Financial uncertainties, publish or parish culture and inappropriate performance metrics seem like the perfect cocktail for depression and anxiety. Probably why the rate of mental health issues for academics surges. I just finished my masters in physics and while I like the romantic idea of dedicating the next portion of my life to research and aim for a PhD, when I think about it I also see all the sad, tired and stressed out faces of PhD students and postdocs in my institute, most of them working well beyond 60hr/week, many of them having mental health issues and somehow everyone is just accepting it. The companies I worked at part time during my studies, while also putting some pressure on the workforce, have not shown this level of dispair. I don't really know what to do and feel a little lost on the subject. I just wish things were better in academia.
It depends on the specific professor. There are stressful and relaxed ones. It trickles down from the professors to their assistants to their PhD students. Here's my ad-hoc list of bad signs. Avoid those.
Professors
* don't have time for feedback
* have no interest in their PhD students' work
* are known to steal results (and put their names on it)
* are ideologically/religiously driven and judge you and everybody else accordingly
* don't open their network to their PhD students
* jump from one hot/trendy topic to the next and burn their PhD students on it
* blame others/circumstances for anything bad
Faculty
* members pride themselves for devoting their lives to the cause
* members do long work days, have little sleep
* has little budget it spends on its PhD students
* feels toxic (Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.")
PhD students
* do overtime
* rarely/never publish
* publish in irrelevant magazines
* publish with their names on the nth position (after doing all the work)
* don't or rarely attend conferences
* don't or rarely work on what they signed up for
* take long to finish (or don't finish at all)
* blame others/circumstances for their bad situation
Talk to PhD students, ask on the net, listen to speeches and lectures the professors gave.
A lot of advice given at HN about whether to join a startup applies to academia as well. Unnecessary work, little pay, vague promises, inconsistent management, insider circles. I wonder what academia's equivalent of stock options is. Aiming for tenureship perhaps?
If physics is just going to be a hobby, treat it like a hobby (and timebox it accordingly). Definitely don't let somebody else destroy your life for it.
I hated it at the time, but my lying, psychopathic "project advisor" where I got my Bachelor's in Physics did me a big favor by helping me realize the last thing I wanted was people like him in control of my life.
At the moment no matter how much you protest there's a stream of chumps happy to take your spot. We need to start examining the ROI of academia the way we would for anything else demanding such a huge chunk of your life and sanity.
Michael Stonebraker (INGRES, Postgres, Vertica, VoltDB, SciDB - Turing Award winner for fundamental contributions to the concepts and practices underlying modern database systems - got a PhD in 1971 with zero publications, tenure from Berkeley in 1976 with 5) about the same problem, https://youtu.be/DJFKl_5JTnA?t=14m17s
People are doing things about it; it’s just that they are outside of the system. You see countless articles, blog posts, and so forth about scientists going rogue, biologists getting certifications to run labs out of their garages, and individuals self-funding or even starting their own hedge funds to fund the research they want to do. Most of that isn’t mainstream. The future of academia is the academics, not the institution itself.
I once received an email from an academic in a field close to my field where he offered 70$ for every time I would cite one of his papers. I never responded to the email but I imagine that many would be tempted.
I can only imagine him showing off how influential his work was when he asks for more grant money... maybe he was even funding this "campaign" of his with leftover grant money as an investment...
I believe this to be a somewhat clear example of how measuring people can lead to strange behaviour and rushed work at the cost of quality.
This is the blog of theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, she just released a new book 'Lost in Math' where she describes just how bad things have become. She ends up focusing more on Physics than general Academia in the book due to pressure from her agent/editor. [0]
How to maintain a healthy working scientific community that produces output useful to the society that sustains it is not a black and white binary issue. Your kind of attitude is what hardens dysfunctional structures because it just spreads FUD to people who genuinely want to improve things without loosing what's good of the current system.
Well the publish or perish thing hasn't improved but there definitely are improvements to the publishing model itself. There's more opposition to Elsevier than ever, we have Arxiv, Sci-hub, OpenReview, and even some non-PDF publications like distill.pub.
Granted, most of that only applies to a few fields. Still kind of sucked if you are in medicine or engineering or whatever.
Readit News
Professors
* don't have time for feedback
* have no interest in their PhD students' work
* are known to steal results (and put their names on it)
* are ideologically/religiously driven and judge you and everybody else accordingly
* don't open their network to their PhD students
* jump from one hot/trendy topic to the next and burn their PhD students on it
* blame others/circumstances for anything bad
Faculty
* members pride themselves for devoting their lives to the cause
* members do long work days, have little sleep
* has little budget it spends on its PhD students
* feels toxic (Sayre's Law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.")
PhD students
* do overtime
* rarely/never publish
* publish in irrelevant magazines
* publish with their names on the nth position (after doing all the work)
* don't or rarely attend conferences
* don't or rarely work on what they signed up for
* take long to finish (or don't finish at all)
* blame others/circumstances for their bad situation
Talk to PhD students, ask on the net, listen to speeches and lectures the professors gave.
A lot of advice given at HN about whether to join a startup applies to academia as well. Unnecessary work, little pay, vague promises, inconsistent management, insider circles. I wonder what academia's equivalent of stock options is. Aiming for tenureship perhaps?
I hated it at the time, but my lying, psychopathic "project advisor" where I got my Bachelor's in Physics did me a big favor by helping me realize the last thing I wanted was people like him in control of my life.
Related - "Don't Do For Money What Others Do For Love" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16792942
At the moment no matter how much you protest there's a stream of chumps happy to take your spot. We need to start examining the ROI of academia the way we would for anything else demanding such a huge chunk of your life and sanity.
I can only imagine him showing off how influential his work was when he asks for more grant money... maybe he was even funding this "campaign" of his with leftover grant money as an investment...
I believe this to be a somewhat clear example of how measuring people can lead to strange behaviour and rushed work at the cost of quality.
[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/12/can-foundational-phys...
The best solution is for a committee of disinterested objective people to make a holistic decision based on their intuition and experience.
That way, nothing can go wrong.
Deleted Comment
Granted, most of that only applies to a few fields. Still kind of sucked if you are in medicine or engineering or whatever.