<p>Yes, I know you think that this is just another example of arrogance of people in academia. You’ve said it many times.</p>
<p>It’s common knowledge that working in industry (i.e., chemistry or pharmaceutical) requires significantly less hours than what is expected in academia. At a meeting for postdocs, a professor asked the room how many of us worked 60 hours a week. A few raised our hands, and she said, “When I was a postdoc, I worked 14 hours a day 7 days a week.” The truth is not everybody does this, but if you don’t work a lot of hours, there is no way to be competitive. I don’t know what the exact number, but consider that maybe 1-2% of the people at a good grad school will get a faculty position at a research university. In order to be competitive, you need to put in those hours. And then once you get there, you are competing with the same group for grants. You don’t need to be in the top 1-2% of your class to get a job in industry. </p>
<p>I have people in my family that are professionals at some major engineering firms, and their attitude is that they work to support their hobbies (e.g., skiing, bike riding, etc.) If they were trying to make CEO there, they would need to put in more hours undoubtedly. Some jobs generally require more extreme hours. I’m sure you know that a neurosurgeon works longer hours than a dermatologist; I’d bet obstetrician (your husband’s field?) is up on that list as well. In terms of consulting, I have heard that 60 hours a week was generally enough, but that once in awhile you may have to also spend the weekend. This was from McKinsey and Boston Consulting people. </p>
<p>PG, #838, I just meant that if you did try the experiment I suggested, going to the labs, you’d get a false negative if you went the weekend the conferences started.</p>
<p>One of the best things about having an elite diploma is being able to choose a job that doesn’t require a 24/7 workweek (?!)… Which is to say, yuck…I really, really would not like to be on the job that much. And I understand, but dislike, the macho wars about who works more.</p>
<p>I didn’t bring up the hierarchies, and I don’t subscribe to them. Different people do different types of things. People who are likely by temperament to become scientists do different types of “more” than people who are likely by temperament to become engineers. Some of the “more” is more demonstrable than other types of “more.” All okay. </p>
<p>Even though MIT does not admit to majors, I suspect the inklings of likely direction are there in the applications. A lot of students who are good in science in high school are steered into engineering when they begin college, because a lot of people don’t know about the differences.</p>
<p>blossom has suggested that we lose none of the talent I am concerned about. I am not sure. I don’t think the students wind up at Stagnant Marsh U. But people get drawn away from science, or just leave it, for many reasons. My grad students who have gone into banking, stock brokerage firms, the law, medicine, government positions, or setting up their own companies outnumber my grad students who went into academics. A lot of the students who are not professors would have taken academic positions, if they had been able to obtain them, even though they would have been worse off financially. I have had friends who left science because the salary levels didn’t permit them to live as they wanted. So it’s hard to know how and why people who are quite talented leave the field.</p>
<p>collegealum314 has posted that he knows strong students who were rejected by MIT and then re-evaluated their career prospects in science (downward) as a result. I don’t have the current statistics for the fraction of grad students who will eventually get academic positions at research universities. In physics, the most recent data I saw indicated that there were faculty openings for 10% of the physics post-docs. Given the total number of faculty openings per year in the U.S., if a student took rejection by MIT as an indication that they were probably not among the 1,500 most promising students in their cohort, and there are far fewer academic openings than that, it would be simple realism to re-evaluate plans then, rather than waiting. I’m not saying that these people have fragile egos (far from it), though that has been suggested before on CC. I do think they misinterpreted MIT’s decision. But if they left science, in light of what they knew at the time, I think they made a decision that was grounded on the “facts” they knew. Regrettably, they had the facts wrong, most likely.</p>
<p>Honestly, if someone "reevaluated their career prospects in science (downward) " simply because of a rejection by MIT that is ludicrous and maybe those kids areen’t as smart as they think they are.</p>
<p>And yes, sally, I had the same question when I saw that about an “elite” diploma. What does that have to do with anything? </p>
<p>I understand your viewpoint, fretfulmother. I have observed a lot of machismo in terms of time of arrival in the lab. There are people who arrive routinely at 6:30 a.m., and think of those who show up at 7:00 as slackers. Never mind that the school buses don’t pick up until 7:30. I have told my spouse that before he retires, he will be attending meetings at 4:30 a.m. The earliest he’s had so far is 5:30 a.m. (when everyone is in the same time zone). When he’s off to the west, he’s had conference calls starting at 4:00 a.m.</p>
<p>I realize that obstetricians have to work when the babies are arriving, so none of this is relevant to a comparison with that field.</p>
<p>collegealum314 was only posting about a mentor who worked 14/7. I’ve seen that.</p>
<p>With the work I do, although it is “work,” it is also fun, though often frustrating. There are certainly times I want to pull my hair out over the frustration at not understanding things. These are counter-balanced by moments–actually, weeks–of sheer ecstasy when I figure something out that is new.</p>
<p>"What? How does the origin of the degree have anything to do with the number of hours a person might have to work? "</p>
<p>During my pre-college years, my father was a psychiatrist in private practice, supporting his family nicely on about 20 work hours a week, which meant he came home for lunch and dinner and went to all kid related activities. That is luxury.</p>
<p>What you all are calling “machismo” I would call "martyrdom.’ And there’s plenty of it in corporate America too. At my company there is sort of a silent competition about Who is Working the Longest and Hardest. And it pervades all levels of the organization and every possible educational background.</p>
<p>My BIL and his wife are both professors (although not in science) at a top 20 national university. I have been hearing for 30+ years how “busy” they are. It seems to go with the territory.</p>
<p>There are some macho contests on who works the most, but the context of the current discussion of it was that there is not a lot of free time to engage in side interests in academia, so maybe they shouldn’t use the lack of non-academic hobbies or activities as a disqualifier when selecting for STEM applicants. </p>
<p>There’s not a lot of time to engage in side interests as any serious professional working adult. College alum, I don’t think it’s arrogance on the part of academia necessarily - I just think it’s naïveté. </p>
<p>I work a lot with McKinsey in the course of my job, and my BFF is there. Of course they routinely think about and do work on weekends. Again, this is just not notable the way you think it is. </p>
<p>""What? How does the origin of the degree have anything to do with the number of hours a person might have to work? "</p>
<p>During my pre-college years, my father was a psychiatrist in private practice, supporting his family nicely on about 20 work hours a week, which meant he came home for lunch and dinner and went to all kid related activities. That is luxury. "</p>
<p>Exactly. The more qualifications and acclaim you have, and the better you perform, the more flexibility/luxury you can expect to have in selecting a life-work balance that works for you. IF, that is, you are able to “opt out” of the cultural value on “face-time”. And with all the usual disclaimers about opportunity variation by location, field, and SES.</p>
<p>I understand that some people, in all jobs, perhaps especially in science labs all the way back to Dr. Frankenstein, really really love what they do and get in the “flow” and can’t step away or don’t want to. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about people who feel pressured to work more hours than they would pick under ideal circumstances.</p>
<p>fretful, alh said nothing about where her father was educated, nor any “acclaim” or success he might have had in his profession.</p>
<p>Apart from what I consider an incorrect assumption about “elite” schools here, though, I do agree with your point that the more successful people are, the more they can choose the kind of life they want.</p>
<p>Well, G. H. Hardy famously did mathematics in the morning and went out to watch cricket in the afternoons. It’s possible. </p>
<p>Some lab equipment can be controlled remotely over the internet, so you don’t need “face-time” in the lab. Or it can be largely automated. One of my friends used to remark that after he had automated his experiment, it could be run from the Panton Arms (a local pub). On the other hand, there is a lot of lab equipment where this would not be a good idea, to say the least.</p>
<p>“collegealum314 has posted that he knows strong students who were rejected by MIT and then re-evaluated their career prospects in science (downward) as a result.”</p>
<p>Really? A kid gets rejected from MIT but accepted at Cornell Engineering or Princeton or Rice or CMU and concludes that he or she can’t cut it in science? I find this very hard to believe.</p>
<p>I know kids who got rejected at Julliard and Curtis and then opted out of the music conservatory path. Mostly because of parents who would be fully supportive of the kid becoming a world class musician (however they define it, on their terms) but were less supportive (i.e. not at all) of their kid “just” graduating from Northwestern with a degree in music, or getting into Peabody. Personally I think that’s a crazy attitude to take, but I didn’t have kids in the music flow, and it’s not my money (nor for me to tell them how to spend theirs).</p>
<p>But science and math isn’t like becoming a cello virtuoso, where there are about 12 young people entering the field every year who could track to become truly world class cellists. Fortunately, the world has lots of room for talented biologists and chemists and aero/astro engineers. The world of academia may disparage the PhD who goes from Purdue to Boeing… but you could hardly argue that this is a person who is not using his/her scientific training in his/her field. There could be three professors in a room arguing that the Cornell trained engineer who ended up at Microsoft or GM “wasted” their education but nobody would take them seriously.</p>
<p>You guys need to get your heads out of the clouds and walk among real folk. The CDC hires math geniuses who at this moment are modeling Ebola transmission to figure out how to keep millions of people safe. Merck is hiring virologists and epidemiologists to figure out why two people of similar height, weight and medical history respond to exposure to the same disease in completely different ways. Novartis is hiring statisticians to crack the code on why cancers respond to chemo in different ways based on the racial and ethnic group of different patients.</p>
<p>If you know kids who view a rejection from MIT as rejection of any of these life saving career paths… boy, they’ve got bigger problems than how to suck it up and attend Princeton or Michigan or Georgia Tech.</p>
<p>And guess what… nobody who runs a lab at Novartis is getting by with 60 hours of work a week. Nobody.</p>
<p>For the most part, I agree with you blossom, but your post doesn’t address the issue of a young physicist, who hopes to do something like particle physics or string theory. Working at Boeing is absolutely worthwhile, but Boeing would prefer aeronautical engineers, or mechanical engineers, or computer scientists, or in fact people in a rather large number of fields, over string theorists. </p>
<p>Yes, people in scientific industries work long hours in general. A young friend of mine, with a Ph.D. and post-doc experience close to my field, remarked that when he went job-hunting, he was offered “a lot of careers, but no jobs.” By that, he meant that he did not want the long hours that were associated with science careers, either in academia or outside of it. He wound up going to law school. I am sure that many lawyers are only offered careers and no jobs, either–or that they are only interested in pursuing careers–but he apparently found something that was a “job.”</p>
<p>There is probably about one opening for a string theorist in the country each year. Perhaps less often, depending on how fashionable string theory is at the time. Needless to say, the openings are all in academia.</p>
<p>So the analogy to cello virtuosos is not far off.</p>