Re:The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste...
by jforman on Saturday December 18, 2010 @03:42PM
(#2020236)
The problem is that the people who are doing it to become a professor are playing a game that is stacked against them. And if/when you lose that game you're well behind your peers in opportunity cost (see my other post).
I know several brilliant scientists (postdocs and PhD students) from my time at Princeton who had / are having a very hard time finding an academic job. At some point even the purest motivations will succumb to feeling used in these circumstances.
Re:The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste...
by impendia on Sunday December 19, 2010 @01:42AM
(#2021279)
Fair point.
In math it is sort of hard to outsource the boring parts of your project to people working beneath you, so I didn't hear people complain that they were getting used. But I can imagine that this might not be the same in other disciplines.
Paul Halmos, a famous mathematician, was often approached by undergraduates who asked him if he thought they should go to grad school. He gave all of them the same advice: "No."
Now mind you, he was extremely enthusiastic about academia, and he would cheerfully encourage students who didn't immediately walk away, but insisted that they really wanted to do academic research.
I quit a well-paying job [added for HN: at a late-stage startup, no less] to slog through a difficult, low-paying PhD program and it was the best decision of my life. It was not a "practical" decision, certainly not for my earning prospects, but I wanted to do advanced research more badly than I wanted to do anything else.
The Ph.D. is designed to introduce you to the world of academic research and prepare you for a career as a professor. Full stop. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone who enters a Ph.D. program for any other reason, but they should not come with illusions about what they are getting into.