And then there is the fact that hard work, intellectual prowess and merit are not even a guarantee you will get ahead in Postdocverse. Andy hasn't even touched in poisonous questions like politics, intimidation, people favoring those who hold views similar to theirs and close the doors to anyone who thinks differently. Which is even worse when you think about what academia is supposed to be about: pursuit of truth, which requires diversity of thought.
Yes, this. As an outlier from the political trend of academia, I am even more glad that I left academia after failing to secure a post-doc because there was no funding for anything I applied for, or because people who knew how to write grants were getting the funding. At the time I was extremely disappointed and depressed that nothing worked out for me. I now have a job from home editing scientific papers, which at one time I scoffed at. I enjoy the work, it brings me not a huge but comfortable income, and (perhaps most importantly) security. I don't have to go through the stress of constant paper-writing and grant applications. I wish you luck in whatever direction life takes you. Always pursue the truth. Academia is becoming more and more a propaganda machine churning out robots that don't know how to think for themselves. I have even become disillusioned with science, the area in which I studied and once loved so much.
@@leoniepipe6910 Thank you for adding precious information to this discussion. The politicization issues are even worse in areas around Humanities ("soft sciences"), but it's spreading everywhere. I'm also disillusioned with academia more and more and considering very seriously leaving the area altogether, which is even worse after 20 years of dedication, teaching, 3 post-grads, being around mid-forties and with family plans. :- (
@@leoniepipe6910 I hear you and relate to everything you said. If I may ask, such a job editing scientific papers, what is that job called and generally speaking, where does one go to apply for a job like that (I'm not trying to muscle in on your space!)? Thanks and I hope everything goes well for you too.
@@alwaysask This is really is saddening to hear that this kind of unjust treatment of people is happening at these universities and institutions. I hope everything works out well for you too.
@@leoniepipe6910 Very familiar story. Don't even get me started on diversity hires (who are diverse in all but the most critical category; thought) and green sciences (who truly know not the first thing about eco systems or physics and thus just regurtitate what people like Al Gore once said even though the actual science is much grayer and has progessed ten fold since then). Like a wise man once said: "Everything woke turns to shiet".
The biggest mistake I did in life was to study a research-focused field. Did Bachelor's, Master's, and then got out of there asap when I noticed that all non-tenured seniors were either depressed, stressed, unhappy, assholes, or about to leave. In Germany, the stress is even worse, as people can only spend 12 years in research and then get kicked out. Soon, this period will be reduced to only one "Postdoc" after you PhD.
What you are describing here is an almost universal deterioration in the 'happiness' of the workplace in Britain. I am old, and now semi-retired, but what has shocked me at my age, still having extensive contact with young people, is how depression and the use of anti-depressant drugs is commonplace now among young people who superficially seem to have great lives. Having seen the changes in British society and in the workplace as a college science lecturer, I can see why. The truth is that management is not just more money driven than ever, but more bureaucratic than ever. All these 'systems' which have been brought in to supposedly improve the functioning of organisations are highly dehumanising. The workplace, and much more of modern life has become very dehumanised and adopts a dehumanising culture. Employees are now expected to be cogs in a machine, the key word I use to describe working life in 21st century Britain is COMPLIANCE. We are not wanted for our personalitites, professional expertise, professional judgement, these we are not allwed to express in favour of 'policies' imposed by our superiors. We are expected to be mindlessly and unquestioningly obdedient to an often perverse local management, who are over powerful and who run organisations as personal fiefdoms, with little accountability and too much power inside the organisation. How it feels now to work in such organisations is as if they would like to replace human beings with machines, but as no machines can be built which have the versatility of humans, it becomes necessary to put the humans under the control and monitoring of the management machine. We are simply cogs with no will, and must comply or go! There is little joy, little personalisation. Everywhere, everyone and everything is standardised and under the watchful control of sycophantic middle-managers eager to curry favour with the 'chieftain'. I knew one physics lecturer who found that a life-time's accumulation of educational software had been deleted from his college laptop by the IT subcontractors who had been ordered by management to remove all software which was not supplied by management to employees, while desktop backgrounds were depersonalised and locked to the corporate approved background, with the corporate logo. Personalisation of backgrounds is banned as is personalisation of office space, hot-desking becoming widespread. We are all made fully aware of how unimportant, and how easily replaceable we are. All workplaces are now more like being in the military than in being in civilian life, with military concepts of management taking over and IT monitoring our weekly compliance. Each organisation is now a miniature USSR.
Well put Bhangra Fan. Puts into perspective what is really happening in organisations nowadays. It seems that the give and take between the employee and the employers has become extremely skewed nowadays. And the personal qualties which was once deemed important for various posts have become unimportant. I do believe though that a change will take place in the future, for the better.
@@femto02 What you are saying puts it in a nutshell. Exactly. When I started as a lecturer, management had some understanding that staff were overloaded and gave some slack. Now its like micromanagement and too much control.
Doing my first (and last) postdoc 2-year contract earned me an anxiety disorder to the point I had to seek professional help. I realized that I had to get out and I set my mind on finding a job outside of the academic sector. Now I have a stable job in another sector and have never been happier. If you feel desperate, if you have anxiety, you need to get out. Stop grinding yourself in the academia and look to the outside. There are better things in life than doing all the dirty work for the tenured faculty who were in the right time and in the right place to snatch their permanent position. You deserve better things in life than this. Good luck and don't give up: you can escape academia too.
I'm so sorry that you had a mental issue and happy that you are happy now. Do you have any tips for finding and getting a right job for you in industry based on your experience? I have no idea outside academia.
@@lfou5580 thank you so much for your comment. Transitioning from the academy to industry can be tricky and it depends on a lot of different factors. First, your location. I am based in France and industry is somewhat biased against people from academia over here, however it is really a local thing (France has a large number of engineering schools and the engineer status is held in particularly high regard over here) so the really important takeaway from this is to target employers who are more or less used to hire PhDs. In other case you will have to spend a lot of energy convincing the person in front of you of the actual benefits of hiring a PhD which is not the best use of your time. Secondly, the field of your research and the work you did during your PhD and/or postdoc. If you worked on projects with a direct industrial application or partnership, it can be very beneficial when applying for the R&D positions in industry. It is important to demonstrate the relevant experience when you apply and not to put much accent on other points like teaching for example. You need to identify marketable skills which you have and present them coherently with the support of your work experience. Also, some industries appear to be more open to hiring PhDs than others so your mileage may vary (l come from STEM background so it might be difficult for me to see the full picture). Third and probably most important is networking. You may start by contacting people on LinkedIn who have a similar profile to yours and work in the industry which interests you. I had great time asking people about their experience of transitioning to industry and sometimes they can give you some useful insights. Sometimes it can allow you to get in touch directly with the hiring manager (skipping the HR filter is really nice). It also helps a lot when you had some negative experience with some of your applications, talking to people who used to be in your shoes. Maintaining your morale is really important, because it can significantly affect your interview performance. Connecting with people who stay in academia is generally not very useful so don't waste your time on that. In the end, I wish you a successful transition to the industry which interests you. This is a very difficult period of your professional life but is worth the effort if you set your mind on leaving academia. Keep moving to your goal, and put work into it every day: instead of writing that paper (which your PI really wants to publish so he can apply for another funding) after you get home off work, look for interesting offers or learn some new skills. Good luck!
@@molokoplus1555 Really appreciate your regardful reply with encouragement. This helps a lot. I'm in the U.S. by the way. Hope you enjoy your happy life!
I'm a foreign postdoc student and my situation is even worse: on top of all you mentioned, I am implicitly threatened all the time with losing my right to a residence permit and being "deported" in the middle of your research is not good at all. Some professors and PI's use it to threaten their postdoc students.
Same here, I brought my wife and daughter as dependents and my pi switched to a different uni two weeks after my family arrived. Kept me in the dark till then. Totally destabilized our lives.
@@lakshmeeshakn5888 I know your pain! One month after I arrived my PI switched Uni too, in addition the next guy was a complete moron from eastern Europe, the result was that people start laeving from the lab. So sad! But I was single and I can't imagine doing it whit my family with me...
@@joaofabio5927 true. It was one year of daily torture and multiple breakdowns every week. There is no protection for international postdocs in such scenarios. We are just like puppets at the hands of the system. Those who never had to apply for Visa in their life time will never understand what we go through.
@@lakshmeeshakn5888 what happens if the PI goes to another Uni, does this mean you need to move with him/her? does this mean you need to go through the visa process to relocate again?
@@batmanonholiday4477 rules in UK are crazy. If you are funded by a grant that your pi has obtained, then you have to move to other uni under a TUPE (transfer of undertaking and protection of employment) scheme. Your certificate of sponsorship will be transferred to new uni. You have to apply for ATAS again as your place of research is changing. VISA wont change. But if you decide not to move, then you have to find a new pi in the same uni who has funding and would be willing to take you. Since your research will change you have to apply for ATAS again. VISA wont change. But if no one in the uni takes you, your job will be redundant and you will have 2 months to find new employer. Even if you find the time wont be sufficient for fresh visa and ATAS application and dont forget you have to pay VISA and IHS fees again if you are changing employer by yourself. If you have dependents, TUPE is the best option. But you have to uproot your family and move. Otherwise you will end up spending lot of money which post docs dont have. In my case the negotiations with HR who also dont know much about these process took 6 months to sort out and it was absolute hell.
This is very good advice, if your doing a PhD take it to heart. i completed at PhD 25 years ago, I really wanted that academic career, but..... I saw that unless you were not in the top 1%/rock start grade compared to your competing peers a postdoc will most likely be a start and end of your career and if your lucky an contract lecture without tenier. Life will be one of financial, career and geographic instability, the stress that this causes, you will never be in a position to confidently have a family and children.... you know the normal life things. And looking back today at what my peers who stayed and started their postdocs very much matches what I expected and what you describe now. For me personally, I left and took up a career completely unrelated to my research.... after some serious introspection i worked out that what drove me was not so much an interest in my subject but the process of researching a complex problem, finding a solution and implementing it.... the process. There are a lot of careers out there that provide this.... in many ways its just as rewarding.
@@andrewjolly319 absolutely! i have absolutely no regrets doing the PhD. And to the admissions tutor for my dept and his final year pep talk about doing a PhD. you might be thinking about doing a PhD, just do it at worst you spend 3 years doing something you enjoy and loosing out on 3 years earning. but if you don’t do it you will have a life time of wondering of what ifs and what price do you put on that? And dont think i will go away for a few years earn some money and come back, you wont, out there you will pick up responsibilities a mortgage, a family and that freedom to come back will be lost for a ever…. did i mention he was s traditional Yorkshireman in every respect?
@@andrewjolly319 absolutely! i have absolutely no regrets doing the PhD. And I am reminded of the admissions tutor for my dept and his final year pep talk about doing a PhD. you might be thinking about doing a PhD, just do it at worst you spend 3 years doing something you enjoy and loosing out on 3 years earning. but if you don’t do it you will have a life time of wondering of what ifs and what price do you put on that? And dont think i will go away for a few years earn some money and come back, you wont, out there you will pick up responsibilities a mortgage, a family and that freedom to come back will be lost for a ever…. did i mention he was s traditional Yorkshireman in every respect?
Good advice, man, both the doing something enjoyable for three years and that on coming to realize that its the thought process you enjoy about research and that it can be found elsewhere. I'm finishing my undergrad about to start a masters, think i'll keep this in mind, cheers
A former boss of mine (no PhD so not an academic) spent several years managing an industrial research centre at a university (non-academic management was part of the industry sponsorship deal I think). He's a switched on guy and basically said from what he saw to really make it in academia you've got to be selfish and self-aggrandising. He said he saw too much talent leave academia or go into academic administration because they didn't have that a-hole streak.
I got a Ph.D. in 1970 about a year or two after a sharp transition in the balance between scientists obtaining advanced degrees and the number of faculty positions available. There were 200 applicants for every open position at universities when I graduated. I left the US to work for the Ausralian government for several years and eventually came back to the US to work at a national laboratory. I was fortunate to be able to do plenty of publishable research, but was on soft money my whole career. During my career I saw a further colapse of the opportunities for research careers. Before I left my graduate career I made an appointment with the department head and pointed out to him that the graduate school was producing way too many Ph.D.s. Man was I naive to think he was not fully aware that he was part of a pyramid scheme.The established faculty were the winners and every once in a while they would let another lucky person in the club. In the meantime the mill supplied plenty of cheap labor turning out publishable results for the faculty member. Post-docs were not as prevalent in those days, but the growth of post-docs is just formalizing the supply of even higher qualified slave labor. It is still a pyramid scheme just more so.
I agree 100% that academia turns out a lot more Ph.D.s than there are positions for in academia. It was certainly that way when I finished my Ph.D. in 1980 and I think it has gotten worse, not better with the transition away from hiring tenure track faculty to using temporary lecturers for more and more of the teaching. Personally I am glad to be retired and not just getting into academia.
This is exactly my impression about academia when I got my PhD in 2019. It's a Ponzi scheme. I found it astounding how much people pop out of grad school for only so little of them to find a permanent occupation in the system for which they just have spent 3 years preparing for. It really opened my eyes on the functioning of the system: dozens of underpaid grad students and postdocs work for the benefits of the tenured faculty without much prospects of obtaining a permanent position for themselves. The system just keeps squeezing all the juices from the young and passionate only to throw out a burnt-out husk after many years of pursuing tenure. I don't believe the system will change since the people who are in charge have no reason to do anything as long as they are getting insanely cheap workforce to propel their career.
This idea of working very hard on projects that just end up enriching someone else... isn't that almost every job? No matter whether you're a software engineer, janitor, or pizza delivery guy, your work is being captured by some executive or investor class, and what you get paid is a small portion of what you're generating for them. We're back at Marx's original argument, that people are being alienated from their labor. I don't think this qualifies as a pyramid scheme, because each successive layer isn't recruiting more investors under them. If grad students were recruiting their own grad students, who were recruiting their own grad students, ad infinitum, then you'd have a point. But it's much more centralized than that, with one boss empowered to directly managing a lot of people. Sure, they might organize a hierarchy of how their folks report to each other, for instance having a postdoc oversee a few graduate students, but so does Microsoft. That's just a standard org chart, isn't it? When I was a graduate student, I didn't consider myself poorly compensated. I was being paid $20-25k/yr (that was the range over 5 years), plus about $60k/yr in tuition waivers, plus other benefits. All told, it was a compensation package of perhaps $85-90k, plus the eventual PhD. This was about 15 years ago, in the 2008 meltdown, so that salary stretched quite a bit further than it does now and I never felt financially stretched. Granted, a lot of that compensation is "imaginary," but as anyone who has had student loans can attest, those "imaginary" expenses become very "real" eventually. Compared to a lab technician at a biotech, for example, it's actually a generous compensation package. The lab technician might bring in $40-60k annually plus benefits, which is perhaps 1/2 to 2/3 of the compensation package offered to the grad student, plus they hit a glass ceiling at that point and generally can't go much higher except for perhaps cost of living increases or the appreciation of stock options. On the other hand, if you want to compare that to a job like computer engineer, then yes, it's woefully lacking. Then again, it's not very clear to me that that field will be nearly as profitable in a decade, given advances in AI. Now, I could see the argument that we've had a lot of inflation since then, and incoming grad students would feel a lot more pinched. That's undeniable. I think something has to give, there, and we'll likely see a recession that deflates prices, but that's a tangent for another day.
I actually left a permanent asst. Professor position in a world top 100 university for a 3-year postdoc at a prestigious research institute in Germany. I'm enjoying my postdoc - I get to learn and concentrate on the work, rather than having to attend useless committee meetings or grade student papers. Yes, the pay is a little lower but more than enough to pay for rent and food and some recreation. It's a rich life. After 3 years, I'll either get an extension or move to a different country where there's fertile ground for a permanent lectureship, rather than staying in a saturated environment. I've already lived and worked in 5 countries.
I have been working as a postdoc for five years. In my case, the conditions are not bad at all, but, indeed, the prospects are extremely vague. For some reason, after covid, the requirements began to grow, and the salary remained at the same level. Moreover, last year, I didn't even manage to get a position as a lecturer at the university where I'm a postdoc. So, the career prospects seem more and more vague to me and I began to think more and more about working in the industry. The most unpleasant thing is that I am already in my late 30, and I often feel that I am missing my chance. Andy describes the situation quite accurately.
Just start somewhere (part-time), the usual expectation is that you will develop quicker than others on lower education level and go up more easily up the chain from application to planning to management/strategy and beyond.
I wanted to be a professor but I jumped ship after my masters degree, and I'm glad I did. I realized that having a degree from a good school didn't change the laws of supply and demand. There just aren't enough academic jobs to justify the number of PhDs.
@@srinivaschillara4023 A MASTERS DEGREE IS " a qualification "....ever heard of that(?). And there are NOT enough jobs for all qualified scientists! Evan was talking about qualifications.Can you think ?
@@irenehartlmayr8369 Ha ha hot under the collar darling; One doesn't obtain Master's from a school, it is usually at Uni or maybe a college. Anyway... TTYN.
@@srinivaschillara4023 here in the US, a master's degree is granted through a college or university. And we use "school," "university," and "college" interchangeably.
@@lucindabreeding How strange! But, thank you. You have tried to be helpful, unlike some people who need not be named (but happily can be called names). What a contrast! I'm from the other side of the planet, not actually from a different planet. cheers and many wishes.
The publishing issue is getting bigger and bigger due to the increase in peer-review times. If getting a paper published takes 6-8 months, you are losing most of the post-doc contract time in waiting for peer-review results. In the end, success in publishing papers depends a lot on how long it takes to publish.
I think it's better when reviewers take time to read the paper thoroughly, 6-8 months seems fair to me. In my field (Mathematics) it can be 12-15 months for some journals. It's not lost time, you just do something else while they read your paper, but I agree it's annoying when you compete for positions that the papers are not fully published yet.
@@ElGranPedrito do you guys seriously believe that the reviewer is just reading your paper for 6 to 8 months they don't have anything else to do? No they put it off for quite some time and get back to it when they are free. At most since they are experienced only a 10 to 15 minutes look at the manuscript will give them enough information on what the paper is about and another hour to understand it.
@@HellRaiZOR13 I have done reviews myself and many times I have taken the time to read carefuly each line, verify the computations, note all the minor typos, then let it rest for a month, do some research about the topic, then come back and write the fairest and most insightful report I can. Sometimes I have sent emails to more qualified peers about aspects of the paper I didn't know well enough. I know all reviewers don't do the same, but I'm not the only one doing it like this in my field and I have received top quality reviews on some of my papers. This is the standard the community should aim for, but we a different system for that.
Five percent? That is astounding. I never really took the prospect of becoming a professor seriously when I was in grad school. My attitude was piratical. I saw faculty exploit students, and decided to use the experience for what it was proclaimed to be - an opportunity to learn. A very toxic feature of academia is an unspoken assumption that if you have aspirations to work outside of academia, you are a failure. This attitude seems into students' minds very early, and it is quite deliberate. If people do not believe this, they will see academia for what it really is and find better things to do with their abilities.
I am doing my PhD in the Humanities and plan on leaving the academia as soon as I get my PhD. I talked a lot with people who plan on staying in the academia and my conclusion is that people either have no idea what else they could do and academia - no matter how terrible - is their comfort zone. Or they are so interested in their field of study that they are ready to accept all the bad conditions just to be able to research.
When I did my own humanities PhD as a mature-age student, I had hopes of academic employment within Australia. These hopes on my part were of course delusional, but one thing which reconciled me to the need to get out was the spectacle of numerous people from my age who already *were* in academic employment. And who were stuck there. These were people who got their PhDs and academic jobs in the last years of guaranteed tenure (in other words the late 1980s). They never considered doing anything else with their lives. Now of course the entire university system has collapsed around them; they're surrounded by full-fee-paying 'students' who can't speak a word of English; but they themselves are stuck in academe because the number of non-academic employers who want to hire experts in (say) feminist critiques of Bartók is minuscule at the best of times. I could almost feel sorry for them if I wasn't the evil insensitive bastard which I am widely known to be.
It is the supervisor's responsibility to nurture the development of a post-doc. I have supervised nine post-docs in my career. Five went on to academia (Virginia Tech, Louisiana Tech, USF, FAU, Versailles, all tenure-track jobs or foreign equivalent) and four are in industry (Microsoft, Arctic Wolf, IBM, CIBC). That's nine for nine in job placement. None has gone on to do another post-doc; they all went into permanent positions. I myself did one post-doc (at Microsoft) and then landed on the tenure track. We have the power to change the system through individual actions. Treat post-docs like human beings and everything else follows.
Huge respect to you for giving quality effort towards the success of others. I think our society needs more of this kind of honest collaborative effort, where the result is better, more valuable people at the end of the process.
@@PeterAGW Perhaps the correct conclusion is that you shouldn't hire post-docs unless there is a reasonable likelihood that permanent positions will be available.
@@DavidJao What you say is ideal and nice but the reality is actually the opposite. People hire postdoc for their own self interests - that there is absolutely NO way their academic career (despite being tenured) can progress if no postdocs do the hard research for them. By nature the system is toxic and incentivises professors to keep having postdocs without rewarding them fairly. That's really sad but that's the truth!
Bachelors was depressing enough for me, but think quite a few postdocs suddenly realize that they're quite trapped with their degrees and career paths & that feelinf sucks.
all we see in this world in the "public mirror" that society reflects is a very narrow propagandized idealized outcome. Reality is something else altogether. But the rat race is so dominant like a matrix, alternative news doesn't come out.
My brother-in-law does just fine in the real world with a math PhD so it's not as hard to jump ship as you think. It just takes a bit of bravery or desperation.
Worked myself almost to death on multiple postdocs, then missed a grant and had to get a non-academic job. Felt like such a failure even though I was earning more for so much less work.
One of the biggest problems with being nontenured faculty or a postdoc is that you are directly competing for University resources (lab space, facilities, staff time, student time) with tenured professors. You can not really get into a position of being a principal investigator because it would require you to have those resources reliably available, whereas you must appeal to tenured faculty and sitting administration to get those resources who are not really committed to helping or advancing the careers as those they see as temporary.
If you consider your PhD a chance to study something hands-on for a few years after which you are free to do something else as well, and not the first step in an academic career in which you are entrenched, it suddenly becomes a lot more fun... and it could get you on average further in live too: you will also automatically prioritize a more free research spirit and pursue a wider range of things that interest you, not scientific fashion or you promoter.
I saw this happening to postdocs around me when I was in year 4 of my BS. I decided not to pursue further education. I didn't want to make further sacrifices to end up used, overworked, underpaid, with my career dying on the vine, no IP rights and no job security. I still feel shame that I "didn't make it," eleven years later, but I know I made the right choice.
Spot on regarding the peer pressure. Happy I left physics before the PhD. Didn’t think the tenured positions were all that. Love working at a think tank now.
I bailed on my PhD after seeing postdoc pay and requirements and the length of time it would take to get to tenure and the low odds of getting there. Maybe some day when I don't have a family to care for, I might do academic research. But the costs right now are not worth the benefits. If we maintain this system, only the fools and the short sighted will opt for academic research.
When I was doing my master's degree I got to know some of the recent Ph.D. grads from my supervisor's program, and I've seldom encountered such a spiritless, dejected, and unsuccessful group of people.
Post doc in UK. Depressed and angry and anxious. Have resigned and will be going back to my native. My postdoc boss ruined my motivation and academic career aspirations. Feel like a failure and trying hard to recover mentally
Don't feel bad about your decision, it seems you were in a toxic environment and took the best possible decision by leaving it behind Make a move to industry, and don't look back
@@vincentadultman6226 From the frying pan into the fire. Industry isn't a panacea - it's equally toxic, more vicious and workplace bullying is rampant. Caveat emptor. I was in a Ph.D. programme at b-school in London, Cambridge post-grad, and director at a FTSE-100 pharmaco. Now happily self-employed!
I’m currently a postdoc and am doing very well in my field; I think I would most likely get a tenure-track position at an R1 if I were on the job market this year. But I am so unhappy in academia. Everyone around me seems to have severe depression and I am on the fast track to that same fate, if I’m not there already (I would guess that I am, but I have not had the energy to find a therapist). My friend who was a postdoc until recently asked her mentor if he knew any professors or postdocs who were happy, and he said, “I know they must exist, but I can’t think of any.” A lot of my peers and I are now trying to get jobs as data scientists, and we have STEM degrees, which should make it “easy.” But I have not talked to anyone who has gotten a single interview without a referral. And referrals are hard to get if your entire network is in academia. The job market for data scientists is also not good. I can stay in my postdoc position for a while still, but I am so worried about the effects it will continue to have on my mental health. If I don’t have a job in industry by the fall, I will probably just choose to be unemployed. If you’re considering a postdoc position, please listen to me: I am doing very well, yet I am choosing to be unemployed over working in academia any longer. It is just not worth it.
@@stephenmcaleese8238 it was mostly the hours and the pressure. In my mentorship group, people would often talk about feeling guilty for taking a couple of hours off on a Saturday. I don’t think it’s healthy for people to work 70 hours a week doing that kind of research. I realize a lot of it had to do with my specific field though. In my industry job now I can read papers and analyze data for hours on end, but with the research I was doing before, I just felt like I was beating my head against the wall and only ever making progress a few times a year. It’s like how cats get depression from playing with laser pointers. The work never pays off
I was a postdoc a few years ago. My supervisor told me something that I remember vividly to this day: beggars can't be choosers. A snapshot of my time as a postdoc.
What you said about a power imbalance where the PI simply points you towards what you need to accomplish but is otherwise totally hands off in the process really resonates for me. The weird thing is, I just finished my undergraduate in the U.S., and have no intention of moving further in academia in my life at this point. There is obviously a great disparity between an undergraduate researcher and a postdoc, as I was not being paid, and generally wasn't as important in the lab, but I am sort of relieved to see there are some parallels as well. My timely graduation was entirely dependent on an independent research project I was doing in my lab, and while the pressure was not extremely high in terms of the expected results, the pressure I experienced mentally was quite high, as I wanted to do good work, but had NO mentorship in methodology, and essentially no help at all in strategization. The PI I worked under would simply tell me what to do, mention some things that would be cool to accomplish, and would otherwise want to be left alone. This wouldn't be so bad, if not for the fact it was HIS project that I was doing. I honestly didn't have a great big interest in the work, so spending hours and hours working out small details such that the project would actually work, and deciding how to do each step where there was ambiguity and open-ended ness was painful. I could go on here, but really I just felt the need to share because I felt oddly connected to what you were saying about being left to handle everything on your own Andy. Where all the risk is on you, and the PI is just living in some other universe otherwise.
That's not a problem with the PI itself or academia. That's a problem with your choices. You shouldn't be doing a project you're not interested in and that did not motivate you to go on and research it by yourself because it brings you emotionally or psychologically in return. You could actually change academia and PI to company and manager and the story would be as true as the one you told. PS: You actually should have had mentorship and he, or a experienced student, should have at least walked by your side until you were confident enough to fly solo. That was either a lack of communication or a poor choice for a professor to work with. He or she should be chosen by their guidance skills as well as their academic resume.
@@caioporto9234 Not going to contradict you regarding my choices being at the heart of my issues. However, without going into all the complicated details I will say I was pressured by time restrictions to get into a lab quickly, and unfortunately didn't have the freedom to be very choosy. Once I started working with the PI I was kind of locked in due to these time restrictions. Further, he started me off with an independent trial assignment, (a little bit like a take home assignment for an interview), and after reporting back to him my first time, every subsequent interaction sort of followed this mold of him giving me some things to do, and me doing my best to execute. He never allowed for in depth discussion of the topic, never attempted to give more than superficial context for any aspect of the project, and would get annoyed if asked more than a few simple questions, which really made the relationship difficult to manage. Overall, I don't like to point the finger at him as the source of my problems. As I was just in a weird and unusual situation for a handful of reasons, and that time constrained need for lab work acted as a real point of risk for me, as I simply didn't have the time to do due diligence. Thus it was a bit of a roll of the dice. I didn't roll well. I also think you should consider the fact that MOST undergraduate students lack the background knowledge and general awareness to effectively evaluate a professors academic resume. I certainly don't feel confident in my ability to do that now, as people are really complex, and I just don't understand what to look for when attempting to identify the bad PIs from the good PIs... I don't know if there is any way to really get down to that subjective truth without having a decent amount of contextual knowledge about a given PI.
@@MrChaluliss IMHO you should point the finger. He could arrange a meeting and discuss your time restrictions and ultimately even fire you, but the lack of guidance is entirely in his hands. The truth is he is a project manager, and he didn't do his job. I agree with you 100%. Just as society asks teenagers to choose what they want to do with a third of their time for the rest of their lives, they must choose an area, a project, a supervisor, to do their graduate studies without any experience and any help at all. You made the best choices you could at the time, with the resources you had at hand. I have seen people taking the right steps to make that choice, but they were all more experienced and generally older than the average graduate student. They came to the university and started hanging out with the graduate students and ask about the good, the bad and the ugly. Who is a pain in the ass? Who help their students? Who has a good resume? They arranged meetings with many professors and then decided if they wanted to enroll there or some other place.
I can only tell you my 35 year experience at an institution. In the beginning. Open, focus was on exploration, focus on new things, focus was on progress. In the end. Closed, focus was on pleasing a legalistic beauracacy, focus was on trimming the budgets elsewher to support the legalistic beauracy, focus and dollars was on conpliance with unfunded government madates, focus was on placating external groups with no authority and no legal mandate, intrusion of third party groups who were ascientific, did not have any authority, but got authority by under-the-table interaction with funding authorities, institutions that do not stand up against wrong, who cower to puffed up authorities, who have become political pushovers. In the beginning overhead portion of a grant was 15 to 30%, when I left it was 65% In the beginning grants funded capital equipment (in cases we used for decades) at the end the fed only granted large equipment to biggest grants. In the beginning the NIH spread money fluidly around science, at the end they funded far few big projects. At the end funding for immunology (think Autoimmunity and Post infection sequella like long covid) dropped to about 1% of all grants submitted. I worked on autoimmunity, autoimmune disease research in the US is about as rock bottom as one can get relative to any developed country. I was plucked out of my retirement by a physician who confronted with a sudden rise in mysterious autoimmune disease looking thing and had noone to really help him study it. The monster was already there, too few people spread over too many diseaes. Then covid came along, noone was prepared and the monster roared. There is always an increase of mysterious autoinflammatory diseases in the wake of new disease pandemics, long covid was expected, it just seems strange because the US was unprepared. Medical Science began to decline the day Ronald Reagan stepped into office, it has been on decline ever since. The conservatives in society are afraid of knowledge.
Honestly man. I'm a lawyer, it's not a PhD, but it was 7 years of schooling and one year articling. I felt that video to my core, it's the same idea with lawyers who work for legal. They have all the risk and not enough pay for what they do.
When I graduated college @1970, there were several people who tried very hard to encourage me to go to graduate school and remain in academia. I declined and moved on with my life, and I have never had a moment’s regret. Something about it just repelled me, perhaps it was just sound instinct.
Strongly relate. My first postdic ended last year, still waiting for the decision about the funding of my next one. Well, formally waiting, in reality getting new skills to enter industry, because I just can't do this any longer.
All of the content for people wanting to survive in Academia is great, but I would love to see some more content on the path out of it. Just like you said, so many are leaving, and it is a difficult change.
I recognize some of those regret. My biggest one, though, is that I had to discover what was required to become an academic on the job (of postdoc). I didn't like it and i quit. But why nobody during grad or phd ever explains how the system works?
Hi Andy, thanks for nice video again. So just few quick comments: I believe that more and more people do not want to do postdoc because work life balance is more important than ever been for many people. Staying in academia it is very hard to keep mental health in good shape and be compensated financially on a decent level. I actually think that the fact that postdoc ( as well as phd candidates) stopped applying so extensively for positions is dictated by the reason that those jobs are not suited for modern idea of balanced, fulfilling, healthy lifestyle. Additionally, being in your thirties/forties you mostly want to settle down and start a family; hard one in academic environment. Last but not least, I think we are in the era when academics start to stand up for themselves and reject crappy positions - which is good and at the end might lead to changes in the system. Hope to see it one day. Best wishes!
I hope that day comes sooner then later; but I don't want to hold my breathe on it. I have moved on from academia to acquiring an industry job; I hope to spend my spare time pursuing research independent of these institutions. And maybe one day, my close friend would join me as well; but regardless that event, I know very well that I am through with rubbish affairs of academia and the people that compose it.
Even here in the US when I worked in pharmaceutical research, I saw many Ph.D. students who left with master's degrees because there were no jobs for Ph.Ds. in industry. Too many people are conned into a graduate program where they become enslaved in academia under some professor. This is why so many foreign students enter these programs. If they become postdocs, then they are expected to supervise graduate students for little pay and the expectation that they will leave in a few years. Those Ph.Ds. who do get into industry often try to rapidly move out of the lab into a comfortable management position where they use none of their scientific skills and become corporate politicians.
I may be starting a posdoc soonish and appreciate very much your experience! I think what is different for me is that I may be working on a project very much conceived by me, where I’ll develop hands-on experience useful for the professional path I want outside academia. I think I could use this time to network more and find a way out too!
I have seen many who has been doing various postdoc positions for 5-6 years or even more with no job security, no idea where they will end up next year and a horrendous amount of job responsibilities 😑 No wonder many left for industries and felt way better than sticking with academia.
this barrage of comments on this treat vilifies Western academia beyond reason and exalts industry, as if the latter provides permanent contracts left and right or any comparable intellectual job satisfaction. i have many friends and relatives who work in banks, bakeries, IT industry, designers, etc. The office job in one big European bank that my friend does sounds almost like a 24/7 slavery, i don't know why you people think that escaping academia will get them necessarily a better deal. You need to network in academia -- like everywhere; you need to know how to write applications and the informal rules of the game --- like everywhere. The only difference is the much higher competition in academia over a smaller number jobs. so, either one accepts this grind stoically or one transfers the skills elsewhere. no need to scandalize the niche profession that has always been the vocation of a tiny elite.
This is not uncommon in every career. Many people find the career they picked isn't what they had imagined and go into something else. I was a video game creator in my career and worked with other video game creators who had been a patent lawyer, ER doctor, air traffic controller, etc...
I left because there was basically no chance of a job without having to leave the country, plus basically zero job security. I already earn as much as my supervisor in industry. No regrets.
@@andrewjolly319 Thank you 😊 I will try again! It didn't work out after my PhD and I really needed a job, so I accepted an postdoc offer, but now, 2 years later, I can really see the academic environment is just not the right fit for me...
I'm planning to start my postdoc journey right now after I finished my PhD. and I believe people like me think that if we don't have a choice in academia only to get a postdoc then we have to take that decision to immerse ourselves in postdoc life. and this is an opportunity for us as third-world survivors to take steps forwards to change our lives for the better.
don't do it, it is scam. Asking researchers to publish 10 or 20 papers in short time is just Fraudulent and has nothing to do with science and research. You will have to compensate with writing useless review papers because you don't have time for real scientific research.
Well I'm currently in that situation. Two professors supervise the grant. I'm with one PhD student are responsible for all the research for a very tough subject and I switched from the topic of my PhD to new one. And currently it looks like all the responsibility is on me and stress is killing me. I just should go back do business
That's another good point. Moving to different countries for 2-3 years and dealing everytime with visa application-extension is a huge source of stress.
This video is so illuminating! I'm currently writing my phd thesis in Asian studies and sometimes I wonder what to do after. On the one hand, I'd like to continue within the academia, but on the other I'd like to be more free and less stressed. Also, I don't know my options outside academia, what could I do with a phd in humanities? 😔
I assume from your accent you, like me, are in the UK. Back in the day, once someone completed as a post-doc, they had quite a hopeful prospect of getting a secure, well-paid job as a full-time University lecturer. Although I left academia some time ago, what I hear from those still working in Universities is just what terrible employers they are. The modern money and commerce obssessed universities seem to have casualised lecturing till it is no longer an attractive proposition for someone at that point in their career. It must be said though that it has always been the case that in academia, as in business, it is WHO you know that is all important. Cultivating personal professional contacts is now and has always been key to getting the best opportunities. It is human nature to prefer the 'devil you know' to the 'devil you don't know'.
I left three Ph.D. programs (in the U.S., I'm a U.S. citizen), having three master's degrees by the time I was finally lured away by the filthy lucre of industry. I still did a couple of stints at local colleges to work on research projects and teach, both of which I loved doing, but when those contracts ended I always got another industry job that wasn't as much fun but I made at least twice as much money. Now I'm 58 and retired, with a house that I fully own, no debt, a nice pile of assets, and I just bought a beautiful live-aboard sailboat with cash. So as far as the work-life balance goes, I have no regrets. But I still miss the trappings of academe, and I feel that I could have done some really cool intellectual things instead of the grind of commercial software development. But the trappings of academe don't compensate for the grind, which would have been a lot worse... I saw that pretty clearly for at least a year before I left, and what you have said here affirms that. Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud, what everyone around me knew but wouldn't talk about, even back in the 90s when it apparently wasn't nearly as bad as it is now. In hindsight, I think there are advantages to having multiple master's degrees rather than a Ph.D.
Purpose of post doc is really be a researcher and junior supervisor to ph. D. students. Of course, more you do, more you are given to do. So, everyone needs to face their destiny. If you love research so much, that you do not at all care for money, then you could be a perfect post doc. But, if you somehow discovered that there is more to life than research (like money), then you have to deal with this new reality. Your post doc life would be terrible with a professor, who himself/herself does not like research as much as you do. Then you are stuck, carrying them on your back. And you can only join industry, if you are relevant to them. They do not want a weight on their back, any more than dead weight of a professor, you have on your back as a post doc. So, what do you do? University tenure-track positions are few in numbers. Teaching in a non-research college or community college is like an insult to you. Well, it is your life. You have to make hard decisions. Life always requires compromises. In my opinion, every dignified work is worth doing.
Well, I can say why I left post-doc land for sure. 1. After suffering years of poverty as a BSc/MSc./Phd candidate I got sick of yet more of it. 2. Many of the staff members in my last University were just hopeless. One student left because of the poor quality teaching, and he was 100% right if you ask me. I wanted to rub shoulders with intellectual giants (like I did at Manchester, Physics), but instead I found myself surrounded by folks with medium sized intellectual abilities at best. 3. The self aggrandizement of some of the staff got to the point of being amusing. They genuinely thought they were doing world class research. In fact they were taking tax-payers money, writing papers in the "Journal of Recondite Garbage" and patting themselves on the back. As an example, the Dept Head was planning his Professorial world valedictory tour, but nobody was interested in hearing his parting words of wisdom, so it got cancelled. Says it all really. 4. Industry was where all the action was (and still is) happening. 5. 30 years later that department has contributed zip to the world of engineering that I have seen, and I doubt it ever will. I never looked back, and heading off into industry was the best move I ever made. Ahh well. Maybe in the next life it will be better.
Thanks! I had to watch this. I always knew this, but my PhD will end soon and I was pretty successful in it. I've been working full-time for the last couple of months in industry while finishing the writeup of my thesis and for a moment, I was really considering applying for post doc positions. I always knew the odds were stacked against early career researchers, but I just really missed doing research. This video reminded me of what I always knew. thanks a lot!
My father got his PhD and is now a professor, and he didn't do a postdoc. He went straight to industry. And this was in the late 80s. He pulled me aside and told me to either go to industry for a few years or spend time at a national lab. His reasons: more money, less stress, still do what you love. And when I asked about teaching, he told me that lots of smart people make tutorial videos online, and doing that is just fine. So I'm heeding his advice. I should have mine in 3 to 4 years, and my plan is to go to return to the US and either join a national lab, take a company job for a few years, or otherwise, join a startup in my field.
@@64standardtrickyness based on those whom I've talked to, you CAN get government funding at a university, but it isn't limited. You get whatever funding you get your hands on, it's just that the university takes a portion as overhead, with the highest I've heard of being circa 65%, which I think is completely outrageous. At a national lab, you don't have the freedom to do whatever you want, but the funding is given from federal and state government departments, the US Military (particularly the air force and navy), and some companies which may be important stakeholders in the success of a project.
We are in a world in which RUclipsrs make a lot of money more than any Postdocs..... Yet people say we love research, we want to pursue research as for the rest of our life....... Well, research my a** You always live in a pressure in this type of life, you don't get enough money..... Yet you say O love research..... Will you feed your children that love for science or are you gonna need real money?
40 years ago I wanted to be a college professor. I love history, and was considering getting a PHD in European History. But while I would have gotten some financial help from my family, I knew that I had was going to have to take care of my self and help family members, so I knew I would end up in a deep economic hole getting the PHD. Secondly I did not think I could learn another language and write a PHD thesis. So I decided to concentrate on finding a stable carrier instead of getting a PHD. What is funny is that I would eventually teach myself a second language, and dabbled in a third one, and the career I chose required me to right long detailed reports and affidavits, which sometimes were 50 pages long in a very short period of time, sometimes within a few hours on things I was not familiar with (6 to 8 pages), that required tons of research and investigation, and had to be absolutely truthful or I could be fired, sued, or indicted. I was a law enforcement officer for 30 years. I still love history with a passion, but I am so glad I did not try to become a college professor. Law enforcement is not as good as a career as it used to be, but I still think it beats academia, and that is a shame.
Postdoc in France...30K euros per year before tax (at best, most get 25K, which is an insult) Postdoc in Singapore....85K S$ after tax Postdoc in Denmark....66K euros before tax Postdoc in UK....36K before tax These are the offers I had. Glad I went to Singapore 😂. Next step will definitely be industry though. I have a real salary to bargain after that.
Do you have any clues about payment in Italy? If you get 25K€\year (to be taxed) you are lucky. yeah it Is quite offensive and over the top... government calls you "capricious child"
My experiences: postdoc offer in Germany was 55k and in Finland 48k. UK postdoc I interviewed for seriously thinks they can pay people 30k in a city where rent is 1200-1500/mo. lol.
My 2 year postdoc in science was great! Great team. Good work. But academics are way overrated. The battles are so heated because the money is so so so small. Get out while you can, but be prepared to diversify.
I was postdoc in the 90s, I did it to bridge an economic downturn. I never had a chance in academia and I did not really try. I found it a pretty corrupt system including nepotism and favoritism. Afterwards I found a really good job in industry. I took a conscious decision to leave academia and do whatever it takes to go to industry. The job insecurity and self doubt is the most depressing of postdoc life…
I think this is an issue in many other areas of civilization as well; nurses aren’t paid enough for their job, primary and secondary school. Teachers are underpaid, low level managers and administrators in most industries are under high-pressure to find money, and upper level, managers and administrators spend all their time finding money instead of doing the work that needed to actually promote a healthy busineenvironment.
As a fresh phd, I'm looking for multiple options for my career. Looks like post doc is quite tough option. I might go for postdoc if I won't be in relationships. But being in relationships gives a lot pressure to earn money as well.
Andy, my problem is trying to get accepted on a funded PhD, in quite a narrow field of study, id fancy my luck in moving on afterwards if only there was a beforewards!.
The main reason: professors that are >70 years old are refusing to retire. It is illegal for the university to fire these people that essentially do no work. All these old professors know they are well past their usefulness, but their name carries weight by itself. Universities have created a rat race of never ending prospects because of one simple fact: the number of available jobs is tiny compared to the number of graduates per year. 95% of graduate students will NEVER be professors in any capacity. Of the lucky 5% that make it, most of them come from top universities. If you are not in a top 10 graduate program for your discipline, start learning to program, network, and prepare to leave after your PhD. It is not worth the agony of getting stuck in adjunct/postdoc hell.
In Germany student population has quadrupled since the 1990s (i think) while number of professorships remained the same. And it wasn't that great before that. We are talking about something more structural here.
I have been studying (10 years ago) with such 70 y.o. engineering professors and they knew more than 99.9% of the industry. Maybe cut down on the philosophy of whatever depts.
My girlfriend was pursuing academia and i gotta tell you, the pay is shit, the work is shit, the workplace is rife with bullying, coercion and politics. The worst possible avenue one can take career wise
Funny enough, I interviewed for a patent examiner job trying to find an alternative to postdocs and the job was MISERABLE and way more precarious and lower paid than all the postdocs I interviewed for. I got many postdoc offers and will be taking the least objectionable one to buy myself sometime and relocate somewhere with more job opportunities. I know I will feel stupid for staying in the ponzi scheme for a few more years, but after a year's worth of trying my hand at industry I've not landed anything and rent is due!
I remember when I was an undergraduate my advisor got me in for a working internship for credit in a biochemistry lab. I talked into the professor that was running the lab once before I started and then maybe I saw him a couple times over the semester but I never talked to him again. The graduate students in the lab all had their own work to do and where constantly doing stuff while he was hardly ever around. I didn't really understand it then but I guess I do now that you bust your ass and get burnt out and if you get to be in charge you then compensate by making everyone else do the work while you sit back and do very little.
I am a project postdoc. I work on a project that is not realizable. Not only I have to deliver a result, that at least comes close enough to almost work. My professor push me to write a proposal for a followup project, based on the same idea. THAT DOES NOT WORK. Or otherwise I lose my job.
Now postdoc is 100K per year in Australia. (The salary is not bad) However, it is pretty stressful. We have not idea what will happen after the first contract.
This is not new news. The same was true in the 80’s when I completed my phd. Began postdocking in the uk and chucked it after two years. No job security and poor career prospects. Moreover, the supervisor was rubbish at managing the research group, which led to infighting and bullying between the postdocs and phd students. Also the publication rate was very slow, you don’t know how lucky researchers are now with the internet. For both collaborating, publishing and finding previous research materials. Anyone heard of hundreds of paper volumes of the chemical abstracts? Anyway, I left to join to make a career in business and never looked back. More pay and less crap.
Completely agree. It was the exact same 20 years ago. I don't even understand how all the people commenting here did not see this well before even graduating from their Masters.
In a dream world, postdocs would just do research that they value and have a splendid time without pressure. I hate Max Weber's Iron Cage. Modern society is messed up.
I do think there needs to be accountability. But right now we have a system where accountability is replaced by market incentives and power dynamics. There is a recent episode by David Harvey on the topic that is worth watching.
That’s a dream because you must do something that is valued by other people if you want to receive something of value from other people. Your dream world is impossible.
@@30803080308030803081 But a lot of research that people want to do is valuable to others but might not be valuable to large corporations. And the deadlines and other policies that some researchers have to follow are actually detrimental to research.
I moved from a faculty position to industry back to academia. I had a three year post-doc. All is not as bad as this video states. Have a broad mentoring network. Keep looking at job ads, make sure you know what skills and experiences people are looking for both in and out of academia. A lot of academic job packages are just not up to standards, not just number of papers. But a clear research proposal etc. make sure lots of people read you job applications. Pick academics for your academic job search, and industry for you industry job hunt. I have mentored students into academic jobs and others into industry jobs. Seek out people who will help you. Don’t do this alone. It is always ok to ask for hel0.
absolutely right, I don't know this first hand but from my sister. She graduated with honors and obtained PHD and went on to do research and was published with several books on her specific field but could only ever teach anthropology and never reach tenure. The problem is Archeology is male dominated and their is a specific side of the political spectrum you must be in order to climb the ladder in colleges. She now works as a curator and still the politics dictates work environment. Horrible crazy work environment dominated by an abusive political appointee.
I didn't do it because the pay was so low. I got literally 3x a postdoc salary working in the private sector. I had a wife and was saving for a house so it was a no brainer.
Realizing the actual nature of academia convinced me that even having a batchelors degree was a waste. I quit during my senior year of undergrad, never to go back.
Random video for my feed, but here’s my 5 cents. My construction site has an overqualified safety officer who is a complete fool for the job he has and a driver geographer who dumped all his academic credentials to pay for the family expenses. The only phd with value nowadays is either data science or medicine, everything else is more valuable if you get it at work.
Fantastic channel! All of this is unlikely to change in the hard sciences in the USA as thousands of internationals are available to enter postdocs or adjunct roles for that matter. Many of my cohorts who graduated with doctorates gave up the game and their dreams to go for the real money- university administration. Now these new administrators are lorded over by poohbahs with doctorates in university administration but make a wage almost an order of magnitude more than they did as postdocs in the natural sciences. Funny how the world works. At least I enjoyed grad school!
@7:09 "PIs don't have any risk or responsibilities". That's not usually true. If RAs fail to meet milestones and deliverable deadlines, then the PI can get into trouble. If they are tenured, then obviously they aren't going to get fired, but they are much less likely to get funding etc. Life is great as a PI/supervisor if you get good RAs that are capable of independent work, but a nightmare if you get lazy boxes of rocks that you have to treat with kid gloves because you don't want them to file complaints. But I definitely agree with you that Academia makes life harder and more toxic than it needs to be. This is a natural consequence of government pushing people for the last few decades and longer into university, now the supply of labor is far greater than its demand with all the consequences that follow.
If US higher education costs in have exponentially outpaced every other good/service, except for healthcare, and enrollment has grown, why aren’t their more professorships? Because, in the US, universities are sitting on enormous resources stolen through the unlimited amount of US government-backed student loans that can never be written-off during bankruptcy.
The numbers don't mean anything without context with general public. There has also been a shift in demographic in post doc research. On top of that the subject matter is becoming more politicised than ever.
The problem is "science" inside of academic institutions. How corrupt is your institution, your department, your supervisors? Most new science happen in the industry as that’s where there is sometime a incentive to innovate, in academia there is mostly an incentive to publish papers, scratch each other back and get more funding.
Basically any industry that can use your analytical skills, abilities to organize yourself etc. This meta skills mean at least just as much than the specific topic, and while some companies might not realize this other do. And I speak from a sociologist perspective with focus on qualitative research, of course we can't hardly expect job advertisements to say sociologist needed (there are in say public service but very rare) but none of my cohorts had any trouble getting a job..
I think 'industry' just means any jobs outside universities, not necessarily means doing other jobs within the same subject so I agree with Lionon's - any non-academic jobs that appreciate specialised and high-level skills you're trained in any subjects.
@@SO-rq3pm I'd say any job for which I'd better have an unexplained hole in my CV than list my graduate studies and post-doc doesn't count. And that's about all of them.
@@SO-rq3pm Thank you, I was going even beyond that, even if your actual trained subject is absolutely useless outside of the university discipline (I wont dare to call any names here, anyway), the primary skillets to work scientifically on problem, to get at the core of stuff, to find easy models to complicated things, you certainly find a place that can use that.
@@georgelionon9050 absolutely agree! I think many humanities postdocs I met (I don't mean anyone here) is that they like to adopt a very subject/disciplinary thinking when talking about chances outside academic. While I appreciate their passion in the subject they choose, when it comes to job market, be it in academia or not, that kind of thinking does more harm than good to you. Even within academia, a very subject-specific mindset is inadequate. Most successful professors have great skills and mindsets OUTSIDE of their own subject, e.g. management skills, problem-solving, coordination etc. - these are all generic and nothing to do whether you're a Kantian philosopher or medieval historian!
A couple ppl I spoke to her on yt, said they went directly into the private sector, and one had to change majors twice to have a marketable research career, due to many of the dishonest tricks their peers were using to get published. It wasn't so much the demands of the work or the uncertainty of finding research teams and grants to keep working, it was according them the politics of the institutions they couldn't deal with.
Don't leave out the Woke infestation in the Universities. There is enough to do without worrying that any word you speak can get you fired. It just needs someone to interpret it as an aggression in some way you have never heard of. It is one of the great mysteries that administrations are helpless before this when there isn't any downside to saying no.
Wanted to do PhD as research appealed to me but didn't feel "smart enough". Regardless, I'm glad i didnt even try seeing how much of the role involves grovelling for funding which would wreck me psychologically, and the insane high competitiveness for a role that you may not even need a PhD to excel in :/
This is not new nor is it confined to Britain. I completed my PhD in Australia in 1985 and took a post doctoral position in the US before returning to Australia to be employed on short term contracts. On the strength of the limited financial security of a three year research grant, at the age of 37 I bought a house.
It's kind of right, pursing a Phd or going to get a job, well it is more about the person and the value that you are going to bring either to the workplace or to the university, so there is no shame of getting a job after you get a Phd, however, your ego will prevent you from getting any job, therefore, opening a business although it is not easy, it still consider a satisfying option, since you will have to tackle down lots of obstacles, which will give you that feeling of giving back to the society.
What is new? Candidates and Post Docs always joked about being slave labor and many were. Being in the real STEM areas, I had a broad skill set that was sellable.
Looking at the average academic position, moving to the industry pays 2x-3x more, is less stressful, with way better work-life balance, and your work is more impactful (with few exceptions). Need I say more?
As an actual patent attorney, I must say thankfully I never got to that stage. I realized while doing my masters that academia just ain't worth it & went to law school instead. Same if not worse hours & gruelling work. But atleast I'm wearing a suit & making money instead of shuffling around in a lab coat. 😅
Just as a manufactured good, the market will determine what something is worth (doctoral degree), regardless of what it cost to make it. You may feel your product (doctoral degree) is worth more because it cost you so much to make, but if the market doesn't need it, you're SOL.
I've been watching you for some months now, and I think the lesson has sunk in. I'm only an undergraduate at the moment, but I'm already networking with people in tech and science industries for possible employment after my doctorate. It seems clear academia sucks (I believe that's the technical term for it). Academia has nobody to blame but themselves. If the dire future predicted by Nature is true, then perhaps the collapse of the system is what's needed. Burn it down and rebuild.
Your plan seems wise to me, but do not count on a cathartic collapse. There will still be several applicants for every postdoc, they'll just look further afield. There would have to be a collapse in the number of PhDs produced to really make a dent, and the current PhD setup is a great deal for taxpayers, PIs, the government, and the academy, pretty much everyone except most PhD students.
Anyone who thinks pay is commensurate with the hard work effort, and time you’ve put into a degree is absolutely delusional. They are still handing out outrageously expensive university degrees without any proof of a basic understanding of economics. It is fun to listen to these videos now that I am no longer supporting an unemployable graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. Who still doesn’t understand basic economics!
And then there is the fact that hard work, intellectual prowess and merit are not even a guarantee you will get ahead in Postdocverse. Andy hasn't even touched in poisonous questions like politics, intimidation, people favoring those who hold views similar to theirs and close the doors to anyone who thinks differently. Which is even worse when you think about what academia is supposed to be about: pursuit of truth, which requires diversity of thought.
Yes, this. As an outlier from the political trend of academia, I am even more glad that I left academia after failing to secure a post-doc because there was no funding for anything I applied for, or because people who knew how to write grants were getting the funding. At the time I was extremely disappointed and depressed that nothing worked out for me. I now have a job from home editing scientific papers, which at one time I scoffed at. I enjoy the work, it brings me not a huge but comfortable income, and (perhaps most importantly) security. I don't have to go through the stress of constant paper-writing and grant applications. I wish you luck in whatever direction life takes you. Always pursue the truth. Academia is becoming more and more a propaganda machine churning out robots that don't know how to think for themselves. I have even become disillusioned with science, the area in which I studied and once loved so much.
@@leoniepipe6910 Thank you for adding precious information to this discussion. The politicization issues are even worse in areas around Humanities ("soft sciences"), but it's spreading everywhere. I'm also disillusioned with academia more and more and considering very seriously leaving the area altogether, which is even worse after 20 years of dedication, teaching, 3 post-grads, being around mid-forties and with family plans. :- (
@@leoniepipe6910 I hear you and relate to everything you said. If I may ask, such a job editing scientific papers, what is that job called and generally speaking, where does one go to apply for a job like that (I'm not trying to muscle in on your space!)? Thanks and I hope everything goes well for you too.
@@alwaysask This is really is saddening to hear that this kind of unjust treatment of people is happening at these universities and institutions. I hope everything works out well for you too.
@@leoniepipe6910 Very familiar story. Don't even get me started on diversity hires (who are diverse in all but the most critical category; thought) and green sciences (who truly know not the first thing about eco systems or physics and thus just regurtitate what people like Al Gore once said even though the actual science is much grayer and has progessed ten fold since then). Like a wise man once said: "Everything woke turns to shiet".
The biggest mistake I did in life was to study a research-focused field. Did Bachelor's, Master's, and then got out of there asap when I noticed that all non-tenured seniors were either depressed, stressed, unhappy, assholes, or about to leave.
In Germany, the stress is even worse, as people can only spend 12 years in research and then get kicked out. Soon, this period will be reduced to only one "Postdoc" after you PhD.
What you are describing here is an almost universal deterioration in the 'happiness' of the workplace in Britain. I am old, and now semi-retired, but what has shocked me at my age, still having extensive contact with young people, is how depression and the use of anti-depressant drugs is commonplace now among young people who superficially seem to have great lives. Having seen the changes in British society and in the workplace as a college science lecturer, I can see why. The truth is that management is not just more money driven than ever, but more bureaucratic than ever. All these 'systems' which have been brought in to supposedly improve the functioning of organisations are highly dehumanising. The workplace, and much more of modern life has become very dehumanised and adopts a dehumanising culture. Employees are now expected to be cogs in a machine, the key word I use to describe working life in 21st century Britain is COMPLIANCE. We are not wanted for our personalitites, professional expertise, professional judgement, these we are not allwed to express in favour of 'policies' imposed by our superiors. We are expected to be mindlessly and unquestioningly obdedient to an often perverse local management, who are over powerful and who run organisations as personal fiefdoms, with little accountability and too much power inside the organisation. How it feels now to work in such organisations is as if they would like to replace human beings with machines, but as no machines can be built which have the versatility of humans, it becomes necessary to put the humans under the control and monitoring of the management machine. We are simply cogs with no will, and must comply or go! There is little joy, little personalisation. Everywhere, everyone and everything is standardised and under the watchful control of sycophantic middle-managers eager to curry favour with the 'chieftain'. I knew one physics lecturer who found that a life-time's accumulation of educational software had been deleted from his college laptop by the IT subcontractors who had been ordered by management to remove all software which was not supplied by management to employees, while desktop backgrounds were depersonalised and locked to the corporate approved background, with the corporate logo. Personalisation of backgrounds is banned as is personalisation of office space, hot-desking becoming widespread. We are all made fully aware of how unimportant, and how easily replaceable we are. All workplaces are now more like being in the military than in being in civilian life, with military concepts of management taking over and IT monitoring our weekly compliance. Each organisation is now a miniature USSR.
Well put Bhangra Fan. Puts into perspective what is really happening in organisations nowadays. It seems that the give and take between the employee and the employers has become extremely skewed nowadays. And the personal qualties which was once deemed important for various posts have become unimportant. I do believe though that a change will take place in the future, for the better.
@@femto02 What you are saying puts it in a nutshell. Exactly. When I started as a lecturer, management had some understanding that staff were overloaded and gave some slack. Now its like micromanagement and too much control.
@Bhangra Fan= BOT CHANNEL
@AM = BOT CHANNEL
@@ghostmanscores1666 Tf are you talking about
Doing my first (and last) postdoc 2-year contract earned me an anxiety disorder to the point I had to seek professional help. I realized that I had to get out and I set my mind on finding a job outside of the academic sector. Now I have a stable job in another sector and have never been happier. If you feel desperate, if you have anxiety, you need to get out. Stop grinding yourself in the academia and look to the outside. There are better things in life than doing all the dirty work for the tenured faculty who were in the right time and in the right place to snatch their permanent position. You deserve better things in life than this. Good luck and don't give up: you can escape academia too.
I'm so sorry that you had a mental issue and happy that you are happy now. Do you have any tips for finding and getting a right job for you in industry based on your experience? I have no idea outside academia.
@@lfou5580 thank you so much for your comment.
Transitioning from the academy to industry can be tricky and it depends on a lot of different factors.
First, your location. I am based in France and industry is somewhat biased against people from academia over here, however it is really a local thing (France has a large number of engineering schools and the engineer status is held in particularly high regard over here) so the really important takeaway from this is to target employers who are more or less used to hire PhDs. In other case you will have to spend a lot of energy convincing the person in front of you of the actual benefits of hiring a PhD which is not the best use of your time.
Secondly, the field of your research and the work you did during your PhD and/or postdoc. If you worked on projects with a direct industrial application or partnership, it can be very beneficial when applying for the R&D positions in industry. It is important to demonstrate the relevant experience when you apply and not to put much accent on other points like teaching for example. You need to identify marketable skills which you have and present them coherently with the support of your work experience.
Also, some industries appear to be more open to hiring PhDs than others so your mileage may vary (l come from STEM background so it might be difficult for me to see the full picture).
Third and probably most important is networking. You may start by contacting people on LinkedIn who have a similar profile to yours and work in the industry which interests you. I had great time asking people about their experience of transitioning to industry and sometimes they can give you some useful insights. Sometimes it can allow you to get in touch directly with the hiring manager (skipping the HR filter is really nice).
It also helps a lot when you had some negative experience with some of your applications, talking to people who used to be in your shoes. Maintaining your morale is really important, because it can significantly affect your interview performance. Connecting with people who stay in academia is generally not very useful so don't waste your time on that.
In the end, I wish you a successful transition to the industry which interests you. This is a very difficult period of your professional life but is worth the effort if you set your mind on leaving academia. Keep moving to your goal, and put work into it every day: instead of writing that paper (which your PI really wants to publish so he can apply for another funding) after you get home off work, look for interesting offers or learn some new skills. Good luck!
@@molokoplus1555 Really appreciate your regardful reply with encouragement. This helps a lot. I'm in the U.S. by the way. Hope you enjoy your happy life!
I'm a foreign postdoc student and my situation is even worse: on top of all you mentioned, I am implicitly threatened all the time with losing my right to a residence permit and being "deported" in the middle of your research is not good at all. Some professors and PI's use it to threaten their postdoc students.
Same here, I brought my wife and daughter as dependents and my pi switched to a different uni two weeks after my family arrived. Kept me in the dark till then. Totally destabilized our lives.
@@lakshmeeshakn5888 I know your pain! One month after I arrived my PI switched Uni too, in addition the next guy was a complete moron from eastern Europe, the result was that people start laeving from the lab. So sad! But I was single and I can't imagine doing it whit my family with me...
@@joaofabio5927 true. It was one year of daily torture and multiple breakdowns every week. There is no protection for international postdocs in such scenarios. We are just like puppets at the hands of the system. Those who never had to apply for Visa in their life time will never understand what we go through.
@@lakshmeeshakn5888 what happens if the PI goes to another Uni, does this mean you need to move with him/her? does this mean you need to go through the visa process to relocate again?
@@batmanonholiday4477 rules in UK are crazy. If you are funded by a grant that your pi has obtained, then you have to move to other uni under a TUPE (transfer of undertaking and protection of employment) scheme. Your certificate of sponsorship will be transferred to new uni. You have to apply for ATAS again as your place of research is changing. VISA wont change. But if you decide not to move, then you have to find a new pi in the same uni who has funding and would be willing to take you. Since your research will change you have to apply for ATAS again. VISA wont change. But if no one in the uni takes you, your job will be redundant and you will have 2 months to find new employer. Even if you find the time wont be sufficient for fresh visa and ATAS application and dont forget you have to pay VISA and IHS fees again if you are changing employer by yourself. If you have dependents, TUPE is the best option. But you have to uproot your family and move. Otherwise you will end up spending lot of money which post docs dont have. In my case the negotiations with HR who also dont know much about these process took 6 months to sort out and it was absolute hell.
This is very good advice, if your doing a PhD take it to heart.
i completed at PhD 25 years ago, I really wanted that academic career, but..... I saw that unless you were not in the top 1%/rock start grade compared to your competing peers a postdoc will most likely be a start and end of your career and if your lucky an contract lecture without tenier. Life will be one of financial, career and geographic instability, the stress that this causes, you will never be in a position to confidently have a family and children.... you know the normal life things. And looking back today at what my peers who stayed and started their postdocs very much matches what I expected and what you describe now.
For me personally, I left and took up a career completely unrelated to my research.... after some serious introspection i worked out that what drove me was not so much an interest in my subject but the process of researching a complex problem, finding a solution and implementing it.... the process. There are a lot of careers out there that provide this.... in many ways its just as rewarding.
Definitely agree with this. I'd encourage folks to do a PhD but I wouldn't recommend anyone go for a career in academia in the current setup.
@@andrewjolly319 absolutely! i have absolutely no regrets doing the PhD. And to the admissions tutor for my dept and his final year pep talk about doing a PhD.
you might be thinking about doing a PhD, just do it at worst you spend 3 years doing something you enjoy and loosing out on 3 years earning. but if you don’t do it you will have a life time of wondering of what ifs and what price do you put on that?
And dont think i will go away for a few years earn some money and come back, you wont, out there you will pick up responsibilities a mortgage, a family and that freedom to come back will be lost for a ever…. did i mention he was s traditional Yorkshireman in every respect?
@@andrewjolly319 absolutely! i have absolutely no regrets doing the PhD. And I am reminded of the admissions tutor for my dept and his final year pep talk about doing a PhD.
you might be thinking about doing a PhD, just do it at worst you spend 3 years doing something you enjoy and loosing out on 3 years earning. but if you don’t do it you will have a life time of wondering of what ifs and what price do you put on that?
And dont think i will go away for a few years earn some money and come back, you wont, out there you will pick up responsibilities a mortgage, a family and that freedom to come back will be lost for a ever…. did i mention he was s traditional Yorkshireman in every respect?
@@davidwhatever9041 A friend of mine just started a PhD in his 60s as a retirement project. Not a bad idea! No pressure!
Good advice, man, both the doing something enjoyable for three years and that on coming to realize that its the thought process you enjoy about research and that it can be found elsewhere. I'm finishing my undergrad about to start a masters, think i'll keep this in mind, cheers
A former boss of mine (no PhD so not an academic) spent several years managing an industrial research centre at a university (non-academic management was part of the industry sponsorship deal I think). He's a switched on guy and basically said from what he saw to really make it in academia you've got to be selfish and self-aggrandising. He said he saw too much talent leave academia or go into academic administration because they didn't have that a-hole streak.
I got a Ph.D. in 1970 about a year or two after a sharp transition in the balance between scientists obtaining advanced degrees and the number of faculty positions available. There were 200 applicants for every open position at universities when I graduated. I left the US to work for the Ausralian government for several years and eventually came back to the US to work at a national laboratory. I was fortunate to be able to do plenty of publishable research, but was on soft money my whole career. During my career I saw a further colapse of the opportunities for research careers. Before I left my graduate career I made an appointment with the department head and pointed out to him that the graduate school was producing way too many Ph.D.s. Man was I naive to think he was not fully aware that he was part of a pyramid scheme.The established faculty were the winners and every once in a while they would let another lucky person in the club. In the meantime the mill supplied plenty of cheap labor turning out publishable results for the faculty member. Post-docs were not as prevalent in those days, but the growth of post-docs is just formalizing the supply of even higher qualified slave labor. It is still a pyramid scheme just more so.
I agree 100% that academia turns out a lot more Ph.D.s than there are positions for in academia. It was certainly that way when I finished my Ph.D. in 1980 and I think it has gotten worse, not better with the transition away from hiring tenure track faculty to using temporary lecturers for more and more of the teaching. Personally I am glad to be retired and not just getting into academia.
This is exactly my impression about academia when I got my PhD in 2019. It's a Ponzi scheme. I found it astounding how much people pop out of grad school for only so little of them to find a permanent occupation in the system for which they just have spent 3 years preparing for. It really opened my eyes on the functioning of the system: dozens of underpaid grad students and postdocs work for the benefits of the tenured faculty without much prospects of obtaining a permanent position for themselves. The system just keeps squeezing all the juices from the young and passionate only to throw out a burnt-out husk after many years of pursuing tenure.
I don't believe the system will change since the people who are in charge have no reason to do anything as long as they are getting insanely cheap workforce to propel their career.
This idea of working very hard on projects that just end up enriching someone else... isn't that almost every job? No matter whether you're a software engineer, janitor, or pizza delivery guy, your work is being captured by some executive or investor class, and what you get paid is a small portion of what you're generating for them. We're back at Marx's original argument, that people are being alienated from their labor.
I don't think this qualifies as a pyramid scheme, because each successive layer isn't recruiting more investors under them. If grad students were recruiting their own grad students, who were recruiting their own grad students, ad infinitum, then you'd have a point. But it's much more centralized than that, with one boss empowered to directly managing a lot of people. Sure, they might organize a hierarchy of how their folks report to each other, for instance having a postdoc oversee a few graduate students, but so does Microsoft. That's just a standard org chart, isn't it?
When I was a graduate student, I didn't consider myself poorly compensated. I was being paid $20-25k/yr (that was the range over 5 years), plus about $60k/yr in tuition waivers, plus other benefits. All told, it was a compensation package of perhaps $85-90k, plus the eventual PhD. This was about 15 years ago, in the 2008 meltdown, so that salary stretched quite a bit further than it does now and I never felt financially stretched. Granted, a lot of that compensation is "imaginary," but as anyone who has had student loans can attest, those "imaginary" expenses become very "real" eventually.
Compared to a lab technician at a biotech, for example, it's actually a generous compensation package. The lab technician might bring in $40-60k annually plus benefits, which is perhaps 1/2 to 2/3 of the compensation package offered to the grad student, plus they hit a glass ceiling at that point and generally can't go much higher except for perhaps cost of living increases or the appreciation of stock options. On the other hand, if you want to compare that to a job like computer engineer, then yes, it's woefully lacking. Then again, it's not very clear to me that that field will be nearly as profitable in a decade, given advances in AI.
Now, I could see the argument that we've had a lot of inflation since then, and incoming grad students would feel a lot more pinched. That's undeniable. I think something has to give, there, and we'll likely see a recession that deflates prices, but that's a tangent for another day.
I actually left a permanent asst. Professor position in a world top 100 university for a 3-year postdoc at a prestigious research institute in Germany. I'm enjoying my postdoc - I get to learn and concentrate on the work, rather than having to attend useless committee meetings or grade student papers. Yes, the pay is a little lower but more than enough to pay for rent and food and some recreation. It's a rich life. After 3 years, I'll either get an extension or move to a different country where there's fertile ground for a permanent lectureship, rather than staying in a saturated environment. I've already lived and worked in 5 countries.
What could you do in the postdoc that you couldn't do in your own lab? Honestly curious.
@@ClickBeetleTV Do hands-on research and learn a new novel method from a mentor by working closely with them.
ooh Germany Id love to go there, currently stuck in USA archaic academia
I have been working as a postdoc for five years. In my case, the conditions are not bad at all, but, indeed, the prospects are extremely vague. For some reason, after covid, the requirements began to grow, and the salary remained at the same level. Moreover, last year, I didn't even manage to get a position as a lecturer at the university where I'm a postdoc. So, the career prospects seem more and more vague to me and I began to think more and more about working in the industry. The most unpleasant thing is that I am already in my late 30, and I often feel that I am missing my chance. Andy describes the situation quite accurately.
If you can go to industry, go for it. I most definitely would do it if my knowledge were not of the "useless academic" type.
Just start somewhere (part-time), the usual expectation is that you will develop quicker than others on lower education level and go up more easily up the chain from application to planning to management/strategy and beyond.
You are. Average male life expectancy 75 years. Retirement? You have 30 functional years left in your life, what do you plan to do with it?
You'll be fine, Evgeniv! Academia has just become something these days.
I wanted to be a professor but I jumped ship after my masters degree, and I'm glad I did. I realized that having a degree from a good school didn't change the laws of supply and demand. There just aren't enough academic jobs to justify the number of PhDs.
Well you have to do better than just going to school.... you need qualifications from a university.
@@srinivaschillara4023 A MASTERS DEGREE IS " a qualification "....ever heard of that(?).
And there are NOT enough jobs for all qualified scientists!
Evan was talking about qualifications.Can you think ?
@@irenehartlmayr8369 Ha ha hot under the collar darling; One doesn't obtain Master's from a school, it is usually at Uni or maybe a college. Anyway... TTYN.
@@srinivaschillara4023 here in the US, a master's degree is granted through a college or university. And we use "school," "university," and "college" interchangeably.
@@lucindabreeding How strange! But, thank you. You have tried to be helpful, unlike some people who need not be named (but happily can be called names). What a contrast!
I'm from the other side of the planet, not actually from a different planet.
cheers and many wishes.
The publishing issue is getting bigger and bigger due to the increase in peer-review times. If getting a paper published takes 6-8 months, you are losing most of the post-doc contract time in waiting for peer-review results. In the end, success in publishing papers depends a lot on how long it takes to publish.
I think it's better when reviewers take time to read the paper thoroughly, 6-8 months seems fair to me. In my field (Mathematics) it can be 12-15 months for some journals. It's not lost time, you just do something else while they read your paper, but I agree it's annoying when you compete for positions that the papers are not fully published yet.
@@ElGranPedrito Yes, my point was about competition
@@ElGranPedrito do you guys seriously believe that the reviewer is just reading your paper for 6 to 8 months they don't have anything else to do? No they put it off for quite some time and get back to it when they are free. At most since they are experienced only a 10 to 15 minutes look at the manuscript will give them enough information on what the paper is about and another hour to understand it.
@@HellRaiZOR13 then let's say the peer-review process in general
@@HellRaiZOR13 I have done reviews myself and many times I have taken the time to read carefuly each line, verify the computations, note all the minor typos, then let it rest for a month, do some research about the topic, then come back and write the fairest and most insightful report I can. Sometimes I have sent emails to more qualified peers about aspects of the paper I didn't know well enough. I know all reviewers don't do the same, but I'm not the only one doing it like this in my field and I have received top quality reviews on some of my papers. This is the standard the community should aim for, but we a different system for that.
Five percent? That is astounding. I never really took the prospect of becoming a professor seriously when I was in grad school. My attitude was piratical. I saw faculty exploit students, and decided to use the experience for what it was proclaimed to be - an opportunity to learn. A very toxic feature of academia is an unspoken assumption that if you have aspirations to work outside of academia, you are a failure. This attitude seems into students' minds very early, and it is quite deliberate. If people do not believe this, they will see academia for what it really is and find better things to do with their abilities.
I am doing my PhD in the Humanities and plan on leaving the academia as soon as I get my PhD. I talked a lot with people who plan on staying in the academia and my conclusion is that people either have no idea what else they could do and academia - no matter how terrible - is their comfort zone. Or they are so interested in their field of study that they are ready to accept all the bad conditions just to be able to research.
why are you doing it then?
@@logic8673 it's necessary for all of the positions outside of academia that I want
@@lottaek1202 got it. Best wishes.
When I did my own humanities PhD as a mature-age student, I had hopes of academic employment within Australia. These hopes on my part were of course delusional, but one thing which reconciled me to the need to get out was the spectacle of numerous people from my age who already *were* in academic employment. And who were stuck there.
These were people who got their PhDs and academic jobs in the last years of guaranteed tenure (in other words the late 1980s). They never considered doing anything else with their lives.
Now of course the entire university system has collapsed around them; they're surrounded by full-fee-paying 'students' who can't speak a word of English; but they themselves are stuck in academe because the number of non-academic employers who want to hire experts in (say) feminist critiques of Bartók is minuscule at the best of times. I could almost feel sorry for them if I wasn't the evil insensitive bastard which I am widely known to be.
🤦♂️
It is the supervisor's responsibility to nurture the development of a post-doc. I have supervised nine post-docs in my career. Five went on to academia (Virginia Tech, Louisiana Tech, USF, FAU, Versailles, all tenure-track jobs or foreign equivalent) and four are in industry (Microsoft, Arctic Wolf, IBM, CIBC). That's nine for nine in job placement. None has gone on to do another post-doc; they all went into permanent positions. I myself did one post-doc (at Microsoft) and then landed on the tenure track. We have the power to change the system through individual actions. Treat post-docs like human beings and everything else follows.
Huge respect to you for giving quality effort towards the success of others. I think our society needs more of this kind of honest collaborative effort, where the result is better, more valuable people at the end of the process.
Good :-) But it sounds like you're in computer science or similar and perhaps there are more permanent positions in that field?
@@PeterAGW Perhaps the correct conclusion is that you shouldn't hire post-docs unless there is a reasonable likelihood that permanent positions will be available.
@@DavidJao What you say is ideal and nice but the reality is actually the opposite. People hire postdoc for their own self interests - that there is absolutely NO way their academic career (despite being tenured) can progress if no postdocs do the hard research for them. By nature the system is toxic and incentivises professors to keep having postdocs without rewarding them fairly. That's really sad but that's the truth!
@@DavidJao Perhaps the correct conclusion is that your nurturing got them motivated and you helped them to not lose sight of their objectives/dreams.
Bachelors was depressing enough for me, but think quite a few postdocs suddenly realize that they're quite trapped with their degrees and career paths & that feelinf sucks.
all we see in this world in the "public mirror" that society reflects is a very narrow propagandized idealized outcome. Reality is something else altogether. But the rat race is so dominant like a matrix, alternative news doesn't come out.
My brother-in-law does just fine in the real world with a math PhD so it's not as hard to jump ship as you think. It just takes a bit of bravery or desperation.
Worked myself almost to death on multiple postdocs, then missed a grant and had to get a non-academic job. Felt like such a failure even though I was earning more for so much less work.
isn't that the definition of stockholm syndrome
@@michaeldai1999 I think you mean imposter syndrome.
worked to death -> much less work WTF
You are not a failure. You made it!!
My condolences(or is it congratulations?) for getting demoted to a less demanding and better paying job.
One of the biggest problems with being nontenured faculty or a postdoc is that you are directly competing for University resources (lab space, facilities, staff time, student time) with tenured professors. You can not really get into a position of being a principal investigator because it would require you to have those resources reliably available, whereas you must appeal to tenured faculty and sitting administration to get those resources who are not really committed to helping or advancing the careers as those they see as temporary.
If you consider your PhD a chance to study something hands-on for a few years after which you are free to do something else as well, and not the first step in an academic career in which you are entrenched, it suddenly becomes a lot more fun... and it could get you on average further in live too: you will also automatically prioritize a more free research spirit and pursue a wider range of things that interest you, not scientific fashion or you promoter.
Post docs should only exist in the tenure track format before the permanent position. Anything short of that is predatory.
I saw this happening to postdocs around me when I was in year 4 of my BS. I decided not to pursue further education. I didn't want to make further sacrifices to end up used, overworked, underpaid, with my career dying on the vine, no IP rights and no job security. I still feel shame that I "didn't make it," eleven years later, but I know I made the right choice.
Spot on regarding the peer pressure.
Happy I left physics before the PhD. Didn’t think the tenured positions were all that. Love working at a think tank now.
I bailed on my PhD after seeing postdoc pay and requirements and the length of time it would take to get to tenure and the low odds of getting there. Maybe some day when I don't have a family to care for, I might do academic research. But the costs right now are not worth the benefits. If we maintain this system, only the fools and the short sighted will opt for academic research.
And the wealthy, sadly
When I was doing my master's degree I got to know some of the recent Ph.D. grads from my supervisor's program, and I've seldom encountered such a spiritless, dejected, and unsuccessful group of people.
Post doc in UK. Depressed and angry and anxious. Have resigned and will be going back to my native. My postdoc boss ruined my motivation and academic career aspirations. Feel like a failure and trying hard to recover mentally
Don't feel bad about your decision, it seems you were in a toxic environment and took the best possible decision by leaving it behind
Make a move to industry, and don't look back
@@vincentadultman6226 From the frying pan into the fire. Industry isn't a panacea - it's equally toxic, more vicious and workplace bullying is rampant. Caveat emptor.
I was in a Ph.D. programme at b-school in London, Cambridge post-grad, and director at a FTSE-100 pharmaco. Now happily self-employed!
I’m currently a postdoc and am doing very well in my field; I think I would most likely get a tenure-track position at an R1 if I were on the job market this year.
But I am so unhappy in academia. Everyone around me seems to have severe depression and I am on the fast track to that same fate, if I’m not there already (I would guess that I am, but I have not had the energy to find a therapist). My friend who was a postdoc until recently asked her mentor if he knew any professors or postdocs who were happy, and he said, “I know they must exist, but I can’t think of any.”
A lot of my peers and I are now trying to get jobs as data scientists, and we have STEM degrees, which should make it “easy.” But I have not talked to anyone who has gotten a single interview without a referral. And referrals are hard to get if your entire network is in academia. The job market for data scientists is also not good.
I can stay in my postdoc position for a while still, but I am so worried about the effects it will continue to have on my mental health. If I don’t have a job in industry by the fall, I will probably just choose to be unemployed.
If you’re considering a postdoc position, please listen to me: I am doing very well, yet I am choosing to be unemployed over working in academia any longer. It is just not worth it.
Why are your peers not happy?
@@stephenmcaleese8238 it was mostly the hours and the pressure. In my mentorship group, people would often talk about feeling guilty for taking a couple of hours off on a Saturday. I don’t think it’s healthy for people to work 70 hours a week doing that kind of research. I realize a lot of it had to do with my specific field though. In my industry job now I can read papers and analyze data for hours on end, but with the research I was doing before, I just felt like I was beating my head against the wall and only ever making progress a few times a year. It’s like how cats get depression from playing with laser pointers. The work never pays off
I was a postdoc a few years ago. My supervisor told me something that I remember vividly to this day: beggars can't be choosers. A snapshot of my time as a postdoc.
Your supervisor is a savage. It's a canine-consume-canine world out there.
What you said about a power imbalance where the PI simply points you towards what you need to accomplish but is otherwise totally hands off in the process really resonates for me. The weird thing is, I just finished my undergraduate in the U.S., and have no intention of moving further in academia in my life at this point. There is obviously a great disparity between an undergraduate researcher and a postdoc, as I was not being paid, and generally wasn't as important in the lab, but I am sort of relieved to see there are some parallels as well. My timely graduation was entirely dependent on an independent research project I was doing in my lab, and while the pressure was not extremely high in terms of the expected results, the pressure I experienced mentally was quite high, as I wanted to do good work, but had NO mentorship in methodology, and essentially no help at all in strategization.
The PI I worked under would simply tell me what to do, mention some things that would be cool to accomplish, and would otherwise want to be left alone. This wouldn't be so bad, if not for the fact it was HIS project that I was doing. I honestly didn't have a great big interest in the work, so spending hours and hours working out small details such that the project would actually work, and deciding how to do each step where there was ambiguity and open-ended ness was painful.
I could go on here, but really I just felt the need to share because I felt oddly connected to what you were saying about being left to handle everything on your own Andy. Where all the risk is on you, and the PI is just living in some other universe otherwise.
That's not a problem with the PI itself or academia. That's a problem with your choices. You shouldn't be doing a project you're not interested in and that did not motivate you to go on and research it by yourself because it brings you emotionally or psychologically in return. You could actually change academia and PI to company and manager and the story would be as true as the one you told.
PS: You actually should have had mentorship and he, or a experienced student, should have at least walked by your side until you were confident enough to fly solo. That was either a lack of communication or a poor choice for a professor to work with. He or she should be chosen by their guidance skills as well as their academic resume.
@@caioporto9234 Not going to contradict you regarding my choices being at the heart of my issues. However, without going into all the complicated details I will say I was pressured by time restrictions to get into a lab quickly, and unfortunately didn't have the freedom to be very choosy. Once I started working with the PI I was kind of locked in due to these time restrictions. Further, he started me off with an independent trial assignment, (a little bit like a take home assignment for an interview), and after reporting back to him my first time, every subsequent interaction sort of followed this mold of him giving me some things to do, and me doing my best to execute. He never allowed for in depth discussion of the topic, never attempted to give more than superficial context for any aspect of the project, and would get annoyed if asked more than a few simple questions, which really made the relationship difficult to manage.
Overall, I don't like to point the finger at him as the source of my problems. As I was just in a weird and unusual situation for a handful of reasons, and that time constrained need for lab work acted as a real point of risk for me, as I simply didn't have the time to do due diligence. Thus it was a bit of a roll of the dice. I didn't roll well.
I also think you should consider the fact that MOST undergraduate students lack the background knowledge and general awareness to effectively evaluate a professors academic resume. I certainly don't feel confident in my ability to do that now, as people are really complex, and I just don't understand what to look for when attempting to identify the bad PIs from the good PIs... I don't know if there is any way to really get down to that subjective truth without having a decent amount of contextual knowledge about a given PI.
@@MrChaluliss IMHO you should point the finger. He could arrange a meeting and discuss your time restrictions and ultimately even fire you, but the lack of guidance is entirely in his hands. The truth is he is a project manager, and he didn't do his job.
I agree with you 100%. Just as society asks teenagers to choose what they want to do with a third of their time for the rest of their lives, they must choose an area, a project, a supervisor, to do their graduate studies without any experience and any help at all. You made the best choices you could at the time, with the resources you had at hand.
I have seen people taking the right steps to make that choice, but they were all more experienced and generally older than the average graduate student. They came to the university and started hanging out with the graduate students and ask about the good, the bad and the ugly. Who is a pain in the ass? Who help their students? Who has a good resume? They arranged meetings with many professors and then decided if they wanted to enroll there or some other place.
I can only tell you my 35 year experience at an institution.
In the beginning.
Open, focus was on exploration, focus on new things, focus was on progress.
In the end.
Closed, focus was on pleasing a legalistic beauracacy, focus was on trimming the budgets elsewher to support the legalistic beauracy, focus and dollars was on conpliance with unfunded government madates, focus was on placating external groups with no authority and no legal mandate, intrusion of third party groups who were ascientific, did not have any authority, but got authority by under-the-table interaction with funding authorities, institutions that do not stand up against wrong, who cower to puffed up authorities, who have become political pushovers.
In the beginning overhead portion of a grant was 15 to 30%, when I left it was 65%
In the beginning grants funded capital equipment (in cases we used for decades) at the end the fed only granted large equipment to biggest grants.
In the beginning the NIH spread money fluidly around science, at the end they funded far few big projects. At the end funding for immunology (think Autoimmunity and Post infection sequella like long covid) dropped to about 1% of all grants submitted.
I worked on autoimmunity, autoimmune disease research in the US is about as rock bottom as one can get relative to any developed country. I was plucked out of my retirement by a physician who confronted with a sudden rise in mysterious autoimmune disease looking thing and had noone to really help him study it. The monster was already there, too few people spread over too many diseaes. Then covid came along, noone was prepared and the monster roared. There is always an increase of mysterious autoinflammatory diseases in the wake of new disease pandemics, long covid was expected, it just seems strange because the US was unprepared.
Medical Science began to decline the day Ronald Reagan stepped into office, it has been on decline ever since. The conservatives in society are afraid of knowledge.
Honestly man. I'm a lawyer, it's not a PhD, but it was 7 years of schooling and one year articling. I felt that video to my core, it's the same idea with lawyers who work for legal. They have all the risk and not enough pay for what they do.
When I graduated college @1970, there were several people who tried very hard to encourage me to go to graduate school and remain in academia. I declined and moved on with my life, and I have never had a moment’s regret. Something about it just repelled me, perhaps it was just sound instinct.
Why are you watching this video in that case?
Strongly relate. My first postdic ended last year, still waiting for the decision about the funding of my next one. Well, formally waiting, in reality getting new skills to enter industry, because I just can't do this any longer.
All of the content for people wanting to survive in Academia is great, but I would love to see some more content on the path out of it. Just like you said, so many are leaving, and it is a difficult change.
I recognize some of those regret. My biggest one, though, is that I had to discover what was required to become an academic on the job (of postdoc). I didn't like it and i quit. But why nobody during grad or phd ever explains how the system works?
Hi Andy, thanks for nice video again.
So just few quick comments: I believe that more and more people do not want to do postdoc because work life balance is more important than ever been for many people. Staying in academia it is very hard to keep mental health in good shape and be compensated financially on a decent level. I actually think that the fact that postdoc ( as well as phd candidates) stopped applying so extensively for positions is dictated by the reason that those jobs are not suited for modern idea of balanced, fulfilling, healthy lifestyle. Additionally, being in your thirties/forties you mostly want to settle down and start a family; hard one in academic environment. Last but not least, I think we are in the era when academics start to stand up for themselves and reject crappy positions - which is good and at the end might lead to changes in the system. Hope to see it one day. Best wishes!
I hope that day comes sooner then later; but I don't want to hold my breathe on it. I have moved on from academia to acquiring an industry job; I hope to spend my spare time pursuing research independent of these institutions. And maybe one day, my close friend would join me as well; but regardless that event, I know very well that I am through with rubbish affairs of academia and the people that compose it.
Even here in the US when I worked in pharmaceutical research, I saw many Ph.D. students who left with master's degrees because there were no jobs for Ph.Ds. in industry. Too many people are conned into a graduate program where they become enslaved in academia under some professor. This is why so many foreign students enter these programs. If they become postdocs, then they are expected to supervise graduate students for little pay and the expectation that they will leave in a few years. Those Ph.Ds. who do get into industry often try to rapidly move out of the lab into a comfortable management position where they use none of their scientific skills and become corporate politicians.
I may be starting a posdoc soonish and appreciate very much your experience! I think what is different for me is that I may be working on a project very much conceived by me, where I’ll develop hands-on experience useful for the professional path I want outside academia. I think I could use this time to network more and find a way out too!
I have seen many who has been doing various postdoc positions for 5-6 years or even more with no job security, no idea where they will end up next year and a horrendous amount of job responsibilities 😑 No wonder many left for industries and felt way better than sticking with academia.
this barrage of comments on this treat vilifies Western academia beyond reason and exalts industry, as if the latter provides permanent contracts left and right or any comparable intellectual job satisfaction. i have many friends and relatives who work in banks, bakeries, IT industry, designers, etc. The office job in one big European bank that my friend does sounds almost like a 24/7 slavery, i don't know why you people think that escaping academia will get them necessarily a better deal. You need to network in academia -- like everywhere; you need to know how to write applications and the informal rules of the game --- like everywhere. The only difference is the much higher competition in academia over a smaller number jobs. so, either one accepts this grind stoically or one transfers the skills elsewhere. no need to scandalize the niche profession that has always been the vocation of a tiny elite.
This is not uncommon in every career. Many people find the career they picked isn't what they had imagined and go into something else. I was a video game creator in my career and worked with other video game creators who had been a patent lawyer, ER doctor, air traffic controller, etc...
I left because there was basically no chance of a job without having to leave the country, plus basically zero job security. I already earn as much as my supervisor in industry. No regrets.
How did you transition? I keep hearing my CV is "too academic", but I unfortunately never had the opportunity to do an internship in industry...
@@sasha_markovsky I just kept applying for jobs. Lost track of how many. Eventually got one as a data scientist.
@@andrewjolly319 Thank you 😊 I will try again! It didn't work out after my PhD and I really needed a job, so I accepted an postdoc offer, but now, 2 years later, I can really see the academic environment is just not the right fit for me...
Good luck. It can be so demoralising.
I'm planning to start my postdoc journey right now after I finished my PhD. and I believe people like me think that if we don't have a choice in academia only to get a postdoc then we have to take that decision to immerse ourselves in postdoc life. and this is an opportunity for us as third-world survivors to take steps forwards to change our lives for the better.
don't do it, it is scam. Asking researchers to publish 10 or 20 papers in short time is just Fraudulent and has nothing to do with science and research. You will have to compensate with writing useless review papers because you don't have time for real scientific research.
Well I'm currently in that situation. Two professors supervise the grant. I'm with one PhD student are responsible for all the research for a very tough subject and I switched from the topic of my PhD to new one. And currently it looks like all the responsibility is on me and stress is killing me. I just should go back do business
Most foreigners who are on a visa need the postdoctoral position to extend the visa and to work on a green card.
That's another good point. Moving to different countries for 2-3 years and dealing everytime with visa application-extension is a huge source of stress.
@@paolomartizzi164 and a huge money pit, just annihilating your savings to move every time.
@@Lavabug So true!
This video is so illuminating! I'm currently writing my phd thesis in Asian studies and sometimes I wonder what to do after. On the one hand, I'd like to continue within the academia, but on the other I'd like to be more free and less stressed. Also, I don't know my options outside academia, what could I do with a phd in humanities? 😔
I assume from your accent you, like me, are in the UK. Back in the day, once someone completed as a post-doc, they had quite a hopeful prospect of getting a secure, well-paid job as a full-time University lecturer. Although I left academia some time ago, what I hear from those still working in Universities is just what terrible employers they are. The modern money and commerce obssessed universities seem to have casualised lecturing till it is no longer an attractive proposition for someone at that point in their career. It must be said though that it has always been the case that in academia, as in business, it is WHO you know that is all important. Cultivating personal professional contacts is now and has always been key to getting the best opportunities. It is human nature to prefer the 'devil you know' to the 'devil you don't know'.
I left three Ph.D. programs (in the U.S., I'm a U.S. citizen), having three master's degrees by the time I was finally lured away by the filthy lucre of industry. I still did a couple of stints at local colleges to work on research projects and teach, both of which I loved doing, but when those contracts ended I always got another industry job that wasn't as much fun but I made at least twice as much money.
Now I'm 58 and retired, with a house that I fully own, no debt, a nice pile of assets, and I just bought a beautiful live-aboard sailboat with cash. So as far as the work-life balance goes, I have no regrets.
But I still miss the trappings of academe, and I feel that I could have done some really cool intellectual things instead of the grind of commercial software development. But the trappings of academe don't compensate for the grind, which would have been a lot worse... I saw that pretty clearly for at least a year before I left, and what you have said here affirms that.
Thanks for saying the quiet part out loud, what everyone around me knew but wouldn't talk about, even back in the 90s when it apparently wasn't nearly as bad as it is now.
In hindsight, I think there are advantages to having multiple master's degrees rather than a Ph.D.
Purpose of post doc is really be a researcher and junior supervisor to ph. D. students. Of course, more you do, more you are given to do. So, everyone needs to face their destiny. If you love research so much, that you do not at all care for money, then you could be a perfect post doc. But, if you somehow discovered that there is more to life than research (like money), then you have to deal with this new reality. Your post doc life would be terrible with a professor, who himself/herself does not like research as much as you do. Then you are stuck, carrying them on your back. And you can only join industry, if you are relevant to them. They do not want a weight on their back, any more than dead weight of a professor, you have on your back as a post doc. So, what do you do? University tenure-track positions are few in numbers. Teaching in a non-research college or community college is like an insult to you. Well, it is your life. You have to make hard decisions. Life always requires compromises. In my opinion, every dignified work is worth doing.
Well, I can say why I left post-doc land for sure.
1. After suffering years of poverty as a BSc/MSc./Phd candidate I got sick of yet more of it.
2. Many of the staff members in my last University were just hopeless. One student left because of the poor quality teaching, and he was 100% right if you ask me. I wanted to rub shoulders with intellectual giants (like I did at Manchester, Physics), but instead I found myself surrounded by folks with medium sized intellectual abilities at best.
3. The self aggrandizement of some of the staff got to the point of being amusing. They genuinely thought they were doing world class research. In fact they were taking tax-payers money, writing papers in the "Journal of Recondite Garbage" and patting themselves on the back. As an example, the Dept Head was planning his Professorial world valedictory tour, but nobody was interested in hearing his parting words of wisdom, so it got cancelled. Says it all really.
4. Industry was where all the action was (and still is) happening.
5. 30 years later that department has contributed zip to the world of engineering that I have seen, and I doubt it ever will. I never looked back, and heading off into industry was the best move I ever made.
Ahh well. Maybe in the next life it will be better.
Thanks! I had to watch this. I always knew this, but my PhD will end soon and I was pretty successful in it. I've been working full-time for the last couple of months in industry while finishing the writeup of my thesis and for a moment, I was really considering applying for post doc positions. I always knew the odds were stacked against early career researchers, but I just really missed doing research.
This video reminded me of what I always knew. thanks a lot!
My father got his PhD and is now a professor, and he didn't do a postdoc. He went straight to industry. And this was in the late 80s. He pulled me aside and told me to either go to industry for a few years or spend time at a national lab. His reasons: more money, less stress, still do what you love. And when I asked about teaching, he told me that lots of smart people make tutorial videos online, and doing that is just fine. So I'm heeding his advice. I should have mine in 3 to 4 years, and my plan is to go to return to the US and either join a national lab, take a company job for a few years, or otherwise, join a startup in my field.
You have a great mentor 😉
So the national lab is goverenment funded research but not at university?
@@64standardtrickyness based on those whom I've talked to, you CAN get government funding at a university, but it isn't limited. You get whatever funding you get your hands on, it's just that the university takes a portion as overhead, with the highest I've heard of being circa 65%, which I think is completely outrageous.
At a national lab, you don't have the freedom to do whatever you want, but the funding is given from federal and state government departments, the US Military (particularly the air force and navy), and some companies which may be important stakeholders in the success of a project.
@@boredscientist5756 Thank you! I think I have an excellent mentor, too!
And that is why many professors are so bad at teaching ...
We are taught in school that knowledge is impt.. but bosses are taught in life that money is everything..
We are in a world in which RUclipsrs make a lot of money more than any Postdocs..... Yet people say we love research, we want to pursue research as for the rest of our life....... Well, research my a**
You always live in a pressure in this type of life, you don't get enough money..... Yet you say O love research..... Will you feed your children that love for science or are you gonna need real money?
screw children, too many already, time and money can be better spent
40 years ago I wanted to be a college professor. I love history, and was considering getting a PHD in European History. But while I would have gotten some financial help from my family, I knew that I had was going to have to take care of my self and help family members, so I knew I would end up in a deep economic hole getting the PHD. Secondly I did not think I could learn another language and write a PHD thesis. So I decided to concentrate on finding a stable carrier instead of getting a PHD. What is funny is that I would eventually teach myself a second language, and dabbled in a third one, and the career I chose required me to right long detailed reports and affidavits, which sometimes were 50 pages long in a very short period of time, sometimes within a few hours on things I was not familiar with (6 to 8 pages), that required tons of research and investigation, and had to be absolutely truthful or I could be fired, sued, or indicted. I was a law enforcement officer for 30 years. I still love history with a passion, but I am so glad I did not try to become a college professor. Law enforcement is not as good as a career as it used to be, but I still think it beats academia, and that is a shame.
Postdoc in France...30K euros per year before tax (at best, most get 25K, which is an insult)
Postdoc in Singapore....85K S$ after tax
Postdoc in Denmark....66K euros before tax
Postdoc in UK....36K before tax
These are the offers I had.
Glad I went to Singapore 😂. Next step will definitely be industry though. I have a real salary to bargain after that.
Do you have any clues about payment in Italy?
If you get 25K€\year (to be taxed) you are lucky.
yeah it Is quite offensive and over the top... government calls you "capricious child"
My experiences: postdoc offer in Germany was 55k and in Finland 48k. UK postdoc I interviewed for seriously thinks they can pay people 30k in a city where rent is 1200-1500/mo. lol.
@@alessiafaggian999 OMG, that's horrible!! A bit like France then!
@@Lavabug yeah, that's ridiculous!
in poland I get like 20k eur (before tax) in warsaw and it's the good salary you get with a grant
My 2 year postdoc in science was great! Great team. Good work. But academics are way overrated. The battles are so heated because the money is so so so small. Get out while you can, but be prepared to diversify.
I was postdoc in the 90s, I did it to bridge an economic downturn. I never had a chance in academia and I did not really try. I found it a pretty corrupt system including nepotism and favoritism. Afterwards I found a really good job in industry. I took a conscious decision to leave academia and do whatever it takes to go to industry. The job insecurity and self doubt is the most depressing of postdoc life…
I think this is an issue in many other areas of civilization as well; nurses aren’t paid enough for their job, primary and secondary school. Teachers are underpaid, low level managers and administrators in most industries are under high-pressure to find money, and upper level, managers and administrators spend all their time finding money instead of doing the work that needed to actually promote a healthy busineenvironment.
As a fresh phd, I'm looking for multiple options for my career. Looks like post doc is quite tough option. I might go for postdoc if I won't be in relationships. But being in relationships gives a lot pressure to earn money as well.
Andy, my problem is trying to get accepted on a funded PhD, in quite a narrow field of study, id fancy my luck in moving on afterwards if only there was a beforewards!.
The main reason: professors that are >70 years old are refusing to retire. It is illegal for the university to fire these people that essentially do no work. All these old professors know they are well past their usefulness, but their name carries weight by itself. Universities have created a rat race of never ending prospects because of one simple fact: the number of available jobs is tiny compared to the number of graduates per year. 95% of graduate students will NEVER be professors in any capacity. Of the lucky 5% that make it, most of them come from top universities.
If you are not in a top 10 graduate program for your discipline, start learning to program, network, and prepare to leave after your PhD. It is not worth the agony of getting stuck in adjunct/postdoc hell.
In Germany student population has quadrupled since the 1990s (i think) while number of professorships remained the same. And it wasn't that great before that. We are talking about something more structural here.
@@sirmclovin9184 The student population has surged in most developed nations. IMO it was a way to massage the unemployment figures
I have been studying (10 years ago) with such 70 y.o. engineering professors and they knew more than 99.9% of the industry. Maybe cut down on the philosophy of whatever depts.
My girlfriend was pursuing academia and i gotta tell you, the pay is shit, the work is shit, the workplace is rife with bullying, coercion and politics. The worst possible avenue one can take career wise
Funny enough, I interviewed for a patent examiner job trying to find an alternative to postdocs and the job was MISERABLE and way more precarious and lower paid than all the postdocs I interviewed for. I got many postdoc offers and will be taking the least objectionable one to buy myself sometime and relocate somewhere with more job opportunities. I know I will feel stupid for staying in the ponzi scheme for a few more years, but after a year's worth of trying my hand at industry I've not landed anything and rent is due!
I remember when I was an undergraduate my advisor got me in for a working internship for credit in a biochemistry lab. I talked into the professor that was running the lab once before I started and then maybe I saw him a couple times over the semester but I never talked to him again. The graduate students in the lab all had their own work to do and where constantly doing stuff while he was hardly ever around. I didn't really understand it then but I guess I do now that you bust your ass and get burnt out and if you get to be in charge you then compensate by making everyone else do the work while you sit back and do very little.
I am a project postdoc. I work on a project that is not realizable. Not only I have to deliver a result, that at least comes close enough to almost work. My professor push me to write a proposal for a followup project, based on the same idea. THAT DOES NOT WORK. Or otherwise I lose my job.
Now postdoc is 100K per year in Australia. (The salary is not bad) However, it is pretty stressful. We have not idea what will happen after the first contract.
This is not new news. The same was true in the 80’s when I completed my phd. Began postdocking in the uk and chucked it after two years. No job security and poor career prospects. Moreover, the supervisor was rubbish at managing the research group, which led to infighting and bullying between the postdocs and phd students. Also the publication rate was very slow, you don’t know how lucky researchers are now with the internet. For both collaborating, publishing and finding previous research materials. Anyone heard of hundreds of paper volumes of the chemical abstracts? Anyway, I left to join to make a career in business and never looked back. More pay and less crap.
Completely agree. It was the exact same 20 years ago. I don't even understand how all the people commenting here did not see this well before even graduating from their Masters.
Academic pursuits are just a very unprofitable and often unfulfilling surrogate activity. A meaningless pursuit of meaning.
It's a more constructive way of pursuing a dopamine hit than most things. Sport is another useful thing to spend time on
In a dream world, postdocs would just do research that they value and have a splendid time without pressure. I hate Max Weber's Iron Cage. Modern society is messed up.
I do think there needs to be accountability. But right now we have a system where accountability is replaced by market incentives and power dynamics. There is a recent episode by David Harvey on the topic that is worth watching.
That’s a dream because you must do something that is valued by other people if you want to receive something of value from other people. Your dream world is impossible.
@@30803080308030803081 But a lot of research that people want to do is valuable to others but might not be valuable to large corporations. And the deadlines and other policies that some researchers have to follow are actually detrimental to research.
@@sirmclovin9184 I agree with everything you said. Thanks, I will watch it.
@@sirmclovin9184 I wonder if it would be possible for you to share Harvey’s video with us?
I moved from a faculty position to industry back to academia. I had a three year post-doc. All is not as bad as this video states. Have a broad mentoring network. Keep looking at job ads, make sure you know what skills and experiences people are looking for both in and out of academia. A lot of academic job packages are just not up to standards, not just number of papers. But a clear research proposal etc. make sure lots of people read you job applications. Pick academics for your academic job search, and industry for you industry job hunt. I have mentored students into academic jobs and others into industry jobs. Seek out people who will help you. Don’t do this alone. It is always ok to ask for hel0.
absolutely right, I don't know this first hand but from my sister. She graduated with honors and obtained PHD and went on to do research and was published with several books on her specific field but could only ever teach anthropology and never reach tenure. The problem is Archeology is male dominated and their is a specific side of the political spectrum you must be in order to climb the ladder in colleges. She now works as a curator and still the politics dictates work environment. Horrible crazy work environment dominated by an abusive political appointee.
I didn't do it because the pay was so low. I got literally 3x a postdoc salary working in the private sector. I had a wife and was saving for a house so it was a no brainer.
Realizing the actual nature of academia convinced me that even having a batchelors degree was a waste. I quit during my senior year of undergrad, never to go back.
good move!
Random video for my feed, but here’s my 5 cents. My construction site has an overqualified safety officer who is a complete fool for the job he has and a driver geographer who dumped all his academic credentials to pay for the family expenses. The only phd with value nowadays is either data science or medicine, everything else is more valuable if you get it at work.
Fantastic channel! All of this is unlikely to change in the hard sciences in the USA as thousands of internationals are available to enter postdocs or adjunct roles for that matter. Many of my cohorts who graduated with doctorates gave up the game and their dreams to go for the real money- university administration. Now these new administrators are lorded over by poohbahs with doctorates in university administration but make a wage almost an order of magnitude more than they did as postdocs in the natural sciences. Funny how the world works. At least I enjoyed grad school!
Write papers no one will read or earn money and make a family?
@7:09 "PIs don't have any risk or responsibilities".
That's not usually true. If RAs fail to meet milestones and deliverable deadlines, then the PI can get into trouble. If they are tenured, then obviously they aren't going to get fired, but they are much less likely to get funding etc.
Life is great as a PI/supervisor if you get good RAs that are capable of independent work, but a nightmare if you get lazy boxes of rocks that you have to treat with kid gloves because you don't want them to file complaints.
But I definitely agree with you that Academia makes life harder and more toxic than it needs to be. This is a natural consequence of government pushing people for the last few decades and longer into university, now the supply of labor is far greater than its demand with all the consequences that follow.
I was recruited into a start-up company directly from a postdoc position.
I worked two postdocs to compensate the money income gap, but I it was a big toll in my sleeping hours
If US higher education costs in have exponentially outpaced every other good/service, except for healthcare, and enrollment has grown, why aren’t their more professorships? Because, in the US, universities are sitting on enormous resources stolen through the unlimited amount of US government-backed student loans that can never be written-off during bankruptcy.
"This has been a pyramid since time immemorial... Money runs uphill, s**t runs downhill" - Tony Soprano
The numbers don't mean anything without context with general public. There has also been a shift in demographic in post doc research. On top of that the subject matter is becoming more politicised than ever.
Postdoc is uncertain, fast, and you still have no career, virtually. Why would anyone do it?
Lots of Chinese willing to get little pay for hard work with the goal of going back to China are now doing post-doc in China.
The problem is "science" inside of academic institutions.
How corrupt is your institution, your department, your supervisors?
Most new science happen in the industry as that’s where there is sometime a incentive to innovate, in academia there is mostly an incentive to publish papers, scratch each other back and get more funding.
I'm in the humanities. What industry?
Basically any industry that can use your analytical skills, abilities to organize yourself etc. This meta skills mean at least just as much than the specific topic, and while some companies might not realize this other do. And I speak from a sociologist perspective with focus on qualitative research, of course we can't hardly expect job advertisements to say sociologist needed (there are in say public service but very rare) but none of my cohorts had any trouble getting a job..
I think 'industry' just means any jobs outside universities, not necessarily means doing other jobs within the same subject so I agree with Lionon's - any non-academic jobs that appreciate specialised and high-level skills you're trained in any subjects.
@@SO-rq3pm I'd say any job for which I'd better have an unexplained hole in my CV than list my graduate studies and post-doc doesn't count. And that's about all of them.
@@SO-rq3pm Thank you, I was going even beyond that, even if your actual trained subject is absolutely useless outside of the university discipline (I wont dare to call any names here, anyway), the primary skillets to work scientifically on problem, to get at the core of stuff, to find easy models to complicated things, you certainly find a place that can use that.
@@georgelionon9050 absolutely agree! I think many humanities postdocs I met (I don't mean anyone here) is that they like to adopt a very subject/disciplinary thinking when talking about chances outside academic. While I appreciate their passion in the subject they choose, when it comes to job market, be it in academia or not, that kind of thinking does more harm than good to you. Even within academia, a very subject-specific mindset is inadequate. Most successful professors have great skills and mindsets OUTSIDE of their own subject, e.g. management skills, problem-solving, coordination etc. - these are all generic and nothing to do whether you're a Kantian philosopher or medieval historian!
A couple ppl I spoke to her on yt, said they went directly into the private sector, and one had to change majors twice to have a marketable research career, due to many of the dishonest tricks their peers were using to get published. It wasn't so much the demands of the work or the uncertainty of finding research teams and grants to keep working, it was according them the politics of the institutions they couldn't deal with.
Don't leave out the Woke infestation in the Universities. There is enough to do without worrying that any word you speak can get you fired. It just needs someone to interpret it as an aggression in some way you have never heard of. It is one of the great mysteries that administrations are helpless before this when there isn't any downside to saying no.
Wanted to do PhD as research appealed to me but didn't feel "smart enough". Regardless, I'm glad i didnt even try seeing how much of the role involves grovelling for funding which would wreck me psychologically, and the insane high competitiveness for a role that you may not even need a PhD to excel in :/
This is not new nor is it confined to Britain. I completed my PhD in Australia in 1985 and took a post doctoral position in the US before returning to Australia to be employed on short term contracts. On the strength of the limited financial security of a three year research grant, at the age of 37 I bought a house.
PhD here...no pay raise in ten years, but CEO making a killing...
It's kind of right, pursing a Phd or going to get a job, well it is more about the person and the value that you are going to bring either to the workplace or to the university, so there is no shame of getting a job after you get a Phd, however, your ego will prevent you from getting any job, therefore, opening a business although it is not easy, it still consider a satisfying option, since you will have to tackle down lots of obstacles, which will give you that feeling of giving back to the society.
So glad I went industry those many years ago! I doubt it’s better now in academia.
What is new? Candidates and Post Docs always joked about being slave labor and many were. Being in the real STEM areas, I had a broad skill set that was sellable.
This sounds more cutthroat and stressful than my finance career
"Academic politics are so ruthless precisely because the stakes are so small." Sayre's Law
@@DrBilly90210 Rarely a decade goes past when I don't mention this gem.
Looking at the average academic position, moving to the industry pays 2x-3x more, is less stressful, with way better work-life balance, and your work is more impactful (with few exceptions). Need I say more?
As an actual patent attorney, I must say thankfully I never got to that stage. I realized while doing my masters that academia just ain't worth it & went to law school instead.
Same if not worse hours & gruelling work. But atleast I'm wearing a suit & making money instead of shuffling around in a lab coat. 😅
Best thing is to learn how to get grants in and do an innovation type project part industry part academia
Just as a manufactured good, the market will determine what something is worth (doctoral degree), regardless of what it cost to make it.
You may feel your product (doctoral degree) is worth more because it cost you so much to make, but if the market doesn't need it, you're SOL.
I've been watching you for some months now, and I think the lesson has sunk in. I'm only an undergraduate at the moment, but I'm already networking with people in tech and science industries for possible employment after my doctorate. It seems clear academia sucks (I believe that's the technical term for it). Academia has nobody to blame but themselves. If the dire future predicted by Nature is true, then perhaps the collapse of the system is what's needed. Burn it down and rebuild.
Your plan seems wise to me, but do not count on a cathartic collapse. There will still be several applicants for every postdoc, they'll just look further afield. There would have to be a collapse in the number of PhDs produced to really make a dent, and the current PhD setup is a great deal for taxpayers, PIs, the government, and the academy, pretty much everyone except most PhD students.
@@acerld519 thanks for that insight.
The wisest lesson you can take from this is to skip the PhD altogether.
Anyone who thinks pay is commensurate with the hard work effort, and time you’ve put into a degree is absolutely delusional. They are still handing out outrageously expensive university degrees without any proof of a basic understanding of economics. It is fun to listen to these videos now that I am no longer supporting an unemployable graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. Who still doesn’t understand basic economics!