41–50 of 173 posts
>>Despite our moans about hours of work, pay, and pensions, being an academic is still the best job in the world for those of a particular temperament and talents. I have a slave temperment and enjoy being hauranged by my PI? My talents include falsifying experiments and writing endless papers about how our method is superior to all other methods? Yet we, much like the communist revolutions in the 20th century, have…
Have you actually been in a PhD program?
The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job. The explosion of higher education, internally and globally, masks the problem to some extent, just like a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme appears s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the UK it is rare that PhD students are funded to do their research.
I looked it up and I'm seeing that it still costs about 6k pounds or less per year. Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students? To me it seems really bizarre to charge this amount because it only seems enough to keep out poor or financially unstable people (for the UK), without conferring much financial benefit to the university.
There are various funders - the largest is the government (via Research Councils UK), but universities also provide a limited number of scholarships, as do charities like Cancer research UK or the Welcome Trust.
The tuition fees are limited by what the funding agencies are willing to pay: e.g. for 2017/18, the EPSRC has an 'indicative fee level' of £4,195 (and a national mimum stipend of £14,553 paid to the student) [1].
> Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students?
Not really: banks do not consider the stipend to be a salary, so when assesing loans treat PhD students as if they had no income at all.
Then a long time ago, someone claimed to have PhD failed my interview. I asked this candidate to pick a language and write a function to determine whether a string is palindrome or not. He couldn't even start with a function declaration (I don't even program Java but I know how to write a function declaration). I was disappointed, but I gave him another chance. This time I wrote the declaration on the board, and I asked him to write code to determine whether a number is even or odd. He flunked again. Our recruiter never followed up to request evidence for his PhD degree because he failed the interview anyway. Even though I still believe he lied, but if he didn't, how did this university, a university with good reputation, gave him his degree?
(btw, every single time I bring this up on HN, I get downvote, I never understand. So challenge me if you think I am lying.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In most countries, being a professor is the only way to have a permanent position as a researcher in academia. You can be a researcher without being a professor, but it may involve changing your position (and country) every few years.
I can't understand why you think this is the case. You can get a full-time job in industry being a researcher. Why would you need to move every few years?
If you step over to the non-STEM (and to a lesser extent non-TE) fields, the answer to the second question tends to diminish to "academia".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I looked it up and I'm seeing that it still costs about 6k pounds or less per year. Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students? To me it seems really bizarre to charge this amount because it only seems enough to keep out poor or financially unstable people (for the UK), without conferring much financial benefit to the university.
Most students never see this fee, because they receive funding that pays it directly as well as paying them a stipend. There are various funders - the largest is the government (via Research Councils UK), but universities also provide a limited number of scholarships, as do charities like Cancer research UK or the Welcome Trust. The tuition fees are limited by what the funding agencies are willing to pay: e.g. for 20…
The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job. The explosion of higher education, internally and globally, masks the problem to some extent, just like a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme appears s…
The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job. The explosion of higher education, internally and globally, masks the problem to some extent, just like a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme appears s…
A PhD program trains one to become a researcher, not a professor. There is a large need for researchers in industry.
The PhD system is a Ponzi scheme. First and foremost, a PhD program trains one to become a professor. During a professor career, one is expected to graduate 5, 10, 20 PhD students. It is mathematically impossible for the majority of these students to find a professor job. The explosion of higher education, internally and globally, masks the problem to some extent, just like a good old fashioned Ponzi scheme appears s…
Quite certainly, becoming a professor is not "first and foremost" what PhD leads to (nor is it what many people do it for). It is certainly not my experience. I am a PhD student and since the very beginning my mentors (program directors, my PhD advisor, committee members) have been pretty clear about future prospects: "the opportunities in industry are such and such (compared to the opportunities for BS and MS)", "po…
http://thegradstudentway.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02...
during the induction lecture on their first day. They are all still there on day 2. I like to think they are smart enough to know what they are doing and that the only people who are still writing phd 'glut' articles like this are those whose ideas about graduate training were formed a few decades ago.
I think what we have is a glut of people who don't want to enter the workforce, and have this naive dream of academia, tenure, and doing research. In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to TEACH. Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties. Universities are deceiving PhD students into thinking this magical world of research, and lifetime tenure awaits them at the end o…
>>In my humble opinion, the purpose of a professor at a university is to TEACH. Not research, that should be secondary to their teaching duties. No. PhDs are extremely specialized on a very narrow topic within a single field. They spend years researching that topic to the exclusion of everything else. Asking PhDs to teach is like asking brain surgeons to treat common cold. They probably can do it, but it's a gross wa…
