5 ms·

Academia has become a prestige obsessed pissing contest. You need to go to a presitigous university for undergrad, so you can find a PhD position under a famous

Academia has become a prestige obsessed pissing contest. You need to go to a presitigous university for undergrad, so you can find a PhD position under a famous professor at another prestigious university who has lots of connections to the editorial teams of top tier journals, so you can publish at the prestigious journals, so that when you finish the PhD you can do 1-2 (or 5, or 10...) postdocs with other famous professors, so that by the time you compete for tenure track positions you use the connections with famous professors and publications at prestigious journals to become a professor yourself. Once you make it to professor, you need to use the connections and the prestige to get the big grants to hire lots of PhDs and postdocs yourself to continue the cycle. If at any point you prioritise your drive and passion for a subject over the prestige and connections game, the peers who play the game will get far ahead of you in their careers, and you won't make it to professor. Saw too many 38+ year old postdocs who thought quietly pursuing their passion in their subject would get them anywhere. No wonder all the people who just wanted to do their damn research went into industry. I did it myself and now get paid more than all of my former supervisor's postdocs combined. I don't think this even has to do with being a 'weird nerd'. Basically, at least in STEM, you have to specifically WANT to play the silly prestige pissing contest to stay in academia. Otherwise, forces of nature (economic and social), naturally push you out of academia.

mjfl 3y ago
> Once you make it to professor, you need to use the connections and the prestige to get the big grants to hire lots of PhDs and postdocs yourself to continue the cycle. It is certainly strange that the final goal of academia is basically to create an org. Totally different from the image of the idealized scientist to me. But this does allow a lot of people to work in science. It probably allowed me to get my foot in the door when I wouldn't have otherwise.
- derbOac 3y ago
  That organizational structure has been called a pyramid scheme.
  - mjfl 3y ago
    Or a tumor :)
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  The problem is that the people who advance are not the people who are good at science, so you end up with top down direction to chase fads while promising leads get passed over. When the fads don't pan out, the PI will push their postdocs to find something to publish just to keep publication counts up, and it doesn't matter if the articles are bunk because the lab is part of a citation ring so the authors influence will only continue to increase.
owlbite 3y ago
This basically reflects reasons I went from academia to industry. There is no real IC career path in academia, if you want to get paid more than peanuts you basically spend your entire life applying for grants and managing other people to do the work on them. Now firmly ensconced in big tech, my cash bonus is roughly speaking the same as my previous salary, I don't spend my entire life filling in grant applications, and I get to work on interesting and relevant problems with a supply of cutting edge hardware rather than whatever I could find a grant to purchase, or the 5-year refresh paid for from the central pot, or some amount of hours on whatever the IBM rep managed to offload to upper management as a "supercomputer".
deleted 3y ago
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mjfl 3y ago

> Once you make it to professor, you need to use the connections and the prestige to get the big grants to hire lots of PhDs and postdocs yourself to continue the cycle. It is certainly strange that the final goal of academia is basically to create an org. Totally different from the image of the idealized scientist to me. But this does allow a lot of people to work in science. It probably allowed me to get my foot in the door when I wouldn't have otherwise.

derbOac 3y ago
That organizational structure has been called a pyramid scheme.
- mjfl 3y ago
  Or a tumor :)
CuriouslyC 3y ago
The problem is that the people who advance are not the people who are good at science, so you end up with top down direction to chase fads while promising leads get passed over. When the fads don't pan out, the PI will push their postdocs to find something to publish just to keep publication counts up, and it doesn't matter if the articles are bunk because the lab is part of a citation ring so the authors influence will only continue to increase.

owlbite 3y ago

This basically reflects reasons I went from academia to industry. There is no real IC career path in academia, if you want to get paid more than peanuts you basically spend your entire life applying for grants and managing other people to do the work on them. Now firmly ensconced in big tech, my cash bonus is roughly speaking the same as my previous salary, I don't spend my entire life filling in grant applications, and I get to work on interesting and relevant problems with a supply of cutting edge hardware rather than whatever I could find a grant to purchase, or the 5-year refresh paid for from the central pot, or some amount of hours on whatever the IBM rep managed to offload to upper management as a "supercomputer".

deleted 3y ago

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