Why I Chose Academia

http://blog.ketyov.com/2013/04/why-i-chose-academia.html

by ohblahitsme • 12 years ago

53 32 12 years ago

blog.ketyov.com

the author needs to chime in a few years later when he fully understands how big science actually works:

- most work is done by untrained and inexperienced graduate students, good luck understanding/reproducing the process

- most faculty are little more than grant submitting machines trying to land a grant at all costs regardless of what actually interests them

- most research reviews processes are incredibly biased with countless people doing terrible jobs (the reviled "reviewer number 3") a single negative can sink a grant/paper acceptance

- most institutions are grossly monolithic and the rules and regulations are such that incompetent individuals can never be removed from any given position.

- most institutions are run as medieval lordships, with many smaller decision makers like deans, head of departments that have incredible influence on someone's career. It is great when the dictator is benevolent and unbearable if not.

Note how instead of paying a good salary the University choses to give out handouts (lower childcare fees, lower rentals) - because those in turn are paid via taxpayer grants. It hides the fact that they pay so little the people would qualify for foodstamps.

jofer• 12 years ago

...And all industry jobs are mindless rote work.

I'm not arguing that the things you describe never exist in academia, but they're the worst examples of when things go wrong. They're not the norm.

tedks• 12 years ago

From my vantage point in academia they're definitely the norm. I'd say the only one that's mostly false is #2, but that could be the norm outside of my particular field (computer science).

I've seen fantastic research sunk and forced through resubmission time and again because of reviewers that either don't understand the work (and why would they? they have zero incentive) or have pre-existing biases based on their own work (and are called in as expert reviewers, effectively functioning as gatekeepers in a subfield).

Bad deans/department chairs can make life suck pretty hard. This is usually not the case because they (in my experience) don't have that much power, but over some things like hiring they can definitely be as capricious as they want. The real killer are the people outside the department, on IRBs, grant review boards, etc.. In a good research-focused school they can be great; in worse schools they can be tinpot despots.

Reproducibility in particular is insane. In computer science virtually no systems are released at the time of a paper submission, so papers describe things that may or may not exist. I'd say this is less due to untrained/inexperienced grad students and more due to a combination of constantly rushing to publish, unclear institutional regulations regarding releasing artifacts such as source, and inability to focus on cleaning things up for a release.

Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it. I think this comes down to an incentive problem -- when there's no incentive to build things that work, you tend to build broken things.

ancientrepeat2• 12 years ago

Sadly with 15 years in the academia spent in three different fields of science (at multiple universities in roles that support dozens of researchers) - I found it to be the norm. Time and again I am surprised just how bad it is and that with time it is getting worse, more people are writing more and more research papers that are worse than ever before.

It is a race with very strange incentives this is the world where a Nature paper makes your career but publishing nonsense has no negative effect (in fact there is a positive one, you now have more publications padding your resume). You have to go out of your way like manufacture data and get caught to experience any negative consequence. Doing sloppy work is the norm.

I wish it weren't true and it could be that the problem is my perception.

As for the comparison with the industry: you can always go and try to work for a different company that does things your way, but guess what, science is all the same. You'll get the same reviewers, same grant application process, same publication process, same ranking methods no matter where you work etc. You are stuck with the system and you can't reform it.

weland2• 12 years ago

I'm not arguing that the things you describe never exist in academia, but they're the worst examples of when things go wrong. They're not the norm.

Unfortunately, they are the norm. There are places when this doesn't happen, or where you have the privilege of working with an extraordinary professor who manages to shield you from this.

That's rare, though. #3 isn't constant and #2 is not an entirely accurate description (or at least not that widespread), but by and large, the portrait is very accurate.

I miss the intellectual challenge of academia. I'm in a pretty high-end job and it's nothing compared to what I used to do. But the working conditions and the colleagues? Not in a million years. I'd seriously consider selling hamburgers than returning there, and I have worked on minimum wage before, I'm not talking out of my ass on that.

cryoshon• 12 years ago

Love of science and research does not pay the bills, nor does an academic level salary.

The "choice" that the author made wouldn't really crop up unless he had help paying the bills.

beambot• 12 years ago

What? Academics may not make the same salary as industry... but an engineering professor generally makes >$100k / yr. For example, you can look up the salary of most public university professors (eg. from Georgia Tech/UGA): http://www.open.georgia.gov/

You might not get rich... but it can definitely be livable with a high quality of life.

pcrh• 12 years ago

The average salary for professors at UCSF used to be ~$160K.

slvv2• 12 years ago

If you get a tenured position, it can be a $100k/year job. Tenured jobs are harder and harder to get, and adjuncts are compensated badly.

cscurmudgeon• 12 years ago

Yes. We are all going to live an infinite number of years. So any difference ($30-60K a year) in salary is justifiable even if you are doing mind numbing tasks making other people insanely rich. Even if you die, you will be taking all that extra money into your next life! So slave away my friends :D

Fomite• 12 years ago

I know a number of academics who will be surprised by this.

For that matter, having "paid the bills" through graduate school and a postdoc, the notion that you can't live on an academic salary is absurd.

dagw• 12 years ago

My wife went the academic route, I went the industry route. For the first several years or so our salaries pretty much kept pace. Now while I admittedly earn a bit more than she does now, she earns plenty enough to to pay her own bills and have money left over.

jccalhoun• 12 years ago

You need to cut your bills then. I'm a 40 year old grad student who's been living on less than 20K for a decade. At this point making 40K would be living large.

Create• 12 years ago

"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified to find other possibilities?" -- H. Schopper

The numbers make the problem clear. In 2007, the year before CERN first powered up the LHC, the lab produced 142 master's and Ph.D. theses, according to the lab's document server. Last year it produced 327. (Fermilab chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as last year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900.

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.

Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff. [...] Potential missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational programmes are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and training are not separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both parties. In my three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting.

http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-stud...

An unsatisfactory contract policy

This will be difficult for LD staff to cope with. Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career

http://staff-association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits.

http://www.gac-epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin...

And a warning to non-western members:

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic labor prices in different countries. The total cost is X (with a western equivalent value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

michaelhoffman• 12 years ago

This blog post is a year old. The writer is now an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego.

http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/447/

sinkasapa• 12 years ago

I like Tanya Khovanova’s perspective:

"I started my life wanting to be a mathematician. At some point I had to quit academia in order to feed my children. And so I went to work in industry for ten years. Now that my children have grown, I am trying to get back to academia. So I am the right person to compare the experience of working in the two sectors."

http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=476

thebooktocome• 12 years ago

Khovanova's stuck in the adjunct trap, and mostly studies recreational mathematics. Because of this, her experiences don't really generalize well.

yodsanklai• 12 years ago

"Why I Chose Academia"

I make enough money to pay my bills, I have as much free time as I want, I get to learn new things all the time and teach them to others.

However, it can be a little depressing to be a lousy researcher, I feel useless at times.

Why I Chose Academia

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