8 ms·

A PhD is not required to do research, nor does research necessarily lead to a PhD. A PhD is ultimately like any other degree: a school programme where, at the

• keithwhor 7y ago
  Maybe some context on my end is missing — but isn’t the last paragraph basically describing the current problem with academia? That’s exactly what people are being trained for, there is just not enough demand for PIs / Professors so bright-eyed optimistic researchers end up getting left up sh*t creek without a paddle after four to six years.
  • Athas 7y ago
    Can't speak for everyone, but for my PhD I was trained for doing research. What else would it be? That kind of research is (presumably) also useful in R&D positions in industry, and I certainly see most of the PhD graduates here eagerly hired by companies with advanced products. Actually, what I was not directly trained for is exactly what you need only in academia: writing grants, managing small teams, supervising students, and so on.
    • arethuza 7y ago
      The thing that killed the appeal of academic research for me was that I found I was playing the "publish or perish" game too well an it was actually making me (as someone observed at the time) "hyper cynical". I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers about about how to build things that people will almost certainly never use.
      • tasogare 7y ago
        I’m 6 months in and already became a bit too cynical for my own good. Your last paragraph exactly describes a feeling I have been for months. Having a paper written in 10 days accepted in the best conference of the field increased both my imposter syndrome, and the feeling that we are writing useless crap. So, in this end what did you do? Are you able to build product you care about now?
        • arethuza 7y ago
          My experiences were a while back (I was in academic research from '89 to '95) - I left to co-found a startup in '95 and did OK. I've never regretted leaving academia for a single moment - that's not to say I don't have fond memories and I learned a lot there but ultimately I have always liked building stuff and ultimately that's only worth it if people get value from what you build. I knew a lot of great people in academia - but I was conscious that there was very much a game to be played (as is the case everywhere) and the game from what I could see wasn't one that interested me.
        • arkano 7y ago
          > Having a paper written in 10 days accepted in the best conference of the field increased both my imposter syndrome, and the feeling that we are writing useless crap. Are you sure you are not harsh on yourself? :) Maybe it was a good paper. If you are so worried, you can always ask the conference reviewers for comments; maybe they thought it was excellent. > useless crap You get enough "useless crap" down as knowledge and, who knows, one day you get to flying cars or the proof of Goldbach's conjecture.
      • Rerarom 7y ago
    • licebmi__at__ 7y ago
      My non PhD experience is totally the opposite. When I was studying physics, while there was interesting stuff and I enjoyed trying to build things, my professors and senior students hammered me with all the petty stuff I needed to organize the projects and get money. Suffice to say, I dropped out of college and chased a quick buck on IT. At least on my university, it as expected that you'll get to academia, and of my friends, those who didn't went to other career path, are still waiting for a place in academia.
  • _Wintermute 7y ago
    I think it depends on the field, I did my PhD in a biotech/drug-discovery lab where there was absolutely no expectation to continue in academia, in fact a post-doc in academia was viewed as pretty much the last option.
  • brazzy 7y ago
    The problem is multifacted, but it's not the case that PhD students are trained to become professors. They are trained to become researchers. The problem is also not generally that PhD grads believe they will become professors and are completely lost when that does not happen - in many fields, a PhD gives you perfectly good job opportunities outside academia, in some it is almost mandatory. The problems are: * People who do become professors have spent years training to become good researchers, and very little (if any) time training to become good teachers. They're kind of expected to be pick it up along the way, which may or may not work well. * Some people in academia still insist on the traditional idea that university should teach academic research and nothing else, and resist including anything that aims to better prepare students (and especially PhD students) for working in industry jobs, even though the vast majority of them will. * There are some fields where there really are few job prospects outside academia, and logically those fields should have very few PhD students, or at least make it very clear to students that they need to have a Plan B that is really more Plan A. But Professors need PhD and postdoc students as cheap, qualified labor. Some unscrupulous professors try to attract students by giving them an unrealistic view of their prospects in academia. They probably don't even think they're lying: see the previous point. This kind of thing is probably most common in fields like literature which combine bad job prospects with being very popular.
• query16 7y ago
  I agree, this isn’t true (especially in CS!). During my PhD, students in my cohort frequently had opportunities to talk to (and work with) people in industry. It’s not as disconnected as it may seem.
• musicale 7y ago
  Precisely - that would be an unsustainable pyramid. The supply of Ph.D. graduates is much larger than the number of faculty job openings, which can attract hundreds of applicants for a single position. Winning the faculty lottery is extremely unlikely.
  • romwell 7y ago
    And nevertheless, plenty of faculty preach the belief that if you don't stay in academia, you are a failure. At least that's the case in mathematics. People who leave academia are spoken of as if they are dead, which might as well be the case: most stop doing mathematics, attending conferences, keep connections with peers, etc. This attitude has only began to change in the last decade.
    • vnorilo 7y ago
      I have plenty of love for academia (PhD here) but it does, like most large institutions and corporations, show a tendency to become a huge feedback loop that interfaces only with itself and excludes the society at large, apart from siphoning money from it. We should make efforts to overcome the friction of opening up and reaching out no matter where we work. That keeps organizations healthy and sane.
      • romwell 7y ago
        Fully agree. That's why I registered as a member of the Ronin Institute[1], and would encourage you to do the same if you are not employed by a university! [1]http://ronininstitute.org/ http://ronininstitute.org/
    • bachmeier 7y ago
      This must be heavily field-dependent. I've honestly never seen that among economists. It's no doubt most common that someone in a PhD program will want to get an academic job, but places like Amazon and the Federal Reserve hire tons of PhD's. I had a student request to work with me because he thought that gave him the best chance of getting a nonacademic job, and I didn't see that as unusual. I have a student at this very moment going through the interview process with one of the big SV companies. For that matter, I would be happy to talk if a nonacademic employer were interested in me. Edit: Take a look at Paul Romer's bio. He worked his way up to full professor at Stanford, quit to start a business, and last year won the Nobel for his early academic work.
• arethuza 7y ago
  A lot of industries are like that though, "up or out" being the usual description - not everyone in law becomes a partner at a decent firm but there is no shortage of lawyers.
• arkano 7y ago
  I agree with everything, but > Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own. I think this statement is lacking some truth. We can rewrite it as: > Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own, but it can take significantly more time and there's no guarantee of consistency (compared to someone learning with a teacher). >some instituting is staking part of its reputation on giving the world a promise that you have some minimum competence in some field. Yes, and part of this process is having your work peer-reviewed as novel by active researchers in the field of interest (and getting advice/corrections from them along the way to the finish). I see this as an integral part of the process.
  • m0zg 7y ago
    >> it can take significantly more time It can also take significantly less time. I'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays. >> there's no guarantee of consistency There's no guarantee of that in any case. I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field. I'm not sure, however, if college is strictly speaking necessary for that in the third decade of the 21st century.
    • arkano 7y ago
      > It can also take significantly less time. Strong opinion, but I think that if you want to learn facts, you can learn them faster on your own. If you want to learn a new skill, you need somebody to check your ideas until you can get to a level where you can self-correct yourself. > II'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays. Sure, and I agree, most of the time I would prefer to study on my own instead of going to the lecture. However, it was incredibly useful to have an expert that could align my understanding whenever I was off to the wrong path; I think those were the opportunities for learning, not reading facts of off the board. > There's no guarantee of that in any case. Let's say that it's significantly more likely that you have practised on a variety of easy to hard problems in your field of interest if you have taken good courses from a university versus doing your own work. I believe that when you pick your own homework, it's natural to cherry-pick problems that seem simple. > I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field. That would (and does) describe research divisions in industry too.
• bigred100 7y ago
  I can’t imagine any circumstance other than a Ph.D program where someone spends 5+ years studying in depth some tiny area of science and practicing research. And without doing that I’m having trouble believing almost anyone will do serious research. There are a few people who did it but to me that is extraordinarily unlikely.
  • superhuzza 7y ago
    Agreed, those people are few and far between. Even if your job is fairly stable, you'll more likely work 'around' a problem more than a deep dive into a very specific problem.
  • minkzilla 7y ago
    Unless it is your job. There are plenty of research jobs depending on your field.
    • bigred100 7y ago
      Which usually require a Ph.D (at least in my field).
• bailefunk 7y ago
  I have a PhD too, and I felt I was expected to join academia after finishing my PhD. My supervisor treats me a bit like a "wasted talent" for getting a job in industry. Professors get reputation points when students become professors, in addition to expanding their influence in the field, as junior professors will still seek them for advice and will occupy strategic positions in academia. Some of my friends have told me they feel the same, and know a PhD student who is being discouraged from applying to teaching positions when she finishes, even though she feels that's her calling. There's a sense that teaching positions in academia are even lesser than a research position in industry.
• bitL 7y ago
  MS is the new BS and PhD is the new MS in the eyes of employers. You need a PhD or even a combo with MBA for certain jobs that used to require just MS these days.
• jessriedel 7y ago
  > A PhD is ultimately like any other degree: a school programme where, at the end, some instituting is staking part of its reputation on giving the world a promise that you have some minimum competence in some field. Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own. No, this neglects perhaps the most important aspect of a PhD: it is an apprenticeship with a professional researcher. Learning through apprenticeship is the most ancient and still often most effective methods of learning complicated skills. It is reasonable to dispute the value of accreditation from a university -- that's a practical question, and indeed strict university accreditation is relatively modern -- but it's not reasonable to think that anything you can learn in "school" can be learned on your own.
• PeterisP 7y ago
  As far as I see, PhD isn't really about studying or schooling - unlike all the previous school programmes, it's essentially an "apprentice researcher" job, where you work on research (possibly studying whatever you need for it), you get given some supervision by a more experienced researcher and once you demonstrate that you're capable of independent research by doing some and writing it up, you get a degree certificate. And it's not necessarily about some institution staking its reputation on it, the main evaluation of your research would be by external peer reviewers looking at your publications, not by your institution alone. A PhD is not required to do research, but research is (or should be) required to get a PhD, and research done outside an university program would generally be sufficient to get a PhD - there are paths to get a PhD degree mostly based on existing publications or based on a 'monograph' such as the research-based book that the OP has written. Learning and schooling alone, on the other hand, is not sufficient for a proper PhD; if you've learned everything that's known and published on some topic, that's not enough, you need to make at least some novel contribution.
• avaku 7y ago
  >> not everybody wants to not everybody has an opportunity to