Why do older grad students become bitter? | Hacker News Reader

Why do older grad students become bitter?

musings.lambdaloop.com

65 pointsHermanMartinus111 comments

I think the psychological aspect of first failure and injustice is rough on grad students.

Hypercompetitive to get into a good enough BS program to get into a MS program yet unlike post-BS tracks like med school, 98% aren't getting that job in academia and will fail out.

Its a pyramid with a very pointy top, much like college football usually doesn't lead to a NFL career.

Meanwhile the "failures" who were not smart enough to get into a good grad program are making incredible salaries etc.

98% of them when they don't get that tenure track professorship "Hey I listened to advice, obeyed, played the game of education, played it VERY hard, put in incredible hours, won top positions, now where's my reward I was promised?"

(I get this emotional response originally from my favorite server at Dennys who did a K12 education degree, busted her butt, got a top half of her class place, back then they were overproducing ed degrees to such an incredible extent she never got a teaching job, came home with her student loans to the same server job she had at Dennys when she was in high school. If you're going to try to climb a job pyramid where most people don't make it to the top, don't take out loans to do it... Anyway she sounded a lot like some MSCS students and grads I've met while programming.)

But if you don't take out loans, you almost certainly guarantee failure to reach the top of the pyramid.

So we're stuck with two bad choices. Either people take a risk on loans, or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

As a society, we have a third option: fund education as a public good.

I feel like the third option should be: not conflating credentials with education or ability.

Education is a funded public good, I won't say well funded, but funded nonetheless. Credentials are not a well funded public good, and shouldn't be in my opinion.

Not all education should be funded. Some subjects are in more demand, results in more jobs, and produce greater benefit to society. Government also should not offer loans, but rather grants to make education affordable.

Credentials should actually be something we should want to protect the general public.

Without credentials, how are non-experts able to tell real experts from charlatans?

I realize we don't seem to mind that in software, but software is still a new field, so even though it's known to have a lot of shoddy snake oil peddlers, people still put up with the situation. For now.

But for the most part, when any of use needs to hire an expert, if there were no credentials, what would we do? Count on our ability to somehow suss out expertise without actually having anything resembling expertise in the field? Word of mouth and hope for the best? Set a war chest aside for the inevitable lengthy lawsuits because surely selection will fail often?

I have friends that insist that acupuncture and chiro-mancy are medicine and not magic. But when I visit a physician, I like to know they're credentialed and have passed through accredited institutions.

Education wasn't always solely or even mainly about earning credentials. It's only when industry offset their responsibilities to train new employees to universities (and thus the taxpayer in publicly funded education), that suddenly education became entirely about getting a corresponding job and getting a piece of paper.

If you think of education as a public utility, something that unequivocally raises the standard of living, then it becomes about forming a population of educated and informed citizens who can, amongst other things, participate in democracy a lot more effectively.

Then what is the point of credentials? How do we prove a level of competency without having to test every single person, in depth, every single interview?

>or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

yes, but it doesn't reasonable that people should ruin themselves out of - what? Some patriotic duty to keep American schools egalitarian?

the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves, the academic pyramid population problem is a bad decision for society.

> the people taking risk on loans are making a bad decision for themselves

Everyone in the world takes risks. Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors?

Of course in retrospect it feels like a bad decision for those who didn't become tenure track professors, but nobody knows in advance who will beat the odds and who won't.

> Can you say it was a bad decision for the people who took the risk, took out loans, and eventually became tenured professors?

Yes. A decision can only be evaluated using what is known at the time, not what is later known in hindsight. Betting on an inside straight in poker is a bad bet, even if in one particular instance you got the card needed.

Ok, as long as you're willing to admit by this same logic that basically every billionaire in the world made a series of bad decisions that don't deserve to be celebrated.

How do you know in advance, as a 20something, that you're doctor material, or lawyer material, until you actually go through med school or law school?

What exactly is the "safe" route in life, Nostradamus?

First, I don't celebrate billionaires for their survivorship bias. Second, there isn't a safe route, but we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards.

As a 20-something, without going through med school or law school, you don't know if it's something you want to do. As a society, we want this hypothetical 20-something to go to med school or law school to find out. Therefore, we should make failure be an acceptable outcome, minimizing the risk for the potential student. In this case, that means publicly funding their education, such that dropping out doesn't place the student with a massive debt.

-------

For context on the PhD probabilities, a professor will typically be supervising 3-4 students at any given time. A professor's career is typically about 30-40 years, and the duration of a PhD program is about 4-6 years. Therefore, over the course of a professor's career, they will supervise around 25-ish freshly minted PhDs. With an average 2% annual population growth, the population will roughly double over that time period.

So on average, a professor will produce about 25 PhDs, after which there will be one empty position due to the professor retiring, and one new position due to a larger need for professors. Two spots for 25 people is not a good bet, if you do a PhD program will the goal of becoming a professor.

> there isn't a safe route

That's my point. You want to talk about personal "bad decisions", but what's a "good decision" and why, given that all of the lucrative careers require a series of risks in order to enter the field and become successful in it?

> we as society can avoid putting up additional hazards

Agreed, but I wasn't arguing against that, just against the criticism of individuals for having personal ambition and taking risks.

there will of course be a subset of people for whom the loans will be a very good risk, of those people some will fail despite it being a good risk - the unlucky.

there will be a subset of people for whom the loans are a bad risk but some of them will succeed - the lucky. It seems unlikely there would be many lucky in such a hotly contested area.

But most of the subset of people for whom the loans are a bad risk will fail.

> or the academic pyramid becomes populated with only those with burnable wealth.

I've got bad news, it already largely is like that. Maybe not via the person themself, but typically by their spouse then.

The most sensible option is that we remove academic credentials from job qualifications entirely. We’ve increasingly introduced non-credentialed ways to learn, and we have non-credentialed ways to determine what a candidate can do. So why are academic credentials related to our job applications at all? Why continue to enforce the whole miserable, class-hierarchy-reinforcing, metriculative education system at all?

The most straightforward option we have is to fund true public education, without credentials or metriculation. Simple, public class-by-class grades and recommended tests would suffice, and could be done with nothing more than HTTPS servers and .edu domains. We have no need for all the other cruft keeping people uneducated.

You can do a BS and work in the industry. Nobody forces you to get a job in the academia.

_Someone_ needs to get jobs in the academia, otherwise after a generation we will not have anyone to train and offer those BS degrees.

Or should we only allow those with plenty of capital to pursue academia?

Oh, um, many classes are taught by adjuncts and grad students now. PIs don't teach anymore, it's seen as a punishment for failure to get grant money.

I think in the example case she was trying to get a job in the teaching industry, not necessarily teaching ed students in academia. At least that was my read on it.

> You can do a BS and work in the industry.

There's no philosophy industry.

Which is one of the reasons sane people suggest not getting a philosophy degree.

One studies because of curiosity, not because of money.

One has to eat. Curiosity and money can go hand in hand. I've learned things out of curiosity but those things helped me build a career, have an income, feed me and my children. There's nothing bad in gaining money.

> One has to eat.

Philosophy grads are eating. I'm about to eat breakfast. Let's not exaggerate the situation. The issue here isn't that grad students are starving or homeless.

But nobody pursues a philosophy degree for the money.

It's a question of personal values and what one wants out of life. Many people of a philosophical predilection would find it unfulfilling, a waste, "insane", to devote themselves to wealth maximization.

>It's a question of personal values and what one wants out of life. Many people of a philosophical predilection would find it unfulfilling, a waste, "insane", to devote themselves to wealth maximization.

Arguably, If your goal in life is to be happy, from a philosophical perspective, maximizing wealth is a valid way to do it.

From a philosophical perspective, if your goal in life is to be happy, you will find it to be temporary at best or illusory. Better to strive for a meaningful life, with all the highs and lows that come with it. You have 70-80 years on this planet, is dying with the most toys the most fulfilling life you can think of?

>You have 70-80 years on this planet, is dying with the most toys the most fulfilling life you can think of?

No, but wealth can free your time to do what you wish. It can enable you to do things that are harder to do without said wealth.

You seem to be contradicting yourself. I want to pursue a philosophy degree, but you say no, I should pursue wealth maximization instead. Then you say wealth can free my time to do what I wish, but what I wish is to pursue a philosophy degree.

>There's no philosophy industry.

You can work in the diversity industry. As a chief diversity officer, for example.

> now where's my reward I was promised?"

These people deserve more without question, but at the end of the day if this is their reaction they didn't look forward far enough.

It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes. You're subjecting yourself to getting treated like absolute shit for a half a chance at a mediocre job.

I do not understand why anyone would ever choose to be an acedemic, at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions, because whenever that happens you don't get in on skill, you almost always get in based on some form of nepotism or politics, and that culture slowly destroys all organizations it's involved with.

> It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes.

Tell that to the professional athletes.

> at least one at any institution that has this sort of crazy imbalances of applicants and positions

Every institution has that imbalance. That's not particularly relevant, because grad students don't typically get jobs at their alma mater.

>> It's a slightly less bad decision than people who decide to try to become professional athletes.

> Tell that to the professional athletes.

I think the point they were trying to make is that you should talk not to professional athletes, but to those who tried to become one. Those who became professional athletes is just a tiny subset of those who tried. And within that, there is an even smaller subset of those who actually made it worth it for them (in terms of career earnings, getting out without debilitating lifelong injuries, etc.).

In a similar vein, you shouldn't be talking to Brad Pitt as a way to gauge your decision to become an actor, you should be talking to someone a bit more representative of the pool of those who tried to become actors (aka those who failed to get there, which is the vast majority).

It's not a question of advice. Of course take a wide variety of advice.

The question is whether it's a "bad decision" to pursue a highly competitive field, despite knowing the odds are against you, if you think you might have the talent to make it. I'm not convinced that it's a bad decision. Risky? Yes. Bad? That's debatable.

Did Brad Pitt make a bad decision? According to the logic that a big risk is never worth it, then he made a bad decision. But I don't agree with that. And I don't agree that failed actors necessarily made a bad decision either.

As I stated in another comment, there is no safe, guaranteed path in life. It's risk all the way down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35196444

Should nobody ever become an actor? Nobody an athlete? Nobody a philosopher? Or are you going to say, only those kids born into wealth? In other words, non-wealthy kids don't ever get to have any ambition?

Thanks for elaborating, I actually fully agree with the points you've made here.

I am so tired of hearing people telling others "the safe ways" of moving forward. If you actually know the risk and knowingly take it, I respect it a lot, regardless off how it pans out.

And I believe that optimizing for entirely "risk-minimizing" choices is a path to mediocrity and feeling unsatisfied in the long-term (and, often enough, limiting your overall potential heavily), as well as missing out on tons of opportunities.

Mind you, there is nothing wrong with mediocrity, but a lot of people who end up going down that path end up there unwillingly and, commonly, due to having an almost zero-tolerance risk aversion.

> I do not understand why anyone would ever choose to be an acedemic,...

When you're young and don't know enough it's easy to look up to the "smartest" people you know at the time, which are often your teachers and other university celebrities. And while at college, if you don't have any serious plans, masters and so forth seems like easy options going forward. Your university mentors will even make you believe it is a good choice. Been there myself. I regret it. Surrounded by academics while my friends and relatives are just "normal", I had a very one-sided worldview.

On the bright side, I think more are quitting the academe recently, realizing it is not worth it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26414881

There is one aspect that was not touched on, which I find to be quite cruel to be honest. There is an obsession with forcing academics to move around. If you do your undergrad in one university, then you should pack your bags and move to another country to do your Ph.d at another university and then do it again for all your Post. docs. (I am not sure if this is more of an EU thing or if it is a worldwide phenomenon).

Abandoning your entire life and moving to another country is hard and it takes a huge toll on your mental well being, especially as you start approaching your 30s. And it just plain makes life harder, when the circumstances are hard enough already. And all of this for what specific benefit exactly? This aspect is so ingrained that, for example I see job ads, where they say, "to be eligible you should not have spent the last x years studying or working in this country". In fact let me quote:

• Must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Germany for more than 1 year out of the last 3 years. This is in line with standard mobility criteria for a standard Doctoral Training Network.

And then a couple of lines below they boast about a family-friendly environment, and how they prioritize disadvantaged individuals, without a hint of irony. It is neither family-friendly nor a suitable position for disadvantaged individuals if you force them to move away from their support networks to a foreign country.

Yes absolutely this! This is 100% a thing in the US as well. Moving around between undergrad and PhD has wrecked my social life. Many of the students in my program are not doing a postdoc because they don't want to move out of Seattle. And I mean, why should they?

In the US, the only places where you could reasonably stay in the same place and switch institutions are LA (and surrounding area), Boston, and New York. Anywhere else you're switching states and potentially leaving friends, family, and loved ones behind. It's really hard.

Burnout + Isolation + Financial burden + Career uncertainty + Unrealistic expectations = disillusioned old phd student

As somebody from the UK, six years feels such a long time. Our PhDs are usually three years, although there's more specialisation earlier on at the undergraduate levels, and people might have done masters first, so you are launched straight into research pretty much when you start. You generally have four years from the start to submit your thesis and three years of funding, although I don't know if that has changed at all since I did mine.

I knew two years into my PhD that it wasn't what I wanted to do - I did see it to the end as I was concerned how it would look on my CV if I quit (not sure if that was a good decision or not, but I think I am glad I did finish it!). But I think it'd have been really hard if it had been four more years rather than just another one or two.

In the US, PhD programs will usually be combined with the Masters, and will start with ~2 years of coursework. This can cause no end of communication issues when discussing how far one is along a PhD.

Can you leave with a Masters after two years then? I was vaguely aware that Grad School in the US wasn't quite equivalent to here. I went straight from my undergraduate to my PhD, but I guess because of the earlier specialisation that the second half of my undergraduate was vaguely similar to a Masters in the US say.

Yes, granting a Masters after the completion of required coursework is commonplace on the way to a PhD, regardless of whether you leave or stay in the program.

Yes, but there isn't that much of a point to it. For fields where the terminal degree is a Masters (e.g. Master of Fine Arts, Master of Business Administration), there's usually some jobs that will require them. For fields where the terminal degrees is a PhD (e.g. STEM fields), there isn't much you can do with a Masters that you couldn't have done with a Bachelors.

> A decent STEM PhD student stipend in the US is about $40k.

I don't know where that number comes from. In most universities you'd be looking at $20k-lower 30k, sometimes less. In fact, in public schools, salaries for teaching assistants/research assistants are public data and people can look them up.

It depends on how you want to compute the stipend. Many stipends are officially $50K or more but that's because they include the tuition (which is kind of silly as most PhD students aren't really students in the traditional sense beyond the first year or two, but still officially have to pay tuition). But yes, students are unlikely to see more than lower $30K as actual pay as the tuition is generally taken out automatically.

To expand on this, IIRC postdocs cost professors about the same, but have double the salary, only because the school isn't taking the "tuition" cut. Of course, the incoming grant money to pay for the postdoc is still "taxed" at 50% by the university. So the lowly PhD student is probably only seeing 25% of what they're costing the government.

(for CS) You can find more numbers from Jeff Huang's Computer Science Open Data, which posts verified stipends: [0]

[0] https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#verified-c...

Yes - here in the UK a typical STEM PhD stipend is £17,668 [1] or $21,400

It's tax-free, and you don't have to pay any tuition fees - but it's nowhere near $40k.

[1] https://www.ukri.org/what-we-offer/developing-people-and-ski...

Britain really undervalues PhD students.

PhD students at the University of Copenhagen earn 36,000DKK/month, which after taxes works out to around £34,000 or $40,000 per year. They are considered normal employees with a pension, holiday etc.

German PhD salaries seem only slightly lower, but taxes and living costs are also lower, so it's probably similar or slightly better.

https://uniavisen.dk/en/salaries-at-the-university-of-copenh...

https://academicpositions.com/career-advice/phd-postdoc-and-...

That's true, I meant to write that it's on the upper end. I think my current stipend is about $36k for a neuroscience PhD in Seattle.

I've updated it to this: > A "good" STEM PhD student stipend in the US is about $35k. Note that many schools pay below this.

overwork, bad salaries, competition, bad relationship with supervisors are often mentioned but I think this is not the whole picture.

I would focus more on research itself. Research can be really shitty. It's extremely open ended, so you may be a brilliant student with exams, but feel clueless about what to do when there is no clear problem and no clear solution.

Science is now extremely incremental compared to 50 years ago, meaning that you work on a tiny problem and you only try to take it forward by epsilon. This is different from the idea we often have of science as "eureka!" and revolutionary changes of paradigm. Most of our time we only aim to publish some paper on something, and move on, even without fully believing in what we're trying hard to convince reviewers of. Which is a horrible feeling.

All this causes one clear phenomenon: lack of motivation. Motivation is essential for any hard job. But it's very very hard to keep motivation high, let's be honest, on working like crazy on some project that ends up in a paper that probably almost nobody will ever read.

I don't ever want to do that again. And it's not about the salary, or my boss, or working long hours (I don't).

As a final year PhD student I wholeheartedly agree with this.

That alone makes it very rough to keep up the high level of motivation. And then add the other quirks of academia on top of that.

Could you elucidate the other quirks for us? I'd be interested to know your experiences.

Sorry if this comes off as gruff, I honestly do want to hear.

- Nepotism

- A high proportion of people from privileged backgrounds

- The academic publishing process (although this has gotten better over the years with more open access). But in traditional, and usually more "esteemed" journals, you pay to submit your work (want it open access? Please pay 9500€! That is no joke, this is Nature's open access fee.), you peer-review others' papers for free ("service to the academic community"), and then you pay to read articles (or your university does). The journals profit. With insane margins.

- It happens that you discuss the same problem, in the same way, saying almost the same sentences many times over the span of months/years. The feeling of running in circles is very common and I find it exhausting.

- Senior people can hold an extreme level of power over the careers of more junior people. You're so specialised that it can happen that there are just like 5 other places on the world where your kind of research happens. You don't want to move away, but still want tenure? You're at the complete mercy of your group leader.

- Being almost expected to move around every 1-3 years as a postdoc when you're in your late 20s / early 30s. This can be very enriching and you see the world and meet many diverse people, but can also be very isolating and depressing depending on your personality and how well your location fits you. And is very rough on relationships.

That's a great point!

Honestly this was a quick post I wrote to practice writing and wrote it from my own personal experiences.

I agree with you about research being really open ended, which makes it hard. Several of us have dealt with depression after an experiment we worked on for 2 years abruptly failed.

I disagree about science being more incremental than 50 years ago. I think we tend to read only read the highlights from the past and it makes it feel like everything was revolutionary. There were incremental changes in the past and we have revolutions in the present.

In my field, Drosophila neuroscience, our methods have completely changed between when I started 5 years ago and now. We can now track all joints of a moving fly in 3D. The tools to image neural activity are literally 10x better (in terms of SNR and speed). We have the connectome for (half of) an adult fly brain and complete larval brain connectome, which is changing how we look at these circuits. We have identified all the motor neurons in the ventral nerve cord of the fly.

> We can now track all joints of a moving fly in 3D. The tools to image neural activity are literally 10x better

This sounds like another blog post I’d dive into…

Ohh good idea. Will write it sometime.

If you're interested in the progress in animal tracking, I wrote a post summarizing some up and coming research here: https://writing.lambdaloop.com/posts/cv4animals-2021/

I am, thanks for sharing!

>Only 15% of postdocs end up being tenure-track faculty.

It's strange that the most intelligent people don't overcome that limit. There are billions of people on earth who could benefit from education to become more productive. A share of that gain could pay for many more 'tenure-tracks', they just wouldn't be called like that.

Being a professor is much, much more about research than about education. You don't normally become a professor because you're good at teaching, nor because you love teaching (or maybe you do, but not only that). This is a bit sad actually, as I am an odd case of an academic that thinks teaching is much more important and even interesting than research. It's changing a bit in that positions that are research-only or teaching-only are starting to appear.

It's just purely about the numbers. A professor, in a 50-year career, can produce 100 PhDs from a large research group. At steady state, those 100 PhDs are competing for one professorship slot. Even "unproductive" professors can produce 20 PhDs.

I know this heavily depends on the location, but at our university most professors weren't there to teach students. Giving lectures was more like the price of entry, something that has to be done to keep the machine alive. Their actual job and passion was doing research, publishing highly-cited papers, going to conferences, and furthering their and by extension their university's reputation.

It might be different if being a grad student was about giving awesome lectures, but usually it's about doing awesome research; and those that are best at doing and publishing research then get tenure-track.

Only 15% of postdocs end up being tenure-track faculty.

And what percentage of PhD graduates get postdoctoral positions? I saw a statistic somewhere (sorry, no source at the moment) that showed something like 2% of PhDs actually making it to a faculty position.

As I was told, pretty much any PhD graduate can get a postdoc somewhere. PhD -> postdoc transition is really about whether you want to stay in academia at all. From my rough impressions, maybe about 10% of the grad students I know are thinking of doing a postdoc, which would be 10% * 15% = 1.5% of PhDs making it to faculty. That roughly matches the statistic you have.

I think the 15% of postdocs becoming faculty statistic really sticks with me, because these are already preselected for wanting to become faculty and even within that pool, only 15% can make it. It's quite demoralizing.

Another factor I’ve wondered in both myself and others: those who choose to be grad students often do so because of irrational unresolved issues or dissatisfactions with life. Grad work doesn’t help with these issues at all, only adds more problems or compounds them, and leaves you with a good amount of bitterness that you might not even understand.

Increased age or progress increases the chance that these unresolved issues are manifesting or compounding.

For me, I was looking for things in academia that just weren’t there, and I was too dumb to know what I was really looking for.

> those who choose to be grad students often do so because of irrational unresolved issues or dissatisfactions with life

Citation very much needed.

I don't know if there is any data on this (I would be really interested!), but anecdotally I would agree. I see high avoidant/anxious/ADHD traits in many colleagues and fellow researchers. In my field certainly way above average levels of the general population.

And I myself am a bit guilty of becoming so competitive and entering grad school partially because of unresolved issues.

I’m just waiting for my depressing postdoc to end so I can take the money and then im out of here. Have hated every moment of it, considered suicide multiple times, etc. Very bad

You considered suicide but not quitting? You're still waiting for your contract to end? I don't understand.

It’s guaranteed money for the next year and a half and I’m basically totally isolated with no expectations of me actually doing anything. In addition, I will be forced to leave the country if I quit. Therefore it makes no sense to quit. Also there is not anything else I want to do. I would not be less suicidal if I quit

I know it never seems like the right time to do anything else than moving forward, but please seek help.

I am on the waiting list for therapy for a year. They told me it would be a year. I rang a couple weeks ago and they told me it would be another year. Help is not available. God knows I’ve tried

EDIT: Why downvote? What am I supposed to do?...I'm so tired

let me guess - it's in Germany.

Correct

Not sure if it would help, but if you're around the Berlin area and want to grab a beer or coffee with another guy that left academia for the industry (and still has delusions that someday will submit his thesis), hit me up.

Isolation is a real problem in this country. Did you also make the mistake of moving to a small city? I spent my last four years at a TU in a small city and it was horrible here. Just one more general problem with this country.

I do understand how do you feel. I quit my PhD, it was crazy.

Then the life was better, having normal jobs. Now I have another very difficult situation in life and there is no chance to get professional help. At least some friends are helping.

If you are from south Germany, let me know, we can grab a beer and talk. The life will be better again!

Ignore the downvotes, I'm not sure which country you are in but there are other suicide prevention services in most of them, phone helplines, charities and other options.

And while I know that you don't feel like you have energy to seek for help, please consider do a Google search and reach out to one of the helplines, they will help you find a way out and figure out how you can get some form of help on a shorter notice. Also you have done the first step which is usually the hardest, realised you need help.

Upvoted you to counter the down votes, if it does indeed work that way. Please connect with the guy who has offered to met you.

To the mods: Agreed that making a system that satisfies everybody is difficult, but one cannot in good conscience have a system where a mob might have it's way.

But suicide being your only other perceived alternative means something isn't right. Please get some help - your life is worth more than that.

Man, I'm sorry to break it to you in this way, but it's up to you to make your life and research interesting. Don't waste time with the bullshit. Try to solve real problems and work towards concretising them.

I’m simply not interested anymore

I feel you. And you know what, it's really ok. It's difficult to accept because sometimes our disciplines have become parts of our identity. But the moment I accepted that I didn't need to love it, and I could move on and do many exciting things with my good education, life became so much better.

Enjoy the rest of your postdoc. Do what you need to do without stressing too much. Also look at the other things in it that you may like: perhaps working with students, perhaps writing an open source software, perhaps volunteering for some extra teaching duty if you hate research, etc. A postdoc can be many things. This is what I'm doing now.

And if you can't wait, start looking for jobs and then quit. Looking for jobs can in itself be uplifting.

Sorry for the preachy tone -- I don't know your situation and I'm more telling you about mine. In the end that's how I managed and it went ok.

> Try to solve real problems

All the engineers working on AdTech and surveillance capitalism solving real problems with billion dollar budgets

All the PhDs researching new physics and fighting for scraps of funding be losers /s

Because when you find a new law of physics you can't patent it.

But if you make a newfangled device thanks to that new physics law you can put a nice patent on it and earn millions

> When I entered grad school, I noticed that the older grad students just seemed... oddly bitter? The 6th years were living in a different world from us 1st years

> You may need to move on for the sake of your life, but your experiments aren't working and the committee says you need one more paper to graduate. It's really hard to balance this, especially combined with the lack of money.

> Only 15% of postdocs end up being tenure-track faculty

From an engineer's point of view, working for 6 years at some organization with no significant professional growth sounds dystopian.

I can't picture why someone with above average work ethic and very likely intelligence would put themselves through that.

Downvote me as much as you want, but there is something seriously wrong in a society that tolerates these schemes.

> Downvote me as much as you want

Protip: This kind of comment almost always becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

"Please don't comment about the voting on comments." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> From an engineer's point of view, working for 6 years at some organization with no significant professional growth sounds dystopian.

To be fair, they do give you a masters degree after 2 years and a doctorate after 6, and expect you to spend loads of your time developing your knowledge.

That's some of the most measurable and transferable professional development out there. The problem is you get paid a pittance.

> something seriously wrong in a society that tolerates these schemes

“Society” isn’t tolerating it, it’s the grad students that are tolerating it. Society doesn’t know and wouldn’t care if they did.

Your general point is spot on. Why put yourself through that?

I found myself nodding in agreement, as this all sounds very familiar to me as a former graduate student (except the final "applications of science" section, because I was in philosophy).

I feel like most people have to evaluate their chances to bail out once in a while, as they get lost in their path. It prevents hours, days and years of useless anxiety for the weaker of us.

For what it's worth, you don't have to do a PhD where you making starvation wages. There are plenty of well paying PhD programs in Scandinavian countries, The Netherlands, etc. During my PhD in Norway I made approx. 55k USD before taxes. This paid for a flat by myself, traveling on holidays to my home country, etc.

Oh this is wild, I didn't expect this to make it anywhere outside of my little site. Thanks for dropping in!

Possibly b/c of the first graph at

"Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists"

https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/?

But… Does it become better after leaving academia? I am just done with my PhD and will leave for industry in 1 month. Even having finished my PhD, I can’t see light at the end of the tunnel. Suggestions?

They... don't ?

I don't know where the person is studying, but it's not a general phenomenon.

I have still students around me, and the number of years don't seem to make them more or less bitters.

A long time since I was a Research Associate at a UK university (salaried short term contract) and trying to finish a PhD and I remember someone from outside of academia describing me as "hyper cynical" - that was after 5 years or so.

I left, co-founded a startup and never regretted leaving academia.

Edit: That comment didn't make me leave but it does rather reflect my state of mind at the time - which was pretty bitter....

5 of my friends did a phd, 4 of them had a clinically diagnosed depression during phd

If you're in a teaching position and students' evaluation depends on you remember that you won't see all that much genuine interactions, as many will try to appear at their best

To add to the anecdata, it is very much a general thing. Most grad students I've encountered were pretty bitter by year 3/4.

If you have a Facebook account you can see memes about grad school life in the "High Impact PhD memes" page. Relatable

1. If you put a sixth grader in second grade, they wont be happy because they are doing a lot less than they should and could be doing. I think this feeling applies for sixth year students, that know they could be starting a real job or building a family.

2. Academia is built on the the theoretical.

Learning is cool, and theories are nice, and colleges are full of kids that don't bear the responsibility of their actions. But most people eventually get the nagging and uncomfortable suspicion that the world that they are being sold doesn't quite match up to reality. A feeling associated with bitterness, cynicism, and denial.

OT> IMO, this one reason why academia is so strongly leftist. Socialism and Communism are theoretically utopian, but can never work in the real world. Ditto to monetary theory (if it was so reliable, the profs would all be rich and retired), and liberalism (unfortunately, since I really buy into the theory), and other agendas that are popular on campus.

Why in the world did you think it was a good idea to turn this into a partisan political debate?

As someone who straddles the fence, trying to get as much theoretical utopia into the messy world we live in as possible, I don't see it as "for" and against", nor as a partisan debate.

I'm a former professor, and my colleagues agreed with the description above, just disagreed how much utopia can be shoehorned in. As far as explaining dissatisfaction of a sixth year, there is something of the dawning of reality in it, and I think both sides of the political spectrum can agree to that.

If you think I should edit the comment, I will.

Good observations....

Do you think the fundamental problem lies within the idea of utopia?

I highly recommend Jan Valtin's book, recently on HN: https://thebaffler.com/latest/unflinching-prisoners-of-a-gra...

It is the biography of German Communist in WWII. To quote from the review "few books have ever done a finer or more honest job of describing the appeal and disappointments of ideology. "

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