The PhD Factory (2011)
nature.com
nature.com
(full disclosure: currently slogging away on my dissertation).
But that's kinda ridiculous. That to do research science, we are expected to choose between, as you say "leaving an imprint", over personal/financial stability. We are not monks of science. And science is not something to be put on a pedestal like religion.
I feel like current academia likes to (for a lack of better term) brainwash prospective students into thinking the life of a research scientist is supposed to be hard. And if you don't have a hard life, you are not really a good scientist. As if personal/financial sacrifice is a virtue when doing research science.
Having this expectation when considering doing research science shouldn't be okay. But we are made to think it is.
(I am currently doing post-doc research)
Haha, almost like being an engineer in a startup is supposed to be? /onlyserious
If you are really good, connected, or lucky, and are willing to make the requisite "sacrifices," then you can end up in a permanent research scientist role. I put "sacrifices" in quotes because these are many careers that people choose to go into (social work, community organizing, arguably teaching) that require much greater sacrifices and would be equally irrational if one were not passionate about the work. The correct response is probably that all these groups should be compensated better, and I (perhaps selfishly) agree, but right now. a research scientist is a much cushier, more prestigious, job than a social worker, and arguably marginally less important to society. (more disclosure: my wife is a social worker)
If, like most, you aren't able to get a permanent research job, or aren't willing to make the "sacrifices", you can go into industry, where (usually) you will make much more money but not get to work on things as interesting. If you hadn't gone into a PhD program, this is likely where you would have ended up in the first place. There is some opportunity cost of reduced total earnings (even if you get a higher salary with a PhD, it's likely you would have made up for that by not being a low-paid graduate student or postdoc for so long), but if you are passionate about science, then at least you will have spent 5-10 years doing it before getting a "real job."
I, like most of my peers, do want to end up being a researcher, but I harbor no illusion that this is the most likely eventual outcome. If I can't find a comfortable arrangement, I'll leave the field, do something else and be no worse off for it. I do realize that I am fortunate to be in a field (experimental high energy physics) where the impedance mismatch to industry is relatively good. Other fields may require different ratios of passion to "sacrifice" to be a good choice.
I am all for people who are willing to tough it out for something they are passionate in. However, I hope these people are passionate because of some kind of internal motivation and not due to external pressure or culture to accept the status quo.
If, on the other hand, you get a science PhD and spend all of your time working with some insanely complex device that only has 1 application studying an esoteric process that has no industry applications... then yeah you're going to have a hard time finding work. This is the story I have seen over and over again among my friends and colleagues that get PhDs.
If you're a graduate student be smart about it and make sure you get the experience necessary to help you find work after graduation! No one else is going to help you with that, it is up to you to build your resume.
Professors that take advantage of cheap labor and don't help their students transition after graduation are a problem that Universities should take up. It is to the University's benefit to get their students into nice industry positions.
What I observed during grad school was that students who wanted to be employable in industry pretty much had to direct their own efforts in that regard. They had to get into the right professor's research group in order to have the leeway to steer their goals. The soft skills needed to function in the business world were those that they were born with, or somehow learned outside the academe. Luck played a role too.
The amount of opportunities seems to be only growing and companies are fighting for them in some areas.
At least that's my observations as an EE for the last 20 years, the quality has gone down a notch.
A similar problem for people who didn't go to university is the new A* grade added to the A-level system. When I did my A-levels, the top grade was A. In a few years time, people will probably forget this, and will then see normal A grades as somewhat 'lesser'.
I can only see grade/credential inflation getting worse in future.
However, I believe that by the time your 2.i degree is considered 'below the minimum', your accrued job experience will have far surpassed your academic achievements. I would also expect HR to not take your university experience into account (or at the very most only minimally) at that point.
In general, engineering and science graduates with bachelor's degrees from large state schools and universities are fairly competent. Core skills and knowledge vary widely with graduates from smaller local schools.
"The hopeless ones become college professors" - http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2015/02/25/hopeless-ones/
But what was startling was how the PhD students were treated like cattle by our department. Shoved into the shittiest room in the building, where the airconditioning ducts were in backwards so it was freezing all the time, I watched number-crunching computers destined for PhDs get redirected to admin temps, amongst other general shake-your-head day-to-day stories.
The kicker story for me was that the dean had managed to poach some prestigious astrophysicist ("Astrophysicist? But this is Biophysical Sciences...") from another university, and in the afternoon of the last faculty day of the year, three days before christmas, one of the supervisors came and said we might want to talk to the dean as there were rumblings. Our office was receiving the astrophysicist and his staff on the next day the faculty was open and naturally they wouldn't be expecting a room full of people. The dean didn't even bother to proactively inform us that we had to move out! Did we have another office tagged for us to go to? Not really, no. So the dying hours of that afternoon were spent shuffling our stuff out and into some storage/office somewhere.
My supervisor hated the way we were treated. Basically we were a head count. Dean gets funding, then fuck 'em after that. My supervisor said that when he did his PhD back in the early 70s, a doctoral student was handled like gold. They were effectively considered another member of faculty. In only two decades we'd become 'room meat'...
Yep, that's the way it is in France too.
Having said that though, it should be noted that a PhD is preceded by an (often independent) MSc degree, so comparing a 5 year (?) US grad school program after just a BSc to a 3-4 yr European PhD isn't quite comparing apples with apples.
As others have said, a PhD may be worth it if and only if you don't expect a job in academia at the end. But that's a long time not spent on one's career, and boy, that love for the subject has to be really strong.
For the vast majority of people I don't think it worthwhile. I said in another thread like this one that I don't think most people in academia want to be rich and famous, but they should expect a reasonable material existence. Academia currently doesn't deliver that. As Louis Menand points out in The Marketplace of Ideas, median times to a PhD degree is now hitting seven years in the sciences and ten in the humanities.
That's a very, very long time in a person's life.
But, there are relatively few of us who end up with permanent research positions in the sciences. So, let's take my field of physics and consider the situation in the US. Let's imagine two tracks for a student. She's skilled in math, computer science, and physics. She could go into computer science and start working in her field immediately after college. Depending on where she goes, she could make $100K/yr shortly after graduation (ok, a lot of that may go towards rent, but let's just use this as a round number).
Now, let's suppose that she decides to go the physics route. She will likely spend 6 years as a PhD student. Back in my day, I remember making a stipend of $13K/yr. Checking online, these have now gone up to ~30K/yr at a number of institutions. So, at the end of 6 years, that's already a huge opportunity cost. She hasn't bought a house, she probably has few if any retirement savings. Now, let's suppose that she continues for a postdoc for 3 years. Let's say that she makes $50K/yr (it's probably more likely that she'll make $40-$45K/yr, but let's again take a round number). So, at the end of this, she's lost $570K of potential earnings. This is ignoring taxes, but to be fair, it's also ignoring any interest growth that she would have made on retirement savings while working for a company.
Now, one might argue that for quality of life and doing what she loves, this might be worth it if she became faculty at this point. However, the chances of this happening are slim. So, at the end of the day, she'll probably examine her options and in many cases (I have had friends and students that have taken different paths to leave physics--ranging from teaching high school to finance) leave physics to do something else.
So, the question isn't whether it makes sense to do a career in physics vs say a career in CS. It's a question whether it's worth the opportunity cost to do a PhD in physics and perhaps a postdoc in physics before doing something completely different. There are of course some areas of physics where people are able to find industry positions doing physics, but this is often not the case...
I think that departments need to be upfront about this and provide students with training opportunities to do other work if they are interested in doing so after their PhD...
The calculation may be different for those in engineering fields...