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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.
Just to be pedantic, "woe is me".
Q:
A: Probably the ones who post questions to Ask Slashdot?
It's probably more like "Woe is me", unless the article is written by Keanu Reeves...
I would have to say out of all the different fields of study, liberal arts are probably the most miserable(though of course for pretty much everyone grad school is a choice....)
Like, in TFA's view, biological sciences grad students, Liberal Arts grad students are incredibly cut throat. There is very little funding, I would argue significantly less per student than in any of the sciences(many don't get stipends), and literally dozens of PhD candidates for every one professorship. And the grads have an even more difficult time finding employment outside academia. If you think only knowing biological sciences is unmarketable, try knowing a ton about modern German literary theory and not much else of note.
Monstar L
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.
Throughout my career (I have a PhD in Chemistry) I found the preparation in maths of Biology majors absolutely abysmal.
To make it worse, it seems to me that *every* college course today is very weak in computer programming. The college graduates I meet seem to rely entirely on excel spreadsheets, with a very few "hard" sciences majors knowing a little bit of matlab.
Computers have become the universal tool, but no one is able to explore their capabilities, recent graduates are like illiterate peasants in a library.
A good analogy is to compare software development with leadership. A leader is someone who gets people to do what cannot be done by a person alone. A programmer is someone who gets computers to do what cannot be done by humans. In an age when automation replaces workers, software developers are the leaders. Too bad university students cannot see this simple analogy.
You're correct here in that while artists, street performers, and people getting advanced degrees in specialities without high demand are taking a risk doing things they love regardless of potential reward, only the grad students (and the crazier entrepreneurs) are paying tens of thousands of dollars to do it.
Nor has it ever been. Pursuing your intellectual passions whether or not anyone wants to keep you in food and shelter while doing it has forever been the domain of the idle rich. For most people you'll need to balance what you want to do with what you need to do to support yourself. This might involve turning your passion into a hobby intead of a career, living a frugal life to pursue your dream or (as many who wanted to grow up to be rocks stars or pro-atheletes have found) giving up on your dreams.
If you've been taught that just following your passions will lead to everything being great then I'm sorry you were mislead. People trying to be nice spared you from the reality that, even in America, the choice to follow your dreams without consideration of how you'll stay alive while doing it has historically always been funded by daddy's deep pockets.
The trouble is, right now there's a surplus of top-end-of-genius smart people with PhDs.
I know you wouldn't think so walking down the street, but the simple fact is that for every tenure-track position there are about 12 PhDs with useful published work capable of doing the job and doing it well, and even more for adjunct and other non-tenure track positions. The same sort of imbalance exists for research positions. The effect of this is that a lot of younger would-be scientists are working as part-time lab techs, or going into other fields, or trying to survive as part-time adjunct faculty, and the wages of those sorts of positions are steadily dropping. Also, many universities have been trying to save cash by avoiding giving anybody any sort of chance at tenure, leaving would-be academics basically no chance of making it.
And yes, that's a terrible waste of a lot of brilliant minds, but it's totally consistent with what's been going on in the US for the last 30 years.
I am officially gone from
At least, that is what I tell myself as I am looking at starting the 7th year of my PhD.
Although really, anyone who finishes a biological PhD and can't find a job outside of academia either made a very questionable decision on what exactly to study, or isn't trying very hard. When the US economy was overall tanking, many bioscience companies were - and still are - doing quite well. A former colleague of mine (PhD from the lab I am currently in) had no trouble getting the job he wanted in industry when he finished here, and that is not the least bit unusual in the area I am in.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think the real story is how the advanced education system is utterly failing America. It's a giant, expensive colossus that suck young people into debt and then, when they do get out, many of them don't even go into the profession they trained for. This all smacks to me of a racket. Now, after 12+ (add kindergarten) of education, the college industry sold this country into the premise that you aren't good enough to work a decent job. That you need at least 4+ years at an expensive school that may or may not even tangentially train you for your eventual profession, to even break into the workforce. It reminds me of the DeBeers diamond racket and how they attack the (American) consumer with psychological ads until the general public builds up an emotional and mental picture, wholly inaccurate, of the meaning, rarity, and value of diamonds wholly self-serving to that industry.
The college industry is the same. It's fine for some professions, and liberal arts may be grand for some people to pursue. But now it's branching everywhere. They even convinced cooks in some places to take forms of college and for a ton of money and with mostly theory and a lot less practical experience. Truthfully, I like the German system much better. For many hands on jobs there, you get an apprenticeship, you take a few weeks of classes (theory) each "semester" and then more weeks of practical on-the-job training. You don't pay, you get paid (a small amount, maybe room and board).
I think it would be way better for most people to get some work after high school and find out what they like doing, and be offered by their employers training courses that can eventually be credited towards a degree (if we really stay addicted to this paper fetish).
But with Khan Academy showing education doesn't need to be exclusive, labor intensive on part of the teacher, or expensive, why do I have a feeling that we'll keep throwing kids into college right after high school, at ever increasing prices, for a dubious return when they get an iota of real-world experience and decide they'd much rather do something else?
If you believe that people should get a real job instead of an education then you've got a country of predominantly labourers and factory line workers. A dangerous route to take in a time when low skilled jobs can get outsourced to somewhere cheaper very easily. I don't think it's a simple binary get a job/or/get an education. You really want all your graduate students to leave education? you want no graduate level education in your country? Who are your entrepreneurs going to turn to when they need somebody to do the research to develop their new product? (Maybe the French, who came up with the word 'entrepreneur'?)
I am assuming you like the idea of *some* education for your nation's people as you are posting in words and can read.
I think the complaint is that PhD's in biology are getting trained for the specific task of a not just their field, but whatever their advisors happen to be working with. So upon completion they are only prepared to work in a very narrow subsection of academic biology. They've been encouraged to avoid such skills as writing, math and programming in favor of cranking out data. Skills which would help them win jobs where they could then do the research they've trained for.
On what would seem like the extreme other end from their experience, I'm working on a graduate degree in statistics. I feel like everything is opening up to me. While it is certainly math heavy, it is all about using math to communicate effectively. Skills that transfer to any number of areas.
If I have one regret from education it would be neglecting writing as I pursued math/sciences. In college I viewed it as something to be endured. Ever since going to work though, I value writing more and more.
t
1 - Started grad School (MSc)
2 - Dropped out (or better, was 'invited' to drop out by my supervisor)
3 - Never looked back
This: http://xkcd.com/664/ doesn't exist
In reality Academia will go: "this isn't in my research area so I don't care", "you didn't prove the linearity of the solution", "not enough citations in your paper"
Corporate will go somewhere like the comic, but they may also be happy with you cause you solved a problem that was delaying the schedule,
no one could solve or it had a bad impact on the product (happened to me, and it got me 'karma points'
Academia: Too much work, not enough pay. And as the article mentions, it's problems and solutions that don't apply somewhere else (even though mine was in Wireless communication)
Most of the people that kept going are earning less than me and/or at a previous stage at their careers.
Granted, my supervisor was 'inexperienced' to say the least.
Really, I'm glad I got a job instead of pursuing an academic career. Where I can work with what interests me,
people can use your work, there's less sucking up, less BS and at least I get payed.
Also this: http://www.phdcomics.com/
how long until
As it is currently practiced, biology science at the phd level is a ponzi scheme. /. should easily see this is an exponential growth type of situation: you start with x professors, they graduate y students/year, who in turn become professors.....like most exp growth situations, the crash comes suddenly.
Research is $, and mostly - almost entirely- paid for by the Fed Gov't either directly thru the NIH/NSF/DARPA, or indirectly via tax welfare for the wealthy (aka tax code, such as the koch brothers giving MIT 100 million for a cancer center.
Most funding is via the "principal investigator" route: the funding agency identifies an *individual* who gets the money and is responsible for it; normally this is a faculty member at a university
Biology is also labor intensive; experiments take a lot of hands on time.
the way it works, professors have slave labor - graduate students, who , relative to their hours and training, are paid peanuts (they are also totally dependent on their professors letter of recomendation for a job)
The carrot is that after you graduate, you get your own faculty position.
anyone on
the clearest evidence of this is that every 20 years or so, the leading PhD nobel laureates go to congress and say, OMG, we have a crisis in funding: there are more PhDs then grant money. And congress, not wanting to see re elections ads with "voted against funding for cancer", obligingly ponies up more money. the last cycle was under clinton; the budget for the NIH, which is the bulk of funding, was doubled
when this happens, all of the Universitys go out and build huge new research buildings, and hire lots of new profs, cause NIH funding is a profit center for the university (or at least the CEO of the university, since university presidents are now paid like ceos, their salary is tied to total university budgets, so simply to hike their own salary, a univ pres will get a huge new RnD building built to increase unive revenues by 100 MM a year....)
call me cynical, but that is life
for those of you who have some familiarity with the system, the postdoc was invented in the 60s, to deal with the 1st glut of phds, and it was for 2 years.... think about that
Biology is one of the few disciplines in which you can apply an existing procedure and earn an advanced degree. Pick a species, pick a fashionable question, apply that question to that species, gather your data, publish and graduate. I think that tends to insulate some of them from "the real world" a little longer than most fields.
Also, the study of a discipline tends to be a walk through it's history. The core of biology is still observational and descriptive - statistical analysis and mathematical modeling only came along later, so it's a field where some students feel blindsided by a bit of a bait-and-switch. A student in biology is absorbing enormous quantities of factual data and context and then, fairly late in their education, there is a switch to a more mathematical framework.
At least this was my qualitative analysis of biologists in the wild - I admit I didn't do any catch-and-release banding or a proper t-test on my hypothesis in the preparation of this post.
Now if you want to talk about students not prepared to deal with the real world, biologists have nothing on mathematicians. Biologists are at least are encouraged to talk to each other. In mathematics you quickly learn that it is likely only five people in the world will understand your idea. Three of them will be borderline autistic and a fourth carries live grenades in his jacket.
I got a PhD in biochemistry 7 years ago. I'm now back in IT working as a sysadmin. If I didn't have that previous computer experience, I would be doing day labor right now. I am not kidding.
Building a better ribosome since 1997
The most miserable grad students are the ones who do their PhD expecting to learn 'generalized skills' to prepare them for industry jobs.
only the grad students (and the crazier entrepreneurs) are paying tens of thousands of dollars to do it.
Graduate students in most sciences are paid while they are in school. Some to teach, some to do research. Their tuition is also paid by the school if teaching or by grant if researching.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Oh, shit, wait...sorry, I read that as "Which Grad Students _Make Us_ the Most Miserable?"
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you believe that people should get a real job instead of an education then you've got a country of predominantly labourers and factory line workers. A dangerous route to take in a time when low skilled jobs can get outsourced to somewhere cheaper very easily.
If a person has a 4 year Bachelors degree in Engineering, for example, and their job gets outsourced, can't find work in a down economy, never learned any other marketable skills, etc etc etc - Wouldn't people in that boat have been better off becoming a Plumber? How about an Electrician? Carpenter? Mechanic?
I tell you what, engineering, science, manufacturing, all those things can to some extent be outsourced to other countries - and have done, but... If someone's toilet is overflowing and they can't stop the geyser of crap - No-one from India is going to come by and fix it for them. At $65 to show up, $75 per hour, don't you think that the licensed plumber with 20 years experience and a good reputation sleeps soundly at night? Academia might look down on a lowly plumber - but who is more often desperately needed?
The traditional trades cannot be outsourced, even some of the new ones - You might get your router and switch from China, but they don't install it and configure it for you - A hands-on networking guy is also a "Trade" that can command high hourly rates and cannot be outsourced either.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
That's easy: the ones that aren't getting laid!
So yes, the STEM students probably qualify for that honor.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Possibly, but there's also some truth to the idea that Physics follows Maths, Chemistry follows Physics, Biology follows Chemistry, then things like Anthropology follows Biology and so on, with the point being that the further you move away from maths, the more specialised and less generically applicable your skills become.
So because of this there may well be some truth in what she says- those trained in Biology may well indeed find it harder to find work if they can't work specifically in their chosen field, whilst those who did a degree in say Maths can go find a job in finance, computing, engineering, or any number of other fields because their skillset is just that much more applicable to so many different fields.
I'm not sure this means we should really feel sorry for the biologists though- it's the choice you make. I did maths and found it quite hard going, and have in recent years taken up biology courses in my spare time with a focus on plants and I find it far easier to learn than I ever found maths, and certainly than I ever found physics or chemistry. I'd argue the reduced employment prospects are simply the price you pay in taking the slightly easier, and hence possibly often less stressful and more enjoyable subject. Of course that's just my personal experience, others may vary, but there you go.
I should note that I don't mean this to be taken out of context by the biologists out there- I'm not saying biology is easy easy, it's still a STEM subject and IMHO they are inherently much more tricky subjects than pretty much all non-STEM subjects, but of the STEM subjects I certainly believe that biology is one of the easier choices - take it and you'll still have much more work and have to be much smarter than many of the non-STEM subjects require, but you'll still be getting it easier than say, the physicists, and mathematicians for example. You've still got to be smarter than what, 80% of people who do the non-STEM degrees, so I'm certainly not saying biologists aren't smart people or any such thing. Interestingly though a pattern I notice with many top biologists is that they're often quite adept in subjects like maths anyway, which is probably what gives them the edge in the first place.
Exactly. I really enjoy playing drums in weekend bands, but there's no income there, so I do it...wait for it....for fun. I play for beer and occasional cash. I would play for free if asked.
Therefore I have a real day job that has a salary and benefits. It's not nearly as fun as playing music, but it keeps my family insured and my bills paid.
I make close to 6 figures and don't use my undergrad degree at all. Shocking, I know. Not really. I imagine MOST people are doing something in their 40s that they didn't study in college.
You are ignoring a few things.
First, the US public school system is horrible. So yes, if I were hiring somebody it'd be at least partially reassuring that they did more than the bare minimum (high school grad or GED). It doesn't necessarily measure how smart or skilled you are, but it gives me something to start with. Many high school grads can barely put 2+2 together, even though they got B's in H.S. Our education system exists solely to push people through, whether they earned it or not. Once you fix that, then I could agree with your argument more.
There's very few people I know with degrees that are actually swimming in their education debt (1 person). There's a handful I know that went into careers they didn't go to school for, and for some of those it was their choice to do that. I know ZERO people who actually regret getting their degree because of debt. That speaks volumes to me.
You're also ignoring the fact that there's tons of "higher" education options in the US. You can go 4 years to a college if you want a bachelors, but you don't have to. Lots of in-demand technical jobs are hiring 2-year associate degree students, where many of them got their education from a cheap community college or something equivalent. There's tons of very specific programs too that are very cheap that can be done in even less time, you can do alongside a job, and will catapult you ahead of where you are now while giving you some sense of direction in your career. Many of these also mix classes with hands-on training. It doesn't take 4 years of college to become a licensed plumber for example (which earns a very decent living). You can argue the quality of said educations all you want, but if it gets you a better job or fulfills a goal, then it works just fine.
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