Young, talented and fed-up: scientists tell their stories
nature.com
nature.com
-- J. J. Thompson"
Tenure's more important because it means you can say naughty but true things about the powerful without losing your job. As structured right now, in the physical sciences, a base salary won't support research.
As for tenure, it qualifies one for all kinds of service. So job security is nice, no questions about it, but one has even less time for serious work (unless you are willing to say no to requests to serve -- and some of these committees do matter).
Math is not a physical science -- and you can get stunning breakthroughs without anything except a quiet room, a pad of paper, a pencil, and a trash can. (old joke: /s/math/philosophy and remove the trash can!)
This is not true if you're a microbiologist.
Money vastly expands the scope of work you can do, but breaking new ground is often less expensive than making minor refinements to well understood areas.
PS: The real risk is will likely will go 20+ years without finding anything, but if you have tenure that should not be a problem.
Kitting out a lab to do publishable work in a lot of fields right now is just jaw-droppingly expensive.
Further, used equipment can often be vastly cheaper.
Honestly, time and consumables really are the biggest issues.
Florescent microscopes are in the low six figures and others are much more expensive. A confocal microscope is typically several hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially approaching $1M if it has all the bells and whistles. Super-res and high-throughput imaging can also consume essentially infinite amounts of money.
You could probably get a usable brightfield microscope for around a $1,000 but realistically, you're not publishing much with that alone.
You will not publish anything good enough to get tenure if all you have is widefield and a lamp in basically any biomedical field.
Further, the assumption is this is someone that has tenure but not funding and is thus able to take long shot risks. Think designing an artificial intestines for microbiome research, not yet another paper using E. coli.
Just ask Peter Higgs[0]
[0]http://www.sciencealert.com/peter-higgs-says-he-wouldn-t-hav...
You can always do some variant of "we tried this, it didn't work; in the future, you no longer have to spend money to see if this will work." Right?
[1] Removing the triple negative: it should always be possible to prove the money accomplished something.
[Of course, some may disagree with this assessment; just throwing it in for your consideration.]
When discovered, there was nothing particular monitizable about quaternions, and they were not found as a consequence of any business enterprise looking for new tools -- but Hamilton didn't starve to death because he failed to capitalize on them. 80 years later, suddenly we rediscover the fact that we've solved gimbal lock and can easily describe quantum states.
There was a point where this made inherent sense - no one but research experts could educate new students, and students were attempting to quickly reach the state of the art. That's long past - a complex analysis expert with no training in education is a terrible candidate to teach basic multivariable calculus.
And yet the whole thing makes a sick sort of sense, because paying and tenuring a professor to teach classes justifies their presence without demanding publications. They'll muddle through intro classes without causing any real problems, and can go back to being brilliant on no particular schedule in between lectures.
Or, on the flip side, set up something like the Institute for Advanced Study. It only took already-proven brilliance, so it could justify paying people for years without any breakthroughs to justify it.
Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"
Richard Feynman, "The Dignified Professor"
The tenure-and-teaching model is a better one than it was ever given credit for; the seemingly irrational connection between elementary teaching and cutting-edge research has been a powerful one.
Even so, I think the IAS model is better than a lot of what we're seeing today. Now, introductory classes have been offloaded onto (poorly paid) lecturers, and professors are expected to publish consistently, even without funding. The results are hideous: not just inaction but counter-productive action.
The replication crisis is, to a real degree, a function of this paradigm. "No results" is not an acceptable justification for "no publications", so we see people using statistical trickery that has been bad practice for decades to keep up their publication count. I'd really like to see them go back to teaching and researching, but even a movement to sinecures that don't demand any results at all would be progress.
Expecting ideas to appear, no matter what you do, is not a good idea. One difficulty is that is very difficult to estimate the probability of rare events. Perhaps having more free time can increase the probability of having new deep ideas, but that is not easy to measure. Furthermore, another key ingredient is communication with people full of energy, like P. Erdos, perhap some people can generate a hub of ideas.
Edit: Added A little more of money in the table not in the hands of political but directed to those that can do real research is a real innovation.
The full context there is that he spent a semester exempt from teaching to have more time for research. He produced very little and was deeply embarrassed, until he eventually realized that many of his insights came from rehearsing fundamentals and talking to people in other subfields.
So he returned to teaching, and when the IAS came knocking he refused on the grounds that it was the worst environment for him to work. Certainly I think he's overgeneralizing (the IAS has seen some pretty good results since that time), but this wasn't about jealousy!
I don't blame you at all (I'm sure your quality of life is magnitudes of order better, and I'd do the same in your position) and this isn't personal at all, it just pains me that our brightest graduates are working in finance rather than something like curing cancer.
Working a prop trading firm is nowhere near "making rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets".
Furthermore, the majority of software/engineering jobs out there are not doing "something more beneficial to society". How many companies are really just ad-driven, marketing-driven.
Yes, it would be nice if the entire world could focus on "something like curing cancer", but other things need to get done. And the majority of people have bills to pay.
I am very similar to the OP, except I bailed halfway through the PhD, because I realized that, in academia, I will work 80 hours a week for $40k, or I can go into finance and work half that and make multiples more.
I can now donate/spend my money to causes like "curing cancer" or "making art" and let somebody who really wants to devote their life to that craft do so.
Some people think research or science is the only path to a better society but in all honesty it may just take paying people in a poor country to plant trees.
The list is extremely partial. I'd be much happier seeing other contributions to it than sniping about significance.
That said, research is seriously underfunded.
"When I was a little boy, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised, the Lord, in his wisdom, doesn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked Him to forgive me."
Sometimes to get what you want you have to sell out or otherwise find an unorthodox means to your desired end state.
This is a big problem in itself.
Yet, every time finance work is mentioned, someone brings up "I can't believe you work in finance instead of curing cancer."
Guess what? I don't want to work on curing cancer. I used to. I went to school for biomedical engineering and wanted to work on big problems. I realized I would rather do as little work as possible (but still be challenged), and spend time with my family and friends. And I'll happily give money to people to cure this problems.
And those big problems that I wanted to work on before? Well, I'm sure there's somebody that really cares about that. The best way I can help is using my time in ways that I enjoy, and giving my money to those who will actually enjoy finding that cure.
A friend of mine almost died from some disease when she was in her teens. She survived, and is now a researcher for that specific field. She has a personal interest in that research, even if it means she might have to sacrifice other things. And she was also the one who convinced me to bail from the PhD program. She said "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else, do something else."
That's when I realized academic research is long, painful work, but you have to be excited for it. If I'm not excited, I should do something else, and then give money or help increase funding to make it less painful for those who still want to be there.
tl;dr - Go short on PhD salaries!
I was simply addressing the absurdity that our smartest minds are incentivized to go into finance rather than work on the most difficult and important problems in the world. The modern day Albert Einstein is probably working at a hedge fund. If we allocated humanity's resources differently, then we could be so much more technologically advanced.
The play chips are not imaginary, the rich have better lives in almost all aspects.
I know very well communism as such does not work, and that at our current stage of development we need prices and markets for resource optimization. And laws and judicial systems and so on.
But.
The play chips are imaginary. We play by the rules due to convention, not due to a law of nature.
The rich are better off not because only a marginal percent of population can be better off, but because how the current economic system stochastically distributes the captured value from various economic processes.
Their main happiness comes not from being "better" than anybody else, but because their resources enable them to avoid the lower rungs of maslow's hierarchy of needs and focus on self actualization.
Society can change. Anything else is misogynic fantasy. USA was born out of hate of kings and aristocracy and the taxes imposed thereof, of the hate of existing status quo of hereditary benefits and cronyism of state power.
Sure, it was not better for a large category of population, but it was a society designed, that functioned differently than anything else before it, and remains functioning to this day. It was born into a world where anything else but a strong monarchy was a whimsical daydream.
Change happens. There is no reason to accept status quo if it seems unsavory. One must remain a realist and a humanist while one is at it.
Saying "nothing but the current system is possible" is delusional denial of empirically proven changes societies and economic systems can go through.
The British Empire continued into the "sun never sets" level. The effects of the British Empire on the colonies has been a mixture of good and bad. They thought about it hard, in a John Stuart Mill way about it. They were often wrong, many were horrifyingly venal about the colonies and it all ended soon enough.
The fundamental problem is that the ability of people to be terrible is a real challenge to counter. It's simply not easy. And the classic Conservative trope is that we really don't know how we got here in a comprehensive fashion.
We live in an utterly amazing time.
I'd also dump Maslow soon. There's too much hubris amongst the rich and powerful for it to work well.
Sorry, I was a bit hyperbolic. I did not claim the founding fathers were anything but what you say.
From historical perspective, what they achieved, was an exceptionally good outcome. Namely - they created a new system of government that did not degenarate into a dictatorship despite the tumultuous beginnings and enormous popular and military support for some of it's leaders (e.g. Washington).
My purpose was to point out that designed changes on how a society operates can be implemented and the change can be implemented in good form. The USA was perhaps a bit too extreme example, as there are many others, less radical as well.
"I'd also dump Maslow soon. There's too much hubris amongst the rich and powerful for it to work well."
I've found the hierarchy of needs a fantastic model in simplicity and power in exploring human condition. What specifically is wrong with it?
Example: there was much meddling in the 1930s with farm production. It took until the 1970s before the modern version of farm subsidy latched in - call it 4 decades. ( See the film "King Corn" for an excellent treatise)
I've just never been able to use Maslow to make predictions. It just doesn't explain things like poets at all. People who "move up the Maslow hierarchy" often become duller and duller - all the weight of maintaining that drags em down. I've known too many people who didn't know where their next meal was coming from, and for some of them, that was a sort of freedom.
I think the magic of the Founders was all the shuffling off to The Colonies of all the malcontents and radicals, in a time when that produced favorable results. You'd get more current theory at Harvard than at King's College.
I would still hold not replicating a familiar monarchy or degenerating into a dictatorship was an achievement. I'm not saying anything about any other aspects.
The thing with psychological models is that they are models and as such cannot replicate all observed phenomena. Just like physical models can't. In general we can observe that poor people lack the resources for doing what they like and struggle unhappily while rich people need something else than just wealth to keep them happy - a long term goal, a hobby and so on. I think Maslows model captures this phenomena on the level of human populations. It does not explain art. I doubt no model understandable to humans could capture all facets of human life.
The US model hasn't really been all that replicated - the Parlimentary model has proved to be more common ( possibly because of the extent of the British Empire ) . The US has advanced the idea of democracy but it's done differently. I would say we do not really know why the US has worked out as well as it has.
I just think Maslow is too reductive. There are some really happy poor people out there. To my eye, a lot of outcomes for especially, say African Americans in the US depends on much more ephemeral factors - like strong family ties - than Maslow would predict.
Meanwhile, wealthy people can be quite anomic and neurotic. I've done medium well, and I spend my time as if I were a student and trying to connect with family. The people I know who have done better seem more isolated and feel more trapped than I do.
Happiness is as much a chosen thing as a matter of resources.
Anecdote: Many of my high school friends and peers went on to pursue medicine. I pursued engineering. Multiple times I was asked by these people, "You're smart so why aren't you spending your life making a difference?" Your comment and its ilk remind me of that question.
"We are quite in danger of sending highly trained and highly intelligent young men out into the world with tables of erroneous numbers under their arms, and with a dense fog in the place where their brains ought to be. In this century, of course, they will be working on guided missiles and advising the medical profession on the control of disease, and there is no limit to the extent to which they could impede every sort of national effort." Fisher, R N (1958). "The Nature of Probability". Centennial Review. 2: 261–274
Your friends were delusional. In the world, there is a pool of change agents driven by intrinsic drive, and some of them can make an actual difference, but I don't think there is any way to choose becoming the specific agent who matters - rather, one can only join the pool and do ones best.
As you describe it, your friends thought they asked why you don't want to be the change agent who matters (which is a non-sequitur). They could have asked why you don't want to jump into the pool and dedicate several years of your life to a possible dead end career (which they probably didn't ask).
I asked why it's bad to whish for different economic environment for those in the pool.
I may have misinterpreted the discussion before my comment, though.
The crapton of data is produced and relied on because of broken philosophy of system. That could be changed as well (I don't know how).
The comment to which I replied chaffed at thinking there could be any other system than what there currently is. To me this is a dangerously rigid way to view the human life. Everything should be questioned, if only to find answers.
Yes, historically we are doing pretty good. This proves sometimes changes in systems improve things. This is why questions that generally lead peoples to think of other systems should be approached with kind questioning and inquiry rather than scoffing them as rubbish off-hand - we should amswer why they often are impossible.
"That's a profound problem. We're limited now by artifacts of human cognition."
Yes, this is a very good summary of the other half of the problem. The other is figuring a dynamical model of the economy (which might or might not be impossible).
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.h...
I also believe society as a whole is being shortsighted in creating such a wide spread, but its not within his power to correct it; it's societies failure to think long term and his duty is to his family first.
> make rich people richer
It is prop trading, so we are making ourselves richer, technically. We do a lot of charity work and donations with schools, etc.
> Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents
Absolutely. However, I also like not having to beg my toddler to eat the food in front of him because payday is 10 days away, every credit card is maxed, and who knows how we will get to the grocery, which is what happened sometimes during my postdoc 3-7 years ago. Student loans were coming in at ~$1500/month when I'm making $2500/month. It was very difficult, and I was deeply depressed. When I finally landed that professor position, my workload got worse, and while there was a pay increase, I still wasn't going to be buying a house anytime soon. This was NOT an expensive area. We ended up living with my parents for a while (me, my wife, and 3 kids). The math just wasn't adding up, and there wasn't an end in sight. Adding in trouble getting grants, not wanting to restart the faculty job search, I started looking at industry. I applied at a few prop trading firms on whim, and mine ended up being a great fit.
I was pretty successful doing the actual research, but my particular niche (neuroscience+software methods and tools) isn't really funded by grants. I even got several rounds of good publicity for some of my PhD work, and did international interviews, etc. I was a very good scientist, but that doesn't cut it any more; new investigators are competing with established labs and members of the AAS who are submitting 30 grants per cycle. I was doing some very cool work with kids with epilepsy, which would greatly improve outcomes. I was a very valuable member of our collaboration; that research more or less came to a halt when I left, though I have been able to help out through consulting from time to time. So, what I did was in high demand and highly worthwhile, but there was a disconnect with getting the funding.
Am I being greedy? Maybe. There is that saying "you have to love yourself before you can love others." I think that might apply financially as well, particularly with regards to your family. It wasn't worth seeing my kids live in the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, going to crappy schools in crime-ridden areas that we can afford, with the added possibility of losing their dad because everyday he wonders if today is the day he drives off a bridge on the way home or something. If that means that my epilepsy research doesn't get done...then so be it. Vote for people who will increase research funding. So, when the offer came in and it was 3X what I was making as a prof, without considering bonuses, the weight of the world left my shoulders.
For the most part, both increased tuition and falling research grants are symptoms of the same underlying cause: reduced government support for higher education and R&D.
With fewer funds for education, tuition rises. But that tuition is filling in the hole created by a subsidy gap. Not increased research.
That's the big question. In addition, when a professor gets a grant, the university takes a large chunk (40-60%) for overhead.
Anecdote: When I started as a postdoc recently, all new faculty and staff had orientation together. This was the middle of the semester, and there were about 20-25 of us. Of that group, there were no new professors (beginning of semester, wouldn't be unusual), 2-3 postdocs, maybe 5 facilities people (janitor, electrician, etc). Everyone else was administration/communication/finance/etc.
Universities, particularly large ones, are very, very, top heavy (with part of that due to compliance with regulations).
The last time I looked at science there was no vow of staying childless required.
This type of question represents one of the things that really turns people away from getting into science, or makes people leave. You are expected to give up your ENTIRE PERSONAL LIFE to "the good of society" and make these sacrifices, for...what? To get denied tenure in 5 years (if you're lucky enough to be tenure-track)? This is even more true for women, though this isn't unique to academia. I was thirty years old, had been married for 6 years, just finished my PhD, and thought starting a family sounded like a reasonable thing to. And, my next two kids were born after my postdoc. So, fuck that, and anyone who thinks that waiting until you're 40 to have kids sounds reasonable.
Waiting for kids until you're 'settled' just isn't a justifiable demand for a career that takes 30 years to become established.
This. You don't owe anyone anything for being smart and diligent. If you were a lone wolf and enjoying your workload there would have been nothing wrong in your previous situation if you felt it wotrthwhile yourself.
Family changes everything. Having to fight to reach ends meet is not beneficial to anyone. Raising three kids means you are responsible for their future. There is nothing more important than caring for your kids. Someone might say that you are responsible for the reduced outcomes of epileptic kids whom your research helped but that would be completely lacking in human perspective.
Humans cannot live like supermen. That's why we have organizations with long term goals and mandates to affect society wide effects. An individual can make a difference, but that individual can be anyone.
A person who claims you should have stayed in the academia can do that if they will pay your loans and provide you with a sufficient life time grant. Otherwise they are full of excrement and lack a sane perspective.
I certainly would have preferred research, but given that most people just go voting for the same political parties that vehemently defend the current financial establishment, I have no remorse. (Yes, I am a huge Chomsky fan...) From my POV, we are only doing what is necessary to enable our families to have a normal life in a world getting more imbalanced, without any critical mass of people seeming to notice or care.
Hopefully, people will wake up soon enough and finally stop voting the non-options they are presented with (HC vs DT...)
Furthermore, firms such as DE Shaw and Renaissance Technologies directly impact research by funding parallel non-profit science organizations (DE Shaw Research and the Simons Foundation respectively).
So it's not really a zero sum game at all.
Candidates aren't draining away—they're being pushed away, either at the selection stage or through terrible conditions. (When taking on real firm-wide risk with millions of dollars is less stressful than basic research, you know something's gone terribly wrong!) The macroscopic problem isn't that finance and industry are luring people away, it's that so many more people want to do research than the system can possibly support.
You could argue that finance is luring away the most qualified candidates, but I don't think that's true. More importantly, since research careers are so impacted, institutions can get away with really noisy selection processes—if you thought tech hiring was bad, just look at how faculty members are selected.
The other part, of course, is that trading is not useless. I recently started a job working on supply chain optimization, and the problems we solve and the models we build actually look a lot like what certain kinds of traders do. I don't think anybody would argue that doing math to eke out a 10% reduction on spoilage at grocery stores is socially useless, and yet that's very similar to the sort of efficiencies that come out of better markets—it's just that the value is more abstract, in large part because the public markets are much more decentralized and abstract than physical supply chains.
Look, I'm not saying trading makes a marginal impact on par with basic research, either at an individual or a global level. But it's not useless, and I wouldn't be surprised if a trader at some small firm was just as useful to society as the 10,000th engineer at Google. (Not that we can really measure that.)
The markets, after all, are a gigantic, distributed coordination system running large swathes of the economy. That's pretty important too!
Plus, they typically only post openings once a year. If you miss the fall interview rounds (to start the following fall), you pretty much wait until the following year. So, you're looking at 2 years out if you don't have something lined up after your postdoc, or if you "finish" (whatever that means) your postdoc in late winter.
Is it though? I got into the (top 2 or 3) program for my field with a middling GPA and a decent GRE. Compared to e.g. law and medicine, I think it was substantially easier for a given level of 'prestige'.
> just look at how faculty members are selected
In my experience, nepotism, later-career candidates, and some shiny publications. All the talk about hiring some younger candidates, even gasp someone with just a few years of postdoc, was just that: empty talk. I've seen tenured faculty threaten to leave if their girlfriend wasn't hired (seriously, fortunately he failed), candidates get fast-tracked because they were friends with the son of one of the faculty, etc.
Out of the 30 or so people I got to know decently well during my PhD, only two of them are off to strong starts. Interestingly, both of them have parents that are well-regarded senior faculty in fields identical and quite similar (respectively). Don't get me wrong, they are both very capable and, in their cases, have earned the positions, but despite being far from naive, the degree of nepotism in science has impressed me.
I think it is. That's certainly my experience with CS. You need some combination of GPA, recommendations from known researchers in the field, research experience/accomplishments and a strong undergraduate school. You don't need all of these always, but they all have an effect.
Most of the grad students I knew at Berkeley CS came in with at least one good publication and high GPAs. Similarly, some very capable people I know from less-well-known universities (in the US and internationally) were rejected from most programs they applied to. My observations combined with the low % acceptance rates lead me to believe it's definitely difficult—especially if you come from an even slightly non-standard background. And this is in a field where most people don't pursue PhDs—I don't even want to think about what Math and Physics programs must be like.
On the other hand, you can get some pretty deep (and well-paying!) positions in industry without having a degree at all, and people won't even look at your GPA. It's a lot more flexible.
Well that's exactly the problem. We as a society have decided that our brightest minds should be working in finance. I think that's outrageous, and that we should be utilizing their minds for the greater good instead. In other words, we need to increase the supply of these research jobs, and make them more attractive then working in finance.
Of course certain fields of finance benefit society. That doesn't mean their talents wouldn't be better off to society elsewhere. Also, certain jobs like proprietary trading are the equivalent of gambling and on a net basis don't make society any better off.
That's a fair summary. My core point was that it's far more a matter of constrained research positions rather than finance being so alluring. It's not hard to make a research position more attractive to most bright minds than finance: you just have to offer autonomy, a bit of prestige and working conditions that aren't absolutely terrible.
> certain jobs like proprietary trading are the equivalent of gambling
The proprietary trading firms I'm familiar tend to be risk averse and specialize in things like market making and arbitrage. This is probably some of the most unambiguously useful activity on the markets: it's companies like that that make things like ETFs and less liquid securities work efficiently. Without market makers, various useful but niche securities would be significantly more painful to trade in practice.
Regarding prop trading, prop trading itself is the betting of the firm's own money for profit. I equated it to gambling because that's what it is. On a net basis, this doesn't really benefit society because it's essentially a zero sum game.
Market making on the other hand does benefit society by providing/ensuring liquidity.
"society" hasn't decided anything. Under capitalism, money flows towards where it is allocated most efficiently and gets the highest rate of return, which is apparently to employ researchers in the finance sector. If you have an issue with that, take it up with capitalism.
> we need to increase the supply of these research jobs, and make them more attractive then working in finance.
Barring the revolution I vaguely implied above, these two things would require lots of money and lots of money, respectively. Have fun asking for it in 2016's political environment.
We don't necessarily have to move off capitalism. We simply need to address the flaws of capitalism, say by increasing research funding or not bailing out large investment banks every time they make awful bets.
The amount of people who recommend that is staggering.
Lesson learnt: I need to get into finance...
but what can I say? We're a culture that in 1969 went to the moon, but by 1974/5 we were cutting everything we could.
That's not it at all. The best and brightest people have decided what they'd really love to do is take a tenured position at a prestigious university and do research.
Since finance companies that need really smart people can't offer that kind of life they have to compensate with cash.
This says nothing about what "we as a society" have decided. What this tells us is finance is boring.
Except we are slowly getting rid of tenure, and "that kind of life" is in no way glamorous for 99% of researchers. You have to be passionate about research to the detriment of nearly every other aspect of your life, or independently wealthy, so live comfortably (again, for most people).
Now I work on trying to get more clicks to my company website.
I'm kind of surprised to hear that being a quant is less stressful than being a research professor, though. I've heard that biology especially is a very "publish or perish"-y environment, but I guess I assumed that once people had a few prominent papers under their belts they might be trusted to work on something longer-term.
From what I saw in biomed only 1/10,000 or so will end up with the time, skills, and appropriately ambitious project to allow a decent job to get done. The rest will be forced to produce BS (literally, most of it is just misinformation at this point) or quit before even graduating.
On the other hand, spending some years pursuing a PhD can be a great time to build skills and introspect in life. I grew a lot in that time in a way I don't think I would have with a job.
Of course, if you have a very stressful advisor, it isn't worth it.
I think something like a basic income would allow the a certain type of person to achieve the same, and do it much faster and cheaper than getting a higher degree. I wonder if that is one reason why most of these problems started when higher education/research became less of an "elite" activity, ie as discussed in subnaughts link in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12805406
as software dev, I would never, ever, ever want to be in academia compared to the jobs I went through. much more life to be lived, much more money to spend on life to live (ie travelling around the world), and CV/skillset that gets door opened for next jobs.
you can build proper introspect in life when trekking few weeks among 8000m peaks, diving in coral reefs or anything in between, just give it a bit more than 1-2 weeks.
great PhD can be interesting experience, but for me, it would always be subpar to great job
NB That's what I did after ~5 years in academic research at a UK university and never really regretted not finishing by PhD as I had no intention of going back into research.
One needs to have clear expectations going into the PhD about what they are trying to do and they need to have clear communication with their advisor.
The vast majority of PhDs in science and engineering do very well and find jobs, but most don't get professorships at research focused institutions. Having realistic expectations is key, but a career in research is great.
A PhD is stressful and takes 5-6 years, but it can be a great experience with the correct expectations and a solid plan. The main problem is that most PhD students don't seem to think about those things nearly enough and have unreasonable expectations.
Honestly, I think the main problem is mostly that PhD students are, on the one hand, full-grown adults supporting themselves, and yet are, on the other hand, paid McDonalds wages to do the most intensive intellectual work our society has for Goldman Sachs hours.
Edit: I see Cyph0n has beaten me by a few minutes. Oh well.
Well, here is how I was taught to do research:
1) You come up with a vague idea that one thing should be
positively/negatively correlated with another thing.
2) You measure some proxies for those two things that have only
been half-validated, if at all.
3) You make a bunch of dubious statistical assumptions and check
whether there was *exactly zero* correlation between the two proxies.
4a) Your sample size was too small relative to the noisiness of
the measurements and p>0.05. So you ignore the result.
4b) Your sample size was large enough, or you got lucky and p<0.05.
So you publish saying these results support your theory or are
counter-intuitive, depending on the direction of the correlation.
http://www.fisme.science.uu.nl/staff/christianb/downloads/me...
http://bml.bioe.uic.edu/BML/Stuff/Stuff_files/biologist%20fi...
I didn't find the PhD to be too stressful, from the jobs I left to enter education I suppose I was well adapted to stress management. That said I think it's a mix of adviser and individual's personality. I despise the work force (that is an understatement) and love learning. Part of the reason why I browse and lurk on HN as I love coming across stuff that I'm not at all oriented with. I don't think I'll become a programmer or anything..it's just I love learning even things I barely understand (e.g. Quantum anything!)
Start ups trying to help:
Science Exchange (YCS11) https://www.scienceexchange.com/ : outsource parts of your research to companies
Instrumentl (YCS16) https://www.instrumentl.com/ : identify and push relevant grants towards applicable research
Experiment (YCW13) https://experiment.com/ : crowdfunding platform for scientific research
Transcriptic (YCW15) https://www.transcriptic.com/ : a robotic cloud laboratory for the life sciences
LabGuru https://www.labguru.com/ : inventory management and lab notebook
Lab Spend https://labspend.com/ : tracks spending and finds savings on supplies and chemicals
If you want to help researchers, vote for people who will increase scientific funding. Much of this crunch is directly attributable to congressional budgetary cutbacks since the early 2000s:
http://www.faseb.org/portals/2/images/opa/Factsheet_Restore-...
(Oh also: encourage your local billionaire(s) to stop funding ridiculous vanity projects, and do scientific good by giving grants to researchers who are already doing peer-reviewed work. Or just encourage them to give their money to the organizations that exist and do a great job of this, like HHMI, or the Gates Foundation. How refreshing it would be to hear a nouveau riche Silicon Valley dudebro stand up and say: "I want my money to have the tiniest chance of curing cancer in my lifetime -- a task so impossibly large that even my vast wealth and gigantic ego cannot possibly tackle it alone -- so I'm making a massive charitable donation to the National Cancer Institute!" Alas...)
Pretty much every time I've seen it, it consists of some fringe researcher promising one weird trick to cure A, B, and C. They don't get funding through traditional channels, because actual experts recognize the subtle-but-inescapable reasons they won't succeed, so instead they go to crowdfunding to squander a bunch of public money.
I'm sure this could work, genuinely viable projects lack funding all the time, but it's generally because they weren't sexy enough for the grant committee. If the NIH thought it wasn't exciting enough, what are the chances the general public will choose it over some guy promising to cure cancer with nanomachines?
The problem with funding science is simply the size of the pot; the way it's dolled out is actually quite reasonable given all the problems it could have.
Sure, you'll have cases of grants not getting funded because it runs contrary to the prevailing wisdom, and that is bad, but the magnitude of this problem is often overblown. You can swim against the current if you're careful about it and make a compelling case, absolutely.
Compare this to the issues of having anyone other than scientific peers judging the merits of work, and you'll see the easy advantage.
Start-ups are geared to return outsided returns (1,000x+) on investment within a short time. Most are wealth-extractive, though a few may present real synergies.
The principle benefits of information technology to research have been in the tools and information access side. Computers are vastly less expensive, programming and data access/analysis tools vastly more powerful. And access to knowledge, mostly in violation of copyright conditions, through Sci-Hub, LibGen, and the like, is unprecedented in all world history.
Compensation is far more difficult.
One element is that the environment of a startup and the environment of research are almost diametrically opposed. Very high-pressur,e high-stress, rapid turnaround, subject to the whims of investors and markets, is pretty much the exact opposite of what a researcher needs. There are reasons that universities buffer faculty from these pressures (or at least do in theory).
The funding and financing of innovation through the ages is an interesting study. Few innovators have directly benefitted by their inventions through the market, many, especially of the most significant inventions (take television, 4-cycle engines, and gas turbines for example) have failed entirely at business.
Alternative models of support, including sinecure (essentially: tenure), and specific prize awards, might be other options. I'm exploring this area, the history is interesting.
Markets have a strong tendency to reward gambling-type activities, especially around monopoly formation.
The essay is long but well worth reading: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12717765
When I was first exposed to the research "environment" during my Diplom studies (undergraduate - graduate, early to mid 90ies), I immediately recognised that if you actually love research and knowledge, academia was the last thing you ever want to get into. No surer way to kill the spark.
Now that I've gone back to do my PhD, the only reason I can do something I consider meaningful is because I am not a regular PhD student. Interestingly, that's also the feedback I get, though as "helpful" advice that while what I am doing may be both good and important, it is unlikely to lead to success in academia. With the implication that I should stop doing it and concentrate on something more reasonable. Fortunately, I am not particularly interested in success in modern academia, so I get to do something I consider both good and important.
A related issue is that there really is no such thing as a senior researcher. Instead, professors are turned into research managers, responsible for helping their charges' careers, who then also turn into research managers. Actual research appears to be mostly a still not entirely avoidable side-effect. (And this seems similar to the way the only real way to advancement in industry is to switch to management, all dual-track equivalence rhetoric aside).
Now I have a job with a well-defined 20% time dedicated to research with effectively no limits on what I can do. I don't need to ask for funding- the resources I need are just expenses I charge against my company's effectively infinite budget. If I want to write a paper, I do- and those papers get cited far more highly than my previous papers, because my employer's name is gold.
My salary is high enough that I maintain a lab in my garage and self-fund most of my experiments.
This path doesn't work for everybody (the number of positions in industry that allow this freedom is limited) but in my experience it allowed me far more time to be a productive researcher than if I had tried to be a professor at a tier-1 university or a researcher at a national lab.
Interestingly, my PhD training (in biomed) turned out to be ideal for being a data scientist, and my personal interests that I pursued during my training turned out to be ideal for working at my firm. In some sense, PhD programs produce the best programmers and researchers in industry, along with teaching a fair amount of how to deal with politics, which is critical in both academia and industry.
From my experience, it seems like the classic scientific research method of the old guard who I was mentored by is fading. The greats in my field would concentrate on one topic, work slowly, wrap it up, move to a new topic, and cultivate protoges. Now, the people securing tenure-track and tenure all seem to have half a dozen diverse projects to start with (to see which one suceeds and look hungry) - I see a lot of corner-cutting in their research - being bold is rewarded over detail and care.
Most of my peers whom I respect for their research output and well-roundedness haven't made the cut for academia. A cynical sure fire recipe for making tenure in academia? 1. Have a great knack for politics; 2. put yourself ahead of your students by treating them as monkeys for publishing with no regard for their scientific development; 3. cut corners (tell yourself you will fix it when you get tenure); and 4. be a narcissist - you can't afford to do anything that doesn't impact your track record positively (outreach counts!). That is not to say there are not some great people who have got positions - but the criteria for who makes the cut has changed sufficiently that it feels like it is being played by those who are willing to play the rules of the game. The worst part is that there is rarely any consequence down the line - once you have secured enough funding the community overlooks all but most severe transgressions.
PhD in bioeng. Not planning on academia. Unfortunately, most of my cohort of grad students are ... blind?... to the data that we all know is out there. I'm part of 2 groups on campus that specialize in industry networking and start-ups. We do monthly happy-hours where we pay for the beer and nachos and we also bring in speakers that have PhDs in industry to talk about the transition and network with them too. We get a lot of people (30+) to show up to these events.
But they are ALL 2nd or 3rd round post-docs. Almost no actual grad-students. I've talk to them. They all know that they have no real shot, they all know the odds in the lottery. They do not care. The only thing I can think is that these 22-27 year olds really think they can out-work each other and 'make it'. Past data in their lives says that they have always done so, and the next time should be no different. It's amazing that such smart people can be so damn bullheaded. Scientists are people too, including the stupidity.
I imagine the reason is as always - our leaders are two-faced in their support of science. They claim that it's a national issue but fail to make professorship even remotely competitive in the hard sciences. This kind of thing raises the most righteous indignation in me. We have a nation of know-nothing politicians claiming "We need more kids in STEM!" without doing anything to address the quagmire academia has become, largely because of over-competition for resources.
For all of this myopia around STEM it's largely a misnomer. No one in industry cares about climate science, geology, theoretical physics, abstract algebra, topology, combinatorics or number theory - at least not in the dollars and cents view. They may care insofar as there's a cash benefit, but not to the degree that they care about building better oil pipelines, faster algorithms and more efficient fabrics. So what we end up with is a world where Nike, Facebook and Exxon Mobil attract the best talent - a world where PhD's are basically forced to quit their jobs in order to go make money for the bourgeois.
Partly because science is very specialized. If I work on something new, then it's possible there is very few people in the world that know it or will easily understand it. I couldn't have someone else write a paper or grant proposal based on it - either they wouldn't understand it, or they are a fellow scientist who wouldn't want to do it either.
The mistake, in my opinion, is making the number of papers published a metric on which you determine a scientist's worth. Just like most metric-ization of society today, it's a bad idea.
The issue is that this kind of idealized division of labor can't exist in the current climate- there just isn't enough money to distribute a researcher's load across multiple specialists. This results in researchers being expected to juggle advising, grant writing, committee work, publishing, coding, analysis, and teaching, which creates more stress on researchers and poorer quality results.
I do agree with you on your second point though- publish or perish is academia's equivalent to rank and yank.
It is actually statisticians who are at the root of the problem. There is no proper way to apply the statistics most people are taught (NHST). However, everyone tries (and fails) to come up with some way to use the stats because they can't believe they were taught to perform such a waste of time ritual. See here for a decent overview: http://library.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/ft/gg/GG_Mindless_2004.pdf
Nodding intensifies
It really is just a logical extension of capitalism - defining and measuring productive units so that you can optimize the means. What people fail to see time and agin is that incentivizing metrics gains is incentivizing metrics games (sorry that just came out gross and punny). It's no longer about doing good science/work/music/programming, it's about getting those numbers up so you can look good to the overseers
I imagine that it will get better eventually, but I can't wait for that to come to pass, and I can't in good conscience advise others to do so.
Like independent film or video games, they couldn't compete head-on with big budget research. But they could presumably make progress in areas ignored by them: longer term, more fundamental research for example.
When I was a postdoc at MIT, it was common for the grad students to want to have a "lunatic fringe" track at conferences or an "unconvential ideas" seminar. But once you're in the heirarchy/buerocracy of academia, you understand why those don't exist. Perhaps independent scientists could actually do them?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_science [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_scientist
No one has figured out academic attribution of data-only in a satisfactory way yet, but some noteworthy attempts exist. E.g. https://www.elsevier.com/connect/new-data-journal-lets-resea...
Something like:
% = ($ Professor paid per Class) / (Students per Class * Number of Credits for Class * $ Charged per Credit)
At least by my calculations based on my own experience, 90% of the revenue here gets sucked up by overhead with only 10% going to the person teaching. If a non-profit was run this way, it would get shut down.
On a personal level I wish I could've been a research professor.
But on an objective level, in pure math the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly. There's already so much amazing pure math published, you could devote your whole life just to understanding 1/100th of the math published in the 1990s, to say nothing of the stuff published in 2016.
We don't need more basic researchers right now.
Sucks though that a lot of people (like me) have to watch a life dream crumble, though.
So who says the invisible hand of the market is acting correctly if it makes your life dream of being a research professor crumble and forces you into finance work instead?
Medical physics research has felt more fulfilling than particle physics, but I’m now in a position where my current contract expires in around 9 months, and with a mortgage to pay and a family to support I have to decide between: looking for yet another short-term postdoc position (in a hopefully related field of physics) - ending up in exactly the same position in 2-3 years; starting to apply for grants and funding with my current research group - a very stressful process with no guarantees of anything; moving into industry / private sector - assuming that it’d be possible to find a company that had a need for the very specific knowledge base and skills that developed over the past 7 years.
Or all of the above, at the same time, while trying to continue working my current research projects.
As someone that has always had an interest in computing, data analysis and software, but has ended up approaching them from a physics-based direction, I don’t feel qualified to compete with computer science/statistics grads for most of the software development or data science jobs that I see advertised.
I'm sure that there are other fields out there that would suit me, but having never had a non-academic-research job, I'm struggling to know where and what to look for. Does anyone have any practical advice for moving away from an academic career path?
I suspect you are more qualified than most oracle-developer-turned-data-scientists
Give it ago. review some of open source projects that can leverage your math or data understanding skills. Contribute to those. Use that as your experience/resume
A few superstars will do well, the rest will be an urban myth of potential prosperity and happiness.
I started attending software meetups in my city and chatting with folks. Meeting others in person was key for realizing the given the breadth and pace of the field, there would always be something new to learn so I needed to take the job posting "requirements" with some grains of salt. Someone encouraged me to attend a recruitment night his employer was hosting, and I figured it would at least be good interview practice. I ended up getting an offer and have been a Software Engineer for three years now. While the referral surely helped, the practice of explaining my experience to programmers at these events and learning where my skills were applicable and how to translate that into the jargon of the software boosted my confidence to actually attend the event and interview.
There were some rough patches at first, being thrown into a front-end project with practically zero experience in html and javascript, but in the end analysis code and front-end code are both debugged with breakpoints, test data and when that fails printing to the console. Recently I have been dusting off my analytical skills by playing with machine learning frameworks and hope to take my career in a direction that builds off both my academic and practical experiences.
it's a big weight off of my shoulders. i tell people who are thinking of going into science not to do so, now.
This is true and is worth anyone making the switch keeping in mind. Commercial companies want a commercial track record before they trust you with important decisions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.2474
(which may or may not bear an odd resemblance to insider trading)
The comments on the nature.com page are interesting, too. No matter how much you love your career and your research, there is more to life.
Also, you can see how climate research has become a total echo chamber--the people fighting over the scraps of funding will gladly sell their souls to a communist lie if that's what it takes to get by.
100% correct. There is a lot of artifitial barriers with the only purpose of deter the poor, introverted, physically disabled, unable to lie convincingly, or coming from incorrect countries to pass.
Maybe we should warn young people to not spending too much time doing science until reaching 50 years old or so. Science, as we understand it currently, is not much different to doing drugs. Will slurp all your money with some glimpses of a promised paradise, isolate you from friends and family, will boost your stress levels, increase your probability of having cancer and will damage your health. Your opportunities of having children or a good life will be seriously handicapped. I wonder why is not forbidden still.