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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

#451

Post by garciasn »

nomadygnt wrote: post #366
jasonhong wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science... Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at the end of it, you should be a world expert in your specific topic. A PhD is more like an apprenticeship, where you develop and refine your skills, your background knowledge in your area of…

Taking a longer time to graduate to become the “world expert” in their field is fine if grad students weren’t paid next to nothing for the 60+ hours a week that they are expected to work. As it is now it’s better to finish as quickly as possible so they can have a real life.

Isn’t this sort of how all terminal degrees work? MDs, JDs, etc are all putting the candidates through the wringer, for relatively low wages, until they’re “experienced”. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s common knowledge it’s the way things work if you want to have those magic letters of a terminal degree next to your name in your email signature.

Don’t want to deal with the machinations required? Opt for the masters track or just get an Undergraduate degree and spend 20y working your way up.

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

#452

Post by biophysboy »

ricksunny wrote: post #355
biophysboy wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a real shame too, because industry is completely incapable of doing basic research. Universities make the fuzzy ideas, and companies turn them into widgets. The only exceptions in history to this are the monopolies, which have their own obvious problems. They cannot produce non-rival, non-excludable goods - stuff that's hard to patent.

Vaswani, A., et al. (2017) Attention Is All You Need. Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Long Beach, 4-9 December 2017, 6000-6010. Generally understood to be an output of Googlers.

Transformers are an applied science: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10740433B2/en

Basic research would be something like optimal control theory, which came well before the transformer design.

I'm not trying to be evasive; I can see how my distinction could be seen as conveniently just outside industry's purview. Put it this way: I think companies, particularly small ones, are incentivized to pursue well-known methods/materials. Innovation modulates and optimizes.

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

#453

Post by SkyBelow »

robotresearcher wrote: post #434
arenaninja wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was disillusioned with academia before I started. We had a candid talk during undergrad with a grad student who was a TA in our class and he laid it out for us: there wouldn't be enough jobs in the US for our small graduating class each year so if you needed a job to support yourself it would not make financial sense. I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago. I'm…

Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art? Most people who study and aspire in these fields don't make a sustainable living in it either. It's a tough competition. There's work and luck involved, as well as talent. I think most grad students understand this, and it sounds like it was communicated clearly to you in a timely way.

>Are you also disillusioned with professional sports, music, acting, and art?

Not the person you were asking, but I think we need to double down on disillusionment in these. I've spoken to too many kids who dreamed of careers in this well into high school, often at cost to other academic paths, when their performance already clearly showed they weren't going this route. Sadly, it is hard to be strong about correcting kids because it is seen as not believing in them and not encouraging them.

As disillusioned as one might become in academia, the path one is on to get there tends to better align with setting students up for a successful career outside of it compared to the ones you listed.

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

#454

Post by rexpop »

busterarm wrote: post #93
andix wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people decided that this sucks and have spoken. Dear god, make America stupid again!

So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?

Are you trolling?

Elections are won by spending, especially since Citizens United. Democracy has not survived oligarchical propaganda.

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

#455

Post by rexpop »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #123
busterarm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're suggesting our systems should be less democratic, then? Maybe opposing points of view should pick better candidates that will actually win elections. That's how it works, right?

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…

You're confusing neo-feudalist oligarchical propaganda with the will of the people.

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

#456

Post by vonneumannstan »

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…

>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.

Sad if true, they should have known that was a long shot, it's extremely well known that the number of postdoc and tenure track openings in any given year is far exceeded by the number of PhD grads each year.

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

#457

Post by sourcinnamon »

jasonhong wrote: post #335
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…

Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science... Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at the end of it, you should be a world expert in your specific topic. A PhD is more like an apprenticeship, where you develop and refine your skills, your background knowledge in your area of…

I agree that completing a PhD under the time originally agreed may not be good, as you lose some of the learning opportunities that come with the apprenticeship (yes, it is) program.

However, taking more time than the standard length, whatever it is depending on the university or country where you are pursuing the title, is also something universities and specially PIs should be actively avoiding.

Maybe I have this view because I got mine in NL, where a PhD is a job with a defined length (4 years) and if you go over it, you don't get paid. So yes, it is an apprenticeship, but you should not be doing work for free in any case. Becoming an expert and the (relative) independence on how to do your research are of course selling points of the PhD, but a job is a job.

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

#458

Post by gowld »

quantgenius wrote: post #440

I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren…

The article is about graduate school, not undergrad. You can tell from the title.

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

#459

Post by lotsofpulp »

noosphr wrote: post #418
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…

>The future belongs to China. China's population pyramid is worse than the USAs. The present belongs to China. This is as good as it gets.

Not really an issue if China decides to go the Soylent Green route.

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

#460

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

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…

There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure.

There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.

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