3 ms·

rattle your network until you find a tenured professor who has interesting-to-you grants, and talk them into letting you join the lab as a visiting researcher.

rattle your network until you find a tenured professor who has interesting-to-you grants, and talk them into letting you join the lab as a visiting researcher. if you do it right they’ll be overjoyed to have technical staff who aren’t degree candidates and you’ll get something tasty to intellectually munch on.

yulaow 6y ago
He did not graduate so he is not eligible for any work as a researcher inside any eu university.
- azhenley 6y ago
  Couldn't he be hired as an engineer or technical staff?
  - yulaow 6y ago
    I don´t know for all the eu nations, but for those that I know staff researcher positions still require degrees (and there is a lot of competition to get those because they are even more limited in number than tenure track positions, just with far less requirements) In mine in particular everyone has at least a Master Degree with some publications. One of two even got a PHD.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  I understand degrees being a requirement for medicine or hard engineering, but for research and topics of the mind it's just an expensive, multi-year hazing ritual into academia. Plenty of good people go straight into industry after getting their BCs. (or avoid degrees entirely) because of this.
- exdsq 6y ago
  This isn't correct. You can work as a researcher without a degree, certainly in the UK. A general example would be an associate professor at a business school with extensive career experience who might contribute to some papers. An anecdotal example is myself; I don't have a bachelors degree but during my masters degree I had some summer research work. I ended up not finishing the masters degree but did chat about the possibility of going back to do a part-time PhD.
  - yulaow 6y ago
    I don't understand. In UK you can be associate professor without a degree? Then you talk about your time "during a master degree" but you say you had not a bachelors... How can you do a master without a bachelors? Now I understand why other members of academia, even when UK was part of EU, treated it as a special case for research positions. Btw not judging, just saying it is totally different of what I expected.
    - exdsq 6y ago
      > In UK you can be associate professor without a degree? Yes, in rare occasions! More frequently without say a higher degree. One that springs to mind is the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford University who read classics for their undergrad but with no further education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald I know there are other examples but I'd need to google a bit to find them. Notable people who got a PhD without a Bachelors or Masters in the US include Wolfram, so it's not just in the UK where rules get a little bent. > How can you do a master without a bachelors? Experience in industry counts if its highly related. I was offered or interviewed for postgraduate courses at the University of Leeds, Oxford University, University of Leicester, and a few others. All in Software Engineering and I eventually accepted a part-time position on an MSc in Computer Science. A bit of rigmarole but not that much - I started the course at 25 with 6 years experience in tech. After some pestering I was able to help with some lecturers papers which led to the whole PhD discussion but dropped the MSc because it wasn't as rigorous as I hoped it'd be (I'm interested in the foundations of computer science and this was more applied). If it helps I've been to doctoral summer schools in both the EU and US without any credentials either! Maybe the UK is the only place with such ways, I emailed Stanford a while back (I'm moving there this Summer, my partners a postdoc, and wanted to try audit some of their postgraduate CS courses) and got shot down pretty quickly!
alexf95 6y ago
Yea i feel like a job in research would be best fit, but that probably also requires a certain level of graduation.
- Fomite 6y ago
  It doesn't, necessarily. I've hired people to work helping support academic projects without ever looking at what their degree is in.
tgb 6y ago
My lab actually did this for a bit. They hired a programmer who was retired but bored and just wanted to do something for far less than market rate. She was great and got a lot done but two problems: 1) It took my boss significant effort keeping her busy with things to do: explaining the problems we needed solved, etc. is non-trivial 2) Since she was working for so little, she could basically dictate what she was or wasn't doing. The very fact that she wasn't on a real salary meant it was actually harder to work with her in some sense.
Fomite 6y ago
A couple notes: 1) You needn't necessarily restrict this to tenured professors. Indeed, plenty of new tenure-track professors have both the need and startup resources to potentially hire you if you're likely to boost their group's productivity. 2) It's hard to fund people with grant money who weren't written into the grant in the first place. So while grants might be interesting as an indicator of interest, they don't necessarily ensure you'll be hirable. Which means either patience, or hoping they have a small slush fund somewhere - which is more likely for a tenured professor, but not exclusively so.

yulaow 6y ago

He did not graduate so he is not eligible for any work as a researcher inside any eu university.

azhenley 6y ago
Couldn't he be hired as an engineer or technical staff?
- yulaow 6y ago
  I don´t know for all the eu nations, but for those that I know staff researcher positions still require degrees (and there is a lot of competition to get those because they are even more limited in number than tenure track positions, just with far less requirements) In mine in particular everyone has at least a Master Degree with some publications. One of two even got a PHD.
throwaway3699 6y ago
I understand degrees being a requirement for medicine or hard engineering, but for research and topics of the mind it's just an expensive, multi-year hazing ritual into academia. Plenty of good people go straight into industry after getting their BCs. (or avoid degrees entirely) because of this.
exdsq 6y ago
This isn't correct. You can work as a researcher without a degree, certainly in the UK. A general example would be an associate professor at a business school with extensive career experience who might contribute to some papers. An anecdotal example is myself; I don't have a bachelors degree but during my masters degree I had some summer research work. I ended up not finishing the masters degree but did chat about the possibility of going back to do a part-time PhD.
- yulaow 6y ago
  I don't understand. In UK you can be associate professor without a degree? Then you talk about your time "during a master degree" but you say you had not a bachelors... How can you do a master without a bachelors? Now I understand why other members of academia, even when UK was part of EU, treated it as a special case for research positions. Btw not judging, just saying it is totally different of what I expected.
  - exdsq 6y ago
    > In UK you can be associate professor without a degree? Yes, in rare occasions! More frequently without say a higher degree. One that springs to mind is the current Professor of Poetry at Oxford University who read classics for their undergrad but with no further education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Oswald I know there are other examples but I'd need to google a bit to find them. Notable people who got a PhD without a Bachelors or Masters in the US include Wolfram, so it's not just in the UK where rules get a little bent. > How can you do a master without a bachelors? Experience in industry counts if its highly related. I was offered or interviewed for postgraduate courses at the University of Leeds, Oxford University, University of Leicester, and a few others. All in Software Engineering and I eventually accepted a part-time position on an MSc in Computer Science. A bit of rigmarole but not that much - I started the course at 25 with 6 years experience in tech. After some pestering I was able to help with some lecturers papers which led to the whole PhD discussion but dropped the MSc because it wasn't as rigorous as I hoped it'd be (I'm interested in the foundations of computer science and this was more applied). If it helps I've been to doctoral summer schools in both the EU and US without any credentials either! Maybe the UK is the only place with such ways, I emailed Stanford a while back (I'm moving there this Summer, my partners a postdoc, and wanted to try audit some of their postgraduate CS courses) and got shot down pretty quickly!

alexf95 6y ago

Yea i feel like a job in research would be best fit, but that probably also requires a certain level of graduation.

Fomite 6y ago
It doesn't, necessarily. I've hired people to work helping support academic projects without ever looking at what their degree is in.

tgb 6y ago

My lab actually did this for a bit. They hired a programmer who was retired but bored and just wanted to do something for far less than market rate. She was great and got a lot done but two problems: 1) It took my boss significant effort keeping her busy with things to do: explaining the problems we needed solved, etc. is non-trivial 2) Since she was working for so little, she could basically dictate what she was or wasn't doing. The very fact that she wasn't on a real salary meant it was actually harder to work with her in some sense.

Fomite 6y ago

A couple notes: 1) You needn't necessarily restrict this to tenured professors. Indeed, plenty of new tenure-track professors have both the need and startup resources to potentially hire you if you're likely to boost their group's productivity. 2) It's hard to fund people with grant money who weren't written into the grant in the first place. So while grants might be interesting as an indicator of interest, they don't necessarily ensure you'll be hirable. Which means either patience, or hoping they have a small slush fund somewhere - which is more likely for a tenured professor, but not exclusively so.