I'd like to start a better kind of school and work there.
On Leaving Academia
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: On Leaving Academia
#72Earlier 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…
The hunt for the Higgs boson is going on at CERN, which is not a university. It's more along the lines of a national lab.
It's more along the lines of an international lab. Many, perhaps most, of the academics working there are still employed by their home institutions and are funded just as if they were working in a lab in their own university.
In fact, the same can be said for some of the academics working in national labs.
Re: On Leaving Academia
#73Earlier 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 think that's covered in the essay, actually. He claims universities are increasingly judging professors by their ability to get funding. And, due to budget cuts, funding is only going to areas likely to pay off. "Too risky for academia" would be too far off the beaten path to get funding. That said, I don't know if it's true or not.
I agree with that, though that's still a somewhat different idea of "risk" than companies have. It's perfectly possible to do "risky" research in academia in the sense of something that may not pan out into practical applications in the next 50 years... if a funding body has made it a priority. If the NSF has decided that Foo Research is a priority and will be funded at $100m/yr for the next 5 years, then it is not risky for the professor to research in that area, but it might be risky research in the sense that it may never pan out to be worth that $500m NSF investment. In industry, that kind of research may never have happened.
What's increasingly hard to do in academia is to take risks individually: if you decide something is under-researched and should be a priority, rather than waiting for a funding agency to decide it's a priority, you'll have tough going.
Re: On Leaving Academia
#74A 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…
This just means you can't lecture. One thing the digital, scalable lecture isn't going to take away is the importance of one-on-one instruction. In fact it may exacerbate it. To me this is the future of teaching for most teachers - whereas currently they may spend ~10% of their time one-on-one with students, in a future model I can see that figure climbing to 80-90% percent as students struggle with their homework af…
I don't remember the lectures I gave, or the students who fell asleep in my first few tutorials... but I do remember the students who asked me about concepts they didn't fully understand and how great it felt when I could see the idea click in their head.
More of that kind of teaching could be a great thing.
Re: On Leaving Academia
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno about the "never did" part. Google is doing some interesting stuff, but I don't think they're yet up to the peak of academia, like the amount of individual researcher freedom combined with innovation going on in the heyday of the MIT AI Lab. Even grad students were doing totally independent never-been-done research projects! Mere staff members like Richard Stallman had influential active side projects, too. G…
Hehe, this is where is gets interesting. There's a huge number of small to mid sized companies which give you huge creative latitude for projects. Perhaps the most famous one is Valve (read their handbook, it's amazing!) I'm actually hoping to replicate some of those ideas of both the good bits of academe plus the modalities in aforementioned handbook as I start to pull people into my org, Wellposed. (because what's…
It's an interesting model that I do hope catches on. My impression is that it's not currently widespread, but maybe I'm missing all the interesting action. Afaict, in the game industry (which I'm pretty familiar with, being an AI researcher in academia focusing on game design / game mechanics), the more common model is a very highly managed EA-style one. And among smaller firms, creative freedom in design is more common, but technical research isn't that common, because they don't have the resources/budget/interest. The only smallish game company I've seen produce actual published research is LittleTextPeople (some years ago, there was also Zoesis, but it's now defunct).
Perhaps it's better in other fields?
Re: On Leaving Academia
#76The claims under "Mass Production of Education" are a little misguided: 1. Online education is not mass produced as he claims; the costs for every video that is downloaded to watch video lecture is incredibly small. Popping up tutorials on YouTube with ads is profitable and sustainable, and that's really all you need for someone who can dedicate themselves to learning more about a topic. 2. I have no idea where he pu…
All three of his points seem reasonable to me. If people can take online courses in place of traditional university courses, it's no great leap of imagination that a handful of professors will teach many thousands of students. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the students, but many universities would be left with no teaching role - which could be a reason not to stay in academia.
The personal connection in education is more complicated. It is certainly important, and I don't think the Khan academy is a good counterexample (they apparently have plans for personal mentoring, but the focus seems to be the videos). I could imagine a model where an online course by a distinguished professor is combined with face time with a local mentor, but it would still be a narrower experience than going to a bricks-and-mortar university.
None of that is to say that online education is a bad idea - I think the advantages outweigh the downsides, and it looks like the author does too. But we shouldn't ignore the downsides, and the time to think about mitigating them is now.
Re: On Leaving Academia
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sav…
"Unfortunately, the people writing checks..."
You will know the true revolution is here when "the people writing checks" has moved far closer to "the consumer".
I actually expect about 80% of the true revolutionary reform to essentially come out of the home schooling movement, and trickle up to the universities, who will hold on to the traditional ways the longest. While what the universities are doing now is a critical step, I don't expect them to ever escape "University lectures and homework, but on a computer!" on their own, except that they will eventually have no choice.
Re: On Leaving Academia
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
That should be the case but it is not primarily for 2 rather related reasons: tenure & funding. Everything you do as university research is towards the aim of getting publications to progress either you or your adviser towards tenure. The problem is that things that don't work are not usually publishable. This leads to 'fluffing' up results (read enough academic papers and you'll find some hilarity there) and avoidin…
If your particular research interest involves eventually killing someone, you'll do fantastic. There are of course other sources of funding but they typically have much smaller wallets, especially the further you go on the 'for the good of humanity' scale. Unfortunately, being in the EU, I don't think changing this part fixes that many of the problems. EU grants are not about killing people, but typically about coope…
But the actual administration is if anything worse: 100-page proposals via hugely bureaucratic processes (NSF's are at least only 15 pages), unwieldy multi-country consortia, periodic mandatory status update meetings in Brussels, the works.
Tell me about it. I was 7 years in "academia" in the EU and 4 of those years was working in a FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme) project. Man, the amount of administrative baggage we have to do is amazing. "Libre research" is a myth, between monthly deliverables, 6-month review, half-way Brussels project review, you could not make a lot of research.
And then you have all the administrative controls, I kid you not, I had to log what I did every day in two places (one in EU FP7 timesheets (in Excel), and another one in my institute's own software (a terrible java program)). Sure, the upside was that I got to travel a lot (the project had about 7 participant countries).
Now I returned to the industry, I am in a company from the Silicon Valey as a "simple" software engineer (even though I have a PhD) and I could not be happier. Moreover, after a couple of months in the position I have made several contacts which are bringing new opportunities.
I am happier at my current "fast paced" job now as I was while I was in academia doing papers just trying to publish papers for the sake of it (that is how I felt).
Re: On Leaving Academia
#79Okay, 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…
I just commented this in reply to another person but I feel you will understand it more.
I was just part of an FP7 EU project in which 11 organisations of 7 different countries participated... and gosh, the admin burden of that is horrible. I got to be a work package leader and unfortunately it means you can't really do a lot of R&D. The amount of forms you have to fill , all the Brussels reporting is amazing. Added to that, I think the whole "publish or perish" attitude of academia just is not for me. So what if I only publish one paper from the project? yeah, everybody things I am a loser and that my participation was not successful (yeah, nobody says that but...). It feels as if research is just done with the objective of publishing papers... not only that, but colleagues actually say it "but you know, we have to see how are we going to translate this research into publications".
On the other hand, I also worked in a smaller 3 year EPSRC project with 3 Universities and 3 industry partners. It "felt" better, although the 3 industry partners did not really care (each meeting they sent someone new because the other person was either out or doing something else, so the new guy didn't know anything about the project and was just in the meeting to fill in). In this project, at least each academic partner was doing whatever they wanted and just presented their work, and a the end of the project, something "practical" came out of it.
Re: On Leaving Academia
#80Earlier 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.
D-Wave are making more exaggerated press release claims. Universities have better working quantum computers (i.e. any at all)