Why are 60% staying is the real question it’s almost always the sub optimal choice
More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
201–210 of 250 posts
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#202Academia 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 think maybe it suffers from the same problem of the video game industry, that being that there's a never ending supply of people trying to get into the industry that has only the slightest relationship to the demand for such roles. In the videogame industry, this mostly led to a bunch of low paying, long hour, lousy jobs with high turnover. Why pay more for a low level employee if you can get a new hire for cheaper…
Hmmm... and with video games as with academia, the glut of willing low-pay labor hasn't actually made the end product much better at all.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
isn't competition good for innovation?
As a former postdoc in the physical sciences (who is now out of academia mostly for family reasons), I don't like the constant argument I hear about whether competition is good or bad in research and especially academic research. I think it is the wrong question. Competition is inherently good in that whatever researchers are competing over will be optimized in the long run. We wish that we were optimizing for new/gr…
>(and there's simply no place outside of academia to work on your own ideas).
And therein lies the rub. Excellent post overall!
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#204Not 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…
Stanford School of Medicine has a FOOD BANK for Postdocs because they literally can't afford groceries lol
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's entirely anecdotal, but in my experience in academia (which consisted of 4 years of post-master's PhD), I've seen this happen exactly 0 times.
In a lot of fields, postdocs are required if you want a shot at a tenure-track position. For the most part, it’s just another artificial rung the system uses to justify exploiting people.
Crazy to think that 50 years ago, postdocs were rare.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#206This 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.
life isn't all about the endgame? sometimes you just want to do research for a few more years
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#207This 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.
Seconded. Ex post doc here. Any post docs reading this, I would say - academia is a sort of gravy train for the middle class (in the UK). If you want a comfortable life without doing much of worth, you’re not really driven in your work, stick with it. You’ll have to fight for your lectureship but once you’ve done that you can live an easy life with the only difficulties stupid bureaucracy, politics, and cynicism.
However, if you have a bit more energy in you than that, have some ambition, leave asap. Startups are a great alternative. Big co research labs are another. Or just get a day job that you love and do research in the evenings. You could even get paid to do real research via patron etc if you do well.
I think academia in the uk is part of the social structure designed to maintain the status quo. The academics get good pensions and don’t do much, and in return they don’t challenge the ruling classes. Part of the class system.
There are some exceptions to this rule, some good places doing good research, but they are a tiny minority.
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
life isn't all about the endgame? sometimes you just want to do research for a few more years
If you can afford it, and that's your passion, great. But (at least in the states) you are instead a student with a doctorate degree now in play and saddled with a lot of student debt (150k average), I'm not sure it makes sense. That unfortunately is roughly 77% of folks out there (at least as of 2020).
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#209It might be a bit off-topic, but my friend, after receiving her PhD from the University of Leeds in England, decided to completely abandon the academic path and became an artist. And when asked why that happened, she can't give a clear answer...
Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals
#210This 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 to mention, many private companies actually offer better resources