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I strongly considered getting my PhD and doing research, but the prospect of spending over a decade making less than subsistence wages and being treated like a neophyte despite years upon years of training was oddly unappealing. I can't think why anyone else would be turned away though.
I am at the end of my PhD and trying to figure out who I hate more, corporations or academia haha. Will probably end up at a non-profit. This stuff can be worth it, but it's a real crap shoot because you can wind up without support. A masters is a good idea, however.
Luckily, academia has become corporatized, so you no longer have to struggle with this choice.
2real4feels.
Well let me tell you about the biggest disservice academia does to PhD students. Or at least some of them. But it's worth mentioning, my PhD is in computer science, so your mileage may vary.
So first, in my experience, there are two kinds of advisors. There are some who give their students a ton of latitude, and are genuinely interested in what they get up to. Then there are those who see grad students as pokémon, and the reason to catch 'em all is that it helps with grant funding. These professors set the agenda, and their offices have all the whips and yokes you could need for slave-driving.
The latter professors prepare grad students for the realities of academia. The former group mean well, but I can't help but feel they're trying to live vicariously through their students. Because they long for the freedom they once enjoyed.
Actual academia is an unending series of songs and dances for funding, interspersed with teaching undergrads who don't give a fuck. This is also why you almost certainly see a huge difference in professors' attitudes toward undergrads versus grads: they have hope for grad students.
This is an interesting perspective! Don't think I've looked at it quite this way - I want to believe that one can be a kind and also realistic mentor - that's what I strive for. But the people who manage to get faculty positions are, by definition the ones who don't heed all of the signals telling them that academia is a mug's game.
Unfortunately I had a third kind that should legitimately never have grad students.
Sorry to hear that. What are they like?
The type that cannibalises students. Fortunately, I'm under someone better now, but I'm not really thrilled at participating in a system that tolerates that.
Ah yeah, I know the type. In CS those tend to be a more malicious version of the pokémon trainer sorts. Their main goal is career advancement, and they figure that parasitizing grad students (and postdocs) is how they can get there.
It's like I said originally, academia has gone corporate, including the abusive middle managers.
I've got the master's and I agree, was a good move. I still use the skills from it often despite being in a totally different field.
I did a pharma internship during my PhD and it cemented my intent to go to industry. It was really the people that I met who convinced me. People in meetings would make sure that everyone in the room understood what was going on, and they were really welcoming of criticism and had backup slides at hand to explain their experiments/results to newbies from other fields. I'd impose myself on random people in the cafeteria and ended up learning a lot about animal testing, scale-up chemistry, project management, and a bunch of other jobs in the company. Managers did a good job of keeping meetings on track when discussion went off the rails or people got into spats.
Going back to grad school after the internship was a culture shock - after I'd seen effective teams, academic collaborations just looked like on-paper money grabs to get grants with a monthly zoom call to keep up appearances. People would give talks with no consideration for whether the audience was following, and lunchtime conversations were people trying to convince me that they're very smart, without making a convincing case that they were doing their research right. I just got this overwhelming feeling that academia was structured in a way where I'd tire myself out fighting against badly incentivized people instead of banging my head against scientific problems.
The pharma money stuff is sketchy, but I tell myself that at least pharma makes drugs that will (in the worst case) eventually go off-patent. After my PhD some specific circumstances had me land my first job in the open source/nonprofit space, but my next stop if I leave this job will very likely be biotech/pharma.
I found the same in academia, to be honest, even in the earth sciences.
This brought me a lot of comfort: https://massivesci.com/articles/chaos-in-the-brickyard-comic-matteo-farinella/
This is real. I'm a white guy with every advantage, a PhD from Harvard and nearly 10 years of research after my PhD,, but it's still rough out there.
I'm geographically limited - I'm sure if I were willing to move anywhere, things would be a bit easier, but still.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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