Goodbye Academia
anothersb.blogspot.co.uk
anothersb.blogspot.co.uk
The really concerning potential consequence of this is that it could result in a dearth of innovation in cures for diseases, and we won't see the affect of losses until 5 or 10 years down the road. No one will fund a biotech startup that's not backed by MDs or PhDs and academia-approved proof-of-concept results. Good luck getting that when everyone is running for the lifeboats.
Underlying your comment is the assumption that every one wants the hedge fund (or other) job. One of the allures of academia is the prospect of doing fundamental research. You ignore that many people derive satisfaction from doing fundamental research that has the potential to be widely used across the research community (and possibly, for product development, e.g. industry labs, some government labs). It is simplistic to dismiss academia as a feudalistic system. There are merits, demerits, and other nuances.
Also, there are, figuratively speaking, thousands of academic fields, each with its own system and culture. For example, academic jobs are plentiful for PhD graduates in these areas (in my experience): information technology/information systems (as opposed to computer science), management, accounting, finance, organizational behavior, etc.
A summary dismissal of academia as 'feudal', especially when such an assessment underlies 'advice' is an unnecessary exaggeration.
It's also a false allure: the problem is that fundamental research requires funding, and the OP is pointing out that he can't get it. He'll be in essence locked out of research and not make a lot of money at it.
This is like saying, "One of the allures of acting is the prospect of being famous and sleeping with lots of fans." On the one hand it's true; on the other, it's very unlikely.
Also, your comment ignores the fact that OP is in just one nook of academia. Further, OP is one data point in that one nook of academia. That he is the top institutes doesn't 'weight' his opinion either way, in the grand scheme of things.
Since the crisis struck in 2009 the quality of candidates that are being interviewed at my second-tier state school is just astounding. They are expected to bring funding in, or else they are out, but they will not manage, and considering the quality of graduate students there, they will not be able to be any productive.
Academia is in a state of transition, and it seems that no one knows what the endgame will look like. University presidents throughout the country are betting on growth as the way out of the crisis, more students means more tuition, and more professors means more grants. It doesn't look sustainable, and personally I see no way forward. It seems wise to stay away.
Agree (in that what you are saying makes sense. I don't have unfortunately (or maybe I should say fortunately) have personal experience in those particular job markets.)
In any case they appear to be pyramid type systems of success [1](and for that matter athletics are similar to this, right?) Things which many people strive for but few people actually achieve what they set out to achieve (throw startups into this mix as opposed to lifestyle type businesses).
One thing that these pursuits have in common is that money really isn't the primarily motivator in that while becoming a rock star may give you money (or an athlete or a top academic) I always thought that it was more the sense of accomplishment and fame that was much more important. Joe Dimaggio made quite a bit of money in his day but nowhere near what athletes today make but yet many people wanted to play baseball back then.
[1] Perhaps someone could point out the right phrase for this concept. I'm looking for the word that describes professions where people are generally driven to work hard believing they will be the ones that become famous or well known or "the best".
A related theory is that technology and globalization has, and will, make more and more industries 'winner take all'.
Equity/stock traders is one of them because of legislation that fixes the commission price per lot (so the banks cannot really use information asymmetry as an advantage) Not all banking is as profitable as people think it is
I consider myself extraordinarily lucky. I can point to many different instances of luck that enabled me to be where I am now. Hard work and talent are a given, but among those that work hard and are talented, there's a lot of blind luck that determines who gets the few positions that are available. I continually remind myself not to fall prey to the narrative fallacy, and think that I was somehow "destined" for my current position, and that I got here entirely because of my own work. I was not, and I did not.
I know people who did not land those academic positions, and are either in industry not doing research, or stuck in the post-doc waiting room.
Pencil, paper, and maybe some Amazon EC2 time as opposed to a bunch of lab equipment and other materials.
I was just making an offhand remark about how R&D gigs in industry for math/cs might be 'easier' to come by because their salary doesn't necessarily compete with lab costs.
These people got funded graduate spots in the best departments in the world, beating out others who obtained first-class degrees (4.0 for the North Americans) and worked their entire lives towards this dream.
How does this happen? Do you want to be the guy who refused to supervise the daughter of the nth most important person in your field? A man who has given you important references in the past and may do so again? When this relationship could get you even closer to the Will Smith of your field? This is good old fashioned corrupt nepotism for all the good old fashioned reasons.
Now, these people are both genetically and environmentally predisposed to be much better than average at this work. Sometimes it works out well. It is possible that this is a good outcome for science. But is it fair? It is not.
(Written as a working prof who had no academic connection advantages. I acknowledge that being white, male and having English as a first language was not a a bad place to start from).
I never witnessed literal nepotism where family relations were involved. But, this definitely does happen when it comes to academic "family"- a famous advisor's "son" or "daughter" usually has a significant edge.
If I parse correctly that you're in academia, you should really make more effort to understand potential sources of bias.
They got into academia because they were able to find plenty of funding. This does not imply that people who offer hard work and talent will typically find funding.
I am in electrical engineering. DoD is by far the largest source of funds. Admittedly, hunting for research funds involves a different set of skills than 'doing great research'. But these skills are learn-able and can go a long way in helping one's career.
As an individual, if you find yourself in an institution that's using allocation by sacrifice, get out. "I will work harder" a la Boxer from Animal Farm makes things worse not better.
This is not necessarily true. At least in life sciences, there is a big element of pure, dumb luck. Biological systems are inherently noisy, and no matter how diligent we try to be about our processes and protocols, there is always luck.
I spent nearly two years of my life performing a single protocol (an endocytic receptor internallization assay) and the line between "good results" and "wasted a week" was incredibly thin. Some things just require luck to work out, no matter how careful you are.
I left academic biology because I didn't want luck playing into my career. In academic biology you must be incredibly smart, incredibly dedicated, willing to work long hours with little pay, AND be incredibly lucky.
I looked around at the post-docs in my department (at MIT, mind you) and saw brilliant people who would never produce a top-tier article, who had spent so long in their post-doc that they had no chance of ever becoming a professor. They would probably wash out to some industry job at Merck testing cholesterol drugs after wasting 10 years of their life pursuing some fictitious dream.
Truth be told, I wasn't as brilliant as most of the people around me, so I made a judgment call and left. It was the right decision, I'm happier than ever (and actually make money too).
In biology, yeah, although I think what a lot of people here are doing is reading stories about high-capital-cost fields (experimental physics, biochem, etc.) and then applying it to their own field, which on HN is mostly computer science. CS research really does not require a lot of funding, outside of specific areas (mostly hardware and robotics stuff). Also, because of a robust industry hiring many people away, the supply/demand situation in CS academia is not as bad, and you can always join them and go to Google/Palantir/Microsoft/whatever if things don't work out. I don't bring in much in the way of grants and I get by just fine, because computers don't cost a lot in 2014, and I don't do the kind of research that requires armies of minions. If I need a 10-computer cluster to run something computationally intensive for a few days, cloud costs are so low nowadays that I can just pay for that out of pocket, never mind trying to figure out how to get it paid by a grant.
Getting a decent job in CS academia where you have some time and freedom to actually pursue research is not at all like winning the lottery. Especially if your focus is not just the top 20 universities and being a famous MIT professor with a big lab. There are many, many places with small to medium-sized CS departments, which will pay you a modest salary and let you do whatever you want.
Now if you're a biologist, the conditions in biology academia are the relevant comparison. But my impression, based on looking at what YC companies are doing, is that most people deciding between YC and grad school are in either CS or business, not the natural sciences.
Postdocs, and computing time, and grad students, and your salary are all things that need to be supported by grant money.
It might be easier, but to assert it's easy is flawed.
The reason I'm asking is my gf is doing her PhD in that area, and I don't think her job prospects are very clear.
Or to be more precise, I don't need employees. I do work with other people, but they aren't my staff. I do some collaborative projects with colleagues, work with masters students doing their masters theses if they're interested (usually 3-5/semester are interested in working on either my projects, or projects I'm interested in), and also work with some people in industry.
Some kinds of research require an army of minions, but I don't really need employees to do mine. In fact generally I prefer having a smaller number of collaborators so I can really be a researcher doing research and writing papers myself, not a research manager, the kind of professor who's the last author on papers written by their students and postdocs. The institution I'm at doesn't expect American-R1-style large labs, so I can do that. Fortunately there are a pretty wide range of institutions with CS departments with different expectations, so there is quite a bit of choice.
When I do produce code, I produce prototype code myself or working together with masters students. When the goal is to produce robust, end-user-ready software, I prefer one of two approaches: 1) work within an existing open-source codebase, contributing improvements upstream; or 2) collaborate with a company to turn a prototype into something polished and end-user-ready. Even if I had a bunch of funding, I don't think I'm in a good position to produce and maintain polished end-user-ready software. Academic software has a habit of going unmaintained when the PhD student graduates or the NSF/EU project ends, and research funding isn't really aligned with production needs. John Regehr talks a bit about that here: http://blog.regehr.org/archives/1058. So I tend to stick with either one-off prototypes, or find a way to collaborate with someone (open-source community, company) that is better positioned to maintain software.
Other decisions are also perfectly valid, just given resources and interests I don't see maintaining essentially a software-production company within academia, with paid staff, as feasible for me personally.
I assume that those people are unlikely to be discouraged, especially those that are stubborn and motivated enough to complete the degree. So I also actively discourage people from doing a PhD, even though I like my job.
That's not at all what he's saying. He's advising people to take the hedge fund job even though they want to work in academia.
Also, the pay after gaining a PHD in a certain field is most certainly worth it.
The pay "in a certain field" is irrelevant; the article is about pay and working conditions in academia.
A PhD is not a continuation of undergraduate or independent study in a subject. It is a career with the tedium of other careers, and then some because so many other people are trying to do the same thing you are. You may love the subject now, but that doesn't mean you are going to be able to do the research you want. At various points in your career you have to do what your adviser wants, manage departmental politics, get funding and crank out publications. Maybe love of the subject helps you stick to it, but more likely it doesn't make a lot of practical difference once it's a tedious job you do every day.
The pay after spending an equal amount of time in any other career with the same background is likely to be better.
i'm not saying the average joe shouldn't get into the university, i'm not even saying the others should get preferential treatment, but what benefit is it to be packed in basics classes that you don't need to anyway? you don't get to skip classes you already know, you have to sit through them, and waste your time. you take away time that could be used to teach the less gifted. you fill a spot which is valuable in the beginning, at the end not so much, because most will have dropped out by then.
i believe that we need to get away from the notion that everyone should study exactly the same. i don't see how it makes sense at all. and the same goes for phd's. which is essentially a pretty static period of underpaid work.
but that would take effort wouldn't it?
When I chose where to study (for undergrad), a major factor in the decision was minimizing the amount of coursework I would have to repeat.
The big advantage is pretty much all of what I'm doing now is new and relevant material, and its great!
As a new assistant professor (as of two months ago), I do have to apply for lots of grants, but in the end, the funding is not so bleak that it's hopeless (got our first grant last week). It does however require me to pick and choose only the most promising projects that can produce results in the near-ish term (2-3 years) and apply technologies we are developing for the larger end-goals to problems in human health and disease. I think that's a fair tradeoff for now. I think we will be able to do the longer-term projects more slowly on the side as well as interface with startups and companies to attack commercial problems where it makes sense.
The problems we face today are because we hit a steady-state in funding, rather than continuing to grow as we've done over previous decades. One can argue we should continue to grow, but at some point we are going to hit a steady-state again and the situation will be the same. There are many interesting proposals on how best to reach a better structure for steady-state funding, but in the end, hard decisions like the one the OP made are going to continue being just that; hard decisions. I think the positive of the whole thing is that there are other options that grad students/post-docs can now consider in biology that aren't a tenure-track position, and that overall is a good thing.
>...funding is not so bleak that it's hopeless. [It] does however require me to pick and choose only the most promising projects
I feel part of the reason for the anger shown in this conversation is the definition of "academic freedom." Academia is more free than other avenues of research, but it isn't completely free; your grants have to be convincing enough to get funded, and this is how the system was built. This distinction can be subtle, but can only be seen with a certain degree of level-headedness.
Unfortunately, not every PhD student can expect to get a well-paid job outside academia.
Inspected rationally, this sort of national gamble is the definition of insanity. It wasn't "American Exceptionalism" that made the U.S.A what it is, but an unprecedented leve of concerted investment by the state into science and technology over the past century.
Let's see where this grand experiment leads us.
Relevant HN post from earlier, where I elaborate on this issue further:
Many great things in the past came from private research. Today's technology companies will probably be forced to invest more in their in-house research rather than acquiring competitors at sky-high prices.
Separately - is this an issue with just new scientists, or existing ones too? The useful data would be "Total NIH funding" and "Per scientist funding." My anecdotal (and quite possibly unrepresentative!) data is that the total pie is staying the same size, but going to a set of existing researchers in a "Winner Takes All" manner. It's not conducive to new independent researchers, but perhaps we are creating too many for a fixed pie of research money.
Alternatively, should tuition be funding research if we are now in the business of producing researchers for the private sector?
It just seems to me that long term science as a group of scientists begging for government funding is no longer sustainable.
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/04/americas-pa...
It sounds like when the free market competes with the NIH for talent, the NIH wins. Perhaps the slowdown in NIH growth can incent folks with that skillset to go into medicine.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1881346585/protocolsio-...
My Academic path has been tortured; graduated from a really good undergrad, went to an even better grad school (my cohort is basically placed as faculty at places like Berkeley, Stanford, UCSD, TSRI, etc). But in grad school I lost time cleaning up after an irresponsible grad student (who, btw, is faculty at UW) and only published two papers that aren't flashy but are solid, and in second-tier journals. Did an amazing first postdoc actually possibly helping the world (pushing forward a drug candidate), at a third-tier school - since due to the economic collapse, was hard to get a job/good position in 2009. One publication, second-tier journal. Did a more amazing second "postdoc" (actually hired as a BS biologist, via craigslist) under a nobel laureate, at an institution where publishing isn't a priority, and the resources available are somewhat orthogonal to doing the comprehensive set of experiments necessary to get a cell/nature/science paper. My efforts resulted in improving an enzyme - three times (there are very few people who can claim to have done that even once), again, second-tier journals (two are papers-in-work, even though I've quit, i'm still going over there to get them written up). I'm not really ever going to get a faculty position (tried, two years running). I see crappier postdocs and grad students get their run, but you know what? I don't care anymore.
One point he doesn't mention is that there are many interesting problems in the "real world". Lots of academics just point to industry in general and say, "no freedom, no thanks." I've held a few jobs and all of them presented with unique, interesting, and challenging problems. I've had the freedom to choose my own approach to solving problems and met up with other academic-minded people to have good lab-meeting style discussions about how to tackle a project. Industry positions can be pretty attractive.
Every now and then, I casually leaf through job ads and I have no idea how to tell which are which. I think that's what scares me. I get this feeling that when it comes time to join industry, it's just going to be a crapshoot---maybe I'll get lucky and maybe I won't.
(Note that this isn't a criticism lodged in comparison to academia. I've already made up my mind that I'll be leaving once I graduate.)
I worked with a huge crop science company for four weeks and got some valuable insights (mostly, I had to justify every little step, and the local boss was a huge fan of micromanagement: meetings, meetings a few a day. But they did have a lot of money and were willing to throw it at possibly not profitable projects; and people did proper 9-5, not 9-5678910 like academia)
The thing about the software industry is that "interesting" tends to be defined down -- for example, you'll be working on a CRUD app, but the "interesting" part is that you're doing it "at scale". Or you'll be doing some "interesting" refactor of a hard piece of software, that isn't interesting in any other way. Or most insidious of all...there's nothing really "interesting" in your job, and you just get inured to the day-to-day nature of the work, which always tends to look the same. The difference is in the big picture, and for most software jobs, the big picture just drains your soul.
I'm pretty lucky in that the project I'm working on now has a truly "interesting" technical component, but it still doesn't compare with the idea that I could be working on an interesting technical problem that also might lead to a new antibiotic or vaccine...or just discovering something new. I miss that part.
I know there are places that are more open-minded towards publishing your results in the open literature, but the majority of companies seem to put roadblocks in the way. I know some people who have done very interesting work (one at Exxon, for example) and will never be allowed to talk publicly about it, because it's their company's trade secret now.
It's a jungle out there people. If you care about salary and upward mobility for god's sake don't go into academia.
PS I am a full professor at a large research oriented university in north america. Most of my contemporaries from high school and undergrad who have spent similar numbers of years amassing expertise in their chosen fields, but in the private sector, are now making approximately 5x to 7x my annual salary (not including their annual bonuses).
[1] http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...
More importantly, there are far more positions being created that aren't on tenure track in the first place.
[1] http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/02/24/1011452/university-em...
Yes, maybe 5-7 times as much. The people you're talking about are exceptional. (How is UNC mid-range?)
I do not think we are arguing here. My point is that good professors and good universities have a solid quality of life. Whether this reward system is the best for society in the long term is another question.
> How is UNC mid-range?
It ain't no Ivy.
...and I stop taking you seriously.
But what surprised me most was that at the end of the essay, after having described his fear of facing such uncertainty in NIH funding, the author mentions that he left academia to co-found a startup making software for life scientists.
Wait a minute — don't small software startups have equally poor success rates? (e.g. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-truth-behind-9-out-of-10-st...)
If uncertainty of success was his major concern, hasn't the author chosen a pretty poor next step in life?
Here's Peter Higgs on the subject of how academics today compares to the past: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-b...
Most people I know who went down the academic route have left the world or are seriously thinking about leaving. I know a couple people with positions at top universities, and around the age of 30 their careers are just starting, with tenure being potentially a coin flip.
And it always traps the most brilliant people. That's the worst part.
Raw metrics like papers and citations are easily gamed, and not great ways to evaluate productivity, but surely there are limits...
(And before you say, "but he gave us the Higgs!", several other researchers did closely related work at the same time [1], so humanity would still know about a mass-producing scalar boson.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_PRL_symmetry_breaking_pap...
I happen to be returning to academia after leaving a non-academic job a few months ago. I spent the intervening months working an application with a friend. Over the past decade we have been attempting to solve a certain problem for ourselves. After dead end upon dead end, we have a prototype. Now, on the verge of re-joining the academic precariat, a potential customer has asked us for how much we would license our software. We'll see how that goes.
The probability of my landing a tenure-track position anywhere is less than the probability that the software venture succeeds (perhaps this isn't surprising, judging from my posts online here). One tires of playing zero-sum games for diminishing payoffs against people who should be your collaborators. This is the kind of the cost-benefit analysis one doesn't do explicitly that seems to underlie decisions to leave. (I am rational, according to a cost-benefit analysis I haven't done.)
On the other hand, during my time as a PhD student doing research for a top tier university, I saw quite a few projects where I was disturbed by the fact that we were contributing any taxpayer dollars to the project at all.
I think the existing academic model is unfair to both professors and especially to undergraduate student. Allowing the very top professors to focus on research, while making the rest take teaching seriously could remedy the situation.
Research has to happen somewhere. Where research happens, there will always be bunk projects. Some will fail despite good intentions, some due to negligence.
Given that there will always be some waste, you can do a lot worse than putting the $ towards academia. The alternative being a research institution, where researchers are paid actual living wages.
There are pros and cons to both models, but academia is undeniably cheaper. Thus, the cost of failure is lower. I didn't mention the third alternative, which is to remove public funding from research altogether. I don't think this is a good idea.
It should be possible for WhatsApp to get "only" $18 billion and scientific research gets the remaining $1 billion. About a 5% tax.
That way, venture capitalists could claim to fund innovation and would actually be truth-tellers.
\o/
So, short answer: because politics.
Currently we just let politicians spend it as they see fit.
On what basis are you making this claim? Since you are familiar with the term deadweight loss, you must be familiar with the economic theory associated with taxation, and therefore the standard claim that the least distortionary tax is income tax. Taxes other than income tax are usually justified in terms of negative externalities.
They've done a good job filling a niche in a broken market, and delivered real value for consumers, I admit.
There's value to a system where plausible things get funded, even if only 1 turn out to pay for the 9 that suck.
It doesn't mean that obscure scientific research has the same market value as almost everything.
Of course not. Food, for example, has much more immediate use.
But it does mean that science is pretty valuable, and more valuable over longer periods.
Market value is a measure of many things. Net benefit to civilization isn't one of them.
Don't tell that to the atmospheric gas industry.
What's the size of the global food industry?
To a rough approximation: everyone who eats must pay for food (at least some of it).
To a rough approximation: nobody who breathes pays for oxygen.
I'm not saying there's no market at all for oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc. But that the vast amount of use for these gases is done without the mediation of a market, or the imposition of a market cost or fee.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the industrial gases industry shipped products valued at nearly $9.5 billion in 2007
http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports/chemicals/indu...
For agriculture, wheat alone accounted for $10.6 billion, corn $48.7 billion, soybeans $32.4 billion. . The total value of U.S. wheat production in 2009 was $10.6 billion.
As was traditionally the case, in 2009 corn far surpassed other U.S. crops in value at nearly $48.7 billion. For comparison, soybean crops, the second leading field crop, were valued at about $32.4 billion.
http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports/agriculture/wh...
http://business.highbeam.com/industry-reports/agriculture/co...
Total food expenditures? Somewhere north of $600 billion:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2011-september/food-spen...
Your atmospheric gasses industry represents 1.6% of the value of food spending in the US. And again, virtually nobody who uses oxygen directly actually pays for that privilege. Which is to say: there is no market value.
And while most people don't pay for their use of atmospheric gasses, those who do are paying for something mission critical. You might as well say there is no value to sunlight because I can go lay on my roof deck.
You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply.
What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder of total economic output ($70 trillion, give or take rounding errors of a few trillion), every last dollar of which requires humans, animals, plants, factories, fires, and god knows what else to have access to an atmosphere. Your $9.5 billion? 0.013% of the total.
Again: air has, to any reasonable approximation, zero economic value. It has tremendous utility value.
Scientific research is not (by design) excludable property, so attempting to assign a market value to it is actually a category error. Markets can only assign prices after definitions of ownership and trade are given.
The actual transfer of equity isn't taxed, at least until they try to pull cash out.
It's time we got rid of this misnomer. Just because part of your company revolves around a piece of software you wrote doesn't mean you are a tech company. Writing software is not necessarily creating technology. Otherwise anyone who's written their own html site has just progressed technology.
Sometimes you have to be innovative just to implement simple ideas in those text books or to make it actually efficient. Its easy to use type 1 UUIDs as ids but if its not practical to store 128bit ids for every value or you need to pack it into 64bits or need better ordering guarantees. you build something like snowflake.
They also fund/maintain OS project they themselves use. Facebook, through their FriendFeed acquisition, obtained Tornado [1] and have maintained it very well since. I use Tornado every day.
I get your point but your anger is misplaced if you think the large "SV tech companies" don't "invent". You want tech companies that don't contribute anything to mankind? Look at purely closed source hardware companies.
http://twitter.github.io/ currently lists 101 public repositories. Highlights include a SPDY library for iOS, Zipkin (a distributed tracing system), flockdb (a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database), Finagle (their own highly concurrent RPC system)... a TON of stuff.
May be BMW is doing things on the back that make it a better choice. Same is the difference between twitter and its thousand clones.
The challenges of scaling to very high levels has presented engineering challenges and solutions. I'm not sold that they're net beneficial in the greater order of things, but to say that there's been no significant innovation would be false.
Oh give me a break.
What you are advocating is populism. You see a large transaction, and say "we could use some of that!", without thinking about the relative efficiency of different kinds of taxation.
Welcome to the party, comrade! Want a beer?
(No, seriously, it's not bad being a socialist. Turn off the American anti-applause-lights that are designed to make us look eeeeeeviiiiil and examine what our actual positions are. We're an ideology like more-or-less any other, with plenty of valid points even outsiders acknowledge.)
[0]http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/awx... [1]https://wicn.nssc.nasa.gov/c10/cgi-bin/cognosisapi.dll?b_act...
And tax revenue for 2018 is expected to be nearly 50% higher than 2013. The idea that tax revenue has somehow "decreased" is folly. It's just not being spent on what this particular special interest group (academics in science-related disciplines, it seems) would prefer.
Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career at CERN.
This lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today.
http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...
In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting. This has particularly been the case when the requirements of the CERN supervisor conflict with the expected time dedicated to a doctoral student’s thesis.
http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Artic...
Basic research is economically worthless-- you can't patent a concept or a law of nature, nor can you sell understanding of nature's principles to anyone. The transistor may be worth billions, but the understanding that enabled the transistor is worth $0 as there is no way to monetize it.
The economic worth of scientific understanding seems to obey an extreme hockey-stick graph: it is worthless until it nears the instant of delivering a marketable technology, at which point it skyrockets. As a result, the market only rewards the last few people in a very long line of innovation that began with basic principles. Mark Zuckerberg is worth billions. How much is Tim Berners-Lee worth? How about the communications theorists before him that pioneered the idea of hypertext? (Do we even know who they were?) ... and so on, with each step back in time being worth exponentially less.
Why do science, except as a hobby?
How many people are getting doctorates (probably increasing)?
How many faculty positions are there over time (probably increasing much less)?
How much money per researcher is out there (probably shrinking RAPIDLY)?
How can we measure if we are getting more lenient with giving out PhD's? Shouldn't only the cream of the crop get to do research, not just the ones who claim to love it.
In contrast, the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics, currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide in experimental high-energy physics, the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.
The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.
Right, so the problem is that there are way too many students. Is the burden on the upcoming students to discontinue their track or on the universities (etc) to slow admissions and hiring postdocs?
In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.
Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff.
http://cds.cern.ch/journal/CERNBulletin/2013/27/News%20Artic...
Everyone knows we have too many PhD students, but no one can afford to be the person who doesn't hire more of them, since that would mean your lab has one person working, writing papers, and chasing funding, and the people you're competing with have an army doing the same things.
although grad students get paid little, the total cost to a lab of a grad student is higher than a tech[nical assistant]. if there were less grad students, labs would hire more techs.
It's also really unlikely that we'd find anywhere near enough techs to make up the difference anyway. In CS, your options as a bright student are to go into research or go make a fortune for Facebook. We can compete with industry only because we're offering the promise of a career in research. If we had to staff the labs with people who had no desire to join academia, the costs would go up substantially.
Why does MIT require funding from the NIH? Isn't this what endowmnets and tuition is for? Imaginge of google or GE hired people and forced them to raise money from the federal government to actually build their next project? Notwithstanding the mis-appropriation of the profits, purely from a managerial perspective this is highly flawed.
The flipside is also true, Universities are sturctured to leverage outside capital rather than their own (despite having gobs of it). MIT has $11B in the bank, they are not desperate for cash. To do "science", or otherwise.
Because research nowadays is very expensive. Seventy years ago you could win the Nobel Prize with a cyclotron half a meter in diameter, nowadays you need the LHC at CERN to do that. And it isn't just high-energy physics, it's biology, chemistry, even computer science. Big data requires big storage.
Research grants go to research and upkeep of facilities (the dreaded indirect costs), tuition and endowment is for salaries, building projects and startup grants.
It's accepted that the mission of universities is to conduct research on behalf of the taxpayer, and that these results are public. Google is not serving the taxpayer, and that's why what falls out of their research is a trade secret.
My favorite example:
Janelia Farm - I believe they expect 50% of their projects to fail.
A Janelia recruitment excerpt is illustrative (and you don't have to have done a post-doc even to lead a lab):
"We invite applications from biochemists, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, neurobiologists and physicists who are passionate in their pursuit of important problems in basic scientific and technical research.
All laboratories are internally funded without extramural grants. Scientists at Janelia have no formal teaching duties and minimal administrative responsibilities. Janelia labs are small groups of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and technicians tackling challenging research problems that are expected to have transformative impact. Group leaders are expected to engage in the direct conduct of research in a highly interactive and collaborative environment."
It's not the only way - and I doubt Janelia thinks it should be - but this style could be good for science in general. Even if funding levels return, I think they should probably return in a different form. Janelia might offer a blueprint for that.
If you're technically minded, open source software developer provides many of the good things about academic work without many of the downsides.
Unfortunately, we have way too many highly trained scientists and not enough research funding. Realistically, the only way out of this is increased government funding, and that's not happening anytime soon.
The average professional baseball player spends his life in the minor leagues, never making much, never seeing any real security. But the upside of being one of the lucky ones is such that you'll never have a lack of talented people trying to play in the big leagues. Academia's upsides are not financial, but the dynamics are basically the same.
It wasn't the money potential, but the lack of opportunities in the field. You can work for less pay if you're compensated for something else in terms of opportunity cost (social status, privilege of doing what you love etc) but right now there's zero incentive and it's so bleak
A lot of my professor friends don't rely purely on salary even if they're tenured. There's other ways like speaking engagements, book royalties etc. I know some tenured professors who don't use grant system at all (especially in humanities) instead they get funding through collaborations and other sources
It's really surprising to me that a wealthy university like NYU would charge PhD candidates. If you don't mind sharing, what field/topic were you considering?
NYU and other private universities (Saas-fae etc.) will charge PhD candidates because they can. They have prestige, more applicants than they can deal with and the whole snob-appeal. I was going to join their Media Studies/Computer Science department
It sounds super idealistic, but nowadays I think the only way to get real research out is to leave academia... which is why I decided to form a startup with my research partner. We aren't really into the whole get-acquired!money thing, it's more like; non-profits rarely work because people don't listen, using productizing techniques spreads ideas faster and research funding is dwindling. In the offer I was given, I was lucky to be fully funded but all the work I did would belong to NYU/Intel....
-You don't have a boss that yells at you and tells you what to do.
-You can work on your own projects and ideas (if you're capable of developing such).
-You can't get fired , or at least the likelihood of you being fired is pretty low.
-You can do a lot of traveling (conferences, summer schools, workshops, exchange visits)
-You can work with very intelligent and motivated people.
-You can work on hard, interesting and (sometimes) important problems.
Personally, what I miss most since leaving science is the possibility to work on really interesting, hard problems, because although most companies will tell job applicants that they're working on really cool and important stuff, most of the work consists of pretty boring, uninspiring things (this is not necessarily different in science, but at least there there are some really cool things mixed in between the boring parts). As one of my colleagues once put it, "the problems are hard and complex in an uninteresting way".
So, I think if people would have the choice between a well-paying position in industry and a position as a research scientist, many would choose the latter even if it meant a lower income and a higher workload. The author is of course absolutely right about the fact that there are not enough "B-level" positions in science (i.e. permanent researcher positions situated somewhere between post-docs and professors), which really has to change in my opinion. Personally, it makes me sad to see so many brillant PhDs leave university and work e.g. as data scientists in companies where they basically try to make people "click more on stuff".
While I fully support her passion, the industry of academia seems completely irrational from almost every sense and full of traps. While the end goal of a tenured professor is exceedingly stable, getting there requires heroic acts of risk, going with the flow and instability that even when compared with the world of startups seems insane.
After 4-7 years on a PhD (which is fraught with the possibility of your PI losing funding, vets shutting you down for weeks on end, the university messing up shipping of things that need to stay frozen, strange policies of academic journals, endless bureaucracy, the university threatening to cancel health insurance or not pay you for a few months despite them wanting you to work) you exit with the ability to make less money at a Postdoc than you had with just your undergraduate degree, and certainly less than you'd make if you had just stayed as a lab tech for that term.
In admission to a Postdoc program, you've gotta deal with PIs who seem to check their email in more archaic ways than RMS and seem to play games with you with their intermittent responsiveness. The chances of you getting into a place doing the research you'd like in a geographic region that has any semblance of culture or livability. Of course, all the pitfalls of your PhD are still present, as funding is constantly on the brink and your PI might die or retire without notice- which essentially ends your academic career.
Then maybe after a postdoc (or two), you find a tenure track position (again, where this is... you seem to have little control over), which also seems to pay crap considering the amount of knowledge and experience you have.
All of these funnels seem to have a 20:1 (or worse) completion rate. Something always seems to screw up. Fortunately, my girlfriend is almost done with the PhD part, and the Postdoc part is looking more promising than it is for most.
Whatever relationships, life, family or culture you'd like to maintain through this seem nearly impossible. Now, I'm aware that 'softer' subjects are a little more flexible on parts of this. You don't need a lab with a half million a year funding to write the next great american novel or study the culture of people on 4Chan.
In comparison, startups seem much more certain. Move to SF|Boston|NYC, program awesome things, get funding, etc... no one's going to ask you suddenly to move to Alabama to work with the one startup in the US that does Haskell programming, but in science academia that's entirely possible. Worst case scenario, you go work for Google or similar. And after working for 10 years, they aren't going to pay you barely livable wages.
Unless you're running a center (which probably less than 0.1% of people entering into a PhD program ever will), the monetary reward almost never catches up. The risk of failure is high, and the alternatives for leaving are grim. Whereas if you leave your CS PhD, you can get a job at a startup... there are few places that are dying to hire PhD dropouts.
>>Whereas if you leave your CS PhD, you can get a job at a startup... there are few places that are dying to hire PhD dropouts.
thanks.
Fixed (perhaps):
>>Whereas if you leave your CS PhD, you can get a job at a startup... there are few places that are dying to hire non-CS PhD dropouts.
This is not a criticism of you; I understand you're trying to do your best for someone you care about, which is laudable in itself; but there is something I think needs to be pointed out.
You did not say "I fully support her rational and well-informed career choice". Probably you would love to be able to say that but, well, it wouldn't be true.
There is a meme floating around at the moment that passion should be the deciding factor in career choice. Every society has its characteristic errors, and this seems to be one of the more harmful ones of 21st-century Western society. In reality, emotion should be an input, yes, but not the only or necessarily decisive one; our emotions evolved in a very different environment, after all, and they don't actually know very much about what's going on today so it's hardly surprising that they often make bad decisions.
Another common wording of this meme is "do what you love". Put that way, it's easier to see why it's bad advice for most people. If you love doing something, probably lots of other people do too, and they'll bid down income and working conditions in that field until your life degenerates into miserable slog.
The obvious reply is that if you end up in a job you hate, your life will also degenerate into miserable slog, which is true. You don't want to end up in a job you hate if you can avoid it.
The best career choice is usually somewhere in the middle: try for something you don't mind doing that will pay a decent wage for no more than forty hours a week without unreasonable demands. If your passion doesn't offer a realistic prospect of that, then it's probably time for reason to overrule passion.
She's well informed about it, and honestly better than the majority of people in the field, but it still doesn't make the field in general a rational decision. In the end her goal isn't to make money or have tenure, but to do science that changes the world; which I admire greatly.
I could say the same about my friend pursuing music professionally (I myself went to school for music, but I'm now in software and far happier)- I went to school with people who probably haven't made $500 in the past year on music, and also with people who won Grammies recently and are at the top of Pitchfork and Billboard's charts. By no means does it make it rational; its a broken system that hasn't caught up to the 21st century, but overall there are still people in it who will do well no matter how hard it is.
On average, you're right however that the best choices are often somewhere in the middle for most of us.
It is true that young academics are not well paid, don't have good job security, and that the academic system is run from the top in the wrong way. Grant-chasing is a fact of life, and administration can distract you from your work.
However, being an academic can be great. I've worked in industry and academia, and I found academia to be less stressful, more rewarding, and more intellectually challenging.
Here are a few great things about academia:
* You get to work with really smart, creative, intellectual, people. Probably the smartest people you meet in your life will be colleagues. It's a very stimulating environment.
* You get to work with young and enthusiastic students and researchers, who constantly challenge you and bring new ideas to the table. It keeps you young.
* You see ideas and technologies that most people don't. For example, I recently saw a bunch of robots in development at another UK institution.
* It's an opportunity to continue learning, with access to great resources (huge libraries, experts on a wide variety of disciplines and sub disciplines down the hallway / across campus).
* You are not constrained to thinking about product development or the short-term. You can think on much greater timescales, and propose and investigate ideas with no direct application.
* When you make a real contribution, find a great result, or inspire other researchers, it's hugely rewarding.
* You're part of a machine that has generated enormous progress. Often people don't recognise it, particularly in Computer Science, because commercial companies appear to have "invented" things that they actually developed from work in academia. The most incredible discoveries and theories have come from academia.
* Every day can be different. You don't repeat the same research twice, so it's a constant progression. This can be really exciting and stimulating.
* You get to travel the world to collaborate, to attend conferences etc. Sometimes you can extend these trips to holidays; I've travelled more since I became an academic than anyone I know outside of academia. You have the opportunity to move overseas and work at foreign institutions.
* You have flexibility in terms of what you wear, how you work, where you work, who you work with -- you get to choose much of the time.
* You have an enormous amount of freedom to organise your time as you see fit. Your hours and holidays are incredibly flexible.
* The money, whilst not great, is enough to live on. If you progress up the ladder to be a senior lecturer or professor (UK), the money is good.
> I found academia to be less stressful, more rewarding, and more intellectually challenging.
I've found it to be quite stressful, unrewarding, and intellectually smothering. Reasons include overlong hours, jerks and bullies in positions of power, territorial battles, arrogance and shortsightedness.
> You get to work with really smart, creative, intellectual, people. Probably the smartest people you meet in your life will be colleagues. It's a very stimulating environment.
Some of the people I work with are really smart. Others are also really smart, but don't care (deeply about what they do). Most are pretty smart, but not very interested in anything outside of an extremely narrow focus. Since most people have no interest in or knowledge of what others do, or desire to learn, I find it decidedly un-stimulating.
> You get to work with young and enthusiastic students and researchers, who constantly challenge you and bring new ideas to the table.
As a young and enthusiastic student bringing new ideas to the table, I'm on the other end of this. Ideas are met with resistance, mockery, endless rounds of meetings and debates, and intellectual laziness (i.e. "I could spend some time thinking about this idea and give meaningful feedback, but instead I'll just axe it"). It's incredibly demotivating.
> It's an opportunity to continue learning, with access to great resources (huge libraries, experts on a wide variety of disciplines and sub disciplines down the hallway / across campus).
Partly agree -- the free access to academic journals is great (although, arguably, they should be free to everybody since the studies are typically performed with public funds, but that's another debate). It's also great to have the freedom to pursue topics I'm interested in, solely because I'm interested in them.
However, I haven't really gotten much benefit from being physically near to experts. Perhaps that's my fault.
> You are not constrained to thinking about product development or the short-term. You can think on much greater timescales, and propose and investigate ideas with no direct application.
This has not been true in my experience. We're forced to focus on what is publishable (often, in the short term). Also, negative results (i.e. disproving a hypothesis, or showing that there's no link between two variables) -- which can be significant, applicable data -- aren't publishable. We're also forced to focus on what is likely to bring in grant money.
> When you make a real contribution, find a great result, or inspire other researchers, it's hugely rewarding.
Wouldn't know. My work has been crap-covered crap, with a side-helping of crap. I feel that the current trend to focus only on extraordinarily meaningful results has actually made it tougher for people to make real contributions -- because if you don't sell it (in the sense of over-hyping it), even if it's going to make a real difference, it'll be tough to publish in a decent journal, or to get grant money.
> You're part of a machine that has generated enormous progress. The most incredible discoveries and theories have come from academia.
I don't want to be part of a machine that has generated enormous progress, if 1) it's not currently generating enormous progress, or 2) I'm not helping it to generate enormous progress.
> You get to travel the world to collaborate, to attend conferences etc. Sometimes you can extend these trips to holidays; I've travelled more since I became an academic than anyone I know outside of academia. You have the opportunity to move overseas and work at foreign institutions.
Agreed. Conferences are awesome.
> You have flexibility in terms of what you wear, how you work, where you work, who you work with -- you get to choose much of the time.
How, where, with whom -- I have little control over these.
> You have an enormous amount of freedom to organise your time as you see fit. Your hours and holidays are incredibly flexible.
This has been somewhat true for me. However, doesn't really matter how flexible the hours are, if they're way too much (and they are).
> The money, whilst not great, is enough to live on.
Agreed. However, the number of hours worked must be taken into account. I expect that it would be extremely tough to afford a family.
> I've found it to be quite stressful, unrewarding, and intellectually smothering. Reasons include overlong hours, jerks and bullies in positions of power, territorial battles, arrogance and shortsightedness.
I know plenty of PhD students who struggle to cope with the stress. Not so many academics, to be honest. The academics who complain about stress would also likely struggle in industry.
Also, I did say less stressful than industry. I can assure you my industrial job was a lot more stressful - if only because I had responsibility for major systems that affected 10000s of people directly. Basically, being terrified of messing things up or trying to fire fight when things went wrong. Overlong hours are rife in the tech industry, and you won't find the other complaints to be any different, I'm afraid. So, it's a relative decision. Most jobs carry some stress. But for me, the wins of academia far outweigh the downsides. It's not for everyone, but I felt it important to point out that the academia-backlash we're seeing at the moment is not necessarily an objective viewpoint.
> Others are also really smart, but don't care (deeply about what they do).
That is far more common in industry, because people turn up for the pay cheque more than anything else. I know few academics with this attitude.
> Most are pretty smart, but not very interested in anything outside of an extremely narrow focus. Since most people have no interest in or knowledge of what others do, or desire to learn, I find it decidedly un-stimulating.
I guess this depends on the institution you're at. The two I've worked in within the UK are quite highly regarded. Colleagues tend to love learning.
> As a young and enthusiastic student bringing new ideas to the table, I'm on the other end of this. Ideas are met with resistance, mockery, endless rounds of meetings and debates, and intellectual laziness (i.e. "I could spend some time thinking about this idea and give meaningful feedback, but instead I'll just axe it"). It's incredibly demotivating.
This just sounds like bad supervision. A lot of PhD students complaining on the web seem to have had poor supervision. It's not uncommon either, and something I think academia really needs to work on. FWIW, the people I work closely with dedicate a huge amount of time to their PhD students and the feedback we get from them is overwhelmingly positive. It does take a lot of time though, and we do go above-and-beyond somewhat.
> However, I haven't really gotten much benefit from being physically near to experts. Perhaps that's my fault.
Could it be the stage in your career? Have you never walked into a seminar on something completely different? Or sat down with a colleague over coffee and had them explain (say) the current state of cancer research, amidst their cutting-edge discoveries? Those opportunities are priceless.
> This has not been true in my experience. We're forced to focus on what is publishable (often, in the short term).
This is true, to some extent. But you can spend significant time looking further ahead, that's the difference. And what may be regarded as "short-term publishable" doesn't have to be something you can deploy in a product. It could be something insightful and far-reaching, but ready for publication. Or just a great idea. Or something that inspires people. Most companies are not going to say "that's a great idea that will never make us money, do some more of that!"
> Also, negative results (i.e. disproving a hypothesis, or showing that there's no link between two variables) -- which can be significant, applicable data -- aren't publishable.
They're actually less publishable, rather than unpublishable, and there's plenty of research on the relative publishability (to coin an unwanted phrase). See "Bad Science" for a summary.
> We're also forced to focus on what is likely to bring in grant money.
This is true to some extent. But really, you have to find a balance. The greatest, supersmart researchers I've met have to follow the money too -- to an extent. But they get a balance, do their bit, contribute some money that often supports PhD students through their study (as someone once pointed out to me when I made the same complaint as a PhD student!), and then get back to working on their research.
> Wouldn't know. My work has been crap-covered crap, with a side-helping of crap. I feel that the current trend to focus only on extraordinarily meaningful results has actually made it tougher for people to make real contributions -- because if you don't sell it (in the sense of over-hyping it), even if it's going to make a real difference, it'll be tough to publish in a decent journal, or to get grant money.
Selling is indeed part of the job -- it also has been. Communication is really important in academia. Collaboration and dissemination are key.
I'm sorry you don't feel that your work has been great :-/. Sometimes this can be a problem of judging your own position; it's really hard to see the big picture wrt your work. You may be your own worst critic. I don't know your situation, but I've seen others students feel the same and it wasn't true in those cases...
> I don't want to be part of a machine that has generated enormous progress, if 1) it's not currently generating enormous progress, or 2) I'm not helping it to generate enormous progress.
ok, (1) is clearly false, if you're objective.
(2) is more difficult. I don't think you can expect to see how your contribution fits in without looking back over a long period. And much of research is about 10 people trying something and one person's idea comes off - the kind of reason why industry doesn't do the work we do. I still think the other 9 people made a worthwhile contribution. Also, you don't have to change the world to help. If you're involved in teaching; if you're part of the wider academic environment; if you contribute a tool that helps others; there are many ways to contribute to the overall, phenomenal, progress that academia has provided. And it takes time to learn how to do important work. It's not as straightforward as it sounds!
One problem PhD students often have is that they don't realise that the purpose of their PhD is research training. Most of the real research contributions come from postdocs, at least in the UK. Lecturers and Professors are busy and mostly act as supervisors/managers. PhD students are very much learning their craft, and as my assessor said to me "you can forget about your PhD work now -- the best things you do will be in another 10 years and you'll have forgotten what your thesis was about by then" ;-). She was being facetious, but there's a grain of truth there.
> Agreed. Conferences are awesome.
:-) I would add perhaps that "some conferences are awesome"! btw, I find conferences to be a larger and more specialised example of the environment of academic life in general -- so maybe you have been a bit unlucky with your environment, if you haven't found the same experience at your uni.
> How, where, with whom -- I have little control over these.
If you're a student, I could imagine this may be the case.
> This has been somewhat true for me. However, doesn't really matter how flexible the hours are, if they're way too much (and they are).
Again, compare to working for Google and the like...
> I expect that it would be extremely tough to afford a family.
The average household income in the UK is £40k, where two people work. A senior lecturer or a professor is going to be earning more than that on their own, and it is not uncommon for professors in particular to earn much, much more than that. I don't think academic wages reflect the sacrifices we make, particularly the time and money sacrificed during a PhD; however, I love what I do and I feel I'm contributing to society in a way that my previous work in industry didn't allow.
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I first entered industry as a software engineer after my Master's from a good university in the US. I felt the job to be very structured. By `structured` I mean - goals were well defined; best practices of SE were applied; at times there was confusion of what exactly the requirement meant but we all had it sorted since meetings with managers and product managers were regular. Research there meant to dive into existing code and/or ask experienced developers around. After having spent ~10 months, I decided to apply for a PhD program. The reason I gave to a lot of my friends at the time of leaving industry was, `I didn't have enough meat to chew`. IMO the company's structure hampered my ability to learn deeper concepts of Math-CS, and made me lethargic (probably due to the compensation). Of course, had I stayed there long enough, I could have probably defined the structure, but at that time I thought there were more interesting things to study.
I was fortunate to get accepted for a PhD program. Having an average Math background, I struggled in my first year studying mathematical models behind CS, for instance queuing theory. Everyone around me had a better intuition to such things and I felt really awkward. I survived the first semester, and in the second managed to handle more than a course.
I am currently in my second year. Most of my classes are theory based and not at all intuitive to me. However, I spend hours to understand the proofs. There are some amazing theoretical work which goes in developing algorithms[1] and concepts like these this keeps me going. Of the some I understand, I feel excited. Of the ones I don't, I hope to get my head around them some day. I meet people who are great researchers. Class projects are a great way to sow seeds of research ideas and challenging since I have to compete, in some cases, with a few classmates who have a lot more knowledge in the subject. With all classes till now, I am able to do mediocre research which aligns with the research grant given to my advisor. However, in the future, I hope to do much concrete research. My advisor knows that my current focus is on courses and he's fine with me investing more time in them as opposed to research.
Till now, all this has been challenging, and exciting. I don't know whether I'll end up in the steady state[2] of research as OP pointed out or may be I am already there :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomathean_Society