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>Academia is full of mechanisms to negatively judge your research work. Fascinating, as I did not find this at all to be the case in general. I imagine in some

by Kranar 4y ago

>Academia is full of mechanisms to negatively judge your research work. Fascinating, as I did not find this at all to be the case in general. I imagine in some cases it could be true, but for the most part I found most research in academia to not be of much interest to many people, one way or another. Hardly anyone takes much time to either validate research or to critique it. I'm glad to hear that you managed to find something to research that caught the attention of many people/mechanisms, even if only to judge it negatively. It must mean you were doing something important, which I think is the exception and not at all the norm.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
I suspect from your comment that you're not familiar with the actual experience of R1 academic research. It is a Darwinian process that involves repeatedly submitting papers to highly competitive conferences for peer-review (a typical top-tier conference in computer security averages <20% acceptance rate.) You must do this many times just to get an Assistant Professorship. Then, assuming you publish N papers during grad school, you need to continue publishing maybe N/2 additional papers (or more) per year while also submitting successful grant proposals to organizations like NSF. These proposals are even more competitive (and worse: these organizations also consider your publication history and reputation, not just the merits of the proposal.) If you do this unabated for seven years or so then you might get tenure, which means you'll get to keep jumping those hurdles for another 25 years or so. Of course you can argue that all this academic competition selects for the wrong thing (that's subjective) but the competition and testing is never-ending. There is a reason that a lot of people leave for industry, simply because it's so much less stressful.

by Kranar 4y ago

matthewdgreen 4y ago

I suspect from your comment that you're not familiar with the actual experience of R1 academic research. It is a Darwinian process that involves repeatedly submitting papers to highly competitive conferences for peer-review (a typical top-tier conference in computer security averages <20% acceptance rate.) You must do this many times just to get an Assistant Professorship. Then, assuming you publish N papers during grad school, you need to continue publishing maybe N/2 additional papers (or more) per year while also submitting successful grant proposals to organizations like NSF. These proposals are even more competitive (and worse: these organizations also consider your publication history and reputation, not just the merits of the proposal.) If you do this unabated for seven years or so then you might get tenure, which means you'll get to keep jumping those hurdles for another 25 years or so. Of course you can argue that all this academic competition selects for the wrong thing (that's subjective) but the competition and testing is never-ending. There is a reason that a lot of people leave for industry, simply because it's so much less stressful.