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A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

president.mit.edu

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Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#371

Post by genxy »

19skitsch wrote: post #328
tasty_freeze wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work with a brilliant and humble guy. He got accepted to MIT at 14, but his parents made him go to community college for a year to give him a little more time to mature. He then went to MIT and graduated after three years, then went to Berkeley and got a masters in one year, then went to Stanford and it took six years to get his PhD? Why? Because his advisor milked him for his work. She had a pile of papers…

yeah I do feel like the PhD system is not uniform in terms of students’ experiences. some get out quite quickly if their advisor is chill while others are stuck being stack ranked in their labs or doing grunt work. your fate is basically in the hands of your advisor..

Which is why you should shop for the advisor and then tailor yourself to the labs you want to apply to. Interview current and former students. Go to conferences where that lab is presenting papers, etc. Have some solid blue collar academic skills like cleaning data, doing instrumentation, hell even making bad ass slide decks will get you noticed. Getting a PhD is similar to landing the job you want. Also showing up with a problem you want to solve that aligns with the lab AND the skills to pull it off, boom!

During undergrad a bunch of us got good enough at electronics and the machine shop that we had grad students asking US for help. We didn't realize it at the time, but just the instrumentation work could have landed us many a phd program, we were just having fun.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#372

Post by greenie_beans »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #207
r2_pilot wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't consign us here in Mississippi, voting in every election, to not be represented in a democratic society. It's hard enough living here without getting dogpiled by external people who never visit and think that just because our "representatives" are a certain way that everyone here is like them, instead of the messier reality that power structures here are misaligned with the actual population's collective will.

If there’s a “collective will” then why isn’t the population forcing its collective will on those power structures?

as if the civil rights movement didn't have very significant events take place in mississippi https://bookshop.org/p/books/local-people-the-struggle-for-c...

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#374

Post by chasd00 »

busyant wrote: post #284
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it’s time to split the country? We are so polarized with very different visions about the future and what is needed to reach and increase prosperity. Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. Democracy is fine, but we are just too divided and either side thinks the other side is dragging all of us down, and refuse to believe it’s because…

> Let Mississippi be Mississippi with Texas and Florida, let California find its own way with New York and Washington. These places aren't homogeneous in their political tastes. I live in a northeast blue state, but there are rural pockets that are still heavily MAGA. And I'm sure Mississippi has liberal enclaves. That being said, I don't know what the "solution" to this problem is.

further, California is a big state. For the concept to work you'd have to split California lengthwise, the Western 1/3 would align politically how the op is assuming but the Eastern 2/3 would not. If the counter argument is majority rule then you're pretty much back to where you started with a divided population and 2 wolves + 1 lamb voting on lunch.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#375

Post by trelane »

jpadkins wrote: post #304
hamdingers wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue here is that PIs don’t have the money to support graduate students What happened to all the money the undergrads are paying?

someone has to pay for administrators!

> someone has to pay for administrators

Turns out, this is also research grant money. Half or more of every grant usually goes straight to the university.as "overhead."

The universities could change this so more finding went to researchers, but they have zero incentive to.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#376

Post by dhosek »

JoeNuts wrote: post #332
ryandrake wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, these well-endowed universities are essentially Private Equity firms, each with a university hanging off the side as a minor, semi-profitable department within the firm.

Universities get ~40-50% of their funding from the government. Private equity doesn't quite fit.

Is that across all universities? Because I would guess that, for example, University of Illinois gets a much larger portion of its funding from government sources than University of Chicago (which would be one of those well-endowed universities which, incidentally, just cut tuition to zero for undergrads from families making less than $250K).

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#377

Post by vatsachak »

jrflo wrote: post #147

Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia. The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all…

I have solved open problems of fields medalists and can't get a job in academia. I currently make 4800 a month after taxes as a lecturer in San Diego, pivoting to SWE. Math PhDs are having a hard time

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#378

Post by contubernio »

I work at a major public research university in Spain. We have five times as many students as MIT, many more personnel, and an annual operating budget that is less than ten percent of that of MIT. Perhaps we return more to society per euro/dollar than MIT does.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#379

Post by dhosek »

trelane wrote: post #375
jpadkins wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone has to pay for administrators!

> someone has to pay for administrators Turns out, this is also research grant money. Half or more of every grant usually goes straight to the university.as "overhead." The universities could change this so more finding went to researchers, but they have zero incentive to.

Much of that overhead is not going to admin salaries (although, as stated elsewhere in the discussion money is fungible) but covers things like the cost of buildings, labs, maintenance, etc.

Re: A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline

#380

Post by insane_dreamer »

999900000999 wrote: post #223

It's ok. The top colleges are arguably now in China. China is providing free education in many poor African countries. Chinese is one of many subjects offered. Of course, a smart African college student will have no issue learning English, Chinese, as well her home countries language. The future belongs to China. We're elevating fine institutions such as Liberty University and celebrating comedians and edge lords. Ch…

China does have some top-tier unis but only a handful: Tsinghua, Beida (Peking), Fudan, Zhejiang, Renmin (humanities mostly), Hangzhou -- maybe a couple of others if you squint hard enough

Still a far cry from the number of top-tier unis in the US/Europe.

Chinese unis pump out tons of engineers and tons of papers but the quality of most of those papers is quite low.

But I agree that China, very smartly, is very active in Africa where the US used to be -- the US stupidly dropped the ball in Africa first with its endless "war on terror" and now with its even more stupid "america first (except when we bomb Iran)" policies

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