Slashdot Mirror
'Nature' Explores Why So Many Postgrads Have Bad Mental Health (nature.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
This week Nature tweeted that the rates of depression and anxiety reported by postgraduate students were six times higher than in the general population -- and received more than 1,200 retweets and received 170 replies. "This is not a one dimensional problem. Financial burden, hostile academia, red tape, tough job market, no proper career guidance. Take your pick," read one response. "Maybe being told day in, day out that the work you spend 10+ hrs a day, 6-7 days a week on isn't good enough," said another.
The science magazine takes this as more proof that "there is a problem among young scientists. Too many have mental-health difficulties, and too many say that the demands of the role are partly to blame. Neither issue gets the attention it deserves." They're now gathering stories from postgraduates about mental-health issues, and vowing to give the issue more coverage. "There is a problem with the culture in science, and it is one that loads an increasing burden on the shoulders of younger generations. The evidence suggests that they are feeling the effects. (Among the tweets, one proposed solution to improving the PhD is to 'treat it like professional training instead of indentured servitude with no hope of a career at the end?'.)"
The science magazine takes this as more proof that "there is a problem among young scientists. Too many have mental-health difficulties, and too many say that the demands of the role are partly to blame. Neither issue gets the attention it deserves." They're now gathering stories from postgraduates about mental-health issues, and vowing to give the issue more coverage. "There is a problem with the culture in science, and it is one that loads an increasing burden on the shoulders of younger generations. The evidence suggests that they are feeling the effects. (Among the tweets, one proposed solution to improving the PhD is to 'treat it like professional training instead of indentured servitude with no hope of a career at the end?'.)"
Permanent head Damage. Been there, bashed my head against the proverbial brick wall, was never the same after.
John_Chalisque
maybe they are just overthinking; ike worrying about overthinking and bad mental health.
These workers are overworked and exploited by their professors, who use them as almost slave labor. I've got an easy fix, one that will coincide with most professors' views on fairness and social justice, and neatly solve the students' problems as well. The idea is simplicity itself:
Total all salaries in the department and divide by the number of people in the department. That's it. That's the whole idea. The profs will go gaga over it because it allows them to live out their theories in real life, and the students will love it because it solves so many of their problems. We need to get some gravitas behind this, who wants to start a petition?
Six-figure school debt, PTSD from having a PhD advisor who hates you, only job prospects are adjunct positions for sub-minimum wage or research assistant, both without benefits. Parents who expect you to be on top of the world now that you have a PhD. Plus, you've spent the last 4-6 years in a library studying and haven't seen the sun since you started your Masters.
Do you really have to figure out why post-docs have depression?
You are welcome on my lawn.
If the work conditions are terrible, and the success rate (presumably landing a tenure-track position) is so low, it would seem to me that the only ethical course of action is to make PhD programs *much* harder to get into, and to discourage students who are considering that career path.
Unfortunately, this may be directly opposed to the interests of the university.
Should we assume that 22 year-olds are not capable of getting the information they need to make rational decisions and intervene with legislation?
Personally, I'd be fine with requiring universities to find out and disclose the percentage of post-graduates who attain a faculty position (and perhaps their salary) within 10 years of their PhD. The cost of acquiring this information would be minuscule compared to years lost by people pursuing an ultimately futile career (who we would hope would be dissuaded once they understand reality).
It might be devastating for science (lots of work by high quality, low paid post-grads lost), but the ethics are clear.
There is irrational depression and rational 'oh shit what the fuck have I done'.
Many recent grads are facing the end of 'the party', the realization that 'the party' has left them dumber then when they started college and denial of the both these facts.
If you have a * studies degree and your not depressed, see a shrink.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Sounds like they're just preparing them for the real world.
Maybe if the universities didn't promote socialism so much, their graduates would have a chance at being able to make a living from their profession, instead of competing with those who receive their work (healthcare, etc) free as handouts and have no debt burden because they didn't go through higher education.
The problem these young PhD padawans may be experiencing may be called Windows 10 + Microsoft Office. Yes Excel 365, I am looking at you...
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
Advanced degrees are not for the people in need of a Career Guidance.
It’s the US. Are university people kind and generous and understanding? Are they warm and friendly? Are they reliable and trustworthy? Are they open and accepting? Are they good?
Spend your time around cold, mean, self-absorbed jerks year after year without a lot of good to balance it out and see if you end up with good mental health.
Trade all that to the corporate arse licking Career , man, and then come back and tell us if the money really do complensate for it.
All Ph.Ds are Bald?
Must be a reason.
Personally, I'd be fine with requiring universities to find out and disclose the percentage of post-graduates who attain a faculty position (and perhaps their salary) within 10 years of their PhD
They already do this (not out of legislation, but out of honesty), and have been doing it since way back in 1989 when I was applying for grad school. And the professional societies keep detailed statistics, publishing them regularly. Although please do note that "faculty position" might not be the best metric for success: physics PhDs who go to work as data scientists out-earn their peers in academia by a lot.
Why do people do it? Because they've been at the head of their class up till that point so are confident. really really love what they're doing, and so persist in spite of the odds. Not so different than your average minor league pro athlete. Wonder what the mental health of those guys is like?
Get rid the loans that can't be discharged!
Maybe, SJWs, PhDs self select and - you won't want to hear this - they do NOT represent a cross-section of society.
Maybe there will be more PhDs from one gender, one race, one sexual orientation NOT because of discrimination but because of BIOLOGY.
Maybe all your SJW whining has been SEXIST, RACIST, and every other IST that you haters made up.
Equality means EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.
Anything else is DISGUSTING DISCRIMINATION.
YOU PIGS.
Not noted here is that like all things, academia requires moderation and balance.
The tradeoff for pursuing a micro-scale specialty in a specialty into a doctorate is that you're missing a balanced education, perspective, worldly experience, and the things that help an adult mature into adulthood as a tradeoff.
Being an academic isn't intrinsically harder than other fields - but it allows one to bypass a lot of peer bonding, and teamwork, and behavior that balances these issues.
The lie is that a 22 year old kid fresh out of school can become an effective scientist by staying in school some more. This is false. When you're 22 and just finished college, you have no idea what the working world is like, you have no idea what a paycheck really gets you, and more importantly, you have no idea what avenues of research are actually interesting to the world at large rather than to do for the sake of doing something.
And on the personal side, marriage and children are the undiscovered country and five or six years aren't really meaningful numbers to you if all you have known is school, school, and more school.
The result is that if you go straight through, as you are encouraged to by all your professors, you have no aim, you have no real work ethic, and you have no adulthood. And you don't find out until you're in your mid twenties, adrift in your research, have no savings, and have had limited opportunities to gain the confidence of having exercised basic adult skills that you might have made a mistake.
A solution to this would be for PhD programs to reject any applicants who have not had at least 5 or 6 years of industry experience. You'd have fewer people, and you'd have to pay them more, but the quality of the research would go up while the quantity of drama would go down. One way of achieving this would be for universities to partner up with companies who sponsor their junior or early mid-career employees to pursue research of interest to the company.
I am partaking of this arrangement that my not-so-well-known employer has with a well-known tech school. I worked for nine years at this place before they sent me off to school, and while a cake-walk it isn't, thinking back to how I handled myself and the sheer volume of stuff I didn't know when I had just graduated from college, I am convinced that I would not have done well at all had I gone straight through.
Of the people I know who did go straight through, some did better than others but they were lucky or innately talented. The rest floundered and graduated after a length of time by writing a "franken-thesis," which reads like, "I did this, then I did this other thing that's kind of related to the first thing, and then I did a third thing, and now I'm done!" To some extent, that can't be avoided if you're doing something new, but it would serve everyone better if that journey of self-discovery which inevitably occurs in one's twenties happened in the course of doing serious work for a serious employer and not dicking around in academia.
The stresses associated with the lie presented as a fancy piece of paper (BA, MA, PhD, and all the BS;) while some banksters sell the other piece of paper (loan forms) off to your parents in their retirement; knowing all the while you can't possible pay it back before you're ready to retire or criminally insane. Whichever comes first.
Hope your $60000 indoctrination was worth it. Now your mind is like a fruity jello mold at room temperature.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
The key to understanding postgraduate work in science is that it is not training and not preparation for anything, it IS scientific work. For the vast majority of us in science, we do not continue in scientific work after academic graduate and postdoc work.
This is because of the economics of scientific work. 1) We heavily subsidize research (not a problem in itself, but the labor market and overall metrics end up set by the government). 2) We prioritize publication over any practical metric such as jobs, public interest, or economic impact. 3) We bid out this work to organizations that can maximize publications for minimal cost, allowing them to violate just about any labor law they'd like in the process.
So "scientific research" is now defined as paper publishing. The people who "do" science are graduate students and postdocs, with a small number of other people directly involved. Once you're done with that stage of your career, either you're a professor, or your primary job is not "scientific research." Though we all tend to do a little publishing in industry and government, it's generally a very minor professional metric. PhDs entering industry have to play catch up on things like processional standards, the basic concepts of profitability, and the difference between technology and product.
Of course the people caught in the middle of this are doing poorly. They're in jobs that sound like a training position, but often there's no industry for them to train for. If there is an industry to train for, you're almost always better off taking a job right out of undergrad. The professors who manage our scientific workforce have no management training. The universities employing these folks are allowed to do things like charge them for the right to keep their job, and have special visas that ensure foreign labor can't leave the job. The "investors" in science (grant managers) have no actual metrics, oversight, or practical goals other than to maximize the churn of young scientists and papers through the system. So that's what we get.
As a young scientist, you can break out of this system. The key is to understand that virtually no one at a university is going to understand what you should be doing. Find one of the few companies making progress in a scientific field you like and ask someone there what to do. Oh, and do that before you apply to grad school.
I know that grad-school can be rough. As other have mentioned, advisors can be a bit ornery. Part of the problem there is the same that occurs in the rest of the economy; no one really knows how to train a good manager. So professors, who might be a bit odd to start (see reason below), wind up working their oddness on grad-students...who might just graduate and become damaged professors themselves.
A bigger reason, I believe, is that academia is more forgiving than the business world. Oddness will get canned in the business world, and I don't mean the usual crap anti-people managers inflict on their subjects. Odd in the manner of barking mad....well, maybe not entirely barking, but certainly yipping a bit like a deranged poodle. The oddness gets intensified because academia rewards individual effort, not team effort. So little oddballs get to spend a lot of time with their own brains...watering and feeding their oddness until by time of graduation, they can become true nutjobs.
Another problem for science is there are few women. That means you have a lot of little boys who don't know what do with one when she tells you in precise terms what your "issues" are. So they get no female feedback, which doesn't give a rat's ass about their ego. Their ego gets to grow unchecked and finds expression in being mean little bastards to the people they can get away with running roughshod over.
The universities make their money from bringing in international students, collecting the fees which they use to fund research. There are also political objectives in introducing democracy and lifestyles of the West to those international students who will return back home. Once you have trained someone up in your country, it is preferable that they stay.
Some transfer to other universities back home. The majority move elsewhere such as industry. Some go into banking.
Some companies are only interest in "straight shooters" or "high achievers", people who have whizzed through high school with awards, passed university with commendations and 1st class Honours or other qualifications, then done a PhD in two or three years. Then after using them for a year or so, those kids will be dumped for the new batch .
It's probably not just the external stresses.
years of cultural marxist indoctrination.
I got a Ph.d. a couple of years ago. Although it wasn't a perfect match (I hated reading and writing papers soooooo much) I still consider myself to be extremely lucky. My advisor was somebody that I have great respect to, who always treated the students with respect. Adequate funding so that I could roughly break even and still start a family. Met a lot of interesting people who I still have close contact with. Long work hours, but at least I had a choice not do work long hours, it wasn't like anybody was forcing me to do so.
The thing is, you really have to be aware of what you are jumping into. If you are applying without knowing who you are working with, what kind of research topic you need to handle, it is very possible that you are going to enter one of those abusive environments. Yes, track records help. For example, how long did people take to finish their degree, how many of them ended up dropping out, etc.
When I signed up, one of the big no-no indicators were to avoid research groups that had little or zero students from that university's undergrad students. If none of the students from the better informed group bothered applying, it usually means there is something wrong.
One last thing - even after starting, if you see something is wrong, run. Personally I dont think a degree is worth being abused for years anymore.
[...]the only ethical course of action is to make PhD programs *much* harder to get into, and to discourage students who are considering that career path.
The real problem is that we have no solid metric to predict future academic success* of a putative PhD candidate.
My feeling is that we shouldn't make it harder to get in. We should make it much easier for them to get out gracefully and in a manner which is still useful to the society and the candidate.
Anecdotally, back in the days when I was applying to get in, I was considered severely under-qualified due to my low GPA and due to my lack of experience. I was admitted on probation into a single university. All because a laid-back guy pushed others to give me a chance. In the years since, I have out-performed my classmates, sometimes by leaps and bounds. I attribute it to my extensive experience at failing, and knowing how to not get freaked out by it, but rather how to get up and try again (and again, and again).
These days, mentoring the new generation of "superstar" PhDs, after about two years, I can predict that most of them just won't be successful. But there is also not a good way to tell them that they are probably wasting their time...
--
*) The best predictor of success for natural sciences appears to be verbal GRE, for whatever reason. All the other predictors - GPA, subject test scores, recommendation letters, age/gender/nationality/wealth - seem to be utter crap.
Do not forget about postsocs. Selling bodies for medical experiments or to willing perverts.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It would indeed be devastating for science, and thus the entire western world. The one competitive advantage we have left is high quality research; if we throw that under a bus we may as well just pack it in and go back to subsistence agriculture.
The solution isn't do do less research, it's to pay people properly. If that means spending central government funding on pure research that might not have immediate commercial benefits, then that's OK; it's probably the best use we can put the money to short of universal healthcare.
The privileged are far more likely to be diagnosed mentally ill. Being a PhD student is a prime indicator of privilege. To think those stuck in menial dead end jobs are not more likely to be mentally ill is merely not to properly consider the question.
Paul Beardsell
Perhaps now you can take the time to learn how to write English correctly.
Your writing is unbelievably poor.
It beggars belief that you have a degree in ANYTHING.
Stuff and nonsense. Research universities make less than half of their money from student tuition, and tuition sure as hell doesn't fund the research. If anything, it's the other way 'round. Research faculty actively pursue funding via grants, and the school takes a cut as overhead. This is why the overwhelming trend since WWII has been to decrease the emphasis on teaching and focus on building up funded research, which in turn has led to demand for grad students to do the grunt labor both in the labs and to cover teaching when faculty are focused on writing grants and publishing.
really really love what they're doing
This is why I dedicated my life to science, and why I received my PhD. After that, my career has been quite hard and at times quite painful. At the moment I am at a turning point in my life, and am unsure if it was all worth it. I had lots of fun doing research, but now the sacrifices are getting too much.
I still haven't figured out which way to turn. I have to say, I am quite bitter and disappointed with at least a part of academia. But I did spend several years working in the industry before returning to academia, and that wasn't fun, either. At my age I expect a lot of ageism, there, so there's that.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Given all the problems in the world that need solving, why does the world find little value in PhD's? Maybe one answer is to create more research organizations outside of universities which can receive government grants, similar to CSIRO in Australia? Universities are not good at problem solving research; researchers choose problems at will not based on value to society but on how easy it is to advance their career and can abandon a problem on a whim, grad students graduate and abandon their research, there is no engineering support for most projects (engineers cost too much and are difficult to add to grant proposals), Corporations hire PhD's but mostly not to solve the worlds problems, just to make money. So there are few long term research groups actually studying crucial problems in depth and the ones that do exist typically are understaffed and have few resources. The system seems designed to keep the world as it is. "This is 20th Century America and we're going to keep it that way." - The Man Who Fell To Earth
A million times this.
When facts, reason and logic are usurped by ideological dogma then its very very difficult to reconcile the thoughts with the real world, there are serious consequences/challenges if they do it for long enough.
Same thing with single parent children, especially single mother children, fathers teach important stuff like limits and consequences amongst many other good things.
ADHD drugs in full force since ~1970
How many other things can we consider? I'm betting a very long list of things that we have been doing for some 30-60 years that are just outright experiments on the live society.
I'm a tenured professor who is considering leaving my position in part because of the problems with academic science.
It's a bit more complicated in my situation because of family issues, but the problems being described are just creeping their way up the chain. Or rather, the postdocs are feeling trickle down what faculty are dealing with.
No one wants to admit this, but universities are broken. They're underfunded by the states, and the perverse system now is that the universities skim off overfunded federal grants to support themselves. This leads to horrible incentive systems, where universities have an incentive to basically create this gladiator-style approach to science, where whoever brings the most money in wins. Inevitably this means accepting grad students to act as labor, to support the grants, all sorts of corruption in terms of attention-seeking and credit, fraud, lack of replicability, and so forth and so on. If research is useful, cited, it doesn't matter if it doesn't bring in external funding, and the goal seems to be TED Talks and money. I've lost any sense that the most talked about researchers are actually the ones who deserve the credit, or that the most popular research is actually the most rigorous.
Imagine if you hired an electrician to fix the wiring in your house, but then told them you wouldn't pay them unless they brought in a profit to you by bringing in funds somehow from somewhere else. This is basically how academics works now.
The issues being discussed in the article are getting more difficult to ignore. I was at a mentoring / teaching workshop recently, and the whole thing just kind of broke down, into an informal discussion about how graduate students and postdocs are not happy about academics anymore. Leaders of their field were just sitting there, in a heartfelt way, talking about how different things are compared to even 20 years ago, in terms of students outright wanting out of academics. These leaders were confused about this, as if they didn't understand, which was equally puzzling to me.
I am not a Republican, but I give them credit for trying to change things. Recently they tried to cut indirect funding, which was the right thing, and they got slammed for cutting science funding. The problem isn't funds for research, it's the incentive system it creates.
Indirect funds need to be itemized and justified, federal grants should be changed in terms of how they're awarded (former federal research institute directors have proposed a lottery system, for example), awards should be given based on publication record, and so forth.
I've been in meetings or heard stories where grad students have been told that if their research doesn't bring in a profit to the university it doesn't have value to society, regardless of citations; where faculty have been told that student research stipends should only go to students who already have grant money supporting them (as in, assistantships should only go to students who already have an assistantship); and know of endowed professors being told it is inappropriate for them to mentor grad students because they don't have grant funding (even though the department is chronically short of TAs to fill their needs).
Take fewer students? That will *never* happen as long as universities are incentivized to find cheap labor.
It may not mean much coming from an AC but I agree. During my education, my friends came from all kinds of backgrounds and political persuasions. Class-wise there has been no consistent outcome - some working-class friends worked their way up; some upper-class friends were on an obvious decline socio-economically. But all of the complete fuck-ups were left-wingers. The one who committed suicide. The several who took enough drugs or alcohol to destroy their brains. The ones who became obsessed with doing something worthless until they reached middle age then became bitter because the others who had followed a career were more successful.
It's not that all of the left-wingers in my life were fuck-ups. Far from it. But I've spent my life with some of the most fascinating, intelligent people and, in my 49 years, all of the fuck-ups were left-wingers.
it's not over supply, any more than there's an over supply of musicians. Actual scientists just plain love doing science. That makes it easy for people to take advantage of them. Same as musicians get taken advantage of. And sports players. And video game programmers. And pretty much anyone who obsessively loves doing a job. There's always a few breakout successes (often times because a spouse or family member is handling the business side of things and keeping them from getting screwed) but for the most part we shit all over the rest.
This is one of the reasons minimum wage laws exist and need strict enforcement. It's also one of the reasons academia is heavily subsidized. These people will do really, really useful work if you let them. Or they'll get ground into dust if you let the suits have their way.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever."
And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society."
Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."
Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document le
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The only smart that is cool, is rich. Other smart and you're surrounded by stupid people that are hell bent on killing all of us.
...Let's remember that this is a self-selected subset of people?
These are the folks who chose to remain (some would say hide) in academia while all their peers were venturing out into the world of maturity.
-Styopa
National research institutions such as the CSIRO make a lot of sense. However, they too fall into the same trappings as everyone else. CSIRO has increasingly fallen into the everyone's an 'entrepreneur' trap that promotes short termism. Also as as organisation it is barred from applying for a lot of Aus government funded grants - for instance CSIRO can't lead ARC grant applications.
Imagine if you hired an electrician to fix the wiring in your house, but then told them you wouldn't pay them unless they brought in a profit to you by bringing in funds somehow from somewhere else. This is basically how academics works now.
That is actually exactly how getting a job at a law firm works, and why I am no longer a practicing attorney.
In the UK, each post-doc student brought in £120K to the department from overseas fees and research grants.
Fewer PhD students would be great for everyone... except unis themselves. My lab has an oversupply and, frankly, many of them are simply not suited to a PhD and will not get a job even after they've been force-fed enough to pass. We supervisors know it, our bosses know it, I suspect the students know it, and yet... if you want to keep your job you *must*, by uni dictate, supervise x students this year, then 1.1x next year, and so on. So here we all are.
It hurts the students. It hurts the quality of research - it kills the ability of researchers to do actual research. And yet... it helps the uni justify its existence to governments, the public, and other unis. It helps them attract still more students (aka money), so the whole nightmare rolls on, harming everyone involved.
My (anonimous because I'm a coward with a mortgage) advice to prospective PhD students is simple: unless you're one of the unfortunate few who are absolutely curiosity driven and must study to feel whole... get out. Don't walk. Run. Run far, far away. Escape while you still can. Do whatever it takes, but for the love of fsm do it now before it's too late.
They only see the tenured professors they want to be, and how good they have it, how few cares. They fail to see the army of the non-tenured around them filling the trenches. They view the other post-grads and associate profs as the cannon fodder they intend to use them as when they make the grade, which will probably never happen. Such a disconnect from reality is certain to lead to depression as the truth slowly reveals itself to their unwilling consciousness.
Like Athletics, where all the players go on to make pro, keep their earnings, and contribute to society. The jocks all go in with realistic expectations for athletic glory and all the trappings...
The stats is here for how many grads get faculty positions:
http://grantome.com/blog/wasted-potential
"For awardees who started their F32 fellowship in 2006, there was less than a 10% chance of obtaining a R01 grant by the end of 2013"
There is no such thing as post-doc student. Either grad student or postdoctoral fella.
Unless you call the professors Students like in some Balliol or Christ church fashion. Have a cup of sherry matey,
Not offensive. Just not funny. All these non-funny one liners don't contribute to the conversation. They just get their poster a tiny bit of social validation like the few guys who replied to yours trying to get along for the ride. Like losers in a comedy club who repeat the comedian's joke with a small twist.
Not picking on you. Many people do it on many sites, but they're just not funny. Being really funny takes work. Read the NYT interview with Seinfeld. There's a lot of work which goes into his jokes with you don't realize. You assume you have the same gift he does. No, you don't, none of you.
So unless you have something really funny or insightful then don't bother. No one cares. Hug your significant other. Your dog. Your cat. Read a book. Anything but this. You're welcome.
Companies like IBM, DEC, Kodak, Xerox, etc. used to DEVELOP PEOPLE. And they
would give upward career paths that didn't always require moving into management per se.
And they used to have pensions.
Companies today are very short-sighted in regards their own staff and in regards to
foreign (I'm looking at you China) competition. Heck, companies are giving away
their IP just to get into China. It's completely nuts.
That's why Trump is the last chance we have to MAGA.
Nothing seriously wrong with his writing and overall he delivers good points.
That's the simple truth. In our time academia is a few useful physicists, chemists, medical researchers and a few other folks surrounded by armies and armies of regular people who have only a very faint graps of what science actually means and got themselves a PhD for the social value an academic title has.
Meanwhile the avantgarde has long since left academia. That goes for technology (preaching to the choir here), that goes for measurable amounts of applicable science and that sure as hell goes for philosophy and art. If you find an artist who's an academic you can rest assured that his/her stuff is shite and that any second-grade graffiti sprayer or street-dancer will produce better art than they.
Apart from fundamental effing hard science such as the basic nature sciences and some engineering basics academia is a farce for people doing "sociology" or "gender studies" and expecting to earn truckloads of money once they graduate.
This all goes especially for the U.S. where universities often are businesses and not official institutions. But it isn't that much better in Europe, I can tell you that much.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Frankly, I cannot conceive how any thoughtful man can really be happy. There is really nothing in the universe to live for, and unless one can dismiss thought and speculation from his mind, he is liable to be engulfed by the very immensity of creation. It is vastly better that he should amuse himself with religion, or any other convenient palliative to reality which comes to hand."
â"H.P. Lovercraft in a letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
(as quoted in the H.P. Lovecraft facebook feed)
-Dave
How easily can you start your own university ? Harder than your own company ?
Being too smart or too successful comes at a price. People tend to be driven to succeed by unrelenting standards, and clearly this has effect on their mental health. But equally, other people donâ(TM)t like those who are successful - it just reminds them of their own failures. As a result, outliers are punished most of the way through, by their peers, by their spouses, and of course by the law and legal system built to deal with a different kind of people.
The antidote is knowing this and being ready for it. You have to look after yourself, because nobody else will.
Seriously. Colleges have become cult indoc centers.
You go messing around in people's heads, feeding them rampant political bullshit instead of the actual knowledge they paid for, and it has consequences.
I can attest to this, having taught at university. I would start with a rousing chorus of "the people's flag", before launching into my lecture entitled "Distributed systems and the worker will rise". I think the best exam question I ever set was "Part A) Using Maxwell's equations, derive the equation for the skin depth in an infinite cylindrical conductor. Pat B) show how this proves that the worker must control the means of production". Also because of Marxism, I gave all the students exactly the same grade.
That ast act sort or caused some truoube with the academic staff, but they realised the error of their ways when I quoted Trotsky at them. Now every student graduates with the same mark.
True story.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Amen to all you write, dude. Another tenured prof here. "Disgusting" is the only word apt to describe the mentality of those who set up the current academic system.
The lie is that a 22 year old kid fresh out of school can become an effective scientist by staying in school some more. This is false.
It's demonstraby true, since the majority of effective scientists have actually done this.
and more importantly, you have no idea what avenues of research are actually interesting to the world at large
Neither does the world at large. Your supervisor wil be some guide but ultimately open research is a scattershot approach. Much will come to nothing. Some wil make a huge difference, but it can take decades.
The result is that if you go straight through, as you are encouraged to by all your professors, you have no aim, you have no real work ethic, and you have no adulthood. And you don't find out until you're in your mid twenties, adrift in your research, have no savings, and have had limited opportunities to gain the confidence of having exercised basic adult skills that you might have made a mistake.
Speak for yourself. Not all of us were as useless as you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
One of the big drivers of uncertainty in the postgraduate job market is oversupply. The graduate schools admit too many students, so there is a glut of PhDs to fill a shrinking number of academic jobs. Schools like Stanford routinely hire three new PhDs when they anticipate one tenured opening, and let the three candidates fight it out before they make a decision in three or four years. This does not make for a collegial or healthy atmosphere. More of these students should be sent into the real world sooner by being denied admittance into graduate schools. It would be a better situation for everyone involved.
Having finished my Ph.D. about 15 years ago, I remember how it was to work in a theoretical field that was described as "safely outside the reach of experiment". Statements were true or false depending on _who_ made them, not the content of the statement. Each person was judged by a different standard.Those who were known from the start to have the right connections were helped while the others were set up to fail. And the Ph.D. advisors waited until the very end before picking up a fight, when the student was under pressure to graduate.
Finishing the Ph.D. with a sane mind was indeed a huge victory. As a confirmation I had to hear on a daily basis the profs telling tales of students who had nervous breakdowns and being unable to graduate.
Later on as a postdoc I had to hear the exact same stories but with "graduation" replaced with "tenure" and "student" replaced with "junior professor". Academia is a very hostile place if you don't have the right connections.
Attack the idea, not the man. I'm quite content with how my twenties turned out. I'm telling you what I've seen in friends and colleagues who went the traditional route. As for history, for every one of yours that achieved greatness by age 27, there are hundreds who shuffled off into obscure mediocrity and would have done better not going to grad school. My statement stands.
The initial problems you experienced were completely predictable, comrade. The academicians and nomenklatura at your institution lacked the proper socio-political awareness and training. Of course such a state is intolerable if we are to build a sound foundation for the future! The situation is being addressed.
Engineering Education: Social Engineering Rather than Actual Engineering
Alas, the world we engineers envisioned as young students is not quite as simple and straightforward as we had wished because a phalanx of social justice warriors, ideologues, egalitarians, and opportunistic careerists has ensconced itself in America’s college and universities. The destruction they have caused in the humanities and social sciences has now reached to engineering.
One of the features of their growing power is the phenomenon of “engineering education” programs and schools. They have sought out the soft underbelly of engineering, where phrases such as “diversity” and “different perspectives” and “racial gaps” and “unfairness” and “unequal outcomes” make up the daily vocabulary. Instead of calculating engine horsepower or microchip power/size ratios or aerodynamic lift and drag, the engineering educationists focus on group representation, hurt feelings, and “microaggressions” in the profession.
An excellent example is the establishment at Purdue University (once informally called the “MIT of the Midwest”) of a whole School of Engineering Education. What is this school’s purpose? Its website tells us that it “envisions a more socially connected and scholarly engineering education. This implies that we radically rethink the boundaries of engineering and the purpose of engineering education.”
I have always thought my own education in engineering was as scholarly as possible. Once I became a professor, I never worried about how “socially connected” the education we provided at Michigan State for engineering students was. With trepidation, I read on to see if I was missing something important. I learned to my dismay that Purdue’s engineering education school rests on three bizarre pillars: “reimagining engineering and engineering education, creating field-shaping knowledge, and empowering agents of change.”
All academic fields shape knowledge and bring about change, but they don’t do that by “empowering” the agents of change. And what does “reimagining engineering” mean? The great aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán said that “a scientist studies what is, while an engineer creates what never was.” In engineering, we apply scientific principles in the design and creation of new technologies for mankind’s use. It’s a creative process. Since engineering is basically creativity, how are we supposed to “reimagine creativity”? That makes no sense. . . .
The recently appointed dean of Purdue’s school, Dr. Donna Riley, has an ambitious agenda.
In her words (italics mine): “I seek to revise engineering curricula to be relevant to a fuller range of student experiences and career destinations, integrating concerns related to public policy, professional ethics, and social responsibility; de-centering Western civilization; and uncovering contributions of women and other underrepresented groups. We examine how technology influences and is influenced by globalization, capitalism, and colonialism. Gender is a key[theme][throughout] the course. We[examine] racist and colonialist projects in science.”
That starts off innocently enough, discussing the intersection of engineering with public policy and ethics, but then veers off the rails once Riley begins disparaging the free movement of capital, the role of Weste
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The initial problems you experienced were completely predictable, comrade. The academicians and nomenklatura at your institution lacked the proper socio-political awareness and training. Of course such a state is intolerable if we are to build a sound foundation for the future! The situation is being addressed.
Da comrade. Since all bolts are made equal, we standardised on M3 nyon bolts through out. Any failure was deemed lack of loyalty.
True story.
Anyway I've no idea why you're quoting some random obscure blog at me about "engineering education" as opposed to the actual teaching of engineering. You don't seem to realise I'm taking the piss. None of whatever the hell it is you're complaining about actually made it in.
I think you're spending far too much time cluching your pearls and complaining about how peope areusing their freeze peach all wrong.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Attack the idea, not the man.
I attacked both the idea and you personally because you attacked first.
I'm telling you what I've seen in friends and colleagues who went the traditional route.
And I'm telling what I've seen in myself, friends and colegues.
As for history, for every one of yours that achieved greatness by age 27, there are hundreds who shuffled off into obscure mediocrity and would have done better not going to grad school.
The vast majority of people I know left academia to pursue well paid careers in industry. Your dichotomy between academic success and utter failure is a false one.
In fact median career average salary with a PhD is higher than without.
My statement stands
Nope.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Anyway I've no idea why . . .
Obviously. A pity though, since it isn't that hard to understand.
I think you're spending far too much time cluching your pearls and complaining about how peope areusing their freeze peach all wrong.
Oooh! Aren't you precious!
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You can't be a MAD scientist unless you are a scientist, now can you?
It is the same paradigm as Dr. Evil and his eight years of evil medical school.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
I think you're reading someone else's comments and responding to mine. Then again, judging by your signature, you may well be reading my comments and substituting your own alternative text somewhere between the back of your retina and your visual cortex.
Nearly all of the people who go to school first and shuffle off to six figure salaries in industry are successful by the metric of being gainfully employed but not successful by the metric of becoming the next Feynman or Salk. That much should be uncontroversial.
What you seem to find controversial and for some reason personally offensive is my further statement that an academic enterprise that sells the idea that everyone can, or should want to, become the next Feynman or Salk is selling a lie. They don't go right out and sell you this, of course, but they heavily imply it and they heavily encourage their graduates to pursue academic careers over industry careers. I am again speaking of my own experience, my friends' experiences, and my wife's experience.
I've seen this issue from both sides. On the academic side, if you are fortunate enough to get a faculty position, the pressure to bring in lots of grant money, and to graduate as many PhD students as possible is tremendous. The amount of grant money and the numbers of current students and graduated students are easy to enter into simple spread sheets that any administrator can read quickly. These are two main criteria for getting tenure. What happens to the students afterwards seems to be a less important metric.
I think you're reading someone else's comments and responding to mine.
Nope. See, the thing is if you trash talk some group of people, one of them might be listening. So all your preciousness about "oooh you attacked meeeeee" falls flat since you were the one hurling out insults first.
Nearly all of the people who go to school first and shuffle off to six figure salaries in industry are successful by the metric of being gainfully employed but not successful by the metric of becoming the next Feynman or Salk. That much should be uncontroversial.
That sounds like literaly the opposite of what you said in your previous post.
What you seem to find controversial
was the utter shite you spewed about having no work ethic etc.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Obviously.
Indeed. There is no reason I should understand why you're quoting large chunks of irrelevant, poorly written bog posts.
Oooh! Aren't you precious!
More so than you, clearly.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You really can't read. Or choose not to. I never said you don't have a work ethic, I said you don't learn it in school the way you learn it on the job. Hmmm...glanced at your sig again. I'm starting to lean against "can't read" and "don't read" and toward "can read and is paid to disagree."
I never said you don't have a work ethic,
Oh you're right you said:
no wait, that's exactly what you said.
You really can't read.
This seems to be the standard excuse from right wingers. When your ideas are so bad that there is iterally no defense, all you're left with is "you didn't read it". Thing is that looks awfully silly when what you wrote is only about 4 posts back.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Do you really think you can win an argument with me by pointing to individual snippets of what I said while ignoring the big picture of what I said in the same exact post? You act like you are a paid troll.
Huh, so you're pretty much denying what you wrote. Intetresting! You're acting like an unpaid idiot.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Hmm...paid by the post or paid by the character?
I get it. You might have written it but you don't feel you meant it now. And facts are after all all about your feelings not the cold hard truth. Oh how you live up to your handle.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
No you don't get it. You seem to think sentences stand on their own, and when a sentence in isolation disagrees with another taken in isolation from the same post or paragraph, that means the writer is insane, rather than making a point that can't be expressed in 140 characters.
Sentences should stand on their own reasonably well. In the case of that sentence, you supplied no context that would clarify its meaning as something other than the literal meaning. As a reader, I'm forced to the conclusion that you think going into grad school straight from the bachelor's doesn't develop an aim or a work ethic. If that's not what you think, please explain what you do think. We're willing to accept that you miswrote something. We all do that form time to time. However, you're doubling down on it and then saying you're misunderstood.
So, what do you think about going from undergrad studies directly to grad studies, like most people do? Given that the grad students develop work ethics (you need one to survive) and aims (you need one to ever get out of grad school with a degree), why do you think it's bad? I'm not saying that the standard practice can't be bad, but it is a bit of an extraordinary claim and does require support.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No you don't get it.
No I do get it. You either iswrote or said something stupid and instead of owning the mistake you're trying to pretend you never made it.
You seem to think sentences stand on their own,
Nothing else in your original post contradicts my interpretation.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
You seem to have understood my meaning quite correctly. What you did not do was jump to the assumption that people who go straight through are forever tainted as shiftless and aimless. I will repeat myself: I do not think grad school teaches you the things that you need to be successful at grad school as well as a couple of years in real employment outside of academia teaches you those things.