A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked. He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws, and everything was working as before.
The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.
"This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.
Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.
One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times r square."
He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"
Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of mathematics.
The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer “one third x cubed.”
She repeats “one thir — dex cue”?
He repeats, “one third x cubed”.
She asks, “one thir dex cubed?”
“Yes, that’s right,” he says.
So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself,
“one thir dex cubed…”.
The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something
about basic mathematics. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks “what is the integral of x squared?”.
The waitress says “one third x cubed” and whilst walking away,
turns back and says over her shoulder “plus a constant!”
I think CS PhD programs in particular can be a little strange. I decided to go back to school to pursue a CS PhD after chatting with a retired mathematician about his PhD. He was talking about how he took classes for two years to explore different areas of mathematics and to pass the general exams, then he decided on a branch of mathematics (topology) and approached a professor in that area to be his advisor. After working through a few textbooks together, this person posed a question to his advisor, spent a few more years working to answer the question, eventually answered it and published the result in his dissertation.
This seemed to be what a PhD was all about, but it's not what I've experienced. I've just completed the first year of grad school, and while the classes have been interesting, the expectation is that you already have an advisor when you arrive (or at the latest at the end of your first year) and you hit the ground running pumping out papers. There seems to be little opportunity to explore computer science as a whole or to work towards one singular result. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Peter Sarnak about CS graduate education. He said that CS is in a weird spot between traditional engineering disciplines and the liberal arts, and that the need for grant funding causes departments to encourage students to work on whatever projects the professors are leading. But even he seemed a little surprised when I told him that our department's general exam is basically a presentation on the research you've accomplished so far.
I think this is unfortunate. First, because it goes against what I wanted out of a PhD. But also because it makes the PhD not much different than working in industry. If in either case I have to write code for some boss and satisfy my curiosities on the nights and weekends, why would I choose to do it for much less money and worse career prospects? I imagine this is causing the best and brightest to avoid academia in computer science, which seems bad for research and technological progress in general.
I think different schools have different philosophies as far as that goes. There are schools that admit to the department and have students do very little research for their first two years, and there are schools that admit by advisor and you start research immediately.
My PhD was the latter, but for me it was actually one of the major selling points for me on the program. I had a pretty good idea of the area that I wanted to work in, and I was always bad at learning from classes as opposed to hands-on self-driven learning. By the end of two years, I'd already gotten a lot of research done and moving towards the end of my PhD I was able to branch out within my area and take my own path in a way I doubt I would have been able to do in a different style program, where I wouldn't have had the same depth of knowledge in my field.
All that to say, I think these are two different philosophies in designing a grad program, and each works better for a different style of student. To those that are still thinking about applying, its something that I think should be a serious consideration when looking at program fit.
With regard to your first paragraph, I don't think there are any American universities that admit students by advisor. As far as I'm aware, your admission is a decision made solely by the graduate admissions committee. Even if you have an advisor ready to take you on the most they can do is recommend you to the committee, not supplant it. When you're admitted there are still criteria aside from research to work on.
I think this is a fundamental difference between American and European universities. In European universities, you can hypothetically join a PhD program without any prior degree at all if an advisor chooses to take you on personally. No such sidestepping can happen in an American institution, and regardless you'll have to take some courses (even if you're only auditing them in effect) before you can begin research. Unsurprisingly, American PhD programs are longer.
> But also because it makes the PhD not much different than working in industry.
I believe this is viewed as a feature, and not a bug. For the most part, academia serves as one of the few reliable ways to emigrate to the U.S., and exploits that fact to generate a large pool of inexpensive labor. In exchange, these students are rewarded with a US visa and a comparatively well-paying job.
Neither party expects these graduates to stay in academia, so the ability to follow orders, work to a deadline, and solve highly-abstract problems provide a much more tangible benefit than inculcating the creativity, communication skills, and bureaucratic know-how that differentiates successful professors.
In many ways, including these reasons, I think the PhD is starting to be viewed by some as a "super-Masters degree" that simply requires more work or takes longer, rather than as requiring a distinct, different skillset.
Note that this is based only on my observations of a top-50 US graduate program; this might be totally different in a top-4 program, for example. However, one data point I found particularly persuasive is that in our program with ~300 PhD students, we have fewer than 30 (and probably fewer than 10) students with US citizenship or green cards.
I've observed this myself and it's creating a weird dynamic in data science. More often, companies are requiring PhDs for their entry level data science positions. (Because there's a surplus of people who want to enter the field and it's difficult to tell who will ultimately be successful. Possessing a PhD is a good predictor of success.)
But there are very few American-born students going on to get PhDs who are interested in industry because, well, why would they waste another 5 years in school when they can get software engineering jobs with only a BS or MS? According to this study [1], 38% of all data scientists are non-US citizens and nearly half of early-career data scientist are non-US citizens. It's weird that we're pushing US citizens out of data science.
What you're describing as what you didn't expect is how PhDs were done traditionally. It's the more recent US model to have classes and exams.
I posed a question to my advisor in order to get onto the PhD, started researching immediately, and my 'general exam' half-way through was a presentation and viva. Obviously the question changed totally by the time I finished, but that's the nature of research and where it takes you.
I'm not sure why you'd expect to explore computer science as a whole on a PhD. The point of a PhD is to become an expert in one part of the field and to push it to expand what we know - not to gain general wide knowledge. I don't think that was ever the idea - that's what a bachelors is for.
I think it depends on the field. In mathematics I think the expectation is that students need to study for a few years to even understand what the open questions are, and only then can they begin the research.
I'm fully aware of what the point of a PhD is. I wasn't expecting to become a generalist, but I was expecting some time to study some recent results and come up with a tractable research proposal. Indeed, if the purpose of a PhD is to expand the totality of human knowledge, why was it expected that I would publish 3-4 conference papers to graduate? Wouldn't one significant result have been enough?
> What you're describing as what you didn't expect is how PhDs were done traditionally. It's the more recent US model to have classes and exams.
Classes and exams in a PhD programme? I've never heard of this anywhere - I had no idea that was a thing in the US.
There is an ugly trend in the UK to having "credits" for attending workshops as part of your "personal development". You basically have to go and sit in a workshop pretending to listen to someone talking about academic writing so that some admin can tick a box. Considering even postdocs and RAs have to write reports on how their "personal development" is progressing I don't think the powers that be will be happy until everyone can be placed into a spreadsheet.
I think the two subjects are very different. Math has a much longer history. To get to the edge of knowledge you need to know a lot more because people have built proofs upon proofs for much longer. You need an undergrad plus a year or two of grad to get both the depth a breadth of what’s been done in the past.
In CS the edge of the field isn’t as far away. New knowledge invalidates more of the old, and you don’t even need a CS undergrad degree to be near some of the edges.
It's pretty rare that PhD programs let you truly explore what you want to do. PIs (generally profs) get the vast majority of outside funding so you pretty much have to find a way to align yourself with a prof from day one.
In general a professor is an entrepreneur. They are running a small business where they sell their product ("knowledge") to customers (business and industry) by means of sales and marketing (conferences and papers). Grad students are employees of this business, and of course the prof's incentive is to keep the good ones and fire (graduate) the bad ones, thus the reward for the student working hard is more hard work.
1) I am evaluated on the progress of my students. While bad ones will actually be fired, good ones are more useful to me if they go off and get postdocs etc. Some of the most powerful "businesses" in the field are created by the network of people who all trained with the same PI and then went on to found their own labs.
2) A burnt out, trapped graduate student is not actually one that produces good work, in my experience.
3) Several grants, which are how I fund my lab, will look very poorly on trainees making no progress. There's very little exploitation that's worth a program officer at the NSF wondering if I'm worth there time.
Are there bad, exploitative PIs? Absolutely. But these people are assholes, not the only logical outcome of the system.
But no good student who approaches the grad school process in a sane manner is going to work for a professor whose students stay there for 12 years and don't graduate. A common thing for deciding if you want to work with someone is seeing how long their students took to graduate, where they ended up, emailing them, etc.
My experience does not agree with what you wrote in your last paragraph. Writing code as a computer scientist is equivalent to doing lab work as a biologist or to building instruments as an experimental physicist. You can't do research in CS if you don't get your hands dirty, unless your research in theoretical computer science. In exchange for this, many doors open to you after you finish your PhD that would otherwise be closed (unless you did your research in theoretical computer science). And among the best and the brightest that I met in industry, many are in fact PhDs.
As someone who's also pursuing a PhD in CS, I feel your comment doesn't reflect my situation, or my colleagues'. It's true that I started working on one of my advisor's projects, but the difference between the industry and academia is that I can discuss whatever I want about the project with him, and he will care about it. I am in lead of the project and my advisor acts as an advisor, not a boss.
Of course it all depends on many factors, just my personal experience here.
I remember in undergrad I took a class and the topic of the day was the concept of an inflection point. The way the professor demonstrated it was like this:
Based on time spent and potential earnings forgone, a Bachelor's degree is a good investment. A Master's is a good investment. The inflection point happens, and a Phd is not as good of an investment.
That's all the information I needed to decide to stop after a Master's. Have only regretted it once, when I worked at a company that was owned by someone with a Phd in Economics and with many Phd Economists working there. I felt like a second class citizen and in a moment of irrationality, when the entire employment universe seemed to consist of only this company and ones like it, I thought about going and getting a Phd in my late 30s.
Thank God I didn't. Making about 2.5x as much as I was making then, two jobs later, no further education needed (other than Cloud Guru courses).
Part of this difference is due to how departments are funded: math departments teach a lot of "service" courses for non-math majors. So there are enough TAships to fund most students who want them. Most other programs do not have enough TA positions to support all the students they have.
Source: I'm on the math faculty at a large public research university.
Too many CS postgraduate programs just feel like engineering ones. This is why chosing a proper advisor is so important as your intentions should be aligned. Even then, there are things you might need to do to satisfy your program requirements that aren't exactly what you want to do.
Anecdoctal experience: I was offered a somewhat decent scholarship for a Master's program backed by an Oil company, but I would work on specific projects chosen by the company. I sincerely prefered to go for a program/advisor that fit my goal (more on the theoretical CS research) and no grant (the program is free here). This meant that I have to work to pay my bills and study on 'free time'. This works for me personally because I make a more than any program scholarship would pay me while acquiring some industry experience. This can work while I am doing my masters, but It is borderline impossible for a PhD program.
my two cents: find something where the grants align with your interests, or find a brand-new faculty member who has startup money so isn't as bound by grants in the near term. and if things don't work out, simply leave and go to industry -- with a marketable skill set like what you get from being a CS major, there's no way for you to lose. go wherever has work that you like more.
I have experience with both mathematics and CS departments, and I have exactly the opposite opinion. I think the Old School Mathematics model is absolute garbage and often explicitly and intentionally exploitative.
1. It's not like those math Ph.D.s are sitting around reading textbooks with their advisors.
They are TA'ing service courses. A lot of TA'ing. In addition to TA'ing, they are prepping for a high-stakes exam.
The exam will wash out the 50-70% of people who are needed as temp TA labor but whom the department has no intention of advising through to a Ph.D.
After 2 or 3 years, you pass the exam. Yay! But wait. Reading textbooks with your advisor? No! you need to take a whole slew of courses. Why? Because course enrollment == money and easy/interesting teaching assignments. And good luck getting tons of research done in-between your TA'ing and courses...
Now you're done with courses! Yay! After TA duties, you can spend 100% of your time on research (aka 50% of a 40 hour work week aka 80% of a grad student work week). Except you only have 2 years left :-(
So now it's on to 1-3 postdocs so that you can start doing, after 5 years, what that CS phd student was doing when they "hit the ground running": build a research agenda that resonates with a large enough set of researchers that it translates into a research job.
--
Also, the "one singular result" style of research is unique not just to mathematics, but to a particular subset of mathematics. It's just not a good fit for most research problems, even in Mathematics. I've seen tons of well-composed dissertations focused on a singular, pointless problem.
The hodgepodge dissertations don't have a "beautiful singular result" feel, but almost invariably contribute at least one piece of useful, new knowledge.
Finally, worth noting that the best and brightest don't leave research; they might leave academia, but typically not research.
TL;DR: If you can find an advisor who isn't a slave driver (the majority of them at good places), the CS model is 1000% better than the Math model. You might be hired as a researcher for someone else's research agenda, but at least you don't spend the first 1/3rd of the phd as temp teaching labor stressing over high-stakes exams.
> The exam will wash out the 50-70% of people who are needed as temp TA labor but whom the department has no intention of advising through to a Ph.D.
At which department?
Speaking as a math professor in an American research university -- this is unusual. Pass rates at most places are reasonably high, and professors hope that as many people as possible pass.
It is true that grad students are expected to TA (if they want funding); usually grant funding is not available to support them. But generally the teaching burdens are relatively modest, around ~15 hours a week including grading and office hours.
A PhD is a degree in conducting research. Get one if you want a career in research. If you don't like research, don't do a PhD. Any decent program pays students about a $1.5-3K monthly stipend. Don't have being a professor as the only acceptable end-goal.
There are lots of careers that benefit from or require a PhD besides being a professor. People with STEM PhDs are found in great concentration in R&D settings. For example, when I worked at NASA JPL probably about 50%+ of the scientists had PhDs.
Outside of STEM activities, it can still be an enriching life experience. You don't incur significant debt. It does have a high opportunity cost, if one's undergraduate degree is lucrative. On the other hand, you get the privilege to spend your time trying to create new knowledge.
Real PhD Issues (and Cons):
1) Research is hard and it requires a massive time investment to create new knowledge, especially when just starting.
2) High levels of impostor syndrome. You will likely meet people much smarter than you, and those that can work 80+ hours per week for years. If you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to them, your mental health will suffer. You have to just work toward solving your problems. As one old friend put it, he felt like a genius when he worked as a software developer, but throughout his PhD he felt like an underachiever.
3) Jealousy of your friends "getting their lives started" (kids, buying a home, etc.). Very hard to have any work-life balance as a PhD student.
4) Don't expect to get rich after a PhD. Do it because you think a career in research will be satisfying.
5) If you want to be a tenure-track professor running a lab, you have to be very flexible with where you live. Being a professor is also very stressful.
6) If you want to teach in college, a PhD is required but the main thing a PhD teaches is research -- not teaching.
7) Clearly assess your ability to get a professorship if you choose to do a podstoc. There is little point in one unless a professorship is your end-goal. Many don't realistically assess their competitiveness for professorships. I wrote a blog post about this about 6 years ago (it needs updating):
http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/
I felt this, but was surprised that while there were a few genuine genius-level people in my program, the vast majority spent most of the effort trying to look like a genius but were far from it.
One of the things I tell people when they ask me about grad school is, "I thought everybody would be smarter".
> I felt this, but was surprised that while there were a few genuine genius-level people in my program, the vast majority spent most of the effort trying to look like a genius but were far from it.
An astounding amount of time is wasted in academia on puffery. I'm not sure how it compares to industry because there's never been a systematic comparison (and I don't really believe such a comparison would be feasible). My personal experience was that the "mediocrities" who kept a low profile and stayed out of departmental politics as much as possible seemed to actually be accomplishing the most work with any actual substance. Some of these folks were working in state-sponsored institutions rather than universities. All of them seemed to be in their 50s and 60s, tenured (or tenure-equivalented) before higher ed became a hypercompetitive shitshow.
This pretension really comes through when scholars don't respect the limits of their expertise / properly delegate to specialists. In software and IT especially, you find academics using technologies that are a poor fit for their work, not understanding budgeting and concepts such as total cost of ownership for compute resources, and reinventing the wheel.
I don't remember where I heard it but I think has some truth to it.
A bachelor believes he's the smartest
A master thinks he's not smart at all
A Phd understands no one is smart
If you're not in STEM, if you want a PhD in the humanities, it's going to be a VERY tough path. Many of those students do shell out many thousands of dollars per semester, ending their PhD with very high levels of debt. At the same time, the jobs for people with PhDs in humanities are becoming less frequent, even as the number of PhDs in non-STEM is increasing. Many of these individuals are stuck in adjunct slavery. It's a sad state of affairs that those who want to further their own knowledge can be so mired in debt, yet it has happened to multiple friends of mine who "followed their dreams".
I thought the entire appeal of a "liberal arts" college was that the college focuses on quality teaching instead of research. Why on earth would they demand their profressors have PhDs?
Requiring a PhD to teach serves the same purpose as requiring a degree to apply for a job: an arbitrary but easy to apply filter. While PhDs are research-oriented, in reality you can end up in a research or pedagogy track depending on (a) what you want and (b) how your research progresses.
I'm at a SLAC. Here are a couple of reasons that the institutions want this.
1) Teachers should know more than the students. The degree quantifies that.
2) The highest-rated SLAC's have PhD faculty, and so the next-highest aspire to that.
One way this is concrete is that the accrediting agencies put as a point they look for that all faculty have a terminal degree. And people looking at colleges want to go to the highest-rated places (subject to monetary considerations), so it is a major factor in enrollment.
3) It helps keep you alive, and your teaching reflects that.
This third one can sound a little BS but in my experience having a professional activity as a creative output definitely helps keep people from becoming toasted.
The PhD first really became a requirement for professors wanting to teach at SLACs around the 1940s. Prior to that point, it wasn't that uncommon for you to find teachers that "only" had BAs. This transition (a BA being the minimum to a PhD being the minimum) occurred substantially earlier at large universities [0].
During the period between the 1940s and the late 80s-ish, the PhD involved research, but not with nearly the same competitiveness as today. As such, budding candidates were able to devote substantially more time to developing their pedagogical skills (even in the past this viewed more like an extracurricular pursuit, but a lot of PhDs took it seriously enough that they got really good at it).
The folks who came out of this era had dual competencies in teaching and research. The need for research skills primarily was to help more advanced and motivated students (juniors and seniors) to get some limited research experience on-campus.
Sometime between the late 90s and early 2000s, the balance in competencies shifted due to hyper-competitiveness. As a result, almost no PhD students today really focus on pedagogy and it is still treated as an increasingly neglected extra-curricular pursuit. This has become a very big problem for SLACs, since almost all PhDs coming out now are enculturated to feel that they have to create a large research program, and almost view working at a SLAC as a "backup" option if they don't land a large university job rather than a goal in and of itself. SLACs have had to compensate for this by offering increasingly attractive incentives / research starter packages to get new faculty.
This trend is also being aggravated by helicopter parents who now insist that their children participate in research at increasingly younger ages (oftentimes high school) so as to pad their resumes for med school.
Disclaimer: Source for some of this is free recall from a temporary job in SLAC archive. Some of it may be wrong. Visit a SLAC archive if you care enough to verify.
If a student wants to get a taste of research, then they will probably need a research mentor with a PhD. Failing that, somebody who has published a few good papers -- but such people usually have PhDs! So it's not unreasonable to have PhDs around for student enrichment, even if having a PhD does little to make you better at teaching undergrad material.
The actual administrative reasoning here is probably a combination of the above and "you just can't be an academic without a PhD!".
A few of my colleagues with bio PhD's have started microbreweries with various levels of success. They seem to be much happier than my colleagues and myself who have chosen the post-doc route.
This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible. For example, the institute I am at has recently extended the maximum assignment length for post-doctoral fellows to from 4 to 6 years. I can see the PI's reasoning for this but it is incredibly demoralizing and one of the contributing factors for a lot of people I know who have abandoned their careers for unconventional jobs.
In my opinion, that’s what needs to happen. Thin out the ranks of professors as they move to greener pastures in the workforce and eventually you’ll see schools get in a position where they have to work harder to recruit. Better pay, benefits, support, etc.
That's pretty much happening in computer science in the US. Pay for CS faculty members has been rising significantly faster than inflation, and faster than other fields, although still not nearly as fast as in industry. A brain-drain of people at all levels of seniority to high-paid tech jobs is a big part of it, although increase in demand is another part of it (the number of incoming freshmen declaring a CS major is exploding, driving lots of places to expand their departments).
The same effects have also made long postdocs less common, and it's even possible to jump directly to a tenure-track faculty job from a PhD with no postdoc in between. Alternately, people seem to be doing a kind of "industry postdoc". You get an industry job, but one that lets you publish (DeepMind, Facebook Research, some startups, etc.), and after a year or two you either find you like it and stay, or you use that as a springboard to apply for faculty jobs, treating it as having been basically a high-paid postdoc.
Still plenty of stuff to complain about, but the job market looks far different than in the natural sciences or humanities.
Professor is already a very comfortable job. Adjunct lecturer is an awful job, but the requirements for those are already quite low, and frankly generally don't include "is an effective teacher". IMO, the problem here isn't supply-and-demand for the lecturer job; the problem is that the service being provided ("teaching a course") isn't the product the customer (student) is buying! In the common case, the student is buying a degree and doesn't care about the course (because the course is a "distribution requirement" inside or outside of major, or because the whole major/degree is a a pointless arbitrary requirement put in place by employers). On both sides, student and teacher, parties are simply going through the motions to fulfill the illusion of a meaningful degree.
I am skeptical that will ever happen. At least in North America there are a plethora of international students willing to train here for next to nothing and in some cases I've heard rumours of post-docs not taking a salary at all.
> This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible
I've witnessed this as well. One of the worst offenses I saw was a master's student in a 1-year master's program (basically supposed to be a post-bac / used for switching fields) who spent around 4 years in the same lab instead.
Chalk me up for another anecdotal "I saw it too" - You would think the upper admins would notice someone on the books for 6-8 years but they didn't do anything. Its a culture that higher education departments perpetuate.
Just to offer a bit of a counter to much of the negative views here, I enjoyed my Ph.D very much. I went into it with my eyes open, and realizing that an academic career wasn't the only option that would work for me.
Through scholarships I was paid enough to be comfortable while spending my time on interesting things. The scholarship game is a bit winner-take-all though, and I know the minimum funding level in my department was less than 1/2 of what some of us were making, and that was in a STEM department - my understanding is humanities are a very different thing. You have to decide what is ok for you.
Afterwards I did a post-doc and then a research position. Through a national fellowship (post-doc) and funding guarantees (faculty) I knew I would be able to make something like the low end of what my industry salary would be - and easily chose the academic freedom at least for a few years.
When I was on the academic market, I didn't find a tenure track position I felt was the right fit. Rather than play the waiting game some of my colleagues were doing, and I realized that "any R1 that will take you" wasn't going to make me happy. So I chose to turn down the offers and go to industry. That's also had it's ups and downs.
I guess my point is there where many steps along that path I took a good look at my options and chose to stay. Sure, I could have made a bit more money in some industries, but there are other considerations. I've never worked with a more talented or motivated group of people than I did during graduate and post-doc work. I've never had the time since to just dig into an interesting problem or really swing for the fences. I'm sure it cost me a bit in terms of lifetime earnings, but it's a trade-off I'd make again in a heartbeat. I'm sure I would have been happy teaching somewhere if the parameters had been slightly different, but I'm ok with that too.
What I really don't understand is people who are somehow shocked to find themselves in the position, many years in, of making less than they think their time is worth and without the career prospects they had hoped for, and bitterly complain about it as if someone else made the decisions that put them there.
Graduate programs absolutely aren't for everyone. They are, however, a unique opportunity - if the good parts really appeal to you and the financials etc. make sense for you, by all means do it. Just don't expect it to be something it isn't.
I agree with you, and I think it depends a lot on the department you are in. Too many people just apply for the top N schools for the field they want to go into. There's a huge difference in culture and feels of each school, and how they deal with funding or advising.
My PhD was some of my best years of my life, and I was truly lucky. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and even now I wish I could return to being a PhD student for the rest of my life. I had a great set of friends, all the research freedom I wanted, supportive department, and I did research internships at least once a year so my average salary was pretty decent (about half a software developer salary at that time). If your goal is to make as much money as fast as possible, then you will be disappointed with a PhD.
I was in a department that was in between social science and computer science, and out of the 8 of us that started together, all 8 graduated. 7 of the 8 landed R1 tenure-track faculty positions, most of us directly after the PhD (the remaining 1 was running a successful business).
I enjoyed my PhD too. But I think that in spite of my own experience, I have a strong misgiving about doctoral education because of the attrition risk. Too many things can happen, completely out of your control, that can throw you out on the street with no degree. I've seen...
Your advisor can drop dead, get sent to the hoosegow, lose grant funding, lose tenure, or change jobs without taking you along. Your research topic could turn out to be controversial among feuding members of your committee. You could be subjected to harassment, discrimination, etc. You might have to escalate matters with your advisor in order to get your final thesis approved, meaning you get your PhD but without a vital source of recommendation.
Some of those things can happen to you in a regular day job as well, but at least when you lose a regular job, you haven't lost everything.
Same here. The academic freedom that I had during my PhD combined with the intellectually stimulating environment, I cannot find anywhere else. Also most of my current close friends I made during my PhD.
I'm nearing the end of my PhD in physics and I feel the same way. I've really enjoyed it and I'm absolutely OK not pursuing an academic career. I'm starting to lay out my plan for applying for jobs in industry - and I won't be applying for anything with "physicist" in the job title. I got to work on fun and interesting projects while having the freedom to learn other things that were interesting and enjoyable to me. I've also made amazing friends along the way.
If things go as they should, PhD may not be a bad deal at all.
It's also useful to note that the money and working condition issues are country and field dependent. For instance, in many European countries PhD students in many STEM and also humanities fields are most often employed full-time with standard work contract(s), with OK salary (but less than in industry), and full benefits with excessive unpaid overtime in principle forbidden, small or no tuition, etc.
The situation with academic career prospects after PhD as I understand however is that situation is similar to US everywhere, and going eventually gets tough after that point, and most people are culled before finding a "permanent" position.
I feel the same way about my degree. The money was clearly a fraction of what I could be making in industry, but it was enough to live fairly comfortably. And the freedom I had to pursue my interests was unmatched in any other position I could have gotten instead.
I have a master's degree and I learned early that getting a PhD was not for me. The way things worked at the university made me not stand to be in that environment anymore.
This thing that is ridiculous in my opinion is that the advisor would say: "there is this conference coming and we will send a manuscript. We can try this and that to see if it is publishable.". Why the hell should I research for publishing? One should get the results AND THEN publish it.
The experience with academia was very toxic, although I know people who have experienced worse than that, with addition to advisors' ego disputes affecting grad students.
Most incoming grad students enter PhD programs with incorrect assumptions about how grad school works. A decent number of those incorrect assumptions involve the grad student role itself. For instance, I knew of a research assistant headed to grad school who was thrilled because he/she liked to learn in classroom environments, which is only a very small part of what grad school is at best (although coming out of undergrad, you might assume that it's a bigger part of a PhD than it is).
All prospective grad students should read over the following to understand what they're truly getting into / developing realistic expectations before committing a substantial amount of their life to the Ivory Tower. The first link covers toxicity in academia (YMMV), which is more or less what drove me out of lab work and into IT. I personally chose to remain working in academia because I find it meaningful, but in a role that was more insulated from academic politics (vs generic work politics).
I think that "Graduate School in the Humanities - Just Don't Go" is a gem of an essay, because it does a good job explaining why students still enter these programs when the data screams out that they shouldn't.
One thing that is often overlooked is that the US does have a very restrictive immigration system for people who don't have relatives here and can't leverage family reunification. In this case, getting advanced STEM degrees provides a path towards residency, work rights, and perhaps eventually a green card or citizenship. So in the US, these folks wouldn't be looking at a choice between getting a PhD and becoming a florist, because it would be illegal to come here and work as a florist. But there's a "shortage" of people getting PhDs in STEM fields, so we allow people to come here under conditions of limited personal freedom provided they agree to work these positions.
This power on the part of universities (the power to bestow residency and limited work right), I think, is one of the reasons STEM PhD programs haven't collapsed or faced the reckoning that would force them to change.
Most of academia is toxic. Those who don't see that haven't spent enough time in it.
I believe things can't go well in general in any area where money comes from organized begging ("proposals", "apply for funding"), driven by reputation ("publications", "impact factor") and where the bad eggs can't even be fired ("tenure")
> driver by reputation ("publications", "impact factor") and where the bad eggs can't even be fired ("tenure")
From personal experience, I've always felt as though the existence of "rock star" academics always gave academia a Hollywood-like feel in terms of systemic abuse and candidly bizarre and maladaptive behaviors on the part of researchers.
My experience is that some people in academia really have minimal idea of what the world outside it is like. They literally can't imagine anything different and certainly haven't experienced it.
Most of academia is toxic. Those who don't see that haven't spent enough time in it.
Or they’ve spent way too much time in. It’s like people who spend a couple of decades in a prison, they’re fully institutionalized and feel they can’t cope with the real world.
>I believe things can't go well in general in any area where money comes from organized begging ("proposals", "apply for funding"), driven by reputation ("publications", "impact factor") and where the bad eggs can't even be fired ("tenure")
So you're never, ever gonna work with venture capitalists?
I have a masters degree, bailed on a phD, and even then I didn't realize it quite quickly enough. My MS program at Berkeley was quite flexible, and it was easy enough to get the requisite math. I dropped courses like Intellectual Property (cross listed with the law school), Product Development (cross listed with the business school), courses I was enjoying and would have done quite well in, to take classes like "advanced nonlinear optimization", which were a bad match for me.
Yes, nonlinear optimization will help you understand how neural nets work, but trust me, you don't need to take an advanced graduate class full of PhD students on the topic. If you have the prerequisites to the prerequisites, you understand math well enough to read about gradient descent on your own.
To be clear, there are people who belonged in this class, I just wasn't one of them.
For a lot of people, the sooner you realize a PhD isn't a good match for you, the better. The problem is, the sort of person who has the grades, test scores, and academic mindset to get into a top PhD program is almost certain to be slow to realize (and accept!) this. Add in the fact that PhD programs have astoundingly high attrition rates compared to professional doctoral programs (atrition at UCSF's med school is below 0.5%, whereas many PhD programs have attrition rates about 50% - yes, literally 100 times higher!) and you start to get a sense of why a lot of seemingly smart people get kind of snookered on PhD programs.
One big difference here is that people who masters out of STEM PhD programs can often still have a career in this field, perhaps a better renumerated one anyway. Though from what I've seen, getting a PhD in lit isn't necessarily a good path for someone who loves literature or theater, either.
> atrition at UCSF's med school is below 0.5%, whereas many PhD programs have attrition rates about 50%
Some of us went through school systems with 50% pass rates for middle school, high school and university, so don't find that either surprising, nor necessarily bad.
In fact, I at least am somewhat confused that a high pass rate is considered "good" - it clearly encourages grade inflation and arguably devalues the received degree...
Im not saying 'why publishing?'. Im saying 'why publish if I barely know if what Im doing will have some positive result?
Think of this example:
we are researching for a few months whether an arbitrary compound X has relieffing effects on people with headache, but since we are still researching, there is no concrete result or any slight evidence yet. maybe the compound will relief the headache in 30min but maybe it will make your nose bleed.
but there is this conference about headaches that is approaching and why not submit a paper about the work with some results? WHAT RESULTS? You will spend countless hours reading (more) about headaches and compound X to write the background of the manuscript while you still have to figure out the tests you will perform test your assumption.
you will work for weeks (under more pressure) with the hope you could publish something that is very uncertain at the current state.
Because most modern PhD factories are sweat shops that offer a rather dismal career prospect. (If you've been through the process --- I suspect there are a lot on HN --- you know what I mean.)
I bailed out three years into a chemistry PhD and my only regret is that I started it at all.
I'm not saying that going to graduate school is necessarily a mistake but I think a lot of people go because they've done well in school up to that point and aren't sure what else to do with themselves.
When I was an undergrad, there was a PhD candidate who advised me to go to grad school for exactly this reason. He told me it was years I could spend avoiding having to find a job.
I commend you on your courage. Reminds me of one of my good friends from college, who bailed out in the second year of his PhD program in geochemistry and started anew in a MSc program in Computer Science. He now works happily in a startup company as a SDE and never looks back.
I loved my PhD - had no intention of staying in academia, got paid a decent stipend for the whole time and was in and out in 2 years 10 months and it gave me the prefect spring board in to starting my own business (unrelated topic but the skills I developed and learned in that time have been a huge help) - I treated my PhD like a full time job and avoided the procrastination that many suffer with in the first 18 months.
I don't know if that is universally true. This type of anecdata tends to be very program specific.
I worked on the computational side of things and got paid a lot to work on (what I thought was) interesting stuff.
Folks who did experimental work (especially on the bio side of things) tended to put in more hours even over the weekends because biological substrates are no respecters of leisure time. On the other hand, it's much easier to publish experimental results than to come up with a new algorithm, so many ended up with quite a few publications than I did when they graduated.
Such a waste of potential. It could be the most amazing time of your life, a chance to ask and answer the most interesting questions you can think of. Instead it ends up being a very negative experience for many.
This is statistically true, one of the curious paradoxes of PhD work is that students continually consider themselves to be an except to the statistics.
I say this as a recovering humanities academic who now works in tech; I am really grateful that my parents pushed me to have a STEM major alongside my interest in music.
I'm positive the same thing happens in the US - grad students spend some time teaching courses and see up-close just what it's like for adjunct faculty (which is all a lot of them will ever be able to get to). In a lot of states they also hear about just how bad things are for public school system teachers. I suspect that they also understand that part of the private school system is management/investors that feel that those protesting public school teachers have it too good, so teaching is basically going to be what they do between their gig economy jobs shopping for groceries for delivery companies.
Readit News
A professor of mathematics noticed that his kitchen sink at his home leaked. He called a plumber. The plumber came the next day and sealed a few screws, and everything was working as before.
The professor was delighted. However, when the plumber gave him the bill a minute later, he was shocked.
"This is one-third of my monthly salary!" he yelled.
Well, all the same he paid it and then the plumber said to him, "I understand your position as a professor. Why don't you come to our company and apply for a plumber position? You will earn three times as much as a professor. But remember, when you apply, tell them that you completed only seven elementary classes. They don't like educated people."
So it happened. The professor got a job as a plumber and his life significantly improved. He just had to seal a screw or two occasionally, and his salary went up significantly.
One day, the board of the plumbing company decided that every plumber had to go to evening classes to complete the eighth grade. So, our professor had to go there too. It just happened that the first class was math. The evening teacher, to check students' knowledge, asked for a formula for the area of a circle. The person asked was the professor. He jumped to the board, and then he realized that he had forgotten the formula. He started to reason it, and he filled the white board with integrals, differentials, and other advanced formulas to conclude the result he forgot. As a result, he got "minus pi times r square."
He didn't like the minus, so he started all over again. He got the minus again. No matter how many times he tried, he always got a minus. He was frustrated. He gave the class a frightened look and saw all the plumbers whisper: "Switch the limits of the integral!!"
The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer “one third x cubed.”
She repeats “one thir — dex cue”?
He repeats, “one third x cubed”.
She asks, “one thir dex cubed?”
“Yes, that’s right,” he says.
So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself, “one thir dex cubed…”.
The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something about basic mathematics. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks “what is the integral of x squared?”.
The waitress says “one third x cubed” and whilst walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder “plus a constant!”
https://simonsingh.net/books/fermats-last-theorem/mathematic...
the entire HN thread for "CIA Declassified Coldwar Russian Jokes [pdf]" is pretty good value https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13585511
This seemed to be what a PhD was all about, but it's not what I've experienced. I've just completed the first year of grad school, and while the classes have been interesting, the expectation is that you already have an advisor when you arrive (or at the latest at the end of your first year) and you hit the ground running pumping out papers. There seems to be little opportunity to explore computer science as a whole or to work towards one singular result. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Peter Sarnak about CS graduate education. He said that CS is in a weird spot between traditional engineering disciplines and the liberal arts, and that the need for grant funding causes departments to encourage students to work on whatever projects the professors are leading. But even he seemed a little surprised when I told him that our department's general exam is basically a presentation on the research you've accomplished so far.
I think this is unfortunate. First, because it goes against what I wanted out of a PhD. But also because it makes the PhD not much different than working in industry. If in either case I have to write code for some boss and satisfy my curiosities on the nights and weekends, why would I choose to do it for much less money and worse career prospects? I imagine this is causing the best and brightest to avoid academia in computer science, which seems bad for research and technological progress in general.
My PhD was the latter, but for me it was actually one of the major selling points for me on the program. I had a pretty good idea of the area that I wanted to work in, and I was always bad at learning from classes as opposed to hands-on self-driven learning. By the end of two years, I'd already gotten a lot of research done and moving towards the end of my PhD I was able to branch out within my area and take my own path in a way I doubt I would have been able to do in a different style program, where I wouldn't have had the same depth of knowledge in my field.
All that to say, I think these are two different philosophies in designing a grad program, and each works better for a different style of student. To those that are still thinking about applying, its something that I think should be a serious consideration when looking at program fit.
I think this is a fundamental difference between American and European universities. In European universities, you can hypothetically join a PhD program without any prior degree at all if an advisor chooses to take you on personally. No such sidestepping can happen in an American institution, and regardless you'll have to take some courses (even if you're only auditing them in effect) before you can begin research. Unsurprisingly, American PhD programs are longer.
I believe this is viewed as a feature, and not a bug. For the most part, academia serves as one of the few reliable ways to emigrate to the U.S., and exploits that fact to generate a large pool of inexpensive labor. In exchange, these students are rewarded with a US visa and a comparatively well-paying job.
Neither party expects these graduates to stay in academia, so the ability to follow orders, work to a deadline, and solve highly-abstract problems provide a much more tangible benefit than inculcating the creativity, communication skills, and bureaucratic know-how that differentiates successful professors.
In many ways, including these reasons, I think the PhD is starting to be viewed by some as a "super-Masters degree" that simply requires more work or takes longer, rather than as requiring a distinct, different skillset.
Note that this is based only on my observations of a top-50 US graduate program; this might be totally different in a top-4 program, for example. However, one data point I found particularly persuasive is that in our program with ~300 PhD students, we have fewer than 30 (and probably fewer than 10) students with US citizenship or green cards.
But there are very few American-born students going on to get PhDs who are interested in industry because, well, why would they waste another 5 years in school when they can get software engineering jobs with only a BS or MS? According to this study [1], 38% of all data scientists are non-US citizens and nearly half of early-career data scientist are non-US citizens. It's weird that we're pushing US citizens out of data science.
[1] http://burtchworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Burtch-Wor...
I posed a question to my advisor in order to get onto the PhD, started researching immediately, and my 'general exam' half-way through was a presentation and viva. Obviously the question changed totally by the time I finished, but that's the nature of research and where it takes you.
I'm not sure why you'd expect to explore computer science as a whole on a PhD. The point of a PhD is to become an expert in one part of the field and to push it to expand what we know - not to gain general wide knowledge. I don't think that was ever the idea - that's what a bachelors is for.
I'm fully aware of what the point of a PhD is. I wasn't expecting to become a generalist, but I was expecting some time to study some recent results and come up with a tractable research proposal. Indeed, if the purpose of a PhD is to expand the totality of human knowledge, why was it expected that I would publish 3-4 conference papers to graduate? Wouldn't one significant result have been enough?
Classes and exams in a PhD programme? I've never heard of this anywhere - I had no idea that was a thing in the US.
There is an ugly trend in the UK to having "credits" for attending workshops as part of your "personal development". You basically have to go and sit in a workshop pretending to listen to someone talking about academic writing so that some admin can tick a box. Considering even postdocs and RAs have to write reports on how their "personal development" is progressing I don't think the powers that be will be happy until everyone can be placed into a spreadsheet.
In CS the edge of the field isn’t as far away. New knowledge invalidates more of the old, and you don’t even need a CS undergrad degree to be near some of the edges.
1) I am evaluated on the progress of my students. While bad ones will actually be fired, good ones are more useful to me if they go off and get postdocs etc. Some of the most powerful "businesses" in the field are created by the network of people who all trained with the same PI and then went on to found their own labs.
2) A burnt out, trapped graduate student is not actually one that produces good work, in my experience.
3) Several grants, which are how I fund my lab, will look very poorly on trainees making no progress. There's very little exploitation that's worth a program officer at the NSF wondering if I'm worth there time.
Are there bad, exploitative PIs? Absolutely. But these people are assholes, not the only logical outcome of the system.
Of course it all depends on many factors, just my personal experience here.
Based on time spent and potential earnings forgone, a Bachelor's degree is a good investment. A Master's is a good investment. The inflection point happens, and a Phd is not as good of an investment.
That's all the information I needed to decide to stop after a Master's. Have only regretted it once, when I worked at a company that was owned by someone with a Phd in Economics and with many Phd Economists working there. I felt like a second class citizen and in a moment of irrationality, when the entire employment universe seemed to consist of only this company and ones like it, I thought about going and getting a Phd in my late 30s.
Thank God I didn't. Making about 2.5x as much as I was making then, two jobs later, no further education needed (other than Cloud Guru courses).
Source: I'm on the math faculty at a large public research university.
Anecdoctal experience: I was offered a somewhat decent scholarship for a Master's program backed by an Oil company, but I would work on specific projects chosen by the company. I sincerely prefered to go for a program/advisor that fit my goal (more on the theoretical CS research) and no grant (the program is free here). This meant that I have to work to pay my bills and study on 'free time'. This works for me personally because I make a more than any program scholarship would pay me while acquiring some industry experience. This can work while I am doing my masters, but It is borderline impossible for a PhD program.
my two cents: find something where the grants align with your interests, or find a brand-new faculty member who has startup money so isn't as bound by grants in the near term. and if things don't work out, simply leave and go to industry -- with a marketable skill set like what you get from being a CS major, there's no way for you to lose. go wherever has work that you like more.
1. It's not like those math Ph.D.s are sitting around reading textbooks with their advisors.
They are TA'ing service courses. A lot of TA'ing. In addition to TA'ing, they are prepping for a high-stakes exam.
The exam will wash out the 50-70% of people who are needed as temp TA labor but whom the department has no intention of advising through to a Ph.D.
After 2 or 3 years, you pass the exam. Yay! But wait. Reading textbooks with your advisor? No! you need to take a whole slew of courses. Why? Because course enrollment == money and easy/interesting teaching assignments. And good luck getting tons of research done in-between your TA'ing and courses...
Now you're done with courses! Yay! After TA duties, you can spend 100% of your time on research (aka 50% of a 40 hour work week aka 80% of a grad student work week). Except you only have 2 years left :-(
So now it's on to 1-3 postdocs so that you can start doing, after 5 years, what that CS phd student was doing when they "hit the ground running": build a research agenda that resonates with a large enough set of researchers that it translates into a research job.
--
Also, the "one singular result" style of research is unique not just to mathematics, but to a particular subset of mathematics. It's just not a good fit for most research problems, even in Mathematics. I've seen tons of well-composed dissertations focused on a singular, pointless problem.
The hodgepodge dissertations don't have a "beautiful singular result" feel, but almost invariably contribute at least one piece of useful, new knowledge.
Finally, worth noting that the best and brightest don't leave research; they might leave academia, but typically not research.
TL;DR: If you can find an advisor who isn't a slave driver (the majority of them at good places), the CS model is 1000% better than the Math model. You might be hired as a researcher for someone else's research agenda, but at least you don't spend the first 1/3rd of the phd as temp teaching labor stressing over high-stakes exams.
At which department?
Speaking as a math professor in an American research university -- this is unusual. Pass rates at most places are reasonably high, and professors hope that as many people as possible pass.
It is true that grad students are expected to TA (if they want funding); usually grant funding is not available to support them. But generally the teaching burdens are relatively modest, around ~15 hours a week including grading and office hours.
There are lots of careers that benefit from or require a PhD besides being a professor. People with STEM PhDs are found in great concentration in R&D settings. For example, when I worked at NASA JPL probably about 50%+ of the scientists had PhDs.
Outside of STEM activities, it can still be an enriching life experience. You don't incur significant debt. It does have a high opportunity cost, if one's undergraduate degree is lucrative. On the other hand, you get the privilege to spend your time trying to create new knowledge.
Real PhD Issues (and Cons):
1) Research is hard and it requires a massive time investment to create new knowledge, especially when just starting.
2) High levels of impostor syndrome. You will likely meet people much smarter than you, and those that can work 80+ hours per week for years. If you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to them, your mental health will suffer. You have to just work toward solving your problems. As one old friend put it, he felt like a genius when he worked as a software developer, but throughout his PhD he felt like an underachiever.
3) Jealousy of your friends "getting their lives started" (kids, buying a home, etc.). Very hard to have any work-life balance as a PhD student.
4) Don't expect to get rich after a PhD. Do it because you think a career in research will be satisfying.
5) If you want to be a tenure-track professor running a lab, you have to be very flexible with where you live. Being a professor is also very stressful.
6) If you want to teach in college, a PhD is required but the main thing a PhD teaches is research -- not teaching.
7) Clearly assess your ability to get a professorship if you choose to do a podstoc. There is little point in one unless a professorship is your end-goal. Many don't realistically assess their competitiveness for professorships. I wrote a blog post about this about 6 years ago (it needs updating): http://www.chriskanan.com/planning-for-life-after-your-phd/
I felt this, but was surprised that while there were a few genuine genius-level people in my program, the vast majority spent most of the effort trying to look like a genius but were far from it.
One of the things I tell people when they ask me about grad school is, "I thought everybody would be smarter".
An astounding amount of time is wasted in academia on puffery. I'm not sure how it compares to industry because there's never been a systematic comparison (and I don't really believe such a comparison would be feasible). My personal experience was that the "mediocrities" who kept a low profile and stayed out of departmental politics as much as possible seemed to actually be accomplishing the most work with any actual substance. Some of these folks were working in state-sponsored institutions rather than universities. All of them seemed to be in their 50s and 60s, tenured (or tenure-equivalented) before higher ed became a hypercompetitive shitshow.
This pretension really comes through when scholars don't respect the limits of their expertise / properly delegate to specialists. In software and IT especially, you find academics using technologies that are a poor fit for their work, not understanding budgeting and concepts such as total cost of ownership for compute resources, and reinventing the wheel.
I don't remember where I heard it but I think has some truth to it. A bachelor believes he's the smartest A master thinks he's not smart at all A Phd understands no one is smart
1) Teachers should know more than the students. The degree quantifies that.
2) The highest-rated SLAC's have PhD faculty, and so the next-highest aspire to that.
One way this is concrete is that the accrediting agencies put as a point they look for that all faculty have a terminal degree. And people looking at colleges want to go to the highest-rated places (subject to monetary considerations), so it is a major factor in enrollment.
3) It helps keep you alive, and your teaching reflects that.
This third one can sound a little BS but in my experience having a professional activity as a creative output definitely helps keep people from becoming toasted.
During the period between the 1940s and the late 80s-ish, the PhD involved research, but not with nearly the same competitiveness as today. As such, budding candidates were able to devote substantially more time to developing their pedagogical skills (even in the past this viewed more like an extracurricular pursuit, but a lot of PhDs took it seriously enough that they got really good at it).
The folks who came out of this era had dual competencies in teaching and research. The need for research skills primarily was to help more advanced and motivated students (juniors and seniors) to get some limited research experience on-campus.
Sometime between the late 90s and early 2000s, the balance in competencies shifted due to hyper-competitiveness. As a result, almost no PhD students today really focus on pedagogy and it is still treated as an increasingly neglected extra-curricular pursuit. This has become a very big problem for SLACs, since almost all PhDs coming out now are enculturated to feel that they have to create a large research program, and almost view working at a SLAC as a "backup" option if they don't land a large university job rather than a goal in and of itself. SLACs have had to compensate for this by offering increasingly attractive incentives / research starter packages to get new faculty. This trend is also being aggravated by helicopter parents who now insist that their children participate in research at increasingly younger ages (oftentimes high school) so as to pad their resumes for med school.
[0] https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/octopus.html
Disclaimer: Source for some of this is free recall from a temporary job in SLAC archive. Some of it may be wrong. Visit a SLAC archive if you care enough to verify.
The actual administrative reasoning here is probably a combination of the above and "you just can't be an academic without a PhD!".
This is a bit of a tangent but it seems to be a common trend now among labs to arrest trainees (particularly phd students and post-docs) in their positions as long as possible. For example, the institute I am at has recently extended the maximum assignment length for post-doctoral fellows to from 4 to 6 years. I can see the PI's reasoning for this but it is incredibly demoralizing and one of the contributing factors for a lot of people I know who have abandoned their careers for unconventional jobs.
The same effects have also made long postdocs less common, and it's even possible to jump directly to a tenure-track faculty job from a PhD with no postdoc in between. Alternately, people seem to be doing a kind of "industry postdoc". You get an industry job, but one that lets you publish (DeepMind, Facebook Research, some startups, etc.), and after a year or two you either find you like it and stay, or you use that as a springboard to apply for faculty jobs, treating it as having been basically a high-paid postdoc.
Still plenty of stuff to complain about, but the job market looks far different than in the natural sciences or humanities.
I've witnessed this as well. One of the worst offenses I saw was a master's student in a 1-year master's program (basically supposed to be a post-bac / used for switching fields) who spent around 4 years in the same lab instead.
Through scholarships I was paid enough to be comfortable while spending my time on interesting things. The scholarship game is a bit winner-take-all though, and I know the minimum funding level in my department was less than 1/2 of what some of us were making, and that was in a STEM department - my understanding is humanities are a very different thing. You have to decide what is ok for you.
Afterwards I did a post-doc and then a research position. Through a national fellowship (post-doc) and funding guarantees (faculty) I knew I would be able to make something like the low end of what my industry salary would be - and easily chose the academic freedom at least for a few years.
When I was on the academic market, I didn't find a tenure track position I felt was the right fit. Rather than play the waiting game some of my colleagues were doing, and I realized that "any R1 that will take you" wasn't going to make me happy. So I chose to turn down the offers and go to industry. That's also had it's ups and downs.
I guess my point is there where many steps along that path I took a good look at my options and chose to stay. Sure, I could have made a bit more money in some industries, but there are other considerations. I've never worked with a more talented or motivated group of people than I did during graduate and post-doc work. I've never had the time since to just dig into an interesting problem or really swing for the fences. I'm sure it cost me a bit in terms of lifetime earnings, but it's a trade-off I'd make again in a heartbeat. I'm sure I would have been happy teaching somewhere if the parameters had been slightly different, but I'm ok with that too.
What I really don't understand is people who are somehow shocked to find themselves in the position, many years in, of making less than they think their time is worth and without the career prospects they had hoped for, and bitterly complain about it as if someone else made the decisions that put them there.
Graduate programs absolutely aren't for everyone. They are, however, a unique opportunity - if the good parts really appeal to you and the financials etc. make sense for you, by all means do it. Just don't expect it to be something it isn't.
My PhD was some of my best years of my life, and I was truly lucky. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and even now I wish I could return to being a PhD student for the rest of my life. I had a great set of friends, all the research freedom I wanted, supportive department, and I did research internships at least once a year so my average salary was pretty decent (about half a software developer salary at that time). If your goal is to make as much money as fast as possible, then you will be disappointed with a PhD.
I was in a department that was in between social science and computer science, and out of the 8 of us that started together, all 8 graduated. 7 of the 8 landed R1 tenure-track faculty positions, most of us directly after the PhD (the remaining 1 was running a successful business).
Your advisor can drop dead, get sent to the hoosegow, lose grant funding, lose tenure, or change jobs without taking you along. Your research topic could turn out to be controversial among feuding members of your committee. You could be subjected to harassment, discrimination, etc. You might have to escalate matters with your advisor in order to get your final thesis approved, meaning you get your PhD but without a vital source of recommendation.
Some of those things can happen to you in a regular day job as well, but at least when you lose a regular job, you haven't lost everything.
It's also useful to note that the money and working condition issues are country and field dependent. For instance, in many European countries PhD students in many STEM and also humanities fields are most often employed full-time with standard work contract(s), with OK salary (but less than in industry), and full benefits with excessive unpaid overtime in principle forbidden, small or no tuition, etc.
The situation with academic career prospects after PhD as I understand however is that situation is similar to US everywhere, and going eventually gets tough after that point, and most people are culled before finding a "permanent" position.
The experience with academia was very toxic, although I know people who have experienced worse than that, with addition to advisors' ego disputes affecting grad students.
All prospective grad students should read over the following to understand what they're truly getting into / developing realistic expectations before committing a substantial amount of their life to the Ivory Tower. The first link covers toxicity in academia (YMMV), which is more or less what drove me out of lab work and into IT. I personally chose to remain working in academia because I find it meaningful, but in a role that was more insulated from academic politics (vs generic work politics).
[0] http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com/
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Getting-What-You-Came-Students/dp/037...
[2] http://100rsns.blogspot.com/
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/448...
One thing that is often overlooked is that the US does have a very restrictive immigration system for people who don't have relatives here and can't leverage family reunification. In this case, getting advanced STEM degrees provides a path towards residency, work rights, and perhaps eventually a green card or citizenship. So in the US, these folks wouldn't be looking at a choice between getting a PhD and becoming a florist, because it would be illegal to come here and work as a florist. But there's a "shortage" of people getting PhDs in STEM fields, so we allow people to come here under conditions of limited personal freedom provided they agree to work these positions.
This power on the part of universities (the power to bestow residency and limited work right), I think, is one of the reasons STEM PhD programs haven't collapsed or faced the reckoning that would force them to change.
I believe things can't go well in general in any area where money comes from organized begging ("proposals", "apply for funding"), driven by reputation ("publications", "impact factor") and where the bad eggs can't even be fired ("tenure")
From personal experience, I've always felt as though the existence of "rock star" academics always gave academia a Hollywood-like feel in terms of systemic abuse and candidly bizarre and maladaptive behaviors on the part of researchers.
Or they’ve spent way too much time in. It’s like people who spend a couple of decades in a prison, they’re fully institutionalized and feel they can’t cope with the real world.
So you're never, ever gonna work with venture capitalists?
Yes, nonlinear optimization will help you understand how neural nets work, but trust me, you don't need to take an advanced graduate class full of PhD students on the topic. If you have the prerequisites to the prerequisites, you understand math well enough to read about gradient descent on your own.
To be clear, there are people who belonged in this class, I just wasn't one of them.
For a lot of people, the sooner you realize a PhD isn't a good match for you, the better. The problem is, the sort of person who has the grades, test scores, and academic mindset to get into a top PhD program is almost certain to be slow to realize (and accept!) this. Add in the fact that PhD programs have astoundingly high attrition rates compared to professional doctoral programs (atrition at UCSF's med school is below 0.5%, whereas many PhD programs have attrition rates about 50% - yes, literally 100 times higher!) and you start to get a sense of why a lot of seemingly smart people get kind of snookered on PhD programs.
One big difference here is that people who masters out of STEM PhD programs can often still have a career in this field, perhaps a better renumerated one anyway. Though from what I've seen, getting a PhD in lit isn't necessarily a good path for someone who loves literature or theater, either.
Some of us went through school systems with 50% pass rates for middle school, high school and university, so don't find that either surprising, nor necessarily bad.
In fact, I at least am somewhat confused that a high pass rate is considered "good" - it clearly encourages grade inflation and arguably devalues the received degree...
Because publications pretty much define your scientific contributions, i.e. your productivity as a researcher.
> One should get the results AND THEN publish it.
You must have had a body of work that was just about worthy of publication though, right?
Think of this example: we are researching for a few months whether an arbitrary compound X has relieffing effects on people with headache, but since we are still researching, there is no concrete result or any slight evidence yet. maybe the compound will relief the headache in 30min but maybe it will make your nose bleed.
but there is this conference about headaches that is approaching and why not submit a paper about the work with some results? WHAT RESULTS? You will spend countless hours reading (more) about headaches and compound X to write the background of the manuscript while you still have to figure out the tests you will perform test your assumption.
you will work for weeks (under more pressure) with the hope you could publish something that is very uncertain at the current state.
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I'm not saying that going to graduate school is necessarily a mistake but I think a lot of people go because they've done well in school up to that point and aren't sure what else to do with themselves.
I don't know if that is universally true. This type of anecdata tends to be very program specific.
I worked on the computational side of things and got paid a lot to work on (what I thought was) interesting stuff.
Folks who did experimental work (especially on the bio side of things) tended to put in more hours even over the weekends because biological substrates are no respecters of leisure time. On the other hand, it's much easier to publish experimental results than to come up with a new algorithm, so many ended up with quite a few publications than I did when they graduated.
I say this as a recovering humanities academic who now works in tech; I am really grateful that my parents pushed me to have a STEM major alongside my interest in music.
Also, https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/college-level-mathematics