Hey I dropped out of grad school too!
Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
81–90 of 259 posts
Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#82Genuinely shocked that graduate programs remain stuffed to the gills. You live off a meager stipend for about a decade and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you. Big dreams of teaching in the Pacific Northwest? Too bad, the only plac…
Starting in your mid-30s, you can get a family, get a job, start making money and eventually get to the 2-3x. Sure, you'll be late to the party, but you'll make it. Moreover, it's going to be a looooong party. Does it really matter if you were there for N hours instead of N + 5?
However, what happens if someone in their mid-30s who has been in the party for quite some time now wants to leave it and go back to school?
Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#83Because most modern PhD factories are sweat shops that offer a rather dismal career prospect. (If you've been through the process --- I suspect there are a lot on HN --- you know what I mean.)
I bailed out three years into a chemistry PhD and my only regret is that I started it at all. I'm not saying that going to graduate school is necessarily a mistake but I think a lot of people go because they've done well in school up to that point and aren't sure what else to do with themselves.
How much do you practically learn about chemistry in those first three years? Was that knowledge at all valuable in your post-academia life?
Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#84In England, particularly the south-east, the gulf between a post-doc salary and starting a City/Wall Street job can easily be a factor of 3 or 4.
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Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#85Genuinely shocked that graduate programs remain stuffed to the gills. You live off a meager stipend for about a decade and then, in your mid-30s, you go on the job market for the first time. Unless you're somehow in the top 0.1% of your field, you're probably going to be fighting for a tenure-track positions at any institution that will take you. Big dreams of teaching in the Pacific Northwest? Too bad, the only plac…
> You live off a meager stipend for about a decade Keep in mind that this is not necessarily true for schools in countries outside of the US. At my school, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, as a PhD student you are considered an employee of the school and you are paid a living wage with full benefits. The current salary starts at 28600 SEK/month and can reach up to 33500 SEK/month [1] which is definitel…
To my knowledge, in the Netherlands and Luxembourg there is a similar situation to the one you described in Sweden, Denmark and Norway.
In Portugal you get a fellowship that covers tuition and a monthly stipend which was increased for the first time in 15 years (by 1.4%) last year. PhD fellows are not considered employees of the University and since the stipend is not really a salary you are stuck in a weird financial situation.
Despite all this, it is enough to live (around 1000 Eur) in most of the country except for the capital (due to house/rent prices have been increasing for the past 2 years at galloping rate), which is where a great number PhD granting institutions are located.
Not to pile up, I've also discovered that you can be granted a PhD fellowship for a project at an host institution that is under equipped (if has any equipment at all) for that project.
Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#86Just to offer a bit of a counter to much of the negative views here, I enjoyed my Ph.D very much. I went into it with my eyes open, and realizing that an academic career wasn't the only option that would work for me.
Through scholarships I was paid enough to be comfortable while spending my time on interesting things. The scholarship game is a bit winner-take-all though, and I know the minimum funding level in my department was less than 1/2 of what some of us were making, and that was in a STEM department - my understanding is humanities are a very different thing. You have to decide what is ok for you.
Afterwards I did a post-doc and then a research position. Through a national fellowship (post-doc) and funding guarantees (faculty) I knew I would be able to make something like the low end of what my industry salary would be - and easily chose the academic freedom at least for a few years.
When I was on the academic market, I didn't find a tenure track position I felt was the right fit. Rather than play the waiting game some of my colleagues were doing, and I realized that "any R1 that will take you" wasn't going to make me happy. So I chose to turn down the offers and go to industry. That's also had it's ups and downs.
I guess my point is there where many steps along that path I took a good look at my options and chose to stay. Sure, I could have made a bit more money in some industries, but there are other considerations. I've never worked with a more talented or motivated group of people than I did during graduate and post-doc work. I've never had the time since to just dig into an interesting problem or really swing for the fences. I'm sure it cost me a bit in terms of lifetime earnings, but it's a trade-off I'd make again in a heartbeat. I'm sure I would have been happy teaching somewhere if the parameters had been slightly different, but I'm ok with that too.
What I really don't understand is people who are somehow shocked to find themselves in the position, many years in, of making less than they think their time is worth and without the career prospects they had hoped for, and bitterly complain about it as if someone else made the decisions that put them there.
Graduate programs absolutely aren't for everyone. They are, however, a unique opportunity - if the good parts really appeal to you and the financials etc. make sense for you, by all means do it. Just don't expect it to be something it isn't.
Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#87It is an extraordinary risky decision to do a PhD (maybe except in CS). I have seen the best ones fail career-wise.
Excellent blog post about it: https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2018/06/14/losing-the-nobel-...
Quote:
"My take-away from the careers aspect of the book is that if you (1) love competition, (2) have a huge appetite for risk, (3) don’t mind working long hours for a minimum of 27 years until getting that first grant, and (4) are mostly indifferent to money, pursuing a physics PhD and an academic job might be a reasonable plan. You’ll get to work with a lot of smart people, for sure, but, as the book notes, quite of few of them may be planning to stab you in the back when it comes time to assign credit for a Nobel-worthy discovery. It is not like most other fields of human endeavor where there is room for everyone to excel in his or her own way."
Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#88Just to offer a bit of a counter to much of the negative views here, I enjoyed my Ph.D very much. I went into it with my eyes open, and realizing that an academic career wasn't the only option that would work for me. Through scholarships I was paid enough to be comfortable while spending my time on interesting things. The scholarship game is a bit winner-take-all though, and I know the minimum funding level in my dep…
Same here. The academic freedom that I had during my PhD combined with the intellectually stimulating environment, I cannot find anywhere else. Also most of my current close friends I made during my PhD.
Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#89The idea, assumed throughout this story, that PhDs are wasted if they don't go into teaching is a very strange idea. It made sense in monasteries, whence schools took many ideas, but it shouldn't be the goal of modern universities.
Rather, you should consider PhDs that end up teaching as the overhead of the educational system, and the ones that go into industry or research labs as the valuable output.
Re: Why some PhDs are quitting academia for unconventional jobs
#90Because most modern PhD factories are sweat shops that offer a rather dismal career prospect. (If you've been through the process --- I suspect there are a lot on HN --- you know what I mean.)
> most modern PhD factories are sweat shops
I don't know if that is universally true. This type of anecdata tends to be very program specific.
I worked on the computational side of things and got paid a lot to work on (what I thought was) interesting stuff.
Folks who did experimental work (especially on the bio side of things) tended to put in more hours even over the weekends because biological substrates are no respecters of leisure time. On the other hand, it's much easier to publish experimental results than to come up with a new algorithm, so many ended up with quite a few publications than I did when they graduated.