Re:Grad school is worse for public health than STDs (2019)
by klyrs on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @08:06PM
(#30281169)
> True - but if your experience of academia makes you want to stay, you don't need a fallback!
Sadly, this is not really the case. The job supply doesn't come anywhere close to the demand of (incredibly smart and well qualified) graduates. The vast majority who choose to stay end up as sessional instructors, with little to no hope of attaining tenure. And with each passing year as a sessional instructor, your chance of becoming a "real" professor drops substantially.
Mathematicians don't get up to p-hacking, thankfully, and while some of your issues are present, you're missing a lot of the actual issues if you manage to get on a tenure track: time on committees, shitty department politics, whiny undergrads who don't want to be in the classes they've signed up for... yeah, there's a lot of problems. But, even with all that, I'd take it over a lot of the jobs I was qualified for before uni.
Sadly, this is not really the case. The job supply doesn't come anywhere close to the demand of (incredibly smart and well qualified) graduates. The vast majority who choose to stay end up as sessional instructors, with little to no hope of attaining tenure. And with each passing year as a sessional instructor, your chance of becoming a "real" professor drops substantially.
Mathematicians don't get up to p-hacking, thankfully, and while some of your issues are present, you're missing a lot of the actual issues if you manage to get on a tenure track: time on committees, shitty department politics, whiny undergrads who don't want to be in the classes they've signed up for... yeah, there's a lot of problems. But, even with all that, I'd take it over a lot of the jobs I was qualified for before uni.