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> Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be
by Xcelerate 10y ago
> Now, as a new crop of graduate students receives Ph.D.s in science, researchers worry over the future of some of these dedicated people; they’re trained to be academics and are often led to believe that anything else is an admission of failure.
As someone finishing up grad school, this doesn't seem quite accurate. To me, it seems like a lot of the interesting research is being done in industry. I remember scrolling through jobs online toward the end of my undergraduate and seeing "PhD required" for all of the positions I was interested in. Most of my friends working on their PhD are aiming either for industry or a research scientist position at a government lab (like ORNL). So I'm not sure who exactly constitutes this group that believes "not professor" = failure.
- beevai142 10y agoIf you don't advance fast enough on your academic career, it can be read as a failure indicator by grant reviewers, which will reduce your chances to stay employed. If you're too old, and not past an appropriate career stage, you will also find it hard to find someone to employ you in academia.
- sliverstorm 10y agoWhat field are you in, though? I believe that attitude is tremendously pervasive the more "theoretical" the field is, e.g. the closer it is to math & physics, and the further it is from engineering.
- Xcelerate 10y agoWell, it's kind of funny. My degree is chemical engineering, my advisor is materials science, yet all of my work is HPC/computational. A lot of this stuff has become very interdisciplinary (I studied more computer science papers than anything over the last year).
- delazeur 10y agoI studied chemical engineering: all of our PhD grads chose industry over academia, and most of our young professors had come out of physics, chemistry, and biology departments. It was an interesting culture mix, partly created by the fact that ChemE is either disappearing as a field or changing to the point of being unrecognizable (depending on who you ask).
- Xcelerate 10y agoYeah, the field has changed a ton. When my dad was working on his ChemE degree, they had a class strictly on galvanization (which was barely covered at all in my undergrad), and they were doing McCabe-Thiele diagrams by hand.
- selectron 10y agoI can confirm that this idea is pervasive in physics (both experimental and theoretical)
- Xcelerate 10y agoThe attitude of going into industry is more prevalent in physics? Or did I get that backward?
- selectron 10y agoSorry I wasn't clear - the attitude of going into industry being seen as a failure is common, especially among older professors. This attitude is changing somewhat, but is still definitely there.
- fdgh 10y agoTo me, it seems like a lot of the interesting research is being done in industry. In CS/programming, there's very little interesting research done in private industry, and mostly its purpose is to mislead the user-story grunts into thinking they have a shot at working on a real project. Google didn't fund AlphaGo to be a good citizen, but to keep the proles motivated. Private-sector research seems to be as thin on the ground as academic jobs, because even though there are smart people in these companies, cost-cutting morons end up getting power in the end and anything that can't be justified in terms of short-term profit gets cut whenever the political temperature gets high enough.