Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

http://www.nature.com/news/many-junior-scientists-need-to-take-a-hard-look-at-their-job-prospects-1.22879

by sz4kerto • 9 years ago

430 277 9 years ago

nature.com

hobofan2• 9 years ago

Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know.

If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.

voltooid• 9 years ago

These are usually people that have always been the best in their class through their academic careers. The idea that they might be the ones to not get a position, because they are not good enough for it may not be something they have experienced /consider possible for themselves.

afarrell• 9 years ago

They may consider the possibility, feel intense despair about it, and work to avoid thinking about it in order to avoid feeling the intense negative feelings that come with something they regard as catastrophic.

mattkrause6• 9 years ago

Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think.

Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definitely in the top 15 percent of the field. It's certainly not that easy, but...you're not obviously worse than most of your classmates, you work on a hot topic and you work hard. What are your chances?

Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or discussion of their prospects. They should obviously think about this, but more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and frank assesments.

noobermin• 9 years ago

but more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and frank assesments.

And they won't do it because they are a) biased due to survivorship bias, and b) they are disincentivized to do so as that would scare away their cheap labor.

hobofan2• 9 years ago

The average age of a PhD student is 33 years and even at normal speed, no breaks/hurdles and starting right out of high-school, you are 25(?). Something about applying this babysitting attitude of "somebody needs to tell them" to highly educated individuals of that age just doesn't sit right with me.

If I were a PhD supervisor, I would probably find it ridiculous that one of my responsibilities would be "pointing people to the universities careers service". I'm also not sure why you would expect a supervisor to be able to give good career advice when some of them have only ever experienced academia themselves.

adekok• 9 years ago

Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think.

I asked around during my MSc (25 years ago), and got told this by everyone.

Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or discussion of their prospects.

They're adults. No one else is responsible for their life. If they refuse to take responsibility for their life, that's their choice.

They can ask. It's not difficult.

pc862• 9 years ago

I enjoy providing mentorship and helping out younger developers, but I certainly don't have any responsibility to do so.

farseer• 9 years ago

You are bound to get down voted for this comment, however I do agree with you. I am one of those people who managed to realize by a good stroke of luck that perusing a Phd in my field would severely limit my earning potential. It was all the Phd grad students always talking about their money problems in the college cafeteria that gave them away.

wolfgke• 9 years ago

> Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know.
If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.

The problem rather is if you really are scientifically better than your peers - so from an "objective" perspective you should be really good enough to obtain such a position. But then you realize how much of a political game (it is much more about politics than scientific achievements) getting such a position is. And I know many great scientists who are bad politicians... They are often much better than the persons who got the tenured positions (the latter ones were great bootlickers and politicians).

s0rce5• 9 years ago

Exactly, I quit after a Science and Nature paper, just didn't want to do a 2nd postdoc and prioritize a tenure-track job over everything else in life.

kensai2• 9 years ago

The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and technical sciences.

Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).

JumpCrisscross• 9 years ago

Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day)

Source? (Genuinely curious.)

Aperson4321• 9 years ago

It is assumed due to the higher knowlege and specialisation level that the world has these days, but such moments of change does not come along very often, and people have always been confident about how there is no way their understanding of the world might be severly lacking in some way. So it might just be that all is as it always has been you just have to look at it using a large enough time frame.

hycaria4• 9 years ago

I've heard of a contemporary mathematician who had small contributions and did it as a hobby. The recent article about insect population decrease was possible thanks to data collected by hobbyists too iirc (but ended up written by scholars I guess). I don't know if there are many other examples.

jstewartmobile2• 9 years ago

I think you've got it from the wrong end. Most academic research I've seen has been so tainted by corporate funding, publish-or-perish haste, over-formalization, misuse of statistics, egos run wild, or some mixture of them all. Then there have been cases where novel research has been stomped into the ground by professional groupthink, like in Yudkin's case. At the same time we had guys like Shulgin being incredibly productive all on their own.

Think of MDMA alone. If it really ends up being a useful treatment, you just know a pharma company would insist that it ran them billions of dollars to develop, and that they should have a God-given right to gouge for it, but it came for considerably less than that from a real expert puttering around in his shack.

Sometimes I wonder if the independent researcher is our only hope.

kensai2• 9 years ago

This has nothing to do with what I said. I just implied sharing the costs for expensive equipment and consumables, what the out-of-academia scientists then do is up to them. I did not imply they are not independent.

But it is certainly close to impossible to coordinate without some kind of sci-funding.

dnautics3• 9 years ago

Don't tell Peter Mitchell that his garage experiment won't work!!

gaius2• 9 years ago

If you are ever in Bath check out the Herschel museum. He was the guy who discovered Uranus, various comets, and other feats of astronomy. Music teacher by day, self-taught astronomer by night, including making the telescopes he needed, by hand, in the back room of his house.

Fast forward to today and you need a multi-billion-dollar orbital telescope or a massive array of radio telescopes to do new work...

acuozzo• 9 years ago

Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).

The rate of major paradigm shifts needs to decrease over time. If it doesn't, then we're working in a scientific livelock or chasing after a moving goalpost.

simonbarker876• 9 years ago

When deciding to do my PhD I did so under the assumption that I wouldn't work in academia afterward. I evaluated it like a any other job offer at the time and decided that the tax free pay, coupled with the freedom to run my project how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc.

Doing a PhD built a large array of skills that I didn't have from my undergrad and allowed me to learn practical skills in a fairly low risk environment and explore other avenues. It let me realise that I wanted to start a business, it taxed me mentally like nothing before, it prepared me to hold myself accountable and that if I don't do the work then it doesn't get done and gave me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do that my undergrad didn't.

As the article says, I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in academia, it can be an excellent bridge to industry if you are prepared for that at the end.

neel_k• 9 years ago

This is basically the same thing I did, except that I worked as a programmer at a startup before going back to school for a PhD.

It was better than doing a startup by a stupidly huge margin. Startups are all about risk-minimization and risk-mitigation, since risky things mostly fail, and so use up your runway without moving you closer to success. So in a startup you are highly incentivized not to take big risks -- and research is always a risk. So you are driven to take an engineering mindset, where the apex of skill is to solve a new problem using only old, entirely proven techniques.

In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid confronting them).

Basically a PhD puts you in an environment where you can take on big, poorly-understood and poorly-defined problems and attack them over and over again. Going from a blank sheet of paper to a solution (or clear failure) in six months 10 times over is an amazing way of improving your skills, and IME it's really hard to get this experience in industry (even though it's really valuable to have this experience in industry).

simonbarker876• 9 years ago

I'd never thought about it quite like that but that really matches my experience. Most of what I tried didn't work but I got to keep trying other ways without some yelling about why attempts 1, 2 and 3 failed. Great fun looking back, glad I'm not still in academia though.

awelkie• 9 years ago

Wow. I'm a few months into a PhD after having worked at a startup for a number of years, I just completed my first project, and just a few weeks ago my advisor had the "you need to stop thinking like you're building a product" talk with me. It's definitely tough to make that mindset change.

eli_gottlieb3• 9 years ago

In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid confronting them).

That sounds heavenly.

KKKKkkkk12• 9 years ago

the freedom to run my project how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc.

Don't know where you're doing your PhD (based on your comment about tax-free pay, I gather you're not in the States). That's not how things work in most places. You enter grad school with a vague idea of what research you want to do, and in 9 out of 10 cases you'll be doing something entirely different. The research you'll be doing is whatever your advisor has funding for. It's not "your" project at all, it's your advisor's, and your job is to produce the deliverables that he promised as part of his grant proposal. Consequently, you have very little freedom about what you're doing and how you're doing it.

arethuza2• 9 years ago

"BAE, Nissan, Seimens"

I'd guess UK and in my experience your description is correct - people can only have a very vague idea when they start a PhD and you've got to work out the detail of what exactly you are doing with your supervisor over the first 6 months to 1 year.

simonbarker876• 9 years ago

The department had a CASE (I think that’s right, it was 7 years ago since I left) award which funded the fairly broad topic of resilient electronics over multiple years and I was able to carve out a segment of that for high temperature energy harvesting (no point developing high temperature sensors if you can power them). I decided the direction, I determined what the project needed and so long as it worked towards high temperature energy harvesting I was good to go. My supervisor was amazing, on day 1 he said “I have two aims. 1: to get you passed and out the door in 3 years and 2: make sure you could do my job at the end of those three years” as a result of point 2 we were given a lot of breadth on self management and point 1 meant he was always around if we needed him - I never had to wait more than 6 hours to see him unless he was on holiday

santaclaus• 9 years ago

tax free pay

Wow what? Is the US? I def got taxed -- and audited because the funding agency screwed up some paperwork -- on my PhD income, while on federal fellowships no less.

simonbarker876• 9 years ago

UK, paid as a stipend so tax free - not a huge amount but with an industry sponsor you can be on the equivalent of a grad scheme + a bit

sliverstorm• 9 years ago

I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in academia

I thought it was pretty well established that this depends heavily on your field.

simonbarker876• 9 years ago

Depends on your definition of “valuable”

chriskanan5• 9 years ago

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years.

When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wanted to punch me in the face. That said, she emailed me years later to tell me that she became a professor, despite those statistics. If you have a lot of tenacity (doing a postdoc), are willing to settle for a school that isn't top-50, and are reasonably productive (a few papers per year) it is doable. Every single one of my friends that graduated and still wanted to be a professor, is one now, but it took 3-5 years of additional work. This is true for my friends in psychology, computer science, EE, and neuroscience.

Of course, now all my other friends say, "Why the hell did you choose to be a professor where you work 80 hours per week and make less than most undergraduates with CS degrees, even when your area of expertise is AI?"

Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic. There are lots of great things to do with a PhD that aren't being a professor.

chriskanan5• 9 years ago

If anyone is interested, here are my old blog posts on the requirements for getting an interview for a professorship at a top-50 school:

[1] http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/

[2] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-computer-science-pro...

[3] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-ucsds-computer-scien...

nopinsight2• 9 years ago

From your [3] above, do theory PhD graduates usually have more or fewer publications?

What would be your guesstimates of the mean/median number of first author publications of faculty candidates at a top school?

"Number First Author Publications (excluding theory folks)

Mean: 12.8±6.5

Median: 14.5

Range: 2 – 25"

neuromantik8086• 9 years ago

Paul Litvak has also written a few interesting posts, both about moving into industry from academia and about the current academic job market:

[1] http://www.paullitvak.com/2013/05/16/why-social-science-grad... [2] http://www.paullitvak.com/2013/02/18/simgradschool-a-study-i...

bhnmmhmd• 9 years ago

I'm really interested in applications of technology (including AI, ML, etc.) in business. But the only way I can get into any US university is by doing a Ph.D. (I live abroad).

Is it at all possible for a person doing Operations/MIS/Quant_marketing - whose main job is econometrics and ML - to not end up in academia after completing his Ph.D.?

singhrac• 9 years ago

Of course, there are plenty of jobs in the industry for PhDs. Another option you might want to consider if you don't enjoy doing research is a Master's program in the US - which gives you some extra training, access to recruiters, a network, etc.

ForHackernews• 9 years ago

Not just possible, extremely likely. That's the whole point of the article: even if you wanted to stay in academia, you would struggle to do so.

disinterred• 9 years ago

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day(s). He made 100k+. Not to mention that there are some professors at my university who make close to or over 300k/year and do not teach, but they are much more rare and have fat CVs. The other side of the coin is that before you get tenure, you may be working a lot for very little and only when you're close to 40 (on average) will you be granted tenure.

gaius2• 9 years ago

From that POV tenure could be considered deferred compensation, but it is more likely that it is a sinecure.

chriskanan5• 9 years ago

I'm going to disagree with this for science and engineering. All of my tenured colleagues work very hard. You have to if you want to keep running a lab, which is the main reason why people choose to become professors. If you stop working hard, you will stop getting funding and PhD students. The department will make you teach more and can make your life difficult if you are being a drag on the department, even if they can't fire you.

That said, for the liberal arts, history, etc., things may be different. They don't tend to have large labs and their goals are different. I honestly don't know.

Realist1337• 9 years ago

> When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

There is another benefit (of course, understanding with all the dues you have to pay along the way.) JOB SECURITY While I make more than a professor, as with most tech jobs I can lose it anytime. When the economy is bad, even great job performance is no guarantee for continued employment. Sometimes entire companies disappear. It is difficult to understand this if you havent been thru a downturn (I've been thru 2) and it is difficult to appreciate this until you have hard responsibilities in live (mortgages, family to support.)

This is another reason why many jobs which pay less (government jobs, k-12 education, police forces, etc) are still attractive -- because they offer relatively more job security. It means you can commit to liabilities -- a higher mortgage, etc without having to sock away funds for rainy days.

gjm11• 9 years ago

I think you mean the amount of work you have to do. Tenured professors typically get that way by (1) being passionate about their subject and (2) working very hard -- as well as (3) being really good at it, of course -- and the amount of work they actually do may be a lot more than the amount they have to do.

jimhefferon• 9 years ago

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

No. False.

rwj• 9 years ago

Watching my supervisor in engineering convinced me that I did not want to become a professor. He worked hard... teaching, mentoring, grant writing, plus a whole pile of administrative duties.

Mediterraneo10• 9 years ago

"When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach."

I doubt this is true for the United States, but it is definitely false for many European countries. Tenure gives you job security, but it also brings an enormous amount of administrative obligations. In my experience, conversations with tenured faculty tend to revolve around how much they hate the endless bullshit meetings they are required to attend, the long many-page forms they have to constantly fill out for uni administration, and how it has really eaten into their time for research or family life.

wil4212• 9 years ago

My programming 101 teacher was exactly like this except instead of going home he would go to his lab. He was extremely disorganized and would spend the first 30-45 minutes of class making sure his java programs were working for the lecture.

A student finally asked him why he doesn’t come prepared to class. His response was he teaches he easiest class the can and only the minimum amount of classes he needs to. He wanted to work on his research and get grants not teach.

He was making 150k.

anjc7• 9 years ago

Teaching is a distraction to the real work that goes on in universities. Just because you don't see professors teaching, doesn't mean that they aren't working extremely hard, on very important and stressful tasks (i.e. tasks that are fundamental to the university being a viable organisation)

ska• 9 years ago

    When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

This is just laughably untrue. Sure, we may be able to dig out examples of tenured professors doing the minimum they can get by with. But you can find rare examples in pretty much any profession - the point is that they are rare.

Pretty much all the tenured professors I know well work their asses off - and due to area of expertise, many of them could make 2x - 5x salary in industry but aren't interested.

dagw2• 9 years ago

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

Some of the hardest working people I know are tenured professors. Managing international research projects is no walk in the park.

omginternets• 9 years ago

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

In my experience, the exact opposite is overwhelmingly true.

BearGoesChirp• 9 years ago

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

I think you are mixing up the amount of work a tenured professor has to do with the amount of work they do do.

A tenured professor has to do very little. The idea (even if not the reality) is that a tenured professor has proven themselves enough that the one employing them is willing to ease back any rules so the professor can do science like they want to.

The end result should be (and I think is, but I don't have any hard data at the moment) is that tenured professor do a far larger amount of work than they have to, and are comparable if not even greater than other professions with similar salaries. In large part because they are doing what they love.

Consider a programmer who loves programming and does it at home and at work. A professor is similar, except since they get to pick the topic they work on (to some extent), they are working on the same project both at home and at work.

The last tenured professor I worked under put in a lot more than 40 hours, and he was high up enough to not have any classes to teach (I think he periodically taught a grad class, but it wasn't ever semester).

BeetleB3• 9 years ago

When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.

If you're in a decently good school, this is not true.

The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all.

In both universities I went to, the only way to reduce teaching loads was to pay your way out of it. And the only way professors would do that would be to get grant money to supplement the lost income.

As for the history professor making $100K, what is the COL in that area? In my university, I just looked it up, and they average about $75K (which, to be frank, is decent for the little work they do).

In any case, most of the 80 hour/week work is in engineering and science...

jonnycomputer• 9 years ago

measuring output of intellectual pursuits is a fool's game. that history professor may be spending all their time watching Netflix, or they might be reading and thinking and conversing with their colleagues, participating in the general intellectual milieu, without publishing anything, but still making a positive and important contribution to society.

Besides, sometimes you will pursue an idea for a year or two and find out that it comes to nothing, and you have very little to show for it. But not giving professors the space and trust to do just that is counterproductive in the long run.

crocowhile• 9 years ago

Perhaps this is true in some countries. In the USA and Europe, the average professor works 61 hours a week and encounters very high levels of stress, linked to continuously having to obtain research funds.

robotresearcher2• 9 years ago

There are lazy and burned out tenured profs. But they are a small minority. To get tenure at a good school, you have to be something of a work beast, and self-driven. That doesn't go away just because you get the tenure letter in your mailbox one day.

I know hundreds of tenured profs in science and engineering and there is a very strong work culture.

ageofwant• 9 years ago

'Professor' is a job description, you usually need a PhD to apply for the job, but it's not always a hard requirement. There are many more people with PhD's than Professor jobs. In my experience its the politically astute that get the job, its much less of a meritocracy than one would assume.

jdpigeon• 9 years ago

Absolutely my experience as well. The grad students I've seen make it to professorship positions are all the ones who:

1. Sacrifice all social life outside science.

2. Play the schmoozing and reputation management game very well (Twitter is taking off for this).

3. Mercilessly squeeze every last drop of productivity out of the undergrads assigned to them.

hyperbovine3• 9 years ago

... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ...

I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry.

To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it stands.

ptero7• 9 years ago

I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status. My experience is in theoretical math/physics -- I got my PhD but decided not to stay in academia; there are pros and cons to both options.

IME most tenured professors have to work significantly less than others for the same salary (those who work more mostly do it because they like working with grad students, not because they get financial benefits for it). Quality of life is good, good benefits, few and flexible work hours, sabbaticals, etc. Salary is lower than at the top of the industry, but sufficient for a comfortable life. Those who do good research can escape for the summer to interesting parts of the world to summer schools and visiting colleagues using grant money.

However, non-tenured professors have it much harder. And postdocs are usually the underclass.

chriskanan5• 9 years ago

Think of it as running a small startup, if the time doesn't make sense. My time is split between teaching and preparing teaching, raising funding, mentoring (on the job training), and lastly trying to figure out the next big thing.

The rewards are getting to be your own boss, advancing the knowledge of humanity, and cultivating the next generation of scientists. It is hard work and time intensive, but most things worth doing are.

rahimnathwani• 9 years ago

I met an amateur comedian recently who mentioned he's almost done with his PhD, but will never make back the lost earnings from the time he's invested. Whilst he talked, part of me was thinking 'man, if only your PhD were in machine learning'. I didn't say it out loud, though.

It turned out he's about to complete a PhD in machine learning, but doesn't want to work in Silicon Valley, or for a big company, or in finance (he lives in a financial capital).

Different people have different motivations, but I find it hard to imagine myself choosing the same constraints were I in the same situation.

eli_gottlieb3• 9 years ago

I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry.

Indeed! Why is the assumption always, "We all value money, so just switch to industry!"? It's like telling a public servant that if they wanted a living wage they'd learn Node.js. Not everyone wants to do industrial web-dev, and not everyone should have to. There are high-skill, high-impact contributions to society that don't involve corporate life, shouldn't involve corporate life, and instead need an institutional space for people to pursue them without the pressures and incentives of corporate life.

"Just switch to industry" is turning into the scholarly equivalent of, "just learn to code". Instead of all giving up on some people making the best impact they can, the impact they work desperately hard for, maybe we should just fix the academic labor system.

daemonk2• 9 years ago

Because not all work in academia is interesting. I don't know about your field but academic research is more about doing what your funding bodies want you to do or following the latest trend to get funding. Publishing can be a political game where institution and contacts matter more than merit. Advancement in your career can be the same. I don't want to make a blanket statement for everyone because I am sure there are varying experiences.

If academia is about interesting research, then I would gladly take your perspective. But sadly, from my experience (life sciences), to get anywhere, it is 3/4 bullshit work (admin, politics) and 1/4 interesting work.

I imagine I can find a job in industry that's 1/4 interesting work and get paid a lot more for it.

So it's not about "values". Let's not religion-fy academia and infuse it with a semblance of "virtue" associated with doing research. Scientists shouldn't be monks for science.

scientistem• 9 years ago

Well this is true, but it’s certianly a far cry from the high employment prospects i was brought up believe STEM fields offered.

My sister is on her second post doc; while the money is perfectly adequate, if she ever burned out she would be stuck up the creek without a paddle.

Personally, it’s the precipitous drop in tenured positions that scared me away. Too risky of a time investment!

kkylin• 9 years ago

Indeed, many of us can get paid more in industry. (Computational applied mathematician here.) But (i) professor pay isn't terrible in the grand scheme of things, and (ii) I view my salary as paying for the things I wouldn't want to do for free, e.g., grading exams, serving on committees, etc., and I'm reasonably well-compensated in having my own time to do the things I love enough to do for free: my own research, work with grad students, learning about things I find interesting and teaching a course on it, etc.

But getting here wasn't easy, took equal measures of hard work and luck.

Halladie75• 9 years ago

Grad school dropout here. I never wanted to be a professor. I have no interest in teaching. I just wanted to research. My degree would have been in CS/ML/NLP.

When I realized that I would be out over half a million dollars in earnings over the time I was in grad school, I made the decision to leave. The fact that my advisor was a terrible researcher and a horrible person made it much easier.

make3• 9 years ago

wouldn't you have made more at the end?

YeGoblynQueenne• 9 years ago

> Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic.

I think that also goes to answer the question about motivation despite long hours and low salaries. Knowledge is its own reward, I guess.

Also, doing work that really satisfies you is a big privilege. Big big privilege. Not many people enjoy that, the world over.

tertius5• 9 years ago

doing work that really satisfies you is a big privilege

This is also quite rare in Academia. Much of the work is still just as unenjoyable as a normal job.

RSchaeffer• 9 years ago

As someone thinking about pursuing a PhD to ultimately become a professor, can you link me to your talks or blog posts on the subject of what's required to be competitive?

Obi_Juan_Kenobi• 9 years ago

I can give you my anecdotal perspective.

Out of the 18 in my cohort, two are doing reasonable postdocs (i.e. positions that aren't just treading water, but should actually lead to a reasonable career) and one who has been remarkably successful (success being a 'young investigator' grant - basically an R1 - and just recently another million+, within two years of PhD). The rest (including me) are doing ... other stuff.

Here are some traits of the successful PhD:

* Mother is professor in a related-ish field. Sister is also a PI of a gov't lab. Has been steeped in research and academia (especially the interpersonal aspects of this!) for decades. His success is 100% merited, but without question this has aided him tremendously.

* Reads papers constantly. I don't know anyone that's as familiar with the literature as he is, including all the faculty I've gotten to know. Has strong opinions about various labs, papers, and researchers, all of which are very well substantiated. TONS of 'soft' knowledge about how so-and-so got this or that funding, why such-and-such research is bunk, etc. If you don't think half the faculty in your doctoral program are trash, you're not being critical.

* Not a terribly great bench scientist. Definitely competent, but not remarkable. He knows it, though.

* Holds many unpopular opinions, and strategically focuses his research goals on the 'achievable'. In other words, he doesn't let being right get in the way of his career. Don't interpret this overly cynically; you can absolutely go against the flow in academia, but big claims require big evidence, and your time is limited. His research focus has shifted a lot depending on the landscape in front of him. I think this is commendable, as idealism in research is extremely fraught, even if some would criticize this. FWIW, he published a 'comment' in science that basically shits all over a garbage paper, which is more than most will do.

* 10 'real' publications since starting PhD in 2010, 7 as first author. By this I mean actual original research in a journal of repute, not reviews or bottom-tier trash. And this covers what are easily considered 3 different topics/fields.

* PhD advisor is Academy member, post-doc advisor is Academy member, institution is top-3 in field, arguably 1 or 2, etc.

The core takeaway is that you need to understand your field (in a very wide sense of the term) and direct your research productively according to that.

You certainly don't need all that to become a professor at Podunk-U, but I think that's a good archetype for a successful investigator. The other successful PhD (different cohort) I know has a very similar story; dad is a 'big dog' in an even more similar field as the son, similarly productive, similarly knowledgeable, etc. I feel pretty confident that this is what's needed for success at a major research university. Though, many unsuccessful faculty will be hired as well (through luck and, very often, nepotism), so YMMV.

If you really like to read papers in your free time, I think that's a very good sign. Even better if what you like best is to read between the lines and really be critical of the work. Very few people, even in doctoral programs, are like this. Know and respect your weaknesses, as well, and you could be great.

dkural• 9 years ago

Having spent 7 years getting a PhD (and a year prior working at a top lab), and then at industry; one of the most amusing facts to me is the belief in academia that professors/postdocs have much longer hours and "work harder" than their "9-5" colleagues in industry.

If you speak with recovering professors and post-docs who've joined industry, you'll quickly realize that one of their big surprises is the faster pace of work, and how much of it there is. Publishing of course is not sufficient, it actually has to work, at scale, reproducibly.

I like the academic environment, because at its best, it allows you explore something very deeply. Efficiency and creativity are different goals. There is value to a meandering path. Even if industry may have a fast pace solving problems, academia at its best, makes you ask a better / different question.

l5870uoo9y2• 9 years ago

Doing a PhD thesis these days doesn't necessarily makes you cut out to be a scientist. One can speculate if job prospects differs across disciplines.

dnautics3• 9 years ago

Just because one is a good scientist doesn't necessarily mean one is cut out to be a professional scientist.

l5870uoo9y2• 9 years ago

I would argue the opposite is more plausible; if one is a good plumber, one is likely also a good professional plumber. I would like to see if this trend is cross disciplinary or say it is mainly within say social sciences or humanities. Personally, I have meet many university students and PhDs whose intellect at best was ordinary.

pks0162• 9 years ago

I am currently pursuing MS in Biological Sciences on animal behavior. I want to do Phd then Post-doc and then continue in the science field. But I am not very talented. Most probably I may get stuck after Phd or Post doc.

I don't want job. But looking into these kinds of articles now and then, make me think "what are the alternatives ?" What about the people who do basic science like in theoretical physics or pure maths?

tom_mellior2• 9 years ago

There are different possibilities for doing research. Note how the current top comment here talks of becoming a "professor", and the featured article talks about "permanent staff position[s] at a university".

If what you want is to do research, then what you want is not necessarily one of these. There are lots of research labs, both public and private, where you can get a permanent position. If you're in animal behavior, you might end up in a zoo, doing research part time or full time. These positions are overlooked by these articles since there you are not a "professor" at a "university". In other words, "X% of PhDs become professors" is a very misleading statistic.

But yeah, that is still not enough to employ all the PhDs out there. I think in theoretical physics or math you just end up going into finance...

thicknavyrain• 9 years ago

I’m doing a PhD in Theoretical Physics, I hedge the uncertainty of academia by finding small opportunities in other fields to do work in. Internships in science communication, teaching at the university, part time work for a tech start up. On their own, none of them are a safety net for jumping out of academia if you have to, but if you accumulate enough experience over the years, the hope is that transitioning to industry goes a bit smoother. There’s also a few fellowship/transitional schemes opening up for PhDs in esoteric fields to go into things like Data Science/Software Development. I think you just have to keep a level head and pursue things while it seems reasonable and always keep in mind the dream can pop at any moment and you may have to move around and go into something else.

pks0162• 9 years ago

Yeah. That's a good piece of advice. I usually spend time on data analysis, learning computer security, web designing or any tech related stuff but as hobby only. I know basic of these things but not a "pro" in one field. I guess better to keep learning new things, any time opportunities might pop up as you have said.

rjsw• 9 years ago

I hope you like kids. All my biology teachers in high school had done research degrees and found that there were not very many research jobs available.

rerx• 9 years ago

What about the people who do basic science like in theoretical physics or pure maths?

In my experience, those who did not do numerical work mostly look into positions in management consulting, finance, or insurance.

j7ake• 9 years ago

How are these odds compared to other similar ventures full of uncertainty, such as start ups ? And if the odds are comparable then why is our culture viewing start ups positively but PhD negatively ?

killertofu89• 9 years ago

Where are you getting the belief that PhD's are viewed negatively by our culture? Or that startups are viewed positively for that matter? A quick google search and you'll find hundreds of articles warning about joining startups and bashing startup culture.

tome3• 9 years ago

Because when you "win" at a PhD you (eventually) get tenure, which these days mean lifetime position of high stress and low salary.

eli_gottlieb3• 9 years ago

Because VCs own a stake in start-ups.

yannis73• 9 years ago

Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on your position in the inter-document citation network.

Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee.

If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depressed sociopaths with Lamborghinis, then tenure-track postdocs are investment bankers with crappy bicycles.

Needless to say, I left academia 3 years ago and never looked back.

zucchini_head• 9 years ago

This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all.

Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.

jtauber1• 9 years ago

Not a big fan of academia either, but I don't see how this is any different than upper management/leaderahip positions in industry.

Analog243• 9 years ago

I wouldn't extrapolate too far from those horror stories you heard. My experience was nothing like what you describe. Plus there are many reasons to get a PhD other than going into academia and when you're a grad student you don't have to deal with any of the politics or the other "grimy" parts (at least not in the vast majority of cases).

There are many downsides to academia, the papermill mentality that has become pervasive being a big one, but this picture of a morally bankrupt subculture where people do whatever they can to get to the top is nothing like what I experienced.

loarake• 9 years ago

-Working for a big tech company: you're writing code to deliver more ads to more people so the company can grow and deliver even more ads to even more people

-Being a truck driver: you're moving boxes around

-Being a professional hockey player: you and your team are moving really fast with a disk shaped object trying to put it in a net while people try to prevent you from doing it

-Being a stock trader: making money by spending your whole life reading company reports and hoping you're right about whether they're doing well or not

-Being a quant: using your hard earned computer science skills to move money around and turn a profit instead of helping humanity

Almost every human endeavor can be trivialized if you choose to only see one side of it.

yannis73• 9 years ago

I guess my point was that the "moral" aspect of academia (="pushing the limits of knowledge") has faded away over the last few decades.

Currently departments are pressing researchers towards output rather than long-term quality work - at least that was the key aspect of my post-doctoral experience.

Robotbeat3• 9 years ago

Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them joy.

Farmer: you're making food for people.

Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in.

I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common in healthcare in the US).

Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just selling ads.

zinzibar• 9 years ago

Tenured professor here.

You're right in some sense, although I think those other fields are different in that people are honest upfront about what you're doing, and people see the value in the tediousness.

Academics, though, reached some inflection point (not too long ago really) where papers are just published, or grants proposals are written, just so it can be put on a CV. There's a huge discrepancy between the activity and its purpose, and a lot of denial about what's going on.

The denial seems to be decreasing a little, with more and more pieces like this Nature article, but I don't think the general public really understands the nature of the problems involved, nor are scientists really often honest about the nature of scientific work today.

One issue that's missing from this article is the impact of these trends on senior academics: it makes it almost impossible to move from one institution to a next, because of the volumes of young Ph.D. grads that are available. So if you are stuck in a problem institution, or in a poor institution-fit, or your spouse needs a job elsewhere, you're f*d, to put it mildly. This then creates all sorts of problems up the chain, where you have senior people whose careers would improve if they could move, and people staying would be happier, but they can't, or it takes forever. It leads to all kinds of problematic interpersonal problems that would be resolved easily in another field by someone just moving someplace else they'd be happier at. In academics, your career is often tied to a particular institution, because of the glut of qualified graduates, which is totally screwed up.

Academics has become cannabilistic. You're expected to just sort of throw yourself and your family at the altar of "science," the meaning of which is increasingly corrupted and distorted.

JepZ2• 9 years ago

Actually, I see the same problems, but in my opinion those are symtoms. I do not know whats the real problem behind it, but it seems related to financing.

Something must have change in recent years, which changed the way scientists work nowadays. While I left academia too, I wish scientists would have the freedom to work on larger/long term subjects again.

gravelc2• 9 years ago

I always tell students in my field (molecular biology) to at the very least learn to code at a reasonable level and pick up some data science skills. Something transferable.

At any given time in my department, there'd be five times the amount of post-grad students to full-time staff. Maybe more. It has to be obvious that there likely isn't a job at any level at the end of it. Not just high-flying jobs on the path to professorship, but even low skill technical stuff.

As in other fields, women are at a significant disadvantage if they want to have kids (presuming they've made it though the initial cull). The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. Given every higher position is so competitive, they simple lose out due to the time taken off. Makes me quite to sad to see very very talented scientist friends passed over for this reason.

tome3• 9 years ago

The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions.

I think it's really a black mark on the system that it should be OK for researchers to still not have a permanent position in their early 30s ten years after completing their undergraduate degree.

s0rce5• 9 years ago

But understandable considering the incentives. Grad students and postdocs cost so little but accomplish so much, the whole system relies on them. Just need to keep selling them the promise of opportunity. Unless something changes I can't see this getting better anytime soon. The cult aspect of many top PIs strongly condemning people leaving or considering non-academic positions also doesn't help.

vixen99• 9 years ago

So what's the solution? Hold a position for a woman and then kick out whoever fills it when the woman returns? Everyone has to make choices and this is one of them. If there's a way round this conundrum, a very very talented woman will find it.

gravelc2• 9 years ago

No doubt it's difficult, but what would help is to take something more than a person's Scopus index into account when picking applicants for interviews. The initial culling of hundreds of CVs to just a few is almost based solely on this (among the people who are actually qualified for the job and work in the advertised field).

Hiring the best person for the job is the solution IMO, but the system doesn't work that way. Does it really matter if person X has 3 Nature papers and person Y has 2? The real issue (in Australia, at least) is that publication is everything. It really shouldn't be, for a myriad of reasons.

hycaria4• 9 years ago

They simply decided what they valued more between later academic career and current family life (as you can have kids later). That's their choice, there's nothing to be saddened about.

dbmikus• 9 years ago

The 20s to early 30s is the healthiest time to have a child, for both the child and the mother. Now, you can have children in your late thirties and beyond, but that can get more difficult depending on the specific health situation of the parents.

Also, there is a problem in parity for how having a child affects men vs women. It is easier for a man to become a parent and maintain a career than it is for the mother.

harry82• 9 years ago

Data so absent that they have to draw an analogy to a different data set without any supporting evidence that such is valid. This is Nature not the daily Mail.

What is the statistic? How many PhD students have jobs in Academia 5 Years after being awarded? Surely they have /something/ that might be indicative they can publish that's better than footballers? Surely..?

aqsalose• 9 years ago

Article cites one hard number:

Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It’s only a little better in the United States.

harry82• 9 years ago

But I claim that number is really pi (or tau/2 if you must). Will you take theirs one rather than mine as an argument from authority? This is Nature, not the damn daily mail. Digital extraction required![1]

  [1] Vernacular expression "Pull your finger out!" Meaning to stop being lazy.[2]
  [2] Jokes you have to explain, suck.[2]
  [3] People who put footnotes on their jokes are terrible human beings.[4]
  [4] There is no [4][5]
  [5] citation needed

dotdi• 9 years ago

Sad but true.

I once had dreams of a career in academia and research. I'm a molecular biologist turned computer scientist turned software engineer in industry. I now have a very good salary, interesting challenges, plenty of work-life balance and good prospects for the future, and that's pretty much directly out of university.

In my opinion, I would have to give up on all of the aforementioned benefits (sans interesting challenges) for at least the next 10 years if I wanted to stay in academia, and on top of that, add the nice non-zero chance of just getting stuck and be forced out of the academic "track".

All my advisors told me it's a pretty bad time to go into academia, and I doubt it will get better, sadly, I might add.

lbeltrame2• 9 years ago

A question: how it is for people doing research but not in traditional academic settings (e.g. no profit foundations)? As far as I understand, you're tied to grants anyway to get money, but there's no clear concept of "tenure": I work in such a place, but it's outside the US, so I was wondering about what happens there.

neebz• 9 years ago

They can always move to Pakistan.

Phds from abroad is one of the most well-paid positions here thanks to the recent influx of numerous private business-minded universities opening up in every city.

rohit2412• 9 years ago

Interesting. Its different in India, where it's not the salary but the prestige that drives people to become professors. Even the research opportunities are limited, and industry pays much more.

wiz21c3• 9 years ago

What about starting a PhD at 45 ? I mean, just for the fun of being a student again, the fun of working on your own little project . Does it open possibilities, in the sense of a career reboot ? (I'm totally OK with earning much less money than I do right now)

yannis73• 9 years ago

it will definitely be fun, both being a student + working on your own project.

From my experience, for some reason PhD advisors tend to work well/really like mature students. No hard data on this, just an empirical observation across 3-4 labs I've worked in before I left academia.

With regards to career prospects (outside academia ofc), you definitely gain respect but anything more than that largely depends on your area of research. Which one is it, if I may ask?

wiz21c3• 9 years ago

I'm looking at anything involving computational geometry; and if I have spare time, ethics :-)

DrNuke• 9 years ago

In 2017 the research path in computer-heavy subjects is not academy-bound anymore. There may be early problems in getting credit within the learned circles, but a couple of good papers and one good presentation at a good conference under your own ltd umbrella solve this for good.

hyperpallium• 9 years ago

Do you mean just publish on your own account, not under the auspices of an institution (aka "academy")?

Is "ltd umbrella" your own "pty ltd" company - instead of an institution? Or you mean, just within your own specialised field?

fergie2• 9 years ago

Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids.

In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades.

The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to those positions for a lifetime.

So there are more professors than footballers at any one time, but due to football's higher turnover, and shorter tenure, many more people will be a footballer than a professor over the course of their career.

The bottom line is that professional football is actually a relatively attainable goal for young British men, and should probably be more encouraged as a realistic career option.

...and when you do put in your application to Oxford, Cambridge, Google, or Facebook, your long-gone 3 year stint as a utility midfielder at Dundee United is only going to make it more interesting.

danieltillett• 9 years ago

Very interesting observation. I should do the equivalent comparison for Australia.

girvo• 9 years ago

For Rugby Union, the path to playing in Super Rugby is surprisingly short. I became a first-grade Union referee pretty much by accident, without really putting much time into it aside from the weekends.

The ARB actually asked me to become a professional referee, but didn't realise how young I was at the time. A shame that I never followed through on it, really.

arethuza2• 9 years ago

Is that the UK or US definition of "Professor" though? I've noticed some UK universities have started using additional titles of Assistant/Associate Professor as well as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader.

fergie2• 9 years ago

If that is the case, I have over-represented the pool of professors, which strengthens the point

michaelt• 9 years ago

If you're pursuing pro football, don't you have to neglect your schooling to compete with the other players?

If so, doesn't that close more doors than the academic route, where you can take your degree/masters/phd to industry any time you like?

VLM2• 9 years ago

There's always tradeoffs; serious academic pursuit means neglecting physical fitness and life goals (relationships and fun and such). Its easier to recover from time lost on the sportsball path than time lost on the academic path.

ced• 9 years ago

True, but there's probably 10 times more young men who would like to be professional footballers than professors.

kerbalspacepro• 9 years ago

But both are probably strongly determined by genetics, so the size of the people that "want" something probably isn't entirely relevant. It's the people that have the natural talent under the people that can do the work.

onan_barbarian• 9 years ago

I'm going to guess that the logic behind your 'relatively attainable goal' here is 90% dependent on the fact that far more people can aspire to be a footballer than a professor, due to the general requirement for a PhD. I would think the pool of people aspiring to be footballers is orders of magnitude larger.

They've also been weeding themselves out from doing something that's pretty much exactly the task ("playing football at a slightly younger age against somewhat less good players") for a while - while future-professor-types may well have been doing a range of activities only weakly correlating to future success in the academy.

gideon_b• 9 years ago

It's a trend in sales to hire retired professional athletes. Google famously hired a cohort of olympic athletes for their Adwords sales team.

henrik_w• 9 years ago

I have an M.Sc. in computer science, and worked as a SW developer for 5 years before going back to do a Ph.D. I stayed with it for one year, but decided it wasn't for me. I really liked the idea of learning more, but realized working in industry was even better for me.

I found that a lot of Ph.D. projects are driven by what you can write papers on, not necessarily what somebody somewhere really needs. Also, you can learn without being at a university.

More here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-prog...

rdlecler1• 9 years ago

University has become a bit of a Ponzi scheme. I’d love to see PhD programs drop to 3-4 years from 5-7. Especially in programs like biosciences where there are limited job prospects. Universities sell a romantic idealism knowing the likely outcome. Most students are too young or captivated to really do their due diligence. There should be labels on a PhD like the anti-smoking labels on cigarettes.

eighthnate• 9 years ago

This is an academic industry wide problem, not just for junior scientists. When tenured professors stay on their job for 40 or 50 years and new universities/positions aren't created each year for newly minded PhDs, it's going to create a pyramid like structure in academia with the comfortable professors at the top and legions of phds on the bottom struggling to get to the top.

Ask philosophy, history and even economics PhDs. The research/academic/etc opportunities simply aren't there because it is structurally impossible. And as time goes on, it's only going to get worse and worse.

nmca• 9 years ago

I'd be interested to see how the institution at which you studied effects the probability of a successful career. If you're a masters student at a top uni, do the numbers change significantly?

diogenescynic• 9 years ago

I know someone who has a PhD in a specific field. They lost their job three years ago and have not been hired since. I can’t even imagine what going to school for that long then being underpaid and discarded must feel like.

VLM2• 9 years ago

The "STEM shortage" phrase means pay is too high for the very few STEM jobs; it means a shortage of income equality, not a shortage of warm bodies. There are obviously far too many warm bodies in STEM fields.

There is also a peculiar birth-death problem in academia where over the lifetime career of a professor, that prof should birth exactly one new qualified student to replace that prof. Otherwise we're dealing with a pyramid scheme. And one of the metrics of "success" of profs is how many qualified grad students they're birthing to provide short term cheap labor and long term hyper over supply of qualified candidates to be profs. We're merely seeing the breakdown of a pyramid scheme. One way to fix it is ban grad student labor. The undergrads, most of whom are going in to industry anyway, can be the lab rats. Or the prof can hire more postdocs.

jessriedel2• 9 years ago

Why would we design a system where only eventual professors have PhDs?

s0rce5• 9 years ago

Maybe not 100% but what fraction of PhDs are professors, maybe 3-5% at most, what about fraction of MDs working as medical doctors, I'm guessing its much much higher (with higher wages) since they limit enrollment in school and residencies (they don't rely on cheap grad student/post-doc labor).

asafira4• 9 years ago

Hey, so I'm a PhD student (in Physics) at Harvard that has been looking into these issues (as graduate council president in the department), and I really don't like the bickering that occurs between (roughly speaking) die-hard academia pursuers and the others that feel there is a lack in support for non-academic jobs. Here are by far the most compelling issues that I think need to be fixed that both sides should be able to agree on:

1) Professors really, really need to be open to talking to their students about what they want in their career and what's sort of career path they are considering. Not having this discussion is prevalent but honestly somewhat outrageous.

2) Internships really should become more widely accepted within greater academia (i.e., outside CS). There are a huge number of great arguments for them, including

a) Exposure. There are a huge number of PhD candidates that have actually never had a job, or even just have never been exposed to what their greatest-interest career is post graduate school.

b) Their length is a drop in the bucket compared to the total length of a PhD. (3 months vs 5.5 years average in my Dept)

c) professors worry their graduate students will become less interested in research after an internship. My thought: great! I am super happy that person found something that makes them happier.

The biggest argument against internships has always been something like 'professors can't just be super flexible with their students, they have their own constraints (grants, etc.)' I'm not proposing that professors go through crazy great lengths to make sure their student can get an internship. I simply think that should become an accepted part of the culture and be an ok thing to discuss with your adviser. Right now, students are literally scared at the reprocussions of even bringing it up.

Disclaimer: I interned at Waymo last summer.

bubagrump• 9 years ago

Curious, what did a physics PhD think of software development/research in industry in comparison to the wonders of equations and abstract beauty?

asafira4• 9 years ago

I loved my internship at Waymo! I don't think it was a typical software engineering or hardware engineering internship, to be fair, but I really enjoyed the work I did and felt my background was beneficial in me making as much progress as I did.

JepZ2• 9 years ago

Well, I think there is a common misconception among academics: They think that theory must be pure and that people who work tend to muddle the theory.

What they seem to ignore is that theory is an abstraction within the human mind and that the real thing is something practical.

So in my opinion the academic path should be accompanied by a real/practical job (within the field of study). Apart from supporting the student with a salary it would bring alternative career paths much earlier to the table.

asafira4• 9 years ago

One issue here is that there aren't always real/practical jobs within the field of study, though. Furthermore, I would claim that people who do experiments often are ones that are doing "real things"

timdellinger• 9 years ago

I'm curious why you think both sides should be able to agree on those things. Professors are incentivized towards and measured by grant money and high profile publications. You're proposing that professors get on board with something that's not aligned to their goals.

asafira4• 9 years ago

I wasn't saying that professors should agree to it --- I meant the (roughly) two types of graduate students: those that are die-hard academia pursuers and the others.

There might be an argument saying that the academia pursuers don't want it to happen, but I think that incentive should be less than just having more freedom as a graduate student.

burnerOh2125• 9 years ago

Yea, i went into a phd program in biomedical sciences, spent 2 1/2 years doing computational biology, studying math, computer science and machine learning, not to mention working on project, then left. It was at the point where the prospect of out competing 7/8 of my fellow phd students was not work it, when all of my skills, where transferable to industry, even without staying for the phd. Part of me wishes I did stay, and I'll probably go back for a masters at some point. who knows. Anyway, the system really is designed to get phd students to do the heavy lifting, at 30k a year, for 6 year stretches. Why would I do that, when I have dropped out, and tripled my salary?

CodeSheikh• 9 years ago

What about creating more private research centers? Where the benefits are not tied to individual company profits or have them hoping for patents stash. OpenAI is an example of one of such initiatives. Similar centers can be spun off more often. Does CERN have satellite labs across the world? Sure committing to funding can be a problem for private entities (companies/families/individual billionaires). Perhaps govt should these entities tax breaks for funding such centers.

ak_yo• 9 years ago

This problem has been a structural feature of the academic profession for a long time -- Max Weber famously wrote about it almost 100 years ago: http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber...

projectramo• 9 years ago

Are there junior scientists who don't know how dim the prospects are for an academic position are?

I've been hearing this for two decades. Seems like the sort of thing that any mildly educated person would be aware of, let alone smart people in the field.

s0rce5• 9 years ago

As others have mentioned this obviously isn't a secret but the environment at top schools is very cult-like especially in certain labs and pursuing non-academic tracks is looked down upon. The problem arises when you are objectively more accomplished scientifically than your peers and you think you might have a chance and realize that it will take 2 postdocs, 10-15 years and more politics than science to get a tenure track job these days.

jartelt2• 9 years ago

During my PhD studies, most students I talked to were aware of the lack of professorships available. The issue, however, was that certain departments/professors really frowned upon PhD students exploring jobs in industry (some departments were great though). I was in engineering and the professors were generally helpful with trying to connect you to people they knew in industry. Departments like Psychology were the opposite though. Some students would search for industry jobs without telling their advisor because they feared they would be ignored and not supported throughout the rest of their PhD if they said they were going into industry. Some of the tenured professors only cared about increasing the number of academics who studied in their lab. They didn't care much about whether the students were happy or were following their interests.

eegilbert• 9 years ago

I agree with most of this. However, I might take issue with the motivation you ascribe to professors: "only car[ing] about increasing the number of academics who studied in their lab." Another explanation, one that I find myself feeling sometimes, is simply mismatched incentives. Practicing academics and students headed to industry simply have different incentives, and that can add friction to the relationship.

I think it would be helpful and useful for departments to consider other ways to facilitate industry pathways that don't so heavily rely on the advisor.

jartelt2• 9 years ago

I get what you are saying, but the incentives do not have to be misaligned. It makes total sense for both the professor and student to be aligned in pursuing the goal of completing and publishing interesting and original research. It shouldn't matter what the student does after completing said research! But, some professors distribute their resources unequally and give the most time/money to the students who are trying to become professors.

throwawayjava• 9 years ago

is simply mismatched incentives

For me, this is kind of tautologically impossible -- the adviser's primary objective should be the success of his/her students.

I understand that makes me pretty wide-eyed and most people/places don't work like that, but I'm talking about shoulds.

znoop333• 9 years ago

Adding insult to injury, you might have to take the PhD off your resume to get a job in industry! I found that outside the biggest companies, HR departments routinely throw out any overqualified resumes.

akyu• 9 years ago

As someone in the process of applying to PhD programs right now, these comments are quite disheartening... scary even.

yread• 9 years ago

Interestingly, I've heard recently from two different sources (both in biomedical sciences) that there is a shortage of professors in Germany. As in foundations or national initiatives having funding for them but there aren't enough candidates

geebee• 9 years ago

Overall, this is overwhelmingly true, to the point that I feel slightly embarrassed to want to discuss edge cases. But here we go. We already know that prospects for humanities and social science PhDs are extremely grim[1]. However, economics might not be so bad[2].

Prospects for science are better, but we need to distinguish between fields. Computer Science PhDs encounter a completely different market from Biology PhDs. In a field like Biology, there is probably great variance even between sub fields.

There was one more great link I wanted to share, but I can't remember were it is or find it. It ranked graduate degrees by degree and university (i.e., MBA from Stanford, JD from Harvard, etc). You don't see any PhD or MS degrees on there until around spot #30, which was a PhD from MIT. Unfortunately, that's not granular enough - a "PhD" from MIT makes about as much sense as a "Masters" that includes the MBA degree. You can figure that since it's MIT, the PhD degrees lean toward the technical, but I'd really need to see PhD in CS to make the comparison. If this data were available, I'd guess that some PhDs from elite universities are actually very well paid on the level of elite JD or MBA programs. Even then, PhDs have vastly higher attrition rates and longer and less certain completion times[3]

[1] "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go" http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4484...

[2] "If you get a PhD, make it an economics PhD" http://theweek.com/articles/452770/phd-make-economics-phd

[3] Attrition rates often shock people who don't know. The attrition rate at an elite law, medical, or business school is typically well below one percent. At elite PhD programs, they can reach or exceed 50%. It's not an exaggeration to say that attrition rates at elite PhD programs can be 100 times higher than a 2 year MBA or 3 year JD program at the same university.

justinzollars• 9 years ago

This is true, I earned my MS in Biology in 2009 (a rough year to graduate). I was able to land a position as a laboratory manager but ended up teaching myself Ruby to solve a few problems on the job.

I've ended up in Silicon Valley in software engineering and I'm quite happy but wish I would have considered job prospects in my field of study a little harder before committing so much time and effort. I might have ended up in a CS program and would have been better suited to succeed earlier.

Biology is definitely interesting and I learned how to think scientifically, and "how to think" about problems. So that component was rewarding.

somethingabout• 9 years ago

I thought there weren't enough people with STEM degrees?

amenod• 9 years ago

Is that really news? Obligatory joke:

Taxi driver to passenger: "Well, someone looks happy today!"

Passenger: "I just got my PhD! :)"

Taxi driver wistfully: "Yeah, I remember the day when I got mine..."

laxatives• 9 years ago

A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked. He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws, and everything was working as before.

The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.

"This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.

Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."

So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.

One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times r square."

He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"

Animats• 9 years ago

The growth area seems to be academic administration. As I pointed out previously, Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City.[1] It's all administrators. 2700 of them. More administrators than Stanford has faculty. "School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development" will move there. This is in addition to all the administrators and staff back on the main campus.

Don't become a doctor - become a Medical Administrator! It pays better.

[1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/

Cacti• 9 years ago

Wow... 16,000 students, 2,100 faculty, and 12,100 admin.

If you need evidence that we're in a college/university bubble, that's a pretty good indicator.

jxramos• 9 years ago

I feel for the students facing this reality, but I think this comment in the article can lead to dead-ends.

"""Our survey, for example, shows that one-third of respondents do not have useful conversations about careers with their PhD supervisors."""

I remember speaking once with a few professors about what their work was like in industry. I was caught off guard when I was told they never worked in industry and had their whole careers in academia. Silly assumption on my part of course, but it was jarring nonetheless to be told so much point blank. It really put into perspective for me the angle at which advice was coming from.

chiefalchemist• 9 years ago

Science like everything else is driven by money and "success." Mind you, the Scientific Method is a wonderful ideal. However, it is implemented by humans. Humans that more often than not have been struggling. Humans under stress do irrational things.

maruhan2• 9 years ago

I feel there could exist "academic industries." There should surely be a way to do similar research for industries. With proper infrastructure I feel like companies can own and sell research materials, allowing them to hire academic researchers to do academic research related to the companies field. In fact, with even better infrastructure, an individual could own and sell research materials

analog31• 9 years ago

I've shared this anecdote before: When I was a grad student in the late 80s, we learned about the oversupply of PhD's compared to the number of available faculty jobs. In fact I remember it as a topic on discussion boards in my earliest experiences with the Internet.

I told my dad about it. He got his PhD in the 50s. His reply was: "Oh yeah, that was common knowledge when we got our degrees too."

He enjoyed a long career in industry, as have I, so far.

Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

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