PhD: reader comments [6]

I just finished my PhD and I just realized how wrong everything was. I wasted precious years of my life, especially in STEM where your younger years are your most precious. The school doesn’t care even the slightest bit about graduate students and they are simply expendable and replaceable commodities – forcing you to “teach” horrible classes babysitting undergraduates and spend countless hours grading. It is absolutely horrifying how graduate students are treated. Even the janitors are treated far far better.

The worst thing is the publication and research racket. The chance of publication depends heavily on the names on the paper and lesser on the content. There is so much publication and most content is absolute garbage, written by people who have no real clue to what is going on. Then, as a graduate student you read it and think that is what is going on and waste your time doing research on it.

First there is the endless charade of pointless classes. Next, is pointless amount of reading “research”. Then, after that is doing your own research which will be read by 2-3 other people ever. Only the superstar papers get any notice and that is 1%. Most likely you will not be one of them if you adviser isn’t a superstar.

I think it might make sense to do PhD if you work with a superstar professor in a famous and well-funded lab with lots of younger nontenured professors – and laser focus and finish everything within a 3-4 years max and get out. Anything worse is an incredible waste of time and your mental health.

The bottom line: the pay is abysmal, the work is hard and pointless without good rewards and worst of all, the people there are terrible.

Academic scams: name the names

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PhD for STEM/Engineering?

Phdscam received a set of questions, which we believe is shared among many wanna-be-PhDs. The questions and answers are as follows.

Questions

I am an engineering student (materials science and engineering) who wishes to do a PhD because most of the “interesting” jobs, like research, require you to have a PhD. Not to mention that I enjoy research. Since it’s a STEM PhD program, I am not worried about going into debt. I am aware that it’s not going to give me much more money after graduation, but that’s fine, since I care more about job satisfaction than money as long as I  have enough of it. I am not seeking professorship either; I just want to go into industry. Engineering PhDs seem to be more employable than pure sciences PhDs in industry as well.
What do you think? Do you think that getting a PhD is still a bad idea in my case? I think it’s fine for me, but I am open to hearing different ideas.

Our response:

First, PhD takes extremely long time, sometimes 6+ years of prime time of your life. You become a virtual hostage for the degree as your professor doesn’t want lose a cheap trained labor. If you are going to do PhD, make sure to check what were the actual finish times of previous PhDs.

It depends on exactly what topic you do PhD on. Industry tends to hire whatever exact skill they need. This puts anyone at significant disadvantage since you only can claim expertise in a very narrow field. Most end up trying to show ‘they are smart enough to do the job’ they are applying. So, you have serious competition (other PhDs are equally smart).
If you are in the united states, industry pushes people to breaking point (10 to 12 hrs/day) with barely 2 weeks vacation/yr. You will be dealing with managers and clients who will make you pretty miserable. Very few jobs give you flexibility to do your interesting research. With a master’s degree you can get these miserable jobs as well . Advantage is, in six years you go way up in the ladder hopefully and maybe even switch career.

Industrial job satisfaction is a mirage, while in academia, jobs don’t exist.

So even for STEM, a generic advice can be given: “don’t do it”.

If you are thinking of employing your superior mathematical ability to problem solving will give you satisfaction, well, solve (it will actually be satisfying in the end) the problem of your career: it is a very big challenge even for smart people like you and time is of essence.

Only when you ‘retire’, ie, you aren’t on someone’s payroll, you can do whatever research you want. Even in best case scenario, how long do you think you need to retire?

Statistically (one of our article has that link) speaking PhD has zero advantage when it comes to money (I would hazard a guess, satisfaction with life, as well).

PhD: The Adjunct Scam

‘Adjunct’ professor is a person usually without any pay. The ‘professor’ has PhD, few years of post-doctoral experience and she still is bankrupt and has no source of income. Why is she wasting time in academia then? Simple, she has nowhere to go.

Yes, these days, universities have very few permanent positions. Even the ones that are there, top tier universities like Harvard and MIT run a scam with them: hire 20 people on tenure track. These people give their best for five years and then you kick 19 of them out. After two years kick the other one too, repeat, and you have a business model of free labor. In short, ‘very smart’ PhDs get treated like dirt.

Still the scam goes on and on. Many still haven’t got the message. Naivety can’t be replaced by ‘smartness’. Many ‘wanna-be-PhDs’ want to do PhD research ‘just for fun’, with big unsaid hope of being able to get monetary reward (have you seen a professor turning down more money?) too. This is not happening for last 40 years and won’t happen tomorrow.

In other words, PhD and associated scams will continue in foreseeable future.

PhD: reader comments [4]

I’m a bit of a non-traditional student. I did not do well in college after high school and opted to go to work. Then came 9/11, and I did what I suppose a lot of naive 18-25 year olds did, I joined the military. There’s maybe a bit more to the story, but I’ll fast forward and say I was about 28 when I started college.

At the time I was hungry. I had a plan, get a four-year degree and go to law school. With the military giving me some credits and a packed undergrad schedule I graduated in 2 years with my bachelor’s degree. My last year I started working with a professor and decided I loved research. He suggested grad school. I took the GRE and scored well and started applying. Most schools wouldn’t take me without a masters degree, but two top ranked schools bit and accepted me fully funded.

After a campus visit I moved and my wife and I purchased a home near campus (I had inherited a little money and thought it might be a worthwhile investment time will tell). My first year of grad school was rough. After ten years out of school and only two years back it was a culture shock to get up to speed in the program. I quickly was put on probation and had my funding cut. Recently I was dropped from the PhD program.

I thought coming to the program I would be mentored and my “potential” would be developed. But the reality was no one cared or tried to help me improve. It was expected that we students would self-teach. Professors camped in their office reserving help for a few chosen students. Other’s have had papers returned to be rewritten rather than failing, one got an extension of a year. My papers were weak, but they were mine. For that I was told I did not have the capability to succeed. I disagree. My first term, with a bachelors I taught a class. I have been very capable with statistics and for the most part writing (though we can all always improve writing). The transition pieces that were hard for me were never addressed and profs I questioned at least once openly mocked me trying to improve. Consequently, now that I’m stuck here I guess I will wrap up my master’s degree and look for a job in data analysis. I hear they pay more. This experience has made me very jaded. I think the PhD is a scam and denotes more that the faculty like you than anything else.

And while my MA is still pending… All I have to show for my time to date is high blood pressure and stress. I wouldn’t recommend grad school to anyone.

PhD: smart, lazy, insane

One article tries ways to “fix the phd”

PhD.. gotten both more difficult and less rewarding: today, it can take almost a decade to get a doctorate, and, at the end of your program, you’re unlikely to find a tenure-track job.

Now, who in their right mind would spend 12 years of prime time in life to jabber about nonsense and try to please a fossil (professor)? Heck, your professor might die in these years and you may have to find a new one. But this is humanities PhDs we are talking about. Humanities folks learns little mathematics/technology and in ‘real world’ jobs they are useless.. it’s harsh but in tech-driven world, humanities PhD has very little offer. For science PhDs, career prospects are grim too, there simply aren’t even 5% positions. And since so many to choose from, even the successful candidates will get very little money, so it’s basically the minimum wage in academia.

Here’s another example, why humanities professors don’t know even the basic mathematics or are ignorant beyond repair.

The core of the problem is, of course, the job market. The M.L.A. report estimates that only sixty per cent of newly-minted Ph.D.s will find tenure-track jobs after graduation. If anything, that’s wildly optimistic: the M.L.A. got to that figure by comparing the number of tenure-track jobs on its job list (around six hundred) with the number of new graduates (about a thousand). But that leaves out the thousands of unemployed graduates from past years who are still job-hunting—not to mention the older professors who didn’t receive tenure, and who now find themselves competing with their former students. (The report name-checks these groups, but, strangely, makes no effort to incorporate them into its overall estimate.) In all likelihood, the number of jobs per candidate is much smaller than the report suggests. That’s why the mood is so dire—why even professors are starting to ask, in the committee’s words, “Why maintain doctoral study in the modern languages and literatures—or the rest of the humanities—at all?”

One can have denials that “all is good”, however, you would do better if you would just go for an actual job, gain experience, earn a livelihood and retire some day. Or be one of the insane people still pushing for a pointless degree.