The PhD problem
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I personally don't see that doing a PhD should be a issue for recruiters in industry. I worked as a programmer for 10+ years before doing a PhD and can confidently say that doing research was one of the most rewarding times of my life. I learnt an incredible amount - especially how to independently research and tackle hard problems. Does industry not have any hard problems?
Perhaps this is just a period of adjustment. The people recruiting don't have PhDs so they don't know what research involves or what someone with a PhD can bring to a company.
I have seen both sides of the fence and if I was ever in a position to recruit I would certainly consider someone with research experience on an equal footing with a new graduate. I often joked that I would have had the same employment chances if I'd have spent 4 years sitting on a beach instead of doing a PhD. In a complex modern world such as ours this is truly twisted and bizarre.
> I got 1 job interview in 1 year. Things have
> improved and I now have a position in academia
> (the first academic position that I applied for).
> I worked as a programmer for 10+ years before
> doing a PhD
Private industry needs to be incentivised to do more long-term R&D.
Corporate America just doesn't have the stomach to fund fundamental research with a payback varying from years in the future (optimistically) to never (pessimistically). In fact, we have exactly the opposite trend -- university researchers have taken on all kinds of applied research projects that would have been considered far too commercial in the past. In turn, the universities are looking to license out their IP portfolios and take stakes in companies founded by their students and faculty to raise more cash.
At Bell Labs the absolute best scientists could come together and just work, without having to deal with writing grant applications, teaching courses, or mentoring grad students (the three activities which now consume the vast majority of an academic researcher's time).
I am convinced that if Bell Labs was as strong today as it was 50 years ago, we'd have kilo-core microprocessors (and know how to program them), all our genomes would be sequenced already, and we'd all be driving electric cars recharged by ultra-efficient solar power stations. Or rather they'd be driving themselves. Maybe Google can help get us back on track.
The book, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, talks about why he left Bell Labs to be a quant on wall street.
I remember after graduating college. I was unsure what to do next. My profs wanted me to do PhD. My fiancee, a PhD candidate, was against it. The company I worked at was willing to pay for my masters in electrical engineering but again my fiancee made the argument since I was repulsed by large organizations that I would resent it. I would most likely end up working for those companies. He was right. This is what happened to my friends.
5 years ago, I was reconsidering a PhD, I thought comp sci or stats. So I dipped my toe and got a masters in stats - it was fun. Do a PhD? No. What for. Economically it would not make sense for me.
I would only do it if I found a fun topic such as modeling detection of prostate cancer (my masters project) but so far the idea of working for the immoral pharma industry including the unis and rest of them makes me ill.
I wish I learnt Marie Curie's secret on how to focus on the work and forget the rest. But I haven't.
My husband works as a computer science researcher (AI) - I KNOW I never want to do this. Pittance for ground breaking work done at excruciating slow pace with so many failures. The shit he puts up so he can work on the stuff that interests him - boggles the mind. I almost want to scream - get a bloody commercial job (effectively 2x salary) and use your own money to run your own tests. But he has seen what the prospects and the environment through the eyes of friends smarter than him and knows the true cost of politics. Smart man.
I would never advise anyone to do a PhD unless you are in love with the topic.
In one corner, we have engineers and scientists whose full time job is to solve problems and create new ideas; in the other corner, we have those whose full time job is to acquire money in any way possible - executives, Wall Street types, etc. It is easy to guess who will emerge financially victorious. Sadly, I don't think it can be any other way.
Most corporations are completely beholden to Wall Street these days, and stock traders can't evaluate long-term research initiatives.
Maybe the government and universities have squeezed the corporate sector out of research?
What would be interesting is to see some heavy quantitative studies done on the ROI of research in a corporate setting. If we could prove that R&D provides a decent ROI, I'd be willing to bet that the business types would be more willing to fund it.
I bet R&D departments benefit from economies of scale -- 5 PhDs can likely produce much more than one PhD at 5 companies, and a solid team attracts top talent -- which means the aforementioned big shots are the likeliest to produce meaningful research. Still, I would give a lot to work at a something like a "research startup."
This IMO is a key factor to understanding many problems plaguing postgraduate world. Of maybe dozen PhDs (spanning two different countries and fields of mathematics, physics and CS) I've been acquainted with, only one had uncompromising, endurance runner attitude that serious research takes. He was the only one who landed at research career after the defense.
I fail to fully realize the reasons behind the motivation of the less successful ones. Whatever it was, it was certainly not a thirst for knowledge. Their contribution to advancing the state of art was zero. Those in the fields were I have a glimpse of understanding, should not have defended. They were net waste of grants/taxpayer money, and their own life.
As it is now, postgraduate research is like uranium enrichment: a costly process with majority of output being waste. Of course the thing wasted in this case is people's effort and time which could (maybe) better spent elsewhere.
Five years in, the more successful PhDs have moved on or are at least in the process of finishing up, but about half of the students are long past burned out but will still be around for 2-5 years. Most careers encourage the less successful people to leave or fire them (which seems harsh, but it's less harsh than wasting peoples' time) but academia doesn't, or to whatever extent that it does, people don't get the hint. The result is that you have a lot of people who reach 29-31 when they finish their PhDs, and because they took too long they can't get great post-docs, and it's downhill from there.
I think graduate school is a great way to learn a lot for people who have the ambition and ability, but the problem with it, from a career perspective, is that it's regressive rather than progressive for a lot of people. What I mean is that I'd rather be a first-year graduate student than a bottom-half investment banker, for sure, but the people in the "real world", even if they take some lumps early on, have already moved on, learned from a mix of success and failure (in most cases) and had a chance to establish themselves by 29-30. The less successful half of the graduate students haven't had this opportunity; they start out as graduate students at elite departments and, 7 years later, they're "wraiths" with nothing to show for their time. It's a really broken and unfair system. They should be given the hint much earlier (like after 1-2 years) so they can move on and do something where they have a better shot at success.
You obviously thought about it before; do you have any ideas how the situation could be improved? Sometimes I feel the whole mentor/advisor thing is flawed, and postgrad students would do better if it was abolished, but you'd think if it was that simple, it'd already be sorted out..
I like a lot of academics individually, but the culture of academia is very narcissistic and insular, which means that it doesn't take in much information from the outside world. Most academics haven't a clue whether their work is useful, nor how to get their graduate students jobs outside of academia. Academics also live in a world where anything non-academic is somewhat disparaged, and people who leave have "sold out". It's similar to what you see in investment banking: changing careers means being an utter failure, as far as many are concerned. It also is too individualistic for its own good; as much as the phrase "team player" annoys me, academia could stand to have more respect for that concept. However, that's an aspect of academia that's actually doomed to get worse as the competition increases. The scarce job market leads to cutthroat competition and insane careerism, which makes the culture even more defective and insular.
Academics need to get better at playing nice with the outside world, because most of the PhD graduates are going to have to work outside of the ivory tower. The advisor system that you mentioned doesn't help. Advisors tend to insist that their best students should get academic jobs and... as for the rest, who cares? They're out on their own. "If you really want to work in 'industry', go ahead, but don't expect my help." Also, having one advisor is like having one boss with all the power-- a single-point-of-failure situation. So there are definitely problems with the advisor system. On the other hand, it has some benefits: if you get a great advisor, it's awesome.
Academia has an additional issue in this: it doesn't "counsel out" those who don't belong. The culture is broken, the people are cutthroat, and well-paid jobs are scarce... but you can stay a graduate student for 8-10 years, and shitty jobs (sub-40k adjunct positions, teaching unmotivated students) aren't that rare or hard to get. Most careers flush people out if they reach extreme failure; academia lets them stick around in an undead status for a long time. This creates an academic underclass of socially undeveloped people who have fallen out of proper academia and have nowhere to go: they can't even get jobs at Starbucks. By middle age, they tend to become very bitter and pretty much unemployable.
Academia is a great place to learn some things, but the culture is broken and should not be emulated.
The research committees that decided to accept these dissertations were composed of multiple experts in their respective fields of research. Every expert took months to evaluate each thesis and decide whether the contribution was sufficient to grant the degree. And yet your glimpse of knowledge is apparently enough to disqualify their judgement.
To answer though, the committees are much more inbred and affiliated than they should be in theory. It is a complicated mix of academic politics, budgetary allocations and feudal bonds that advisor-student relationships are. There is a lot of leeway in interpreting things like "novelty" and "importance", and amazingly often it is treated in the broadest way possible.
As to me, yes, I'm qualified enough in certain fields to make a judgement, and have enough understanding of some others to cut through bullshit. The issue here is not the knowledge (or lack of) the judges, but rather their complacency with mediocrity due to life realities. I didn't imply they were green-lighting falsified results or outright crackpotry. Just that the amount of meh that shouldn't belong to PhD domain at all but gets through is incredible. If you throw all those dissertations out, the state of respective field wouldn't degrade a iota.
In many cases, we need to properly analyze the chain of value creation, from basic sciences to applied engineering, and iron out the inefficiencies. Once this occurs, PhDs will again enjoy their proper place in the economy.
Central planning is ver rarely the answer. Besides, who is the 'we' in this proposition?
I disagree. That's dogma. Dogma is rarely the answer. The a lot of university's research already relies on public funds which is disbursed by a central committee. There is little private money in this space because the timelines and risks are too high.
As for solutions, I heard of a few entrepreneurs who regularly visit university's technology board looking for interesting solutions that they can take to market. This is a kind of gap filling move that can be done broadly, provided the frameworks are realistic. I remembered a tale about IdeaLabs where they were spinning off a startup and decided to give the entrepreneurs 80% share of the company instead of the regular 20%. If a university has unrealistic expectations, then this can also curb the introduction of a technology/technique.
Then there are some schools who do very good basic research but little in the way of translational research (e.g. medical trials, FDA approvals etc). The reason these may be occurring is because the way research funding works is that these activities are outside of their scope and ability.
Outside of a handful of top US schools the resources (i.e. high level graduate courses taught by people who actually understand what they are talking about) are simply not available. Indeed even there one needs to make an effort to take classes from other departments.
Somewhere like UK with no course work requirements at all, it is not as easy to find a PhD student with an understanding of the proverbial bigger picture (of course there are exceptions etc).
It is the broad understanding of the relations between methods employed in different fields that makes a PhD useful in an industry setting and not the narrow topic of their research (for example someone familiar with ideas used in numerical computing can do research level work in many fields).
A bachelors degree is good if it helps you do a masters degree.
A masters degree is good if it improves your chances at finding a job.
And then a PhD is good if it increases your expected salary.
Well, I am sorry, but we shouldn't be complaining about "the PhD problem" then. If you do a PhD, do it to learn. Don't do it to find a job that will pay more.