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I can sum up this article: A PhD is roughly the same as a Masters for getting a job, except that you get paid a bit more if it's a big company with an HR depar

I can sum up this article: A PhD is roughly the same as a Masters for getting a job, except that you get paid a bit more if it's a big company with an HR department. You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you do at 30. Well, you might be able to do well, or maybe not, some PhD's are great and some are suck, and the same is true for people without degrees. You have to prove you are valuable. This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia, but you have to eat so you might as well get on with it. Well, that's my summary :) (I'm a bit biased being a dropout)

pbiggar 14y ago
Your "summary" is bullshit and has completely distorted the article. You're not just biased, you're also completely misinformed. > You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you do at 30. More likely, you've spent 3-6 years coding, learning to communicate, and work well in a team. > This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia. Most recently hired academics on a tenure track work 80 hour weeks. You've got to teach course, mentor research students, write grant proposals, and produce research. If you don't, you're out the door. Imagine I were to suggest that because you're a dropout, all you're good for is saying "do you want fries with that?" That's about the level of what you've done with your comment.
- bnegreve 14y ago
  I think justin_vanw wanted to show that the article was not really informative. I agree with that, I haven't learnt much by reading it.
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    Oh, if that's the case I overreacted. Sorry justin_vanw!
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      It turns out I did not overreact. Apology rescinded, you do not know what you're talking about.
- justin_vanw 14y ago
  Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM, 7 days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)??? This doesn't seem likely, since they would be completely burned out after only a few months, and you would have diminishing returns after the first week. If you are really working 80 hour weeks then you are being incredibly foolish and wasting a lot of time being completely unproductive due to exhaustion. But, of course, you don't really mean 80 hours, you were just exaggerating a bit to make your point. Fair enough, lets say profs are putting in (I'm assuming a proper research university where tenure track professors teach 3-4 classes at most) 12 hours lecturing each week, for 30 weeks per year. That's (at most) 360 hours of teaching, per year. Lets say you spend 2 hours per week preparing for lectures (you should know this stuff already, but lets say you just need time to get organized). That's 60 hours, yearly. Now, lets say you spend 4 hours every day working on research. Everybody probably would like to spend more, but some days you have to see friends or your wife/husband or kids or get your car fixed or whatever. That's 4 * 365, which is probably a huge overestimate for most people, but that's 1460 hours per year. Now, as for writing grant proposals, or mentoring students, or whatever else, nobody believes you are spending any serious time (more than 5 hours a week) on that. I don't know how long you really spend on it, but I'm going to assume that you aren't writing more than 1 grant proposal per month, so I'm going to just say that I gave very optimistic and too-high estimates for everything else, so this will get rolled in as overhead. So you're doing (drumroll) 360 + 60 + 1460 = 1880 hours of work per year, all but 420 of which is just thinking about the problems that interest you most. If you work in industry, you are spending 220 * 9 = 1980 hours per year working on stuff that are not the things that most interest you, and almost none of it is blue-sky thinking of any kind. Want fries with that? Edit: With my really crazy overestimates on how tenure track profs spend time, averaged over a regular work schedule it is 42.72 hours per week, of which 9.5 is anything at all besides pure 'research'. Odd that, it's within .5 hours per week of my original guess, and I swear I didn't cook the numbers to come to that.
  - daleroberts 14y ago
    I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of work we need to do...
  - 14y ago
AlisdairO 14y ago
> You haven't really developed any skills that are useful That's practically all I did. Doing a PhD gave me both the time and the excuse to pick up both technical skills and soft skills that prove useful to myself and my colleagues on a regular basis. I'm a dramatically better coder for it. > This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about I work 37 hour weeks doing stuff that I find really interesting. I made a conscious decision near the start of my PhD that I had no desire to work in academia but that doing a PhD was fantastically interesting, so I'd keep doing it. > instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia That might have been the cause of your dropout.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Very interesting perspective (Disclaimer: I dropped out, with a little help from my advisor) I guess it all depends on a lot of things. If you enjoy what you are doing, and have a nice environment, go for it. But dropping out was something I'm very glad I did. And I learned a lot outside of Academia. (and the money is good as well)
  - AlisdairO 14y ago
    I think it probably helps (for people like me) that the UK PhD system is rather lighter weight than that in NA - I spent about 3 years and 4 months on mine, which I considered a very acceptable tradeoff for the learning (and ability to work on a project I was really interested in). My lifetime earnings will probably be a little lower, but the flipside is I'm now equipped to take on much more interesting jobs than I was beforehand. If the timescale had been closer to 6 years I would be more inclined to think twice about it. edit: I don't mean to imply that a PhD is for everyone - I have friends who dropped out who made absolutely the right decision: they didn't want to become academics and had lost interest in their subject. If anyone is in that position they absolutely should drop out. The uninformed supposition that skills gained during a PhD are useless is frustrating to me, though - I really honed skills like the ability (and motivation) to investigate a topic area, present my work clearly, and learned a whole load of new technologies along the way. These have all been invaluable to me - far more so than a little extra time in industry would have been. I was certainly at a disadvantage at 0 years in industry compared to someone else with 3 and a bit. A few years later, though, and I feel at an advantage. I guess I'm also quite defensive about PhDs because mine holds a special place for me - it was during that time that I discovered how much I love to learn. As a result I'm far more motivated to improve my knowledge than I ever was before.
hessenwolf 14y ago
Miaow, bitchy. You are right, however, about it being a bit depressing competing with 25 year olds that have 3 years experience. My first post-doc job started as borderline data-entry (but then in three months I became chief developer on the entire system :)).
TheComedian 14y ago
My understanding is that academia is very competitive, so I don't understand how you are only going to work 9 hours a week. Further, you'll probably have classes to teach which surely take up more than 9 hours a week. Also, since tenure is largely tied to the quality of your output, you can't always work on what interests you--you have to work on what you can publish.

pbiggar 14y ago

Your "summary" is bullshit and has completely distorted the article. You're not just biased, you're also completely misinformed. > You haven't really developed any skills that are useful, and now you are going to be paired up with some 25 year old that has 3 years of experience more than you do at 30. More likely, you've spent 3-6 years coding, learning to communicate, and work well in a team. > This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about, instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia. Most recently hired academics on a tenure track work 80 hour weeks. You've got to teach course, mentor research students, write grant proposals, and produce research. If you don't, you're out the door. Imagine I were to suggest that because you're a dropout, all you're good for is saying "do you want fries with that?" That's about the level of what you've done with your comment.

bnegreve 14y ago
I think justin_vanw wanted to show that the article was not really informative. I agree with that, I haven't learnt much by reading it.
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Oh, if that's the case I overreacted. Sorry justin_vanw!
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    It turns out I did not overreact. Apology rescinded, you do not know what you're talking about.
justin_vanw 14y ago
Tenure track profs work 80 hours per week? Really? They work from 8AM to 8PM, 7 days per week (taking only a 15 minute break each day to eat)??? This doesn't seem likely, since they would be completely burned out after only a few months, and you would have diminishing returns after the first week. If you are really working 80 hour weeks then you are being incredibly foolish and wasting a lot of time being completely unproductive due to exhaustion. But, of course, you don't really mean 80 hours, you were just exaggerating a bit to make your point. Fair enough, lets say profs are putting in (I'm assuming a proper research university where tenure track professors teach 3-4 classes at most) 12 hours lecturing each week, for 30 weeks per year. That's (at most) 360 hours of teaching, per year. Lets say you spend 2 hours per week preparing for lectures (you should know this stuff already, but lets say you just need time to get organized). That's 60 hours, yearly. Now, lets say you spend 4 hours every day working on research. Everybody probably would like to spend more, but some days you have to see friends or your wife/husband or kids or get your car fixed or whatever. That's 4 * 365, which is probably a huge overestimate for most people, but that's 1460 hours per year. Now, as for writing grant proposals, or mentoring students, or whatever else, nobody believes you are spending any serious time (more than 5 hours a week) on that. I don't know how long you really spend on it, but I'm going to assume that you aren't writing more than 1 grant proposal per month, so I'm going to just say that I gave very optimistic and too-high estimates for everything else, so this will get rolled in as overhead. So you're doing (drumroll) 360 + 60 + 1460 = 1880 hours of work per year, all but 420 of which is just thinking about the problems that interest you most. If you work in industry, you are spending 220 * 9 = 1980 hours per year working on stuff that are not the things that most interest you, and almost none of it is blue-sky thinking of any kind. Want fries with that? Edit: With my really crazy overestimates on how tenure track profs spend time, averaged over a regular work schedule it is 42.72 hours per week, of which 9.5 is anything at all besides pure 'research'. Odd that, it's within .5 hours per week of my original guess, and I swear I didn't cook the numbers to come to that.
- daleroberts 14y ago
  I think you're seriously underestimating the amount of work we need to do...
- 14y ago

AlisdairO 14y ago

> You haven't really developed any skills that are useful That's practically all I did. Doing a PhD gave me both the time and the excuse to pick up both technical skills and soft skills that prove useful to myself and my colleagues on a regular basis. I'm a dramatically better coder for it. > This is all going to make you very depressed since you are facing 50 hour weeks doing work you don't really care about I work 37 hour weeks doing stuff that I find really interesting. I made a conscious decision near the start of my PhD that I had no desire to work in academia but that doing a PhD was fantastically interesting, so I'd keep doing it. > instead of 9 hour weeks doing only what interests you in Academia That might have been the cause of your dropout.

raverbashing 14y ago
Very interesting perspective (Disclaimer: I dropped out, with a little help from my advisor) I guess it all depends on a lot of things. If you enjoy what you are doing, and have a nice environment, go for it. But dropping out was something I'm very glad I did. And I learned a lot outside of Academia. (and the money is good as well)
- AlisdairO 14y ago
  I think it probably helps (for people like me) that the UK PhD system is rather lighter weight than that in NA - I spent about 3 years and 4 months on mine, which I considered a very acceptable tradeoff for the learning (and ability to work on a project I was really interested in). My lifetime earnings will probably be a little lower, but the flipside is I'm now equipped to take on much more interesting jobs than I was beforehand. If the timescale had been closer to 6 years I would be more inclined to think twice about it. edit: I don't mean to imply that a PhD is for everyone - I have friends who dropped out who made absolutely the right decision: they didn't want to become academics and had lost interest in their subject. If anyone is in that position they absolutely should drop out. The uninformed supposition that skills gained during a PhD are useless is frustrating to me, though - I really honed skills like the ability (and motivation) to investigate a topic area, present my work clearly, and learned a whole load of new technologies along the way. These have all been invaluable to me - far more so than a little extra time in industry would have been. I was certainly at a disadvantage at 0 years in industry compared to someone else with 3 and a bit. A few years later, though, and I feel at an advantage. I guess I'm also quite defensive about PhDs because mine holds a special place for me - it was during that time that I discovered how much I love to learn. As a result I'm far more motivated to improve my knowledge than I ever was before.

hessenwolf 14y ago

Miaow, bitchy. You are right, however, about it being a bit depressing competing with 25 year olds that have 3 years experience. My first post-doc job started as borderline data-entry (but then in three months I became chief developer on the entire system :)).

TheComedian 14y ago

My understanding is that academia is very competitive, so I don't understand how you are only going to work 9 hours a week. Further, you'll probably have classes to teach which surely take up more than 9 hours a week. Also, since tenure is largely tied to the quality of your output, you can't always work on what interests you--you have to work on what you can publish.