Slashdot Mirror
Faculty To Grad Students: Go Work 80-Hour Weeks!
New submitter Ian Paul Freeley writes "Controversy has erupted after a departmental email from faculty to astrophysics graduate students was leaked. Key tips for success in grad school include: 'However, if you informally canvass the faculty (those people for whose jobs you came here to train), most will tell you that they worked 80-100 hours/week in graduate school. No one told us to work those hours, but we enjoyed what we were doing enough to want to do so...If you find yourself thinking about astronomy and wanting to work on your research most of your waking hours, then academic research may in fact be the best career choice for you.' Reactions from astronomy blogs has ranged from disappointment to concern for the mental health of the students. It also seems that such a culture, coupled with the poor job prospects for academics, is continuing to drive talent away from the field. This has been recognized as a problem for over 15 years in the astronomy community, but little seems to have changed. Any tips for those of us looking to instigate culture change and promote healthy work-life balance?"
This sounds shockingly similar to the (possibly still-ongoing, I'm not sure) controversy over 36-hour shifts for doctors. The only real justification is "We did it when we were young, so today's young'uns should do it too! Never mind what the data says!"
Everything is better with chainsaws.
It's not just a job; it's an indenture.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
While producing your thesis!
Watch faculty position offered to applicant from China or India!
Win!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Bosses love to hear it. Employees like you are easier to exploit. More work for less pay. Employees like you also make it easier to pressure other employees into similar behavior.
An important difference is that the reason for wanting to reduce the medical resident workload wasn't concern for the residents, it was concern for the patients. Who wants to be treated by a resident who hasn't slept in 48 hours?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
"More than 40" is not the same as "80." I've hit 60 hours in a week before, but at 80 I doubt I'd be any more productive.
Exactly.
The letter-to-students suggests that 80-hours should be the regular work-week, that works out to:
16/hours a day 5 days per week, or
13/hours a day 6 days per week, or
11/hours a day 7 days per week.
Assuming 7 hours of sleep, three 0.5 hour lunch diversions, 1 hour for commuting, and 0.5 hours/day for bathroom breaks, this leaves the person with about 2.5 hours/day for everything else: running errands, doing laundry, exploring hobbies, relaxing, etc. This is not a fun way to live, and it's also not a sustainable way to live/work: trying to work that hard inevitably results in people being burnt-out, constantly tired, and not very productive. This is especially true in highly-skilled jobs, where the quality of your work comes down to how alert your mind is, and how creative you are... both of which require rest, relaxation, and time spent on diversions.
The 80-hour week is also a lie. That's not how much the professors worked when they were in grad school. No doubt they worked 80-hour weeks on occasion, and those may have even been productive weeks. But there's no way they sustained that kind of work for the entirety of grad school. When I was in grad school we all routinely worked long hours (more than 40 hours/week), and occasionally crazy hours (80 hour/weeks not at all unheard of). But students who tried (e.g. because of pressure from their supervisor) to sustain crazy 70+ hour weeks burned out incredibly quickly.
The letter was trying to encourage the students to work hard and be passionate, which are indeed crucial for grad school. But by setting an arbitrary and frankly ridiculous rule like "80 hours/week" undermines this message.
The point is that if working 80-100 hours a week is the norm for those students, then many of them are going to suffer and be un healthy, and we as a society should not simply accept, condone or encourage that. I mean do the math: 100 hours of work in one week means 14.5 hours a day, every day. That's INSANE. Considering the average person needs 9 hours of sleep per night to stay healthy, that leaves them the choice of either not sleeping enough, or having 30 minutes of time away from work per day. No prob, it's just enough time for a shit and shower! You can eat while you work.
If there's a joke here, it's that anyone thinks its ok for this to be a reality check.
The fact is you get rich and success by working hard.
What you really meant was, "People become successful by working hard on the right things." Unfortunately, the first thing graduate students discover when they begin their research careers is that they are not going to be working on "the right things," that research work is not what they thought, and that the likelihood that their PhD work will be worth mentioning (beyond the fact that they did PhD work) is very low. Here are some characteristics of research as a graduate student:
There are exceptions, but the reality of research is that it is mostly incremental, it is mostly determined by what NSF/NIH/DARPA want to see researched, and it is loaded with overstatements of results. Most outsiders do not notice this, because the only way to learn enough about a topic to even notice this trend is to become a researcher in that field. Most graduate students are embarrassed to be part of such a system, so they convince themselves that they are not actually doing it (but they really are, with a few rare exceptions).
Palm trees and 8