Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects
nature.com
nature.com
When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wanted to punch me in the face. That said, she emailed me years later to tell me that she became a professor, despite those statistics. If you have a lot of tenacity (doing a postdoc), are willing to settle for a school that isn't top-50, and are reasonably productive (a few papers per year) it is doable. Every single one of my friends that graduated and still wanted to be a professor, is one now, but it took 3-5 years of additional work. This is true for my friends in psychology, computer science, EE, and neuroscience.
Of course, now all my other friends say, "Why the hell did you choose to be a professor where you work 80 hours per week and make less than most undergraduates with CS degrees, even when your area of expertise is AI?"
Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic. There are lots of great things to do with a PhD that aren't being a professor.
[1] http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/
[2] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-computer-science-pro...
[3] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-ucsds-computer-scien...
What would be your guesstimates of the mean/median number of first author publications of faculty candidates at a top school?
"Number First Author Publications (excluding theory folks)
Mean: 12.8±6.5
Median: 14.5
Range: 2 – 25"
In CS theory (and math), they go by alphabetical author order, so none of the aforementioned rules work unless there is only a single author. So, I excluded the theory folks from the first author analysis.
Alphabetical order should be banned, period.
Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue?
Edit:
Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why people care so much about it. (ie, what they think it accomplishes.)
C'est la Internet, I suppose.
If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers?
For example, in the RSA paper, Adleman clearly knew his contribution was less than Rivest and Shamir and he insisted that he put his name in the end. I believe, in most papers it would be obvious to the co-authors that someone's contribution is more significant than the others. If this is true, why do they still choose to follow the alphabetical order convention rather than the contribution order convention?
[1]: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/graphs/contributors (example)
I'm probably biased from being in industry, but even when people contribute unequal code to a module or writing in a report, we just list the authors alphabetically because it's obnoxious to do anything with the list otherwise and it stops a huge amount of politicking when the first three out of ten authors contribute equal amounts. At the end of the day, stable collaborations will outpace individual contributors -- so we should focus on what allows us to openly collaborate and tears down barriers to doing that.
But from my point of view, we have a lot of the same incentives between industry and academia:
1. If you want to get promoted, you need projects associated with you and to get noticed.
2. There needs to be some method to decide who gets what amount of bonuses.
3. Funding allocation is tied to past successes.
...and probably some more I'm forgetting.
So I think my experience isn't totally irrelevant -- you get enough signal out of the distribution of the person's name that the loss of whatever from not getting "first" information is eclipsed by the gains from less politics (and if you have a lot of documents, easier parsing).
Again, perhaps it's the industry talking, but I'd rather hire an author that contributed the third most to a large number of papers than someone who contributed first most to a few. One of them seems to be a "force multiplier" in that they're keeping several other ICs moving (and contributing on all those efforts), while one guy just seems a specialist in a particular work.
I don't think removing the "first" signal harms my ability to find those "force multipliers", because they'll still have the same markers (as they weren't showing up first under the other system anyway).
So perhaps I simply have different uses for the rankings than people who feel differently?
Interestingly, some fields where alphabetical order is used have started adding a note that explicitly shows who did how much work.
I'm quite a fan of explicitly tagging authors for what they did. That way you avoid deciding whether the person who did the stats did "more work" than the person who did the code, etc.
Typically, the first author did most of the intellectual work. Rarely if ever would the first author be a person who did a lot of practical work but little to no intellectual work.
It's an incredibly noisy measure that people nevertheless take seriously.
I understand how people can feel that way though, but my question is -- why is that feeling anything but obsessing over a vanity metric, and actually a useful mechanism for author evaluation?
https://library.leeds.ac.uk/skills-citations-harvard#activat...
> If a source has three or more authors, the name of the first author should be given, followed by the phrase "et al".
It might be good if this wasn't the case, but since it is, it's a realistic concern for authors.
Beyond that, really the reason will be that this is what people the people who decide your funding see.
Perhaps a useful example would be like saying if you have more than a few people in your team, anyone referring to your project must say "Alan's team" because Alan's name is the first in the list, even if they're a junior or part time. This is what your bosses see come promotion time, all that great work like Alan's team (2016) and who can forget the amazing piece of work Alan's team (2015).
If you called "BCS" (superconductivity) "Bardeen et. al." it would take everyone a minute to figure out what you meant, and they'd wonder about your background.
As an old Russian saying goes, 'a great engineer would never be promoted'.
[1] http://www.paullitvak.com/2013/05/16/why-social-science-grad... [2] http://www.paullitvak.com/2013/02/18/simgradschool-a-study-i...
Is it at all possible for a person doing Operations/MIS/Quant_marketing - whose main job is econometrics and ML - to not end up in academia after completing his Ph.D.?
That said, for the liberal arts, history, etc., things may be different. They don't tend to have large labs and their goals are different. I honestly don't know.
When I did my PhD I worked in Math and CS (plus had friends in Physics with similar observations): many professors on the theoretical side had no need for and were not interested in getting grants. They would get some minor travel money for conference expenses and pay themselves over summer so they would not have to teach then, but even if they got nothing they would be just fine on a base salary. And I am talking about reasonably well known full professors, not some young researcher at the end of a rope (career-wise).
Things are different when you have experimental labs to run. That is when you need external funding and have to do all that is involved in getting it (proposals unlimited, etc.)
That is definitely not true for many non-experimental science departments. Many students are TAs and as such care not a bit about grants. When I was getting my PhD I had to teach 4.5 hours/week (often structured as 6 and 3 at alternating semesters), which gave me my stipend and free tuition (and was a useful skill to polish). Maybe I spent another 4-5 hours preparing for classes and grading (we got student graders but I seldom asked them anything as grading was quick enough).
I was paid by the department and it did not matter to me whether my advisor got grants or not; what mattered were research interests and his guiding of research. This was the picture across the department; changing advisers was quick and based on mutual interest, not financials / grants.
I have never heard of a 20 hour TA load. Again, just wondering.
I'd imagine my experience wasn't an uncommon one.
This is just a couple of data points, though. Maybe we were just lucky.
There is another benefit (of course, understanding with all the dues you have to pay along the way.) JOB SECURITY While I make more than a professor, as with most tech jobs I can lose it anytime. When the economy is bad, even great job performance is no guarantee for continued employment. Sometimes entire companies disappear. It is difficult to understand this if you havent been thru a downturn (I've been thru 2) and it is difficult to appreciate this until you have hard responsibilities in live (mortgages, family to support.)
This is another reason why many jobs which pay less (government jobs, k-12 education, police forces, etc) are still attractive -- because they offer relatively more job security. It means you can commit to liabilities -- a higher mortgage, etc without having to sock away funds for rainy days.
Thought that was a great way to think about income stability in an actionable manner.
No. False.
I doubt this is true for the United States, but it is definitely false for many European countries. Tenure gives you job security, but it also brings an enormous amount of administrative obligations. In my experience, conversations with tenured faculty tend to revolve around how much they hate the endless bullshit meetings they are required to attend, the long many-page forms they have to constantly fill out for uni administration, and how it has really eaten into their time for research or family life.
A student finally asked him why he doesn’t come prepared to class. His response was he teaches he easiest class the can and only the minimum amount of classes he needs to. He wanted to work on his research and get grants not teach.
He was making 150k.
Working on research that's worthy of grants is extremely taxing, and is the part that makes universities function. Teaching undergrads is a chore.
My education was subpar due to his lack of effort.
This is the most concise statement I've ever seen of the sickness at the heart of the academy. By and large, and with a few heroic exceptions, professors don't value instruction. It's why I was told my ambition to improve the preparation of engineering graduates through better instruction was a fool's errand, "career suicide" in my advisor's words. And it's why I took my Ph.D. and left academia. This attitude is going to come back and bite them when the marks wise up.
I've seen it myself...groups whither and disappear due to lack of funds.
I'm not sure how much can be done at the teaching level, but like you, it's something I'd also like to help correct.
Yes, college graduates do better then non college graduates which is why those people still do it. But since they are paying a lot of money, university literally owns them more then just "you are a distraction".
True enough. My Euro-centric brain didn't consider this. Even in Europe actually, non-European students pay a lot to join a course.
My sense is that American unis do offer some "value for money" when compared to European schools, through flexible options for minors and majors, and grad school. Maybe the teachers are still poor though.
I'd suggest that faculty don't want there to be a low emphasis on teaching, it's just that there aren't enough resources to do the critical tasks first. This is bearing in mind that teaching duties are always fulfilled either way (just not to the satisfaction of some people).
When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.
Pretty much all the tenured professors I know well work their asses off - and due to area of expertise, many of them could make 2x - 5x salary in industry but aren't interested.
Some of the hardest working people I know are tenured professors. Managing international research projects is no walk in the park.
Some of the harder working people I know are post docs...
In my experience, the exact opposite is overwhelmingly true.
I think you are mixing up the amount of work a tenured professor has to do with the amount of work they do do.
A tenured professor has to do very little. The idea (even if not the reality) is that a tenured professor has proven themselves enough that the one employing them is willing to ease back any rules so the professor can do science like they want to.
The end result should be (and I think is, but I don't have any hard data at the moment) is that tenured professor do a far larger amount of work than they have to, and are comparable if not even greater than other professions with similar salaries. In large part because they are doing what they love.
Consider a programmer who loves programming and does it at home and at work. A professor is similar, except since they get to pick the topic they work on (to some extent), they are working on the same project both at home and at work.
The last tenured professor I worked under put in a lot more than 40 hours, and he was high up enough to not have any classes to teach (I think he periodically taught a grad class, but it wasn't ever semester).
If you're in a decently good school, this is not true.
>The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all.
In both universities I went to, the only way to reduce teaching loads was to pay your way out of it. And the only way professors would do that would be to get grant money to supplement the lost income.
As for the history professor making $100K, what is the COL in that area? In my university, I just looked it up, and they average about $75K (which, to be frank, is decent for the little work they do).
In any case, most of the 80 hour/week work is in engineering and science...
Besides, sometimes you will pursue an idea for a year or two and find out that it comes to nothing, and you have very little to show for it. But not giving professors the space and trust to do just that is counterproductive in the long run.
That's an oddly specific number that I wouldn't expect to agree exactly across the USA and "Europe". Do you have a source?
I know hundreds of tenured profs in science and engineering and there is a very strong work culture.
1. Sacrifice all social life outside science.
2. Play the schmoozing and reputation management game very well (Twitter is taking off for this).
3. Mercilessly squeeze every last drop of productivity out of the undergrads assigned to them.
I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry.
To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it stands.
IME most tenured professors have to work significantly less than others for the same salary (those who work more mostly do it because they like working with grad students, not because they get financial benefits for it). Quality of life is good, good benefits, few and flexible work hours, sabbaticals, etc. Salary is lower than at the top of the industry, but sufficient for a comfortable life. Those who do good research can escape for the summer to interesting parts of the world to summer schools and visiting colleagues using grant money.
However, non-tenured professors have it much harder. And postdocs are usually the underclass.
I am not sure, but I do know that at some time I knew I did not want to stay in academia. And when I understood this the first thought was "why did not I realize this a year ago"? Nothing wrong with academia, I just chose a different path.
EDIT: On some thought the mentality "if you did not stay in academia you are a loser" probably delayed the above realization. It was very prevalent.
I see that as a common feeling among some of my friends slaving away on their PhDs. Its hard to not feel this way if all your friends, social circle, basically your entire world, is built around the school/program you are attending (which isn't that unusual since you're likely to be friends with other PhD students).
Additionally, I've noticed some of my peers who did very well academically in undergrad want to continue the "good streak" right through PhD. I know it sounds rather silly, but if you've been killing it with grades and awards and the like, its easy to feel that you are special and if you don't do a PhD, who will?
This is unfortunately what happened with me. Although, I realized my mistake within the first year and decided to leave with a Masters degree.
This was a bridge too far, coupled with the 1000+ applicants per position. Made it hard to make a case to continue in that field.
To some degree, you are measured, as a student/postdoc, by the number of highly rated papers in good journals that you produce, as well as citations, invitations to speak, etc. All of this factors into how high in the stack you will rise.
When I was looking at applying for tenure track positions, I was hampered to a degree, by being in a group that didn't publish often (and of course, as a student, I couldn't push my advisor to publish more ... she had tenure already). So I had a couple of good papers, but nothing compared to these senior folks from FSU, with 20+ years experience, many Phys. Rev. Letters, and other top journals. And hey, to make it even more fun, they were willing to work for less than the newly minted Ph.D.s.
I don't blame them. Would have done the same thing in their shoes. We are better off for them having come here and advanced physics.
But to the younger me, thinking ... damn ... this ain't fair ... it wasn't so obvious at the time.
I made a conscious decision to go into industry, knowing full well that it ended my hopes of landing a job as a prof. I've had a few side research associate prof gigs to teach HPC programming or work in a CS group (not bad for an ex-physics guy), and for the most part, they were fulfilling.
This is a hard choice to make though. All grad students and post docs need to know what awaits them in the world. Don't, as in never, believe anyone ever telling you about shortages. Assume that they have an agenda.
I was part of a cohort to whom the NSF exhorted the looming shortage of scientists for staffing physics positions (mid 80s). I was both naive enough to believe them, and foolish enough not to do my own research.
I would have gone in a different direction, had I known what I learned later. One more pragmatic. Likely Math or CS.
My recommendation to younger versions of me, my wife (also an ex-physicist, now a math/physics teacher in a local high school) would be to look carefully at how the world is moving toward some things and away from others. Estimate where we will be in N years when you finish up, and try see if something you think you would like to do aligns with something people are willing to pay for. Make sure you are flexible enough to change, and you can adapt as needed. Learn how to learn, learn how to think, learn how to move beyond your comfort zones. Learn how to communicate, how to sell (not necessarily things, but ideas). Learn what value is.
Then when you get to be an older fart, responding, slightly wistfully, to posts on HN, you can pass along your own experiences, thereby, hopefully, helping someone to optimize their own journey.
That's great advice, but how do you translate it into practice? Should someone considering grad school do a PhD in AI or in biomedical engineering or in finance or what?
My daughter is pursuing a degree in Art at a good university. I gave her the same talk. As she seems to have some genetic predisposition to computers and science (and math, though if you ask her she'll claim that the tests lie), she looks like she'll be mixing computer science and/or engineering into this.
My wife and I struggled to find a solution to the two body problem [1], which is part of what informed our collective decision. As much as I wanted (at the time) to be a physics prof, I saw my contemporaries struggle for years afterwards, with low pay, long hours, while having to put up with a spouse in a different city (and often a different state/coast), as their solution to this problem. That didn't appear to me to be a solution. And in the language of theoretical physics/mathematics, this problem did not appear to admit a general closed form, simple solution.
The FSU collapsing was a large part of my (really our) choice (we got married in grad school). The lack of "secure" job until early 40s (tenure track starting around 35, decision around 40-42) caused us to rethink what was important to us.
The trajectory you take is one you should undertake with eyes clearly open, aware of all the pitfalls on the path you take to the end point. And have a few concepts in mind for plans B and C in case plan A's endpoint becomes out of reach for any reason.
That said, my experience in this is only with Oceanography professors who are research professors first and teachers a distant second.
Only because of competition. It's still vastly better in the U.S. than any other country.
Competition is good.
There was a retrospective study looking at grant scores vs. outcomes (citations of the papers produced). The correlation was pretty weak. Reviewers can identify the obvious dreck, but beyond that was a bit of a toss-up.
If you have too much competition, people start rushing sexy, half-baked results out the door, regardless of whether they seem likely to hold up--or even make sense. This selects against the people doing the careful sort of research that we probably intend to encourage.
But as you say, the incentives are not aligned correctly. And yes, it's very difficult for reviewers to make the best decisions.
So instead, they reject and request preliminary data. Which requires money. But at least this is better than a sexy shot in the dark, which I think private institutions should be funding. Or things like MD Anderson's moonshot program.
Things aren't perfect, but I think we can both agree that there is no perfect solution to this problem, incremental improvement? Certainly.
It's at 10. We're hearing more and more about large cheating scandals. I wonder, what could possibly be wrong with the system?
In my school, the physics department was part of the College of Engineering. They had the usual 80 hour weeks because their evaluations depended on the amount of grant money they brought in.
Only tangentially. In my engineering department, the expectations on the professor who ran a lab with heavy and expensive equipment were no greater than the one whose work was all computational and just needed a bunch of PC's to run simulations on.
After I got my masters in Anthropology, I had been planning on a career in academia. At the time (early aughts), there was a huge backlash against tenure and there was a big movement trying to do away with it completely and it really turned me off. I subsequently left the field altogether in large part to the idea of having to "prove" my tenure, when, at the time, it was one of the few things which gave professors some stability in their role at a given university.
The rewards are getting to be your own boss, advancing the knowledge of humanity, and cultivating the next generation of scientists. It is hard work and time intensive, but most things worth doing are.
It turned out he's about to complete a PhD in machine learning, but doesn't want to work in Silicon Valley, or for a big company, or in finance (he lives in a financial capital).
Different people have different motivations, but I find it hard to imagine myself choosing the same constraints were I in the same situation.
> That is also math we should be doing.
There are things that should not only be seen in narrow economic terms, though. If someone wants to run their own business, or increase the stock of knowledge, or seek enlightenment in meditation retreats, that's perfectly ok, even if they don't strictly optimise their expected monetary payoff.
I mean, I like traffic now. Back then? I was just meh... But it was something I could bite into and really see where Chaos Theory techniques could apply to understanding traffic. Which is to say, quite well - actually. But, I digress...
A great advisor really, really helps.
Indeed! Why is the assumption always, "We all value money, so just switch to industry!"? It's like telling a public servant that if they wanted a living wage they'd learn Node.js. Not everyone wants to do industrial web-dev, and not everyone should have to. There are high-skill, high-impact contributions to society that don't involve corporate life, shouldn't involve corporate life, and instead need an institutional space for people to pursue them without the pressures and incentives of corporate life.
"Just switch to industry" is turning into the scholarly equivalent of, "just learn to code". Instead of all giving up on some people making the best impact they can, the impact they work desperately hard for, maybe we should just fix the academic labor system.
And unfortunately we have pundits here in the HN community and refinforeced by YC, that this should be the case. Oh and btw, those same people think the solution for "just fix the academic labor system" is "well let's just write some code".
Living in the CS bubble, a lot of us forget that outsiders think of programming as some kind of black magic that they could never figure out ever. And are baffled that those who know it are not milking it as much as they can.
If academia is about interesting research, then I would gladly take your perspective. But sadly, from my experience (life sciences), to get anywhere, it is 3/4 bullshit work (admin, politics) and 1/4 interesting work.
I imagine I can find a job in industry that's 1/4 interesting work and get paid a lot more for it.
So it's not about "values". Let's not religion-fy academia and infuse it with a semblance of "virtue" associated with doing research. Scientists shouldn't be monks for science.
This idea is implicitly ingrained in a lot of graduate students when they enter the program. In my opinion, this is all to justify the shitty treatment. And I find this mentality very similar to organized religions where you are expected to make personal sacrifice in the name of some abstract notion.
Of course, this also exists in industry. Big tech companies sell their "vision" and "culture" in the same way. But at least they pay their employees relatively better.
I am glad you have a rewarding academic career and I hope you continue to enjoy it. I personally didn't find academia that enjoyable. The science was interesting, but academia is not just about science these days.
My sister is on her second post doc; while the money is perfectly adequate, if she ever burned out she would be stuck up the creek without a paddle.
Personally, it’s the precipitous drop in tenured positions that scared me away. Too risky of a time investment!
But getting here wasn't easy, took equal measures of hard work and luck.
When I realized that I would be out over half a million dollars in earnings over the time I was in grad school, I made the decision to leave. The fact that my advisor was a terrible researcher and a horrible person made it much easier.
You'd only make more money if you founded a company and it was successful. You don't make fuck you money as employee #5000.
I think that also goes to answer the question about motivation despite long hours and low salaries. Knowledge is its own reward, I guess.
Also, doing work that really satisfies you is a big privilege. Big big privilege. Not many people enjoy that, the world over.
This is also quite rare in Academia. Much of the work is still just as unenjoyable as a normal job.
Out of the 18 in my cohort, two are doing reasonable postdocs (i.e. positions that aren't just treading water, but should actually lead to a reasonable career) and one who has been remarkably successful (success being a 'young investigator' grant - basically an R1 - and just recently another million+, within two years of PhD). The rest (including me) are doing ... other stuff.
Here are some traits of the successful PhD:
* Mother is professor in a related-ish field. Sister is also a PI of a gov't lab. Has been steeped in research and academia (especially the interpersonal aspects of this!) for decades. His success is 100% merited, but without question this has aided him tremendously.
* Reads papers constantly. I don't know anyone that's as familiar with the literature as he is, including all the faculty I've gotten to know. Has strong opinions about various labs, papers, and researchers, all of which are very well substantiated. TONS of 'soft' knowledge about how so-and-so got this or that funding, why such-and-such research is bunk, etc. If you don't think half the faculty in your doctoral program are trash, you're not being critical.
* Not a terribly great bench scientist. Definitely competent, but not remarkable. He knows it, though.
* Holds many unpopular opinions, and strategically focuses his research goals on the 'achievable'. In other words, he doesn't let being right get in the way of his career. Don't interpret this overly cynically; you can absolutely go against the flow in academia, but big claims require big evidence, and your time is limited. His research focus has shifted a lot depending on the landscape in front of him. I think this is commendable, as idealism in research is extremely fraught, even if some would criticize this. FWIW, he published a 'comment' in science that basically shits all over a garbage paper, which is more than most will do.
* 10 'real' publications since starting PhD in 2010, 7 as first author. By this I mean actual original research in a journal of repute, not reviews or bottom-tier trash. And this covers what are easily considered 3 different topics/fields.
* PhD advisor is Academy member, post-doc advisor is Academy member, institution is top-3 in field, arguably 1 or 2, etc.
The core takeaway is that you need to understand your field (in a very wide sense of the term) and direct your research productively according to that.
You certainly don't need all that to become a professor at Podunk-U, but I think that's a good archetype for a successful investigator. The other successful PhD (different cohort) I know has a very similar story; dad is a 'big dog' in an even more similar field as the son, similarly productive, similarly knowledgeable, etc. I feel pretty confident that this is what's needed for success at a major research university. Though, many unsuccessful faculty will be hired as well (through luck and, very often, nepotism), so YMMV.
If you really like to read papers in your free time, I think that's a very good sign. Even better if what you like best is to read between the lines and really be critical of the work. Very few people, even in doctoral programs, are like this. Know and respect your weaknesses, as well, and you could be great.
If you speak with recovering professors and post-docs who've joined industry, you'll quickly realize that one of their big surprises is the faster pace of work, and how much of it there is. Publishing of course is not sufficient, it actually has to work, at scale, reproducibly.
I like the academic environment, because at its best, it allows you explore something very deeply. Efficiency and creativity are different goals. There is value to a meandering path. Even if industry may have a fast pace solving problems, academia at its best, makes you ask a better / different question.
Doing a PhD built a large array of skills that I didn't have from my undergrad and allowed me to learn practical skills in a fairly low risk environment and explore other avenues. It let me realise that I wanted to start a business, it taxed me mentally like nothing before, it prepared me to hold myself accountable and that if I don't do the work then it doesn't get done and gave me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do that my undergrad didn't.
As the article says, I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in academia, it can be an excellent bridge to industry if you are prepared for that at the end.
It was better than doing a startup by a stupidly huge margin. Startups are all about risk-minimization and risk-mitigation, since risky things mostly fail, and so use up your runway without moving you closer to success. So in a startup you are highly incentivized not to take big risks -- and research is always a risk. So you are driven to take an engineering mindset, where the apex of skill is to solve a new problem using only old, entirely proven techniques.
In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid confronting them).
Basically a PhD puts you in an environment where you can take on big, poorly-understood and poorly-defined problems and attack them over and over again. Going from a blank sheet of paper to a solution (or clear failure) in six months 10 times over is an amazing way of improving your skills, and IME it's really hard to get this experience in industry (even though it's really valuable to have this experience in industry).
That sounds heavenly.
If you don't have this mindset, a PhD will make you very angry, and you'll feel like you've wasted several years of your life.
Don't know where you're doing your PhD (based on your comment about tax-free pay, I gather you're not in the States). That's not how things work in most places. You enter grad school with a vague idea of what research you want to do, and in 9 out of 10 cases you'll be doing something entirely different. The research you'll be doing is whatever your advisor has funding for. It's not "your" project at all, it's your advisor's, and your job is to produce the deliverables that he promised as part of his grant proposal. Consequently, you have very little freedom about what you're doing and how you're doing it.
I'd guess UK and in my experience your description is correct - people can only have a very vague idea when they start a PhD and you've got to work out the detail of what exactly you are doing with your supervisor over the first 6 months to 1 year.
Wow what? Is the US? I def got taxed -- and audited because the funding agency screwed up some paperwork -- on my PhD income, while on federal fellowships no less.
I thought it was pretty well established that this depends heavily on your field.
Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee.
If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depressed sociopaths with Lamborghinis, then tenure-track postdocs are investment bankers with crappy bicycles.
Needless to say, I left academia 3 years ago and never looked back.
Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.
There are many downsides to academia, the papermill mentality that has become pervasive being a big one, but this picture of a morally bankrupt subculture where people do whatever they can to get to the top is nothing like what I experienced.
-Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around
-Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it
-Being a stock trader: making money by spending your whole life reading company reports and hoping you're right about whether they're doing well or not
-Being a quant: using your hard earned computer science skills to move money around and turn a profit instead of helping humanity
Almost every human endeavor can be trivialized if you choose to only see one side of it.
Currently departments are pressing researchers towards output rather than long-term quality work - at least that was the key aspect of my post-doctoral experience.
Farmer: you're making food for people.
Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in.
I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common in healthcare in the US).
Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just selling ads.
As far as being well-paid: farmers are fairly well-paid. They have to work hard and use a LOT of what you might call automation (combine harvesters and the like).
But to your point: I sometimes am persuaded by the conjecture that we developed BS paper-pushing jobs for people since we've automated away farming, much of manufacturing, etc. Office Space comes to mind, too.
As for the ethanol, it's a fuel, but without the subsidies and legal mandates would there be a good reason to use it? I'd always heard it's not really efficient and the environmental impact is negligible-to-negative, even though on the surface being renewable is good.
But I digress.
You're right in some sense, although I think those other fields are different in that people are honest upfront about what you're doing, and people see the value in the tediousness.
Academics, though, reached some inflection point (not too long ago really) where papers are just published, or grants proposals are written, just so it can be put on a CV. There's a huge discrepancy between the activity and its purpose, and a lot of denial about what's going on.
The denial seems to be decreasing a little, with more and more pieces like this Nature article, but I don't think the general public really understands the nature of the problems involved, nor are scientists really often honest about the nature of scientific work today.
One issue that's missing from this article is the impact of these trends on senior academics: it makes it almost impossible to move from one institution to a next, because of the volumes of young Ph.D. grads that are available. So if you are stuck in a problem institution, or in a poor institution-fit, or your spouse needs a job elsewhere, you're f*d, to put it mildly. This then creates all sorts of problems up the chain, where you have senior people whose careers would improve if they could move, and people staying would be happier, but they can't, or it takes forever. It leads to all kinds of problematic interpersonal problems that would be resolved easily in another field by someone just moving someplace else they'd be happier at. In academics, your career is often tied to a particular institution, because of the glut of qualified graduates, which is totally screwed up.
Academics has become cannabilistic. You're expected to just sort of throw yourself and your family at the altar of "science," the meaning of which is increasingly corrupted and distorted.
Something must have change in recent years, which changed the way scientists work nowadays. While I left academia too, I wish scientists would have the freedom to work on larger/long term subjects again.
1) Professors really, really need to be open to talking to their students about what they want in their career and what's sort of career path they are considering. Not having this discussion is prevalent but honestly somewhat outrageous.
2) Internships really should become more widely accepted within greater academia (i.e., outside CS). There are a huge number of great arguments for them, including
a) Exposure. There are a huge number of PhD candidates that have actually never had a job, or even just have never been exposed to what their greatest-interest career is post graduate school.
b) Their length is a drop in the bucket compared to the total length of a PhD. (3 months vs 5.5 years average in my Dept)
c) professors worry their graduate students will become less interested in research after an internship. My thought: great! I am super happy that person found something that makes them happier.
The biggest argument against internships has always been something like 'professors can't just be super flexible with their students, they have their own constraints (grants, etc.)' I'm not proposing that professors go through crazy great lengths to make sure their student can get an internship. I simply think that should become an accepted part of the culture and be an ok thing to discuss with your adviser. Right now, students are literally scared at the reprocussions of even bringing it up.
Disclaimer: I interned at Waymo last summer.
What they seem to ignore is that theory is an abstraction within the human mind and that the real thing is something practical.
So in my opinion the academic path should be accompanied by a real/practical job (within the field of study). Apart from supporting the student with a salary it would bring alternative career paths much earlier to the table.
There might be an argument saying that the academia pursuers don't want it to happen, but I think that incentive should be less than just having more freedom as a graduate student.
I think it would be helpful and useful for departments to consider other ways to facilitate industry pathways that don't so heavily rely on the advisor.
For me, this is kind of tautologically impossible -- the adviser's primary objective should be the success of his/her students.
I understand that makes me pretty wide-eyed and most people/places don't work like that, but I'm talking about shoulds.
In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades.
The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to those positions for a lifetime.
So there are more professors than footballers at any one time, but due to football's higher turnover, and shorter tenure, many more people will be a footballer than a professor over the course of their career.
The bottom line is that professional football is actually a relatively attainable goal for young British men, and should probably be more encouraged as a realistic career option.
...and when you do put in your application to Oxford, Cambridge, Google, or Facebook, your long-gone 3 year stint as a utility midfielder at Dundee United is only going to make it more interesting.
The ARB actually asked me to become a professional referee, but didn't realise how young I was at the time. A shame that I never followed through on it, really.
If so, doesn't that close more doors than the academic route, where you can take your degree/masters/phd to industry any time you like?
Relationships are difficult for anyone that pursues extreme success, athlete or academic.
They've also been weeding themselves out from doing something that's pretty much exactly the task ("playing football at a slightly younger age against somewhat less good players") for a while - while future-professor-types may well have been doing a range of activities only weakly correlating to future success in the academy.
I found that a lot of Ph.D. projects are driven by what you can write papers on, not necessarily what somebody somewhere really needs. Also, you can learn without being at a university.
More here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-prog...
If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.
Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definitely in the top 15 percent of the field. It's certainly not that easy, but...you're not obviously worse than most of your classmates, you work on a hot topic and you work hard. What are your chances?
Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or discussion of their prospects. They should obviously think about this, but more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and frank assesments.
And they won't do it because they are a) biased due to survivorship bias, and b) they are disincentivized to do so as that would scare away their cheap labor.
If I were a PhD supervisor, I would probably find it ridiculous that one of my responsibilities would be "pointing people to the universities careers service". I'm also not sure why you would expect a supervisor to be able to give good career advice when some of them have only ever experienced academia themselves.
Nonetheless, a good supervisor should understand and take into account what the student is ultimately trying to obtain out of the PhD.
If the student is aimed toward academia, then producing influential papers is priority. If the student is aimed toward industry, then the advisor can guide the student towards a less theoretical problem and encourage the student to produce results that showcase their ability to tackle and solve a problem that is both research-level and practical for industry.
Of course a poor advisor can disregard the students goals and use the student for whatever purpose that advances the advisor's standing in the field.
While it would be nice to get more support finding non-academic jobs, you are right that 1) other resources exist and 2) they don't know much about it anyway.
However, a professor should be able to give a trainee an assessment of their own academic prospects: based on your current record, are you part of the 10% of people who land jobs right now? If not, what would help you get there, or is it more of an issue with your aptitude/temperament? Career Services can't do this: they don't know you from Adam and aren't career academics anyway.
You can certainly ask for this--and I did (with varying degrees of effectiveness), but I really feel that if you're (claiming to be training) someone, you owe them honest and regular feedback on how that training is going.
I asked around during my MSc (25 years ago), and got told this by everyone.
> Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or discussion of their prospects.
They're adults. No one else is responsible for their life. If they refuse to take responsibility for their life, that's their choice.
They can ask. It's not difficult.
PhD programs are meant to be training programs and universities repeatedly have argued that it is not an employer-employee relationship, but a mentor-mentee one. If that's true, I think the mentors have a bit more responsibility even where it cuts against their own self-interests (e.g., tell someone that this is not the career for them and risk losing out on their labor).
> If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.
The problem rather is if you really are scientifically better than your peers - so from an "objective" perspective you should be really good enough to obtain such a position. But then you realize how much of a political game (it is much more about politics than scientific achievements) getting such a position is. And I know many great scientists who are bad politicians... They are often much better than the persons who got the tenured positions (the latter ones were great bootlickers and politicians).
I once had dreams of a career in academia and research. I'm a molecular biologist turned computer scientist turned software engineer in industry. I now have a very good salary, interesting challenges, plenty of work-life balance and good prospects for the future, and that's pretty much directly out of university.
In my opinion, I would have to give up on all of the aforementioned benefits (sans interesting challenges) for at least the next 10 years if I wanted to stay in academia, and on top of that, add the nice non-zero chance of just getting stuck and be forced out of the academic "track".
All my advisors told me it's a pretty bad time to go into academia, and I doubt it will get better, sadly, I might add.
From my experience, for some reason PhD advisors tend to work well/really like mature students. No hard data on this, just an empirical observation across 3-4 labs I've worked in before I left academia.
With regards to career prospects (outside academia ofc), you definitely gain respect but anything more than that largely depends on your area of research. Which one is it, if I may ask?
Don't become a doctor - become a Medical Administrator! It pays better.
If you need evidence that we're in a college/university bubble, that's a pretty good indicator.
At any given time in my department, there'd be five times the amount of post-grad students to full-time staff. Maybe more. It has to be obvious that there likely isn't a job at any level at the end of it. Not just high-flying jobs on the path to professorship, but even low skill technical stuff.
As in other fields, women are at a significant disadvantage if they want to have kids (presuming they've made it though the initial cull). The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. Given every higher position is so competitive, they simple lose out due to the time taken off. Makes me quite to sad to see very very talented scientist friends passed over for this reason.
I think it's really a black mark on the system that it should be OK for researchers to still not have a permanent position in their early 30s ten years after completing their undergraduate degree.
Hiring the best person for the job is the solution IMO, but the system doesn't work that way. Does it really matter if person X has 3 Nature papers and person Y has 2? The real issue (in Australia, at least) is that publication is everything. It really shouldn't be, for a myriad of reasons.
Also, there is a problem in parity for how having a child affects men vs women. It is easier for a man to become a parent and maintain a career than it is for the mother.
Some women manage to have top careers while bearing children. It's just that most prefer to focus on their family. I'm female, in a field which recently swapped from male to female dominance. The market is flooded with part time jobs (saturdays, or wednesday when school's off) and it's definitely causing some recruitment problems in the field (and on a deeper level, female are less likely to become partners because of responsibilities and work involved, many stay salaried and thus have lower revenues, etc). There has been numerous studies on this topic in my field and family is the biggest factor holding people back (although men also value their off time more than they used to so its partly a generational thing). At least there's work for motivated people, so I don't complain.
To me it's rather obvious that most women don't value their careers that much. Which is not a problem in itself, just stop pretending otherwise, no one's holding anyone back from careers but people themselves. (I guess most men don't either actually, but it doesn't show as much.) I also really don't get why it is such a punishable offense to assume in recruitment that a childless woman in her thirties will be on maternity leave soon as it's indeed a really strong probability. It's not like waiting for the end of probatory periodto get pregnant is a rare thing...
There is also a peculiar birth-death problem in academia where over the lifetime career of a professor, that prof should birth exactly one new qualified student to replace that prof. Otherwise we're dealing with a pyramid scheme. And one of the metrics of "success" of profs is how many qualified grad students they're birthing to provide short term cheap labor and long term hyper over supply of qualified candidates to be profs. We're merely seeing the breakdown of a pyramid scheme. One way to fix it is ban grad student labor. The undergrads, most of whom are going in to industry anyway, can be the lab rats. Or the prof can hire more postdocs.
And attending surgeons definitely rely on cheap resident labor.
Taxi driver to passenger: "Well, someone looks happy today!"
Passenger: "I just got my PhD! :)"
Taxi driver wistfully: "Yeah, I remember the day when I got mine..."
The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.
"This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.
Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.
One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times r square."
He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"
What is the statistic? How many PhD students have jobs in Academia 5 Years after being awarded? Surely they have /something/ that might be indicative they can publish that's better than footballers? Surely..?
>Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It’s only a little better in the United States.
[1] Vernacular expression "Pull your finger out!" Meaning to stop being lazy.[2]
[2] Jokes you have to explain, suck.[2]
[3] People who put footnotes on their jokes are terrible human beings.[4]
[4] There is no [4][5]
[5] citation needed"""Our survey, for example, shows that one-third of respondents do not have useful conversations about careers with their PhD supervisors."""
I remember speaking once with a few professors about what their work was like in industry. I was caught off guard when I was told they never worked in industry and had their whole careers in academia. Silly assumption on my part of course, but it was jarring nonetheless to be told so much point blank. It really put into perspective for me the angle at which advice was coming from.
Prospects for science are better, but we need to distinguish between fields. Computer Science PhDs encounter a completely different market from Biology PhDs. In a field like Biology, there is probably great variance even between sub fields.
There was one more great link I wanted to share, but I can't remember were it is or find it. It ranked graduate degrees by degree and university (i.e., MBA from Stanford, JD from Harvard, etc). You don't see any PhD or MS degrees on there until around spot #30, which was a PhD from MIT. Unfortunately, that's not granular enough - a "PhD" from MIT makes about as much sense as a "Masters" that includes the MBA degree. You can figure that since it's MIT, the PhD degrees lean toward the technical, but I'd really need to see PhD in CS to make the comparison. If this data were available, I'd guess that some PhDs from elite universities are actually very well paid on the level of elite JD or MBA programs. Even then, PhDs have vastly higher attrition rates and longer and less certain completion times[3]
[1] "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go" http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4484...
[2] "If you get a PhD, make it an economics PhD" http://theweek.com/articles/452770/phd-make-economics-phd
[3] Attrition rates often shock people who don't know. The attrition rate at an elite law, medical, or business school is typically well below one percent. At elite PhD programs, they can reach or exceed 50%. It's not an exaggeration to say that attrition rates at elite PhD programs can be 100 times higher than a 2 year MBA or 3 year JD program at the same university.
I don't want job. But looking into these kinds of articles now and then, make me think "what are the alternatives ?" What about the people who do basic science like in theoretical physics or pure maths?
If what you want is to do research, then what you want is not necessarily one of these. There are lots of research labs, both public and private, where you can get a permanent position. If you're in animal behavior, you might end up in a zoo, doing research part time or full time. These positions are overlooked by these articles since there you are not a "professor" at a "university". In other words, "X% of PhDs become professors" is a very misleading statistic.
But yeah, that is still not enough to employ all the PhDs out there. I think in theoretical physics or math you just end up going into finance...
In my experience, those who did not do numerical work mostly look into positions in management consulting, finance, or insurance.
Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).
Source? (Genuinely curious.)
Think of MDMA alone. If it really ends up being a useful treatment, you just know a pharma company would insist that it ran them billions of dollars to develop, and that they should have a God-given right to gouge for it, but it came for considerably less than that from a real expert puttering around in his shack.
Sometimes I wonder if the independent researcher is our only hope.
But it is certainly close to impossible to coordinate without some kind of sci-funding.
Fast forward to today and you need a multi-billion-dollar orbital telescope or a massive array of radio telescopes to do new work...
The rate of major paradigm shifts needs to decrease over time. If it doesn't, then we're working in a scientific livelock or chasing after a moving goalpost.
I've ended up in Silicon Valley in software engineering and I'm quite happy but wish I would have considered job prospects in my field of study a little harder before committing so much time and effort. I might have ended up in a CS program and would have been better suited to succeed earlier.
Biology is definitely interesting and I learned how to think scientifically, and "how to think" about problems. So that component was rewarding.
Ask philosophy, history and even economics PhDs. The research/academic/etc opportunities simply aren't there because it is structurally impossible. And as time goes on, it's only going to get worse and worse.
Phds from abroad is one of the most well-paid positions here thanks to the recent influx of numerous private business-minded universities opening up in every city.
I told my dad about it. He got his PhD in the 50s. His reply was: "Oh yeah, that was common knowledge when we got our degrees too."
He enjoyed a long career in industry, as have I, so far.
I've been hearing this for two decades. Seems like the sort of thing that any mildly educated person would be aware of, let alone smart people in the field.
Is "ltd umbrella" your own "pty ltd" company - instead of an institution? Or you mean, just within your own specialised field?