
Why I Chose Academia - ohblahitsme
http://blog.ketyov.com/2013/04/why-i-chose-academia.html
======
ancientrepeat
the author needs to chime in a few years later when he fully understands how
big science actually works:

\- most work is done by untrained and inexperienced graduate students, good
luck understanding/reproducing the process

\- most faculty are little more than grant submitting machines trying to land
a grant at all costs regardless of what actually interests them

\- most research reviews processes are incredibly biased with countless people
doing terrible jobs (the reviled "reviewer number 3") a single negative can
sink a grant/paper acceptance

\- most institutions are grossly monolithic and the rules and regulations are
such that incompetent individuals can never be removed from any given
position.

\- most institutions are run as medieval lordships, with many smaller decision
makers like deans, head of departments that have incredible influence on
someone's career. It is great when the dictator is benevolent and unbearable
if not.

Note how instead of paying a good salary the University choses to give out
handouts (lower childcare fees, lower rentals) - because those in turn are
paid via taxpayer grants. It hides the fact that they pay so little the people
would qualify for foodstamps.

~~~
jofer
...And all industry jobs are mindless rote work.

I'm not arguing that the things you describe never exist in academia, but
they're the worst examples of when things go wrong. They're not the norm.

~~~
tedks
From my vantage point in academia they're definitely the norm. I'd say the
only one that's mostly false is #2, but that could be the norm outside of my
particular field (computer science).

I've seen fantastic research sunk and forced through resubmission time and
again because of reviewers that either don't understand the work (and why
would they? they have zero incentive) or have pre-existing biases based on
their own work (and are called in as expert reviewers, effectively functioning
as gatekeepers in a subfield).

Bad deans/department chairs can make life suck pretty hard. This is usually
not the case because they (in my experience) don't have that much power, but
over some things like hiring they can definitely be as capricious as they
want. The real killer are the people outside the department, on IRBs, grant
review boards, etc.. In a good research-focused school they can be great; in
worse schools they can be tinpot despots.

Reproducibility in particular is insane. In computer science virtually no
systems are released at the time of a paper submission, so papers describe
things that may or may not exist. I'd say this is less due to
untrained/inexperienced grad students and more due to a combination of
constantly rushing to publish, unclear institutional regulations regarding
releasing artifacts such as source, and inability to focus on cleaning things
up for a release.

Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's
obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it. I think this comes down to
an incentive problem -- when there's no incentive to build things that work,
you tend to build broken things.

~~~
tensor
>Academia has serious problems at its core, and in a lot of places, it's
obvious that startups and industry is outpacing it.

Let's be realistic here. How many startups actually do any sort of _research_
at all? By my estimates, the number is very close to zero.

How many places in industry? You can cite the big labs, but the majority of
science is still done by universities. While academia has serious problems,
lets not fool ourselves into thinking that industry is any kind of substitute.

~~~
tolmasky
To some degree it depends what you consider research. I agree startups and
"the industry" are 1) not necessarily publishing, and 2) not doing work in a
way that matches the procedural standards of traditional research, but a lot
of new ideas are being experimented.

Does git count as important research? Does CoffeeScript?

~~~
auggierose
Git: Yes; CoffeeScript: No;

------
michaelhoffman
This blog post is a year old. The writer is now an assistant professor at the
University of California, San Diego.

[http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/447/](http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/research/faculty/447/)

------
cryoshon
Love of science and research does not pay the bills, nor does an academic
level salary.

The "choice" that the author made wouldn't really crop up unless he had help
paying the bills.

~~~
beambot
What? Academics may not make the same salary as industry... but an engineering
professor generally makes >$100k / yr. For example, you can look up the salary
of most public university professors (eg. from Georgia Tech/UGA):
[http://www.open.georgia.gov/](http://www.open.georgia.gov/)

You might not get rich... but it can definitely be livable with a high quality
of life.

~~~
slvv
If you get a tenured position, it can be a $100k/year job. Tenured jobs are
harder and harder to get, and adjuncts are compensated badly.

~~~
ivan_ah
I think "associate professor" is the untenured position, regardless they seem
to be all 100k +... even in Canadia:

[https://uwaterloo.ca/about/what-we-
stand/accountability/sala...](https://uwaterloo.ca/about/what-we-
stand/accountability/salary-disclosure-2012)

~~~
slvv
The untenured position is really a sessional instructor, which I'm sure also
goes by different names, but involves zero job security and extremely shitty
pay. It's not a salaried position, it's a "per course you teach that semester"
position.

------
sinkasapa
I like Tanya Khovanova’s perspective:

"I started my life wanting to be a mathematician. At some point I had to quit
academia in order to feed my children. And so I went to work in industry for
ten years. Now that my children have grown, I am trying to get back to
academia. So I am the right person to compare the experience of working in the
two sectors."

[http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=476](http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?p=476)

~~~
thebooktocome
Khovanova's stuck in the adjunct trap, and mostly studies recreational
mathematics. Because of this, her experiences don't really generalize well.

------
Create
"How should we make it attractive for them [young people] to spend 5,6,7 years
in our field, be satisfied, learn about excitement, but finally be qualified
to find other possibilities?" \-- H. Schopper

The numbers make the problem clear. _In 2007_ , the year before CERN first
powered up the LHC, _the lab produced 142 master 's and Ph.D. theses_,
according to the lab's document server. _Last year it produced 327_. (Fermilab
chipped in 54.) That abundance seems unlikely to vanish anytime soon, as _last
year ATLAS had 1000 grad students and CMS had 900_.

 _In contrast_ , the INSPIRE Web site, a database for particle physics,
_currently lists 124 postdocs worldwide_ in experimental high-energy physics,
the sort of work LHC grads have trained for.

Let's not confuse students and fellows with missing staff. [...] Potential
missing staff in some areas is a separate issue, and educational programmes
are not designed to make up for it. On-the-job learning and training are not
separated but dynamically linked together, benefiting to both parties. _In my
three years of operation, I have unfortunately witnessed cases where CERN
duties and educational training became contradictory and even conflicting._

[http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-
stud...](http://ombuds.web.cern.ch/blog/2013/06/lets-not-confuse-students-and-
fellows-missing-staff)

An unsatisfactory contract policy

This will be difficult for LD staff to cope with. _Indeed, even while giving
complete satisfaction, they have no forward vision about the possibility of
pursuing a career_

[http://staff-
association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-...](http://staff-
association.web.cern.ch/content/unsatisfactory-contract-policy)

Pensions which will be applicable to new recruits as of 1 January 2012; the
Management and CERN Council adopted without any concertation and decided in
June 2011 to adopt very unfavourable mesures for new recruits.

[http://www.gac-
epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin...](http://www.gac-
epa.org/History/Bulletins/42-2012-04/Bulletin42-en.html)

 _And a warning to non-western members_ :

"The cost [...] has been evaluated, taking into account realistic _labor
prices in different countries_. The total cost is X (with a _western
equivalent_ value of Y) [where Y>X]

source: LHCb calorimeters : Technical Design Report

ISBN: 9290831693 cdsweb.cern.ch/record/494264

------
yodsanklai
"Why I Chose Academia"

I make enough money to pay my bills, I have as much free time as I want, I get
to learn new things all the time and teach them to others.

However, it can be a little depressing to be a lousy researcher, I feel
useless at times.

