7 ms·

I am a math professor. My first Ph.D. student got a job outside of academia and I was happy to support him fully and unreservedly. But: >students still come o

I am a math professor. My first Ph.D. student got a job outside of academia and I was happy to support him fully and unreservedly. But: >students still come out with a very narrow window of extremely specialized knowledge Duh. >Additional courses in broader topics such as writing and business would also be beneficial (6). Huh? This suggestion ignores the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized. (And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.) If students or employers want alternative degree programs, that is well and good, I encourage universities to begin offering them, and as a professor I would be quite happy to teach and advise such students. But I see no reason to dilute Ph.D. programs, which continue to serve the purpose for which they were created.

fatjokes 13y ago
May I ask what industry he went into? Was it finance?
- psychometry 13y ago
  My observation is that math PhDs who don't go into academia end up at the NSA more often than any other public or private entity.
potatolicious 13y ago
> "(And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.)" Do they have the time? My undergrad program was extremely... focused (a word the administration would no doubt use to describe it). In my entire 4.5 years I had exactly two non-engineering electives, the rest of the schedule was a full stack of "core" courses. This was not atypical at my school. The result of which is that you create a bunch of people who are very narrowly educated. I dodged that bullet with a combination of suicidal course loads (e.g., taking a 7th course in a 6-core-course semester) and class-skipping. Neither were good solutions and I only made it out by the skin of my teeth. The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented. There is a dramatic misalignment of what you think you're doing there and what your students think they're doing there.
- Fomite 13y ago
  "Do they have the time?" People in my program take Spanish. I knew one person who did creative writing. We actually have a class on consulting in a closely related department that you could manage to sell as an elective. I took some only faintly related classes in another department. It's not easy, and it will add time (that's the true problem with a PhD, balancing 'Things I want To Do' and 'I want to finish') but it's doable. PhDs are also often much less "locked in" to coursework than undergraduates, especially after their first few years. "The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented." I can't think of a single person in my program who wasn't fully aware that a PhD is about producing original research. They might struggle with doing that, but it's a known and understood requirement. There's a career-oriented degree. It's a Masters.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    Oh, I do believe your students are aware that they must produce original research, but I'm willing to bet that none of them see it as a primary objective, but rather a means to the real objective: a career in academia. The Ph.D. program, in our times at least, is pitched as a quid pro quo: you produce some original research, something worthwhile and of substance, to add to the sum of human knowledge, and in exchange they gain access to an academic career. The problem is that there are a lot of people paying the quid, and barely anyone getting the quo. Unless you are a student of independent wealth, you are not producing this research out of the goodness of your heart with no greater, more important objective. To the vast, vast majority of people doing their Ph.D's, a Ph.D. is a career maneuver.
    - tansey 13y ago
      I'm not sure what PhD students you're hanging around, but all the ones I know are painfully aware of the fact that we're making terrible career choices. No one expects to get a job as a professor right out of the program, except maybe a few people who hope to get a job at a teaching college. Even those who are going to do a post doc are doing it with full belief that it is unlikely to lead to a tenure-track position. And all of that is at a top 10 CS PhD program. PhD students generally just love research. We sign up for this because it's what we enjoy doing. Companies try hard to recruit us away, but we stay in spite of that, because why would we want to do anything other than work on the one problem we've always wanted to solve? Maybe it's different in the humanities, but every STEM PhD student I've ever met has low expectations, with the exception of one-- and she has a first authorship on a Nature paper and is working on a Science submission, so I still think she's pretty well-grounded.
rayiner 13y ago
I don't think it "dilutes" the purpose of a PhD to add courses in business and writing. I worked for two companies founded by PhDs. The specialized knowledge poised them well to be more than a cog in industry, but take the lead in enterprises related to their expertise. It's one of the competitive advantages of PhDs over other degrees. A BS and some work experience doesn't prepare you, for example, to get a job building groundbreaking computer vision systems. A PhD is a real value-add for that. That's not dilution. That's recognizing that the degree has value outside the traditional niche of academia.
- michaelt 13y ago
  The 'dilution' isn't the first course, but once you open the door to mandatory courses that people think could come in handy suddenly you have a bunch of them. It starts with writing and business. And of course you'll need a course on teaching as you'll be teaching. A course in research tools like statistics and designing surveys will help you avoid some potholes. You'll need to reference things properly and avoid plagiarism, better have some training for that. Everyone in this field uses (Matlab/Excel/Latex/MS Word/SPSS/R/NumPy/Fortran/EndNote/BibTeX) so we'd better train you to use that. Effective study strategies will be vital, as will effective note-taking skills. You'll need to know about time and project management, better have a course on that. Of course you'll need to know how to use the library, research databases, and how to make document supply requests. Writing papers and working out which journals and conferences to target is important of course. Presentation skills and public speaking are vital in all manner of jobs. Not to mention career planning, networking and professional development. And you can't be a public academic these days without managing your online presence. Oh, your project involves spending money? You'll need training in managing a budget and working the purchasing procedure...
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Actually, mandatory courses in statistics and Latex would be a great idea. You have no idea how much time is wasted getting those wrong!
dinkumthinkum 13y ago
You are correct, it is really silly. As far as business and writing ... Presumably, Ph.D students should have an undergraduate degree, if not a double major. That seems like enough time to have taken a "writing" course. As far as business ... I mean, presumably a Ph.D in mathematics understands supply and demand. It's just all a bit weird advice.
cowsandmilk 13y ago
> (And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.) True this. Almost every university I've dealt with loves for their math and science Ph.D. students to take a business class or two. But requiring it would be outside the point of a Ph.D. Honestly, most Ph.D. programs have a couple core classes, then they are pretty flexible about what classes you take as long as you can make up an excuse. Additionally, one friend getting a Ph.D. really wanted a job in science journalism. He found time to intern for a newspaper doing the journalism while still a candidate. Plenty of others build up a portfolio just blogging on the side. If you come out of a Ph.D. wanting to be a writer, it's your fault if you don't have a well put-together portfolio.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  > If you come out of a Ph.D. wanting to be a writer, it's your fault if you don't have a well put-together portfolio. I learned to how to write and to enjoy writing in my PhD program. Writing and communicating research ideas and results coherently is actually one of the primary things a PhD does...
mathattack 13y ago
I do believe there should be some "Buyer Beware" on Phd programs. Especially if they are fully funded. But you shouldn't change the programs. If you want to work at a hedge fund, a masters in financial math is a lot more efficient than a Phd in Physics.
analog31 13y ago
>>> the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized. I'd modify this a bit, since a PhD candidate is still a student, and still works under a teacher. The purpose is to learn how to produce original research, by doing it under a mentor. The mentor has some responsibility to guide the student away from making themselves so specialized and unemployable that their first research result is their last. Now, I think that as students move up the ladder, they are afforded greater responsibility for their own careers, and greater freedom to -- frankly -- make mistakes. A PhD student should be able to figure out that a job in business might require being conversant in business. But they should also be free to master a skill that no employer cares about, with eyes-open awareness of the risk to their careers. On the other hand, a student could also think strategically about their research project and employment prospects. I had a physics thesis project with a particular research goal, but considerable latitude as to how I could carry it out, and I steered the project through a series of obstacles that "forced" me to become demonstrably proficient in areas such as electronics and programming, which also happened to be my hobbies. In other words, I tackled a specialized problem by being a generalist. My father gained his PhD yet was and is a generalist. He went to work in industry. Perhaps this gave me a natural role model, and a background that enabled me to manage the same transition.
- kskz 13y ago
  I think this is silly. A BS or MS degree is where you should acquire employable skills. A PhD is an apprenticeship for a research topic.
- zmb_ 13y ago
  I suppose that depends on the program. At my department Ph.D. candidates are researchers (it's the official title). Their job is not to learn how to produce original research, it is to actually produce original research. Professors are not teachers, they are bosses who assign you to a project and make sure there's a budget to pay you. M.Sc. gives you the background to produce the research, but just like in the industry, you will learn while on the job. You could be doing equivalent work outside the academia with your M.Sc., in an R&D department of some large company. As for specialization, you must be extremely specialized to advance your field, which is a requirement for a Ph.D. The point is not to be hired because of your particular speciality, the point is to earn the highest "license to practice science".
mjg59 13y ago
I did my PhD in computational genetics. My current career has precisely nothing to do with genetics, which suits me just fine - but I was fortunate in ending up with having a choice between an academic career in a modern field, or a non-academic career in a modern field. Most PhD students don't have that choice, and that does seem like something of a problem. Realistically, most of them aren't going to have the opportunity to enter a meaningful tenure-track program and stand a real chance of becoming a full professor. Pushing a bunch of people down that track without providing any support for the ones who aren't going to make it seems pretty unreasonable. I'm not going to argue that that means we should dilute PhDs. I'm fine with the current degree remaining as it is. But we should stop encouraging people to do PhDs just because there's a chance that they're going to get into academia. I gained a lot from my degree, but I could have been taught that without the aspects that were tied to the assumption that I'd spend the rest of my life in academia. We should work out how to provide the more generally applicable aspects without making people feel like shit for doing that and then discovering that they don't an academic position to take up.
- judk 13y ago
  Who is pushing PhDs? The meme that there are far fewer academic jobs than PhDs has been widespread for at least 10 of 15 years. A PhD is either a segue to a job in that field, if there is an industry (like pharmacology) or to launching a new segment of industry (as in computer technology) or a non-pecuniary pursuit of folks who are intelligent and financially independent.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    This is factually wrong; universities are replacing tenured faculty with "cheaper labour" in the form of PhD holders from the excess glut. So, they are quite motivated to keep producing an "over-supply". The percentage of teaching staff that have tenure is a decreasing number over the pas ~30 years or so. Furthermore, the universities are getting comp'd on the tution of PhD students even though the students themselves don't pay fees. They do this indirectly through the "3 card monty" system of research grants, government subsidies, stipends & etc. Lastly but not leastly, the "prestige" of any political organization, hinges on the amount of resources and staff that come under the executive's aeigis. And so it is with departments at universities: large scale command of cash and IQ is a proxy for "power" and "verility" and all of the other stuff that people use to indirectly "measure themselves" against one another. After all, "prestige" is the measure of the modern university man... see: figure 3, p7 http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/2011-12Economic-Status-Report.pdf http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/2011-12Economic-Stat...
ramsaysnuuhh 13y ago
> This suggestion ignores the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized. Tell that crap to the tourists, the purpose of the Ph.D. is afaict to get the student a high paying job that requires a Ph.D. (because existing phd's say you need one), and the professor tenure and grants.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

fatjokes 13y ago

May I ask what industry he went into? Was it finance?

psychometry 13y ago
My observation is that math PhDs who don't go into academia end up at the NSA more often than any other public or private entity.

potatolicious 13y ago

> "(And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.)" Do they have the time? My undergrad program was extremely... focused (a word the administration would no doubt use to describe it). In my entire 4.5 years I had exactly two non-engineering electives, the rest of the schedule was a full stack of "core" courses. This was not atypical at my school. The result of which is that you create a bunch of people who are very narrowly educated. I dodged that bullet with a combination of suicidal course loads (e.g., taking a 7th course in a 6-core-course semester) and class-skipping. Neither were good solutions and I only made it out by the skin of my teeth. The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented. There is a dramatic misalignment of what you think you're doing there and what your students think they're doing there.

Fomite 13y ago
"Do they have the time?" People in my program take Spanish. I knew one person who did creative writing. We actually have a class on consulting in a closely related department that you could manage to sell as an elective. I took some only faintly related classes in another department. It's not easy, and it will add time (that's the true problem with a PhD, balancing 'Things I want To Do' and 'I want to finish') but it's doable. PhDs are also often much less "locked in" to coursework than undergraduates, especially after their first few years. "The problem here is that the definition of a Ph.D. for you is extremely different from the definition of Ph.D. for most of your students. I think there's next to no one whose primary objective with a Ph.D. is to produce a piece of original research - it is always a means to another end: usually career-oriented." I can't think of a single person in my program who wasn't fully aware that a PhD is about producing original research. They might struggle with doing that, but it's a known and understood requirement. There's a career-oriented degree. It's a Masters.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  Oh, I do believe your students are aware that they must produce original research, but I'm willing to bet that none of them see it as a primary objective, but rather a means to the real objective: a career in academia. The Ph.D. program, in our times at least, is pitched as a quid pro quo: you produce some original research, something worthwhile and of substance, to add to the sum of human knowledge, and in exchange they gain access to an academic career. The problem is that there are a lot of people paying the quid, and barely anyone getting the quo. Unless you are a student of independent wealth, you are not producing this research out of the goodness of your heart with no greater, more important objective. To the vast, vast majority of people doing their Ph.D's, a Ph.D. is a career maneuver.
  - tansey 13y ago
    I'm not sure what PhD students you're hanging around, but all the ones I know are painfully aware of the fact that we're making terrible career choices. No one expects to get a job as a professor right out of the program, except maybe a few people who hope to get a job at a teaching college. Even those who are going to do a post doc are doing it with full belief that it is unlikely to lead to a tenure-track position. And all of that is at a top 10 CS PhD program. PhD students generally just love research. We sign up for this because it's what we enjoy doing. Companies try hard to recruit us away, but we stay in spite of that, because why would we want to do anything other than work on the one problem we've always wanted to solve? Maybe it's different in the humanities, but every STEM PhD student I've ever met has low expectations, with the exception of one-- and she has a first authorship on a Nature paper and is working on a Science submission, so I still think she's pretty well-grounded.

rayiner 13y ago

I don't think it "dilutes" the purpose of a PhD to add courses in business and writing. I worked for two companies founded by PhDs. The specialized knowledge poised them well to be more than a cog in industry, but take the lead in enterprises related to their expertise. It's one of the competitive advantages of PhDs over other degrees. A BS and some work experience doesn't prepare you, for example, to get a job building groundbreaking computer vision systems. A PhD is a real value-add for that. That's not dilution. That's recognizing that the degree has value outside the traditional niche of academia.

michaelt 13y ago
The 'dilution' isn't the first course, but once you open the door to mandatory courses that people think could come in handy suddenly you have a bunch of them. It starts with writing and business. And of course you'll need a course on teaching as you'll be teaching. A course in research tools like statistics and designing surveys will help you avoid some potholes. You'll need to reference things properly and avoid plagiarism, better have some training for that. Everyone in this field uses (Matlab/Excel/Latex/MS Word/SPSS/R/NumPy/Fortran/EndNote/BibTeX) so we'd better train you to use that. Effective study strategies will be vital, as will effective note-taking skills. You'll need to know about time and project management, better have a course on that. Of course you'll need to know how to use the library, research databases, and how to make document supply requests. Writing papers and working out which journals and conferences to target is important of course. Presentation skills and public speaking are vital in all manner of jobs. Not to mention career planning, networking and professional development. And you can't be a public academic these days without managing your online presence. Oh, your project involves spending money? You'll need training in managing a budget and working the purchasing procedure...
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Actually, mandatory courses in statistics and Latex would be a great idea. You have no idea how much time is wasted getting those wrong!

dinkumthinkum 13y ago

You are correct, it is really silly. As far as business and writing ... Presumably, Ph.D students should have an undergraduate degree, if not a double major. That seems like enough time to have taken a "writing" course. As far as business ... I mean, presumably a Ph.D in mathematics understands supply and demand. It's just all a bit weird advice.

cowsandmilk 13y ago

> (And for that matter, if students in my Ph.D. program want to enroll in courses in business, writing, or anything else, they can.) True this. Almost every university I've dealt with loves for their math and science Ph.D. students to take a business class or two. But requiring it would be outside the point of a Ph.D. Honestly, most Ph.D. programs have a couple core classes, then they are pretty flexible about what classes you take as long as you can make up an excuse. Additionally, one friend getting a Ph.D. really wanted a job in science journalism. He found time to intern for a newspaper doing the journalism while still a candidate. Plenty of others build up a portfolio just blogging on the side. If you come out of a Ph.D. wanting to be a writer, it's your fault if you don't have a well put-together portfolio.

seanmcdirmid 13y ago
> If you come out of a Ph.D. wanting to be a writer, it's your fault if you don't have a well put-together portfolio. I learned to how to write and to enjoy writing in my PhD program. Writing and communicating research ideas and results coherently is actually one of the primary things a PhD does...

mathattack 13y ago

I do believe there should be some "Buyer Beware" on Phd programs. Especially if they are fully funded. But you shouldn't change the programs. If you want to work at a hedge fund, a masters in financial math is a lot more efficient than a Phd in Physics.

analog31 13y ago

>>> the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized. I'd modify this a bit, since a PhD candidate is still a student, and still works under a teacher. The purpose is to learn how to produce original research, by doing it under a mentor. The mentor has some responsibility to guide the student away from making themselves so specialized and unemployable that their first research result is their last. Now, I think that as students move up the ladder, they are afforded greater responsibility for their own careers, and greater freedom to -- frankly -- make mistakes. A PhD student should be able to figure out that a job in business might require being conversant in business. But they should also be free to master a skill that no employer cares about, with eyes-open awareness of the risk to their careers. On the other hand, a student could also think strategically about their research project and employment prospects. I had a physics thesis project with a particular research goal, but considerable latitude as to how I could carry it out, and I steered the project through a series of obstacles that "forced" me to become demonstrably proficient in areas such as electronics and programming, which also happened to be my hobbies. In other words, I tackled a specialized problem by being a generalist. My father gained his PhD yet was and is a generalist. He went to work in industry. Perhaps this gave me a natural role model, and a background that enabled me to manage the same transition.

kskz 13y ago
I think this is silly. A BS or MS degree is where you should acquire employable skills. A PhD is an apprenticeship for a research topic.
zmb_ 13y ago
I suppose that depends on the program. At my department Ph.D. candidates are researchers (it's the official title). Their job is not to learn how to produce original research, it is to actually produce original research. Professors are not teachers, they are bosses who assign you to a project and make sure there's a budget to pay you. M.Sc. gives you the background to produce the research, but just like in the industry, you will learn while on the job. You could be doing equivalent work outside the academia with your M.Sc., in an R&D department of some large company. As for specialization, you must be extremely specialized to advance your field, which is a requirement for a Ph.D. The point is not to be hired because of your particular speciality, the point is to earn the highest "license to practice science".

mjg59 13y ago

I did my PhD in computational genetics. My current career has precisely nothing to do with genetics, which suits me just fine - but I was fortunate in ending up with having a choice between an academic career in a modern field, or a non-academic career in a modern field. Most PhD students don't have that choice, and that does seem like something of a problem. Realistically, most of them aren't going to have the opportunity to enter a meaningful tenure-track program and stand a real chance of becoming a full professor. Pushing a bunch of people down that track without providing any support for the ones who aren't going to make it seems pretty unreasonable. I'm not going to argue that that means we should dilute PhDs. I'm fine with the current degree remaining as it is. But we should stop encouraging people to do PhDs just because there's a chance that they're going to get into academia. I gained a lot from my degree, but I could have been taught that without the aspects that were tied to the assumption that I'd spend the rest of my life in academia. We should work out how to provide the more generally applicable aspects without making people feel like shit for doing that and then discovering that they don't an academic position to take up.

judk 13y ago
Who is pushing PhDs? The meme that there are far fewer academic jobs than PhDs has been widespread for at least 10 of 15 years. A PhD is either a segue to a job in that field, if there is an industry (like pharmacology) or to launching a new segment of industry (as in computer technology) or a non-pecuniary pursuit of folks who are intelligent and financially independent.
- 001sky 13y ago
  This is factually wrong; universities are replacing tenured faculty with "cheaper labour" in the form of PhD holders from the excess glut. So, they are quite motivated to keep producing an "over-supply". The percentage of teaching staff that have tenure is a decreasing number over the pas ~30 years or so. Furthermore, the universities are getting comp'd on the tution of PhD students even though the students themselves don't pay fees. They do this indirectly through the "3 card monty" system of research grants, government subsidies, stipends & etc. Lastly but not leastly, the "prestige" of any political organization, hinges on the amount of resources and staff that come under the executive's aeigis. And so it is with departments at universities: large scale command of cash and IQ is a proxy for "power" and "verility" and all of the other stuff that people use to indirectly "measure themselves" against one another. After all, "prestige" is the measure of the modern university man... see: figure 3, p7 http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/2011-12Economic-Status-Report.pdf http://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/2011-12Economic-Stat...

ramsaysnuuhh 13y ago

> This suggestion ignores the purpose of a Ph.D.: to produce a piece of original research, which is necessarily extremely specialized. Tell that crap to the tourists, the purpose of the Ph.D. is afaict to get the student a high paying job that requires a Ph.D. (because existing phd's say you need one), and the professor tenure and grants.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]