Slashdot Mirror
Which Grad Students Are the Most Miserable?
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Jessica Palmer has an interesting post about the miseries of STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] graduate students and makes the case that of all grad programs, those in biology are particularly miserable. One basic problem stems from too many biology Ph.D.s and not enough funding, leading to an immensely cutthroat environment that is psychologically damaging to boot. But the main problem is that most of the skills you learn in biology, especially biomedical sciences are only useful in the biomedical sciences and that most grad students don't learn enough 'generalist' skills, such as high level math or serious programming skills, to have other career alternatives if academia doesn't work out. 'A decade ago, sequencing was a Ph.D. activity, or at least, an activity supervised very closely by a Ph.D.,' writes Mike the Mad Biologist."
I feel very strongly about this.
Throughout my career (I have a PhD in Chemistry) I found the preparation in maths of Biology majors absolutely abysmal.
Fact is, the way I understand it, biology (and medicine, for that matter), is not an exact science and individuating a direct cause effect is close to impossible.
It all relies on statistics, and showing that a certain treatment has a higher probability of causing a certain beneficial effect (or reducing a side effect).
Then why in the world don't medical doctors and biology majors receive a STRONG education in math and statistics? Is it because the large majority of them are women, thus the whole "ooohh math is hard, there Barbie, go back to the kitchen" comes into play?
I find this a shame, it makes me dispute every finding in medical and biology science.
For further information, see Ben Goldacre's work.
I did mine in physics, the wife in Biochem. The real issue I saw with the biology program is that you were unable to publish or graduate with a null result. You do a valid experiment, which could have shown something, but it turns out biology simply doesn't work that way, and so your experiment simply confirms what is currently known and shows nothing particularly new (but done in a new way, so it could have.) Sorry, you don't graduate. So people seem to either fake it (here is a 2 sigma result, might be valid, will need more study, yay I graduate) or they flush out, and in either way nowhere does the result get published so the same experiment will get done 10 more times other places. There seems to be not as much respect for the scientific process, only respect for novel results, which results in bad science and bad scientists.
>>Computers have become the universal tool, but no one is able to explore their capabilities, recent graduates are like illiterate peasants in a library.
To be fair, betting on ignorance is always a safe bet, no matter what subject or area of our society you're talking about. Nobody** knows history, math, computer programming, religion, physics, etc. at a very good level these days.
That said, there's a lot of smart people in every field. Some of the best math people I met were bioengineering professors at UCSD, at least or especially in their areas of expertise. I was fortunate enough to be partnered on my master's thesis project with an AMES guy who was a pretty decent programmer and had a good knowledge of math, but unfortunately the AMES program at the time (early 2000s) was still using FORTRAN. So we had fun getting our code to interoperate, but at least he was competent enough that if I told him how I was formatting my output, he'd have it all read in and analyzed by the next day.
By contrast, two of the stupidest people I've ever had to work with were at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. It was at the time of the internet boom, so they were having trouble finding competent programmers, so they hired these biology PhDs instead. Their sum output of work in the two years I spent there was half-constructing a web page (that didn't work) and a lot of snarky emails to my professor about how I should be using whatever trendy thing they'd read about somewhere. Because I wasn't using XML or whatever internally in our project, you know, that was the only reason they couldn't get any work done.
(**Approximately.)
My 53 year old uncle is a senior professor (or whatever they call a full professor in North America) in geotechnical engineering. I've heard him lament how kids these days don't know how to do programming, since there are so many pre-made tools that ALMOST do what you need. Amazing to hear a white haired old chap complaining about my generation and its poor computer literacy, usually that is the one exception that they give us credit for. Apparently his PhD students all come running to him to do basic programming for them. Programming of course is on his IBM monstrosity that cost $100K and who's only practical difference from a high-end Xeon is that it runs a visually identical version of AIX and runs an input-compatible version of his Fortran 70 compiler and graphics package as he used in "the good old days"... turns out that old people are just like that.
As a professional 3d game engine programmer with multiple published titles, it is a little bit embarrassing when he is going on about the Delauny triangulation algorithm he hacked up back in '95 or whenever and I suddenly realise it's better than what I used a few weeks ago with the benefit of the Internet, at that point I just agree and pretend that I use a similar algorithm all the time. Main point of contention is when he interrupts my anecdotes about writing in c with some disparaging remarks about recursion and how I should use an array as a stack in a for loop to make program flow clear or some archaic bollocks, God help me if he ever sees what I do with python.
Problem is, you force an scientist or engineer to use FORTRAN or MATLAB and you will get code written with hate. He may make good calculation or publish useful papers in his field, but he'll end up a cranky old bastard complaining about how PGPLOT does not look like it did on the faculty mainframe in '87, that is about as un-hacker as they come. Matlab is obviously designed by someone who hates computers and FORTRAN was designed BEFORE the compiler was invented, meaning it was never meant to be used as what we would call a programming language. Engineers/Scientists love this stuff just to be rude to us, because every successfully executed program written in this spaghetti is a huge fuck-you to 40 years of software research.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Dozens of applicants for professorships? I've applied for teaching/generalist English professorships in the last year for which there have been 500-800 applicants. No kidding. Those are extreme cases, but most searches, even in specialist areas, are netting at least 150 applications. I think that, right now, any humanities field is a bad bet. In my current department, we've lost about 4 tenure-track lines, and we're having a hard time gaining them back, and these are core areas: early modern British lit, composition, and ESL. It's worse for art history, especially given the teaching expectations. And then the people in German and other languages are seeing entire programs of study wiped out of existence. I don't want to play "who's more miserable?" because there's enough misery going around for everyone to get a share. But the humanities are really suffering for employment now because of the trend toward nontenured, lower-paying teaching roles and the fact that most programs don't have external funding. Whether that equates to more misery or not, I don't know. But it's tough, almost impossible, to get a job paying a living wage, and I don't advise pursuing graduate study in the humanities at this time.