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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

> Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is an admission of failure.

As someone finishing up grad school, this doesn't seem quite accurate. To me, it seems like a lot of the interesting research is being done in industry. I remember scrolling through jobs online toward the end of my undergraduate and seeing "PhD required" for all of the positions I was interested in. Most of my friends working on their PhD are aiming either for industry or a research scientist position at a government lab (like ORNL). So I'm not sure who exactly constitutes this group that believes "not professor" = failure.

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If you don't advance fast enough on your academic career, it can be read as a failure indicator by grant reviewers, which will reduce your chances to stay employed. If you're too old, and not past an appropriate career stage, you will also find it hard to find someone to employ you in academia.

What field are you in, though? I believe that attitude is tremendously pervasive the more "theoretical" the field is, e.g. the closer it is to math & physics, and the further it is from engineering.

Well, it's kind of funny. My degree is chemical engineering, my advisor is materials science, yet all of my work is HPC/computational. A lot of this stuff has become very interdisciplinary (I studied more computer science papers than anything over the last year).

I studied chemical engineering: all of our PhD grads chose industry over academia, and most of our young professors had come out of physics, chemistry, and biology departments. It was an interesting culture mix, partly created by the fact that ChemE is either disappearing as a field or changing to the point of being unrecognizable (depending on who you ask).

Yeah, the field has changed a ton. When my dad was working on his ChemE degree, they had a class strictly on galvanization (which was barely covered at all in my undergrad), and they were doing McCabe-Thiele diagrams by hand.

I can confirm that this idea is pervasive in physics (both experimental and theoretical)

The attitude of going into industry is more prevalent in physics? Or did I get that backward?

Sorry I wasn't clear - the attitude of going into industry being seen as a failure is common, especially among older professors. This attitude is changing somewhat, but is still definitely there.

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