19 ms·

Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects

430 points by sz4kerto 9y ago

hobofan 9y ago
> Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know. If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.
- voltooid 9y ago
  These are usually people that have always been the best in their class through their academic careers. The idea that they might be the ones to not get a position, because they are not good enough for it may not be something they have experienced /consider possible for themselves.
  - afarrell 9y ago
    They may consider the possibility, feel intense despair about it, and work to avoid thinking about it in order to avoid feeling the intense negative feelings that come with something they regard as catastrophic.
- eradicatethots 9y ago
  What’s your point?
- mattkrause 9y ago
  Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think. Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definitely in the top 15 percent of the field. It's certainly not that easy, but...you're not obviously worse than most of your classmates, you work on a hot topic and you work hard. What are your chances? Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or discussion of their prospects. They should obviously think about this, but more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and frank assesments.
  - noobermin 9y ago
    >but more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and frank assesments. And they won't do it because they are a) biased due to survivorship bias, and b) they are disincentivized to do so as that would scare away their cheap labor.
    - s0rce 9y ago
      I believe that b) is the key issue here. They need the cheap labor so it needs to appear that the PhD will get you somewhere. In the end only industry is benefiting from being able to hire highly trained people without have to pay anything to train them.
  - hobofan 9y ago
    The average age of a PhD student is 33 years and even at normal speed, no breaks/hurdles and starting right out of high-school, you are 25(?). Something about applying this babysitting attitude of "somebody needs to tell them" to highly educated individuals of that age just doesn't sit right with me. If I were a PhD supervisor, I would probably find it ridiculous that one of my responsibilities would be "pointing people to the universities careers service". I'm also not sure why you would expect a supervisor to be able to give good career advice when some of them have only ever experienced academia themselves.
    - hycaria 9y ago
      That's higher than I thought, but I guess that's US numbers. Are they starting it way later (and if so what are they doing in between) ? Or is it simply a long time spent in PhD ?
      - jogundas 9y ago
        Europe Physics adds up as follows: finish school at 18 + 4 BSc + 2 MSc + 4 PhD = 28
    - chestervonwinch 9y ago
- farseer 9y ago
  You are bound to get down voted for this comment, however I do agree with you. I am one of those people who managed to realize by a good stroke of luck that perusing a Phd in my field would severely limit my earning potential. It was all the Phd grad students always talking about their money problems in the college cafeteria that gave them away.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > > Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know. > If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you. The problem rather is if you really are scientifically better than your peers - so from an "objective" perspective you should be really good enough to obtain such a position. But then you realize how much of a political game (it is much more about politics than scientific achievements) getting such a position is. And I know many great scientists who are bad politicians... They are often much better than the persons who got the tenured positions (the latter ones were great bootlickers and politicians).
  - s0rce 9y ago
    Exactly, I quit after a Science and Nature paper, just didn't want to do a 2nd postdoc and prioritize a tenure-track job over everything else in life.
kensai 9y ago
The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and technical sciences. Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day) Source? (Genuinely curious.)
  - Aperson4321 9y ago
    It is assumed due to the higher knowlege and specialisation level that the world has these days, but such moments of change does not come along very often, and people have always been confident about how there is no way their understanding of the world might be severly lacking in some way. So it might just be that all is as it always has been you just have to look at it using a large enough time frame.
  - hycaria 9y ago
    I've heard of a contemporary mathematician who had small contributions and did it as a hobby. The recent article about insect population decrease was possible thanks to data collected by hobbyists too iirc (but ended up written by scholars I guess). I don't know if there are many other examples.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  I think you've got it from the wrong end. Most academic research I've seen has been so tainted by corporate funding, publish-or-perish haste, over-formalization, misuse of statistics, egos run wild, or some mixture of them all. Then there have been cases where novel research has been stomped into the ground by professional groupthink, like in Yudkin's case. At the same time we had guys like Shulgin being incredibly productive all on their own. Think of MDMA alone. If it really ends up being a useful treatment, you just know a pharma company would insist that it ran them billions of dollars to develop, and that they should have a God-given right to gouge for it, but it came for considerably less than that from a real expert puttering around in his shack. Sometimes I wonder if the independent researcher is our only hope.
simonbarker87 9y ago
When deciding to do my PhD I did so under the assumption that I wouldn't work in academia afterward. I evaluated it like a any other job offer at the time and decided that the tax free pay, coupled with the freedom to run my project how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc. Doing a PhD built a large array of skills that I didn't have from my undergrad and allowed me to learn practical skills in a fairly low risk environment and explore other avenues. It let me realise that I wanted to start a business, it taxed me mentally like nothing before, it prepared me to hold myself accountable and that if I don't do the work then it doesn't get done and gave me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do that my undergrad didn't. As the article says, I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in academia, it can be an excellent bridge to industry if you are prepared for that at the end.
- neel_k 9y ago
  This is basically the same thing I did, except that I worked as a programmer at a startup before going back to school for a PhD. It was better than doing a startup by a stupidly huge margin. Startups are all about risk-minimization and risk-mitigation, since risky things mostly fail, and so use up your runway without moving you closer to success. So in a startup you are highly incentivized not to take big risks -- and research is always a risk. So you are driven to take an engineering mindset, where the apex of skill is to solve a new problem using only old, entirely proven techniques. In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid confronting them). Basically a PhD puts you in an environment where you can take on big, poorly-understood and poorly-defined problems and attack them over and over again. Going from a blank sheet of paper to a solution (or clear failure) in six months 10 times over is an amazing way of improving your skills, and IME it's really hard to get this experience in industry (even though it's really valuable to have this experience in industry).
  - simonbarker87 9y ago
chriskanan 9y ago
The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wanted to punch me in the face. That said, she emailed me years later to tell me that she became a professor, despite those statistics. If you have a lot of tenacity (doing a postdoc), are willing to settle for a school that isn't top-50, and are reasonably productive (a few papers per year) it is doable. Every single one of my friends that graduated and still wanted to be a professor, is one now, but it took 3-5 years of additional work. This is true for my friends in psychology, computer science, EE, and neuroscience. Of course, now all my other friends say, "Why the hell did you choose to be a professor where you work 80 hours per week and make less than most undergraduates with CS degrees, even when your area of expertise is AI?" Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic. There are lots of great things to do with a PhD that aren't being a professor.
- chriskanan 9y ago
  If anyone is interested, here are my old blog posts on the requirements for getting an interview for a professorship at a top-50 school: [1] http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/ http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/ [2] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-computer-science-professors-at-americas-best-universities/ http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-computer-science-pro... [3] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-ucsds-computer-science-faculty-candidates/ http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-ucsds-computer-scien...
  - nopinsight 9y ago
    From your [3] above, do theory PhD graduates usually have more or fewer publications? What would be your guesstimates of the mean/median number of first author publications of faculty candidates at a top school? "Number First Author Publications (excluding theory folks) Mean: 12.8±6.5 Median: 14.5 Range: 2 – 25"
l5870uoo9y 9y ago
Doing a PhD thesis these days doesn't necessarily makes you cut out to be a scientist. One can speculate if job prospects differs across disciplines.
- dnautics 9y ago
  Just because one is a good scientist doesn't necessarily mean one is cut out to be a professional scientist.
  - l5870uoo9y 9y ago
    I would argue the opposite is more plausible; if one is a good plumber, one is likely also a good professional plumber. I would like to see if this trend is cross disciplinary or say it is mainly within say social sciences or humanities. Personally, I have meet many university students and PhDs whose intellect at best was ordinary.
    - dnautics 9y ago
      What I meant was that the skill set to become a successful professor (grantsmanship, political wheeling and dealing) is antithetical to being a good scientist.
pks016 9y ago
I am currently pursuing MS in Biological Sciences on animal behavior. I want to do Phd then Post-doc and then continue in the science field. But I am not very talented. Most probably I may get stuck after Phd or Post doc. I don't want job. But looking into these kinds of articles now and then, make me think "what are the alternatives ?" What about the people who do basic science like in theoretical physics or pure maths?
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  There are different possibilities for doing research. Note how the current top comment here talks of becoming a "professor", and the featured article talks about "permanent staff position[s] at a university". If what you want is to do research, then what you want is not necessarily one of these. There are lots of research labs, both public and private, where you can get a permanent position. If you're in animal behavior, you might end up in a zoo, doing research part time or full time. These positions are overlooked by these articles since there you are not a "professor" at a "university". In other words, "X% of PhDs become professors" is a very misleading statistic. But yeah, that is still not enough to employ all the PhDs out there. I think in theoretical physics or math you just end up going into finance...
- thicknavyrain 9y ago
  I’m doing a PhD in Theoretical Physics, I hedge the uncertainty of academia by finding small opportunities in other fields to do work in. Internships in science communication, teaching at the university, part time work for a tech start up. On their own, none of them are a safety net for jumping out of academia if you have to, but if you accumulate enough experience over the years, the hope is that transitioning to industry goes a bit smoother. There’s also a few fellowship/transitional schemes opening up for PhDs in esoteric fields to go into things like Data Science/Software Development. I think you just have to keep a level head and pursue things while it seems reasonable and always keep in mind the dream can pop at any moment and you may have to move around and go into something else.
  - pks016 9y ago
    Yeah. That's a good piece of advice. I usually spend time on data analysis, learning computer security, web designing or any tech related stuff but as hobby only. I know basic of these things but not a "pro" in one field. I guess better to keep learning new things, any time opportunities might pop up as you have said.
j7ake 9y ago
How are these odds compared to other similar ventures full of uncertainty, such as start ups ? And if the odds are comparable then why is our culture viewing start ups positively but PhD negatively ?
- killertofu89 9y ago
  Where are you getting the belief that PhD's are viewed negatively by our culture? Or that startups are viewed positively for that matter? A quick google search and you'll find hundreds of articles warning about joining startups and bashing startup culture.
- tome 9y ago
  Because when you "win" at a PhD you (eventually) get tenure, which these days mean lifetime position of high stress and low salary.
- eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  Because VCs own a stake in start-ups.
yannis7 9y ago
Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on your position in the inter-document citation network. Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee. If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depressed sociopaths with Lamborghinis, then tenure-track postdocs are investment bankers with crappy bicycles. Needless to say, I left academia 3 years ago and never looked back.
- zucchini_head 9y ago
  This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all. Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.
  - jtauber1 9y ago
    Not a big fan of academia either, but I don't see how this is any different than upper management/leaderahip positions in industry.
    - taway_1212 9y ago
      It's true that you need to eat the same shit, but at least upper mgmt/leadership pays much better.
  - Analog24 9y ago
    I wouldn't extrapolate too far from those horror stories you heard. My experience was nothing like what you describe. Plus there are many reasons to get a PhD other than going into academia and when you're a grad student you don't have to deal with any of the politics or the other "grimy" parts (at least not in the vast majority of cases). There are many downsides to academia, the papermill mentality that has become pervasive being a big one, but this picture of a morally bankrupt subculture where people do whatever they can to get to the top is nothing like what I experienced.
gravelc 9y ago
I always tell students in my field (molecular biology) to at the very least learn to code at a reasonable level and pick up some data science skills. Something transferable. At any given time in my department, there'd be five times the amount of post-grad students to full-time staff. Maybe more. It has to be obvious that there likely isn't a job at any level at the end of it. Not just high-flying jobs on the path to professorship, but even low skill technical stuff. As in other fields, women are at a significant disadvantage if they want to have kids (presuming they've made it though the initial cull). The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. Given every higher position is so competitive, they simple lose out due to the time taken off. Makes me quite to sad to see very very talented scientist friends passed over for this reason.
- tome 9y ago
  > The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. I think it's really a black mark on the system that it should be OK for researchers to still not have a permanent position in their early 30s ten years after completing their undergraduate degree.
  - s0rce 9y ago
    But understandable considering the incentives. Grad students and postdocs cost so little but accomplish so much, the whole system relies on them. Just need to keep selling them the promise of opportunity. Unless something changes I can't see this getting better anytime soon. The cult aspect of many top PIs strongly condemning people leaving or considering non-academic positions also doesn't help.
- vixen99 9y ago
  So what's the solution? Hold a position for a woman and then kick out whoever fills it when the woman returns? Everyone has to make choices and this is one of them. If there's a way round this conundrum, a very very talented woman will find it.
harry8 9y ago
Data so absent that they have to draw an analogy to a different data set without any supporting evidence that such is valid. This is Nature not the daily Mail. What is the statistic? How many PhD students have jobs in Academia 5 Years after being awarded? Surely they have /something/ that might be indicative they can publish that's better than footballers? Surely..?
- aqsalose 9y ago
  Article cites one hard number: >Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It’s only a little better in the United States.
  - harry8 9y ago
    But I claim that number is really pi (or tau/2 if you must). Will you take theirs one rather than mine as an argument from authority? This is Nature, not the damn daily mail. Digital extraction required![1] [1] Vernacular expression "Pull your finger out!" Meaning to stop being lazy.[2] [2] Jokes you have to explain, suck.[2] [3] People who put footnotes on their jokes are terrible human beings.[4] [4] There is no [4][5] [5] citation needed
dotdi 9y ago
Sad but true. I once had dreams of a career in academia and research. I'm a molecular biologist turned computer scientist turned software engineer in industry. I now have a very good salary, interesting challenges, plenty of work-life balance and good prospects for the future, and that's pretty much directly out of university. In my opinion, I would have to give up on all of the aforementioned benefits (sans interesting challenges) for at least the next 10 years if I wanted to stay in academia, and on top of that, add the nice non-zero chance of just getting stuck and be forced out of the academic "track". All my advisors told me it's a pretty bad time to go into academia, and I doubt it will get better, sadly, I might add.
lbeltrame 9y ago
A question: how it is for people doing research but not in traditional academic settings (e.g. no profit foundations)? As far as I understand, you're tied to grants anyway to get money, but there's no clear concept of "tenure": I work in such a place, but it's outside the US, so I was wondering about what happens there.
neebz 9y ago
They can always move to Pakistan. Phds from abroad is one of the most well-paid positions here thanks to the recent influx of numerous private business-minded universities opening up in every city.
- rohit2412 9y ago
  Interesting. Its different in India, where it's not the salary but the prestige that drives people to become professors. Even the research opportunities are limited, and industry pays much more.
wiz21c 9y ago
What about starting a PhD at 45 ? I mean, just for the fun of being a student again, the fun of working on your own little project . Does it open possibilities, in the sense of a career reboot ? (I'm totally OK with earning much less money than I do right now)
- yannis7 9y ago
  it will definitely be fun, both being a student + working on your own project. From my experience, for some reason PhD advisors tend to work well/really like mature students. No hard data on this, just an empirical observation across 3-4 labs I've worked in before I left academia. With regards to career prospects (outside academia ofc), you definitely gain respect but anything more than that largely depends on your area of research. Which one is it, if I may ask?
  - wiz21c 9y ago
    I'm looking at anything involving computational geometry; and if I have spare time, ethics :-)
    - photoJ 9y ago
      Find the right advisor and anything is possible. Remember tho, that the department and the research community to which you will belong will also have a considerable say in if you are allowed to progress.
    - bpicolo 9y ago
      Have you considered bootstrapping the field of computation ethics ;)
      - wiz21c 9y ago
        I guess it already exists a bit (Asimov's laws or robotics ?) but I'm afraid no one is interested.
DrNuke 9y ago
In 2017 the research path in computer-heavy subjects is not academy-bound anymore. There may be early problems in getting credit within the learned circles, but a couple of good papers and one good presentation at a good conference under your own ltd umbrella solve this for good.
- hyperpallium 9y ago
  Do you mean just publish on your own account, not under the auspices of an institution (aka "academy")? Is "ltd umbrella" your own "pty ltd" company - instead of an institution? Or you mean, just within your own specialised field?
fergie 9y ago
Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids. In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades. The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to those positions for a lifetime. So there are more professors than footballers at any one time, but due to football's higher turnover, and shorter tenure, many more people will be a footballer than a professor over the course of their career. The bottom line is that professional football is actually a relatively attainable goal for young British men, and should probably be more encouraged as a realistic career option. ...and when you do put in your application to Oxford, Cambridge, Google, or Facebook, your long-gone 3 year stint as a utility midfielder at Dundee United is only going to make it more interesting.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Very interesting observation. I should do the equivalent comparison for Australia.
  - girvo 9y ago
    For Rugby Union, the path to playing in Super Rugby is surprisingly short. I became a first-grade Union referee pretty much by accident, without really putting much time into it aside from the weekends. The ARB actually asked me to become a professional referee, but didn't realise how young I was at the time. A shame that I never followed through on it, really.
- arethuza 9y ago
  Is that the UK or US definition of "Professor" though? I've noticed some UK universities have started using additional titles of Assistant/Associate Professor as well as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader.
  - fergie 9y ago
    If that is the case, I have over-represented the pool of professors, which strengthens the point
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henrik_w 9y ago
I have an M.Sc. in computer science, and worked as a SW developer for 5 years before going back to do a Ph.D. I stayed with it for one year, but decided it wasn't for me. I really liked the idea of learning more, but realized working in industry was even better for me. I found that a lot of Ph.D. projects are driven by what you can write papers on, not necessarily what somebody somewhere really needs. Also, you can learn without being at a university. More here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-programmer/ https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-prog...
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rdlecler1 9y ago
University has become a bit of a Ponzi scheme. I’d love to see PhD programs drop to 3-4 years from 5-7. Especially in programs like biosciences where there are limited job prospects. Universities sell a romantic idealism knowing the likely outcome. Most students are too young or captivated to really do their due diligence. There should be labels on a PhD like the anti-smoking labels on cigarettes.
eighthnate 9y ago
This is an academic industry wide problem, not just for junior scientists. When tenured professors stay on their job for 40 or 50 years and new universities/positions aren't created each year for newly minded PhDs, it's going to create a pyramid like structure in academia with the comfortable professors at the top and legions of phds on the bottom struggling to get to the top. Ask philosophy, history and even economics PhDs. The research/academic/etc opportunities simply aren't there because it is structurally impossible. And as time goes on, it's only going to get worse and worse.
nmca 9y ago
I'd be interested to see how the institution at which you studied effects the probability of a successful career. If you're a masters student at a top uni, do the numbers change significantly?
diogenescynic 9y ago
I know someone who has a PhD in a specific field. They lost their job three years ago and have not been hired since. I can’t even imagine what going to school for that long then being underpaid and discarded must feel like.
VLM 9y ago
The "STEM shortage" phrase means pay is too high for the very few STEM jobs; it means a shortage of income equality, not a shortage of warm bodies. There are obviously far too many warm bodies in STEM fields. There is also a peculiar birth-death problem in academia where over the lifetime career of a professor, that prof should birth exactly one new qualified student to replace that prof. Otherwise we're dealing with a pyramid scheme. And one of the metrics of "success" of profs is how many qualified grad students they're birthing to provide short term cheap labor and long term hyper over supply of qualified candidates to be profs. We're merely seeing the breakdown of a pyramid scheme. One way to fix it is ban grad student labor. The undergrads, most of whom are going in to industry anyway, can be the lab rats. Or the prof can hire more postdocs.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Why would we design a system where only eventual professors have PhDs?
  - s0rce 9y ago
    Maybe not 100% but what fraction of PhDs are professors, maybe 3-5% at most, what about fraction of MDs working as medical doctors, I'm guessing its much much higher (with higher wages) since they limit enrollment in school and residencies (they don't rely on cheap grad student/post-doc labor).
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      Why would we think these fractions should be closely related? And attending surgeons definitely rely on cheap resident labor.
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asafira 9y ago
Hey, so I'm a PhD student (in Physics) at Harvard that has been looking into these issues (as graduate council president in the department), and I really don't like the bickering that occurs between (roughly speaking) die-hard academia pursuers and the others that feel there is a lack in support for non-academic jobs. Here are by far the most compelling issues that I think need to be fixed that both sides should be able to agree on: 1) Professors really, really need to be open to talking to their students about what they want in their career and what's sort of career path they are considering. Not having this discussion is prevalent but honestly somewhat outrageous. 2) Internships really should become more widely accepted within greater academia (i.e., outside CS). There are a huge number of great arguments for them, including a) Exposure. There are a huge number of PhD candidates that have actually never had a job, or even just have never been exposed to what their greatest-interest career is post graduate school. b) Their length is a drop in the bucket compared to the total length of a PhD. (3 months vs 5.5 years average in my Dept) c) professors worry their graduate students will become less interested in research after an internship. My thought: great! I am super happy that person found something that makes them happier. The biggest argument against internships has always been something like 'professors can't just be super flexible with their students, they have their own constraints (grants, etc.)' I'm not proposing that professors go through crazy great lengths to make sure their student can get an internship. I simply think that should become an accepted part of the culture and be an ok thing to discuss with your adviser. Right now, students are literally scared at the reprocussions of even bringing it up. Disclaimer: I interned at Waymo last summer.
- bubagrump 9y ago
  Curious, what did a physics PhD think of software development/research in industry in comparison to the wonders of equations and abstract beauty?
  - asafira 9y ago
    I loved my internship at Waymo! I don't think it was a typical software engineering or hardware engineering internship, to be fair, but I really enjoyed the work I did and felt my background was beneficial in me making as much progress as I did.
burnerOh2125 9y ago
Yea, i went into a phd program in biomedical sciences, spent 2 1/2 years doing computational biology, studying math, computer science and machine learning, not to mention working on project, then left. It was at the point where the prospect of out competing 7/8 of my fellow phd students was not work it, when all of my skills, where transferable to industry, even without staying for the phd. Part of me wishes I did stay, and I'll probably go back for a masters at some point. who knows. Anyway, the system really is designed to get phd students to do the heavy lifting, at 30k a year, for 6 year stretches. Why would I do that, when I have dropped out, and tripled my salary?
CodeSheikh 9y ago
What about creating more private research centers? Where the benefits are not tied to individual company profits or have them hoping for patents stash. OpenAI is an example of one of such initiatives. Similar centers can be spun off more often. Does CERN have satellite labs across the world? Sure committing to funding can be a problem for private entities (companies/families/individual billionaires). Perhaps govt should these entities tax breaks for funding such centers.
ak_yo 9y ago
This problem has been a structural feature of the academic profession for a long time -- Max Weber famously wrote about it almost 100 years ago: http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber...
akyu 9y ago
As someone in the process of applying to PhD programs right now, these comments are quite disheartening... scary even.
projectramo 9y ago
Are there junior scientists who don't know how dim the prospects are for an academic position are? I've been hearing this for two decades. Seems like the sort of thing that any mildly educated person would be aware of, let alone smart people in the field.
- s0rce 9y ago
  As others have mentioned this obviously isn't a secret but the environment at top schools is very cult-like especially in certain labs and pursuing non-academic tracks is looked down upon. The problem arises when you are objectively more accomplished scientifically than your peers and you think you might have a chance and realize that it will take 2 postdocs, 10-15 years and more politics than science to get a tenure track job these days.
jartelt 9y ago
During my PhD studies, most students I talked to were aware of the lack of professorships available. The issue, however, was that certain departments/professors really frowned upon PhD students exploring jobs in industry (some departments were great though). I was in engineering and the professors were generally helpful with trying to connect you to people they knew in industry. Departments like Psychology were the opposite though. Some students would search for industry jobs without telling their advisor because they feared they would be ignored and not supported throughout the rest of their PhD if they said they were going into industry. Some of the tenured professors only cared about increasing the number of academics who studied in their lab. They didn't care much about whether the students were happy or were following their interests.
- eegilbert 9y ago
  I agree with most of this. However, I might take issue with the motivation you ascribe to professors: "only car[ing] about increasing the number of academics who studied in their lab." Another explanation, one that I find myself feeling sometimes, is simply mismatched incentives. Practicing academics and students headed to industry simply have different incentives, and that can add friction to the relationship. I think it would be helpful and useful for departments to consider other ways to facilitate industry pathways that don't so heavily rely on the advisor.
  - jartelt 9y ago
    I get what you are saying, but the incentives do not have to be misaligned. It makes total sense for both the professor and student to be aligned in pursuing the goal of completing and publishing interesting and original research. It shouldn't matter what the student does after completing said research! But, some professors distribute their resources unequally and give the most time/money to the students who are trying to become professors.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    > is simply mismatched incentives For me, this is kind of tautologically impossible -- the adviser's primary objective should be the success of his/her students. I understand that makes me pretty wide-eyed and most people/places don't work like that, but I'm talking about shoulds.
znoop333 9y ago
Adding insult to injury, you might have to take the PhD off your resume to get a job in industry! I found that outside the biggest companies, HR departments routinely throw out any overqualified resumes.
yread 9y ago
Interestingly, I've heard recently from two different sources (both in biomedical sciences) that there is a shortage of professors in Germany. As in foundations or national initiatives having funding for them but there aren't enough candidates
geebee 9y ago
Overall, this is overwhelmingly true, to the point that I feel slightly embarrassed to want to discuss edge cases. But here we go. We already know that prospects for humanities and social science PhDs are extremely grim[1]. However, economics might not be so bad[2]. Prospects for science are better, but we need to distinguish between fields. Computer Science PhDs encounter a completely different market from Biology PhDs. In a field like Biology, there is probably great variance even between sub fields. There was one more great link I wanted to share, but I can't remember were it is or find it. It ranked graduate degrees by degree and university (i.e., MBA from Stanford, JD from Harvard, etc). You don't see any PhD or MS degrees on there until around spot #30, which was a PhD from MIT. Unfortunately, that's not granular enough - a "PhD" from MIT makes about as much sense as a "Masters" that includes the MBA degree. You can figure that since it's MIT, the PhD degrees lean toward the technical, but I'd really need to see PhD in CS to make the comparison. If this data were available, I'd guess that some PhDs from elite universities are actually very well paid on the level of elite JD or MBA programs. Even then, PhDs have vastly higher attrition rates and longer and less certain completion times[3] [1] "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go" http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4484... [2] "If you get a PhD, make it an economics PhD" http://theweek.com/articles/452770/phd-make-economics-phd http://theweek.com/articles/452770/phd-make-economics-phd [3] Attrition rates often shock people who don't know. The attrition rate at an elite law, medical, or business school is typically well below one percent. At elite PhD programs, they can reach or exceed 50%. It's not an exaggeration to say that attrition rates at elite PhD programs can be 100 times higher than a 2 year MBA or 3 year JD program at the same university.
justinzollars 9y ago
This is true, I earned my MS in Biology in 2009 (a rough year to graduate). I was able to land a position as a laboratory manager but ended up teaching myself Ruby to solve a few problems on the job. I've ended up in Silicon Valley in software engineering and I'm quite happy but wish I would have considered job prospects in my field of study a little harder before committing so much time and effort. I might have ended up in a CS program and would have been better suited to succeed earlier. Biology is definitely interesting and I learned how to think scientifically, and "how to think" about problems. So that component was rewarding.
somethingabout 9y ago
I thought there weren't enough people with STEM degrees?
amenod 9y ago
Is that really news? Obligatory joke: Taxi driver to passenger: "Well, someone looks happy today!" Passenger: "I just got my PhD! :)" Taxi driver wistfully: "Yeah, I remember the day when I got mine..."
- laxatives 9y ago
  A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked. He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws, and everything was working as before. The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked. "This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled. Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people." So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly. One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times r square." He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"
Animats 9y ago
The growth area seems to be academic administration. As I pointed out previously, Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City.[1] It's all administrators. 2700 of them. More administrators than Stanford has faculty. "School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development" will move there. This is in addition to all the administrators and staff back on the main campus. Don't become a doctor - become a Medical Administrator! It pays better. [1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/ https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/
- Cacti 9y ago
  Wow... 16,000 students, 2,100 faculty, and 12,100 admin. If you need evidence that we're in a college/university bubble, that's a pretty good indicator.
jxramos 9y ago
I feel for the students facing this reality, but I think this comment in the article can lead to dead-ends. """Our survey, for example, shows that one-third of respondents do not have useful conversations about careers with their PhD supervisors.""" I remember speaking once with a few professors about what their work was like in industry. I was caught off guard when I was told they never worked in industry and had their whole careers in academia. Silly assumption on my part of course, but it was jarring nonetheless to be told so much point blank. It really put into perspective for me the angle at which advice was coming from.
chiefalchemist 9y ago
Science like everything else is driven by money and "success." Mind you, the Scientific Method is a wonderful ideal. However, it is implemented by humans. Humans that more often than not have been struggling. Humans under stress do irrational things.
maruhan2 9y ago
I feel there could exist "academic industries." There should surely be a way to do similar research for industries. With proper infrastructure I feel like companies can own and sell research materials, allowing them to hire academic researchers to do academic research related to the companies field. In fact, with even better infrastructure, an individual could own and sell research materials
analog31 9y ago
I've shared this anecdote before: When I was a grad student in the late 80s, we learned about the oversupply of PhD's compared to the number of available faculty jobs. In fact I remember it as a topic on discussion boards in my earliest experiences with the Internet. I told my dad about it. He got his PhD in the 50s. His reply was: "Oh yeah, that was common knowledge when we got our degrees too." He enjoyed a long career in industry, as have I, so far.

430 points by sz4kerto 9y ago

> Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know. If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you.

voltooid 9y ago
These are usually people that have always been the best in their class through their academic careers. The idea that they might be the ones to not get a position, because they are not good enough for it may not be something they have experienced /consider possible for themselves.
- afarrell 9y ago
  They may consider the possibility, feel intense despair about it, and work to avoid thinking about it in order to avoid feeling the intense negative feelings that come with something they regard as catastrophic.
eradicatethots 9y ago
What’s your point?
mattkrause 9y ago
Someone posts this glib comment every time academic careers are discussed. It's true, and yet harder than you'd think. Suppose you know that only 1 in 10 PhDs in your field end up in a tenure track job. A decent fraction of your classmates are interested in industry--or never want to see the inside of a lab again. Maybe this reduces the competition down to one in six or seven. You're in a pretty good program, definitely in the top 15 percent of the field. It's certainly not that easy, but...you're not obviously worse than most of your classmates, you work on a hot topic and you work hard. What are your chances? Very few grad students get any kind of personalized career advice or discussion of their prospects. They should obviously think about this, but more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and frank assesments.
- noobermin 9y ago
  >but more senior scientists also have a responsibility to provide mentorship and frank assesments. And they won't do it because they are a) biased due to survivorship bias, and b) they are disincentivized to do so as that would scare away their cheap labor.
  - s0rce 9y ago
    I believe that b) is the key issue here. They need the cheap labor so it needs to appear that the PhD will get you somewhere. In the end only industry is benefiting from being able to hire highly trained people without have to pay anything to train them.
- hobofan 9y ago
  The average age of a PhD student is 33 years and even at normal speed, no breaks/hurdles and starting right out of high-school, you are 25(?). Something about applying this babysitting attitude of "somebody needs to tell them" to highly educated individuals of that age just doesn't sit right with me. If I were a PhD supervisor, I would probably find it ridiculous that one of my responsibilities would be "pointing people to the universities careers service". I'm also not sure why you would expect a supervisor to be able to give good career advice when some of them have only ever experienced academia themselves.
  - hycaria 9y ago
    That's higher than I thought, but I guess that's US numbers. Are they starting it way later (and if so what are they doing in between) ? Or is it simply a long time spent in PhD ?
    - jogundas 9y ago
      Europe Physics adds up as follows: finish school at 18 + 4 BSc + 2 MSc + 4 PhD = 28
  - chestervonwinch 9y ago
farseer 9y ago
You are bound to get down voted for this comment, however I do agree with you. I am one of those people who managed to realize by a good stroke of luck that perusing a Phd in my field would severely limit my earning potential. It was all the Phd grad students always talking about their money problems in the college cafeteria that gave them away.
wolfgke 9y ago
> > Permanent jobs in academia are scarce, and someone needs to let PhD students know. > If you are studying on a PhD level and have not figured that out already, that's kinda on you. The problem rather is if you really are scientifically better than your peers - so from an "objective" perspective you should be really good enough to obtain such a position. But then you realize how much of a political game (it is much more about politics than scientific achievements) getting such a position is. And I know many great scientists who are bad politicians... They are often much better than the persons who got the tenured positions (the latter ones were great bootlickers and politicians).
- s0rce 9y ago
  Exactly, I quit after a Science and Nature paper, just didn't want to do a 2nd postdoc and prioritize a tenure-track job over everything else in life.

kensai 9y ago

The hard truth. I wonder if a new scheme of collaborative research (to share costs) out of academia can possibly pop out. But this is hardly possible given the high costs of equipment and consumables, especially in the natural and technical sciences. Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day).

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> Bygone are the days (in the 18th-19th century) when a single brilliant scientist could singe-handedly revolutionize his field in his home lab (the "garage" of the day) Source? (Genuinely curious.)
- Aperson4321 9y ago
  It is assumed due to the higher knowlege and specialisation level that the world has these days, but such moments of change does not come along very often, and people have always been confident about how there is no way their understanding of the world might be severly lacking in some way. So it might just be that all is as it always has been you just have to look at it using a large enough time frame.
- hycaria 9y ago
  I've heard of a contemporary mathematician who had small contributions and did it as a hobby. The recent article about insect population decrease was possible thanks to data collected by hobbyists too iirc (but ended up written by scholars I guess). I don't know if there are many other examples.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
I think you've got it from the wrong end. Most academic research I've seen has been so tainted by corporate funding, publish-or-perish haste, over-formalization, misuse of statistics, egos run wild, or some mixture of them all. Then there have been cases where novel research has been stomped into the ground by professional groupthink, like in Yudkin's case. At the same time we had guys like Shulgin being incredibly productive all on their own. Think of MDMA alone. If it really ends up being a useful treatment, you just know a pharma company would insist that it ran them billions of dollars to develop, and that they should have a God-given right to gouge for it, but it came for considerably less than that from a real expert puttering around in his shack. Sometimes I wonder if the independent researcher is our only hope.

simonbarker87 9y ago

When deciding to do my PhD I did so under the assumption that I wouldn't work in academia afterward. I evaluated it like a any other job offer at the time and decided that the tax free pay, coupled with the freedom to run my project how I wanted and work on what I wanted (within reason) for a fixed period of time was a better offer than a grad scheme with BAE, Nissan, Seimens etc. Doing a PhD built a large array of skills that I didn't have from my undergrad and allowed me to learn practical skills in a fairly low risk environment and explore other avenues. It let me realise that I wanted to start a business, it taxed me mentally like nothing before, it prepared me to hold myself accountable and that if I don't do the work then it doesn't get done and gave me the breathing space to work out what I wanted to do that my undergrad didn't. As the article says, I don't think a PhD is only valuable for a career in academia, it can be an excellent bridge to industry if you are prepared for that at the end.

neel_k 9y ago
This is basically the same thing I did, except that I worked as a programmer at a startup before going back to school for a PhD. It was better than doing a startup by a stupidly huge margin. Startups are all about risk-minimization and risk-mitigation, since risky things mostly fail, and so use up your runway without moving you closer to success. So in a startup you are highly incentivized not to take big risks -- and research is always a risk. So you are driven to take an engineering mindset, where the apex of skill is to solve a new problem using only old, entirely proven techniques. In contrast, after my first project as a PhD student, my advisor straight-up told me that I needed to shed the engineering mindset to succeed. Inventing new techniques was the goal, and so you need to adopt a mentality of confronting problems head on (rather than designing the system to avoid confronting them). Basically a PhD puts you in an environment where you can take on big, poorly-understood and poorly-defined problems and attack them over and over again. Going from a blank sheet of paper to a solution (or clear failure) in six months 10 times over is an amazing way of improving your skills, and IME it's really hard to get this experience in industry (even though it's really valuable to have this experience in industry).
- simonbarker87 9y ago

chriskanan 9y ago

The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years. When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wanted to punch me in the face. That said, she emailed me years later to tell me that she became a professor, despite those statistics. If you have a lot of tenacity (doing a postdoc), are willing to settle for a school that isn't top-50, and are reasonably productive (a few papers per year) it is doable. Every single one of my friends that graduated and still wanted to be a professor, is one now, but it took 3-5 years of additional work. This is true for my friends in psychology, computer science, EE, and neuroscience. Of course, now all my other friends say, "Why the hell did you choose to be a professor where you work 80 hours per week and make less than most undergraduates with CS degrees, even when your area of expertise is AI?" Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic. There are lots of great things to do with a PhD that aren't being a professor.

chriskanan 9y ago
If anyone is interested, here are my old blog posts on the requirements for getting an interview for a professorship at a top-50 school: [1] http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/ http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/ [2] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-computer-science-professors-at-americas-best-universities/ http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-computer-science-pro... [3] http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-ucsds-computer-science-faculty-candidates/ http://www.chriskanan.com/statistics-on-ucsds-computer-scien...
- nopinsight 9y ago
  From your [3] above, do theory PhD graduates usually have more or fewer publications? What would be your guesstimates of the mean/median number of first author publications of faculty candidates at a top school? "Number First Author Publications (excluding theory folks) Mean: 12.8±6.5 Median: 14.5 Range: 2 – 25"

l5870uoo9y 9y ago

Doing a PhD thesis these days doesn't necessarily makes you cut out to be a scientist. One can speculate if job prospects differs across disciplines.

dnautics 9y ago
Just because one is a good scientist doesn't necessarily mean one is cut out to be a professional scientist.
- l5870uoo9y 9y ago
  I would argue the opposite is more plausible; if one is a good plumber, one is likely also a good professional plumber. I would like to see if this trend is cross disciplinary or say it is mainly within say social sciences or humanities. Personally, I have meet many university students and PhDs whose intellect at best was ordinary.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    What I meant was that the skill set to become a successful professor (grantsmanship, political wheeling and dealing) is antithetical to being a good scientist.

pks016 9y ago

I am currently pursuing MS in Biological Sciences on animal behavior. I want to do Phd then Post-doc and then continue in the science field. But I am not very talented. Most probably I may get stuck after Phd or Post doc. I don't want job. But looking into these kinds of articles now and then, make me think "what are the alternatives ?" What about the people who do basic science like in theoretical physics or pure maths?

tom_mellior 9y ago
There are different possibilities for doing research. Note how the current top comment here talks of becoming a "professor", and the featured article talks about "permanent staff position[s] at a university". If what you want is to do research, then what you want is not necessarily one of these. There are lots of research labs, both public and private, where you can get a permanent position. If you're in animal behavior, you might end up in a zoo, doing research part time or full time. These positions are overlooked by these articles since there you are not a "professor" at a "university". In other words, "X% of PhDs become professors" is a very misleading statistic. But yeah, that is still not enough to employ all the PhDs out there. I think in theoretical physics or math you just end up going into finance...
thicknavyrain 9y ago
I’m doing a PhD in Theoretical Physics, I hedge the uncertainty of academia by finding small opportunities in other fields to do work in. Internships in science communication, teaching at the university, part time work for a tech start up. On their own, none of them are a safety net for jumping out of academia if you have to, but if you accumulate enough experience over the years, the hope is that transitioning to industry goes a bit smoother. There’s also a few fellowship/transitional schemes opening up for PhDs in esoteric fields to go into things like Data Science/Software Development. I think you just have to keep a level head and pursue things while it seems reasonable and always keep in mind the dream can pop at any moment and you may have to move around and go into something else.
- pks016 9y ago
  Yeah. That's a good piece of advice. I usually spend time on data analysis, learning computer security, web designing or any tech related stuff but as hobby only. I know basic of these things but not a "pro" in one field. I guess better to keep learning new things, any time opportunities might pop up as you have said.

j7ake 9y ago

How are these odds compared to other similar ventures full of uncertainty, such as start ups ? And if the odds are comparable then why is our culture viewing start ups positively but PhD negatively ?

killertofu89 9y ago
Where are you getting the belief that PhD's are viewed negatively by our culture? Or that startups are viewed positively for that matter? A quick google search and you'll find hundreds of articles warning about joining startups and bashing startup culture.
tome 9y ago
Because when you "win" at a PhD you (eventually) get tenure, which these days mean lifetime position of high stress and low salary.
eli_gottlieb 9y ago
Because VCs own a stake in start-ups.

yannis7 9y ago

Academia nowadays is a high-tech bureaucracy; you are forced to churn out documents (papers) that need to cite other documents, and you're evaluated based on your position in the inter-document citation network. Then you have to write other documents (grant proposals) to grab money to write more documents (papers) by gaming the inner mechanics of some comittee. If partner-track investment bankers are overworked, depressed sociopaths with Lamborghinis, then tenure-track postdocs are investment bankers with crappy bicycles. Needless to say, I left academia 3 years ago and never looked back.

zucchini_head 9y ago
This is essentially exactly why I have not chosen to do a PhD, but go into industry. The bureaucracy is intense in academia and you can in some places spend far too long brown-nosing upper-positions to get anywhere at all. Some of the horror stories I've heard from older people who have done a PhD are awful. For example, apparently, it's quite often that there will be a collection of people gossiping when a particular upper senior will retire or die so that they can all compete for the opened slot. It's quite terrible and grimy when you get past the good PR angle that the Universities and mass media portray. Just like any bureaucracy.
- jtauber1 9y ago
  Not a big fan of academia either, but I don't see how this is any different than upper management/leaderahip positions in industry.
  - taway_1212 9y ago
    It's true that you need to eat the same shit, but at least upper mgmt/leadership pays much better.
- Analog24 9y ago
  I wouldn't extrapolate too far from those horror stories you heard. My experience was nothing like what you describe. Plus there are many reasons to get a PhD other than going into academia and when you're a grad student you don't have to deal with any of the politics or the other "grimy" parts (at least not in the vast majority of cases). There are many downsides to academia, the papermill mentality that has become pervasive being a big one, but this picture of a morally bankrupt subculture where people do whatever they can to get to the top is nothing like what I experienced.

gravelc 9y ago

I always tell students in my field (molecular biology) to at the very least learn to code at a reasonable level and pick up some data science skills. Something transferable. At any given time in my department, there'd be five times the amount of post-grad students to full-time staff. Maybe more. It has to be obvious that there likely isn't a job at any level at the end of it. Not just high-flying jobs on the path to professorship, but even low skill technical stuff. As in other fields, women are at a significant disadvantage if they want to have kids (presuming they've made it though the initial cull). The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. Given every higher position is so competitive, they simple lose out due to the time taken off. Makes me quite to sad to see very very talented scientist friends passed over for this reason.

tome 9y ago
> The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. I think it's really a black mark on the system that it should be OK for researchers to still not have a permanent position in their early 30s ten years after completing their undergraduate degree.
- s0rce 9y ago
  But understandable considering the incentives. Grad students and postdocs cost so little but accomplish so much, the whole system relies on them. Just need to keep selling them the promise of opportunity. Unless something changes I can't see this getting better anytime soon. The cult aspect of many top PIs strongly condemning people leaving or considering non-academic positions also doesn't help.
vixen99 9y ago
So what's the solution? Hold a position for a woman and then kick out whoever fills it when the woman returns? Everyone has to make choices and this is one of them. If there's a way round this conundrum, a very very talented woman will find it.

harry8 9y ago

Data so absent that they have to draw an analogy to a different data set without any supporting evidence that such is valid. This is Nature not the daily Mail. What is the statistic? How many PhD students have jobs in Academia 5 Years after being awarded? Surely they have /something/ that might be indicative they can publish that's better than footballers? Surely..?

aqsalose 9y ago
Article cites one hard number: >Global figures are hard to come by, but only three or four in every hundred PhD students in the United Kingdom will land a permanent staff position at a university. It’s only a little better in the United States.
- harry8 9y ago
  But I claim that number is really pi (or tau/2 if you must). Will you take theirs one rather than mine as an argument from authority? This is Nature, not the damn daily mail. Digital extraction required![1] [1] Vernacular expression "Pull your finger out!" Meaning to stop being lazy.[2] [2] Jokes you have to explain, suck.[2] [3] People who put footnotes on their jokes are terrible human beings.[4] [4] There is no [4][5] [5] citation needed

dotdi 9y ago

Sad but true. I once had dreams of a career in academia and research. I'm a molecular biologist turned computer scientist turned software engineer in industry. I now have a very good salary, interesting challenges, plenty of work-life balance and good prospects for the future, and that's pretty much directly out of university. In my opinion, I would have to give up on all of the aforementioned benefits (sans interesting challenges) for at least the next 10 years if I wanted to stay in academia, and on top of that, add the nice non-zero chance of just getting stuck and be forced out of the academic "track". All my advisors told me it's a pretty bad time to go into academia, and I doubt it will get better, sadly, I might add.

lbeltrame 9y ago

A question: how it is for people doing research but not in traditional academic settings (e.g. no profit foundations)? As far as I understand, you're tied to grants anyway to get money, but there's no clear concept of "tenure": I work in such a place, but it's outside the US, so I was wondering about what happens there.

neebz 9y ago

They can always move to Pakistan. Phds from abroad is one of the most well-paid positions here thanks to the recent influx of numerous private business-minded universities opening up in every city.

rohit2412 9y ago
Interesting. Its different in India, where it's not the salary but the prestige that drives people to become professors. Even the research opportunities are limited, and industry pays much more.

wiz21c 9y ago

What about starting a PhD at 45 ? I mean, just for the fun of being a student again, the fun of working on your own little project . Does it open possibilities, in the sense of a career reboot ? (I'm totally OK with earning much less money than I do right now)

yannis7 9y ago
it will definitely be fun, both being a student + working on your own project. From my experience, for some reason PhD advisors tend to work well/really like mature students. No hard data on this, just an empirical observation across 3-4 labs I've worked in before I left academia. With regards to career prospects (outside academia ofc), you definitely gain respect but anything more than that largely depends on your area of research. Which one is it, if I may ask?
- wiz21c 9y ago
  I'm looking at anything involving computational geometry; and if I have spare time, ethics :-)
  - photoJ 9y ago
    Find the right advisor and anything is possible. Remember tho, that the department and the research community to which you will belong will also have a considerable say in if you are allowed to progress.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    Have you considered bootstrapping the field of computation ethics ;)
    - wiz21c 9y ago
      I guess it already exists a bit (Asimov's laws or robotics ?) but I'm afraid no one is interested.

DrNuke 9y ago

In 2017 the research path in computer-heavy subjects is not academy-bound anymore. There may be early problems in getting credit within the learned circles, but a couple of good papers and one good presentation at a good conference under your own ltd umbrella solve this for good.

hyperpallium 9y ago
Do you mean just publish on your own account, not under the auspices of an institution (aka "academy")? Is "ltd umbrella" your own "pty ltd" company - instead of an institution? Or you mean, just within your own specialised field?

fergie 9y ago

Its a bit unfair for professional football to be portrayed as an unreasonable aspiration pursued by naive working class kids. In actual fact the UK currently has around 4000 professional footballers, many of whom will play for a couple of years before moving on, and some of whom will play for a couple of decades. The UK currently has 14,000 professors the vast majority of whom will fight tooth and claw to hang on to those positions for a lifetime. So there are more professors than footballers at any one time, but due to football's higher turnover, and shorter tenure, many more people will be a footballer than a professor over the course of their career. The bottom line is that professional football is actually a relatively attainable goal for young British men, and should probably be more encouraged as a realistic career option. ...and when you do put in your application to Oxford, Cambridge, Google, or Facebook, your long-gone 3 year stint as a utility midfielder at Dundee United is only going to make it more interesting.

danieltillett 9y ago
Very interesting observation. I should do the equivalent comparison for Australia.
- girvo 9y ago
  For Rugby Union, the path to playing in Super Rugby is surprisingly short. I became a first-grade Union referee pretty much by accident, without really putting much time into it aside from the weekends. The ARB actually asked me to become a professional referee, but didn't realise how young I was at the time. A shame that I never followed through on it, really.
arethuza 9y ago
Is that the UK or US definition of "Professor" though? I've noticed some UK universities have started using additional titles of Assistant/Associate Professor as well as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader.
- fergie 9y ago
  If that is the case, I have over-represented the pool of professors, which strengthens the point

deleted 9y ago

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henrik_w 9y ago

I have an M.Sc. in computer science, and worked as a SW developer for 5 years before going back to do a Ph.D. I stayed with it for one year, but decided it wasn't for me. I really liked the idea of learning more, but realized working in industry was even better for me. I found that a lot of Ph.D. projects are driven by what you can write papers on, not necessarily what somebody somewhere really needs. Also, you can learn without being at a university. More here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-programmer/ https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-prog...

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rdlecler1 9y ago

University has become a bit of a Ponzi scheme. I’d love to see PhD programs drop to 3-4 years from 5-7. Especially in programs like biosciences where there are limited job prospects. Universities sell a romantic idealism knowing the likely outcome. Most students are too young or captivated to really do their due diligence. There should be labels on a PhD like the anti-smoking labels on cigarettes.

eighthnate 9y ago

This is an academic industry wide problem, not just for junior scientists. When tenured professors stay on their job for 40 or 50 years and new universities/positions aren't created each year for newly minded PhDs, it's going to create a pyramid like structure in academia with the comfortable professors at the top and legions of phds on the bottom struggling to get to the top. Ask philosophy, history and even economics PhDs. The research/academic/etc opportunities simply aren't there because it is structurally impossible. And as time goes on, it's only going to get worse and worse.

nmca 9y ago

I'd be interested to see how the institution at which you studied effects the probability of a successful career. If you're a masters student at a top uni, do the numbers change significantly?

diogenescynic 9y ago

I know someone who has a PhD in a specific field. They lost their job three years ago and have not been hired since. I can’t even imagine what going to school for that long then being underpaid and discarded must feel like.

VLM 9y ago

The "STEM shortage" phrase means pay is too high for the very few STEM jobs; it means a shortage of income equality, not a shortage of warm bodies. There are obviously far too many warm bodies in STEM fields. There is also a peculiar birth-death problem in academia where over the lifetime career of a professor, that prof should birth exactly one new qualified student to replace that prof. Otherwise we're dealing with a pyramid scheme. And one of the metrics of "success" of profs is how many qualified grad students they're birthing to provide short term cheap labor and long term hyper over supply of qualified candidates to be profs. We're merely seeing the breakdown of a pyramid scheme. One way to fix it is ban grad student labor. The undergrads, most of whom are going in to industry anyway, can be the lab rats. Or the prof can hire more postdocs.

jessriedel 9y ago
Why would we design a system where only eventual professors have PhDs?
- s0rce 9y ago
  Maybe not 100% but what fraction of PhDs are professors, maybe 3-5% at most, what about fraction of MDs working as medical doctors, I'm guessing its much much higher (with higher wages) since they limit enrollment in school and residencies (they don't rely on cheap grad student/post-doc labor).
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    Why would we think these fractions should be closely related? And attending surgeons definitely rely on cheap resident labor.

deleted 9y ago

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asafira 9y ago

Hey, so I'm a PhD student (in Physics) at Harvard that has been looking into these issues (as graduate council president in the department), and I really don't like the bickering that occurs between (roughly speaking) die-hard academia pursuers and the others that feel there is a lack in support for non-academic jobs. Here are by far the most compelling issues that I think need to be fixed that both sides should be able to agree on: 1) Professors really, really need to be open to talking to their students about what they want in their career and what's sort of career path they are considering. Not having this discussion is prevalent but honestly somewhat outrageous. 2) Internships really should become more widely accepted within greater academia (i.e., outside CS). There are a huge number of great arguments for them, including a) Exposure. There are a huge number of PhD candidates that have actually never had a job, or even just have never been exposed to what their greatest-interest career is post graduate school. b) Their length is a drop in the bucket compared to the total length of a PhD. (3 months vs 5.5 years average in my Dept) c) professors worry their graduate students will become less interested in research after an internship. My thought: great! I am super happy that person found something that makes them happier. The biggest argument against internships has always been something like 'professors can't just be super flexible with their students, they have their own constraints (grants, etc.)' I'm not proposing that professors go through crazy great lengths to make sure their student can get an internship. I simply think that should become an accepted part of the culture and be an ok thing to discuss with your adviser. Right now, students are literally scared at the reprocussions of even bringing it up. Disclaimer: I interned at Waymo last summer.

bubagrump 9y ago
Curious, what did a physics PhD think of software development/research in industry in comparison to the wonders of equations and abstract beauty?
- asafira 9y ago
  I loved my internship at Waymo! I don't think it was a typical software engineering or hardware engineering internship, to be fair, but I really enjoyed the work I did and felt my background was beneficial in me making as much progress as I did.

burnerOh2125 9y ago

Yea, i went into a phd program in biomedical sciences, spent 2 1/2 years doing computational biology, studying math, computer science and machine learning, not to mention working on project, then left. It was at the point where the prospect of out competing 7/8 of my fellow phd students was not work it, when all of my skills, where transferable to industry, even without staying for the phd. Part of me wishes I did stay, and I'll probably go back for a masters at some point. who knows. Anyway, the system really is designed to get phd students to do the heavy lifting, at 30k a year, for 6 year stretches. Why would I do that, when I have dropped out, and tripled my salary?

CodeSheikh 9y ago

What about creating more private research centers? Where the benefits are not tied to individual company profits or have them hoping for patents stash. OpenAI is an example of one of such initiatives. Similar centers can be spun off more often. Does CERN have satellite labs across the world? Sure committing to funding can be a problem for private entities (companies/families/individual billionaires). Perhaps govt should these entities tax breaks for funding such centers.

ak_yo 9y ago

This problem has been a structural feature of the academic profession for a long time -- Max Weber famously wrote about it almost 100 years ago: http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber...

akyu 9y ago

As someone in the process of applying to PhD programs right now, these comments are quite disheartening... scary even.

projectramo 9y ago

Are there junior scientists who don't know how dim the prospects are for an academic position are? I've been hearing this for two decades. Seems like the sort of thing that any mildly educated person would be aware of, let alone smart people in the field.

s0rce 9y ago
As others have mentioned this obviously isn't a secret but the environment at top schools is very cult-like especially in certain labs and pursuing non-academic tracks is looked down upon. The problem arises when you are objectively more accomplished scientifically than your peers and you think you might have a chance and realize that it will take 2 postdocs, 10-15 years and more politics than science to get a tenure track job these days.

jartelt 9y ago

During my PhD studies, most students I talked to were aware of the lack of professorships available. The issue, however, was that certain departments/professors really frowned upon PhD students exploring jobs in industry (some departments were great though). I was in engineering and the professors were generally helpful with trying to connect you to people they knew in industry. Departments like Psychology were the opposite though. Some students would search for industry jobs without telling their advisor because they feared they would be ignored and not supported throughout the rest of their PhD if they said they were going into industry. Some of the tenured professors only cared about increasing the number of academics who studied in their lab. They didn't care much about whether the students were happy or were following their interests.

eegilbert 9y ago
I agree with most of this. However, I might take issue with the motivation you ascribe to professors: "only car[ing] about increasing the number of academics who studied in their lab." Another explanation, one that I find myself feeling sometimes, is simply mismatched incentives. Practicing academics and students headed to industry simply have different incentives, and that can add friction to the relationship. I think it would be helpful and useful for departments to consider other ways to facilitate industry pathways that don't so heavily rely on the advisor.
- jartelt 9y ago
  I get what you are saying, but the incentives do not have to be misaligned. It makes total sense for both the professor and student to be aligned in pursuing the goal of completing and publishing interesting and original research. It shouldn't matter what the student does after completing said research! But, some professors distribute their resources unequally and give the most time/money to the students who are trying to become professors.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  > is simply mismatched incentives For me, this is kind of tautologically impossible -- the adviser's primary objective should be the success of his/her students. I understand that makes me pretty wide-eyed and most people/places don't work like that, but I'm talking about shoulds.

znoop333 9y ago

Adding insult to injury, you might have to take the PhD off your resume to get a job in industry! I found that outside the biggest companies, HR departments routinely throw out any overqualified resumes.

yread 9y ago

Interestingly, I've heard recently from two different sources (both in biomedical sciences) that there is a shortage of professors in Germany. As in foundations or national initiatives having funding for them but there aren't enough candidates

geebee 9y ago

Overall, this is overwhelmingly true, to the point that I feel slightly embarrassed to want to discuss edge cases. But here we go. We already know that prospects for humanities and social science PhDs are extremely grim[1]. However, economics might not be so bad[2]. Prospects for science are better, but we need to distinguish between fields. Computer Science PhDs encounter a completely different market from Biology PhDs. In a field like Biology, there is probably great variance even between sub fields. There was one more great link I wanted to share, but I can't remember were it is or find it. It ranked graduate degrees by degree and university (i.e., MBA from Stanford, JD from Harvard, etc). You don't see any PhD or MS degrees on there until around spot #30, which was a PhD from MIT. Unfortunately, that's not granular enough - a "PhD" from MIT makes about as much sense as a "Masters" that includes the MBA degree. You can figure that since it's MIT, the PhD degrees lean toward the technical, but I'd really need to see PhD in CS to make the comparison. If this data were available, I'd guess that some PhDs from elite universities are actually very well paid on the level of elite JD or MBA programs. Even then, PhDs have vastly higher attrition rates and longer and less certain completion times[3] [1] "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go" http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 http://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/4484... [2] "If you get a PhD, make it an economics PhD" http://theweek.com/articles/452770/phd-make-economics-phd http://theweek.com/articles/452770/phd-make-economics-phd [3] Attrition rates often shock people who don't know. The attrition rate at an elite law, medical, or business school is typically well below one percent. At elite PhD programs, they can reach or exceed 50%. It's not an exaggeration to say that attrition rates at elite PhD programs can be 100 times higher than a 2 year MBA or 3 year JD program at the same university.

justinzollars 9y ago

This is true, I earned my MS in Biology in 2009 (a rough year to graduate). I was able to land a position as a laboratory manager but ended up teaching myself Ruby to solve a few problems on the job. I've ended up in Silicon Valley in software engineering and I'm quite happy but wish I would have considered job prospects in my field of study a little harder before committing so much time and effort. I might have ended up in a CS program and would have been better suited to succeed earlier. Biology is definitely interesting and I learned how to think scientifically, and "how to think" about problems. So that component was rewarding.

somethingabout 9y ago

I thought there weren't enough people with STEM degrees?

amenod 9y ago

Is that really news? Obligatory joke: Taxi driver to passenger: "Well, someone looks happy today!" Passenger: "I just got my PhD! :)" Taxi driver wistfully: "Yeah, I remember the day when I got mine..."

laxatives 9y ago
A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked. He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws, and everything was working as before. The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked. "This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled. Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people." So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly. One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times r square." He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"

Animats 9y ago

The growth area seems to be academic administration. As I pointed out previously, Stanford is building a new "campus" in Redwood City.[1] It's all administrators. 2700 of them. More administrators than Stanford has faculty. "School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development" will move there. This is in addition to all the administrators and staff back on the main campus. Don't become a doctor - become a Medical Administrator! It pays better. [1] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/ https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/

Cacti 9y ago
Wow... 16,000 students, 2,100 faculty, and 12,100 admin. If you need evidence that we're in a college/university bubble, that's a pretty good indicator.

jxramos 9y ago

I feel for the students facing this reality, but I think this comment in the article can lead to dead-ends. """Our survey, for example, shows that one-third of respondents do not have useful conversations about careers with their PhD supervisors.""" I remember speaking once with a few professors about what their work was like in industry. I was caught off guard when I was told they never worked in industry and had their whole careers in academia. Silly assumption on my part of course, but it was jarring nonetheless to be told so much point blank. It really put into perspective for me the angle at which advice was coming from.

chiefalchemist 9y ago

Science like everything else is driven by money and "success." Mind you, the Scientific Method is a wonderful ideal. However, it is implemented by humans. Humans that more often than not have been struggling. Humans under stress do irrational things.

maruhan2 9y ago

I feel there could exist "academic industries." There should surely be a way to do similar research for industries. With proper infrastructure I feel like companies can own and sell research materials, allowing them to hire academic researchers to do academic research related to the companies field. In fact, with even better infrastructure, an individual could own and sell research materials

analog31 9y ago

I've shared this anecdote before: When I was a grad student in the late 80s, we learned about the oversupply of PhD's compared to the number of available faculty jobs. In fact I remember it as a topic on discussion boards in my earliest experiences with the Internet. I told my dad about it. He got his PhD in the 50s. His reply was: "Oh yeah, that was common knowledge when we got our degrees too." He enjoyed a long career in industry, as have I, so far.