Beware survivorship bias in advice on science careers
nature.com
nature.com
Among my many regrets, I wish there had been a professor who could have been honest with me about my ability to succeed as well as the consequences of failure. Unfortunately, by the very fact that they were professors, they had never experienced anything like the misery that I did.
I did miraculously salvage my science career, but any time I get the chance, I strongly discourage anyone from pursuing a graduate degree in my field.
Many fields are worse than that. They demand postdocs. Some people make the terrible mistake of thinking that adjuncting is a way of staying in the academy. It's not. If you are adjuncting full time you are extremely unlikely to ever get a real academic job, as a lecturer or professor. Get out.
Getting a PhD is fine if you are in a field with great outside options, like Economics, CS, Math etc. but it's consumption, not an investment in future earnings. Outside top programmes the likelihood of becoming an academic drops of f rapidly. A PhD is training to become an academic. It can also be necessary to get a job in some fields with huge oversupply of PhDs, like the sciences, but those jobs are badly paid too.
If you really, really want to be an acedemic and you can get into a good programme go for it. No one else should go unless they don't need the degree to earn a living or the degree comes with the prospect of radically improving their lives by making immigration possible.
Could you elaborate on this one? I thought tenure professor is as stable as you can get in terms of a career
"Tenure track" doesn't mean tenure, it means on a track towards a possible tenure. People are hired to start their tenure track, and then during the next 6-7 years, they are evaluated, and in the end some of them are promoted to a tenure position.
> Because for most people going into a doctoral programme is a bad idea. If you do not come from money or have a spouse who can support you it's a terrible bet in terms of chances of success.
In the hard sciences you get a pretty decent salary (scholarship). I know that in many countries in Europe they are significantly above average. That doesn't mean you should do a PhD for financial reasons (there are definitely better paying jobs out there), but I know of several people who support both kids and a spouse on a PhD salary, so you don't need to rely on someone else.
> Outside demand for PhDs is low in most fields.
That depends a lot on field. For CS this might be true (although quite a few jobs in ML expect PhDs for example). In chemistry and biology a PhD is almost expected if you want to work in industry. In my area (photonics/telecom) the vast majority of R&D roles are PhDs. Masters or bachelor degrees essentially get you a technician role.
>Most people who start a PhD don't graduate with one. They drop out.
I would like to see some stats on that. I know that in my experience (having seen more than 100 PhDs graduate) almost everyone graduated (I know of one who didn't, and he ended up with a very good job anyway)
> Substantial numbers of people who do get a PhD never even get a tenure track job. Getting a tenure track job often leads to looking for a new job after seven years, with the "rejected" sticker.
The first part is certainly true, becoming an academic is one of the less likely outcomes. However, regarding tenure track, the rejection really only happens at the most prestigious institutions in the US. In Europe this is not even a thing.
> Many fields are worse than that. They demand postdocs. Some people make the terrible mistake of thinking that adjuncting is a way of staying in the academy. It's not. If you are adjuncting full time you are extremely unlikely to ever get a real academic job, as a lecturer or professor. Get out.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by adjuncting and what it's relation to postdocs is. Yes many fields require postdocs if you want a tenure position. Pay is highly dependent on country, e.g. in Australia you get paid on the same scale as other academics, in the US the pay is sometimes worse than a PhD.
> Getting a PhD is fine if you are in a field with great outside options, like Economics, CS, Math etc. but it's consumption, not an investment in future earnings. Outside top programmes the likelihood of becoming an academic drops of f rapidly. A PhD is training to become an academic. It can also be necessary to get a job in some fields with huge oversupply of PhDs, like the sciences, but those jobs are badly paid too.
It really depends what your life goals are. If money is your primary motivator, a PhD is not a great investment, do finance, programming or get into sales quickly (a good sales person can outearn all of the others). If you want to do R&D in many fields you require a PhD and pay can still be excellent. I know several people who were offered >150k jobs out of their PhDs.
> If you really, really want to be an acedemic and you can get into a good programme go for it. No one else should go unless they don't need the degree to earn a living or the degree comes with the prospect of radically improving their lives by making immigration possible.
This advice again highly depends on your motivation. If you want to just earn as much as possible as quickly as possible, yes don't get a PhD. If you are interested to work on hard problems relatively independently, a PhD could be right. One thing to realise is that it does require a high frustration tolerance, because there will be significant setbacks. That said everyone considering a PhD should do their homework on the group they want to join. Unfortunately there are bad supervisors, who consider PhDs like slave workers, or other groups who don't get you the publications that you should get, because the do poor research.
> I would like to see some stats on that.
I was wrong. Over 55% of students get a doctorate within ten years of beginning. [Edited to correct error]
"the completion rate ten years after students begin their doctoral program remains low at 56.6% (Sowell, Zhang, Redd, & King, 2008). Additionally, the analysis indicates that completion rates continue to vary considerably by field of study: 49.3% in humanities, 54.7% in mathematics and physical sciences, 55.9% in social sciences, 62.9% in life sciences, and 63.6% in engineering."
https://cgsnet.org/cgs-occasional-paper-series/university-ge...
I think the GP's point was that you're wrong on many fronts, simply because you've made broad, sweeping generalizations that don't necessarily apply to all fields, or even to any particular field across countries. Note even that this study you've cited is old and of very limited scope.
If you think I'm wrong on any particular I welcome correction. Feel free to cite some evidence that doing a PhD is a good decision for anyone who doesn't want to be an academic and doesn't view a PhD primarily as consumption.
Also as an MS research DSP engineer: I work with PhDs who know far less and are far less productive than me. In some fields, for industry, it may really be just a piece of paper.
I know that's probably not what you meant, but saying 100% of PHD graduates graduated is the text book definition of survivorship bias. Obviously, if you look at a group made of only people who got a PHD, 100% will have a PHD.
I imagine you meant you knew 100 people who started a phd and not phd graduates?
Adjuncts professors teach at American universities on a course-by-course contract basis. These people usually have PhDs. Some would like tenure track positions. But it’s generally a career dead-end.
I suspect your experience is from Europe, and I don’t think it generalizes to the US.
I agree that the US "in general" (again simplified) seems to be worse regarding PhD pay, but AFAIK there are significant variations across fields even in the US (i.e. engineering PhD students get paid significantly better than most others for example).
Also in Europe the concept that PhD means you want an academic career doesn't seem to be as true. I work with a lot of people who have PhDs and none of them did it because they wanted an academic career. In fact going back to get your PhD after working for a few years is surprisingly common, and in many cases your employer will partially sponsor that.
Not in Ireland
I'd be surprised if this were the case. In the UK, stipend is ~£16k.
You do get to keep student benefits, e.g. no council tax and don't pay taxes but even then it's below what a lot (most?) graduates make.
In the rest of Europe, grandparent's remark mostly holds. In France, for instance, students get bout 1.7kEUR/month [0], and life is cheaper (unless you're in Paris). Maybe you'd get a slightly higher salary in a company, but the difference is not that big.
[0]: https://academicpositions.com/career-advice/professor-salari...
If you think you could be interested in a PhD and don't try, you might as well regret it for your whole life. If you try and it does not go well, you can quit.
But when you're the survivor, please, be very careful about the words you use. You are on the winning side of a very unfair lottery.
Is it any more ok to talk this way for non-survivors?
I think the absolute biggest factor was supervisor - mine was new, very supportive, and pushed for my work to be relevant. Theirs seemed to mostly use them as cheap engineering labour, and they seemed to spend the majority of their time polishing optical fiber and binning LEDs.
Those that I am still in contact with also managed to get a career in science - this was probably helped a little by the fact they had spent time doing their doctoral program, but I'm sure that while it wasn't a complete waste I don't think the time was entirely necessary either.
I wouldn't go quite so far as "strongly discourage", but it's certainly a decision not to take lightly and you should go into with your eyes open.
Also, from what I've seen, experimental Physics is pretty low on the abuse scale compared to some of the other sciences, so suspect general experience is _very_ sensitive to the particular field you are interested in.
What's more interesting, to me at least, is that I was one of the very few that didn't continue down the academic science path. Though to be fair most have since left it and I think only 5 have stuck with it, but still an impressive amount of postdocs
That said, personally I think doing a PhD is one of the worst things a person can do them financially long term. I think gambling is one of the few that ranks higher than PhD. They lose the most critical part of life they must be earning and saving to harness the power of compounding to become financially secure. On top, they learn no marketable skills that can get them a job out in industry or corporations.
Not teaching economics in school and colleges to all students is partially to blame as many undergrads believe just doing a PhD with minimum wages can make them happy. But when commitments increase and when they realize academic jobs are very few they become disillusioned and desperate.
https://medium.economist.com/why-doing-a-phd-is-often-a-wast...
In many non-European, non American countries, a PhD is three years after your undergraduate (with honors year, 4 year undergraduate instead of the normal three).
Very different equation.
I believe there is an even bigger issue, that is not quantified or discussed, which is that PhD programs have extremely high attrition. Things can go wrong, which result in either having to quit or start over. Your advisor could lose finding, change jobs, or die. You could get sick. I know two people who got into serious ethical disagreements with their advisor. One had to lawyer up. At least when you read stories about jobs from hell in industry, you know that the person can at least walk away with the money that they already earned.
The non-PhD career path involves assumptions too. Having marketable skills, getting a lucrative job, moving up in the ranks, and putting money away, are all hypotheticals with their own survivor bias issues.
Disclosure: Physics PhD.
This style of PhD is a lifestyle choice and a vow of "poverty". For context, at a school like MIT or Berkeley a typical fully-funded stipend is about $30k USD annually (gross), which you will make until you finish (at age 27-30, depending on when you start). Once you run through the cost of living in the area, you start to see that some compromises must be made to your quality of life. If you have independent money these compromises are less necessary, but if you are not careful it can alienate you from peers, in the same way that having money generally means you live in a different world than others.
If your goal in a career is to make enough money or have enough stability to support your actual life (family, community, hobbies, etc), doing a PhD is not a particularly reliable path. Having one opens doors in life, but you have to value that over the alternative for the decision to make sense.
(I have a chemistry PhD)
Your experience can be very different in countries that see junior researchers as professionals. You get a solid middle-class salary, and while you earn less than your friends who went to the industry, your life is not qualitatively different from them. Some travel extensively during their PhD, while others have kids and buy a home.
The opportunity cost for doing a PhD is much lower in the latter system.
You don't suppose that's because the N on "get the type of professorship you want" is too low to draw reasonable statistical inferences?
> Not teaching economics
I took undergrad econ, it didn't keep me from making stupid decisions, especially if those stupid decisions are rational, e.g. "I'm willing to roll the dice on a high beta event". The problem is not a lack of rationality; it's that the system is actively irrational, and it is in the interest of continuation of the scientific industrial complex to continue to lie to grad students about the nature of scientific promotion. If they knew the truth they would quit doing good science, or quit science.
The academic job market is hyper-efficient and gets close to a Pareto distribution very quickly. I agree that economics programs don't do a good enough job teaching about the implications of systems which distribute outcomes according to a Pareto distribution (which are many).
Obviously this true… in particular, anyone getting a PhD in a quantitative field could make more money in tech or finance.
You seem to misunderstand why people pursue a PhD. At some level there has to be love of learning and pursuit of knowledge.
Getting job in academia is difficult but not impossible…
The people who’ve been working in the mRNA fields did ok. Successful tech CEO’s might have more money but Nobel laureates are, just maybe, more useful.
While we're at it, let's get kids thinking about how valuable it would be to win a gold medal in the Olympics when deciding if they should make sports the #1 priority in their life/career.
This describes almost no one I knew when I was in grad school. It probably helped that I picked a school that paid well and was in a LCOL area. That's the advice I would give those pursuing a PhD.
You can choose to put off kids till you have a PhD. Plenty of people can get a PhD before 28.
Either of the following are good reasons:
1. To do research in industry.
2. To gain the knowledge acquired via a PhD.
Not true in many fields, and by the time most people have postdocs, they're makibg decent enough money that they don't need to keep their lives on hold.
> If they are leaving for industry after PhD, why do a PhD in first place.
I don't know what to say to this, other than that you have very strong opinions and I can't tell what you're basing them on -- or whether you're basing them on anything more than the strange belief that study is useless and school makes people poor.
This isn't true, especially in stem and the sciences.
> They are better off with a Masters and having a good career and then spending spare time on pursuing knowledge.
In most places I'm aware of, a terminal master's degree or a master's degree program is a degree mill and a racket, costing tens of thousands for a course ofstudy that's too short to teach students much anything useful, let alone provide real knowledge or understanding.
Every single person I know who has a stem PhD is doing interesting, cutting-edge work, and almost everybody they work with has a PhD, too. The kids with a BS in CS, by contrast, almost never wind up with jobs in those settings. They almost never get jobs at Microsoft Research. They don't get paid to think.
> the trouble is to sustain that love if your bowel is hungry, your clothes are old and torn and you are unable to give your kids a decent accomodation
Again, this simply isn't true. This wasn't my experience or the experience of anybody I went to school with or met when I was in acadenia. PhD programs in the US are funded and usually pay poorly in absolute terns but well enough. And grad-student insurance is usually quite good if you're in the US.
A PhD from a good program opens doors and pays for itself many times over, sometimes materially, sometimes in ways that are difficult to quantify.
I didn’t have any sort of foot in the door at FAANG level companies before my PhD (ask me about my 3x rejections from Microsoft!), but I was able to parlay my CS PhD into such a job, and the earning potential there is profoundly higher than would be found elsewhere. Enough, even, to offset 6 years of lost earning potential.
Obviously this is just my experience, and those talented undergrads who can ace a Google interview are likely better off just taking it, but it’s not like the PhD was a vow of poverty.
I had a friend who was a chemist but she left the field to pursue data science instead after her pharmaceutical company started even more layoffs in R+D - it seems pharma companies are more interested in intellectual property law than drug development these days.
Lots of engineering companies have positions where they value PhDs.
Will it offset the cost of not earning all those years? Probably not.
Will you get those jobs without a PhD? Probably not.
If your goal is to get a job at Google a PhD is a poor way to get it.
And we’ve come full circle to the topic of survivorship bias
Google Research employs 2000+ people. I believe not only they all have PhDs, but also from top-tier schools.
a PhD is really an absolute minimum requirement for those jobs, and with extremely fierce competition for those jobs, I would be seriously surprised there is anyone there without a PhD who is doing actual cryptography research. Not aware of any exceptions to this general rule.
"a job" could also be a janitor. yes, don't need a phd for that. for some jobs it's a bare minimum qualification.
(not to say people should necessarily strive for those, but such is life)
Hiring is weird. You definitely don’t need an advanced degree to get your resume looked at, but a PhD from a top program will at least get you interviews and so it gets you over one difficult hurdle.
This would imply that Google Research is a great deal less meritocratic than Economics research, where someone like John List, who went to an unranked school, can end up teaching at UChicago. More generally ranking is not as big a dealn in Europe in at least one country, Germany. There are definitely people with doctorates from schools you've never heard of working at Google Research.
I don't think Google Research is as credentialist as you paint it. I'm willing to bet $200 at even odds that I can find one person working at Google Research as a researcher who does not have a PhD. My email is in my profile.
to be sure, i specifically selected cryptography in the very first comment for a specific reason. math subspecialties require rather unhealthy amounts of training that is best started as early as practically possible. it is very hard to do, a mentor often helps and speeds up the process, and by the time you start doing original research as a fully self-taught mathematician, well, you might as well get get some recognition of your efforts by way of getting a degree, plus potentially get funded to do it. why not?
due to several factors, in all probability, successful applicants for mathematical research (cryptology) positions will have a phd, if nothing else simply because prior original research is likely to be required. competition pushes up the entry barrier as high as possible, for better or worse, and so the exceptions in research without a phd are going to be exactly that - exceptions.
the school ranking is a bit of a red herring here. while reputation of the school itself does matter quite a bit of course despite everyone doing their best to pretend it doesn't (but insist on sending their kids to the best school possible), it is simply that very often talent is sought out from specific groups/departments/professors who just happen to teach at this institution, wherever they are located. it's just that most of the time large well known institutions have budgets and brand recognition that attracts top talent, often from around the world. brain drain is real.
just to be sure, its not that i recommend everyone goes out and gets a phd in math (personally, i think that even a masters degree is a complete waste of time for the vast majority of jobs), but that in some situations it is a de facto pre-requisite. it likely will not pay off financially and it is a big commitment that can crush you mentally, emotionally and potentially even physically. some departments have sadly a reputation for high suicide rates.
btw. john list does have a phd, and spent 8 years teaching elsewhere prior to UC. not sure if that supports your meritocracy argument, as one would think someone with his reputation today could advance quicker.
I know John List has a PhD. I said he went to an unranked school. You had previously said
> Google Research employs 2000+ people. I believe not only they all have PhDs, but also from top-tier schools.
and I was pointing out that Google Research seemed unlikely to be more credentialist than university economic research, implying that there would be quite a few people at GR with PhDs from non-top schools.
I don't think there's much disagreement between us. I doubt there are more than 20 researchers at GR without PhDs, if that many. May your research and life be fruitful.
“Well, I think it actually is very destructive. I'm now retired, but when I was a professor here [Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton], my real job was to be a psychiatric nurse. There were all these young people who came to the institute, and my job was to be there so they could cry on my shoulder and tell me what a hard time they were having. And it was a very tough situation for these young people. They come here. They have one or two years and they're supposed to do something brilliant. They're under terrible pressure — not from us, but from them.
So, actually, I've had three of them who I would say were just casualties who I'm responsible for. One of them killed himself, and two of them ended up in mental institutions. And I should've been able to take care of them, but I didn't. I blame the Ph.D. system for these tragedies. And it really does destroy people. If they weren't under that kind of pressure, they could all have been happy people doing useful stuff. Anyhow, so that's my diatribe. But I really have seen that happen."
I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.
And also, of course, it wastes a tremendous amount of time — especially for women, it’s particularly badly timed.
If they’re doing a Ph.D., they have a conflict between raising a family or finishing the degree, which is just at the worst time — between the ages of 25 to 30 or whatever it is. It ruins the five years of their lives.
And I see the difference in the business world. My daughter happens to be a businesswoman, so I meet a lot of her young friends.
The life there is so much easier for women. They start a company when they’re 20; they go bust when they’re 22. [Laughs] Meanwhile, they have a kid, and nobody condemns them for going bust. If you’re in the business world, that’s what’s expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it’s a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It’s also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.
[The Ph.D. system] was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it’s fine. But the trouble is that it’s become a kind of a meal ticket — you can’t get a job if you don’t have a Ph.D. So all sorts of people go into it who are quite unsuited to it. [...]
Anyway, so, I’m happy that I’ve raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.
Richard Feynman noted a problem with the environment:
When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!
This is a borderline absurd statement. There are so many other bad things that people can do with their time. Even a PdD in the most strange topic will give you the opportunity to learn things that you can use later, even if it is just to become a high school teacher. It beats a lot of other things, including doing nothing.
* You are smart enough to keep doing this.
* You do not get burnt out, more chances of that with boring work.
* Your job does not get effectively automated.
That probably tells more about your country than about doing a PhD. In where I came from, financial security was something you had by default if you had some social capital, useful skills, determination, and a degree. You had to be particularly unlucky to lose it after that. Financial security only became a relevant concern after I moved to the US.
Isn't that because there aren't enough spots in academia? I'm under the impression most PhDs want to stay in academia (or perhaps adjacent true R&D departments) but there aren't as many positions.
For a change over time in that regard I'd suggest: many more people are going to university, presumably at least proportionally many more PhDs, ratio of undergrads to PhD-holding staff roughly constant and <1, hence proportion of PhDs awarded that stay in academia goes down.
Financially, I don't disagree.
The amusing thing is that I often would say the exact same thing on the other end of the coin. Going to industry right after your undergrad is one of the worst things one can do intellectually. People who want to grow intellectually[1] typically will grow more in their grad school years than most people will in their life. I can clearly see it when I look at my friends who did not opt for grad school.
And even within a particular discipline, for a lot of disciplines, there is virtually no way you can attain that particular knowledge while having a full time job. Life gets busy.
It ultimately comes down to values. Some prefer the money, others the knowledge. Personally, I appreciate the adage: Money comes and goes, but knowledge tends to remain with you.
> On top, they learn no marketable skills that can get them a job out in industry or corporations.
People who plan and aim properly for a career in academia probably pick up more marketable skills than the average industry employee. Self promotion and networking matters more in academia than in industry. There's also stuff like grant writing, public speaking, etc.
[1] Not all people who pursue a PhD want to grow intellectually, but a significant portion do.
What does this mean? Do you mean this as psychological maturity? Domain knowledge expertise?
That combination describes what a doctoral disserataion is.
Not a few are more jargon than substance, covering up mediocre ideas with a sugar frosting of math symbols and bizarre wordy academic pseudo-abstraction which obfuscates simple ideas instead of clarifying complex thoughts.
A few are straight out pandering and careerism, with style and content apparently designed to appeal to a specific supervisor.
I was considering a PhD and the quality of the work was the biggest factor that decided me against it.
To be fair it's a fairly niche field. But even so - literally only a handful of those dissertations come close to matching your criteria.
As much as my PhD was stressful and grueling at times, I wouldn't want to miss those years for the personal growth they facilitated. But then, that might be survivor bias speaking...
I'll have to talk to my former colleagues who quit the program to figure that one out.
I started my PhD rather late after quite a few years in industry. Honestly, I felt like it held back some personal growth because there was more structure than self-guided learning
But working at a company taught me very different things than the PhD did. It feels like I learned to program at the company, and I learned to think at the university.
As a PhD (concentration in semiconductors) I agree with you. After a decade in the field, I'm trying to break into software engineering using knowledge I mostly gained in high school and undergrad (and studying in the evenings recently). Even down-leveling I can keep my compensation mostly flat, so essentially I lost 5 years of my career by pursuing a PhD. One could argue that I worked on more interesting problems, having a PhD, but over time I've realized companies will exploit your enthusiasm to either keep your pay low or work you for long hours. Consequently, I mostly care about money these days.
Another downside of the PhD was how blind it made me to what was acceptable work. Now that I am highly-credentialed, I need to work in R&D, I thought. It took a long time to de-program. What helped was getting a more diverse set of friends, some of whom owned their own business in "boring" areas and had done quite well for themselves.
Strongly disagree. Somewhat true only if you're doing phd just for the sake of completing it, without any particular plans on what you're going to be doing next, and how/why your degree will aid you in that (both from time-spent perspective and from financial perspective).
Sometimes, pursuing a graduate degree is a great idea if you're looking for a specific type of job that requires it. Example: many quant roles in high-echelon trading firms require a phd in math / stats / cs.
Depends on the uni / advisor / field / topic, but in my particular case (math/stat/quant-finance) completing the dissertation was fairly easy, all things considered. I had enough free time to travel, party, tour with a rock'n'roll band, record music, work in another country for over a year, and find myself a wife. Then defend the dissertation and immediately find a job in the field.
1) I was a "failed" PhD student that left with a masters in mechanical engineering. Now I have a Software Engineer job that I love. A lot of credit for that goes to the software I wrote to run experiments as a grad student, and I am very happy with where I ended up.
2) My wife and I compared our advisors and they make a huge difference in your future prospects. Her post-doc advisor sent >95% of the people from his lab to tenure track positions. My advisor was successful at finding people jobs in industry and ran a great lab, but produced 0 tenured professors from his lab in 30 years. Look at where graduates of a lab end up before joining if you know what you want to do.
3) The academic job market is competitive in a strange way. Top candidates are clearly top candidates. Schools will get ~100 applications for an open position, but the top candidates will get job offers at nearly all of the places they apply. I don't think most job searches are weighted that way.
4) Research faculty positions are strange. You nominally get the job by being good at science, but then your job is to run a small business (your research lab). Being a good writer and good manager are probably the most important for running a successful lab, and PhD programs should probably focus on nurturing this more.
One afternoon we were with 100 PhD students in one room, a Prof. addressed us and told us: "You are here with 100 scientists, only 1 of you will make it to become a Professor. The rest will find jobs elsewhere or get stuck eternally as a postdoc."
It woke me up, I'm not a hard worker, I'm not that 1%. I started to think about alternatives soon afterwards. This was 20 years ago and I never regretted it. There is an elegance in science, traveling and trying to become a Rock Star of science [0]. But there is also "publish or perish", a high percentage of time spend traveling (away from family) and a work-long-hours honor system.
I'm in industry now, it can really be seen as selling out by some scientists, but it's much less stressful if you ask me. And I'm lucky I found a company where I am still quite free to do science (although I now develop software most of the time and haven't seen a biolab since covid...)
[0]: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/rock-stars-of-...
It sounds like you still do get to do science. I suspect that you may be having a bigger impact on the world now than you would have had as another science professor. Can you offer any comment on this? Am I off base?
Some professors do pretty amazing stuff. We work with academic groups a lot, they focus on new science, we focus on IP and making products or software we can use.
Thanks again for your comments in this thread. They were very enjoyable to read and lessened some cynicism I've been mired in lately.
One project in my research group is now locked into an EU funded project with a professor that absolutely seems to hate industry and seems to be opposed to anything that gives us more insights then the project plan was supposed to give us. And it is really unworkable. We are good people and we want to solve issues together with others as well. Over the last years I did have some really good experiences with other academic groups by the way, so often it works well.
Blocking a market with shitty IP you are never going to put in practice yourself is pretty bad imo. But publishing something that is wrong wasting a lot of other researchers' time and sometimes even stopping progress (if a group/prof is influential) is also bad. Both are part of the game and arguably we shouldn't blame the players. But avoiding such things, sometimes at great cost, is what being ideological is all about ;) (a quick example: I once came up with a nice new type of assay, and knew my company would never ever make a product out of this. So I won't push on the IP angle, instead I express the benefits of publishing the assay [open access] as a way to show our company's expertise.)
Basically, is a PhD worth it even if you're 100% planning to go into industry?
To start with answering your question: I completed my PhD indeed and I would do it again. But mainly because I had such a good time. It was fun, I was with people in my age group, traveled (about once a year internationally). My prof was an older man and really cared for his students, he wanted us to learn something and took time to help, even in the lab. This was all in the Netherlands where the salary for a PhD student is quite ok. I published only one article (although my thesis had 4 scientific chapters that could have been published). There was not a lot of stress nor a competitive environment.
That said, I had direct colleagues under an Assistant Professor that were pushed much harder, that Assistant Prof still had prove himself and his students had a worse time than me.
Being in between a Physics Prof and a Molecular Biology Professor also taught me the importance of plotting my own path, I was the one with the best information in both fields. I realized this quite late.
My PhD did help me get hired where I work now (although I may have been hired faster at other places without it), and it makes some things easier, mainly I think it helps in meetings with many other PhDs. But that may just be how I experience it. Interestingly I have a colleague with who I am often seen as "a pair" but after her MSc she briefly worked in an academic lab then switched to industry. She is very good at organizing stuff and got the team lead position that I also applied for. She is at the same level as me (although she got there a bit later) and makes about the same as well. She proved herself in the company and I bet she would have no problems finding a job elsewhere with her track record. She leaves no loose ends and gets things done in complex research projects. You don't need a PhD for that. But she confesses she often feels uncomfortable when we have meeting where everyone introduces themselves and their PhD topic and further career. I think it's BS, she's being too modest often, I wonder if a title would have helped her there.
Was it worth it? I don't know, I liked it. My advice would be to try and find a nice prof, a fun group, make sure you don't end up as a "measurement slave" and burn out. That may mean you ignore that super high profile lab, but that lab may burn you out. I've heard professors smilingly proclaim "This was tough, I burned 6 PhD students on this". You don't want to be one of those.
It's nice to be able to focus on 1 topic for 4 years and make it your own. But you can get where I am without it. And you may find something like that in industry as well. I ended up in a Research department, where we had a lot freedom, a lot of money and a lot or rapid prototyping technology. I really enjoyed that. I still got to go to conferences, albeit a bit less than during my PhD.
I saw people dropping out, and I understood why, even though our group and prof were low-stress it isn't for everyone. There is no shame in it. Only finish it if you're having a good time or the finish line is near. Hope this helps, feel free to ask more. I often coach the young ones over a beer late at night during the few conferences I still attend (pre-covid) ;)
I'm in my second year of a STEM PhD, and I'm not really sure what I want to do with this. I'm kind of contemplating dropping out, but it's difficult to say how much of my frustrations stem from pandemic-related things (the lack of that social stuff, and the way the university has handled the pandemic) and how much they will persist past it. It seems the department used to have a really good social life before the pandemic, so I'm hopeful. I'm also frustrated with my advisor, but after an important deadline soon I will bring my frustrations up to them and see how that goes.
On the other hand, I have a lot of free time compared to when I used to work full-time. I have the freedom to work on projects I want to work on (both by steering/concentrating my research into cool things but also in my plentiful free time). I moved from overseas to a very good university in the US in a cool city for the PhD. I feel like I've climbed so high in some sense, from an unknown, small regional city to where I'm at now, and it feels like a "huge thing to throw it away".
Then on one hand I feel like I will reap benefits of the PhD for life; as you mention in meetings, I think in the US there is even more "credentialism" and having a PhD from a well known university makes you "smart" a priori. (Typing that out, it sounds like such a vain thing to care about. I joke that my parents will never see me as an adult until I have a doctorate.)
I'm on the fence with these things... But I don't think dropping out and getting a job would be a very good idea until we emerge a bit more from covid, so my contingency plan is to wait it out for a few months and re-evaluate.
Anyway, sorry, I realize this ended up being a long excerpt of my internal monologue and was probably not particularly exciting or interesting to read!
If it's the advisor, just keep in mind that you are the only one that has your best interest at heart. Your advisor (prof?) has different goals. But some goals align, for example you probably both want you to finish your PhD (in the Netherlands this means a lot of money for the institute) and to write some articles while getting there. This means you can respectfully indicate that it is in her/his best interest if you stay (or just hint at leaving if nothing changes) and that something has to change (indicate that you are experiencing pressure?). I always tell people: You're either at the table or you're on the menu. In other words, make your choices or someone else will make them for you. Being able to respectfully stand up for yourself is an important skill and one that is (given a healthy relationship) always appreciated. Employers don't want you to leave (and if they do: Leave) so give them the chance to make things better for you instead of just leaving suddenly. Looking back your advisor may have wished for a opportunity to help you finish smoothly, even though that desire might not be expressed now (some managers believe some pressure and show of power is good for you and it makes them "a real manager", I never understood that personally).
It seems that you still have about 2 years to go, I had 0 articles at 3 years, but if you already have 1 or more you are well underway to finishing successfully I guess.
Still I feel you'd really like to stop it. Again, there is no shame in that if you ask me. The biggest downsides are probably the self judgement and they way that makes you feel. But you could choose to feel like you made a choice for the better (better mental health, no more 2 years of pain to look forward to) and just go for it.
And indeed it sounds like a vain thing to care about, but it's real and it can help you. But what is it worth? Who are you disappointing when you stop? Hopefully not yourself and your parents, the rest: you don't need them.
Again, I can't speak for you, and your mental well-being is important so it is important to determine the source of you not feeling optimal. Is it the PhD? Is it Covid restrictions? Sometimes it's good to live by the day, find something nice to do each day and don't focus too much on the future. It will come, you have time.
Learning to do science was fantastic, teaching was awesome. I really loved the uni environment.
I started to do some well-paid consulting for IBM and when I first heard about the pay of someone more or less my age, I realized that I have to make hard choices. I also started to get involved with the university politics and realized that there are plenty of people who want to assess dominance over a stack of paper, because they have it and you do not.
I went to industry to see plenty of great people, plenty of politics - but the politics was on a x100 scale, for a x5 or so pay long term.
I will always cherish my PhD years, they were fantastic. I am also glad I ultimately moved to industry because I have the same stress level for a more comfortable life.
One thing I really, really miss is teaching.
The sciences are different, and the prospects for and conditions of academic employment seem worse. In the humanities, though, in the very best programs, the system still seems to work. This may no longer be true though. I finished about ten years ago.
Additionally, I know a fair number of people who finished their PhDs in the humanities and the sciences, or didn't finish, and don't regret at all the time they 'lost.'
I've heard about places that have programs but all the facility are hired from top-tier schools.
But maybe I should be using the past tense. There has been no job market at any tier since the pandemic started, and I'm told universities are seizing the opportunity to make that permanent.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-i...
Basically it states that most tenured positions are filled by PhDs from the top programs.
Lower tier schools have far fewer future professors.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/university-hiring-i...
Anyway, is that still true? Nowadays you have to do one or more postdocs, and lower tier schools can feed newly-minted PhDs into postdocs at a top tier school, who then go onto faculty positions. There are a significant number students who don't do as well in high school, university coursework, but excel in research and are able to differentiate themselves when they make it into a research program.
Yes, my subjective impression is that a successful post doc at a top name university will do a lot.
> Fortunately, Bill was a tall good-looking fellow. He managed to score himself a lovely girlfriend during the semester, we'll call her Theresa. Theresa was a biology postdoc, with a PhD from an elite institution and a plum job at MIT. Bill got to see how Theresa was treated in the lab, count her working hours, see the pay stubs she received as a young woman in her 30s with a PhD, wave goodbye as she got fired after her experiment did not work out, and write email to Theresa at her new postdoc at Stanford. By the end of the semester, Bill said, "I think I want to be an architect."
First, to even apply to medical school, you need a completely unrelated 4 year undergrads. Then there's residency where, let's face it, it's more of a contest of who can sleep the least and impress whoever's in charge and not at all about learning.
This isn't the case outside of the US which shows that the American track can definitely be compressed.
But you're unlikely to find a single one discussing even the possibility that maybe the OP is, in fact, an "imposter".
The imprints of this sort of toxic optimism are all over western culture. There is a hesitancy to criticize and without sufficient criticism you are unlikely to make sound choices/policies for complex systems which are liable to breakdown.
Being extended a unique opportunity during a chance social encounter is luck. Gaining greater access to new opportunities because you intentionally made an effort to develop good relationship with your colleagues and other people in your industry is not luck. It’s not a guarantee of success either, but it’s definitely not luck.
Luck favors the well prepared, but if you can do everything right and success is still an even toss up, then that is what most people would consider luck.
If you want to get a new job, perhaps it’s luck if you get the one particular job that you wanted to get, at the one particular company you wanted to work for. But if your goal is to get a certain type of job offer within some reasonable timeframe, that likely doesn’t come down to luck very much at all.
There are some career paths where luck plays a much greater role. Like if you want to be a famous musician, or the president. But for most careers, this isn’t highly relevant.
The chance of success for anything is always less that 100%, so you can frame every event that will ever occur as the result of luck if you want to. But if your goal is to achieve a more general level of success over the course of many years, then you can absolutely devise a strategy for doing that.
My company would gladly pay for me to get a PhD. Are there programs out there which are highly regarded, remote or part time, and in the cluster of CS/AI that would accept a professional and not an academic?
Once you completed the required courses, passed your PhD prelim exam, and started focusing on your dissertation work, the expectation was that you would become a full-time student. There’s no way you’d complete a dissertation in anything resembling a timely manner while maintaining a full time job elsewhere. (I even know some people who had their PhD work slowed down by research assistantship work in the same area— it can be tough to hit that balancing point, especially when funding’s on the line.)
(I do not know if they offer any kind of remote postgraduate program; I’ve been away from that for several years.)
While survivorship bias is a thing, we can't be so stuck on being 100% correct all the time (news flash, you won't ever be) that it cripples us from helping/inspiring others.
Give advice. Inspire others. I'd rather someone tried on my advice and failed than failed to try anything.
With that being said, don't sugar coat the truth. Accept that success takes some luck. But not "going for it" guarantees failure. Work hard, and you'll "make your own luck" eventually. Be lazy and you'll accomplish very little in your life.
Working hard and failing at some thing is going to grow you and most likely open up other opportunities for you.
A bit like the training of zen monks.
There were other issues though:
1. being a professor is quite different from being a PhD student
2. research is a global competition, and most likely, you won't be a superstar but an average researcher surrounded by big egos. Just like a skinny guy in a room full of people who value the size of their muscles above all.
3. The pay sucks, esp. if you can earn many times more somewhere else. I didn't care when I was 20. But as I grew older, I started to get more concerned.
4. A lot of cool stuff happens in companies, and the smart people are there too (maybe even more so)
If you aren't a rich kid, go for the first option.
I had an unsuccessful PhD due to poor project planning. It led to pretty severe burnout which I am lucky to have recovered well from. But it is good to share that there is life to be lived after quitting a PhD. I still encourage PhD students to pursue science, but I do so with a word of caution and a note that there are alternatives to the sick system that is academia.
Not that I do very well but I really wish I had been taught these high-level skills at school!
Of course, you can still get paid well as a rank and file employee in industry, so the harm is not the same.
I’m not sure what you mean.
Even if you never get lucky, the character traits of high-ranking people in your field can still be useful to you. Unfortunately there is no guaranteed path to success, and you just need to keep trying and hanging around if you want to become top-tier in whatever career you choose.
Can you say more about why you’re convinced this is true?
I view "the hustle" as the hard work. You need to constantly try and improve your craft while simultaneously networking and putting yourself out there. When the stars align you meet the right person who can help translate the skills you developed via hard work into success.
There are exceptions to every rule of course, but I find the general premise of working hard and trying to make your own good luck to be a reliable success indicator.
Being born into good fortune helps tremendously, but I have met rich kids who became nothing as well as poor kids who became absurdly successful. Life is simply what you make of it, and there is no "one true path" to follow.
I doubt there is anything I could say to convince you of this, so I guess we should call this one a draw.
I think compared to other industries, you can make a comfortable upper-middle class salary by being a fairly competent person. But to succeed in a very high way is as brutal as any other industry.
I agree with this.
The common ground unite us all.
Slogging your way through postdoc indentures isn't the only way into scientific research, just like starting in the mail room isn't the only way to become captain of industry. Science can also happen outside of acedemia, and you don't have to be a tenured lecturer to be a successful scientist.
Careers in science are just like careers in anything else: you can demonstrate your value to an organization, or your can start your own organization. There's no point in positioning yourself at the very top of the bell curve and then complaining that your career is unremarkable.
> If today’s successful academics habitually work late in the laboratory, they’re likely to advocate that the next generation does the same.
If all successful academics work late, then advocating others do the same seems reasonable?
The prey that a human is trying to hunt isn't gonna be up after sundown. Ancient humans can't hunt or forage or farm things late into the night.
What are humans build to do? And do we have an obligation to do what we are built for? Should I start persisting hunting [1] my meals? Should all my decision be dictated towards minimizing physical and mental health issues?
And it seems particular important to define what constitutes "success" (is it getting a PhD or actually doing something useful with it?) and the means to obtain it (does it depend on the approval of said late-working academics, who therefore may be inclined to reward others who share their beliefs that working late merits rewarding?)
In my experience in academia, it is the former. Working late has more to do with rites of passage than with successful research. When a colleague of mine defended his thesis and was looking for faculty positions, he listed a whole bunch of crappy things he had to do to appease his advisor, and said that he'll make his students do the same. When I asked him why, he said "If I have to go through crap, so should they."