The only thing missing is that the grants administrators are very often (I can think of two, dear to me counterexamples) people who got into science and couldn't hack it, making for sort of a bureaucratic dunning-kruger effect. I remember meeting DOE bureaucrats coming to visit our site, and being in awe at their complete lack of basic scientific concepts, and thinking, "these idiots probably get paid six figures to sit around pushing paper and get nice paid junkets to pretty places like San Diego while I'm struggling trying to push innovation and deal with failure as a postdoc on 30k". Of course you can't say that to their face, because you won't get your grant continued.
In one particular egregious example, I remember a grants administrator who came to our facility, got a ride in the boss' tesla roadster, and for whom a cocktail party was thrown. Several years later, this administrator's PhD research came to light as being very likely artefactual. https://raphazlab.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/stripy-nanopartic...
The uncharitable interpretation is that this person escaped academic science to administration because they knew they couldn't hack it, because the data are willfully overinterpreted and that wouldn't fly for too long. And of course wound up in the position of managing hundreds of millions of dollars in grant moneys. I can't accuse this particular person of that particular motivation; but isn't it evident that science funding positions would disproportionately attract such people, and is that a situation we want to be in?
I am sadly unimpressed by a lot of people who end up managing investment or research funds. I wonder if it is similar to politicians? It takes some specific social skill to get there, but it doesn't mean you are any good in that position when you get it.
I don't think its a "social skills selects orthogonally" problem. Its a "to want this job selects for low intelligence" problem. One of the counterexamples I have in mind chose to pursue the alternative despite being brilliant because as a professor she wound up in a place where the red tape was unbearable and the median quality of postdoc and grad student she was getting was impossibly low to achieve reasonable results, but like I said, I think she is an exception and she rails about the difficulties she has as an administrator (but at least it pays better than professor)
This is true of all fields where social skills are critical for the acquisition of the position. The problem is that people with good social skills are also really skilled at avoiding being removed from a position that they can't do - often the only way to get them out is to promote them and hope they don't cause more damage.
Thanks for the link to my blog. This interpretation is not just uncharitable; it also does not really back up your argument: contrarily to the student who became a grant admin, the PI decided to pursue in this very same route, building a vast scientific enterprise on the said PhD work... If the to-become-grant-administrator decided to leave it there, this person has demonstrated a somewhat more rational course of action than the academic!
I agree that it's more rational than the academic, but that's exactly my point, what is the rational course of action in these cases for selfish individuals in aggregate creates an environment where bad outcomes are enriched. The bad outcome of the PI's lack of introspection, is a really low bar to be comparing against.
An administrator doesn't have to be competent at science, perhaps the opposite might help make more pragmatic decisions. For example, a former particle physicist might have a spot in his heart for multibillion dollar colliders, whereas a former football coach might invest in school nutrition.
Somebodies whose work was 'artefactual' might very well understand exactly much (or rather how little) your work is worth.
As an alum of the physics department at WUSTL - the author of this piece has quite a negative reputation on campus due to his outspoken beliefs on various political matters. It has led to his removal from many important projects and nearly cost him his tenure
This comment is borderline ad hominem [1]. I say borderline because you don't explicitly use the information you give to counter his views but since you don't actually say anything, that's the impression a reader might take away.
The articles you cite have nothing to do with the author's views on academic careers or the choices people should consider regarding graduate school. Personally, I'd find a discussion of those points more 'on topic' than the author's views on sexuality.
[1] I had to look it up to be sure. " ... a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument" - from wikipedia.
What nonsense. What on Earth is the point of your post? Very clearly the GP posts some links which are helpful to someone assessing the written output, world view, politics and mindset of the author of the original piece on academia. Furthermore, have you read the piece on homophobia? I'm not the most politically correct person out there, but really that article is the sort of thing we expect from semi-literate bible-thumping retards from the small towns of the southern USA. It is definitely of interest to this thread that the physics professor in question wrote that.
Yeah you're right. His opinions on the last movie he watched is relevant when he's discussing what he thinks of postdoc positions as professor with tenure.
Even though I find his political beliefs repulsive, and am sure that his beliefs have put him afoul of the academic groupthink (which leaves me in a weird place, because I dislike his beliefs but also dislike the leftist conformity being brandished against him and breaking his career) I don't think any of this stuff is relevant.
Standing alone, everything he says in this essay is correct and insightful. So I'd rather discuss that than him.
Did you actually read what he wrote? The views he expressed are much closer to what you so derisively call "leftist conformity" than his titles would seem to indicate.
Huh? Modern "Leftist conformity" involves placing homosexuality and heterosexuality in a scientifically and sociologically spurious equivalence. His piece on homosexuality is extremely far from leftist conformity.
There's a place on HN for discussing both strictly the content and also issues related to the author don't you think? I mean, we have a beautiful tree UI, we may as well use it :)
Scott's quip "many PhD programs even see training students for industry as a fundamental part of their mission." Has long been true for chemistry and biology, and that has possibly staved off the phenomenon for a bit longer than it was for physics (original article, 1999), but it is certainly now true in these fields too.
Of course, these are all anecdotes, by which I mean data strongly filtered through confirmation bias. So it's worth thinking about the bias here; we have tons of grad students and postdocs comiserating, and a select few professors. One of which says it's miserable and is trying to warn people in the future, and the other who has had a fabulously successful career saying everything's more or less fine.
It is really a simple analysis: The number of tenured faculty is not increasing, so to have a long-term sustainable job market, each one can only graduate one PhD. The actual number over their career is probably more like 5-10. Every one except one of them will not get a tenured faculty job, that's just basic numbers.
> The actual number over their career is probably more like 5-10
Where did you get that number? I think that number is actually closer to the number of PhD's in training at any given time. The number over a career is probably 10x that. Heck, I can name one professor who whas 25 PhD students at any given time.
Totally right. Polarizing/absolutist proclamations like the OP tend to start noisy, unhelpful discussions on HN. It's even worse when (as here) the OP concerns a general topic where most HN readers have anecdotal evidence, but only anecdotal evidence.
This kind of outrageous statement can be kind of fun in a small group, at dinner or a bar, but not here (IMO).
Do you think the discussion in this thread is that bad? I don't—mainly because many people have been commenting from significant relevant experience. The replies to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763777, for example, are really good.
No, it's not truly bad, just very anecdotal, and I think we can do better. (But I didn't flag the article.) Also -- the peripheral concerns around this particular writer, who has written on a variety of red-button topics, can make things go downhill fast.
OP here. I'd like to say that I did not know about the author's other controversial articles and many of which I find disturbing. I was on a journey to figure out whether PhD (esp. in other fields than your prior ones) makes sense, for myself and while doing so came across this article and HN seemed like a nice place to have a discussion.
My apologies to not have searched HN prior to submitting this, to see if it will be a re-post. However, even if comments were anecdotal, it still helped me understand the gravity of the situation.
I feel rather conflicted by any advice given to anyone to not become as scientist. I have been through the whole science treadmill all they way up to tenured professor, but I have recently given up tenure to work on my original start-up full time. I loved everything about being an professor except the pointless committee work and paper shuffling, but I reached the point where I felt I could do more good science outside of academia than inside.
My advice for what it is worth is do science if that is what you are passionate about, but work on side skills like programming, business and networking (yes networking is a skill) so that when you reach a point where science is not the way forward anymore you can do something else without feeling like you are a failure.
What field are you working in? I am a prospective physics graduate student, and I want to do physics research as a career. However, I am uninterested in going into academia after attaining my PhD, and I am also financially independent due to inheritance.
I develop genomics software - my company is in my profile.
If you are financially independent then you should look at becoming an adjunct professor as a long term goal. If you don't cost the university any money and you generate papers and grants then you will not have too much trouble finding a position.
You should use this freedom to work on areas that other less fortunate scientist can't like project that may not generate any results for 3 or more years. No grant funded scientist, or even tenured staff member, can afford to tackle projects that don't generate publications within a relatively short timeframe as any breaks in publication output is career killing.
Hm this is an interesting thought but I'm having trouble parsing it. Isn't there a contradiction there? If you generate grants and papers, you can find a job, but then you should tackle stuff that doesn't produce any results for awhile and doesn't get grants?
Long term I am curious about going back to academia, and finances aren't a big issue. But being forced to do short term work is a dealbreaker. I have done some original research outside of academia (mostly in the form of source code, some semi-published), and I'm curious about thoughts on how to "work the system".
EDIT: I looked at what an adjunct professor actually is, and it sounds sorta horrible? You don't even get benefits? I assumed low pay, but at least with benefits, but apparently that's not the case. What do you get out of it, other than a title? Access to facilities? Since I am in software I don't really need facilities....
Or do you get students to do work for your pet project? I imagine the good ones would want to work for a "real" professor.
"I have done some original research outside of academia (mostly in the form of source code, some semi-published)"
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Source isn't something that gets published, source code is at best a demonstration of the concept you publish about. Either you have some papers published (that means, peer-reviewed from a real journal, not uploaded to xyz 'open access' journal) or you don't.
To 'work the system', you need to get real papers published, several, for a number of years, and work with people in positions that can get you into a university. That way you can sidestep the several years postdoc route. Or become an adjunct.
As an adjunct professor you are 'affiliated' with a university, giving you access to some resources (usually) and a name/email address to put on your papers. So yes you need a source of income besides that.
" Since I am in software I don't really need facilities...."
Yes you do, maybe not in the sense that you need hardware, but you need an environment to reflect your ideas on, and to give you social proof that you're not a quack working from his basement. Yes it's theoretically possible to get published without an academic affiliation, and it sometimes happens, but you'll never be taken serious to the same extent your competition is.
If I were independently wealthy, an adjunct professorship would be pretty appealing (in the right institution). Getting frontline access to very smart people working on potentially world-changing problems while having very few hard responsibilities/commitments (lectures, committees, etc) seems like a nice way to work. Being independently wealthy is a pre-requisite as the institution offers nothing but access.
I agree - it is a pity I was not born to really wealthy parents.
There was a paper in Science about 15 years ago that was on how the independently wealthy worked in science that was really interesting (I might see if I can find it online).
If we go back to the foundations of science all scientist were just wealthy dilettantes :)
Edit. Found it - actually it was from 16 years ago :P
If only generating papers and getting grants made it easy to get a job in science - most of the lament in this story is that even being a great and productive scientist won't get you a job these days.
In regards what you get out adjunct professorship is access to the academic environment, things like lab space, shared equipment, intelligent people to talk to (students and postdocs mostly). Sure you aren't paid, but if you are independently wealthy it is not an issue.
Yes students will work with and adjunct professor - actual in some cases it is better as the adjunct actually has more time to train student.
I wonder if/when this will happen to programmers. I keep thinking that the job market for programmers will be radically different in ten years, what with the enormous amount of people "learning to code" these days. He did however suggest people to become programmers in 1999, and if you followed his advice then, you would probably still be quite happy with that decision today.
It's a completely different situation. Programming leads to some serious concentrated rewards, while science leads only to dispersed rewards. As a result, there are plenty of people wanting to invest in programming, but mostly governments want to touch sciences.
That of course does not mean that the job market for programmers will always be good, only that when it stops being, it will be for very different reasons.
But the scientist generally wins less than a programmer who has a moderately good year making a website to help people find other people who would like to walk their dog.
It's almost impossible to sell a public good. A career that focus on them will inevitably get less monetary rewards than one that focus on excludable ones.
A scientist gets less money than a programmer because despite creating much more total wealth on average[1], nobody needs to pay to get a share of the results, thus nobody has much of an incentive to pay.
As a related concept, life ain't fair.
[1] Does he really? I'm going with the common opinion, but I'd love to see data on that.
Well, that's certainly one way of putting it. You could also say, "Academia has the potential to absorb about 10% of PhDs produced annually." That's fine for CS, where most people want to go into industry anyway and industry understands the product. Not so much for, say, physics, where more PhDs would rather stay in academia and you have to explain very quickly why someone should hire a PhD physicist before they slam the door in your face.
There is a huge imbalance in new phd/new tenure-job openings. also, the proportion of faculty jobs with tenure is shrinking. both of these are massive 'caveats' to the use of 'stable'.
I actually meant that the demand for programmers matches and evolves with the supply, and has certainly room to grow for a while, whereas academia has been completely mismatched for years.
Programming is a profession that's become a part of society. It function as electricity does, in that without electricity modern civilization wouldn't exist.
Science is more of an investment that is important to the future of society, but can only be achieved if basic needs of a society are met. It's like other profession such as math, art, or philosophy in that it makes the society itself more flavorful, and progressive.
... can only be achieved if basic needs of the scientist are met ...
This has an obvious interesting long term evolutionary effect. If via mandatory poverty and celibacy we force everyone out of academic science who cares about the future, the long term results will be (insert something probably very negative for the future here) Or another way to put it, is if everyone involved has a predisposition for extreme recklessness, maybe its time to close down dangerous areas of research before its too late.
Aside from absolutely everything else mentioned, if you strongly select for recklessness and lack of concern for the future, historically the occasional misguided soul would leap off a building, and in the future you might end up with organic chemists, nuclear physicists, internet-era programmers deciding to take an entire city with them.
So even in the most self centered inhumane analysis of the humans involved, not enforcing a vow of poverty, celibacy, an recklessness on scientists is at the very least a security matter. At least issue food stamps or welfare or something?
Is that new though? I remember loads of people signing up to CS courses (both university and vocational, as well as self taught) during the 1st dot com boom in the late 90s. In my native Israel that was particularly extreme, everyone was trying to get into "computers".
And yet 15 years later we still have much higher supply of work than workers when it comes to experienced talented programmers.
Everyone is learning to code due to this massive movement of programming as of late, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will be learning to code effectively nor efficiently.
I think a more nuanced article would instead explain to students how to gain competitive advantage, and work with the system, while simultaneously fulfilling the desire to work on one's own problems of interest.
I still don't know for sure if I made the right choice in 1995, sticking to bio grad school, instead of trying to get a job at Yahoo! I mean, had I done the latter, I would likely be independently weathy and able to fund any science project I wish. On the other hand, I really did learn a lot about politics trying to be a scientist. And how to write prose that gets funded. And how to tell a good story.
Same story for 2001, when I did a couple postdocs instead of dedicating all my time trying to get a job at Google. Again, would be wealthy instead of having to work, and could contract out to answer any scientific questions I cared about...
The process of becoming a scientist was painful. The vast majority of being a scientist seems to be doing work that ensures you are free to pursue something of interest... but not having enough time to pursue it, due to bureaucracy. However, spending well over 10,000 hours laboring on interesting problems, and being able to apply the skills gained from that (without having to apply for funding) is very satisfying.
" I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs."
and
"The result is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak American students and with foreigners lured by the American student visa."
Well, I'm sure glad I don't work with this professor. Yeesh! Talk about confirmation bias.
I don't think it's fair to assert a confirmation bias.
The first quote: That is probably a factually true quote. He did not say, "Therefore, more people's lives are ruined by physics than drugs."
The second quote is also probably factually true, and jives with my experience in graduate school. Of course, many of the foreigners are also weak, but he leaves that out.
Ok, I used my list of logical errors incorrectly, my bad.
Still, yes, for him, maybe he does in fact know more 'failed' physicists than junkies. However, there are many many many more junkies with much much worse lives than almost all PhDs.
I'm going into neurosci this fall, so I don't know yet personally. However, the attitude expressed in that sentence is so very toxic. If that's what the professor publishes, then I'd never want to hear what he gossips to the other professors. Maybe, just maybe, the professor is a jerk. And maybe, just maybe, the only people that are left near him are the ones not smart enough to avoid him in the first place. I don't remember what bias that is.
I'm finishing my 5th year of grad school now. My adviser constantly sets expectations so high that they literally cannot be met. I have had to skip holidays and neglect my family and I have still often had my work trivialized. My work is not appreciated, the fact that I have given up almost everything else in my life is not appreciated. Most people do not even make it to their 5th year in our group.
I spent a lot of time being really bitter about all this. But I have realized that you have to do this to be a good scientist. My adviser only wants to train good scientists. So I'm not even upset about it any more. I have to look beyond my adviser, and look at the actual science I am doing, and realize that he is irrelevant, but that I still have to behave in this way (i.e. giving up much else in my life) to make progress.
I don't know if you'll encounter this in neurosci. Perhaps good neurosci research can be done without this level of commitment. I'm sure it would depend on your exact specialty. But I'm telling you all this so that you don't end up being really bitter towards your adviser if you get into a situation like many aspiring scientists face. It's not his fault.
I'm not exactly sure what your problem was with the quotes you posted. I guess it was that he was calling his students weak? My point is: in school, what your adviser says is fundamentally irrelevant. Don't let it affect your self-esteem. But science itself has a way of absolutely kicking your butt. And that is why professors say things like that in the first place.
It takes massive virtue to be a good scientist. It also takes a particular set of life circumstances in order for it to be a rational choice. What I do would not have been a rational choice if I had considered it mandatory (for me) to have a girlfriend or start a family, for example (at this stage in life).
That said, I haven't left because what I do truly is rewarding. I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I am a purely selfish person. I don't do science for the greater good. So my point here is: it can be worth it.
Wow, thank you for the advice, I do appreciate it!
I'm going to push back on you though. Having to skip out on your life and family to satisfy an advisor who "sets expectations so high that they literally cannot be met" is NOT ok. I have done this to myself and family before as well, and am old enough now to know that it is WAY unhealthy and detrimental to the work over the long term of months.
Honestly, it sounds like you are kinda Munchhausen-syndroming here. I mean, bravo for sticking with it and having the hardihood, but... dude.... wake up. Your advisor seems to be an ass. If they ride you this hard and trivialize all the hard work it is not helping you be a scientist, it's helping them further their career. You are getting screwed here.
Also, you seem to be very confused as to why you are doing this. You claim to not have a life outside of grad school and yet your life in grad school is terrible. You claim to love what you are doing but only after years of struggle and browbeating. From what little data you have shared (and thank you for doing so, I do appreciate it) you seem resigned. You advisor is not going to give you a good letter of recommendation. You indicate your science is not good enough for your advisor and do not refute this. You claim to be selfish but care about missing out on family and friends. You state your advisor is trying to make you a better scientist, but only discovered so after 5 years of their bad treatment. What is your plan? What are you going to do with your life? If this is what science is doing to you, you might want to reconsider. You seem miserable.
Back to the quotes; my problem was that he is self selecting out the good students. You advisor is a person you should trust. Writing an article like this sends out big red flags to anyone maybe thinking of working with him. I'd never work with the guy because I know for a fact he is a bad investment. If he had any students at the time of the writing, he just threw them all under the bus, along with most of his co-professor's students. He tarnished the reputations of his lab, department, and school by saying those things. Mostly he tarnished his own reputation.
Thanks a lot for your comments. You are insanely good at reading between the lines.
I don't let it get me down that my adviser doesn't give me that much approval, because I'm not in it to get his approval. I also don't let it get me down that he doesn't think my work is that much of a contribution, because I genuinely do believe it is.
I did let that stuff get me down for a long time, so I have been miserable part of the time, but I have learned an important life lesson about not letting your own self-esteem come from other people's standards. You have to set your own standards and do your own thinking and evaluation. This is true in all areas of life, but it's super important for self-esteem.
I don't think my adviser is just using me to help his career. He's too established to need that. It's just not a factor. That is definitely something to look out for in academia but not all professors are that hardcore/machiavellian.
Your questions may have been purely rhetorical, but in case not, my plan is to finish my doctorate and then most likely go on to become a practicing (i.e. non-academic) computer scientist.
I do think all this is worth it in terms of not spending much time with my family (I mean my parents' generation, as I'm not married and have no kids) on holidays. It would have been a much larger tradeoff if I had had much social (friends/romantic) prospects, but I don't think I really would have done much better outside of grad school (my best years are still ahead of me in all that kind of stuff). And I do have some really good colleagues that basically are friends, AND I get to do real computer science full time, which is basically a dream come true.
" You have to set your own standards and do your own thinking and evaluation. This is true in all areas of life, but it's super important for self-esteem."
I agree and also struggle with this. Many times I put others opinions of me in front of my own. I need to work on it, but I don't have any clue where to start. If you know of any strategies, I'm all ears.
Do remember to watch out for recommendations though. Having an advisor that thinks little of you can and does hurt your chances at jobs. Especially for a PhD candidate, they will be looking to you as a senior role and likely will ask for recommendations. Make sure to have friends that can vouch for you that make sense to a hiring manager. You need to weave a good reason you are using some friend and not your advisor. I know it seems silly, considering what I just said about external self-esteem, but cover your bases.
I am envious of you a bit. I wish I could love programming as much as you seem to. I struggle a lot with the logic and basic concepts. I hate doing it, but since I am willing to, I get the job a lot. Also, the dyslexia makes bug finding an impossibly frustrating job. ';' and ':' look just the same to me.
Lastly, thank you for the compliment. "You are insanely good at reading between the lines." At least, I hope it was. Wait, I'll keep my self-esteem and think of it only as such.
I think when we are little children we learn that when our parents or other adults tell us we are good, we are good, and when they tell us we are bad, we are bad.
For the kinds of things that a child deals with, they were possibly or probably accurate most of the time (unless your parents were alcoholics or something---and one of mine was; then you get told or treated as "bad" all the time).
So your brain just learns to operate this way, until you retrain it.
And retrain it, you must. Because the kinds of things adults deal with are much more complicated, plus some adults take advantage of others, are dishonest, don't think things through thoroughly, make mistakes, etc. So if you don't retrain your brain in this regard, you will constantly get "punished" by other adults judging you negatively.
The question is, how to retrain it? In a nutshell, I think the answer is: it just happens automatically by consciously thinking about this issue every time it is relevant. e.g. when my adviser says something that threatens my self-esteem, I remember the principle that his judgement may not be correct, and that it should not affect my self-esteem, and then come up with my own honest, meticulous judgement, which should and does affect my self-esteem. (If you aren't "honest" and "meticulous", you won't really trust your own judgement, so it won't sink in and the whole technique won't work.)
Those are my thouhgts/strategies, hope it's helpful.
I appreciate your point about recommendations. My adviser's judgement does matter for that, just not for my self-esteem, and you have to separate the two, because they are different things. I think I'll probably be OK on the merit of eventually publishing the code I am working on (plus some more papers), which will mean more than anything my adviser could say for the kind of work I want to potentially do (though I might actually just totally change fields after I graduate [1]).
And don't worry, if you keep looking and refuse to give up, changes are very, very high that you will find something as fulfilling as programming could have been, had you actually enjoyed it more. I guess you've already figured this out though since you mentioned planning to study neurosci.
[1] Because the kind of programming I like doing is really cutitng edge and research-y. I like solving really challenging problems slowly and carefully and thoroughly. Not sure I'll find this in industry and not sure I could live with "just normal" programming.
To be successful in science, as in most other professions, requires a combination of direct skills (ability, knowledge, industriousness, perseverance, etc.), indirect skills (e.g. connections, political ability, salesmanship) and luck.
As a field gets more overcrowded, the job itself becomes less attractive (lower pay, more hours, less interesting work) and the relative importance of the indirect skills and luck becomes much greater, leading to a lower average quality of practitioners.
Presumably, the demand to enter the profession should subsequently decrease and eventually lead to some sort of equilibrium.
Mr Katz, please remove the third party link to the "German" translation (http://uhrenstore.de/blog/seikeinwissenschaftler ). The translation is completely off - probably done using machine translation.
e.g. first two sentences:
Don't Become a Scientist!
wrong: Sei kein Wissenschaftler!
correct: Werde kein Wissenschaftler!
Are you thinking of becoming a scientist?
wrong: Denken Sie an einen Wissenschaftler zu werden?
correct: Spielen Sie mit dem Gedanken ein Wissenschaftler zu werden?
or: Möchten Sie eine wissenschaftliche Karriere einschlagen?
(the uhrenstore.de website is a fake website - all blog articles are machine translated and makes no sense, probably part of a SEO link farm network)
Scientist here who managed to get out of the science trap:
Prof Katz is totally right. I started a great career as string theorist, postoc at several elite universities, international lectures and talks, wrote a book, appeared on TV etc etc ... and then didn't get a professorship (at least not on a reasonable time scale). Tried scientific management for a while, but that was too depressing. So, in my late thirties (!) I went into automotive industry, working on self-driving cars, having a fantastic and cool job with a salary I could only dream of a few years ago.
I wouldn't have wanted to miss large parts of my scientific career. But I really regret my excursion into scientific management. I should have switched careers five years earlier.
My advise to young scientists: define some aims and a time scale, and if you don't meet them (i.e. get a tenured job), say good-bye. There is nothing to regret. Don't believe those professors, friends of yours, who promise you a position next year or in two or in three ...
* Since I already have an alternative career path (computer science, programmer) can I now pursue my passion of science by going to grad school (physics)?
I got a PhD in particle physics 6 years ago. I did my first postdoc and enjoyed it - I got to travel, and work on relatively interesting things occasionally. Every year since then it's got worse, to the point where I've given up on getting a permanent job and am actively looking elsewhere. If I was offered an tenured academic post tomorrow, I would decline.
The other thing that is generally left out of this discussion is that academic excellence does not matter for a permanent job. There's no politics as vicious as academic politics (since so little is at stake), and who your supervisor is for your PhD matters more than how clever you are. If your achievements are first-rate, no-one up the chain will really understand them, and you'll be derided. If what you do is unoriginal, but suits the political landscape fame and riches (60 hour weeks and a starting salary of $75k) may become yours after you've moved city, country or continent a few times.
That is scale-independent. If you have tenure, funding committees become the new tenure or interview committees. Collaboration boards and conference boards (which confer status and prestige and therefore opportunity) work who likes whom - not on competency.
All the best people (technically and personally) I met during my PhD have left the field and I'm hoping to join them soon...I'm just slightly ashamed of myself for staying in the field this long.
+1d specifically for "There's no politics as vicious as academic politics (since so little is at stake), and who your supervisor is for your PhD matters more than how clever you are."
Also, don't be ashamed - if you tried to do good, thorough work despite seeing quick and dirty work being rewarded, in the end you did a great thing!
I can only speak for the biological sciences (I am a grad student in bioengineering), but from my perspective this is 100% accurate.
My PI got his own lab and his first big grant (R01) in his late 20s. My father did the same at 28. In the lab I am currently in, I have personally witnessed 3 brilliant, qualified, 40 year old post-docs with fellow to faculty transition grants be turned down for assistant professorships. If you go into academic science with the idea that you will end up as tenured professor, then you are naive.
As a tenured professor, and even as a new PI, you will not perform much, if any science. You will spend your time writing grants, approaching industry for funding (sponsored research, gifts etc), writing and reviewing papers and editorials, managing grad students, complying with regulations, teaching classes, serving on useless committees etc). There is also stiffer competition for grants every year, making it extremely difficult to stay funded. Our lab does alright because we are heavily industry funded, but individual groups in our lab have suffered.
I plan to either go into industry, work for a startup, or start something with some colleagues.
I'm under the impression that it has only gotten worse.
Anecdote: A super smart friend of mine from physics grad school finished in 2008 and went on to post-docs at Caltech and Harvard. He was unable to get a tenure track job, primarily because in that 4 year timespan only 1 faculty position opened up in the entire US for his (tiny) field. He now works at Google.
In fact I'm not sure that anyone from my cohort is still in academia. Other students used to come ask me questions all of the time, because I had worked in industry before going to grad school. Their questions were always some variation of "what are my options if I get out of physics?".
Edit: I'll also add that most grad students I knew gave little thought to their post-grad job prospects before starting grad school. It seems now that the message has trickled along a little better that the outlook is very poor.
I interviewed recently for a Data Engineer position in Chicago and was surprised when 2 interviewers from the data team introduced themselves as astrophysicists. They reasoned that they weren't happy with the career path in academia and so found a way out.
It's becoming more common as far as I can tell - I also left academia (mathematics) since academia is less about the work you do now. My brother stuck it out and finished his PhD in chemistry, but he too bolted from academia since he hated it as well (and that is with the fortune of having a high reputation thesis advisor, but who milked him for as many papers as he could before my brother threatened to just up and leave) - he's now a senior engineer at Samsung.
The academic landscape is just poor these days - it is a pretty brutal world to operate in.
while most people would agree that we train too many PhDs, I can assure you: the process of training many PhDs (in any discipline) has been very, very good to Google. It selects for, and hones the skills of, people who are quantitative, can form hypotheses, and test them.
I went to Goog- and took a significant temporary hit to my bioinformatics career- while working as a software engineer on stuff that was far from science. However, I can assure you: my training could be easily transferred.
Looking at the alumni list for my program,
http://biophysics.ucsf.edu/people/alumni
I see a very wide range of outcomes- yeah, a few professors, but also SVPs of companies, venture capitalists, doctors, software engineers, patent counsel, and industrial scientists. You can also see the postdoc bolus.
Another way to put it: going to school is not the fast or easy path.
I'm seeing more and more bioinformatics-related positions in industry that are listing a PhD as a requirement. I'm currently trying to decide if it's worth it to do the PhD now (in Bioinfo or a strongly related program) or to side-track for a little while doing something more directly computational or entrepreneurial. I'm ultimately interested in coming back to bioinformatics regardless. Would you say it's worthwhile to do the PhD (even if intending to work in industry), or to try to make up for the lack of a PhD with other experience?
The older, safer part of my says get the PhD.
The younger, more risk prone part (which I ignored for too long) suggests you're going to make a bigger impact sooner by doing something computational and entrepenurial.
The PhD means, when you get to industry, you won't end up as a lab tech. it doesn't mean that you will be running a lab, however.
I usually tell people to brush up on their programming skills as much as possible. If you're a theorist who only does pencil + paper or maybe Mathematica, it might be hard to find a decent job. Also, it never hurts to talk to / network with any industry people that are related to your field (software or hardware vendors, etc).
I'm now doing data science, but have also done hardware development and electrical engineering related things (signals). When I was transitioning to data science I also did some very specialized consulting related to my PhD. A few people paid me to do simulations and/or help then implement some techniques that I worked on as a grad student.
Also: I had a very supportive advisor, who encouraged me to accept a job offer before I graduated.
I got a PhD in physics, in 1993. Everything written in Katz's article was widely known to grad students when I was in school. Through a bit of planning and probably a lot of luck, I went to industry after finishing my degree. (Friend of a friend owned a tech business).
One "fact" that is apparent by omission in Katz's article rings true today as well: The complete lack of any consideration of industry employment by a physics professor advising grad students. When I told my advisor that I was likely headed towards industry, he gave me his best wishes, but admitted that he had nothing to offer me in the way of guidance towards such a career.
There's an amusing aspect of Von Munchausen By Proxy Syndrome in a PhD thesis: You cause the problems that you subsequently solve. I chose a problem, and steered it in a direction that required solution via extensive work in electronics and programming, which then became the basis of my resume.
The irony is that those of us who swore up and down that we were in it for the love of science and not money, are now the ones who you must compete with in the job market.
As an aside, I observed that a lot of people went into fields like physics to escape the eventuality of confronting the job market, and may not have been any better off in a supposedly more lucrative field.
Munchausen by Proxy is not something you want to do in science - it's explicitly faking data (child injuries) so you get attention that you desire. It's not causing the problem, but faking the problem. MbP definitely is a very serious problem, but it's not the problem that the parent claims is happening. A better semantic fit for the science world for MbP would be faking data to get grant money.
It was indeed very true then, and it is even worse today.
In 1999, there were around 400,000 STEM PhDs in the US, but only 70,000 STEM academic faculty positions available. Today, there are over 800,000 STEM PhDs, but only around 100,000 STEM faculty positions [2].
And the gap will get even worse: in 2013, over 35,000 new STEM PhDs were awarded, but only about 3,000 new STEM faculty positions were open [ibid]. It's just unsustainable.
So, anecdotes aside, this is a very real and very serious structural problem. No matter how 'passionate' or how resourceful they are, with current trends, at least 9 out of 10 current first-year PhD students will invariably not get an academic faculty position when they enter the market. The longer this elephant in the room is ignored, the worse it will be [3].
I started a group leader position (not tenured) since about 1 year ago in bioinformatics (UK). The trend only got worse since this article was written. It is particularly bad in biology but physics and chemistry are not much better off. There is an ongoing debate about what to do about it. A good overview of the debate can be found in this recent perspective published in the PNAS journal (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/04/09/1404402111).
If you have a passion for research and have a solid back-up plan that you are sure can always fall back then feel free to try. Keep in mind that your salary will go down. Also, age factors in and there is some bias towards people that have always been on a straight path of high academic success. This should not be a big issue for the PhD but it will start to matter for postdoc and tenure track positions.
If anything, the trends outlined in this article have continued in the last 15 years, so it's truer now that it was then. The disparity between PhDs vs. faculty positions is illustrated in this graph:
(The last time this was posted here everyone complained about how the annual and cumulative scales are different and make the graph hard to read, so caveat emptor.)
Physics could be an outlier, as there is a non-academic career path for certain specialities. But these tend to be the more engineer-like specializations. If your passion is theoretical physics, your job prospects are probably limited to searching for academic roles, and that's a tough place to be these days.
I have a PhD in Neuroscience and left the "postdoc treadmill" to be a software engineer. So far I am very happy with my decision and wish I would have read this article before getting my PhD. It's 100% accurate, and everyone in the biological sciences knows it.
Not bad. I spent a year as a CS major in undergrad and programming is something that I did as a hobby for most of college and grad school, so even without a degree, I had a pretty decent resume for entry-level positions.
Given that cheap and disposable trainees — PhD students and postdocs — fuel the entire scientific research enterprise, it is not surprising that few inside the system seem interested in change. A system complicit in this sort of exploitation is at best indifferent and at worst cruel.
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.
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.
The situation is equally difficult for postdocs trying to make the jump to a junior faculty position or a permanent job at a national lab. The Snowmass Young Physicists survey received responses from 956 early-career researchers, including 343 postdocs. But INSPIRE currently lists just 152 "junior" positions, including 61 in North America. And the supply of jobs isn't likely to increase, says John Finley, an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who is leading a search to replace two senior particle physicists.
"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
Indeed, even while giving complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of pursuing a career at CERN.
This lack of an element of social responsibility in the contract policy is unacceptable. Rather than serve as a cushion of laziness for supervisors, who often have only a limited and utilitarian view when defining the opening of an IC post, the contract policy must ensure the inclusion of an element of social justice, which is cruelly absent today.
The long-held but erroneous assumption of never-ending rapid growth in biomedical science has created an unsustainable hypercompetitive system that is discouraging even the most outstanding prospective students from entering our profession—and making it difficult for seasoned investigators to produce their best work. This is a recipe for long-term decline, and the problems cannot be solved with simplistic approaches. Instead, it is time to confront the dangers at hand and rethink some fundamental features of the US biomedical research ecosystem.
Since 1982, almost 800,000 PhDs were awarded in science and engineering (S&E) fields, whereas only about 100,000 academic faculty positions were created in those fields within the same time frame. The number of S&E PhDs awarded annually has also increased over this time frame, from ~19,000 in 1982 to ~36,000 in 2011. The number of faculty positions created each year, however, has not changed, with roughly 3,000 new positions created annually.
One is simply that graduate students represent the cheapest form of labor, and so graduate programs have expanded to keep researchers well supplied. The end result is that 8,000 people get a PhD in the biological sciences each year, far more than can ever hope to find faculty positions. Only about 20 percent of them end up staying in research positions, yet graduate education generally provides training in nothing but research.
The problem is that everybody who would actually implement these reforms at the institutional level won't like them. Successful researchers will have to accept smaller and more focused labs and see their smaller pool of grad students distracted by training in areas other than research. University administrators will see their departments and incoming money both shrink. You can count on many of them to resist.
I don't know about America, but our university here in UK just received a huge, 15 million pound grant to open another 11 PhD positions in Big Data Analysis, fully funded by Red Hat - and they practically guarantee a job afterwards, a well paid job. I am doing something completely unrelated, but I have to say that a prospect of job security for 4 years and then a good job afterwards is very enticing.
I think the piece this prof wrote targets classical PhD programs and does not take into account industry-sponsored PhD programs like the one you mention.
And also the email we've been sent directly by the university:
We’re delighted to announce that we have been awarded an EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cloud Computing for Big Data. This new multi-million pound initiative will train the next generation of experts in the analysis of "big data" using the latest cloud computing technologies and statistical techniques. People with these skills are in such demand that the Centre is being heavily backed by industry worldwide (including Microsoft, Red Hat and IBM); companies will work with us on the training, and provide placements during the PhD.
Some additional details are included in the University Press Release: http://t.co/5HvBUhhZ1t
We have eleven fully funded, four year PhD studentships available for home (including EU) students to start in October 2014. These fully cover both the fees, and living expenses (no loans or debts are needed).
We are recruiting students from both Computing Science and Mathematics/Statistics backgrounds and providing an intensive course of interdisciplinary training during Year 1 of the four year PhD programme. Students from a CS background will be trained in advanced cloud computing and statistical skills during year 1, beginning with a crash course in "Statistics for Computer Scientists" in October. Students will then work on a PhD research project.
As well as working with closely with industry, the course will also teach and support students interested in setting up their own company.
We can provide full funding (fees plus living expenses) for students expected to gain a II(i) or First who meet the usual Home fee status regulations (contact us if you are not sure).
If you would like to register an interest in this programme, or ask any questions, please send an email to bigdata-cdt-enquiries@ncl.ac.uk containing your full name, stage, degree programme, fee status and predicted degree classification. In the case of a predicted degree classification of II(i), please also include a predicted final average. Students registering an interest will be sent further details about the programme, including information on how to apply, as soon as applications formally opens.
As an American physics PhD who is continuing his career in academia in France, the situation is comparable to that in the US: the number of tenure openings (French CR1/CR2) is declining while the number of PhDs is growing.
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I rather dislike these essays that deter young, intelligent and motivated young people from a career they might otherwise enjoy and be passionate about. There are legitimate problems with the career track as established and outlined in this essay. It is even wise to inform young people of those problems so they know what they're getting into. However it is discouraging to hear from tenured professors that they should give up their passion and dreams and be a lawyer.
I can think of no greater torture, save complete isolation, than eternal boredom.
It's disingenuous to deter the curious on account of your cynicism, is it not?
I don't think disingenuous fits for what you are saying. In particular, the author seems quite sincere in his belief that the job market for PHDs has lots and lots of candidates and that this creates disadvantages for it as a career path.
I also don't think that young, intelligent, motivated, passionate and curious individuals are especially fragile.
I was thinking about trying to become a computer science professor.
I think I could potentially get more top-quality research done living an impoverished lifestyle and working at something else part time, than I could in academia, where you have to focus on pleasing the "powers that be" (program committees, grant committees, tenure committees).
This reminds of something Feynman said something in "You Must Be Joking..."
"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"
The internet has probably nullified this effect to some extent.
I think Feynman was just jealous :) When you consider that von Neumann was at IAS and he managed a huge amount of collaboration of vast importance I think it had more to do with the individual than the environment.
Not everyone is sociable and finds the company of other people conducive to their thought processes like Feynman evidently was. Some people work best alone, and there is no shortage of good work (including from the IAS) to demonstrate that. Personally I find talking to other people only occasionally helpful for work.
It's been 15 years since this article was originally written, which doesn't seem like a long time.
But China's GDP was $1T in 1999, and was $9T in 2013. I confess near-absolute ignorance but the job prospects for advanced degrees in China probably have gotten at least a little better in that time.
the problem is far more people getting a advanced degree.
In 1999, if you hold a Phd degree from US, it is easy to find a faculty position in China. However, Even you hold a PhD degree from Top Univ in US today, you can hardly find a faculty position in China. You have to do postdoc to publish more papers in top journal.
I agree with you. I see the same pattern with Indian science landscape. Unless you have nice and strong connections, landing an academic position in India is tough too, even with a PhD from some ace university in the US.
And China's GNI per capita (PPP) in 2013 was still just about 20% that of the US: $10,900 in current intl dollars [1]; and India's is half of that, at $5,080 [op cit].
Notwithstanding all that moral panic about China and India, it's hard to fathom how desperately poor these countries were throughout the twentieth century in the first place --and how in many ways they still are.
I presume that he means that economic conditions are so bad in India and China that people would go through poverty in American Graduate schools instead of staying back home.
I think there is some truth and some hyperbole to that presumption. Especially in the past five years when both nations have seen strong economic growth. Not all people who come from India are the same. Not all American graduate schools are the same. I did a part of my high school and my undergrad in India and came to America as a part of a EECS PhD program at UT, Austin. All of the people who got accepted in my program from both India and China were either academically incredibly strong (top of their classes at strong undergraduate programs in India/China) or had done relevant research. This was true also for the American undergraduate students in my program. Economically speaking, none of the Indian/Chinese students were going to suffer if they didn't join a PhD program in America. They had very good jobs. (A job at Google India in 2009 was pretty fucking hard to get into what with dozens of interviews and so on.).
Now, this is only part of the story. There were at the same time enough lots of students in India who either found it hard to get a job or wanted to improve on their economic situation who came to (equally shitty) graduate schools in America in order to better their situation. Presumably the same is true for students from China.
The facts presented here are OK, but the facts would be even stronger if they were about: "Don't build a hundred million dollar company; don't get traction or leave an indelible imprint on humanity." (i.e. many of us here are doing far less justified things, statistically speaking, regarding career choices as entrepreneurs. Rather like the physicists discussed in the article.)
Maybe none of us should be building anything. The facts are pretty strong toward that one, as well, and most readers building a company would have a much safer path coding at Microsoft.
It just doesn't matter. Did you know Fermat was an "amateur mathematician" and Wikipedia introduces him as such, after giving his introduction as "a French lawyer."
So what? Was mathematics a waste of his time - certainly. Would you have advised him not to squander it doing that? Would you have told him not to actually study mathematics formally and devote his profession to it? Who knows what we could have gotten.
Thankfully these arguments are never going to affect the bright minds of our or any generation, and people will go and do whatever fascinates them.
Planck, too, was discouraged from studying physics:
"The university's professor of physics, Philip von Jolly, discouraged the young student from studying physics because—as Jolly told him—it was very nearly a closed subject with little left to discover. Luckily, Planck disregarded his professor's advice." [1]
Basically that's all you need to know about the current blog post as well :) :)
I should clarify that I mean that the argument and facts that the article uses are OK. It starts:
>Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the world works? Forget it!
and ends
>What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career.
But the very same argument would apply to: "Are you thinking of founding a company? Do you want to build value and change the lives of millions of people, getting rich in the process? Forget it!"
We could then go on to state why entrepreneurship has an even lower success rate than that talked about in the article. For every one hundred people who set out to change the world by founding a company, how many succeed?
The truth is that the average founder's prospects are, rationally, miserable.
That does not stop the best and brightest from going into entrepreneurship, building companies and actually changing the world.
In the exact same sense that Planck was not discouraged by his university's professor of physics stating that he should not study physics, and should concentrate on something else. Likewise Von Neuman's father insisted he study chemistry (which he did, along with mathematics.)
The facts presented in the article just don't matter to those who have a true passion for science, just as the statistics don't matter for those of us building companies. They will study mathematics, or physics, or start companies, regardless of the odds. It's not a rational decision so much as a passionate one.
I don't think it's entirely inappropriate in this case because this kind of article is only of value if the author is basically trustworthy and sane. He's not really reporting facts or making an argument so much as just reporting his own experiences and opinions. That's fine but it does make his personal credibility relevant.
Of note is that this 1999 essay came back around in 2010 when Katz was tapped by the DoE for a scientific task force evaluating options for the Deepwater Horizon cleanup.
He was removed from the group in fairly short order, after people found this essay and put the heat on him for it.
Shortly afterwards, Katz' son came out to his father.
From this article from the Washington University student newspaper, it looks like Katz reposted the essay within days after that Post-Dispatch article ran.
Well that was enough crazy for today. I'm always impressed by the logical flaws someone can have when they are emotionally passionate about something. I'm pretty sure that his final analogy between homosexuality and belonging to the klu klux klan was definitely worth putting in post-scriptum to absolutely confirm he hasn't thought any of this out.
I hope I don't get too many downvotes: I see people wanting to make a change from academia to technology and I think I may have something for you. If you are interested in working on interesting data problems, Golang, and living in Austin, TX, please message me.
The result is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak American students and with foreigners lured by the American student visa.
Not quite true, but what I have noticed is that, at the graduate-school level, there's a very low correlation between the quality of the program and the students.
If you go to a top-5 PhD program, you'll be surprised by how many of these supposedly "best in the generation" people just aren't that good. Many are, and the talented outnumber the talentless, but you'd expect there to be zero talentless schmucks at the top programs, and it just ain't so. This is where the OP's perception that PhD programs are "full of weak students" probably comes from; the fact that even top PhD programs can't keep the schmucks out. It's not hard, even for a total mediocrity, for a 22-year-old packing socioeconomic advantages, and already coming from an elite college, to appear smart.
Drop down to the #10 or #20 or even #35 department, and the talent distribution isn't much different. The difference, in raw intelligence, between the students isn't that strong. There are some really good students and some terrible ones, at any of them. The change is barely perceptible. You wouldn't be able to tell the difference except by the reputation of their advisors.
If you go in to a top school and expect its students to be the best of the best, you'll be disappointed when only 75-85% of them are halfway intelligent, and you might conclude that the #30 school has no intelligent students. In fact, it has almost as many. There are probably 20-100 times as many people (probably 3-5% of the general population) with the talent for academia as actually put themselves anywhere near contention for the positions.
What we now have, and it's not new, is evidence of a sorting system that doesn't really work. We can't sort talent from well-positioned mediocrity (read: socioeconomic status) before college, we certainly can't do it in college, and we don't do it for graduate school (George W. Bush is a Harvard Business School graduate). At all levels, we do a terrible job. We're actually talent-rich as a society, because we've had the smartest people coming here for generations. We just haven't a clue what to do with it.
Why are you so surprised that a metric like GPA (or undergrad accomplishment in general), with a hard ceiling, loses its correlation with actual talent at the top end of the scale? That is, most undergrads will simply never get the opportunity to publish one paper in undergrad, let alone two or three, so if you admit them to grad-school based on maybe a publication, good grades, and maybe some internship/REU experience, you should expect to admit some highly talented students and some students who were very talented at optimizing the capped metrics on their resume to the maximum but not at actual research.
Hell, in a way, it's basic reinforcement learning, is it not? What sort of rational agent or system will "go above and beyond" when the reward signal is capped at a maximum value? When you look at it that way, every single step of the selection, sorting, and filtering process we call academic meritocracy is optimizing for irrational devotion to careerist signaling, which has only a weak correlation to real devotion to science.
Well, one thing you can do is admit everyone who a colleague you know and trust says can do research (what I've heard, quite logically, is the #1 way to get into a good graduate program, after of course convincing a professor in one to demand your admittance).
So the "schmucks" ... and I've known of one MIT professor who didn't get tenure who was in that category (a friend tried to do research in her laboratory and found it impossible, it was so badly run, something subsequent events proved) ... are either false positives from the above metric or from the cohort of department's best guesses after running out of them.
>Well, one thing you can do is admit everyone who a colleague you know and trust says can do research
I always thought this was simply how you get into grad-school: do research in undergrad, and have your research mentors write you letters of recommendation, trusting their reputation to carry information the admissions committee will understand and care about where grades and awards won't.
>So the "schmucks" ... and I've known of one MIT professor who didn't get tenure who was in that category (a friend tried to do research in her laboratory and found it impossible, it was so badly run, something subsequent events proved) ... are either false positives from the above metric or from the cohort of department's best guesses after running out of them.
Kinda. Politics become a problem, but it is true that once you actually get to the point of publishing papers, the cap on your achievements disappears, so you do, in some way, get career credit for doing more.
i don't totally disagree with the article, but it's probably worth pointing out that this guy is apparently a "proud homophobe." great. one might question his judgement after reading this drivel.
I find the trend in our society that "if you say anything I disagree with, everything you say is invalid" to be very disturbing (the corollary of "if you agree with something important to me then I will forgive much, if not all, bad behavior" seems to be true as well). McCarthyism in any form is evil, yet people will hold up their own beliefs and say "this is the only right way to believe". I fear what this will do to important rights like free speech. It doesn't matter if you have the "right" if cultural pressure squashes any ability to use it.
This is a textbook ad hominem attack. Although I have very little respect for homophobes, this doesn't automatically torpedo every other argument a person makes. (Especially when it is on a completely unrelated subject).
Just because you have very extremist and incorrect views about something outside your profession, doesn't mean that you are automatically incorrect when talking about your profession.
I didn't say he's automatically incorrect, and I think if you reread my comment, that should be clear. I do think a person's subjective judgement on serious issues are relevant to their subjective judgement on any one issue.
Everyone wants to dismiss this as an ad-hominem attack but it's still a valuable datapoint. At best maybe it would make one more skeptical of the arguments put forward by katz because I think even the brightest person can be easily persuaded by a written piece or incorporate its "facts" into their beliefs and not pursue further scrutiny of it.
No, people should be skeptical of arguments made for things and pursue further scrutiny of them regardless of the author's views and opinions in other non-relevant fields.
Not that I'm supporting his other radical views but this is an ad-hominem attack by definition and his views on irrelevant subject matter should not affect, in any way, how you interpret his opinion here.
I agree. Ideally we scrutinize everything but we don't. If the guy believed the earth was flat you would take whatever else he said with a grain of salt.
Part of the problem is that Murkans are inherently fearful/distrustful of science and scientists, so it's hard to get any respect -- and the attendant pay raises -- unless you work in defense or "national security". The situation is different in Europe or Asia, though, so if you do want to become a scientist, you'd have a much better time of it outside the USA.
Getting PhD and trained as scientist has a HUGE value counter to the arguments in this article.
First, as Guy Kawasaki puts it, you want to be in school as long as possible. Getting a job means life long working on your bosses orders whether you like it or not. Going to graduate school allows you to work on your favorite area, become master at something and gives you an opportunity to add that little bump in the human knowledge with your name.
After you get PhD, you should also realize that not everyone is cut out becoming next Einstein or Feynman. If you can get good postdoc with interesting challenges then fine but otherwise you can always go to industry and get a job. You enjoyed your years in graduate school unlike spending those years trying to make some company little bit more profit and that's what counts.
Today, having a PhD in any field is invaluable if you want to enter the software industry. Most PhD work today involves some level of data science and software work anyway. When you apply for a job, at least in software industry, you will get better offer faster.
The correct way to look at this not how much money you would have made if you weren't doing PhD and straight went to industry but rather how much fun you would have missed out on your favorite area of work and possibly childhood passion if you didn't.
Software is eating academia. Concern for not getting tenure positions should be minimal today. There has never been better time to get PhD and get trained as scientist.
In one particular egregious example, I remember a grants administrator who came to our facility, got a ride in the boss' tesla roadster, and for whom a cocktail party was thrown. Several years later, this administrator's PhD research came to light as being very likely artefactual. https://raphazlab.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/stripy-nanopartic...
The uncharitable interpretation is that this person escaped academic science to administration because they knew they couldn't hack it, because the data are willfully overinterpreted and that wouldn't fly for too long. And of course wound up in the position of managing hundreds of millions of dollars in grant moneys. I can't accuse this particular person of that particular motivation; but isn't it evident that science funding positions would disproportionately attract such people, and is that a situation we want to be in?