3 ms·
If we stick to PhDs as opposed to the excellent but undervalued MS degree: Far better chance of becoming a tenured professor (I'd say roughly 1 in 10-20 in my
by cossatot 10y ago
If we stick to PhDs as opposed to the excellent but undervalued MS degree:
Far better chance of becoming a tenured professor (I'd say roughly 1 in 10-20 in my field, geoscience). Plus, like has been said elsewhere in this thread, after 4-7+ years of being underpaid and overworked, you've got a PhD.
However, a freshly-tenured professor at a major research school might make 100k, and might make 150k by full professor. Very few outside of business/medicine/maybe some engineering make more than 200k by full professor.
If you found a unicorn, you probably do a bit better than that, financially.
- j7ake 10y agoThose seem to be pretty good odds. Thanks for the rough estimate. You can also hit 'unicorns' as a scientist, for example a major discovery (nobel prize) or innovation (millennium technology prize), which should be taken into account somehow if we want to compare the two. In start ups there are lots of discussions and analysis of long tails and capturing unicorns (implying lots of failures along the way) but analysis of careers in science never gets the same treatment, although I find many connections between the two (many small failures but big wins). It is always statistics of what an average scientist would achieve rather than what a top scientist would achieve. It would be nice to apply some of the same analyses we do on careers in start ups to careers on science.