All prospective grad students should read over the following to understand what they're truly getting into / developing realistic expectations before committing a substantial amount of their life to the Ivory Tower. The first link covers toxicity in academia (YMMV), which is more or less what drove me out of lab work and into IT. I personally chose to remain working in academia because I find it meaningful, but in a role that was more insulated from academic politics (vs generic work politics).
[0] http://academiaiskillingmyfriends.tumblr.com/
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Getting-What-You-Came-Students/dp/037...
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-in-the/448...
One thing that is often overlooked is that the US does have a very restrictive immigration system for people who don't have relatives here and can't leverage family reunification. In this case, getting advanced STEM degrees provides a path towards residency, work rights, and perhaps eventually a green card or citizenship. So in the US, these folks wouldn't be looking at a choice between getting a PhD and becoming a florist, because it would be illegal to come here and work as a florist. But there's a "shortage" of people getting PhDs in STEM fields, so we allow people to come here under conditions of limited personal freedom provided they agree to work these positions.
This power on the part of universities (the power to bestow residency and limited work right), I think, is one of the reasons STEM PhD programs haven't collapsed or faced the reckoning that would force them to change.
At my very first job, nearly all of my coworkers were Indian. As I met more people at work and started adding them on LinkedIn, I noticed one thing in common with all their LinkedIn profiles: they all got their bachelor's in India and their master's in the US.
One day, I was riding either to or from a company lunch with a coworker, and we started talking about our lives. He asks me about my education, and when I told him I only did my undergrad and never went to grad school, he told me that in his case, he had to go to school here as a condition of getting into this country, and since he already had a bachelors in CS, he went for a master's in CS.
This was before I learned how fucked-up our immigration system is. Once I learned that, his words made so much more sense.
Fucked up because they give higher-educated people preference, or fucked up because corporations lobby for more H1B workers to depress engineering wages industry wide?
And in this case they're not giving educated people preference. They didn't come here on a rule that says that people with postgraduate degrees get to come to the US. They came here on a student visa because coming here on a student visa is one of the few ways to get in at all, and it just so happens that a student visa can be upgraded to an H1-B later if the student lands a job with a company willing to sponsor them.
I'd recommend reading this flowchart which explains in detail how fucked-up our immigration system is:
https://reason.com/assets/db/07cf533ddb1d06350cf1ddb5942ef5a...
Interestingly enough, it doesn't mention coming here on a student visa and then upgrading to an H1-B; it's basically the only loophole around that depressing flowchart. Vox's slideshow on immigration, though, does link the flowchart and mention student visas are one of the only other ways to get in (the other is a tourist visa, which is useless for immigration because you can't upgrade, and you'll be denied a tourist visa if the US thinks you're interested in immigrating):
https://www.vox.com/cards/immigration-immigrants-reform-us/h...
tl;dr: Immigration reform would be a godsend for restoring some sense of sanity to the system.
I believe things can't go well in general in any area where money comes from organized begging ("proposals", "apply for funding"), driven by reputation ("publications", "impact factor") and where the bad eggs can't even be fired ("tenure")
From personal experience, I've always felt as though the existence of "rock star" academics always gave academia a Hollywood-like feel in terms of systemic abuse and candidly bizarre and maladaptive behaviors on the part of researchers.
Or they’ve spent way too much time in. It’s like people who spend a couple of decades in a prison, they’re fully institutionalized and feel they can’t cope with the real world.
So you're never, ever gonna work with venture capitalists?
One of the few benefits of ICO: you can now raise money without having to bother with VCs. That's a nice evolution.
Yes, nonlinear optimization will help you understand how neural nets work, but trust me, you don't need to take an advanced graduate class full of PhD students on the topic. If you have the prerequisites to the prerequisites, you understand math well enough to read about gradient descent on your own.
To be clear, there are people who belonged in this class, I just wasn't one of them.
For a lot of people, the sooner you realize a PhD isn't a good match for you, the better. The problem is, the sort of person who has the grades, test scores, and academic mindset to get into a top PhD program is almost certain to be slow to realize (and accept!) this. Add in the fact that PhD programs have astoundingly high attrition rates compared to professional doctoral programs (atrition at UCSF's med school is below 0.5%, whereas many PhD programs have attrition rates about 50% - yes, literally 100 times higher!) and you start to get a sense of why a lot of seemingly smart people get kind of snookered on PhD programs.
One big difference here is that people who masters out of STEM PhD programs can often still have a career in this field, perhaps a better renumerated one anyway. Though from what I've seen, getting a PhD in lit isn't necessarily a good path for someone who loves literature or theater, either.
Some of us went through school systems with 50% pass rates for middle school, high school and university, so don't find that either surprising, nor necessarily bad.
In fact, I at least am somewhat confused that a high pass rate is considered "good" - it clearly encourages grade inflation and arguably devalues the received degree...
Because publications pretty much define your scientific contributions, i.e. your productivity as a researcher.
> One should get the results AND THEN publish it.
You must have had a body of work that was just about worthy of publication though, right?
Think of this example: we are researching for a few months whether an arbitrary compound X has relieffing effects on people with headache, but since we are still researching, there is no concrete result or any slight evidence yet. maybe the compound will relief the headache in 30min but maybe it will make your nose bleed.
but there is this conference about headaches that is approaching and why not submit a paper about the work with some results? WHAT RESULTS? You will spend countless hours reading (more) about headaches and compound X to write the background of the manuscript while you still have to figure out the tests you will perform test your assumption.
you will work for weeks (under more pressure) with the hope you could publish something that is very uncertain at the current state.
Deciding to publish the results can just as easily be restated as "Come up with an experiment with a clear and precise scope"
Where to publish is often determining what audience and what questions to ask. For example, targeting a clinical journal means proofs and analytical results may be less compelling, while a simulation of a study might be of active interest.
Both of those help narrow the scope of "All possible interesting questions" to something tractable.
However, unless you stumble upon something that works out very nicely right before a deadline, a publication requires planning many months in advance what you are going to do.
The experience with academia was very toxic, although I know people who have experienced worse than that, with addition to advisors' ego disputes affecting grad students.