Why? Because his advisor milked him for his work. She had a pile of papers to peer review ... hand it off to the grad studends. Have a talk to give? Give the grad students the task for writing up first drafts, collecting data, generating graphs etc. My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation.
I'm amazed that behavior like that of the advisor is allowed.
Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at the end of it, you should be a world expert in your specific topic.
A PhD is more like an apprenticeship, where you develop and refine your skills, your background knowledge in your area of specialization, your ability to write and do presentations, and your taste in research problems. These are all things take a lot of time to mature.
The problem with graduating fast is that (a) you wouldn't be able to do internships, (b) you would severely limit your ability to grow your social network (via workshops, conferences, internships, department service, etc), (c) you would limit your ability to deepen and broaden your portfolio of research, and (d) you limit the time your ideas have to percolate out into the rest of the research community and industry.
While I can't speak directly about your friend's experiences, learning how to do peer review and learning how to write first drafts are really important skills that can indirectly help with coming up and executing on a dissertation idea.
Can you define that with more specificity? I find that academics have a major blind spot where good career means "the path I took" to the exclusion of all other paths.
>Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science
And your CV says another 6 dropped out. What was good for their careers?
Also, depending on where you do it in Europe, the pay as a PhD student is higher. At the extreme end, I knew students getting paid $60K/year in one country, while I was getting $24K/year in the US.
Often it spill over a bit and I guess France travail (French job agency managing insurance for people losing their job) should often be cited /thanked in Phd student thesis for funding the final steps of their manuscript.
There are limited internship culture during the phd itself Afaik.
However phd is never started at Bachelor level, only after Msc that last two years and requires an internship or research projet.
I heard a person saying a bit like you that it is not enough to grow a Real expert though compared to US phd. But Oftentimes postdoc always follow for Longer and longer
However, taking more time than the standard length, whatever it is depending on the university or country where you are pursuing the title, is also something universities and specially PIs should be actively avoiding.
Maybe I have this view because I got mine in NL, where a PhD is a job with a defined length (4 years) and if you go over it, you don't get paid. So yes, it is an apprenticeship, but you should not be doing work for free in any case. Becoming an expert and the (relative) independence on how to do your research are of course selling points of the PhD, but a job is a job.
this is such a "trust me bro it's good for you" con.
i graduated in 3.5 years and went directly to FAANG where i make 2x the highest paid TT at the T10 school i graduated from. do you really have the gall to tell me that it wasn't good for my career to accelerate my PhD and thereby minimize its cost (i.e., opportunity cost).
> A PhD is more like an apprenticeship
the vast majority of advisors have no skills other than how to hack the pub game. they literally have zero clue about the research. the remainder are the "exceptions that prove the rule".
The straw that broke the camel back was being treated like shit by my avisor for the nth time. I still remember it. He was like let's meet tomorrow at 8.30. I woke up at 6.30 to be there in time. He shows up at 10.37. Mind you, this happened like a 10s times over the 2 years I was doing my doctorate. And that was just one of the things he would do to undermine you and have the feeling he hold you by the balls. And he sort of did. Not being able to do anything because of potential repercussions was dreadful.
Anyway, after that day I decided it was enough. I slashed his car tires in the evening, still showed up for a couple of weeks to avoid suspicions, and only then formally quit.
In my program the main reasons people took a long time to graduate was: by year 6 you are usually very well-trained and highly productive (making you very useful to your advisor), and advisors often require you to publish an important paper in a major journal (Science, Nature, Cell) before they sign your dissertation.
During undergrad a bunch of us got good enough at electronics and the machine shop that we had grad students asking US for help. We didn't realize it at the time, but just the instrumentation work could have landed us many a phd program, we were just having fun.
A molecular biochemist PhD I know was forced to redo her advisor's experiment over and over again because it wasn't getting the results he wanted. She knew she was beating a dead horse over the several years she was directed to work on the experiment, and had no other choice but to continue marching forward.
You must learn to write good reviews. That doesn't happen without writing quite a few.
Of course grad students should generate the first draft of talks, collect data, and generate graphics. That's exactly the point of grad school. You need to learn how to organize and present knowledge. How to tell a story.
>My friend said that nothing in the first five years of his PhD work contributed to his dissertation.
The point of the PhD is to learn to think about hard problems that are vague, to find your way around them, and learn how to do something new. It's not to stuff as much as possible into a dissertation or anything else.
And 6 years for a PhD? That's about right. You need to go from 0 to being the go-to expert everywhere on a totally new problem.
I stopped then and there, maybe one or two classmates continued. That was almost 20 years ago.
I'm thankful someone told us the truth and I made a career in a different field.
I think most grad students understand this, and it sounds like it was communicated clearly to you in a timely way.
Not the person you were asking, but I think we need to double down on disillusionment in these. I've spoken to too many kids who dreamed of careers in this well into high school, often at cost to other academic paths, when their performance already clearly showed they weren't going this route. Sadly, it is hard to be strong about correcting kids because it is seen as not believing in them and not encouraging them.
As disillusioned as one might become in academia, the path one is on to get there tends to better align with setting students up for a successful career outside of it compared to the ones you listed.
In general, pursing a doctoral degree requires a certain degree of financial stability. The successful doctoral students usually came from wealthy families, whereas the ones who struggled the most also struggled with finances. I believe it's essentially impossible to perform truly novel academic research when your personal finances are volatile. I also firmly believe that graduate student unionization is an elitist mentality that must be unilaterally opposed, as it is guaranteed to destroy any constructive academic culture.
The general message was academia isn't a romantic pursuit. If you love doing research and writing, work in a more technical field where the pay is much better, the hours are more stable and you're not fighting an uphill battle against the system and the people who want to take away tenure (which was a big flashpoint in academia when I was there) and with whom you will always be in competition for grants and research funding.
Thankfully, I never went back. The summer before I was supposed to start, the enthusiasm for grad school just turned off like a light switch. I just had no interest in pursuing a masters in my program. I pivoted instead and ended up in a totally different field. I later found out only one person in our class of 15 went on to grad school. Kind of crazy.
how is this different than saying if folks don't get a job it's just because they "weren't qualified"?
And isn't that just a tautology?
Isn't the point that we might think that getting a terminal degree would qualify a person for some kind of job in their field?
I mean, "I'm not too poor to eat, I just can't find anyone to sell me food at a price I can afford" is -a- take, but maybe not a helpful one.
I think this was always the case. The disillusionment isn't new and not all who are disillusioned will act on it. The rest just put their PhD where the money is, as always.
Has this changed recently?
But I don't think that's done with most science PhDs. Is that because of a culture of exploiting cheap labor?
However there have been a couple of long term trends: Switch to gig economy for college teaching, and loss of manufacturing industry. My first job out of grad school was in a factory.
This paper https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/93208 gives and estimate 87% PhD holders leave before becoming (tenured) faculty. And that's academia-wide. In the sciences more will be leaving. In exact sciences yet again more.
Truth is most people leave before even getting a PhD, so it's even worse (and the advice is to think long and hard before doing a PhD, and certainly starting one because you can't find a job for a few months is sure to result in disappointment)
And just a side question, it's incredible that her advisor would not use their computer (especially since they were in an analytical field, would think computers were essential for statisticians). What were their reasons? One obvious thought was were they just much older and didn't learn how to use them?
University of Illinois at Chicago (my alma mater) had a graduate student union in 2011, and I don't think a grad student union was so uncommon at the time...
> Besides the people in this thread bemoaning the state of research funding, international students, etc. (all of which are valid), a lot of people are becoming disillusioned with academia. ... grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market.
If there was more research funding and more jobs for researchers in academia this would result in both better pay for PhD students and more academic jobs post-PhD. The disillusionment is related to the funding.
Imagine if the US currently had a new massive project for physics research, you would get a lot more people doing physics Phds and much faster progress in physics. We know this because Edward Teller tricked Reagan into pumping billions of dollars into optics research and that resulted in optics being one of few areas in physics to see breakthrough after breakthrough.
There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.
This is a timeless entry. It's aimed at humanities, but every STEMy person I have shown it to agrees with it.
TLDR: Only get a PhD under 2 conditions:
1 - You are rich and otherwise very bored.
2 - If by Christmas in your first year in grad school, you are absolutely certain that you and your PI get along so well that nothing could hold you back from carrying that coffin at their funeral.
If either condition is not met stringently, you're wasting yours and everyone else's time.
Is this really true for the US? There's a grad student union which represents me where I'm at (non-US), was not aware this was so rare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...
Which is not to say that conditions in graduate schools (or academia as a whole) are great. But the unionization process is entangled in the legal framework around unions in the United States.
https://www.aaup.org/brief/columbia-university-364-nlrb-no-9...
Not really "intends". They already have a negotiated contract with the university to ensure wages, healthcare, overtime protections, etc.
Generally understood to be an output of Googlers.
Basic research would be something like optimal control theory, which came well before the transformer design.
I'm not trying to be evasive; I can see how my distinction could be seen as conveniently just outside industry's purview. Put it this way: I think companies, particularly small ones, are incentivized to pursue well-known methods/materials. Innovation modulates and optimizes.
Student unions like MIT's GSU should be banned.
Sad if true, they should have known that was a long shot, it's extremely well known that the number of postdoc and tenure track openings in any given year is far exceeded by the number of PhD grads each year.
Is any of this news though? This is the status quo for decades. What is new are massive cuts in funding and the current administration's hostility to foreigners and to universities.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union
It definitely isn't :) many universities have unions for grad students
I'm deep in the weeds and literally everyone around me has a "make as much money as you can while it lasts and maybe you'll have enough to retire in some remote village if the job market goes to shit" attitude.
So yeah I can imagine people taking that $150-250K entry level silicon valley job over the $30K/year PhD and risking having nearly zero savings and no job prospects at graduation time.
... in a highly politicized and volatile environment. If you're in a PhD program at a university and its president says something that hurts the US president's feelings, well, all your funding gets cut and, best case, your work is stalled for some time.
I know somebody who somehow landed a tenure track position in the humanities where a PhD can take 10 years and there are 200-300 applicants for 10 positions.
Any field with an imbalance like this leads to low pay, unpaid work, the importance of politics and petty grievances. I don’t understand the appeal.
I’d really love to know why people pursue this career knowing all this in advance. Is it the belief that they’ll beat the odds? So hubris?
Lol. Well you should introduce MIT to the concept of supply and demand. I am confident you can find people to pay MIT to work there.
Is the grass generally greener though?
This is not disconnected. It is also not new. People have been disillusioned with academia since there were students.
> Probably 80% of the recent PhD grads I know are looking to leave academia, despite the fact that they went into it to pursue a career in academia.
It’s very hard to make a sweeping statement like this. PhDs are segmented by field and subfield.
Almost everyone entering a Ph.D. program does it to have the option of going to academia. It’s a _research_ degree. Unlike a JD or an MD it doesn’t lead to a licensed profession. Or even a job.
But in some fields (eg: chemistry and many areas of biology), 80% of grads have ended up in industry for decades. There’s also a long tradition of Nobel Prizes going to people in industry, so it’s not viewed as a second-rate choice.
> The median science PhD takes 6 years now, and is grueling work for terrible pay, all for difficult job prospects given the current market.
It’s true that the pay is (relatively) bad. I liked to think of it as an incentive to graduate, but then I did a postdoc for similarly bad pay before leaving for industry, so maybe it wasn’t enough of an incentive.
But the length has been 6ish years in a good portion of the physical and biological sciences for a couple of decades.
I wouldn’t call the work “grueling.” In most fields you’re doing lab work or desk work, not manual labor, and while the hours can be long, at the end of the day it’s driven a lot by the a startup-like mentality: this is your career and you get what you put into it.
> MIT recently became one of the first universities to get a grad student union to try and combat the increasingly exploitative nature of academia.
MIT is not a thought leader here. Unions have been a thing since at least the mid 2010s at a number of Ivy’s, and various University of California schools have had a union since the early-to-mid 2000s.
> I can see how undergrads may look <things> and decide that they don't want to continue down that path.
It’s a valid choice. It’s been a valid choice. This has nothing to do with AI. You start a PhD to pursue original research (fsvo original), and that’s _hard_. It’s always been hard. It didn’t get hard last year.
Depending on the field, the job market has been bad for decades, too. Humanities fields are always a bear market. There used to be blogs about leaving for industry in history in the 2000s. In the 90s you’d hear cautionary tales about someone’s uncle had a PhD in physics and was now managing an Arby’s.
Departments could do a much better job with prepping graduates for industry. Successfully completing a PhD comes with a lot of hard-won skills that transfer to industry. And it would help if faculty didn’t view it as “giving up.”
But this is a long-running problem. I don’t think the undergrad zeitgeist has changed. I think the current administration has cut funding and closed off the immigration pipeline. We’ll be feeling those effects for a long time.
