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Because most modern PhD factories are sweat shops that offer a rather dismal career prospect. (If you've been through the process --- I suspect there are a lot

Because most modern PhD factories are sweat shops that offer a rather dismal career prospect. (If you've been through the process --- I suspect there are a lot on HN --- you know what I mean.)

cageface 8y ago
I bailed out three years into a chemistry PhD and my only regret is that I started it at all. I'm not saying that going to graduate school is necessarily a mistake but I think a lot of people go because they've done well in school up to that point and aren't sure what else to do with themselves.
- geoalchimista 8y ago
  I commend you on your courage. Reminds me of one of my good friends from college, who bailed out in the second year of his PhD program in geochemistry and started anew in a MSc program in Computer Science. He now works happily in a startup company as a SDE and never looks back.
  - cageface 8y ago
    I have another friend that just switched from being an associate professor in chemistry to working as a developer for a bioinformatics lab. He loves it and doesn’t regret making the switch at all.
- Kalium 8y ago
  When I was an undergrad, there was a PhD candidate who advised me to go to grad school for exactly this reason. He told me it was years I could spend avoiding having to find a job.
  - cageface 8y ago
    I worked much, much harder as a graduate student than I ever have as a developer, even at startups. At the lab I worked in putting in anything less than 70 hours a week was considered malingering.
  - privacypoller 8y ago
    Same here. I encountered a lot of students, especially international, who were in grad school because it was a socially acceptable alternative to going home and getting a job.
- raziel2701 8y ago
  Where did you land after leaving the phd program?
  - cageface 8y ago
    I worked as a lab tech for a while and then switched to programming, which I’ve been doing happily ever since. I miss working in the lab a bit but overall I prefer the freedom and more meritocratic culture of working as a developer.
- jamestimmins 8y ago
  How much do you practically learn about chemistry in those first three years? Was that knowledge at all valuable in your post-academia life?
  - cageface 8y ago
    I leaned quite a bit but unfortunately I can’t say any of it has been specifically useful. I guess I could say I learned to work very very hard and to teach myself whatever I needed to know. Perhaps the price I paid was that was years before I could sit still and enjoy myself for five minutes without feeling like I was shirking.
  - tpfour 8y ago
    Not OP but it absolutely depends on the sub-field, the most glaring difference being between exclusively computational/theoretical research vs "wet" lab, and even withing sub-subfields it can vary a _lot_. Depending on the PhD program you can be required to take as low as 1 PhD level course per year. The "real" learning takes place by reading papers + lab work. The transferable knowledge might not be the specific capacities developed (e.g. how to properly plan and manage a multi-step organic synthesis, how to write an SCF routine, etc) but rather to be able to sit down long enough and reason about the world to make hypotheses and test them. That in general is very useful and a skill most workers in the workforce simply lack. I do not say this to be condescending, it is simply my experience that there is a clear divide in the mental processes of people who went through at the very least a Bachelors' vs people who did not. It's not better or worse, it's different. PS: Anecdotally, I have not completed my graduate degree for reasons of lack of funding. I really enjoyed what I did but TAing 2-3 courses per semester while working a part-time job (or two) to make sure I could get some vacation time once a year, pay the bills and go to the restaurant with my SO just wasn't worth it. As others have commented, money in academia is most definitely a winner takes all game. Experience showed me that in a cohort, it's mostly the top 5 or so students with excellent grades that will get the scholarships. Then you get maybe a dozen or two who live on ~1k a month and the rest well, fend for yourself (even if you have an advisor). I happened to be in a sub-field where professors were broke, so that was it. I eventually quit due to being absorbed in other (boring but paying) work, with now realising it was a mistake but a mistake that brought food on the table. Today I regret and want to go back, but you can't feed a family with $10k a year can you?
drewmassey 8y ago
This is statistically true, one of the curious paradoxes of PhD work is that students continually consider themselves to be an except to the statistics. I say this as a recovering humanities academic who now works in tech; I am really grateful that my parents pushed me to have a STEM major alongside my interest in music.
shoguning 8y ago
Such a waste of potential. It could be the most amazing time of your life, a chance to ask and answer the most interesting questions you can think of. Instead it ends up being a very negative experience for many.
simonbarker87 8y ago
I loved my PhD - had no intention of staying in academia, got paid a decent stipend for the whole time and was in and out in 2 years 10 months and it gave me the prefect spring board in to starting my own business (unrelated topic but the skills I developed and learned in that time have been a huge help) - I treated my PhD like a full time job and avoided the procrastination that many suffer with in the first 18 months.
wenc 8y ago
> most modern PhD factories are sweat shops I don't know if that is universally true. This type of anecdata tends to be very program specific. I worked on the computational side of things and got paid a lot to work on (what I thought was) interesting stuff. Folks who did experimental work (especially on the bio side of things) tended to put in more hours even over the weekends because biological substrates are no respecters of leisure time. On the other hand, it's much easier to publish experimental results than to come up with a new algorithm, so many ended up with quite a few publications than I did when they graduated.
- Fomite 8y ago
  This. My PhD program wasn't a sweat shop, and I actively make an effort to make sure the lab I run isn't either.

Because most modern PhD factories are sweat shops that offer a rather dismal career prospect. (If you've been through the process --- I suspect there are a lot on HN --- you know what I mean.)

cageface 8y ago

I bailed out three years into a chemistry PhD and my only regret is that I started it at all. I'm not saying that going to graduate school is necessarily a mistake but I think a lot of people go because they've done well in school up to that point and aren't sure what else to do with themselves.

geoalchimista 8y ago
I commend you on your courage. Reminds me of one of my good friends from college, who bailed out in the second year of his PhD program in geochemistry and started anew in a MSc program in Computer Science. He now works happily in a startup company as a SDE and never looks back.
- cageface 8y ago
  I have another friend that just switched from being an associate professor in chemistry to working as a developer for a bioinformatics lab. He loves it and doesn’t regret making the switch at all.
Kalium 8y ago
When I was an undergrad, there was a PhD candidate who advised me to go to grad school for exactly this reason. He told me it was years I could spend avoiding having to find a job.
- cageface 8y ago
  I worked much, much harder as a graduate student than I ever have as a developer, even at startups. At the lab I worked in putting in anything less than 70 hours a week was considered malingering.
- privacypoller 8y ago
  Same here. I encountered a lot of students, especially international, who were in grad school because it was a socially acceptable alternative to going home and getting a job.
raziel2701 8y ago
Where did you land after leaving the phd program?
- cageface 8y ago
  I worked as a lab tech for a while and then switched to programming, which I’ve been doing happily ever since. I miss working in the lab a bit but overall I prefer the freedom and more meritocratic culture of working as a developer.
jamestimmins 8y ago
How much do you practically learn about chemistry in those first three years? Was that knowledge at all valuable in your post-academia life?
- cageface 8y ago
  I leaned quite a bit but unfortunately I can’t say any of it has been specifically useful. I guess I could say I learned to work very very hard and to teach myself whatever I needed to know. Perhaps the price I paid was that was years before I could sit still and enjoy myself for five minutes without feeling like I was shirking.
- tpfour 8y ago
  Not OP but it absolutely depends on the sub-field, the most glaring difference being between exclusively computational/theoretical research vs "wet" lab, and even withing sub-subfields it can vary a _lot_. Depending on the PhD program you can be required to take as low as 1 PhD level course per year. The "real" learning takes place by reading papers + lab work. The transferable knowledge might not be the specific capacities developed (e.g. how to properly plan and manage a multi-step organic synthesis, how to write an SCF routine, etc) but rather to be able to sit down long enough and reason about the world to make hypotheses and test them. That in general is very useful and a skill most workers in the workforce simply lack. I do not say this to be condescending, it is simply my experience that there is a clear divide in the mental processes of people who went through at the very least a Bachelors' vs people who did not. It's not better or worse, it's different. PS: Anecdotally, I have not completed my graduate degree for reasons of lack of funding. I really enjoyed what I did but TAing 2-3 courses per semester while working a part-time job (or two) to make sure I could get some vacation time once a year, pay the bills and go to the restaurant with my SO just wasn't worth it. As others have commented, money in academia is most definitely a winner takes all game. Experience showed me that in a cohort, it's mostly the top 5 or so students with excellent grades that will get the scholarships. Then you get maybe a dozen or two who live on ~1k a month and the rest well, fend for yourself (even if you have an advisor). I happened to be in a sub-field where professors were broke, so that was it. I eventually quit due to being absorbed in other (boring but paying) work, with now realising it was a mistake but a mistake that brought food on the table. Today I regret and want to go back, but you can't feed a family with $10k a year can you?

drewmassey 8y ago

This is statistically true, one of the curious paradoxes of PhD work is that students continually consider themselves to be an except to the statistics. I say this as a recovering humanities academic who now works in tech; I am really grateful that my parents pushed me to have a STEM major alongside my interest in music.

shoguning 8y ago

Such a waste of potential. It could be the most amazing time of your life, a chance to ask and answer the most interesting questions you can think of. Instead it ends up being a very negative experience for many.

simonbarker87 8y ago

I loved my PhD - had no intention of staying in academia, got paid a decent stipend for the whole time and was in and out in 2 years 10 months and it gave me the prefect spring board in to starting my own business (unrelated topic but the skills I developed and learned in that time have been a huge help) - I treated my PhD like a full time job and avoided the procrastination that many suffer with in the first 18 months.

wenc 8y ago

> most modern PhD factories are sweat shops I don't know if that is universally true. This type of anecdata tends to be very program specific. I worked on the computational side of things and got paid a lot to work on (what I thought was) interesting stuff. Folks who did experimental work (especially on the bio side of things) tended to put in more hours even over the weekends because biological substrates are no respecters of leisure time. On the other hand, it's much easier to publish experimental results than to come up with a new algorithm, so many ended up with quite a few publications than I did when they graduated.

Fomite 8y ago
This. My PhD program wasn't a sweat shop, and I actively make an effort to make sure the lab I run isn't either.