Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

Getting a tenure track job offer in academia is a very tough prospect. I wish we academics would be more honest with incoming graduate students (or even at an earlier stage) about how much of a filter there is between 1st year grad school and the tenure-track job offer. It's not like there aren't other examples of dense filters in the working world. We just aren't very honest about it with our trainees.

The other thing we fail at as academics is helping trainees understand and take advantage of non-academic tracks after grad school, without attaching a stigma of failure to them. There are many, many ways to succeed, have a rewarding and exciting career, and contribute to society as a non-academic with a graduate degree... not to mention the higher salaries! Too many academics treat their trainees as failures if they even initiate this conversation. It needs to stop.

Imagine if students entering med school, who wanted to be pediatric neurosurgeons, for example (sub-sub-speciality requiring many post-med school years of study) found out at the end of all their training, at age 35 or 40, that oops, perhaps only 25% of them will ever get the job they want?

Spot on! The majority of grad students I've met thought that getting the sheepskin will solve all their problems. You are from a top department so you will surely get a tenure-track position, and that will materialize into an associate professor job in no time. The first time I realized that things were not that rosy was when I started applying for faculty jobs and read the book "A PhD is not enough".

One key reason for all this pain is very simple - too much competition. If we had large institutions like the old bell labs (being funded the same way), that would create demand for fresh PhDs and reduce some of the stress.

Academia is also considered by almost everyone I know to be a one way gate. If you get out, you can't come back in (unless you have achieved massive success and popularity on the outside). This is a sad state of affairs.

All this said, I think there are some very good results of getting a PhD. My social circle is full of ridiculously smart people. I think I'm trained to be unsatisfied until I better understand things, and I have more critical thinking today than when I started grad school.

When I started my PhD last year, my department head gave us a speech where he told us that college football players have better career prospects in the NFL than we will in academia. While that was probably a bit of hyperbole, it certainly made us realize how unrealistic most of our goals were.

This is fine ... but what he ought to do as well is to tell you that going through the program is still beneficial to you even if you don't thread the needle and land that academic job ... and that the Dept or University has resources that will help you find a non-academic job where you can make the most of your skills

That's rather presumptuous to assume that he didn't. In fact, he did and as part of our grad student resources, we have access to a whole host of school specific recruiters. While students from our programme regularly go into the postdoc mill, many go to work at startups, at industrial labs, in finance, at consulting firms, etc. Even more important, though, none of these options are denigrated.

wow that's awesome then! I wish more academic departments were like that

That's not a hyperbole, I totally agree with it. If you sum upp the yearly income of all university football coaches in the US, the amount should be more than triple of the cumulative income of all professors.

It isn't the filters most of you are dishonest about.

It is about the teaching euphemism: students are rather used as cheap labor for exploitation to be disposed of, when "too old" (read expensive: family etc.). I guess there is also a legal reason why trainees and interns are on the rise as opposed to students and initial probation periods.

I totally agree

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