
How to build a better PhD - tokenadult
http://www.nature.com/news/how-to-build-a-better-phd-1.18905
======
astazangasta
The problem is simple, and easily solved: fund science at greater levels.

I trust everyone knows this story - the funding rate has dropped dramatically
in the last 15 years, and as a result the average age for an RO1 has gone up
steadily (see [here]([http://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/age-o...](http://nexus.od.nih.gov/all/wp-
content/uploads/2012/02/age-of-investigators.png\))).

Just give scientists more money, and a lot of these problems will vanish.
There will be more academic positions; there will be less competition for
grants.

This is entirely a problem of money. I have a PhD and have somehow managed to
shoehorn myself into academia without pursuing a tenure track. There is a
tremendous scope for people like me. I could hire three people today and put
them to serious full-time work on difficult projects that would make a
substantial impact in my field (cancer research) - if I had the resources.

It's easy to fit people into non-tenure track positions in academia, there is
no structural issue. The reason people go to industry is only because there is
no room made for them on the public dole. If the public steps up and funds
more science, this problem will abate.

~~~
jbob2000
This is a completely layman's analysis, but I think that science funding has
gone down because we are less and less able to understand what it is that is
being studied and how it can benefit humanity. Go back 40 or 50 years and the
things scientists were discovering were tangible and real. They produced
things that people could touch, consume, and understand.

The biggest science project we have going, the LHC, is impossible for the lay
man to understand. "A big circle which smashes tiny things together? You're
just watching it? I don't get it!". Compare that to the discovery of
penicillin; "You're growing fungus under your fridge and it's going to cure my
sick child? Take all my money!".

~~~
dhruvsuyam
That is because this generation has lot of diversions. Focus is the key for
research.

~~~
jbob2000
Focus is easy when there's a strong value proposition. We got nuclear done
very quickly because the value was near infinity. The science being done today
_seems_ to have weak value.

------
chrisseaton
When these articles about people leaving academia after doing a PhD, I'm
utterly baffled.

I thought it was completely normal and expected that people would do a PhD and
then go into industry or do something else entirely? Where do they think all
the industry researchers, school science teachers, etc come from? Where do
they think all the banks were getting their PhDs from? I don't think many of
my peers when I started my PhD were set on an academic career.

But these articles talk about it like it's some bizarre unexpected thing, and
they seem to say that when people leave for academia they are never heard from
again. This article literally illustrates them as floating off into the sky
[http://www.nature.com/news/life-outside-the-lab-the-ones-
who...](http://www.nature.com/news/life-outside-the-lab-the-ones-who-got-
away-1.15802)

Do they actually want to limit the number of PhDs to the number of academic
positions? What will industry do in that case? Where will schools get science
teachers?

I have never seen the picture they try to paint of fool-hardy young students
all thinking they'll get a faculty position.

~~~
tensor
People often go into PhD, like I did, to do research and contribute to the
public good. Most people like me dreamed of an academic job with tenure.
Tenure so that you can actually do radical work without retribution.

That environment no longer exists. Tenure is highly fought for and there are
very few positions. And even if you get tenure, you really don't have the
luxury to work on anything you wish because of funding. A good portion of your
days as an academic consist of teaching, another good portion is writing
grants. If you don't do the popular thing, you don't get grants. If you don't
get grants you don't get students.

And sadly, without students that means that you don't get to do much research
because the majority of your time is teaching and dealing with grants and
other bureaucracy. As my former supervisor put it: you get time to do research
yourself when you get home after work.

So you have time, but not much. Most profs use this time, but it's just not
enough without grants and students.

Ok, so let's go to industry. You get paid a lot more. You get to do primarily
research. But it's not public. It's mostly locked up and directed to
ultimately lame purposes like targeting ads or making trades. These help no
one and don't help society, so it's really not very enticing to an academic
hopeful.

And yes, these researchers do fall off the radar because they stop publishing.
They may file patents, but the only people who read those are lawyers. This is
because patents are not papers. Their primary purpose is law, and they don't
contain any of the information an academic would be interested in. You
generally can't reproduce a work from a patent, and patents don't include any
requirements of proving your invention works, which is the primary requirement
of science.

To make matters worse, the patent office typically patents extremely simple
things that aren't even worth the attention of someone trying to achieve state
of the art. Essentially patents are a huge joke, so nobody looks at them,
either in academia nor industry engineers.

TLDR: people go into academia to make the world a better place and do novel
research that gets published to the world for free. Academia is increasingly a
bad way to achieve this and industry doesn't achieve this at all. Though
industry does get you paid so ends up being the fall back, even if you fall
off the map.

~~~
chrisseaton
Industry researchers don't do things in public and don't publish? Lame
purposes and helps no one?

Again I just can't relate any of that to what I know at all!

When I finished my PhD I moved into industry and basically kept working on the
same project. I work for a megacorp, and almost everything I do is developed
fully in the open (public GitHub repo, not a mirror), we publish several times
a year at the same venues I did in academia, and everyone is free to benefit
from what I work on from using the code, reading the code, reading the papers
etc.

And this isn't unusual. I know many many people in the academic community who
do almost exactly the same thing. Look at everyone in Microsoft Research,
Oracle Labs, IBM TJ Watson, etc.

~~~
gr33nman
There are a few industry options for the sciences but less so for the
humanities, where tenure is intended to protect scholars who investigate and
question things that the wealthy and powerful might find dangerous to their
interests (e.g. Marxism).

~~~
gr33nman
Also, it sounds like you are talking about (software) engineering, rather than
basic science (e.g., astronomy). There are plenty of questions humanity would
like for science to answer for which there is no financial incentive to a
corporation.

------
NumberSix
A couple comments.

There are pervasive claims both by prominent scientists and politicians in
both parties that there is shortage of scientists (Google STEM shortage) going
back at least to the 1950's. Many people even to this day starting a Ph.D.
program are unaware of the long odds against getting a permanent research job.

Most Ph.D.'s in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)
fields who leave academia find jobs as some sort of software developer, an
often high paying but highly unstable and often short lived career. There are
not a lot of jobs for scientific research in private industry; many research
labs such as Bell Labs or Xerox PARC established in the post Sputnik 1960's
period have been closed or substantially shrunk. Microsoft Research and
similar outfits are not nearly as large as the Bell Labs, HP Labs, Xerox PARC
of the past.

The vast majority of STEM Ph.D. students are funded through grants and
contracts from funding agencies such as the National Institutes of Health
(NIH) which by policy chooses to fund far more Ph.D. graduate students than
there are long term positions. In most cases, the funding agencies promote the
false idea that there is a current or future shortage of scientists. The
funding agencies could by policy limit the number of funded graduate students
to some reasonable multiplier of retirements of senior researchers each year,
taking into account that some graduate students will reasonably decide to
pursue other careers after completing their Ph.D.

The extremely long odds of a permanent position, most of which pay no more
than a software developer with a few years of experience or an associate at a
top tier corporate law firm ensure that a high fraction of the "best and
brightest" will not pursue a career in research, tackling problems like curing
cancer or better energy sources. The present system hopes that quantity and
regimentation -- an army of easily abused indentured servants from India and
other "third world" nations -- will win over quality and individual
creativity. In many fields, like cancer research, over forty years of this
approach has failed unequivocally.

------
randcraw
As the article notes in its introduction, too many PhD students misunderstand
where their PhD will lead. That's a clear problem, and robs many of our
brighter kids of years spent in prep for jobs that don't exist. Doing that
deliberately is malignant and should end.

How to correct the problem? Start by _requiring_ universities to inform
incoming students AT ALL LEVELS of two things:

1) Given the forthcoming degree, what jobs await them? Report job trends for
their graduates in the past 20 years, including what job titles they take at
what employers.

2) What will this education cost them? Report the range of student debt for
students over that same 20 years, including repayment horizons.

Much needs to change in academia, and it starts with a full accounting of the
cost and market value of a degree, especially when a significant market value
is _expected_.

(It's worth noting that nowhere would the benefit of doing this be greater
than countering the for-profit degree mills that abound in recent years. But
in the end, the damage done by teaching useless skills at a good university is
little different than failing to teach useful ones at a bad university.)

------
fluxquanta
>“And a master's is not considered a failure for those who can't make it to a
PhD.”

I was in a physics PhD program straight out of undergraduate school. In that
program, at least, the culture very much was that the master's degree was the
"failure option".

I ended up leaving after one year for personal reasons, and I felt like even
more of a failure because I couldn't even get to the "failure option" point.
Five years later and even though I'm relatively successful working as a
programmer it still bothers me.

