11 ms·

I have a master's degree and I learned early that getting a PhD was not for me. The way things worked at the university made me not stand to be in that environm

• MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  > Why the hell should I research for publishing? Because publications pretty much define your scientific contributions, i.e. your productivity as a researcher. > One should get the results AND THEN publish it. You must have had a body of work that was just about worthy of publication though, right?
  • luizfzs 8y ago
    Im not saying 'why publishing?'. Im saying 'why publish if I barely know if what Im doing will have some positive result? Think of this example: we are researching for a few months whether an arbitrary compound X has relieffing effects on people with headache, but since we are still researching, there is no concrete result or any slight evidence yet. maybe the compound will relief the headache in 30min but maybe it will make your nose bleed. but there is this conference about headaches that is approaching and why not submit a paper about the work with some results? WHAT RESULTS? You will spend countless hours reading (more) about headaches and compound X to write the background of the manuscript while you still have to figure out the tests you will perform test your assumption. you will work for weeks (under more pressure) with the hope you could publish something that is very uncertain at the current state.
    • ylmm 8y ago
      I'm not sure I see what your issue is. It seems the scenario you're describing is just a case of working harder to make a deadline, which there's nothing wrong with per se. If you're talking about fudging results or cutting corners to make a deadline, then that'd be a problem. Otherwise, I'm not sure I see your point.
      • glitchc 8y ago
        The OP's point is, I'm afraid a valid one. Attempting to find a statisticallly significant to report on in time to meet a conference deadline means experiments are fudged, results are cherry picked and discrepancies are swept under the rug. Conference and funding deadlines coupled with the need to generate a publication record are almost entirely responsible for the dubious nature of the average scientific article. It's a classic case of Goodhart's Law.
    • anjc 8y ago
      I don't know why the downvotes. Publishing something takes a lot of directed effort. It's so tough to stop doing (what feels like) the real work, and quickly squeeze out a submission for a conference that has a 10% acceptance rate. Of course publishing is extremely important, but too large a focus on publishing hampers results.
      • Fomite 8y ago
        Results that aren't disseminated are functionally useless.
        • taejo 8y ago
          Sure, results need to be published. The problem is that the cart is put before the horse: we decide to publish the results, and where to publish, before we have an inkling of what the results will be.
          • Fomite 8y ago
            I'm not necessarily sure this is the cart before the horse. Deciding to publish the results can just as easily be restated as "Come up with an experiment with a clear and precise scope" Where to publish is often determining what audience and what questions to ask. For example, targeting a clinical journal means proofs and analytical results may be less compelling, while a simulation of a study might be of active interest. Both of those help narrow the scope of "All possible interesting questions" to something tractable.
    • tnecniv 8y ago
      If you have no results, there's nothing you can do. However, unless you stumble upon something that works out very nicely right before a deadline, a publication requires planning many months in advance what you are going to do.
• 1996 8y ago
  Most of academia is toxic. Those who don't see that haven't spent enough time in it. I believe things can't go well in general in any area where money comes from organized begging ("proposals", "apply for funding"), driven by reputation ("publications", "impact factor") and where the bad eggs can't even be fired ("tenure")
  • neuromantik8086 8y ago
    > driver by reputation ("publications", "impact factor") and where the bad eggs can't even be fired ("tenure") From personal experience, I've always felt as though the existence of "rock star" academics always gave academia a Hollywood-like feel in terms of systemic abuse and candidly bizarre and maladaptive behaviors on the part of researchers.
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    • 1996 8y ago
      At least Hollywood has tabloids to keep things reasonable!
      • neuromantik8086 8y ago
        Academia does have Retraction Watch [0]. Unfortunately/fortunately, it operates outside the system. [0] https://retractionwatch.com/ https://retractionwatch.com/
  • GW150914 8y ago
    Most of academia is toxic. Those who don't see that haven't spent enough time in it. Or they’ve spent way too much time in. It’s like people who spend a couple of decades in a prison, they’re fully institutionalized and feel they can’t cope with the real world.
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• neuromantik8086 8y ago
  Most incoming grad students enter PhD programs with incorrect assumptions about how grad school works. A decent number of those incorrect assumptions involve the grad student role itself. For instance, I knew of a research assistant headed to grad school who was thrilled because he/she liked to learn in classroom environments, which is only a very small part of what grad school is at best (although coming out of undergrad, you might assume that it's a bigger part of a PhD than it is). All prospective grad students should read over the following to understand what they're truly getting into / developing realistic expectations before committing a substantial amount of their life to the Ivory Tower. The first link covers toxicity in academia (YMMV), which is more or less what drove me out of lab work and into IT. I personally chose to remain working in academia because I find it meaningful, but in a role that was more insulated from academic politics (vs generic work politics). [0] http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com/ http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com/ [1] https://www.amazon.com/Getting-What-You-Came-Students/dp/0374524777 https://www.amazon.com/Getting-What-You-Came-Students/dp/037... [2] http://100rsns.blogspot.com/ http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
  • geebee 8y ago
    I think that "Graduate School in the Humanities - Just Don't Go" is a gem of an essay, because it does a good job explaining why students still enter these programs when the data screams out that they shouldn't. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/44846 https://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/448... One thing that is often overlooked is that the US does have a very restrictive immigration system for people who don't have relatives here and can't leverage family reunification. In this case, getting advanced STEM degrees provides a path towards residency, work rights, and perhaps eventually a green card or citizenship. So in the US, these folks wouldn't be looking at a choice between getting a PhD and becoming a florist, because it would be illegal to come here and work as a florist. But there's a "shortage" of people getting PhDs in STEM fields, so we allow people to come here under conditions of limited personal freedom provided they agree to work these positions. This power on the part of universities (the power to bestow residency and limited work right), I think, is one of the reasons STEM PhD programs haven't collapsed or faced the reckoning that would force them to change.
• geebee 8y ago
  I have a masters degree, bailed on a phD, and even then I didn't realize it quite quickly enough. My MS program at Berkeley was quite flexible, and it was easy enough to get the requisite math. I dropped courses like Intellectual Property (cross listed with the law school), Product Development (cross listed with the business school), courses I was enjoying and would have done quite well in, to take classes like "advanced nonlinear optimization", which were a bad match for me. Yes, nonlinear optimization will help you understand how neural nets work, but trust me, you don't need to take an advanced graduate class full of PhD students on the topic. If you have the prerequisites to the prerequisites, you understand math well enough to read about gradient descent on your own. To be clear, there are people who belonged in this class, I just wasn't one of them. For a lot of people, the sooner you realize a PhD isn't a good match for you, the better. The problem is, the sort of person who has the grades, test scores, and academic mindset to get into a top PhD program is almost certain to be slow to realize (and accept!) this. Add in the fact that PhD programs have astoundingly high attrition rates compared to professional doctoral programs (atrition at UCSF's med school is below 0.5%, whereas many PhD programs have attrition rates about 50% - yes, literally 100 times higher!) and you start to get a sense of why a lot of seemingly smart people get kind of snookered on PhD programs. One big difference here is that people who masters out of STEM PhD programs can often still have a career in this field, perhaps a better renumerated one anyway. Though from what I've seen, getting a PhD in lit isn't necessarily a good path for someone who loves literature or theater, either.
  • davidgay 8y ago
    > atrition at UCSF's med school is below 0.5%, whereas many PhD programs have attrition rates about 50% Some of us went through school systems with 50% pass rates for middle school, high school and university, so don't find that either surprising, nor necessarily bad. In fact, I at least am somewhat confused that a high pass rate is considered "good" - it clearly encourages grade inflation and arguably devalues the received degree...
• KKKKkkkk1 8y ago
  It's pretty standard in industry to get a deadline by which you need to finish your project when you start working on it.
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