
Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Back to School, Usually - simonorlovsky
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/science/phd-post-doc-positions-study.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur
======
scott_s
I found some of the phrasing in the NYT article odd, and this sentence clued
me into why: "The authors, who did not get postdoctoral degrees themselves
..."

I think the NYT reporter thinks that people in postdocs are pursuing another
degree. They are not. It's just a way for people with PhDs to remain in
academia, doing research, so that they can build up their publication list to
land tenure-track academic positions. (And, sometimes, even industry
positions.) Perhaps what the study authors told the NYT reporter that they did
not do postdocs, and the NYT reporter translated that to "did not get
postdoctoral degrees".

I agree this is a holding pattern, as the author says it is. But it's not
quite "back to school", as the title implies. (I know the person who wrote the
article probably did not supply the title, but I suspect they both have the
same confusion.) They're not pursuing another degree.

~~~
chrisseaton
I'm not sure holding pattern is fair either. I think doing a postdoc is a
normal healthy part of a research career. I don't think most people are ready
to start their own groups straight after finishing a PhD.

~~~
compactmani
I agree. The title should read 'Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Forward to More
Research, Usually'

Which is the entire point getting a PhD in the first place. More research.
Forever.

I (along with many others) cringed at the phrasing of postdoctoral degree. A
post-doc is not a degree. The article's comparison of a post-doc to law school
for liberal arts majors was equally egregious. Sloppy writing.

Now, to be fair to their point. What they are observing is a cultural
phenomenon in academia which is to stay in academia until you can't stay any
more. Industry is for those who fail at academic research, whether that
failure occurs at the post-doc stage or pre-tenure stage. This is in contrast
to the sentiments of the real world (the perspective of the article author)
which wonders why these "students" take so long to get a real job.

------
pmiller2
Academia, as a career path, is a non-starter for the huge majority of people
who even want to go down that path.

Universities are not growing at the same rates that they were in the 60's and
70's. If you're a graduate student, not only are your classmates your
competition, but every professor who supervises more than 1 PhD thesis is
actually contributing to the overpopulation of PhDs. These two things in
combination are why we have so many adjuncts on campus doing most of the
teaching of undergrads.

Even if the above weren't true, the path to a tenured position is not
something I'd wish on a mortal enemy. Start off with several years in grad
school making poverty-level wages. Add on 1-3 postdocs at a minimum, making
probably 3/4 or less of what an assistant professor would. Then, there's the 6
year job interview (i.e. the tenure process). And, then, factor in that you
don't get to choose where you live during all this. You have to go where the
jobs are, and there might only be a handful of jobs in your subfield any given
year.

That all amounts to about 6-10 years of post-baccalaureate slog before you can
even start a career and begin living like an adult.

If you come out the other end without a job, then your next search becomes
even harder. If you get the job, then, yes, congratulations, it's now very
hard to fire you, but good luck finding another tenured position if you decide
you want to move. Oh, and the people you work with, you're going to see most
of them every day for the next 10, 20, or 30 years.

In spite of all that, I might have actually ridden the train to the end, had I
not realized that I was preparing to enter a field where I'd literally have to
wait for someone to die before I got a job. Nobody told me any of this until I
was already in grad school for a couple of years, and even then I ended up
figuring most of it out on my own.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
> Universities are not growing at the same rates that they were in the 60's
> and 70's. If you're a graduate student, not only are your classmates your
> competition, but every professor who supervises more than 1 PhD thesis is
> actually contributing to the overpopulation of PhDs.

I must say, I quite disagree with what seems to be a generally negative tone
on HN towards academia. Basic research is fundamentally important, more than
that there are extremely talented people who should be doing it - rather than
allow themselves to have their time wasted by some corporation that does
absolutely nothing beneficial for civilization.

Obviously it's a problem if these people are disenfranchised, not sufficiently
funded or otherwise aren't able to do what they wanted to do and for those
reasons are turned away from Academia (btw tenure track is not the _sole_
option for doing fundamental research).

But on here it seems the entire critical conversation is centered, on job
options, salary, competition, and all the other things are really evidence of
someone too deeply emersed in the corporate culture. If you are doing _good_
research - competition doesn't matter, if you care significantly about the
research salary doesn't matter all that much. There are surely negative
aspects but statements like these:

> That all amounts to about 6-10 years of post-baccalaureate slog before you
> can even start a career and begin living like an adult.

Sound almost like corporate salesmanship for getting talented people out of
Academia, into useless soul-destroying jobs.

~~~
morgante
This attitude is part of the problem.

People shouldn't have to make a decision between quality of life (good salary,
recognition, benefits, etc.) and doing fulfilling/meaningful work.

Wanting to be compensated fairly for your work is not corporate thinking. It's
basic fairness and rationality. The fact that academia treats it as a
character flaw is part of the problem.

~~~
jebediah
Being paid less for a more fulfilling/meaningful job IS fair.

~~~
morgante
Fair point. The market is working properly.

The problem is mostly academics selling lies about that market to
impressionable young students. They're supposed to be mentors looking out for
their students' best interests, but are actually just pushing up the labor
supply and pushing down prices.

forgotpwtomain's comment is highly indicative of the way academics do that.
"Ignore the reality of terrible job options in academia. Industry is dirty and
being a penniless researcher is the only noble path through life."

~~~
forgotpwtomain
I don't know about you but I'm quite grateful that people like Donald Knuth
stayed in the apparently terrible place that academia is rather then becoming
senior managers at IBM for 500k+ a year.

I don't think that not having a huge salary == lower quality of life, I think
having a non-rewarding job does though.

> Industry is dirty and being a penniless researcher is the only noble path
> through life."

I never advocated this, while for some people in fact being penniless doesn't
significantly impact quality of life; for a lot of talented people that want
to have families it does in fact matter and it's a large loss for science if
Academia cannot retain these people.

~~~
morgante
So am I. In fact, I wish more people were able to work on research. Treating a
desire for a comfortable living as the problem rather than an objective to be
fulfilled is what keeps us from getting more and better researchers.

Also keep in mind that his generation's options were much better. The academic
job market was a _lot_ friendlier back then.

------
FourSigma
I am extremely happy that the my initial postdoc route was a total bust. It
was so hard to leave academia and take a risk in the startup space directly
after my PhD. I ended up in data engineering/science at a small EdTech
startup. Looking beyond the bump in salary (relative to a postdoc), I find my
work extremely rewarding, love my colleagues, and really look forward to going
into work everyday and developing my skill set. This was probably the best
career decision that I made in life so far. This non-traditional career path
is hard for my family, friends, and professors to fully digest and absorb. My
dad still wonders why I got a degree in virology/immunology and decided to
basically go into software engineering. My friends who are still in academia
think I made a terrible mistake going into a startup scene completely
unrelated to my graduate education. However, I feel like I am getting great
training and setting up for a wonderful career. I seriously doubt I would have
felt the same way if I ended up as a postdoc in some research lab.

~~~
otoburb
Is there any chance that you would wish to initiate research part-time in your
field? I would presume any self-funded research program would need to be
limited in scope and heavily weighted towards computational citizen science,
which seems to be where your growing skillset can be readily applied.

~~~
timroy
FourSigma and IndianAstronaut, what do you think about doing bioinformatics as
research, formulating and testing hypotheses, and then either using a cloud
lab or a garage lab for at least some wetlab testing?

I've been researching intensively whether to go get a life sciences PhD, and
I'm now leaning instead toward just learning bioinformatics and ML, with the
wetlab stuff as an adjunct. If that's an effective way to do "real research",
then it might be more accessible.

~~~
FourSigma
I would 100% lean towards to a more computational skill set while having some
exposure to a wet-lab experimentation. I think having a data science skill set
in biology is becoming extremely valuable. Moreover, if you choose to leave
academia you have a set of skills that are in high demand across a range of
industries.

~~~
timroy
Thanks for the advice! That's very helpful to fold into my research/analysis
of next steps. :-)

------
rifung
The article makes assumptions about job prospects for PhDs and which careers
getting a PhD will enable, but is it strange that I want to get a PhD just
because I want to be able to do research and learn about all the currently
unsolved problems? I realize that I might not be able to do it for a living,
but being able to take a few years off and get paid (although very little) to
study something of your choosing sounds great in contrast to getting paid more
but spending your time doing things other people want you to do.

Would I be better served just taking a few years off and studying on my own?
That seems unlikely though since having an advisor is very useful/important..

~~~
foldr
The thing to bear in mind is that PhD programs aren't geared towards people
who just want to work on interesting questions, get the PhD, and then leave
and do something else. You'll be immersed in a culture where all of your peers
see a tenure track position as the only job worth having. No-one will take any
aspirations you may have outside academia at all seriously. Unless you are
very tough and independent-minded, you _will_ have your perception of your own
goals shifted by this.

(There may be some exceptions to this generalization for fields that have very
close connections to industry, e.g. CS.)

~~~
rsfern
I feel like the odd one out considering an academic career in my engineering
PhD program. I don't think the attitude you're describing is all that common
in many technical fields these days.

I'm sure it depends on the field, the university, and the department culture,
but isn't that what admissions interviews and open house are for?

------
whyenot
Another problem that the article didn't mention is that with the end of
mandatory retirement, professors take a lot longer to leave [1]. With people
sticking around longer, there is less turnover in tenure track positions, and
more competition when positions open up. It's the reason people accept the
poor pay and terrible job security of being an adjunct: you've got to hang out
somewhere waiting for that dream job and you don't want to stray that far from
academia... Serial postdocs are doing the same thing. From personal
experience, its very difficult to find that one thing that you absolutely
excel at, your life calling, but having to face the likelihood that you may
never get that dream professorship and make the money to have children or buy
a house.

1\. [https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/02/new-study-
sho...](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/08/02/new-study-shows-
difficulty-encouraging-professors-retire)

------
Ulti
This article shows a gross ignorance of the reality. Academic sciences
especially are woefully under funded and anyone coming out now with a PhD has
no position to go into especially if you are half decent. Accepting to only
teach in a crap university and struggle to have a research career is not a
choice for competent people. Instead they leave once they fully understand the
insermountable task of obtaining a decent life in the academic world is. Worse
is the younger 40-45 yol academics think people now face the same world they
did. Whereas there has been a 10x increase in PhD graduates since they went
looking for a position. The number of available jobs has not dramatically
increased at all. This and the stochastic nature of funding of grant proposals
means no one _chooses_ to remain in academia. Apart from the top 1% or the no
hopers who think being a stooge for the next 40 years is admirable and they
should take one for the team to pursue "science". The reality is research jobs
outside of academia are obviously booming with this sudden availability of
talented and highly educated work force.

------
sndean
We should better educate people entering (or considering) PhD programs about
their likely job prospects after graduation.

There have been a lot of articles (example [2]) written about the terrible
situation that graduating PhD students are put in, where they'll likely be
stuck in a postdoc for 10+ years with no chance of advancement.

It's insane that 1/3 are graduating without a job in hand. Either we limit the
number of PhDs we generate or we increase the available number of (academic?)
positions [1].

[1] [https://research.wisc.edu/biomedworkforce/wp-
content/uploads...](https://research.wisc.edu/biomedworkforce/wp-
content/uploads/sites/11/2015/03/Larson-et-al-2014.pdf) [2]
[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-
phd-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust-
americas-awful-market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339/)

~~~
munin
they know. there is no other path to the job that they want. what do you
propose they do instead?

~~~
otoburb
The study surmises that they (PhD students) generally do _not_ know:

 _We describe evidence of a “default” postdoc and of “holding patterns” that
suggest a need for increased attention to career planning among students,
their mentors, graduate schools, and funders._ [1]

[1]
[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6286/663](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6286/663)

~~~
pkaye
With the availability of information on the internet and their education
levels, I have a hard time believing PhD students don't know about the job
prospects. More likely they continue to believe that they will be the
exceptional case.

------
argonaut
I've heard a few people in CS say they _loved_ their postdocs. My outsider's
impression is: there's generally no teaching responsibility, no pressure or
anxiety over your thesis/graduation (the biggest stressor for a PhD),
generally more flexibility in your research agenda (though it depends on the
lab), less pressure to find funding, and there's no stigma to just leaving or
moving around whenever you want (it is common to leave a postdoc after just a
year). Although you're still paid poorly.

~~~
a_bonobo
>Although you're still paid poorly.

In the US, yes - in Australia postdocs get between 60k and 90k per year, with
an additional 15-17% that goes into your Super (retirement account -
Australia's equivalent of US' 401k). I'm a "new" post-doc in Perth with a
salary of 86k p/y and my wife doesn't need to work.

But yes, so far I'm enjoying it greatly, after a few years of the constant
Damocles' sword of my thesis deadline dangling over my head the freedom is
great!

~~~
Cyph0n
Wow, that's pretty good! I'm an Australian citizen starting a PhD in the US
this year, so I'll keep an eye on any postdoc openings Down Under when I'm
nearing completion. But I'm kind of worried that there won't be many
opportunities for the field I'm in (circuit design).

~~~
a_bonobo
Yes, that's my problem too - there are only very few groups that work in any
given area, after this contract is over I may have to go overseas

------
algirau
Got me to being a CTO of a nanotechnology start-up. Academia is not the only
end goal.

------
snaggley
How can you take this article seriously when they write "getting postdoctoral
degrees"? There are things to do in Universities beyond getting degrees...
like doing science.

------
rdlecler1
When you spend ten years of your life pursuing something, and you feel you
have few prospects then it's likely that you'll continue down the same path.
The attitude is better the devil you know than the devil you don't. I left
academia after my PhD because I felt that I couldn't do another ten years in
academia scraping by on $35k/year postdoc salary... Instead I went through a
couple of startups, and here I am seven years later making what I probably
would have been making had I never left academia. PhDs can make you painfully
unhireable. Oh the irony!

------
mookerific
The real article should be discussing where a JD will take you. That's the
scam of the century.

~~~
gunshigh
In what way?

~~~
pmiller2
Law school bar pass rates and first year associate salaries are not what they
used to be. According to [http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/15/pf/jobs/lawyer-
salaries/](http://money.cnn.com/2014/07/15/pf/jobs/lawyer-salaries/) , the
median salary for a first year associate is $62k. Add to the mix that law
schools inflate their employment stats by including people whose jobs have
nothing to do with the law, and what you get is students suing their law
schools for fraud (e.g. [http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/08/pf/college/lawsuit-
thomas-je...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/08/pf/college/lawsuit-thomas-
jefferson-school-of-law/))

~~~
rayiner
A JD is still a big step up for the sorts of people who get them. Humanities
majors as a group don't hit much more than $60k mid-career, and more than half
of fresh college graduates are unemployed or working a job that doesn't
require a college degree.

~~~
pmiller2
Even after factoring in massive debt?

~~~
rayiner
College and graduate school loan payments are limited to 10% of discretionary
income under Obama's recent programs. So yes, even with the debt.

------
atemerev
Pursuing a PhD only makes sense if you want to go to the academia. Staying in
the academia only makes sense if you genuinely love science to the point that
financial reward is much less motivating for you.

(There are some shortcuts and exceptions to that. If you have PhD in physics
or probability-related applied mathematics, you can become a quant trader; a
common career path for those who decided that purely scientific pursuits are
not their cup of tea.)

~~~
denzil_correa
> Pursuing a PhD only makes sense if you want to go to the academia.

The pursuit of a PhD makes sense if you are interested in research.

~~~
johnminter
First, I have a STEM Ph.D. and am in my 35th year at a U.S. corporation. Now
my question: Just where do you expect all these newly minted Ph. D. grads to
do that research?

At least in the US, the last two decades have not been kind to the once iconic
corporate research labs. As global competition increased and the push for
constant high quarterly returns by investors, more and more has been off-
shored. The most recent casualty was DuPont CR&D but there has been constant
erosion. My colleagues and I have actually lost count of the number of
downsizings we have been through.

Here is a test for you: Next conference you go to, look at the talks and
posters. How many corporate people are there who are not instrument vendors or
contract labs?

~~~
denzil_correa
I'm not sure I get your point though. I said the pursuit of Ph.D makes sense
if you'd want to do research. I never said it's a good return on investment or
you'd have a job or you'd end up doing research in the industry.

FWIW, I have a STEM Ph.D too.

------
amist
A Ph.D. in a field where the only thing you can do with it is teaching it to
other people is no more than a pyramid scheme.

------
VLM
Stepping back and having a non-emotional discussion about sportsball might
help. Consider that the default plan for the stereotypical high school
football player is to play college ball, of course. Also, of course, they know
the odds of a successful pro career are very low. Its just something to do
until you have something else to do, and there's really nothing wrong with
that.

Maybe another way to put it is the most interesting cultural change is the
death of the career and the rise of the gig or job as the default. Once you
know you're very unlikely to have a career, you're free to have a fun job or a
fun gig or fun life while doing work you like, or at least like the most out
of your options.

So the article boils down to the career path is dead, and that's had little
short term effect on the workers, like every other job in the country.

------
santaclaus
I know a non-negligible number of new professors who, when offered faculty
positions, negotiated a later starting date to pursue a postdoc for a year.
Postdocs are a great low risk way to expose yourself to different research
groups, to undertake crazy projects that you might not be able to do at your
next institution, and to expose yourself to new communities (eg a theory CS
PhD working in a math group) and to other researchers. Postdocs are also, in
some sense, the most freedom you'll have as a researcher. As a grad student
you are more beholden to an advisor than as a postdoc, while as a professor
you have administrative duties, recruiting, teaching, and all that jazz
distracting you from your work.

------
OJFord
Is this at all surprising?

Obviously they're interested in research; ask anyone to name one place where
research will happen - how many do you think won't pick "universities"?

------
saryant
Every day I'm glad I bombed my GRE.

