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On Leaving Academia

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Re: On Leaving Academia

#61

Post by yen223 »

mfitzerald wrote: post #8
jackpirate wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

research of my own that'd be too risky for academia I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. Edit: I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying that they still manage to do resear…

With business, if you don't innovate, you die. University research is usually grant-driven. Grants are the result of filling in the right answers and telling a committee what they'd like to hear. There's much more urgency to be constantly innovating in business.

With business, your innovation absolutely has to turn a profit. This means that important research with less potential profit will die out, e.g. malaria and tuberculosis treatments.

It is for this reason that I believe there is still a place for academia in our society.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#62

Post by SoftwareMaven »

dspeyer wrote: post #57
jerf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But I can't help feel like some part of the experience is lost in the process." Some of the experience is lost in the process. We need not really dance around or wonder about that, it is. But what will be gained will be greater than what is lost, or we'd go back to the old ways, which we won't. A mass-produced medium-class bed isn't a magnificent hand-carved bed adorned with various and sundry Greek gods and goddess…

Rather than await a moment of silence, perhaps now is the time to carefully see what can be preserved. Somewhere in possibility-space is a model in which great minds teach in only the ways that they are well-suited to. Giving the same monologue year after year will likely die, but the teaching time that frees up could be used for some sort of mentorships or discussions or teaching of subtleties. The first step is to…

Unfortunately, the people writing checks don't ask "how could it be better for the same money?"; they ask, "how could it be equal for less money?"[1] Yes, we have an opportunity to make education much, much better. With the exception of a few places like Harvard and MIT, most of it will pass right by the US.

[1] I see a small possibility where the strong teachers unions get behind this as a future-directed way to save teaching jobs, and that could make all the difference. However, unions aren't too smart at predicting and driving assive upheavals. Instead, they will likely fight any change kicking and screaming.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#63

Post by ctl »

Simucal wrote: post #46

A dream of mine has been that I'd move into academia and teach Computer Science in the latter half of my career. I know that I enjoy teaching and I'd love to be able to devote the remainder of my time to researching topics that interest me in my field. This may be impractical for a lot of reasons, but it has been my dream none the less. So, when I read posts like this it leaves me somewhat disheartened. The reason it…

I think it's an overstatement to say that online programs are the future of education. Coursera and Udacity are not selling the same thing that universities are selling, at all, and I find it hard to imagine them affecting higher education substantially.

What do people gain from spending four years in college? Many of them learn something, but most of the value is in the degree, which serves as a signal of competence in the workforce and is a requirement for most jobs. Online programs probably won't provide the same kind of signaling in the foreseeable future. Moreover even students who are primarily interested in learning are unlikely to get as much out of online programs as they do out of college; the rewards structure of college drives many students to work much harder than they would on their own, and (without the signaling reward) online programs can't reproduce that motivation.

Lectures are a very small part of the value proposition that universities make, and of course their functionality is already mostly duplicated by textbooks. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure why American universities primarily teach their students with lectures right now (versus books, video, Socratic method, etc.). I'd guess that the answer is some combination of tradition, students having a fundamental psychological preference for live teaching, and society in general preferring to believe that colleges are selling "education" rather than signaling, motivation, and lifestyle. In particular, I don't at all believe that the dominance of live lecture is driven primarily by a lack of good video materials. And availability of good video materials is the only thing that I see Coursera and Udacity really changing.

So: I'm not sure if there will still be state school professorships in 20 years, but I wouldn't bet against it.

(Note: for the record, I'm a fan of Coursera and Udacity. I also enjoy universities as they are today, though I wouldn't be heartbroken if they changed dramatically.)

Re: On Leaving Academia

#64

Post by SoftwareMaven »

yen223 wrote: post #60
scarmig wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Higgs boson also wasn't super risky an undertaking. It was expected, and the project was a multi-billion dollar affair that was likely to come up with something. A somewhat ungenerous view is that it was just glorified taxonomy. When you think about the sums involved, we could have done a whole lot of smaller, riskier projects, which may or may not have panned out but had a great deal more potential. Which I gues…

Could the smaller projects have the expertise and resources to discover something like the Higgs-Boson? Centralization of resources is not necessarily a bad thing.

The more important question is could multiple smaller labs have come up with something more valuable (to science or society) than weighing the Higgs Boson (the discovery was expected, the weight was an unknown)?

Re: On Leaving Academia

#65

Post by neutronicus »

alextp wrote: post #48
jackpirate wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

research of my own that'd be too risky for academia I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. Edit: I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying that they still manage to do resear…

Regarding finding the higgs boson, regardless of whether you agree that it's what they're actually doing, the main people actually building the first quantum computer are D-Wave, a private company.

They've got some serious-business Quantum Computing experiments at NIST, as well.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#66

Post by neutronicus »

scarmig wrote: post #45
mbreese wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The human genome sequencing didn't really get going until they had to start competing with Celera. In the end, the HGP ended up adopting the same techniques to keep up. So, that probably isn't the best example to use. The LHC on the other hand is one example of what the original post was worried about - the trend towards more consolidation, towards funding bigger projects (with fewer people), at the expense of many s…

The Higgs boson also wasn't super risky an undertaking. It was expected, and the project was a multi-billion dollar affair that was likely to come up with something. A somewhat ungenerous view is that it was just glorified taxonomy. When you think about the sums involved, we could have done a whole lot of smaller, riskier projects, which may or may not have panned out but had a great deal more potential. Which I gues…

It's not like looking for the Higgs is the only thing people have done at the LHC. For instance, there's another big experiment going on investigating Quark-Gluon plasma, and the OPERA experiment was using LHC neutrinos.

The LHC is a big, expensive piece of infrastructure that groups have to share, but there are multiple groups.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#67

Post by tensor »

mbreese wrote: post #20
jackpirate wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two enormous successes of academia are mapping the human genome and finding the higgs boson. Both were hugely speculative the time the projects were undertaken. If there's something comparable coming out of industry, I don't know about it.

The human genome sequencing didn't really get going until they had to start competing with Celera. In the end, the HGP ended up adopting the same techniques to keep up. So, that probably isn't the best example to use. The LHC on the other hand is one example of what the original post was worried about - the trend towards more consolidation, towards funding bigger projects (with fewer people), at the expense of many s…

This is very misleading. Celera used techniques born from academia to sequence the genome quickly. While it did prove that the method was both feasible and preferable, it did not cause the genome to "really get going." The genome was nearly finished already by the time Celera got close to completion.

The public draft was also of much higher quality then Celera's, and as hindsight shows, also born of better scientific technique. Celera secretly used only one person (very nearly) to sequence from, rather than a collection.

If Celera never existed, the human genome would still have been completed in a similar timeframe and shotgun sequencing would still have been adopted. If nothing else, academics are just as competitive as anyone else and thus some lab would have loved to show the feasibility of shotgun sequencing, albiet on a different species.

Disclosure: I worked on the public draft and also had access to the Celera draft right around the time that the genome was "completed". Our lab was using and comparing both the public draft and the Celera draft at the time. We were even fusing the two to get the best possible "up to the minute" draft for a specific chromosome.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#68

Post by TheEzEzz »

Cd00d wrote: post #44
carterschonwald wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you doing computational or theoretical or a combo thereof ?

Neither. I'm an experimentalist. It appears to me at this point that if I were computational or a simulationist, the transition would be a bit easier. Some of my difficulty comes from the fact that I'm limiting my search to the greater NYC area. If finance was something I was willing to do, there would be more opportunities for my background.

I just left a postdoc at NYU (math) to start a company. Shoot me an email if you want to grab a drink sometime (or lunch, if you don't drink).

Re: On Leaving Academia

#69

Post by arethuza »

pnathan wrote: post #13

Okay, so there are issues with academia. How do those get solved? The obvious answer is "more funding", but there's also cultural shifts, wherein academia is excorcised for not doing "Real World Work". Is part of the solution to drive upward from K to PhD, focusing on critical thinking and humanities, educating more than training ? I don't know.

When I worked in academic research (NB a long time ago) I worked on pretty large EU funded projects (30 to 40 people, 7 or 8 organisations in multiple countries) and they were a nightmare due to the amount of "management" that comes with projects spending millions or tens of millions.

My feeling was that taking the money (even less money as you wouldn't have the manager/bean-counter overhead) and splitting it amongst a large number of small projects would have been far more productive in terms of actual research output.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#70

Post by neilc »

aswanson wrote: post #18
jackpirate wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

research of my own that'd be too risky for academia I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. Edit: I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying that they still manage to do resear…

I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. I get it. I recall specifically posing a promising, if not clear-cut, research topic to my grad school advisor and his response "that's high risk". Ac…

Academia is more concerned with the volume of publications rather than impact and unique ideas.

As a generalization, this is false. Certainly there is more emphasis on publication than is warranted, but most of the top places care much more about impact/reputation than about raw # of papers or citations. If you talk to people about how research labs hire newly-minted PhDs, how faculty are hired, or how tenure decisions are made, everything I've heard suggests that, at least for good places, they aren't just looking at the length of your pub list or the # of citations.

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