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Comment by gustavo-fring | Hacker News Reader

Unfair to paint academia like that. My interactions with tenured professors in my dep has been nothing but pleasant. They don't have egos (or don't act like it), are more than happy to help, and have been like a family to me my entire academic career. Don't mean to nitpick, and I know there are academics that are huge pricks and depts that are unfriendly places. But it's not true of them all and I'd hate for people to get that view.

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You probably aren't going after the same pool of funding dollars. Folks tend to get along well where there is abundance.

This comment is so dissonant with the average experience in academia it reads like sarcasm

I'm not sure where your idea about the "average experience in academia" comes from (I don't even know if such a thing exist, because the very word "experience" implies a subjectivity beyond the scope of surveys or other objective measures), but even given such an average more positive experiences do still exist in the head of the distribution. But concerning the point: even though my own experience in academia hasn't been exactly pleasant, my professors weren't the source of it (the "system" was), and always provided helpful advice and selfless acts of teaching, like the OP described.

Outside of bio/medical academia, I think the GP is very true to my experiences as well.

Not really. Academia has it's share of assholes, but the probability distribution of encountering assholes is pretty similar outside of academia too.

Thing is, it can be very brutal if you are flaky. It has a very low tolerance for bullshit/lack of expertise and people will not hesitate a second to call others out on it - even in public.

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