Being a PhD student shouldn’t be bad for your health | Hacker News Reader

Being a PhD student shouldn’t be bad for your health

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28 pointspseudolus18 comments

Ex professor turned hedge fund dude here -- Can confirm working in a hedge fund is more ethical than being faculty.

Vote with your feet people. Stop pretending to care, and leave a system which really does no one any good besides a handful of faculty in the top 5. -- certainly not science

Could you elaborate?

Roughly paraphrased, "Just do the research yourself and forward science like they did in the past. Why does everything have to be through the universities of the world?

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-ma...

Not the OP but the straw that broke the back of my PhD's camel was an exchange with my supervisor that went something like this:

Supervisor: I need to improve my metrics and you only published a paper last year. You owe me 3 papers in the next 6 months.

Me: How am I going to write 3 papers?

Supervisor: You figure it out.

Me: What topic should I write about?

Supervisor: That's your job.

Sure. I worked in non-relativistic Many Body QM which is a mature field (although some outstanding problems remain). I had funding etc.

I was looking into two sorts of things, one which was an applicable replacement for some old technology, and a pure theory project focused on some insoluble fundamental mystery.

The applicable project was popular, but at best I could put in extra hours to compete with how rapidly people in the top 5 would copy my ideas and successfully receive the credit for it. The passion project remained permanently only interesting to me, and was too difficult for any students I could acquire. I quit when I realized that I wouldn't be able to actually make scientific progress on the second vein of research because of the other demands on my life.

To 'Work' as faculty is to write grants, play politics (and necessarily do less science) or ignore the well being of yourself and your students, because the field is worse than indifferent to progress and new ideas. Progress is intrinsically threatening to old faculty, who control the resources the field by sitting on NSF panels.

One can choose to ignore what success is, but if so taking students is (in my opinion) unethical. Even hidden away alone behind your desk hoping no one knocks, you will sit on so many committees etc. that you would be lucky to have 2 hours a day for science.

I had friends who were doing incredible science with a few students, focusing on intellectual virtue, who then were denied tenure for being unliked by modern university's customers (undergraduates).

Because no one in finance exchanges information, I am genuinely free to focus on ideas. The ideas are the same as quantum mechanics, as finance is also a problem of many-dimensional probabilities. Hagen Kleinert wrote a great book about it.

It would be trivial to fix American academia, by either eliminating tenure, forcing retirements from grants, or simply testing that faculty could do a single project a year without a student. Of course the national academy would sooner die than allow any one of these things to pass. They prefer to travel on grants and pretend they are wealthy.

Do you have recommendations for places in Europe to apply to?

Is it really any worse tan a high-stress job? What is the baseline for the comparison? Is the corporate environment with all the office politics, performance reviews, project deadline pressure etc so much better?

IME, hard to say better or worse, but definitely different: less day-to-day stress (work on your own schedule, drive your own project, usually no one directly dependent on your day-to-day output) but much more existential-threat-type pressure (if this doesn't work, I won't graduate). Couple that with a culture that looks down on quitting, and the fact that one can't just "quit and find another job" while staying on the academic track (one can switch advisors but it's difficult and often costs years of progress), and PhD students are often under a tremendous amount of stress. Personally I'm happy I finished but I've seen it take a lot out of others.

"Senior scientists are expected to be both a robust support system and a stern, independent assessor of progress — a contradiction that discourages students from sharing potential mental-health issues for fear of damaging their professional progress."

This is true at all levels. As someone recently pointed out on HN, bundling formal evaluation with teaching makes students cautious, for good reason. It makes it harder on both sides for teachers to help students learn.

Graduate advisors become even more powerful when they control your funding (i.e. ability to eat) as well as your continued presence at the school.

There are similar problems in workplaces where your boss is supposed to be a coach or facilitator but is also expected to be an evaluator who has power over your salary and continued employment.

I recently terminated my PhD - a very hard decision after 4 years of study. But my mental health hit rock bottom, after it had continually declined so much over the years. Worst of all, when I seeked help from my universities student wellbeing services, I was told to 'google my issues'.

Universities really need to do a better job and not cut students off from mental health services.

I've found universities to have far more robust mental health services than the general population has.

What were the reasons? Research results not turning out well? Not enough supervision or too much micromanagement? Too much irrelevant tasks? Stress about funding sources?

Unfortunately depression is almost an occupational hazard of graduate programs.

And if you actually manage to finish your Ph.D., your chances of making it to the top of the academic pyramid scheme are essentially nil.

This is an entitled view. Pursuing a PhD is a choice; privilege even. How we value (or should value) pushing the frontiers of knowledge is a separate debate. Ideally, nothing should be detrimental to your health.

How extreme would the health detriments have to be such that it’s no longer an “entitled” view?

'Capitalism' shouldn't be bad for your health.

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