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A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

theguardian.com

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Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#91

Post by stvswn »

thrwaway11 wrote: post #2

How much of this argument should apply to more theoretical areas of research like pure mathematics?

While everyone is pointing out the practical, long-term benefits of pure mathematics, I disagree with the premise that there needs to be a practical pursuit associated with mathematics or any other theoretical fields (including the humanities). Sometimes we study things to pursue knowledge itself. If we're talking strictly about public funding, then sure, let's talk about practicality, but otherwise I'm happy that someone is getting funded by a university to devote their lives to something like the Riemann hypothesis. Expanding known human knowledge is justification itself I think. One shouldn't expect it to be easy, or to pay especially well -- it's its own privilege.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#92

Post by bradhoffman »

godelski wrote: post #85
bradhoffman wrote: post #84

You all are kind of scaring me a bit... I just finished my Bachelor's and am starting my Master's this month. I have no formal research experience, but I planned to dive in during my Master's. For anyone who has done/is doing there PhD, if there is any advice you all could give me in order to get the most out of this next year before I apply for PhD programs, that would be great.

Apply straight to a PhD program. Don't pay for a graduate degree.

My graduate degree is already paid for.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#93

Post by jderick »

I agree that the PhD system needs some rethinking but I don't think focusing research on more 'practical' problems is necessarily a good idea. I have seen 'practical' research going on in industry labs and I think it often falls into a no man's land of neither being practical nor advancing the state of knowledge in any meaningful way. Citation counts are problematic in some ways, but they do approximately measure what the research community thinks of as important work. I agree they seem to suffer from overly promoting "what's in fashion." OTOH, there is benefit to having a community of researchers all focusing on one topic at a time so that ideas can be exchanged and build on one another. Just like with startups, for some good ideas, it may just be that they are being proposed at the wrong time or haven't found the exact right form yet.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#94

Post by btrettel »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #57
extralego wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These phenomenons are interesting to witness for someone like myself who loves doing research but followed a very different academic path because I felt demonized by formal school systems in high school and at a state uni. Speaking purely from observation of many peers, there were definitely some who navigated the social and academic realms well, and garnered respect from socially-encourageable and conformist mentors…

I work in a large academic research lab and I'm with you on the lack of creativity and conformism. Most people here don't have ambitious ideas. They always think in terms of basic improvements to ideas that were recently published about. They seem to automatically think that progress can only be made in the direction of the latest cool papers from well-established authors in the field. Me, I'm with Peter Thiel... Don…

I don't think there's such a clear link between nonconformity in the sense of having a "normal" lifestyle and nonconformity in research. Or at least I have never viewed people who don't drink as less creative in research than those who do (to use one of your examples). If anything, a conformist is more likely to drink given that most people do and that there is a lot of social pressure to drink.

I think the problem comes more from uncritically accepting standard practices or beliefs, not from just doing something superficially different from others.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#95

Post by indoorfish »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #57
extralego wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These phenomenons are interesting to witness for someone like myself who loves doing research but followed a very different academic path because I felt demonized by formal school systems in high school and at a state uni. Speaking purely from observation of many peers, there were definitely some who navigated the social and academic realms well, and garnered respect from socially-encourageable and conformist mentors…

I work in a large academic research lab and I'm with you on the lack of creativity and conformism. Most people here don't have ambitious ideas. They always think in terms of basic improvements to ideas that were recently published about. They seem to automatically think that progress can only be made in the direction of the latest cool papers from well-established authors in the field. Me, I'm with Peter Thiel... Don…

I worked in an medium sized research lab while I was doing my graduate work in BioEngr. While I was doing research as an undergraduate I felt I had much more leniency to be free-thinking and out-there with my research/papers.

Once in grad school the reality of winning grants in 6-12 month cycles meant that the most successful PhD's were really much better at marshaling undergrads and master's students to do their work for them, rather than being elite, creative scientists themselves. I saw a lot of time being wasted tweaking previous research into something 'novel' so we could cite ourselves as much as possible and still put up a good introduction about doing something to improve society.

Ultimately, the lack of long-term vision coupled with a pretty unstable PI made me reconsider the academia route. As an aside, I was doing all of my advisor's "peer-review" of articles, reproducibility is a huge issue, I saw a ton of funky stuff submitted that I personally didn't have the time or budget to check, but couldn't in good faith outright reject, because I was also sending out papers to be reviewed.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#96

Post by xamuel »

extralego wrote: post #40
apo wrote: post #14

When you look at the stats, it’s hard not to conclude that the current PhD system is fundamentally broken. Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The high level of dropouts is similarly worrying – and possibly another symptom of the same problem. Research suggests that on average 50% of PhD students leave gradu…

These phenomenons are interesting to witness for someone like myself who loves doing research but followed a very different academic path because I felt demonized by formal school systems in high school and at a state uni. Speaking purely from observation of many peers, there were definitely some who navigated the social and academic realms well, and garnered respect from socially-encourageable and conformist mentors…

Can you elaborate what you mean when you say, "experts of citations"?

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#97

Post by chrisseaton »

pytyper2 wrote: post #77
chess19 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course this quote also suggests that maybe people who go in to PhD programs have higher rates of mental health issues. I would definitely argue that PhD programs are both bad for mental health and also attract people with poor mental health in the first place. I have known plenty of people who didn't feel like they had the skills (both technical and/or social) to go in to industry so they applied to grad school.

Hoping that the degree will mask a lack of actual skills. I encounter this often, 'guy has phd but struggles with the decisions to make actual progress in practical terms'. Is it possible to attain a phd and rely mostly on rote memorization? Are all phd candidates required to make an original contribution to their respective field?

> rely mostly on rote memorization

What on earth would you be memorising and for what purpose?

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#98

Post by ApostleMatthew »

knappa wrote: post #61

A lot of this seems ridiculous: > Mental health issues are rife: approximately one-third of PhD students are at risk of having or developing a psychiatric disorder like depression. The baseline percentage of the population which experience depression (and other mental illness) each year is known to be pretty high -- and highest in for people in their 20's. One third sounds fairly normal; at any rate, there is a burde…

I agree with your latter two points, but I must take issue with your first point about mental health. I've posted some links below for your further reading which can explain the stressors better than I can, but graduate school is a breeding ground for mental health problems -- you have constant pressure to always be working (often up to 80-100 hours a week), constantly comparing yourself intellectually to other graduate students, and dealing with the overbearing reminder that you need to take a candidacy exam and defend your thesis. As a poster above said, 30% is absolutely not normal for society as a whole. Most articles point out the dearth of students who seek help, which I don't think is uncommon, but what is uncommon is the additional stressors.

I don't know if you've been through a PhD program, but as someone who has, it's really difficult to explain the pressures and stress that you encounter during it to someone who hasn't.

https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2014/02/paying-graduate-s... https://psychcentral.com/blog/highlighting-mental-health-in-...

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#99

Post by TearsInTheRain »

chriskanan wrote: post #55

It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a surrogate for impact . If you are doing research, the goal is to do research that matters and citations are one way to measure that people cared about the work (of course, once something becomes a measure people start optimizing for that instead of the original objective). A PhD is a degree in doing research. When students start, it is true that many…

> "It is true that people chase citations, but only because they are a surrogate for impact."

I think the author would agree, although he is making the distinction between impact in academic circles vs impact in society. His claim is that impact in academic circles has become out of touch with impact in society.

> If anything, when I meet people in industry they often think non-practical research isn't worth doing even if it might have long-term value.

Is there a way to measure how much non-practical research ends up having long-term value? Intuitively, the marginal utility of a 115th definition of a circular economy doesn't seem worth the academic man power yet that is what the author is being incentivized to work on because citation culture in academia.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#100

Post by UncleMeat »

klodolph wrote: post #73
DSingularity wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, professors are so often in no position to offer genuine advice. They often have massive conflicts of interest which they do not disclose: funding sources, requirements, and plans.

In my own personal experience, professors and academic advisers have consistently given me the worst advice (about choosing a path or personal development) when I have asked for it. It takes a certain temperament to become a professor. There are a couple exceptions, but most of the professors and academic advisers I talked to seemed to be unable or unwilling to connect with people who were not there for academia qua…

I'm the inverse, and so are most people I know.

Every faculty member I spoke to in undergrad told me very clearly that a PhD was bad for my career, enormously stressful and risky, and led to a faculty job search that was likely to fail. I was told not to pursue it unless I desperately wanted to be a faculty member. The most common advice I got was "don't do it".

This wasn't because I was a shitty candidate. I was accepted to four of the top five schools.

It's a mixed bag whether you will get good advice I guess.

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