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Comment by mattkrause | Hacker News Reader

Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think.

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.

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>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.

I believe that b) is the key issue here. They need the cheap labor so it needs to appear that the PhD will get you somewhere. In the end only industry is benefiting from being able to hire highly trained people without have to pay anything to train them.

The average age of a PhD student is 33 years and even at normal speed, no breaks/hurdles and starting right out of high-school, you are 25(?). Something about applying this babysitting attitude of "somebody needs to tell them" to highly educated individuals of that age just doesn't sit right with me.

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.

That's higher than I thought, but I guess that's US numbers. Are they starting it way later (and if so what are they doing in between) ? Or is it simply a long time spent in PhD ?

Europe Physics adds up as follows: finish school at 18 + 4 BSc + 2 MSc + 4 PhD = 28

> 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.

That's not really what I meant.

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.

> Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think.

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.

I enjoy providing mentorship and helping out younger developers, but I certainly don't have any responsibility to do so.

That seems a little different.

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).

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