Ask HN: What is life like at a UARC? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is life like at a UARC?

6 pointsipunchghosts4 comments

I have a PhD and was offered a position as a researcher at a UARC in the United States. UARCs are university affiliated research centers setup by the US DoD to act as a liaison between DoD and academia. However, after interviewing and speaking with a few employees of a competing UARC, these places seem like research dead-ends mostly acting like a glorified defense contractor.

I would like to do research and publish. HR tells me this is a great place to do these thing but when I check IEEE and Google scholar, i cant find any publications of authors from this institution. Plus, the interviews made it seem like the work is mostly doing data analysis or writing software. Nothing there lead me to believe I would be doing research day in and day out.

Does anyone on HN work for a UARC? Do you like it? How much research do you do?

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My take is this.

Some people who work at defense contractors find their work meaningful and are really happy. (e.g. thanks to you a soldier came home, or one of our adversaries hasn't invaded a country they might want to invade) On the other hand I was at a wedding this weekend and met an electronics test engineer who thought the people he was working with at a major defense contractor were completely undisciplined and thought AMZN (!) which he was at now, was a better workplace. I know another person who worked on assorted ill-fated projects like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM2001_Crusader

for quite a while before getting her dream job at NASA (she's a tech lead on a project to fly samples back from Mars)

Some people think applying for grants and dealing with academic publishing is a whole lot of BS and might find that UARC a great place to work. It sounds like writing papers is important to you and if that's the case you should be looking for a different job.

I worked at a UARC in Maryland about 10 years ago, as an assistant (so take my words with a grain of salt). Among the PhDs we hired, there were some people who struggled in their job search because they did laborious research that didn't yield a lot of publications. Others were coming from industry (and then returned to industry research). My PI came to the center because he was denied tenure on the campus we were affiliated with.

Our research projects had a heavy focus on application and mostly yielded technical reports, not publications. We had to write a lot of BS boilerplate about how our projects contributed to national security.

I got some co-author credits and a few conference posters out of the experience, but it was hard to pretend that it was high-impact research.

My read is that a UARC is a crossroads for academics who aren't doing great in their careers and are on the way out into private industry or defense jobs.

Thank you for your response.

How was your PI funded?

Entirely through the corresponding research directorate. We had a stressful period once a year securing renewed funding, but the actual money was pretty consistent year to year, and it was allocated per "department," not per PI or per project. You are likely to avoid spending much time on grant applications, but you are beholden to one big grantmaker.

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