tmoot

My advisor made the exact same point. Although we did receive funding from startups to work on adjacent problems.

Physicist here.

Since you probably have a good background in optimization, work through problems in:

- Taylor for Classical Mechanics or Goldstein (a bit more advanced) - Griffiths for E/M and Quantum.

For stat. mech. I find the chemists have more intuitive textbooks.

- Introduction to Modern Statistical Mechanics by Chandler

That's how I learned; on a good ol'fashion gentoo box.

learned so much about os stuff and kernel drivers, etc...

It was like diving in the deep end of a pool though.

I'm happy you posted this.

Typically the university pays professors salary and gives you a startup fund.

Professors have to bring in grant money to fund students, build a lab, travel to conferences to advertise the work, etc.

Plus the university gets a little slice of the grant.

This is not my experience with the newer generation of professors in STEM.

Writing that paper means making getting funding and that means networking (giving talks, creating/maintaining collaborations), participating in inter/intra department grant writing, managing students to produce the work, etc.

Of course you could write an amazing research paper but more often than not it won't go to an amazing journal unless you have positive connections in the field (-ie potential reviewers and editors).

Papers in good journals -> Easier to get grants.

A major part of the tenure packet is grants and awards.

Teaching is not the top priority.

Hahaha, some of the people I considered the most academic in my physics cohort are going consulting.

After 5-6 years of making 25k per year and working long hours (which is not bad given the cost-of-living where I was in grad school is low), the salary becomes a very real draw.

Most of my cohort are now data scientists or ML/AI engineers.

Honestly, the trend I seeing is that weaker students -ie can't find data science or consulting jobs- move on to post-docs.

Although, there are the dedicated few academics that also move on to post-docs as well.

Physics research always involves statistics, cough, 'machine learning' cough so that's how people are selling it these days.

This is a good point. There are too many confounding factors. I recently finished my PhD and reflecting back, it was hard and a lot of work, certainly not what I imagined as an undergrad. I worked most weekends and holidays and have a few projects that failed and grants I couldn't produce the results, subsequently losing funding. It was a bit debilitating watching friends and family enjoying the 9-5 lifestyle.

Honestly, what kept me afloat were my Chinese and Indian colleagues that pretty much lived in the office but were candid about the experience.

I'm not staying in academia because physics AP's don't make that much compared industry positions (I want a cybertruck :) ).

However, I'm glad I finished, because it's opened quite a few doors in industry to work on cutting edge tech with problems I want to work on.

Well, there goes my weekend :)

Your comment made my day :)

This hits close to home.

What, you don't want to be a 10th year grad student then post-doc till your mid-to-late 30's?

Also, to be honest, those problems are kind of boring.

:)

-- phd in physics.

It's too bad we lost blue waters.

ejmr is the anon job board/shitposting for economists

heavier on the shitposting though.

I feel totally undervalued financially and intellectually in acadamia.

I'm was considering calling this a sunk cost and moving on but based on the comments here, I think I'll stick it out and try to develop on the side.

This is the first time I've really lost interest in my work. It's really hard to work on something you don't care about.

And other career or life advice?

Thanks for the words.

I'm a frustrated grad student in STEM. I posted here a few days ago crowdsourcing for career advice on what to do next:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15610675

Thanks.

I'd wish I had read this in 2006.

I didn't know PG had this repo of great articles.

Good point about waking up early and working. That's what I'm doing now with my coursework.

I also do research during weekends, but I've been experimenting with taking one day off to try to explore other things and spend time with my SO.

One of the reasons I want to leave is the work culture. I have the freedom to work whenever I want, but there are just too many deadlines to not stop working. Most of my labmates pretty much live in the office, although, they're all international students. I'm fairly disillusioned with academia now.

My advisor would be a bit upset if he knew I was taking classes. I know my research productivity has been down lately.

Thanks for the response. One of the main reasons I'm unhappy with my work is I do the bare minimum to publish and submit. So far I've published 3 first author papers and somehow they've gotten into decent journals for my field.

I'd much rather have only published 1 paper with a more expansive coverage of that topic. I feel intellectually dishonest because I know the end game is adding an extra line to the grant application/progress report.

Good point. I'm lacking in the side projects area since I've dedicated most my effort to my phd which really just amounts to data analysis scripts.

I did take quite a bit of cs courses (almost close to a second major) as a undergrad but I'm years out of practice and I've forgotten most of the material.

I'm toying with a few ideas related to the cannabis marketplace.

Honestly, I've been way to risk averse in life. It's part of the reason I stayed in academia.

Startup. :)

really quickly:

matrix inversion is ~O(n^3)

gradient descent is ~O(np) where p is the number of predictors and n are the observations (n x p matrix).

for lasso, calculating that derivative of the multiplier is not possible (for all points), so coordinated descent is used.

Hahahaha, funny seeing this here. I took this course at UIUC about 6 years ago taught by Stone.

I didn't read the paper but it's in scientific reports (minimal and rushed peer review, bottom of the barrel nature subjournal)...I'd be a bit skeptical.

It's not exactly anyone's first choice place to publish.

Crispr/Cas9 is not as robust as people make it out to be, but it's promising. (I do some work with crispr/cas9)

It seems like publishing standards have really sank.

I'm a physics phd student, but I did my undergrad in cs+physics at well known school in the midwest.

I really regret going to grad school for physics, I gave up a lot of earning potential, time to develop new skills and I've forgotten a lot of my CS background. Most methods in my area have already been developed and the pressure to publish (pushy advisor, several projects not producing the intended results, and proposal writing) has always been hampering away at my free time to think. I really dislike this system. At the same time, I'm sure exists in industry too (never had a real job). I'm not going lie, I feel a bit trapped, but I'm still a fairly positive person.

In the sciences, grad school is sold as a necessity but I'm starting to think this is a way of fueling the ivory tower.

I realize that this is a bit incoherent/ranty, but whatever. :)

so just Matt Might's article.

great. :|