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More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

nature.com

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Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#71

Post by vv_ »

pca006132 wrote: post #41
vv_ wrote: post #15

I'm not sure about the situation elsewhere, but in Lithuania, it feels like professors produce articles or tackle topics solely to check a box. Most of the content generated by universities here seems completely irrelevant and ends up being discarded after completion. The courses are very bland and uninformative too.

I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depe…

> spend more time on teaching and less on research, which may reduce their research output

It's ironic that universities are primarily judged by their research output rather than their teaching, even though their original purpose was to share and preserve knowledge.

But the academic paper printer goes brrrr!

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#73

Post by dotdi »

More anecdotal evidence: while writing my Master's thesis it became clear that my advisor (the dept. head) was quite interested in the subject matter, and repeatedly asked me to shelve it, do a quick-and-dirty thesis to graduate and return to working on my original draft during a PhD. I was very open to the idea, since I was in love with research ever since childhood.

We sat down and talked about what this meant in particular, the workload, compensation, options after graduating from the PhD program.

It broke my heart, but I had to turn him down. It felt like everybody who wanted to have a shot at having a career in academia needed to put an insane (read: literally destructive) amount of effort into it, all while accepting that it was extremely easy to get stuck for good. There is extreme pressure on postdocs to produce results, with institutions and labs becoming very cautious about working with people in their 2nd or 3rd postdocs if they hadn't published in high-impact journals until then. Also, good luck finding any sort of tenured positions, with more and more universities switching to freelance "collaborators".

I was not going to spend 80 hours a week investing in something where all odds are stacked against me. I was not going to put years of my life into a thing that can go 'poof' just because your stars didn't align, or because the faculty decided instead of hiring you on a professorship track, they would rather extort some more money and "let the contracts expire" when it was no longer convenient to have you there.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#74

Post by verzali »

ninalanyon wrote: post #72

Is this actually a problem for society as a whole? Surely a lot of such people would be valuable in industry.

I think it is in a way, since postdocs are often bad preparation for industry. Postdocs usually learn skills that are useful in academia, not the skills that are useful in industry. And the knowledge they focus on is often hyperspecialised, and not necessarily valuable in industry (though that does vary by field).

Essentially, postdocs can be a good way to waste the most valuable years of highly intelligent people...

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#75

Post by segfaltnh »

vkou wrote: post #14
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the real world of corporations and all their made-up bullshit. Much more real than a university.

Figuring out new and better ways to make the owners richer is both a real-world and chronically underfunded problem.

No one ever thinks of the poor owners.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#76

Post by 2cynykyl »

wink wrote: post #70
pca006132 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depe…

I think it doesn't really enter the equation. The single worst lecturer I've had at university is now a professor. I don't enough about tenure tracks and we also call them differently (not adjunct, associate, etc) - but he's still there, 20y later, teaching (I think he just had gotten his PhD back then). I can only hope he has improved from "open script, read one page at a time, close script, dismiss".

At least he showed up! That is what we call an A for effort.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#77

Post by voxl »

verzali wrote: post #74
ninalanyon wrote: post #72

Is this actually a problem for society as a whole? Surely a lot of such people would be valuable in industry.

I think it is in a way, since postdocs are often bad preparation for industry. Postdocs usually learn skills that are useful in academia, not the skills that are useful in industry. And the knowledge they focus on is often hyperspecialised, and not necessarily valuable in industry (though that does vary by field). Essentially, postdocs can be a good way to waste the most valuable years of highly intelligent people...

Comments like these make me want to vomit with how out of touch industry people are. No, fiddling with AWS or writing some simple Go code is not beyond the capabilities of a postdoc... You really are not doing anything that complicated. Switch the roles and you would be completely useless.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#78

Post by goosedragons »

rednafi wrote: post #64
probably_wrong wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. And with the exception of irrelevant papers, a friend of mine went through all of those at a startup she joined after her PhD. I am doing a postdoc now - the pay sucks (still good compared to non-tech salaries) but I like what I do, I can choose my own tools, and I'm not longer contractually obligate…

> With the exception of poor pay, I experienced all of those things while working as a software dev for a major company. Same here. I've worked at grindy startups that made me want to leave the profession altogether—everything from gaslighting by small shop CEOs to firing threats, and even firing a colleague just to show "who's in charge." But switching companies is always an option, as is switching domains. I did th…

Is short term stability, really stability? I think it's pretty rare to get post-doc contracts longer than 3 years, renewal after that is unlikely especially for a long period of time. You can't really be a post-doc long term and it can easily have you bouncing across the country/countries following funding. It's more stable than freelancing perhaps or maybe a startup.

There's stability in academia as tenured professor but outside that, there really isn't.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#79

Post by bigbacaloa »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #22
bigbacaloa wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like being a professional athlete. Until you get to the first division you don't know if you have what it takes and no one else does either.

I think that's generally true but I've noticed that there are a couple of people in every cohort who have the right stuff. They're good and everyone knows it, including themselves. Glad this post was revived after being dead for some reason.

That's true if the cohort is MIT grad students. It's probably not true if the cohort is Random Western State Institute of Technology. On the other hand the relatively high percentage of postdocs who survive according to the cited article probably reflects that in the analogy many of the hiring institutions are closer to second division clubs than to first division ones. The analogy breaks at this point because salary structures are quite different. The marginal difference between working at Research I and Research II is not so great, while the marginal salary difference between playing in Division I and Division II is huge.

Re: More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals

#80

Post by pca006132 »

wink wrote: post #70
pca006132 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes just wonder, a lot of professors are bad at teaching because they don't have to be good at it. Is it the same for universities? It feels like reputation for universities are quite detached from the courses they have or teaching quality. Rankings focus a lot on quantitative measures, but teaching quality is hard to measure quantitatively. The output of universities, i.e. the quality of their students, depe…

I think it doesn't really enter the equation. The single worst lecturer I've had at university is now a professor. I don't enough about tenure tracks and we also call them differently (not adjunct, associate, etc) - but he's still there, 20y later, teaching (I think he just had gotten his PhD back then). I can only hope he has improved from "open script, read one page at a time, close script, dismiss".

Meh, not actively messing up the course is already better than some of the other professors...
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