juillet

but there doesn't negate the fact that advisors can and do exploit their graduate students.

I never said that it did, but this article says "Professors *will* exploit you," which is different from saying that it's a possibility. It's a possibility, but so is getting exploited by your boss.

If you lack passion for your field, the first two years is the best time to drop out of any doctoral program. Once you have lingered around beyond that, it becomes much harder to psychologically prepare yourself for another career if you can't pass the comprehensive exams or dissertation defense.

I'm in a PhD program myself, and I have to disagree somewhat. It depends on you and your personality, as well as your program and the kinds of experiences you've had. Personally, I've prepared myself psychologically for another career quite well (particularly because I never wanted to be a professor in the first place), and I know many PhDs who have successfully changed careers - either by using their PhDs to do something besides academic jobs, or returning to school to get trained in something else.

My point is, though, that anything you try could end up being a failure. So you spent 3-4 years studying something you really liked and realized that the career wasn't really for you. Big deal - you could've spent 3-4 years in a job you hated, or 3-4 years looking for a job. Sometimes in life we take risks and things don't work out; you pick up the pieces and move on. Now I'm not saying this is carte blanche for someone to just go barreling into a program without serious thought, but if you are really passionate about your field and reasonably convinced that you want a PhD, there's nothing wrong with going and trying it. I'm also not saying that leaving is easy, but there goes that thing about how nothing worth doing is easy.

All graduate programs should keep placement statistics so that prospective students are not manipulated, exploited, and then thrown under the bus when they can't find employment

That was exactly the point I was trying to make.

And no, I didn't miss the point of number 12. I am near the end of my PhD career, so I know what a PhD is about. First of all, not all PhDs go into being a professor - in fact, most don't. Second of all, the reason is "You can't eat prestige," which the implication that even if you publish papers in Nature, if you don't make enough money to live on it's not worth anything. This is essentially the same thing as saying "you may end up on food stamps," which is ludicrous because just over 1% of PhD holders is on food stamps.

There are many good reasons not to get a PhD, but this article is not doing a good job of articulating them. Some people have bad experiences in graduate school and some people have good. I think the net of my experiences has been neutral to positive, but ask me on a bad day and you might get a different answer. The thing is, most things in life worth doing are difficult.

And Sakky's post #8 is why I am happy I chose to go to Columbia. I could go into management consulting after, if I wanted to.

Gthopeful, getting paid less does not mean you are getting exploited. A lower salary does not necessarily equal exploitation. And graduate programs are very upfront with how much your stipend is ahead of time, so no one can say they are going in blind. You have a choice - go get a job, or go to graduate school.

ReallyOldSchool

sakky wrote:

This is essentially it. Anyone with any reasonable alternative should not even apply to a PhD program that does not place the majority of its graduates in tenure-track faculty positions. This would mean that in some fields you would apply to no more than 5-7 programs. If you get in, great; if not, you do not pursue the PhD. This puts most of the risk before the opportunity cost has been sunk. Applying to, let alone attending, "safety schools" at the PhD level is flirting with disaster.

The problem of freeway-flying adjuncts who rely on Medicaid would vanish quickly if fewer people were not suckered into PhD programs that produce graduates with extremely marginal professional prospects. Unfortunately, this is the case for the vast majority of PhD programs.

(Potential/Prospective) PhD students always figure that they will be the exceptional case that defies the odds because they have always been exceptional in the past. In that sense they are not unlike a lot of (prospective) Division-I athletes who anticipate lucrative pro sports careers even though the odds are greatly against them. The majority of the responses in this threaded reflect that.

For the record, I am not bitter. I was lucky enough to get this advice from the professors who wrote my LORs. I was fortunate enough to win the admissions lotto, so I didn't have to gamble on the back-end.

gthopeful

I was mostly being facetious in that post, but to go further along the line of it, as an engineering student, if I am able to get $X for my grad school skills on the open market, being forced to take $X/3 or $X/4 after ending that internship until I graduate is exploitation because there are no set terms for graduation. When you joined your advisor's lab, they didn't make you sign a contract that said "if you do this work then you get your Ph.D", did they? Your advisor can keep you around as long as they want to and there's not a lot you can do about it until you run up against your department's mandatory graduation rules, which are, of course, generously long in the U.S. Stricter graduation timelines, like in Europe, would definitely reduce the potential for exploitation.

The above was, of course, playing devil's advocate. My advisor happens to be great.

vienneselights

so whom would all those professors at secondary universities teach? Wouldn't that make them superfluous, therefore reducing the number of grad programs in each discipline, therefore making a lot of professors unemployed, therefore actually worsening what you're trying to make better? We live in a Keynesian economy. We have to play the consuming game.

jack63

Recently at Michigan the author of book "A PhD is not Enough!" came and gave a talk about PhD careers in Science and Engineering. The guy had worked in a national lab for years. Not that I'm advertising....but a link to the book is below.....

Amazon.com: A PhD Is Not Enough!: A Guide to Survival in Science (9780465022229): Peter J. Feibelman: Books

Some of this guy's points is that there are other options for PhDs. He emphasized that a national lab is a good option that is available to US citizens. He thought it was a much better option than being an assistant prof. In his book he was critical of universities, and strongly recommended against becoming an assistant prof. The reasons are that the job is insecure, you'll work constantly, and not get paid nearly as much as somebody would in a national lab.

He also said that going first into a national lab is a better path to become a tenured professor than first becoming an assistant professor. He is actually right. They keep it under wraps, but PhDs do get hired into Michigan engineering from a national lab WITH TENURE and without ever having worked in academia before. just as long as these people are publishing, which they will do in a national lab.

My point is not to let sakky get you down. There are other options in PhDs and science and engineering other than academia and there is more than one path to become a tenured professor.

scaleupchem

@jack63

In order to get hired with tenure from industry at any university, you need to have an extensive track record of delivering new technologies to the market (generating $$$), numerous awards (reconigiton by your peers) from external groups (AIChE, IEEE, ACS, etc.), as well as, an extensive publication record in peer reviewed journals (the higher the impact, the better). The problem with the latter is that all publications that come from industry must be approved by upper management and legal. That is why most people in industry don't/can't publish, especially if they can't make a convincing case to upper management that publishing a paper in subject X is a business priority. And if you don't publish you can't get the external recognition needed to win those awards. I know from experience the headache of having bosses shoot down request to publish work that wasn't close to being proprietary.


Nobody ever said that you were going to be able to find a job with a PhD in Chicano Studies, or Medieval Literature. You decided that you were going to do that. You should have considered your future empolyment prospects before you embarked on that PhD program.

Just the same as someone with a PhD in Chemical Engineering, who expects to get a job handed to you after you graduate with a PhD. You have to apply yourself, and be proactive in your job search. Your job search begins even before you take one graduate lecture course. How many conferences are you attending? How many talks are you giving? How much visibility do you have in your department? These are all critical questions, that frankly, you should be asking youself. And these same questions apply to any job you may get. Going to work everyday by 9, doing only what you are told, and going home at 5 will get you nowhere in the "real world," and surely end with you getting the **** work nobody else wants to do, and maybe even a pink slip. You have to constantly network, have several mentors, seek out high visibility/impact work you could be doing, and execute your work with excellence. You have to seek advocacy and strive for excellence. This is what makes you a superstar at work, and in school. That is what gets you a job. Most of the people who end up with tenure track jobs in pretty much all fields, get their jobs because of relationships that their post-doc has with someone who is looking to fill a position. If you did these things, more than likely people will be willing to help you with whatever they can give you.

Unfortunately, we don't live in a meritocracy. In order for you to get many of the things you want in the working world, someone else has to want you to have it. I saw it many times at my former company. In fact, that is the way you got promoted to the managerial level. For me, a PhD is a tool that I am using to make more money than I was making as a BS chemist, with limited career prospects. Sure, I made a good deal of money (>$50K), but for 4-6 more years of school, I could be making $90K/yr as a PhD. I could be promoted to a managerial position (something that BS chemist were not permitted to do at my old company), and assume various leadership roles in the R&D organization (again, something that BS chemist weren't permitted to do).

jack63

Sigh.... scaleupchem

Do you know what a national lab is? It's not industry.

There are also similar private labs that work on non-classified government grants where you are encouraged to publish and the government grants want you to publish(i.e. MIT-Lincoln labs) to name a major one.

I've had or know of number of professors who've worked at one of these(Sandia, Los Alamos, MIT-Lincoln) etc. They publish and that is their job, so they are well qualified to jump back into academia if they want.

scaleupchem

Getting a job at a national lab is not that easy. You will still have to do your rounds as a post-doc to even get an interview. I know what a national lab is (example: NIH-NIDDK). And with the current economic/political climate, you really won't be able to count on government to provide a stable job. The FDA always has rounds of lay offs, and it has been that way for decades. My machienist got laid off from Las Alamos.

jack63

I agree getting a job at a national lab is not easy. Usually, they want a post-doc or will only hire a new PhD as a post-doc. A graduate from my lab did get a Research position at a national lab without a post-doc....straight out of the PhD program. This is rare though, but I've heard a few examples of this happening.

The counties national labs are generally considered to be thru the dept. of energy. A map of them in the US is below:

United States Department of Energy National Laboratories - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Occasionally, they lay off at these places, but there is a big difference between a machinist being laid off and a PhD being laid off. Also, what I've heard is often the layoffs are voluntary(they offer retirement or a buyout, etc.)

The point is there are more opportunities for PhDs in Science and engineering than just academia. Of the US citizens who wind up on the engineering faculty here at Michigan, a number have some connection with a national lab. They've either worked there or done a post-doc there.

These popular articles from CBS annoy me. They don't tell the entire story, and they lump all PhDs together. There is a dramatic difference between getting a PhD in mechanical engineering vs. Political Philosophy.

RacinReaver

I know here at JPL the only real issue with publishing is ITAR restrictions, so some people that work on sensors or other specialized gadgets can have difficulty publishing. We're also experiencing some layoffs, though most PhDs are pretty secure in their job. The big problem is that many of the national labs or psuedogovernmental labs have become very top heavy and full of bureaucracy. In order for us to have a product machined in house we need to send a drawing to be approved, then it has to be approved by someone else for safety, then it needs to be machined, then the part needs to be approved, and then it might get back to us in two weeks. I've been told a price of $130 an hour is the cheapest we can get by doing it in house. By comparison, I can send it out to a company and have it done in half the time for half the money.

mathboy98

Racinreaver and juillet make good points. The reason such articles keep cropping up seems to be that there's a large number of programs where the candidates simply don't have reasonable job prospects related to what they are specializing in. Then, these artciles' somewhat hyperbolic points end up getting refuted by people sitting in graduate programs like Columbia, Harvard, Caltech, which are some of the best places to go if one wants to have a good shot at a good career in the academic area (assuming we're not talking of some of the cases where even those schools happen not to be very strong at what the student is doing).

I think it ends up quite an amusing state at the end, where the people who would benefit most from the advice of "don't pursue a PhD" might not end up getting the message anyway.

The main thing I've learned is that academia success involves not just great ideas and terrific effort to make those come to fruition, but also the support of prominent members of the academic community and just plain fortune in a sense, because what someone wants to hear a lot of at one point needn't be the hottest thing another day. Whenever someone hands over a tenure-track or tenure level position, it's probably with some level of nervousness, because there are lots of terrific candidates out there waiting for it, and there will always be a high level of arbitrariness in terms of who gets what, well aside from the few cases where the individual is prodigious beyond imagination at the field, and even most people at top notch schools aren't quite that.

It's important to remember that for all the students a terrific professor at one of these great schools had, while there are a lot of grad students coming in each year, probably a max of around one out of those can get tenure-track each year at the same school. This might be flawed, but it's still a pretty good rough estimate in my mind of the situation, marking the level of arbitrariness.