to clip coupons on bonds and have uni admin fawning over you. It beats the alternative of the tenure track, where you have to continue wage slaving at a university whose admin has been totally MBAified and can't really offer your direct reports much in the way of solidarity because there are 100 28 year olds who can also be PIs on military-industrial projects interspersed with the occasional NSF/NIH grant.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#176

Post by ke88y »

kevviiinn wrote: post #110
spamizbad wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of what contributes to this is the "brainwashing" that takes place in PhD programs that discourages applicants from transitioning out of academia into "the industry". Academia has tons of extremely smart, hard-working individuals, most of whom would have excellent white collar careers with half the work and 2-10x the pay. There are a handful of academics who are truly built for working in academia and wouldn't b…

In my PhD program I don't see that at all, in fact our program recently paid for students to attend a multiple day seminar about how to get jobs outside academia. I'm not sure where you get that impression from

> in fact our program recently paid for students to attend a multiple day seminar about how to get jobs outside academia.

Consider that preparing you for jobs outside of university should be the goal of your education, not relegated to a two-day seminar.

And also consider how relatively fucked it is that such a seminar is actually quite necessary due to the fact that the vast majority of your faculty haven't spent more than a trivial amount of time in industry. (Things that don't count as non-trivial industry experience include: the gap year between undergrad and grad school, the one year industry Post-Doc, sporatic consulting, the "spinoff" that never got past a seed round in which the university endowment or SBIR was the lead "investor", or especially the "several internships at top companies" lol.)

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#177

Post by naijaboiler »

wat_do_phd_923 wrote: post #152

This isn't even remotely surprising. I'm a current PhD student in a coveted top-3 program. We have one of the better stipends in the country, and I've been fully funded by fellowships. My advisor thinks highly of me and isn't abusive. I have a perfect GPA (not that that matters), some publications, and pretty broad technical skills in "hot" area(s). Nevertheless, graduation feels hopelessly out of reach, and I'm gett…

take your masters and run. go into the real world and get a job. your paycheck, mental health, future family will all thank you

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#178

Post by sage76 »

currymj wrote: post #52
dbcooper wrote: post #33

A part of this is that in academia there are often few positive career rewards. You're under pressure to publish frequently, in high impact factor journals, and that is to keep your job. You don't get pay rises or bonuses, or any other career improvements, and job security can be until your next contract, at best. If you don't make it to tenured professor, and have good grant funding, then you are staring down the ba…

This would help on some level, although it would definitely make the stress on applicants much higher. E.g. there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year). So you better get a good research assistant job as a…

> there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year).

This is something I discovered pretty late in my life. The web pages maintained by profs barely have any info.

I have come to hate the whole "everybody looks for different things" type of answer when it comes to PhD apps. I wish profs would just spell it out on their site in concrete terms what they personally look for.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#179

Post by AlbertCory »

jebarker wrote: post #166
fatnoah wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income Early in my career, I considered (with an MS in Electrical Engineering, but with 4 years of professional programming experience) a switch into law. Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school. When I join…

> Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school. I've never heard this before. What job title would you search for?

Although I AM a patent agent, the job title that I had at Google was "technical advisor." Most of the others with my job were not patent agents and the credential was really not necessary. Litigation is not something you study to pass the Patent Bar.

If you're looking for a job like that with Big Law, you might look for "litigation advisor" or something similar.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#180

Post by nextos »

nenrkkfn wrote: post #75
bioemerl wrote: post #53

Science as a whole has died a hard death. All reward and prestige of being a researcher has been lost and the people in the study have a slim chance of being able to work with their degree. Which I understand is about the opposite of what this article wants, but you shouldn't trust the people who have broken science to fix it. Research itself gets locked behind tightly walled journals and are written with obscure and…

I had a tenured faculty position at an R1 university and left it in part because of a completely dysfunctional institutional environment with no insight. My best friends include full professors at well-known institutions, though, and I've continued to be involved with academics and research. I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that.…

> It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are often questionable or even fraudulent

This is my experience as well, after working in many different departments. It's really sad. I could hardly summarize it better.

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