I got a Ph.D. at age 66 (2018)
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
I took a break after I got my MA in a humanities field. I eventually planned to return for a PhD, but then two things happened in the intervening years: 1) I was already able to write up journal articles and successfully get them published, because in double-blind peer review all that mattered was the strength of my research and my familiarity with the literature, and no one knew or cared that I had only an MA; and 2) I got used to traveling a lot and having a very flexible schedule, because as my day job I established a remote freelancing career.
Now people are interested in my research and inviting me to come back and do a PhD, but I’m not sure I can ever go back to having to wake up early in the morning, sit in a boring seminar, be pressured to take on teaching duties, and not be able to escape to a warm country in the cold winter. (That’s me, others may want e.g. more time to spend with their families.) I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.
I realize that I am lucky to be interested in a humanities field. I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.
Well, that's not quite true I guess, because in most areas of math, or theoretical physics, you certainly don't need much beyond pen, paper, and (usually) a reasonable computer.
In physics, I suspect the value of collaboration is a major effect keeping research bound to the universities and national labs. Single-author papers are quite rare. The big experimental groups infamously have 100- or 1000-author papers, but even in theory, a 10-author paper is no longer particularly surprising.
I don't know of any (halfway-reputable) independent researchers in theoretical physics, though. I'm not sure if the above reason justifies that. The more important thing may be that's it's just impossible to get funding without a university/lab appointment.
Actually --- that's a good question. Where does your income for your lovely warm-weather travel come from? Is somebody paying you for research, outside of the strictures of universities?
E.g., in Germany you get the entire spectrum from “be a professors slave for 6 years with minimum pay” to “I don’t care where you are - but the publications count”.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that there are quite a few professors in Europe who would be willing to guide you through (the relatively light weight bureaucracy) PhD process as long as you create and publish high quality research.
Usually a PhD process requires SOME formal training (e.g., attending a fee seminars), peer-reviewed publications and a cumulative summary over your research.
Personally I respect somebody who “freestyled” his way through PhD as measured by research output a lot. E.g., quite a few women take that route along with maternity leaves; which is great because of flexibility without compromise on quality.
I mean, in CS, engineering, physics, there are plenty of areas where you don’t need a lab per se but can just simulate etc. I must admit that depending in the field interaction with fellow PhD students can be super great an valuable (that’s just gonna make life harder for you if you don’t take advantage of it).
Good luck!
Nitpick: You may want to change "his way" to the gender neutral "their way" especially since you use women taking maternity leave as an example. :)
Yea... I wanted to start PhD this year. Unfortunately it turned out that the only thing that counts, are my previous and future publications. Any work experience seems like a disadvantage. They value more someone with no experience, but with a couple of, usually not very inventive, publications.
I have over 18 years of work experience. I used to make more complicated things at work, than you can find in many published papers or even PhDs. So I asked a professor about how to start it.
It turned out that: the pay is much below the minimum salary + I will be thrown away if I won't have one publication in a good journal after the first year. If you also think that after sending a paper to a journal, they usually reply in six-nine months with a rejection or a list of comments to fix... it turned out that I have to start my PhD with a bunch of papers already written. And to have them count, they need to be exactly about the same topic as my PhD.
So, after rethinking all this, I stopped dreaming about a PhD. I can publish my paper on arXiv without all the academic fun.
Besides, you've got to think how would you use this degree after you finish. Inside academia, you will be locked in a job with a mid-low salary with scarce options to advance. Outside of academia, PhD is less valued than most people think. I know quite a few people who do great research in the industry with only a BSc degree.
But as you say, appearances can be deceptive and it's like the grass is always greener, so maybe I need to broaden my horizons somehow. It's definitely hard to find that path at the moment though.
Edit: Oh and I do have to admit the fancy title that lets me feel like I'm truly educated and learned, and satisfies credentialism in the world is a draw too... Peer pressure is a hell of a drug
If you don't have a PhD, you do have to compete with everyone who has it. But it is still possible to gain an edge on them by simply studying what your prospective employers need. For PhD students, it is actually harder to do that unless their PI is doing something closely related.
But what kind of recognition do they get? I know somebody who worked at some really good labs for ~10 years and did great work. He co-authored a couple of Nature (?) papers of which he did most of the work and writing. But ultimately with a BSc you're just a lab tech and nobody takes you seriously.
OTOH, that person just finished his Ph.D at Harvard but this is pretty much the end of the road for him--I don't think he's keen on navigating the cut-throat world of academia or commercial research.
It's kind of a lose-lose. If you love basic research, no recognition and you're stuck following orders. If you want recognition and some autonomy, you're stuck playing politics.
The quest for autonomy and recognition is rough, it's a very tough game and it's not easy to stay motivated at trying to make progress.
They get paid well. Most of the stuff they do cannot be published due to intellectual property reasons, so they indeed miss out on academic recognition. This is a trade-off one has to make.
Sad to hear the story of that person. Ideally, you should not start a PhD unless you have a burning question to answer and need ample time to study it. Given that a career post-graduation is not guaranteed, it's best to hedge your bets and study something that has immediate applications and/or gives you transferable skills.
I suspect it had nothing to do with your qualifications - rather he probably wanted to avoid saying “sorry, but I wont be able to abuse you enough”.
At no institution in Germany have I head of “if you don’t publish in a year, you are out”. Usually you work 2 years as a slave with no context what your research is and after the first couple of years, you are allowed “to think loudly about a topic”.
This encounter is not “normal”... Keep looking. And yes: Academia knows that industry works on hard shit. And they often don’t want “outsiders to take a look under the rug”... They create a fake world to justify themselves more often than not...
It was in Poland.
This really isn’t what a PhD is like. A PhD is a research degree - you do research in your own time. You don’t have to be in seminars if you don’t want to and you don’t have to teach (unless you need the money.) Think of a PhD more like a sabbatical to focus on your own research. There’s a goal you need to achieve but freedom in how you get there.
Not trying to say Mediterraneo10 should get a PhD, but PhD life probably sounds very nice to many people in the world without the kind of freedom and financial stability Mediterraneo10 describes. Credit to him/her in achieving such enviable life circumstances!
Very condescending comment tbh.
There isn’t much “fun” about PhD. People who “do it on the side” without “university housing, pay and support” are borderline masochists.
Doing so on your own motivation without family/peer-pressure has my respect. In a First World country generally you don’t have any benefit from a PhD... Much different in “not first world”.
At least in france there are some minimum legal hours of seminars you have to attend and classes you have to teach during your phd.
True, but that's like a few dozens hours over 3+ years.
> and classes you have to teach during your phd.
Nope. Might depend on the “École doctorale” or the lab you are attached to, but that's not a universal requirement.
For example, a political science PhD at Columbia (including the Masters) requires a full 12 courses, as well as teaching for at least a year (more if you receive a fellowship, up to 20 hrs/wk).
And you can't do your Masters somewhere else first and then just do the PhD part at Columbia, that's not an option.
This does, of course, differ by program.
Of course you can leave with Master's degree at that point, it's just that it seemed to me that USA generally didn't got for MSci style degree, not in CS related areas at least.
OK you don't want to teach, but I suppose my point is if people are already 'interested in your research' which is peer-reviewed & published etc. then maybe they'd consider hiring you without that formal training. Maybe, not like I've tried it.
Sorry, I know this is a tangent. Do you have any blog posts about this, or advice you can give now? This would be my dream but I wouldn't even know where to start finding work.
That’s certainly possible if you start the PhD after finishing a career like the author, and in some fields of research too. I just wanted to point out that more broadly speaking, an advanced degree usually brings financial benefits. The Fed recently published statistics on this that completely surprised me: in the U.S., people with advanced degrees earn on average about 50% more than bachelor’s degree holders, and 3x more than non-degree holders. I had no idea the average difference was that high until I read the report. https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/revie...
There may be financial benefit, maybe not. There's also the opportunity cost of giving up your career income for four+ years to get a grad student stipend (if it's a program with stipends at all).
I understand you were broadening the point, but I think "first-career PhDs" vs. "second-career PhDs" are the topic under discussion, and broadening it to "bachelor's" is too broad.
Supposing a PhD earned 20% over a masters and it takes 3 years, then it could be a net negative return unless you have 15 years or more of career left after returning to work. That is a valid point and something to consider before going back. The Fed report I linked to is actually arguing that recent trends have changed the balance of opportunity costs when getting degrees. (Though I happen to think the report leaves out some important details and thus frames things in a misleading way.)
Even though I brought up financial side, what I dislike about boiling it down to financial opportunity cost of attending school is that tends to frame the entire outcome as a financial decision, and ignores the opportunity cost or future value of a life getting to do research. In my mind it's better to do the PhD because you want to rather than for the money, and I suspect that people who care more about the research than the money tend to fare better as a byproduct. (That's pure speculation though.)
Both of these fields have a non-trivial amount of people earning excess $1M a year.
It is really hard to come up with a useful average when including with History PhD's and Dermatologists as part of the same cohort.
The averages aren't that misleading though, since they represent the average choice of degree. If you know you're going to study history, then yes the numbers are too high for you, but the averages are correct for the average person.
You're right that a non-trivial number of professional advanced degree holders making more than $1M/yr. There are also many scientists and engineers and business people doing the same. People making more than $1M/year are statistical outliers, as are history PhDs in the U.S.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185353/number-of-doctora...
Oh yeah. I went to med school after having an actual career. Going back to a heavy-handed bureaucracy whose primary intention is to herd a mob of people with the least benefit of doubt is incredibly infantilizing. It's hard to endure the first time, when you're in uni, but after you've already been an adult?
I understand that this may be specific to your sub-field, but this is absolutely not the case for many students. It varies heavily with university and country. I believe it makes a big difference whether you're considered to be a staff member or a student. In the UK you're a student, in Germany, you're staff.
We have several part-time PhD and Masters students in our department and I think the requirements are generally relaxed for them. Most of them work remotely. Many of them also have other jobs, families, etc. One is a sci-fi author!
Here, teaching is something that students occasionally do to earn a bit of money. It's rare though, usually it's only lab supervision or grading - we pay lecturers to teach. So this is absolutely not the case for a lot PhD positions. In the US and other European countries this is different and requirements will vary.
Our lab's core hours are 10 AM - 4 PM. When you go into work is mostly dependent on your supervisor. In the majority of cases they're laid back and as long as research gets done, they're happy. I routinely arrived at midday and left at 6-7PM during my PhD (and I do the same in my postdoc). Similarly nobody cares if you need to take the morning or afternoon off for personal reasons. That said, I know some people who have more traditional supervisors who treat their group like a sweat shop.
Students funded by research councils here get around 8 weeks of holiday a year. I don't think anyone counts though and it's rare for anyone to actually book that much time off. As a postdoc, I get 30 days, plus up to 5 carried over (and that doesn't include forced closures over Christmas). Staff can accrue up to 35 I think. Winter sun is definitely an option. I knew someone at Oxford (mathematics) who took 3 weeks off and just shrugged when we asked if his boss knew where he was. I confess to taking the odd week off, forgetting to tell anyone, and having to call into an unexpected telecon from my campsite.
We do make PhD students attend seminars, but that's mostly to get them involved in research, asking questions, etc. Boring is I guess a matter of opinion - you're expected to hear what other people in your field are doing. On the plus side, our seminars are either on Wednesdays, followed by subsidised dinner with the speaker; or they're on Fridays and followed by pub in the evening.
> I know that in hard sciences, you cannot meaningfully contribute to the field without access to a lab and other such infrastructure, and therefore you have to go back to a university position.
Well this is definitely not true, unless you deal with instrumentation or experimental work. You need infrastructure for sure, but unless you're actually doing practical work that can be remote access. Most students here log into our cluster to do work.
> I talk to my colleagues and get the impression that I have more time for research than they do, because anyone in a formal position is saddled with bullshit administration duties.
This bit is unfortunately true. The higher up you get, the more admin you need to do. And once you go permanent, teaching does become a necessity in most departments.
> Boring is I guess a matter of opinion - you're expected to hear what other people in your field are doing.
Obviously anyone interested enough in a field to do a PhD, is going to be interested in the work all the other people are doing. However, that would preferably be done by reading, where one is free to schedule that reading at the times one sees fit, and one is free to skim (which I know everyone does, because otherwise it would be impossible to keep up with the volume of publications). If you have to attend a weekly seminar, you’re on someone else’s schedule, and then you’re stuck there for the entire time of the seminar.
I think the deciding factor is probably where your money is coming from. In the UK if you're paying for your tuition, you can usually demand whatever conditions you like. If you're being funded by a specific grant, that might confer some additional requirements defined by the department.
This may not be the case in your particular sub-field, but we have plenty of fully remote students and staff. I know several academics who work half the year in one institution and half in another - though usually that's due to family, not being unhappy about the weather!
Given the costs of modern universities, and the current identity crisis they're facing, this might be a new business model for them, especially if wealthy foreign students are to no longer be admitted to the country.
At the same time, I'm reminded of an exchange from an episode of This American Life about how in some parts of the country state disability payments have become a de facto retirement and welfare system:
Ethel Thomas: You asked me a while back what would be the perfect job. I thought about it, and I said that the perfect job, it would be like I would sit at a desk like the Social Security people, and just weed out all the ones that come in and file for disability.
Chana Joffe-Walt: At first, I thought Ethel's dream job was to be the lady at Social Security, because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But no. After a confusing back and forth, it turned out Ethel wanted this woman's job because she gets to sit. That's it. And when I asked her, OK, but why that lady? Why not any other job where you get to sit? Ethel said she could not think of a single other job where you get to sit all day. She said she'd never seen one.
I brushed this off in the moment. I was getting in my car. It was getting late. And also, it just did not seem possible to me that there would be a place in America today where someone could go her whole working life without any exposure to jobs where you get to sit, until she applied for disability and saw a woman who gets to sit all day.
Kendall has a focus on senior learning:
https://www.kendal.org/about-kendal/kendal-values/lifelong-l...
I would highly recommend anyone take a look at it - it explains where people go and what happens when those linchpin factories in a small town close down, and the growth of disability programs.
Even if peers speak to you and some courses are offered in your preferred non-Slovak language, much of the world is inaccessible with a language barrier. You either go all in or look elsewhere.
It really depends on the person. Some really cannot stand not understanding everything around them on the street, in the supermarket etc, others find it thrilling and a positive challenge to work through, they often take language courses in parallel to uni studies, but some never learn the local language and stick to international circles or English speaking locals.
There are many ways and tons of people do it to their satisfaction.
In all seriousness though, I can only think of one or two occasions personally where citizenship had an effect on a PhD admit decision, and in those cases the source of funding and external politics were the deciding factors.
But generally I mean that the unsubsidized cost of a foreign education can be 1/10th what a US person pays.
It's a ridiculous and selfish goal, somewhat like wanting to own a tropical island or talking about spending ten years sailing around the world.
It’s seems they redesigned it recently and it’s not super usable in mobile, but this is golden mine.
There are sites like MIT courseware that are completely free and allow online learning. Though of course, there are signaling benefits to online degrees.
Czech and Sumerian. Too much ressources is also a problem, as you said, because navigating into them is difficult for a beginner.
That's not to say you can't learn remotely, but rather than in many fields, it certainly helps to have a teacher/guide.
But universities really make you push through those things you are not motivated enough to do (and subjects that seems to have no purpose) and many times you find out it was fun after grooking it and it actually made a lot of other things way easier. The first week after the exam you might be upset over the exam, feel something was unfair, but eventually those feelings fade away and you have another telescope to view the world through and arguably you have gained some grit. The universities are a guiding hand off what the experts in their field find important to know.
It's a bit like ordering the chef's choice in a restaurant. Sure you might hate a piece and never come back, but you might also find new combinations of flavours that you start to love but looked tasteless.
Anyway how many of us haven't felt great because we can code and suddenly we are more logical? What happens when you suddenly start to study logic or even learn something extremely simple as De Morgan's laws [1]?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws
PS. I would also say that good universities are very, very different from high school. When the professors say something, they've studied it for years so they use precise language and are strict in their teaching. Definitions mean everything for them and you can't just say language is fluid to score a point which seems popular nowadays.
PPS. University is free in my country, so I don't consider cost-effectiveness to get a job. Especially as it seems pretty much anyone can get a coding-gig (we had a hot-shot consultant from a very prestigious firm (if you have lived in US, you've heard of it) ask me why his CSV file wouldn't work in our software. He had just taken an Excel-file and renamed the file-ending to CSV instead of exporting it! He could code, it was just that his knowledge was very, very shallow. We where quite expensive too).
I really strongly disagree with this. Good learning is inherently pleasurable[1] and if it isn't then there's something wrong. If a subject doesn't feel like it has enough purpose, it's not worth taking. Your brain is a fairly good predictor of that, contrary to what school would lead you to believe.
I think overall you'd be way better off just learning the things that you want to learn, that are applicable to something you actually care about instead of taking a class and learning things your brain tells you are useless and you will probably never use. I haven't read it in depth but I think ultralearning is interesting for the learning-for-application approach.
I'm probably a bit biased though because I use incremental reading[2] and no matter how good university teaching is it just can't compare to learning by myself (with occasional help from an expert, rather than being handheld)
[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Pleasure_of_learning [2] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading
I doubt it even makes sense for adult education - I don't enjoy learning JavaScript nearly as much as I enjoy C#, but I require both for my job. SQL was an afterthought at the time, but it's proven to be incredibly important. If I only did what made me happy my career would be incredibly limited.
- Peers that aren't just voices on an internet board
- Validation of the syllabus, and a sense of which parts are more important in the field. For instance, my econ tutor who was a famous Marxist didn't find it of high importance for me to study Marx.
- A timeline that is relatively inflexible. If you're in uni you need to learn how that proof works be the time of the exam, and you'll have to put off other things in your life. Outside of uni you can learn it today or when those things have happened.
I am much less certain about the depending on university to force yourself to study things and being handheld by a prof/tutor.
Flagellation by university to get yourself to learn things is not a reliable long-term means of learning. I think it's far better (and I have had more success) when I learn for myself.
While there is some benefit in having a mentor, I think being handled and being told exactly what to learn isn't the most productive. A lot of times you'll end up learning really useless things as opposed to listening to your brain which generally has a decent grasp on figuring out what is worth learning to actually apply.
It seems to me that going to university to be told what to learn is counter to the actual goal of going to university, namely to have first-class access to resources (people resources, knowledge resources, laboratory resources) to pursue your own learning goals.
I've been tempted to go back to university in order to learn more about organic chemistry and chemical engineering, for instance. There's certainly a lot of information online, but a world-class chemistry lab with access to chemicals would be a great resource to have available to me, along with readily available mentors to help guide me when I have questions.
As for homework and essays, that sounds more like high school than university, from what I remember. It's always possible things have changed in the last 15 years, though.
University is also an excellent facility for making contacts in your field. Not every expert hangs out on Slack.
It’s a skill that cannot be learnt from books or lecture videos. You need intimate apprenticeship under an expert.
I don't regret anything, the bottom-line of the story is just that it's hard to know in advance which strategy is better, and even afterwards you can never be sure. That's the problem with the counterfactual reasoning that is the basis of these kind of life decisions.
I think I chose correctly - I'd only really enjoy a PhD if I were doing it as a member of the Leisured Aristocracy. I only regret not having entered that club, despite having worked through three software booms where everyone else with a compiler and powerpoint deck apparently got stinkin' rich.
https://careers.peopleclick.com/careerscp/client_mit/externa...
And they offer tuition reimburstment:
https://hr.mit.edu/benefits/tuition-plan
ALso here's some california universities for West Coast people.
https://jobs.universityofcalifornia.edu/site/advancedsearch?...
Why? Insurance. She pays 1/5 what the open market would cost, even factoring in the tuition and fees. Because she at 60 is grouped with young healthy people.
The college is not upset about this. In fact they have a whole program and an advisor to assist older folks in negotiating the paperwork.
Her tuition is only that, and is good for half a year. The student insurance cost is small and annual.
We had an interesting conversation. She had completed a PhD in Greek literature, I think. Self-funded. Taken the standard time. She was sorry about all the domestic responsibilities she had put on her husband. She had, with her, a younger friend (a lady probably late 50s, early 60s) to help her with computers :D
Made me feel very differently about all the hard work I had done. Very inspiring and uplifting. She said, she did it because she was bored and wanted to go beyond her two Masters degrees.
For undergrads it's clearly a combination of finishing school, networking hothouse, and social club, with some education thrown in.
For postgrads, it's a long-shot chance at tenure (extremely unlikely unless you're the product of an Ivy, but it's nice to dream) and perhaps some improved job prospects. (Also unlikely, but not as much.)
For universities, it's a cash grab. First they get the fees, then they get the bequests. Also, some education is thrown in.
Considering the age/wealth profile is now heavily skewed to the over-50s, it would make sense for universities to cater more for mature students. Remaking university culture as life-long access rather than here-come-the-teens would break a lot of cultural expectations - but might also be the only way to keep the university model alive over the medium term.
Never was it for me, and I'm certainly not alone.
Meh, I'm probably atypical (though not unique) but my postgrad was mostly a matter of doing what seemed the most interesting and fun/bearable at the time. I continued as a lecturer for a couple of years for the same reason. I've left academia but I'm ultimately following the same path, although I'm now also thinking a bit more about the impact of my work on society.
The point of a university is that it is a store house of universal knowledge. That's even where the name came from.
The point of professors is to generate more knowledge and to pass it along. The most important place in a university is the library, although much of the library these days might physically be rack of flashing lights and cooling fans in a dark room somewhere.
The task of young adults is to prepare themselves for a career, do networking, build social contacts, and broaden their education. That they do that at university as well as everywhere else is irrelevant.
It's OK for anyone of any age to go to a university to gain knowledge, because that's its main purpose. It's great that anyone can obtain formal recognition for a level of knowledge gained, at any age.
Conditional on actually wanting to go that deep in courses and research. Many PhD students take a couple semesters of courses (the hardest year of their life) and they quit after they realize the research they're going to be doing for at least the next few years. It's certainly not for everyone.
It's not all it's cracked up to be. People are people wherever you go, and you'll see the same shit in academia that you encounter outside, except you're paid much less (if you get paid at all).
There is one big plus, and that is that you're not the only one who bought into academia's narrative of enlightenment, so you're likely to get more respect from your peers and family if you go to academia than if you do meaningless stuff like sell ads for Google.
Very low-EQ, highly competitive, highly self-regarding. In my experience PhD departments are worse that top-tier software engineering groups, as PhDs tend to be depressed and underappreciated in addition.
I think the whole model is one big mental health meat grinder, and the meat going in is quite bitter in the first place.
I would suggest you spend some time thinking about your EQ rather than spending time on the internet posting nonsense generalizations about entire classes of people.
I think the motivation "to be a better researcher" is quite narcissistic (in a mild sense) in the first place. It's what produces such contention in similar software engineering groups.
There is no conflict between this motivation and my description of the psychology of people that tend to persue PhDs.
Imagine having to work with someone that judges based on your education rather than you as an individual! Probably something only a PhD would do, right? :)
> The meaning of narcissism has changed over time. Today narcissism "refers to an interest in or concern with the self along a broad continuum, from healthy to pathological ... including such concepts as self-esteem, self-system, and self-representation, and true or false self".[2]
PhDs typically have, as an aspect of their core identity, their role as a scientist/philosopher/(..researcher) (cf. doctors being doctors, etc.).
Concern with excellence in this dimension then can often lead to narcissistic injury (aka., a threat to self-esteem, ego, etc.). ie., to fail to be excellent is a threat to one's identity. It makes the whole affair rather fraught.
Contrast with one's life passion being, say, a parent -- or a volunteer. A passionate volunteer is typically a less bitter pursuit, insofar as ones "psychological economy" depends only in sacrifice which is under one's control.
The bitterness of the PhD world, which I observe, frequently comes with this cycle: I am a philosopher; I am an excellent philosopher; but some other PhD is better than me; so I am not the best philosopher; so I am a terrible philosopher; but I must be the best philosopher etc.
And so on in ruminative cycles.
....
The building up of one's own intellect, one's own skill, one's own ... is a narcissistic (self-oriented) project. The pursuit engages in a significant amount of material and emotional sacrifice for the sake of internal intellectual gratification.
It is useful for society that such people exist: those who act to further their own ability to such (prima facie) pathological and self-destructive ends. Those caught up in it, however, are often rather bitter about it.
Don't you think that researchers sand-bagging paper reviews with requests for citations of their own work is a tad narcissistic? That behavior is rampant in academics, among many other behaviors seeking public name recognition. I don't fully agree with the views above, and they seem to have a pessimistic flavor, but I don't see the word narcissism being misused according to the dictionary definition you provided.
Anyway, I don't really care what the definition of the word is, it just seemed like you had an extreme version in the opposite direction that is at least as prone to confusion. It doesn't exactly help prove the point if your version has the same defect, or if weasel words are used to back-up the claim, right?
> I think the motivation "to be a better researcher" is quite narcissistic (in a mild sense) in the first place.
This claim is independent of the negative behaviors; it's intended as independent support by claiming that the desire to be a better researcher is inherently narcissistic, without regard to the negative behaviors. As to my personal definition being extreme: well, yeah. I've never heard someone use it to mean anything remotely positive. The justification for using it that context was, to me, non-sensical. But I am a descriptivist; words mean how people use them. So I won't call it wrong. Just: don't be surprised if people are confused.
Now that I am retired, I still find challenging projects to work on, mainly helping to improve open source electron microanalysis software.
Honestly, this sounds like most PhD programs I'm familiar with.
Also Ph.D. gives chances to work with younger people keeping middle and older generations more active and alive.
I hope to continue learning in my middle and old age like the post, not sure of Ph.D. though. But may consider if it opens a way for me to work alongside young researchers can learn new things from them and feel alive.
As I get older, the (non-financial) value of the PhD keeps diminishing in my eyes, whereas the pursuit of knowledge hasn't. As I have less time on Earth, I want to optimize my time, and much of PhD work is orthogonal to my goals of gaining knowledge. A PhD will force you to spend years on an extremely narrow topic (of course, acquiring some breadth along the way). When you're older, that time is precious. It better be a problem you really are passionate about.
Consider:
1. You likely will work on your advisor's research ideas and not your own.
2. You will have to fulfill several steps tied to the culture of academia, and none of these is needed to acquire knowledge. But tradition is tradition, and you have to do it.
3. There can be a lot of politics involved - also orthogonal to acquiring knowledge, but you will have to put up with them, play them, and suffer because of them.
4. Professors will often work you harder than you'll want at an older age. Their rationale is often a variant of "Well, if you want a career in research/academia, this is the workload you will have to deal with". But a 60+ year old usually has very different goals. Of course, I have seen plenty of professors who are sympathetic to such people.
Overall, if you're at an older age, don't do it unless you already have a research problem you really want to work on, and can find a sympathetic advisor who cares more about you than their own careers.
Disclaimer: My view on this topic is a bit biased. I spent most of a decade in grad school (at a younger age) but eventually quit the PhD program. I was at the point where I felt I had attained most of the benefits of a PhD except that final paper (acquired a lot of knowledge, published in journal, lots of personal development/introspection, gained much from being around the intellectual environment, etc). I quit because my work was not good enough to get my dream research jobs (in academia or industry), and spending the 2 or so more years fulfilling my advisor's requirements knowing it would not lead me to my dream jobs was just pointless. Sure - I could get a postdoc and do enough good work there to land my dream job, but I decided it wasn't worth the gamble.
I often fantasize about becoming financially independent and going back to university and hopefully do some research (in a different discipline this time). I do miss the intellectual discussions, etc. But while the studying and research problem aspect appeal to me, I really don't have the patience to put up with all the negatives I listed above. And I didn't even get into how in some disciplines (or sub-disciplines), journal publications are a racket (with both the publisher and academia being guilty parties). If I ever did anything interesting and novel enough, I'd likely write it up in a blog post or at most post to arxiv. I really don't want to participate in the current journal publishing culture.
But of course, kudos to the person in this submission!
>>> 1. You likely will work on your advisor's research ideas and not your own.
You choose a professor based on how their research program appeals to you, and there is often room for compromise. This is a conversation that happens before joining their group. There are some benefits to starting with at least a suggested project. In my case, such a project idea came with a fully equipped lab including a quarter million 1986 dollars worth of gear. But my unique interests and abilities definitely steered my project in a direction that my advisor had not originally imagined when I started out.
In the humanities, where the cost of research is close to zero, you might have more latitude, again depending on how you choose your advisor. I have a friend who literally created her own project and pitched it to a couple of departments who agreed to let her pursue a dual discipline PhD in education and psychology. She was 60.
>>> Overall, if you're at an older age, don't do it unless you already have a research problem you really want to work on, and can find a sympathetic advisor who cares more about you than their own careers.
True at any age. I think that in general, there aren't really that many top rungs for professors to grasp for, and most are comfortable having a relatively stable career and focusing on the educational aspect of their research programs. I live in the shadow of a great university, and some of my relatives are professors, and this pretty much describes their attitudes. They have their own grips about the system, but every system has a system.
I sympathize with not finishing, and would never hold it against anybody. One thing finishing did for me was force me to keep going until my project was really ready to go out the door. Granted that's something I would also have learned the hard way, had I started a start-up, but that was just not on my radar as a physics student in the 1980s for whatever reason.
As was mine, despite not completing it. However, I don't think I'd want to deal with the negatives at an older age.[1] To put it another way, if you're older and want admission to grad school so you can learn a lot, and are not too particular about actually completing the PhD, then you probably will enjoy the experience and can ignore my previous comment.
Also, if you have the resources, a second BS or MS can be fun. I knew at least two students who were in their 60's pursuing a second BS (one of them was pursuing both a BS in math and physics, with little background in them). They both enjoyed the experience and were quite content. However, a PhD is quite different from that.
> You choose a professor based on how their research program appeals to you, and there is often room for compromise.
If you've had prior research experience, this advice may work. If you haven't, then you will likely be wrong about whether a particular professor's research program appeals to you - and you may not realize this until you've been in the program for a few years.
> I think that in general, there aren't really that many top rungs for professors to grasp for, and most are comfortable having a relatively stable career and focusing on the educational aspect of their research programs. I live in the shadow of a great university, and some of my relatives are professors, and this pretty much describes their attitudes.
Having spent time at both a mediocre and a top school, what you describe was more in line with what I saw at the mediocre school, and not at all like the top school. Most of the professors in the engineering departments were always trying to climb the rung, and competing with everyone to do it. Things got very petty. My advisor, who was already a Fellow of 3 large professional bodies (IEEE, physics (AIP? I forget), etc), was still quite competitive, extremely protective of his research, upset if a paper got rejected and would try hard to find out who the referees were, etc.
I remember wondering why he was so invested in all of this. He was fairly old, had achieved a lot, and what more could he achieve?[2]
He was not an outlier there. Even the more laid back professors would eventually exhibit some of this behavior because not doing so would demean them in the eyes of their peers (and yes, one of the benefits of academia and tenure is supposed to be that you're relatively immune from this, and yet...).
Now at the mediocre university, it was more like you described. In fact, not many professors even had PhD students. There it was more about the research and not the career.
And yet, in my last few visits to the department (again, engineering), the professors told me that even there the culture was shifting to being more career focused. The pressure to get funding was much more, etc. The common sentiment from people who had joined the department in the 80's through the 90's was "The level of work I had to do to get tenure (number of papers, funding, etc) will not get anyone tenure now in this department."
I see you were in physics, and the experience there can be different. In some universities it is less funding driven than in engineering, and there probably are fewer rungs to climb (or perhaps they don't value those rungs as much). In the top university I went to, the physics department was actually in the college of engineering, so the pressure for funding, publishing, etc was similar to engineering.
> I sympathize with not finishing, and would never hold it against anybody. One thing finishing did for me was force me to keep going until my project was really ready to go out the door.
For me, a lot of the problem was that I sincerely doubt anyone will ever find a way to test my results. Unfortunately, a lot of theoretical/computational engineering/physics is that way. Did I really want to become an expert in something that no one will ever prove/disprove? It wasn't just my research, but much of my discipline, and a lot of why papers would get accepted/rejected had to do with groupthink.[3] It really felt like I was doing literature where subjective opinion matters so much. I remember asking some of my peers if they even believed their research, and for many it was a strange question: They were in the business of publishing papers and getting research/academic jobs, not seeking the truth. If it's publishable, it's good!
Ultimately, I picked the wrong area to do research in. Also, one of my undergrad professors told me it was a hot, young discipline. He was right in some ways but was mostly wrong. It was very mature by the time I entered grad school, and that usually means a lot more time (years) studying to get to the state of art before you can make a meaningful contribution. As a general rule, I tell people going for PhDs to find a discipline that is not mature - it'll be easier to make meaningful contributions that way.
[1] Arguably, I probably did not want to put up with it at my younger age, and it probably contributed to my decision to quit, but it would have been one of the minor factors in that decision.
[2] And several years later, I know - there were lots more rungs on that ladder. There always are, until you become a president of a university or the head of the NSF or something.
[3] Yes - they did care about your formalism, techniques, novelty of ideas, etc. But there were far too many subjective ways to reject a paper as not being interesting enough to be published in this journal, etc.
There should, of course, be ways for pensioners challenge their intellectual ability, but studying at a university is just way over the top I think. There must be another way. Maybe expand the adult-education-centres with special programs for seniors, I don't know.
EDIT: this comment is not about getting a PhD. I would not lobby for any age-restricted subsidy for getting your PhD, since I think PhDs are producing an immense amount of benefit for society, regardless of whether they're in humanities or natural science.
(I'm making a digression here from the main topic, so don't read on if you're not interested.) I'm not sure why you would think pensioners in France will get far back far more than they paid in.
Under the current system in France, when you're working, you pay into one or more of the dozens of different pension plans. Each plan is designed to be self-sufficient. It receives money from those who are currently working, invests or saves the money, and pays out those who paid in in the past and who are now retired.
Doing things this way has several pitfalls. The main problem is that if demographics change (greater percentage of pensioners as compared to workers) it puts a strain on those left in the workplace. This doesn't mean however that each pensioner is getting more than they paid in, it just means that proportionately there are less people left paying into the plan.
The retirement system is currently being revised. In the future, there will be one universal plan where each euro paid in will buy a certain number of points, which will have some value when you retire. Since the value of a point can fluctuate, pensioners may end up getting more or less than they paid in. (They'll get what the plan can afford to pay out.)
If the pension funds had been managed responsibly (which is not the responsibility of the people paying in to them) then there would have been plenty of money to make the system work. Pension funds management has been responsible more than once for funds not being able to make good on their obligations resulting in a reduction of pensions. In many countries this has already resulted in the pension age being raised from 65 to 67 and there is talk about raising that even further.
Long term financial planning for pension funds and actuarial computations including an adjustment for increased longevity are simply things that go with that territory, that these adjustments are necessary is further proof that the responsible people messed up.
Universities' financial affairs should also not be the limiting factor in people's quest for education and knowledge. I'd much rather that people that are pensioned have access to free university courses because it will always be a very small minority that is driven to do so and they have a unique perspective to bring to the table compared to the rest of the university crowd. You are also automatically pretty sure that they are not following courses because they want to get another job, but mostly because they are really driven about a particular subject, which tends to make for the best kind of students.
Seniors have no employment goals. There is no need to limit supply because it doesn't affect the marketplace. These seniors buy books and pay for other costs and schools can get additional government money. It helps society because you have more educated people with additional knowledge who may share back with the community at little cost.
> It helps society because you have more educated people with additional knowledge who may share back with the community at little cost.
Same could be said of younger people - but they can actually do the good over many more decades than the senior people! So the social good is much more compounded!
> Seniors have no employment goals. There is no need to limit supply because it doesn't affect the marketplace.
This has many assumptions baked in that are hard to justify, such as:
- Younger people will 'flood' free PhD programs and successfully complete them, the price is the only thing keeping the flood under control. This sounds wrong because a PhD will still take time, effort & interest to complete.
- The job marketplace for PhDs is a fixed pie and a zero sum game. This sounds wrong because I buy into the belief system that more progress for all leads to more jobs (and prosperity) for all.
- It is morally justifiable to keep poor or disadvantaged - yet interested - people, out of the hallowed academic gates, by simply pricing the programs high. This is egregious for self explanatory reasons.
You are probably "telling it like it is", but I really hope that awful status quo is overhauled for the better, and for more access to all - old and young.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Armstrong_(programmer)
The challenge of coming up with ideas, writing proposals for compute resources or funding, and trying to deliver on the research was fun. Most of my PhD was industry funded so there was potential for product integration.
The added bonus is that you're around really smart and motivated people in a variety of disciplines. I was exposed to the hard problems in Finance, Accounting, and Economics hung out with opera singers, stage directors and novelists.
The years I didn't have funding were pretty miserable. 40-60 hours in the lab plus 20 hours teaching per week for $23K kind of wears you down.
I'm sure the author enjoyed it, but it, but it doesn't seem that she will use her new educational skills at all. To the extent that her professors could have done something else, she sucked up a lot of resources that could have been used lot productively.
This will become a bigger issue going forward....
That’s absolutely not their sole purpose.
And someone must take care of state bureaucracy anyway.
It's rather obvious. There are even offices that collect the relevant statistical data.
> you can eliminate most physicists and mathematicians
No. Both disciplines are required by a lot of companies today. If you have a look at www.indeed.com there are currently 3.5k jobs for physicists. There are subjects where there might be a dozen jobs per year per thousand graduates. But engineers are missing everywhere.
It is difficult to start a PhD worthy job in a new field at 66, as there's still a lot of domain specific learning (in the private sector), and most companies don't want to commit to making that investment in someone likely to voluntary retire, or quit due to health issues.
So, instead of working for 6 years, she got a very expensive degree that society is unlikely to benefit from, as there's often no way to apply these skills in the economy
Sure. But you complain that resources are wasted when retirees go to college and get their doctorates. I replied that resources are already being wasted on a large scale when there are academic studies that generate more economic costs than benefits. I have clarified my position in my further comments if you are interested.
I'm all for continued learning but can't that be done in a non-credentialed manner that doesn't disadvantage young people?
> Are we in an alternate reality where 67 year olds immediately drop dead?
This is called a straw man. Where did I say this? Reread my comment calmly and rationally and you'll see I never wrote that.
"I'm all for continued learning but can't that be done in a non-credentialed manner that doesn't disadvantage young people?"
I'm all for old people living their best lives except when it directly and negatively affects young people for no reason other than pure vanity.
- The vast majority of PhDs don't do anything productive with their research topic or work in their research field later on. Doing a PhD is about advancing human knowledge and a lot of personal growth - it has very little to do with productivity. The current trend is that you get burned out and sick of your research area and decide to do something totally different. There are very few areas where you do a PhD for credentials or to advance in your career.
In what sense? I'm quite positive the number of PhDs being produced has grown by leaps and bounds over the years.
Ah, that's the thing though.
Who gets to determine what is a worthwhile use of time and resources, and what isn't?
You?
Or the faculty, administration and the student herself?
I think you have trust them to know their business. Who better?
Anyway, is counting widgets produced (or software released, or academic papers published) really the best way to measure value?
Oh well, two chances and no dice.
My grandfather was a vulcanologist, too. He worked on proving the continental drift theory.
(a case of parallel construction affecting science: the data were only declassified after they covered enough of the sea basins that it was no longer obvious what the common boomer cruise routes were)
(my local mountains are actually rebounding up faster from the last glaciation than they are being eroded down by weathering — kind of the orogeny version of Wirth's Law)