[HN Gopher] The PhD Paradox: A Journey into Academia's Upside-Do...
___________________________________________________________________
The PhD Paradox: A Journey into Academia's Upside-Down World
Author : greghn
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-09-18 17:15 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lemire.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (lemire.me)
| Narhem wrote:
| I feel like this article missed the mark, getting a PhD used to
| be something for affluent people who genuinely felt like
| contributing toward the progress of society.
|
| There's always a disconnect between a romanticized ideal and what
| is practically possible. And reading the comments what some
| departments do to secure funding seem like a far cry from the
| ivory towers universities were known for.
| nhggfu wrote:
| not sure i agree with this assertion.
|
| Personally I embarked on a PhD because i wanted the credentials
| to become a university lecturer.
| jll29 wrote:
| "Brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it
| badly enough." -- Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
|
| A Ph.D. filters out people who do not want to be a scientist
| enough whilst training the doctoral candidate in the "publish
| or perish" mantra that now prevails.
|
| But for every smart observation there are exceptions: Fields
| medal recipient (well, he won it but rejected to take it) G.
| Perelman (born 1966 and jobless last time I checked) has almost
| no publications or citations to show. But he will be remembered
| forever for proving the Poincare conjecture (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman ).
| m463 wrote:
| Isn't this true for every job?
|
| Doctors break up their day into 15 minute patient visits.
| Policemen spend a lot of time on domestic disputes. Software
| engineers spend more time understanding someone else's code
| than writing their own.
|
| wonder how many jobs actually track expectations?
| aaplok wrote:
| > Imagine if we recruited professors not just for their academic
| credentials but for their real-world achievements.
|
| The mistake is to think that someone's world is more "real" than
| their neighbor's. That may be arguably true if we talk about
| farmers or fishermen, but it's much less clear that an
| entrepreneur's world is more "real" than a university
| professor's.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I do enjoy things like fishing and woodworking because they
| have an obvious immediate value- when you're done you get
| something people can immediately use to survive.
|
| But as an academic, I feel like there is more risk of e.g. a
| project failing and ultimately not being useful, but also a lot
| more potential. An experiment could uncover the clue leading to
| curing a major disease, and then you've saved a lot more lives
| than people you would have fed fishing. There is more risk, but
| the expected real world value is actually quite high... if it
| were not grant agencies would not fund it.
|
| I'm pretty sure my elderly dad, who recently had a difficult
| fight with covid, is only alive because of academic mRNA
| research.
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| This seems like a biased angry rant rather than a legitimate
| criticism, coming from the perspective of being an academic PI
| running a research lab.
|
| In what sense are an academics accomplishments not "real world
| achievements?" excepting cases of fraud, etc.
|
| To get tenure you need to publish a lot of papers in good
| journals as the lead PI. Co-authorship means you were supervising
| people, e.g. effectively running a team doing novel research,
| even if you didn't do all of the work yourself.
|
| You can't really publish papers in the "hard sciences" without
| actually doing valuable real world stuff. Running a life sciences
| wet lab for example means you are actually operating a biotech
| lab and doing real physical experiments, basically the same type
| of stuff one would do in industry. Computational labs nowadays
| are typically maintaining and releasing software along with their
| papers, and will often employ a team of professional software
| engineers (I do so in my lab). To do these experiments you need
| to win grant proposals which fund doing them, which means you are
| working on something deemed important by a well funded granting
| organization or agency, and you have a track record of delivering
| results when you've won grants in the past. For example, the NIH
| only funds research with clear human health implications, under
| priorities set by congress.
|
| At my institution the majority of my colleagues have spun off
| multiple startups, and have a huge number of patents that are
| licensed by industry. They are in general making the same type of
| discoveries and research that industry is doing- but at an
| earlier stage, they can do things that won't pay off in VC
| timelines.
| norir wrote:
| This response comes across as rather defensive and makes a
| number of assumptions that are not universal across all fields.
|
| From my perspective, the author's basic thesis which is that a)
| there is a glut of PhDs b) getting tenure is political and c)
| publication quality is generally low is true. That doesn't mean
| that people who are successful in the system aren't smart or
| don't have meaningful real world successes. But my decade in
| higher ed through a postdoc made it very clear that even at top
| institutions, many, if not most, faculty are not doing work
| with significant real world implications.
| bustedauthor wrote:
| University and college students used to have one standard
| deviation higher intelligence compared to the general population.
| With credential creep, this has disappeared. College students are
| average. There's no reason to believe the same thing hasn't
| affected PhD students. In other words, the quality is just not
| there (on average). There are also much better career tracks for
| the best minds in 2024 compared to 1924 (startups, biotech, etc.)
| which exacerbates this.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-18 23:02 UTC)