The longer students stay in a PhD program, the less likely they want to be professors. Typically many first year students say this, but the numbers quickly drop off in later years.
When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wanted to punch me in the face. That said, she emailed me years later to tell me that she became a professor, despite those statistics. If you have a lot of tenacity (doing a postdoc), are willing to settle for a school that isn't top-50, and are reasonably productive (a few papers per year) it is doable. Every single one of my friends that graduated and still wanted to be a professor, is one now, but it took 3-5 years of additional work. This is true for my friends in psychology, computer science, EE, and neuroscience.
Of course, now all my other friends say, "Why the hell did you choose to be a professor where you work 80 hours per week and make less than most undergraduates with CS degrees, even when your area of expertise is AI?"
Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic. There are lots of great things to do with a PhD that aren't being a professor.
> ... you work 80 hours per week and make less than ...
I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry.
To answer your (friends') question, because the work is more interesting and I make plenty of money as it stands.
Because not all work in academia is interesting. I don't know about your field but academic research is more about doing what your funding bodies want you to do or following the latest trend to get funding. Publishing can be a political game where institution and contacts matter more than merit. Advancement in your career can be the same. I don't want to make a blanket statement for everyone because I am sure there are varying experiences.
If academia is about interesting research, then I would gladly take your perspective. But sadly, from my experience (life sciences), to get anywhere, it is 3/4 bullshit work (admin, politics) and 1/4 interesting work.
I imagine I can find a job in industry that's 1/4 interesting work and get paid a lot more for it.
So it's not about "values". Let's not religion-fy academia and infuse it with a semblance of "virtue" associated with doing research. Scientists shouldn't be monks for science.
I'll echo this. The large majority of PIs I have interacted with (or know of via friends/family) could care less about their research. You get a skewed view from conferences, presentations, TED Talks, etc. They are 'on stage' at those events and are 'selling' their research largely. Get a beer in them and the facade drops quickly (ok, 3 beers for the people that really hate the mess, their tolerance is higher)
Well, that wasn't the claim, that all work in science is interesting. It was that mine is. And it very clearly is about values. Your hypothetical job in industry that's 3/4 uninteresting sounds awful to me. I'd never want that. For any (realistic) amount of money.
What I meant by "values" is some kind of moral superiority that seems to be espoused by a lot of people I've met in academia. That somehow not pursuing academic research is "selling out".
This idea is implicitly ingrained in a lot of graduate students when they enter the program. In my opinion, this is all to justify the shitty treatment. And I find this mentality very similar to organized religions where you are expected to make personal sacrifice in the name of some abstract notion.
Of course, this also exists in industry. Big tech companies sell their "vision" and "culture" in the same way. But at least they pay their employees relatively better.
I am glad you have a rewarding academic career and I hope you continue to enjoy it. I personally didn't find academia that enjoyable. The science was interesting, but academia is not just about science these days.
You know, I get the point you are making, and there is some truth to it. But overblown statements like "academia is just not about science these days" totally undermine the rest of your argument. It's unfortunate that you had a bad experience, but extrapolating that to an indictment of _all of science_ seems like sour grapes. A lot of people, the majority, are doing good work. It's not the caricature you make it out to be.
I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status. My experience is in theoretical math/physics -- I got my PhD but decided not to stay in academia; there are pros and cons to both options.
IME most tenured professors have to work significantly less than others for the same salary (those who work more mostly do it because they like working with grad students, not because they get financial benefits for it). Quality of life is good, good benefits, few and flexible work hours, sabbaticals, etc. Salary is lower than at the top of the industry, but sufficient for a comfortable life. Those who do good research can escape for the summer to interesting parts of the world to summer schools and visiting colleagues using grant money.
However, non-tenured professors have it much harder. And postdocs are usually the underclass.
I happen to be extremely well acquainted with one tenured professor of biological oceanography, and one tenure track professor of physical oceanography, and I can't say I agree with your observation. My experience has been that tenure or not, the amount of work that these individuals have on their plate is essentially endless. Grants are extremely difficult to come by these days, although its getting better, and it is worth noting both of these individuals must pay a significant chunk of their salaries from grants. Not to mention that the pressure to keep publishing is essentially unending. Also, sabatical is not code for vacation. The system is the same, if you don't publish it's hard to get funding, and if you don't get funding you don't get your full salary.
That said, my experience in this is only with Oceanography professors who are research professors first and teachers a distant second.
There was a retrospective study looking at grant scores vs. outcomes (citations of the papers produced). The correlation was pretty weak. Reviewers can identify the obvious dreck, but beyond that was a bit of a toss-up.
If you have too much competition, people start rushing sexy, half-baked results out the door, regardless of whether they seem likely to hold up--or even make sense. This selects against the people doing the careful sort of research that we probably intend to encourage.
But as you say, the incentives are not aligned correctly. And yes, it's very difficult for reviewers to make the best decisions.
So instead, they reject and request preliminary data. Which requires money. But at least this is better than a sexy shot in the dark, which I think private institutions should be funding. Or things like MD Anderson's moonshot program.
Things aren't perfect, but I think we can both agree that there is no perfect solution to this problem, incremental improvement? Certainly.
I don't think slacking in science is a bad thing. Less papers means less noise and if people are not sufficiently motivated by their ideas themselves may be it is best for everyone they are not publishing.
I don't know about theoretical physics, but math professors usually have almost no burden to produce grant money. My observation is the same - they are very relaxed.
In my school, the physics department was part of the College of Engineering. They had the usual 80 hour weeks because their evaluations depended on the amount of grant money they brought in.
This is related to the cost of doing experiments and running a lab. My wife is a bio-physicist and goes through $1k is supplies on a good day. In contrast you could run a math lab on almost nothing.
There's this old joke about math departments being the second cheapest to run, since you only need pen, paper, and a trash can. The cheapest department to run is Philosophy, since you only need pen and paper.
>This is related to the cost of doing experiments and running a lab.
Only tangentially. In my engineering department, the expectations on the professor who ran a lab with heavy and expensive equipment were no greater than the one whose work was all computational and just needed a bunch of PC's to run simulations on.
Interesting. In my school math and physics were part of College of Science and CS was in College of Engineering. Maybe this burden of grant money production is college-based.
Also, many tenured professors double dip into industry as well, leveraging their guaranteed position for minimized exposure if the startup goes poorly.
> I think work hours and salary have a bimodal distribution, driven by tenured / non-tenured status.
After I got my masters in Anthropology, I had been planning on a career in academia. At the time (early aughts), there was a huge backlash against tenure and there was a big movement trying to do away with it completely and it really turned me off. I subsequently left the field altogether in large part to the idea of having to "prove" my tenure, when, at the time, it was one of the few things which gave professors some stability in their role at a given university.
Absolutely, for the first 2 years. I suspect 3-6 years of postdoc plus 3-5 years at tenure track before getting tenure was a significant burden. And all that is not a guarantee of success. Maybe I was also tired at being inside academia and wanted to see what life outside was.
I am not sure, but I do know that at some time I knew I did not want to stay in academia. And when I understood this the first thought was "why did not I realize this a year ago"? Nothing wrong with academia, I just chose a different path.
EDIT: On some thought the mentality "if you did not stay in academia you are a loser" probably delayed the above realization. It was very prevalent.
> EDIT: On some thought the mentality "if you did not stay in academia you are a loser" probably delayed the above realization. It was very prevalent.
I see that as a common feeling among some of my friends slaving away on their PhDs. Its hard to not feel this way if all your friends, social circle, basically your entire world, is built around the school/program you are attending (which isn't that unusual since you're likely to be friends with other PhD students).
Additionally, I've noticed some of my peers who did very well academically in undergrad want to continue the "good streak" right through PhD. I know it sounds rather silly, but if you've been killing it with grades and awards and the like, its easy to feel that you are special and if you don't do a PhD, who will?
This is unfortunately what happened with me. Although, I realized my mistake within the first year and decided to leave with a Masters degree.
Yeah, I heard the "loser" bit. Somewhat comforted by the end of my third year in industry, in that my compensation was 2.5x what new profs was making. The postdocs I looked at included a number for which the salary for 60+ hours of real work/week would have been (well) below the poverty level for my family.
This was a bridge too far, coupled with the 1000+ applicants per position. Made it hard to make a case to continue in that field.
When I entered grad school it was. Then the Soviet Union died, and the market, already awash in a large number of Ph.D.s in physics suddenly transformed into something that I could not effectively compete in.
To some degree, you are measured, as a student/postdoc, by the number of highly rated papers in good journals that you produce, as well as citations, invitations to speak, etc. All of this factors into how high in the stack you will rise.
When I was looking at applying for tenure track positions, I was hampered to a degree, by being in a group that didn't publish often (and of course, as a student, I couldn't push my advisor to publish more ... she had tenure already). So I had a couple of good papers, but nothing compared to these senior folks from FSU, with 20+ years experience, many Phys. Rev. Letters, and other top journals. And hey, to make it even more fun, they were willing to work for less than the newly minted Ph.D.s.
I don't blame them. Would have done the same thing in their shoes. We are better off for them having come here and advanced physics.
But to the younger me, thinking ... damn ... this ain't fair ... it wasn't so obvious at the time.
I made a conscious decision to go into industry, knowing full well that it ended my hopes of landing a job as a prof. I've had a few side research associate prof gigs to teach HPC programming or work in a CS group (not bad for an ex-physics guy), and for the most part, they were fulfilling.
This is a hard choice to make though. All grad students and post docs need to know what awaits them in the world. Don't, as in never, believe anyone ever telling you about shortages. Assume that they have an agenda.
I was part of a cohort to whom the NSF exhorted the looming shortage of scientists for staffing physics positions (mid 80s). I was both naive enough to believe them, and foolish enough not to do my own research.
I would have gone in a different direction, had I known what I learned later. One more pragmatic. Likely Math or CS.
My recommendation to younger versions of me, my wife (also an ex-physicist, now a math/physics teacher in a local high school) would be to look carefully at how the world is moving toward some things and away from others. Estimate where we will be in N years when you finish up, and try see if something you think you would like to do aligns with something people are willing to pay for. Make sure you are flexible enough to change, and you can adapt as needed. Learn how to learn, learn how to think, learn how to move beyond your comfort zones. Learn how to communicate, how to sell (not necessarily things, but ideas). Learn what value is.
Then when you get to be an older fart, responding, slightly wistfully, to posts on HN, you can pass along your own experiences, thereby, hopefully, helping someone to optimize their own journey.
> My recommendation to younger versions of me, my wife (also an ex-physicist, now a math/physics teacher in a local high school) would be to look carefully at how the world is moving toward some things and away from others. Estimate where we will be in N years when you finish up, and try see if something you think you would like to do aligns with something people are willing to pay for. Make sure you are flexible enough to change, and you can adapt as needed.
That's great advice, but how do you translate it into practice? Should someone considering grad school do a PhD in AI or in biomedical engineering or in finance or what?
Pursue what you are passionate about, but be realistic about how you are going to work and handle the real issues that come with being an adult and having a family (if this is your goal).
My daughter is pursuing a degree in Art at a good university. I gave her the same talk. As she seems to have some genetic predisposition to computers and science (and math, though if you ask her she'll claim that the tests lie), she looks like she'll be mixing computer science and/or engineering into this.
My wife and I struggled to find a solution to the two body problem [1], which is part of what informed our collective decision. As much as I wanted (at the time) to be a physics prof, I saw my contemporaries struggle for years afterwards, with low pay, long hours, while having to put up with a spouse in a different city (and often a different state/coast), as their solution to this problem. That didn't appear to me to be a solution. And in the language of theoretical physics/mathematics, this problem did not appear to admit a general closed form, simple solution.
The FSU collapsing was a large part of my (really our) choice (we got married in grad school). The lack of "secure" job until early 40s (tenure track starting around 35, decision around 40-42) caused us to rethink what was important to us.
The trajectory you take is one you should undertake with eyes clearly open, aware of all the pitfalls on the path you take to the end point. And have a few concepts in mind for plans B and C in case plan A's endpoint becomes out of reach for any reason.
I met an amateur comedian recently who mentioned he's almost done with his PhD, but will never make back the lost earnings from the time he's invested. Whilst he talked, part of me was thinking 'man, if only your PhD were in machine learning'. I didn't say it out loud, though.
It turned out he's about to complete a PhD in machine learning, but doesn't want to work in Silicon Valley, or for a big company, or in finance (he lives in a financial capital).
Different people have different motivations, but I find it hard to imagine myself choosing the same constraints were I in the same situation.
Maybe a better advisor would have helped them find a research topic that engaged them? I really didn't care much about traffic. I cared about Chaos Theory and MDOT had free traffic data and DEC was willing to loan me some hardware. That's it.
I mean, I like traffic now. Back then? I was just meh... But it was something I could bite into and really see where Chaos Theory techniques could apply to understanding traffic. Which is to say, quite well - actually. But, I digress...
Doing a phd in machine learning and working at a high paying tech company is still a money losing competition due to the opportunity cost. Getting a masters and then working for 5 years gives you at least a half million dollar head start.
There is this notion (that I find quite convincing) that people tend to be overly optimistic as to their prospects (to become a successful entrepreneur/professor/etc.), and that leads them to decisions that are suboptimal for themselves (as they overestimate the likelihood of a big exit/tenure/etc.), but are good (optimal?) for society, because it encourages more people to take these huge risks, some of which do pay off.
> That is also math we should be doing.
There are things that should not only be seen in narrow economic terms, though. If someone wants to run their own business, or increase the stock of knowledge, or seek enlightenment in meditation retreats, that's perfectly ok, even if they don't strictly optimise their expected monetary payoff.
Lots of other areas where people are interested in machine learning and willing to pay good money. Biotech, pharma and medical, and oil/geology are just a few areas off the top of my head.
>I've read so many comments like yours, on HN and elsewhere, and invariably the argument hinges on some variation of the above sentiment. I've come to believe I just have fundamentally different values than the vast majority of people who work in industry.
Indeed! Why is the assumption always, "We all value money, so just switch to industry!"? It's like telling a public servant that if they wanted a living wage they'd learn Node.js. Not everyone wants to do industrial web-dev, and not everyone should have to. There are high-skill, high-impact contributions to society that don't involve corporate life, shouldn't involve corporate life, and instead need an institutional space for people to pursue them without the pressures and incentives of corporate life.
"Just switch to industry" is turning into the scholarly equivalent of, "just learn to code". Instead of all giving up on some people making the best impact they can, the impact they work desperately hard for, maybe we should just fix the academic labor system.
I don't think asking a researcher in AI why they couldn't work in industry that is willing to pay them tons more $$ is a bad question to ask. Its certainly not the same as asking a public servant to learn coding.
Living in the CS bubble, a lot of us forget that outsiders think of programming as some kind of black magic that they could never figure out ever. And are baffled that those who know it are not milking it as much as they can.
> "Just switch to industry" is turning into the scholarly equivalent of, "just learn to code". Instead of all giving up on some people making the best impact they can, the impact they work desperately hard for, maybe we should just fix the academic labor system.
And unfortunately we have pundits here in the HN community and refinforeced by YC, that this should be the case. Oh and btw, those same people think the solution for "just fix the academic labor system" is "well let's just write some code".
I am going to re-read your post until I have thoroughly have it committed to memory.
Yours is the verbiage that I have wanted to use in conversations so many times when the end discussion equals 'we'll all be web devs at some point'. The end product of these conversations always made my brain itch; I knew why, just couldn't formulate a reasonably worded response.
I will adopt yours gladly.
Very insightful! I agree that many people are tone deaf when it comes to the fact that other people may value something other than money, consumption, etc.
Think of it as running a small startup, if the time doesn't make sense. My time is split between teaching and preparing teaching, raising funding, mentoring (on the job training), and lastly trying to figure out the next big thing.
The rewards are getting to be your own boss, advancing the knowledge of humanity, and cultivating the next generation of scientists. It is hard work and time intensive, but most things worth doing are.
Indeed, many of us can get paid more in industry. (Computational applied mathematician here.) But (i) professor pay isn't terrible in the grand scheme of things, and (ii) I view my salary as paying for the things I wouldn't want to do for free, e.g., grading exams, serving on committees, etc., and I'm reasonably well-compensated in having my own time to do the things I love enough to do for free: my own research, work with grad students, learning about things I find interesting and teaching a course on it, etc.
But getting here wasn't easy, took equal measures of hard work and luck.
In other areas of computer science, first author counts for a lot. It indicates a person did the majority of the implementation work, probably wrote the first draft of the paper, etc. Typically the last author is the PI that came up with the idea, mentored the first author, and funded the work. The contributions of those in the middle are less well defined.
In CS theory (and math), they go by alphabetical author order, so none of the aforementioned rules work unless there is only a single author. So, I excluded the theory folks from the first author analysis.
This is changing, thankfully. First authors should be the ones leading the paper, according to contributions.
Some journals are asking for the actual contributions performed by each author, which I think is very good.
Littlewood and Hardy disagree. Ranking/attributing contributions to a joint paper in mathematics is very hard especially when the results grow out of conversations between all of the authors.
You state your opinion, but don't justify it -- could you share why you think it is important we list first author by contribution? What does this accomplish?
Obviously not everyone agrees (or you wouldn't have felt the need to post), so why not share why you think you're right, so we can discuss the issue?
Edit:
Well, we've proven that people feel very strongly about this, but I'm no closer to understanding why people care so much about it. (ie, what they think it accomplishes.)
I don't publish papers, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. But like you, I am genuinely curious why alphabetical order was chosen as the convention rather than the amount of contributions (like GitHub does[1]).
If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers?
For example, in the RSA paper, Adleman clearly knew his contribution was less than Rivest and Shamir and he insisted that he put his name in the end. I believe, in most papers it would be obvious to the co-authors that someone's contribution is more significant than the others. If this is true, why do they still choose to follow the alphabetical order convention rather than the contribution order convention?
> If the answer is that contributions to scientific papers can be very fuzzy, e.g. it is hard to determine which contribution is more important than others, then I agree alphabetical order makes sense. But is it really so in most of the papers?
I'm probably biased from being in industry, but even when people contribute unequal code to a module or writing in a report, we just list the authors alphabetically because it's obnoxious to do anything with the list otherwise and it stops a huge amount of politicking when the first three out of ten authors contribute equal amounts. At the end of the day, stable collaborations will outpace individual contributors -- so we should focus on what allows us to openly collaborate and tears down barriers to doing that.
But from my point of view, we have a lot of the same incentives between industry and academia:
1. If you want to get promoted, you need projects associated with you and to get noticed.
2. There needs to be some method to decide who gets what amount of bonuses.
3. Funding allocation is tied to past successes.
...and probably some more I'm forgetting.
So I think my experience isn't totally irrelevant -- you get enough signal out of the distribution of the person's name that the loss of whatever from not getting "first" information is eclipsed by the gains from less politics (and if you have a lot of documents, easier parsing).
Again, perhaps it's the industry talking, but I'd rather hire an author that contributed the third most to a large number of papers than someone who contributed first most to a few. One of them seems to be a "force multiplier" in that they're keeping several other ICs moving (and contributing on all those efforts), while one guy just seems a specialist in a particular work.
I don't think removing the "first" signal harms my ability to find those "force multipliers", because they'll still have the same markers (as they weren't showing up first under the other system anyway).
So perhaps I simply have different uses for the rankings than people who feel differently?
I would suggest you consider the emergent properties of these systems of attribution, rather than just the primary affect. Could there be a reason why theoretical fields have small numbers of authors given alphabetically, and experimental fields sometimes have ten or more authors, given in order of "contribution"?
Isn't GitHub just ranking by number of commits? That's not a very good measure of contribution. After all, I don't think tensorflow-gardener is the primary contributor of Tensorflow.
I have such a name -- doesn't particularly bother me.
I understand how people can feel that way though, but my question is -- why is that feeling anything but obsessing over a vanity metric, and actually a useful mechanism for author evaluation?
> If a source has three or more authors, the name of the first author should be given, followed by the phrase "et al".
It might be good if this wasn't the case, but since it is, it's a realistic concern for authors.
Beyond that, really the reason will be that this is what people the people who decide your funding see.
Perhaps a useful example would be like saying if you have more than a few people in your team, anyone referring to your project must say "Alan's team" because Alan's name is the first in the list, even if they're a junior or part time. This is what your bosses see come promotion time, all that great work like Alan's team (2016) and who can forget the amazing piece of work Alan's team (2015).
In alphabetical fields people avoid saying "Author et. al." for this reason. Lots of famous papers are known by their three- or four-letter acronyms.
If you called "BCS" (superconductivity) "Bardeen et. al." it would take everyone a minute to figure out what you meant, and they'd wonder about your background.
It shows who did the most work in an unambiguous way. If you have never collaborated on a paper, you'll probably think this is not important, but in reality it is.
Interestingly, some fields where alphabetical order is used have started adding a note that explicitly shows who did how much work.
I think the problem is that it's really not that unambiguous. There are general rules to the order but it's not explicit, and being second author doesn't explain in any kind of detail what was done.
I'm quite a fan of explicitly tagging authors for what they did. That way you avoid deciding whether the person who did the stats did "more work" than the person who did the code, etc.
Explicit tagging is the best option, yes, but contribution-based is significantly better than just alphabetical.
Typically, the first author did most of the intellectual work. Rarely if ever would the first author be a person who did a lot of practical work but little to no intellectual work.
I agree it's largely better than nothing, though there was that paper recently that got pulled because the authors couldn't agree on the ordering of the names.
In this case, being the last author should matter more. As in, you have a number of first-author publications to prove you can do research yourself, then start publishing as the last author with different first authors, to show you're into management now and can train new first authors.
As an old Russian saying goes, 'a great engineer would never be promoted'.
No wonder there is a reproducibility crisis. This one of the reasons why so many papers out there are so scientifically unimportant and statistically dubious and are only adding noise to human knowledge. Slow down scientists!
Grad school dropout here. I never wanted to be a professor. I have no interest in teaching. I just wanted to research. My degree would have been in CS/ML/NLP.
When I realized that I would be out over half a million dollars in earnings over the time I was in grad school, I made the decision to leave. The fact that my advisor was a terrible researcher and a horrible person made it much easier.
No. Because I'd have gone to private industry anyway. Starting research and engineering salaries are roughly equivalent. Their respective progressions are about the same too.
You'd only make more money if you founded a company and it was successful. You don't make fuck you money as employee #5000.
At some of the larger tech companies the salaries for scientists/researchers is usually higher than for engineers specifically because of the extra educational requirements. Where I work there are actually on two separate pay scales to account for this. I can't say this is true everywhere but there are definitely cases where you could have made more had you stayed in industry (emphasis on "could", it's not guaranteed).
There's definitely variation from company to company, but the gap isn't huge. Let's say the private research role got me $30k more than engineering. It would take at least 16 years to make up for the 5-6 I spend for a phd. Lots of variables though. I made the right choice for myself.
People usually work for 30 years... Grad school is definitely a long term investment but it's not always the best choice. As you said, in the end you have to do what's right for you.
My tuition was fully paid and I got a $1600/mo stipend for being a dedicated research assistant. So the opportunity cost wasn't worth it when I discovered I'd be earning the same on either career path.
When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all. I knew a history professor that would come into the university for his 1 or 2 classes per week and then would go home for the rest of the day(s). He made 100k+. Not to mention that there are some professors at my university who make close to or over 300k/year and do not teach, but they are much more rare and have fat CVs. The other side of the coin is that before you get tenure, you may be working a lot for very little and only when you're close to 40 (on average) will you be granted tenure.
I'm going to disagree with this for science and engineering. All of my tenured colleagues work very hard. You have to if you want to keep running a lab, which is the main reason why people choose to become professors. If you stop working hard, you will stop getting funding and PhD students. The department will make you teach more and can make your life difficult if you are being a drag on the department, even if they can't fire you.
That said, for the liberal arts, history, etc., things may be different. They don't tend to have large labs and their goals are different. I honestly don't know.
Things are different for those doing theoretical science where the main instruments are pen and paper. External funding is often not required at all. This might not please the department, but the tenured professor would be just fine.
When I did my PhD I worked in Math and CS (plus had friends in Physics with similar observations): many professors on the theoretical side had no need for and were not interested in getting grants. They would get some minor travel money for conference expenses and pay themselves over summer so they would not have to teach then, but even if they got nothing they would be just fine on a base salary. And I am talking about reasonably well known full professors, not some young researcher at the end of a rope (career-wise).
Things are different when you have experimental labs to run. That is when you need external funding and have to do all that is involved in getting it (proposals unlimited, etc.)
That is definitely not true for many non-experimental science departments. Many students are TAs and as such care not a bit about grants. When I was getting my PhD I had to teach 4.5 hours/week (often structured as 6 and 3 at alternating semesters), which gave me my stipend and free tuition (and was a useful skill to polish). Maybe I spent another 4-5 hours preparing for classes and grading (we got student graders but I seldom asked them anything as grading was quick enough).
I was paid by the department and it did not matter to me whether my advisor got grants or not; what mattered were research interests and his guiding of research. This was the picture across the department; changing advisers was quick and based on mutual interest, not financials / grants.
That's a very light TA load. It's far more normal to have a 20-30 hour a week commitment to your TA responsibilities (multiple lectures, grading a few hundred assignments every few weeks, etc) so it's a lot harder to fit research around that.
Are you serious? Can you share the school and department? This is an honest question -- I always thought 4-5 lecture or classroom hours was normal. That's what I had and that's what my friends had. Most of us never even used graders assigned as grading duties were light and it would often be more trouble to explain how you wanted it graded anyhow.
I have never heard of a 20 hour TA load. Again, just wondering.
I was in a stats department for grad school. My assistantship load was nominally 20 hours, but I managed to teach a course as a GI in probably ~10 hours/week (doing my own grading). It took more time commitment if it was my first time teaching the course, and when I had to write/grade exams.
20 hours of work is pretty extreme and I suspect cuts down on your mental ability to do research (you have to take classes, too). I suspect the department usually has to say it is a 20 hr/wk position (probably so student gets free tuition), but the actual work is often less -- my friend who went to U of Maryland for PhD in CS had a similar experience to mine -- 7-10 hours a week of actual work at most.
This is just a couple of data points, though. Maybe we were just lucky.
>> When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.
There is another benefit (of course, understanding with all the dues you have to pay along the way.) JOB SECURITY While I make more than a professor, as with most tech jobs I can lose it anytime. When the economy is bad, even great job performance is no guarantee for continued employment. Sometimes entire companies disappear. It is difficult to understand this if you havent been thru a downturn (I've been thru 2) and it is difficult to appreciate this until you have hard responsibilities in live (mortgages, family to support.)
This is another reason why many jobs which pay less (government jobs, k-12 education, police forces, etc) are still attractive -- because they offer relatively more job security. It means you can commit to liabilities -- a higher mortgage, etc without having to sock away funds for rainy days.
Great point about job security being a valuable part of tenure. I read "Are you a stock or a bond" and the author (a professor, actually) recommended that folks treat their income stream (and the safety of that) in a similar manner to other investments. So if I have tenure, I can invest more in risky assets (possibly even on margin). If I am a software contractor, I should invest more in bonds because my income stream isn't stable.
Thought that was a great way to think about income stability in an actionable manner.
When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.
This is just laughably untrue. Sure, we may be able to dig out examples of tenured professors doing the minimum they can get by with. But you can find rare examples in pretty much any profession - the point is that they are rare.
Pretty much all the tenured professors I know well work their asses off - and due to area of expertise, many of them could make 2x - 5x salary in industry but aren't interested.
"When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary. The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach."
I doubt this is true for the United States, but it is definitely false for many European countries. Tenure gives you job security, but it also brings an enormous amount of administrative obligations. In my experience, conversations with tenured faculty tend to revolve around how much they hate the endless bullshit meetings they are required to attend, the long many-page forms they have to constantly fill out for uni administration, and how it has really eaten into their time for research or family life.
I think you mean the amount of work you have to do. Tenured professors typically get that way by (1) being passionate about their subject and (2) working very hard -- as well as (3) being really good at it, of course -- and the amount of work they actually do may be a lot more than the amount they have to do.
>When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.
I think you are mixing up the amount of work a tenured professor has to do with the amount of work they do do.
A tenured professor has to do very little. The idea (even if not the reality) is that a tenured professor has proven themselves enough that the one employing them is willing to ease back any rules so the professor can do science like they want to.
The end result should be (and I think is, but I don't have any hard data at the moment) is that tenured professor do a far larger amount of work than they have to, and are comparable if not even greater than other professions with similar salaries. In large part because they are doing what they love.
Consider a programmer who loves programming and does it at home and at work. A professor is similar, except since they get to pick the topic they work on (to some extent), they are working on the same project both at home and at work.
The last tenured professor I worked under put in a lot more than 40 hours, and he was high up enough to not have any classes to teach (I think he periodically taught a grad class, but it wasn't ever semester).
There are lazy and burned out tenured profs. But they are a small minority. To get tenure at a good school, you have to be something of a work beast, and self-driven. That doesn't go away just because you get the tenure letter in your mailbox one day.
I know hundreds of tenured profs in science and engineering and there is a very strong work culture.
Teaching is a distraction to the real work that goes on in universities. Just because you don't see professors teaching, doesn't mean that they aren't working extremely hard, on very important and stressful tasks (i.e. tasks that are fundamental to the university being a viable organisation)
> Teaching is a distraction to the real work that goes on in universities.
This is the most concise statement I've ever seen of the sickness at the heart of the academy. By and large, and with a few heroic exceptions, professors don't value instruction. It's why I was told my ambition to improve the preparation of engineering graduates through better instruction was a fool's errand, "career suicide" in my advisor's words. And it's why I took my Ph.D. and left academia. This attitude is going to come back and bite them when the marks wise up.
Your adviser was right though. If there was an infinite amount of money then they'd have lecturers who are dedicated to lecturing. But there is never enough money so...what options are there but to do the things that will bring more in so that your role/group/department/university survives.
I've seen it myself...groups whither and disappear due to lack of funds.
You're right, of course, there's no place for teachers in the academy, except as members of that most degraded and despised class, contingent faculty. But I think this is a serious problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, but many recipients of engineering degrees being turned out by our well-respected institutions of higher learning can't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag. I worked with people who didn't understand the physical models underlying their discipline. I worked with people who didn't trust statistics, who were easily misled by noise in their data and preferred to eyeball regression lines. I worked with one individual who somehow had a B.S. in electrical engineering despite having real trouble with the concept of plotting points on a Cartesian coordinate plane. These people had degrees from R1 universities. The indifference of career academics to these outcomes is a disaster. It's a disaster I'd hoped to avert, but I can only do my best to get out of its way.
No doubt about it. People made it through 4 years of my CS degree from a good university, and couldn't code a line. However these people all found their place in the workforce which suited their own skills.
I'm not sure how much can be done at the teaching level, but like you, it's something I'd also like to help correct.
I can easily accept it in some European country where government pays for it all. I have much harder time to accept this paradigm in USA, where 19 years old are paying a lot of money or going into debt just so they can study at the university.
Yes, college graduates do better then non college graduates which is why those people still do it. But since they are paying a lot of money, university literally owns them more then just "you are a distraction".
> where 19 years old are paying a lot of money or going into debt just so they can study at the university.
True enough. My Euro-centric brain didn't consider this. Even in Europe actually, non-European students pay a lot to join a course.
My sense is that American unis do offer some "value for money" when compared to
European schools, through flexible options for minors and majors, and grad school. Maybe the teachers are still poor though.
Do undergraduate fees contribute to a faculty's research funding? And if not why are student fees so high, if there is such a low (albeit understandable) emphasis on undergraduate teaching?
In my country (and all of Europe) no. The fees are a nominal administration fee, which admittedly is crawling higher each year. The government, and the EU, then funds each student, and yeah that money would help with research.
I'd suggest that faculty don't want there to be a low emphasis on teaching, it's just that there aren't enough resources to do the critical tasks first. This is bearing in mind that teaching duties are always fulfilled either way (just not to the satisfaction of some people).
I think our difference in perspective is a result of our experience with different systems. I've met a number of professors who expressed contempt toward the undergraduate population at the Big State U where I did my graduate studies. It's not that they're reluctantly doing a bad job at teaching, they're doing a bad job and they really don't care.
Perhaps this is true in some countries. In the USA and Europe, the average professor works 61 hours a week and encounters very high levels of stress, linked to continuously having to obtain research funds.
measuring output of intellectual pursuits is a fool's game. that history professor may be spending all their time watching Netflix, or they might be reading and thinking and conversing with their colleagues, participating in the general intellectual milieu, without publishing anything, but still making a positive and important contribution to society.
Besides, sometimes you will pursue an idea for a year or two and find out that it comes to nothing, and you have very little to show for it. But not giving professors the space and trust to do just that is counterproductive in the long run.
Watching my supervisor in engineering convinced me that I did not want to become a professor. He worked hard... teaching, mentoring, grant writing, plus a whole pile of administrative duties.
My programming 101 teacher was exactly like this except instead of going home he would go to his lab. He was extremely disorganized and would spend the first 30-45 minutes of class making sure his java programs were working for the lecture.
A student finally asked him why he doesn’t come prepared to class. His response was he teaches he easiest class the can and only the minimum amount of classes he needs to. He wanted to work on his research and get grants not teach.
I understand but the students are the ones struggling due to an absent teacher. I’m greatful he wants to do research but jaded due to the fact he doesnt care about the class or students.
My education was subpar due to his lack of effort.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm only too aware that expertise in a field doesn't make you a good teacher. I did badly in some subjects for the same reason, I feel.
>When you become a tenured professor, the amount of work you do is far less than the vast majority of other jobs with a similar salary.
If you're in a decently good school, this is not true.
>The only real commitments are the classes you have to teach and if you minimize the amount of teaching you do, you'll barely be working at all.
In both universities I went to, the only way to reduce teaching loads was to pay your way out of it. And the only way professors would do that would be to get grant money to supplement the lost income.
As for the history professor making $100K, what is the COL in that area? In my university, I just looked it up, and they average about $75K (which, to be frank, is decent for the little work they do).
In any case, most of the 80 hour/week work is in engineering and science...
Having spent 7 years getting a PhD (and a year prior working at a top lab), and then at industry; one of the most amusing facts to me is the belief in academia that professors/postdocs have much longer hours and "work harder" than their "9-5" colleagues in industry.
If you speak with recovering professors and post-docs who've joined industry, you'll quickly realize that one of their big surprises is the faster pace of work, and how much of it there is. Publishing of course is not sufficient, it actually has to work, at scale, reproducibly.
I like the academic environment, because at its best, it allows you explore something very deeply. Efficiency and creativity are different goals. There is value to a meandering path. Even if industry may have a fast pace solving problems, academia at its best, makes you ask a better / different question.
'Professor' is a job description, you usually need a PhD to apply for the job, but it's not always a hard requirement. There are many more people with PhD's than Professor jobs. In my experience its the politically astute that get the job, its much less of a meritocracy than one would assume.
>> Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic.
I think that also goes to answer the question about motivation despite long hours and low salaries. Knowledge is its own reward, I guess.
Also, doing work that really satisfies you is a big privilege. Big big privilege. Not many people enjoy that, the world over.
I'm really interested in applications of technology (including AI, ML, etc.) in business. But the only way I can get into any US university is by doing a Ph.D. (I live abroad).
Is it at all possible for a person doing Operations/MIS/Quant_marketing - whose main job is econometrics and ML - to not end up in academia after completing his Ph.D.?
Of course, there are plenty of jobs in the industry for PhDs. Another option you might want to consider if you don't enjoy doing research is a Master's program in the US - which gives you some extra training, access to recruiters, a network, etc.
As someone thinking about pursuing a PhD to ultimately become a professor, can you link me to your talks or blog posts on the subject of what's required to be competitive?
Out of the 18 in my cohort, two are doing reasonable postdocs (i.e. positions that aren't just treading water, but should actually lead to a reasonable career) and one who has been remarkably successful (success being a 'young investigator' grant - basically an R1 - and just recently another million+, within two years of PhD). The rest (including me) are doing ... other stuff.
Here are some traits of the successful PhD:
* Mother is professor in a related-ish field. Sister is also a PI of a gov't lab. Has been steeped in research and academia (especially the interpersonal aspects of this!) for decades. His success is 100% merited, but without question this has aided him tremendously.
* Reads papers constantly. I don't know anyone that's as familiar with the literature as he is, including all the faculty I've gotten to know. Has strong opinions about various labs, papers, and researchers, all of which are very well substantiated. TONS of 'soft' knowledge about how so-and-so got this or that funding, why such-and-such research is bunk, etc. If you don't think half the faculty in your doctoral program are trash, you're not being critical.
* Not a terribly great bench scientist. Definitely competent, but not remarkable. He knows it, though.
* Holds many unpopular opinions, and strategically focuses his research goals on the 'achievable'. In other words, he doesn't let being right get in the way of his career. Don't interpret this overly cynically; you can absolutely go against the flow in academia, but big claims require big evidence, and your time is limited. His research focus has shifted a lot depending on the landscape in front of him. I think this is commendable, as idealism in research is extremely fraught, even if some would criticize this. FWIW, he published a 'comment' in science that basically shits all over a garbage paper, which is more than most will do.
* 10 'real' publications since starting PhD in 2010, 7 as first author. By this I mean actual original research in a journal of repute, not reviews or bottom-tier trash. And this covers what are easily considered 3 different topics/fields.
* PhD advisor is Academy member, post-doc advisor is Academy member, institution is top-3 in field, arguably 1 or 2, etc.
The core takeaway is that you need to understand your field (in a very wide sense of the term) and direct your research productively according to that.
You certainly don't need all that to become a professor at Podunk-U, but I think that's a good archetype for a successful investigator. The other successful PhD (different cohort) I know has a very similar story; dad is a 'big dog' in an even more similar field as the son, similarly productive, similarly knowledgeable, etc. I feel pretty confident that this is what's needed for success at a major research university. Though, many unsuccessful faculty will be hired as well (through luck and, very often, nepotism), so YMMV.
If you really like to read papers in your free time, I think that's a very good sign. Even better if what you like best is to read between the lines and really be critical of the work. Very few people, even in doctoral programs, are like this. Know and respect your weaknesses, as well, and you could be great.
When I was a PhD student, I gave a few talks and blogged about this issue. I would present all these statistics in my talks about what they needed to do to be competitive, and people just absolutely hated me for it. One person said she wanted to punch me in the face. That said, she emailed me years later to tell me that she became a professor, despite those statistics. If you have a lot of tenacity (doing a postdoc), are willing to settle for a school that isn't top-50, and are reasonably productive (a few papers per year) it is doable. Every single one of my friends that graduated and still wanted to be a professor, is one now, but it took 3-5 years of additional work. This is true for my friends in psychology, computer science, EE, and neuroscience.
Of course, now all my other friends say, "Why the hell did you choose to be a professor where you work 80 hours per week and make less than most undergraduates with CS degrees, even when your area of expertise is AI?"
Lastly, I want to add that a PhD is a degree in learning how to do research and in becoming one of the world's foremost experts on a particular topic. There are lots of great things to do with a PhD that aren't being a professor.