It's so heartening to see young PhDs figuring out that academia is a scam before they invest 25 years into it, like I did. The other point to make is that the reward for doing one or more postdocs is a chance at a crappy academic position with continued low pay (relative to your skill set) more work, insane expectations and colleagues, etc. This is coming from a tenured full professor at an R1 university who resigned his position after twenty years.
Yeah… I pivoted to a masters when I realized that academics spend a good portion of their time on what boils down to busy work. I was on board for doing research and teaching. I was not on board for writing 30 page grants that people would only read two pages of… sometimes it’s necessary for accuracy to have that level of precision but not always. It definitely needs some work though I’m glad that academic research exists for various reasons, without the work and research of Kati Kariko many more would have died of COVID 19 before we could have developed a vaccine. But she was treated like 💩in the academic system despite her work saving millions of lives and the companies who further developed her research into the vaccines are the ones who make all the profit. Definitely needs an overhaul ….
It depends on your academic field. My PhD is in business and literally 98%+ of us get tenure-track jobs directly after leaving university. In other words, it’s extremely rare for business PhDs to do a postdoc.
The most depressing thing about this video, is that it is actually an understatement for how bad it really is for a lot of postdocs. You make all of these great points about how exploitative postdoc positions are, assuming that they make around between 50-60k. That salary is absolutely far too low given the level of expertise and training a postdoc has under their belt. But here I am, on my 3rd postdoc at my 3rd university and my salary is 38k, at one of the largest universities in the US. I had to get an apartment 45 miles away from campus just to afford a roof over my head, as the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city of my university is 80% of my monthly take home salary.
@@PieMaster2425 they can surely escape from their landlord. That doesn't make it less outrageous to have a system that slowly cooks you to financial ruin and have you work for Walmart cashier salary after 15+ years of days and nights. That's just my opinion.
I feel like the clown meme fits well with this video like: "Sure, I'll move across the country" "Leave my spouse and kids or uproot them too." "For minimal pay." "For a temporary position." "Because it will be worth it in the end."
When I proposed doing what I called a "postdoc tour" to get experience in multiple fields, my advisor said immediately "I hope you like poverty". That says it all.
But why should that pay? I'm just confused. You're doing whatever you want in order to be "kind of sort of decent" at multiple different fields? Specialization is the only way to make money in current times. I'm sorry it's like that, but it is. People good at several things get paid nothing. You end up poor because you basically just did all of that because you felt like it, not because it matched with someone who would actually pay you money for knowing said things. Ultimately just knowing stuff is worth nothing; It's just you having fun for your own benefit, which is fine, but don't go off from there and get angry because no one wants to pay you for your hodgepodge of random skills... I see this a lot in academia where people care way more about their supposed "experience" overall than, you know, matching to an employer who VALUES your skills. Like, you just get paid for knowing things and trying hard and messing around for 15 years in various random postdocs? That is not how ANY of this works. That being said the core problem being presented in the video is 100% true and horrible. I'm just saying your viewpoint is ridiculous. Why should anyone pay you for that? Legitimately would love to hear your answer, cheers.
@@nuggyfresh6430 It depends on the field. If you're in something interdisciplinary like cognitive science, varied experiences could be an asset. Not many people have concurrent training across natural sciences, behavioral sciences, and philosophy. That said, most academic fields are sufficiently siloed that you're correct a majority of the time, though you could have made your point a bit less aggressively.
@@nuggyfresh6430 In the trades the reality is the opposite, but the climate is the same. When you know about other trades as a carpenter, you do better work. The same is true for the plumber, the electrician, etc. They all work together to build the same house, the same apartment complex, the same office building. So when they specialize to the same degree as academics... we get shitty construction. We get uncritical builders who just do what they're told regardless of the shitty outcome. And you know what? When you look at academia it's the same situation. People just doing they're small tasks and ignoring the big picture in order to protect their finances. Information and data serve lies more than truth, because of this negligence. It's the same crumbling effect that you can see on our infrastructure, which is due to the same specialization without compensation.
Your hypothesis about classes being taught by a dead man online happened in my city. Back in 2021 it was revealed that students in a class at a local university were watching recorded lectures and notes from a teacher who had died in 2019 without knowing he had died. They just... didn't inform the students... or take his name off the course... so the students only found out he was dead a few weeks into the semester after one of them tried to look up his email and found his obituary.
@@melelconquistador No, I'm not sure there was grounds for that. No students pushed for that to happen in any case. There was an actual teacher 'teaching' the course (answering emails, responding to questions and grading assignments), and they were using the dead professors' lectures with permission. After the school realized that they failed to properly update the course description they changed it but kept using his lectures, and the whole thing mostly just caught a lot of headlines because of how strange the situation was.
I ran into the same thing at Kent State. At least two classes I took towards the end of the pandemic were "taught" through recorded lectures and graded by TAs, with no evidence that the professors on the video were in any way involved with the class; no office hours, email contact only through Blackboard, no feedback on assignments, nothing. In one of them, the syllabus hadn't been updated since Windows 7 was a thing (and referred to several university sites/systems that hadn't existed for over three years), and the class notes were just *full* of dead links to nonexistent sites or UA-cam videos that we somehow had to answer questions about. I asked about it in an e-mail and the response I got back so terse that it bordered on hostile, but at least I could be sure the dude wasn't dead.
The equivalent of that, before the invention of recording media, was to read out a dead professor's lecture notes. A notorious exponent of this was Alexander Monro III, who had inherited the Chair of Anatomy at Edinburgh from his father and grandfather. AM I had been appointed in 1720, and AM III retired in 1846. The latter read his grandfather's lectures out word for word, including anecdotes of "his" experiences as Herman Boerhaave's student in Leiden, which usually provoked a riotous response from his mostly teenage audience.
I was a postdoc in physics at Harvard from 1986 to 1990. When I adjusted my salary to 2023, I got $82K. It sure looks like salaries have not kept up. I did really enjoy my postdoc, but I might not if I was paid 25% less.
@@audreymcknight Well, it's just that corporations have taken over the world. Financial institutions, in particular, are responsible for the lack of funding necessary for salaries of academics and scientific infrastructure.
Advice from an "old guy": If you aren't in the top 5% of the graduate students in your field (and can "prove" it with papers that are already becoming heavily cited) then you should forget about academia. Get a postdoc position with the (USA) federal government. You'll have to put up with way more bureaucracy than in academia or private industry, but the pay is twice academia's and the academic freedom is way more than private industry. And the federal S&E workforce is older than the general population, so there's a decent chance of a permanent job at the end of the postdoc, instead of an entire career as a postdoc. AND, you are generally expected to work 40 hours per week, like a normal human being. (US citizenship helps with your long-term prospects.) [btw: I never did a postdoc. PhD --> feds. 30+ years now. Not famous, or rich, but have done interesting work in a half-dozen fields. (At least, I thought my work was interesting. Not the citations I'd like, though. Feel free to fix that for me before I retire!)]
I think you should forget about it period except for using it to acquire (useful) knowledge. Get a contract gig with a government contractor. That's what I tell my students. A secret clearance is nice too.
@@billp4 Secret clearance is very important for military and energy areas. So, don't ruin your chances for this in grad school. (Basically, don't do crimes, and don't get involved with people who want to overthrow the US gov't.) Academia can be a great life, IF that's what you want to devote your life to, and IF you can perform at the needed level. There is a LOT of pressure for the first 5 to 10 years. But, some people thrive on it and are pretty happy doing it. There is some luck involved, tbh. Kinda like show business.
To be honest...I get people telling me they are in the "Top 2%" of their field all the time...all in institutions that only care about that for the purpose of hiring...very quickly they aren't in the Top 2% of anything...
I think this is VERY field dependent. In my field (neurobiology), federal postdoc is basically NIH postdoc, which... pays about the same as other postdocs expected to work as much as your PI expects you to May give you enough prestige to get a TT job, but not necessarily (I've seen K99/R00 folks go not get ONE tenure-track position) And I can say with confidence that it seriously isn't how many papers you publish and in what tier. I've seen people from my department I did my PhD in get positions with one paper with less than 10 citations (tenure track, not postdoc). It is really about who your advisor is and how much clout the person has. Academia at the moment is sort of like the Trump administration. Corrupted and very based on nepotism with how much you can do not saying much. You want to succeed in the "Trump" administration? You have to know who to suck up to.
Average salary of a tenured professor in the US: $145,000.00 Average salary of a MSL (one of possible entry roles for a PhD in pharma): $175,000.00. One needs multiple postdocs, luck, and many years... to earn less than entry positions in industry.
The thing with professors are, you get part of your funding at the end of the term, which is a lot of money. Well, assuming that (1) You got big enough fundings and (2) You got leftovers.
A word from an ex postdoc: Get a government job as was already stated. I gave all my twenties and thirties to my academic career just to notice I have to get out of here and get a real stable job before 40. If I would have done this 5-10 years earlier I would even earn more money. As I realized: Those people with the high salary do not nearly have, if any at all, as many academic achievements as I do: research money, patents, publications, students. So what can you do? Built your own niche, challenge yourself academically, rebuilt your network and try to avoid being the donkey for others. And remember always: If you come from a non academic family background and did a PhD you are already the 1% compared to other non academic children. Postdoc even more unlikelier. So do not be bitter if you cannot achieve the further 1% of postdocs making it to prof. If you now have a stable decent paying job try not to be bitter or envious. Enjoy life and built your career from where you are now.
As an employment law attorney serving STEM employees, I love that you’re bringing light to these issues. Helps me and my paralegals understand our clients’ challenges a lot better so we can better represent them. ❤
PLEASE PLEASE help support student legally because they are being discriminated against, exploitation, and black mailed. Im glad some are taking a legal stance. HOLD these institutions accountable!
I can't say how I agree with this. Since I was a child I didn't understand this. I still don't, I NEVER had any problem saying how high or low my wage was. Even between my family members this is a taboo, I guess I'm just a black sheep.
This is just an thing in America. People in other countries are like, "Hey, nice to meet you. What do you do? Oh, that's great and how much does that pay?"
I’m a physicist and while working on my PhD dissertation I realized I was making the highest earning research student at $22K annually, mandatory health insurance had to be budgeted out of that, school was in DC so I needed a car to commute from the more affordable suburbs, and I finally looked at the post doc in my group at 3 am asked him his salary he said $36K and I left the school a week later and got a federal job for $75K starting. I’m at $150K ten years later with benefits. The post doc is now an adjunct professor.
I left uni after an MSc in physics and started in applied research in underwater acoustics for the Canadian navy. Not only did I enter the work force 3 years earlier (by not doing PhD), I was making real money, and three years later I was well established in my field, writing journal papers, and attending conferences. I received several professional distinctions during my career, and was able to retire at age 55 with a decent pension. That was 15 years ago, and I have enjoyed myself in amateur astronomy since then (my first love).
Great video! I'm from Argentina and did my physics PhD in Manhattan Kansas! I saw many of my postdoc friends leave and fly to some other country just to do another postdoc. Great minds and awesome people with kids in charge and no prospects. When getting into my PhD, I thought that postdocs were the only path worth following, I realized I was so wrong. I finished my degree and changed career path
I was a postdoc for 7 years, came out of it with no academic job, no money, having probably lost my opportunity to have children, and ruined mental health. Thank you so much for this, breaking down the financial side alone is incredibly validating.
Which part of that, exactly, were you "tricked" or "lied to" about? You knew beforehand what ages people can have children at, that wasn't a surprise or a secret. You knew what the average salaries were, too. "Bad ideas" are not "scams". "Scam" implies FRAUD, which means someone had to give you fabricated numbers about what to expect ahead of time. Who did that? What numbers did they lie about? How, precisely, were you scammed? (I am assuming you think you were, since you're agreeing with the video all about claiming that)
@@gavinjenkins899 That's a great point, obviously your idiosyncratic requirement that a scam involves someone misrepresenting with numbers is totally true and not made up, and definitely invalidates my experience. That's why people who are invited to participate in rigged carnival games aren't actually scammed, no one specifically told them a lie about their odds of winning! You have defeated my experience and that of thousands of other young academics who feel like their chances of a viable and stable career were badly misrepresented to them. Thank you, great mind! Academia is saved.
I'm a postdoc at MIT. You told the entire story dead on. A LOT of postdocs have help from their parents. If you really really want to be faculty, then do it. I can't say I regret it, but I'm happy I took an industry position and will have the freedom to enjoy the other facets of life that matter. I can have my garage machine shop and maybe get a pilot's license one day! If you want to be really pissed off, ask about how much how much you cost your grant! Even though you take home 40k-70k per year, the cost to your grant is deep into the six figures. The overhead the university charges is truly insane.
@@zatarawood3588it means you have a milling machine, a metal lathe, possibly a cnc machine, along with other sundry tools that enable.you to fabricate metal parts. It's like a woodworker shop except for metal.
I don't like negative people and I keep watching your videos convinced from the thumbnail that your just an angry little girl, but then you make good points . I find smart girls attractive then I seen your video about sexual harassment. And I'm a 60 year old dropout crackpot and found your video a little mean . But you make me laugh so I will keep watching 😊
I don't like negative people and I keep watching your videos convinced from the thumbnail that your just an angry little girl, but then you make good points . I find smart girls attractive then I seen your video about sexual harassment. And I'm a 60 year old dropout crackpot and found your video a little mean . But you make me laugh so I will keep watching 😊
Hey Evan, as an undergrad in physics who wanted to go into academia I've been getting disillusioned with it as well. Could you tell me what someone can do as an industry job after getting a PhD? Do you just mean working at a research center for a company?
I'm a retired boomer, but saw this coming from miles away. In my grad school work in computer science & engineering, I saw what the academic route entailed, and mastered out to work at the most prestigious place I could find at the time (Bell Labs, in the 1970s, with a similar offer from Hewlett-Packard, which was then not a synonym for crap). I did marry a DVM who was getting her PhD (and did a postdoc in industry), but for a *very long* time I out-earned her, supported her through the frustrations of getting the PhD, becoming an adjunct and a postdoc, and eventually entering industry herself. After that, I followed her unique career around the country, but had far less frustration in my career moves. A generation later, and we've counseled our kids (one with a PhD from University of Chicago, the other with a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon) to get out of academia and into industry, where they've been for a decade or so each. I've met people in their 50's and 60's who are still occupying postdoc positions, subsisting in college towns in low-cost areas in the Midwest, who yearn to get out of the trap. Get out now. Never subject yourself to it to begin with.
Bell Labs? I'm a bit envious. I'm in government R&D and although I know Bell Labs was a private consortium it's kinda the poster child for that sort of high impact research.
To those of us still in academia: unionize, and unionize across job categories! Worker-led unions in partnership with their surrounding communites (including students, in the case of academia) are the only way any sort of effective and positive systemic change will happen.
Exactly. Academic doesn't care about its employees. I am hoping unions start to come through for their workers (or that they just run out of people to exploit because people stop excitedly showing up).
I'm in a union and it honestly doesn't change much. As a postdoc yhe university still only pays me just barely enough to afford the luxury of paying rent AND eating (with 0 job security on 1 year contracts). But thanks to the union, I also get to pay compulsory union dues for the privilege of being lectured on unrelated international political issues that the union executives happen to be obsessed with.
@@andresmorera6426 it consists of research assistants (i.e., grad students), postdocs, and non-permanent faculty. I think the problem isn't as much the lack of postdoc representation, as it is that membership in the union is mandatory for employment at this university, and we cant stop paying dues. As a result, the union leadership has little incentive to actually work in the member's interests, and is instead too busy pushing their pet political agendas and increasing their own power and leadership perks.
I work in industry doing work R&D on thin films, materials science, things like that. Recently hired a physicist who was looking to escape his n'th postdoc position. I think he had a bit of shell shock after his first day when I showed up around. Samples for an experiment that would have taken months or years to produce at a university he can build in literally an hour or less. If one morning an instrument breaks, or some vacuum equipment is acting up, there is an entire pit crew of people who will fix it for him by lunch. He doesn't have to publish a single paper unless he wants to...just do the experiments and come up with something that works. He asked about TEM and when I showed him that there were four at his disposal + dedicated staff for running them I think he cried a little. Fact is, for the research he is interested in and good at, a university is a shit place to do it, even if they paid as much as we do. This wasn't always the case. The post doc exodus is just one of many ongoing consequences of the hollowing out of public research.
Ironically, you actually form more work relationships when you job hop every 2-3 years because you meet so many more colleagues in your field. I’ve known so many people who were able to tap previous coworkers for knowledge of positions at other companies before they were advertised that it’s not funny.
Not even academia, my wife is a chef and thats what they told her to do in culinary school, except it was more like 2-3 months. And with the way more jobs todays are asking for demanding people wear many hats, you almost have to. I have friends who were looking for Comp Sci gig, and apparently the running meme when you see a lot of their job posts, is "my dude, you aren't looking for an employee, you're looking for a while damn IT department!" Its the "you can't get a job without experience and you can't get any experience without a job!" We thought getting a degree would get us past that problem, but no, it only makes the problem WORSE!
I'm a master in Physics from Brasil. I gave up on PhD here cause it's on an even worse scenario. The crowd of grads keep going into an academy path because teachers tell them it's the only way since there's no national industry around here. Truth is there's no path. I'm teaching on High School now, but studying to get into the police. Wish a PhD was worth it.
That's how I've felt for years coming to terms with my career as a teacher in the US...I don't want to lie to my kids about the promise of the path knowing the path is a funeral parade that is nearly impossible to escape I got told "it'll get better" but they meant "you'll break eventually", and 23 years in they're starting to regret having numbed me to the pain, cause I don't forget.
Careful there, buddy. Smart people don't get hired to work the force, neither do veterans, cuz they've actually been trained on rules of engagement, and that'd make the rest of the cosplaytriots look bad. There's a specific psych profile they look for. If you're dead set on that path, you should look into it and figure out how to wear that hat to find yr passing grade. Here in Seattle (SPD are fucking croocked, lying thugs. I've WATCHED them murder someone and then, swept under the rug) new hires come on at $90k. Over half the force makes over $200k. And I can only imagine how much they confiscate that never makes it to storage. "Asset forfeiture" they call it. I call it theft. I just want everyone to be treated like criminals when they break the law. Including the amoral affluenzant, politicians, judges, attorneys (cant wait for AI to take that job over) AND police. Police should have to carry insurance as well, and payouts due to negligence or lawsuits should be paid from their retirement fund, not tax payer money. In Indiana, and only in Indiana, so far, it's legal to return fire at police during a no knock raid or if they aren't in uniform. Cops shoot their guns a whole lot less there. Maybe that should go nationwide. Idk, man. If pressed, I'm saying ACAB. Dance with the Devil, devil don't change, devils changes you. Fuck the police. Disband the entire force and create a new community emergency response team, with embedded officers, journalists amd/or civilian oversight, paramedics and social workers. And make sure all of which report to different people/departments. The loss of trust in our government is at least 50% their fault. Business's breaking the social contract and politicians kicking cans instead of governing Def cover the rest.
Man, some days I consider bailing out. I'm a physics PhD and I have no interest in doing a postdoc anytime in the future. I'm on my fifth year as a university teacher under temporary contracts. You know, the two year ones, with no stability and no growth potential... And I basically see no way out. There are colleagues in my department who are going on their tenth year, with no tenure position in sight (last opening in my university was in 2014, and not only for physics, for all departments!). Publishing under these conditions is not really ideal, as us temporary teachers are the ones which get the most classes to teach. At least the salary is better than a postdoc position. But honestly I see no future, no possibility of growth or change... I may be one of your competitors in the next police exam if things don't change lol.
@@johnsmoak8237 I'm a teacher also; I tell this ^^ to my students, because often no one else will. We do calculations on how much school will cost you, vs what kind of salary you might receive. Much simpler math than needed to get into college, but not enough folks do it.
We're seeing this across all jobs that if you break down cost of living in (whatever city, throw a dart at the board) that the salary you're earning against the expenses of rent, utilities, food, and other bills is leaving people with basically nothing for themselves to even save. We're experiencing an unprecedented crisis of compensation today, and there isn't an excuse that it's the depression. It's that all the money is going up and never, ever coming back down.
The daycare cost is so real. When one of my parents was a postdoc and the other in residency, daycare put my dad in the red, needed my mom’s salary to help even it out. Eventually it got too much, they sent me back to live with my grandparents in China for a year. That certainly saved money, ha
I just spreadsheeted out a potential Boston postdoc today, hahahaha. That's exactly what happened. The other aspect is the uncertainty of the advisor. You could get a good one, like the one you mentioned. You can also get a sociopath, like my first PhD advisor. I've already turned down a few PIs that looked and talked like sociopaths. Many are out there. We get locked into a non-negotiable deal for 2-3 years, with little knowledge of what we're walking into.
@@TooManyBrackets Exactly. That's why postdocs are walking away. If the PI is a sociopath - not uncommon - then it's just a scam to exploit highly skilled and specialized labor. The whole postdoc experience is even more dependent on having a good boss than a PhD experience.
@@TooManyBrackets perhaps someone like and old friend: her and her family valued academia A LOT (even though they liked to pretend to be hippies for ~the people~) and was able to get almost a free ride to a nice, liberal arts college. She chose to take one of these because it looked like a nice star on her family's "my daughter did a thing" wall, and daddy would give her money and a car and health insurance. She was also a female in STEM so got a few grants. She's now a well paid professor who likes to claim she was "so, so poor" in and post college, while she mainly ate all organic and went on trips paid for by daddy and her partner of the moment.
@@moxxibekk Aha...you mean because of stories like hers. People think they can beat the system...and as long as there are enough people motivated by that tale to join the pyramid it will continue. Academia like being an actor in Hollywood movies is a glamour profession.
My mother is a tenured professor and has been for the entire time I've been alive. Her position pays well but the culture of overwork and unpaid work is so toxic it never ends. Even if you get a tenured position, how are you going to maintain your personal work life balance while you're asking your grad students and postdocs to forgo theirs for poverty wages? You don't. You're also going to overwork. She loved her research but it doesn't change that her work hours kept her absent and now that research funding has dried up she's realizing how little she did to cultivate other parts of her life. Academia just seems like an endless grind in service to an antiquated ideal of what a university used to mean. I don't mean to come off as an anti intellectual, I just think the system is totally busted
Why would you overwork yourself once you have tenure? That's the whole point of tenure that you don't have to overwork yourself or bend over backward to hit unreasonable external expectations once you have it. She didn't have to do that, she WANTED to do that.
@@captainspirou Those magazine lists are based on their readers' OPINIONS, not on any sort of objective research. I would trust Cosmopolitan's list of "The Ten Best Ways to Please Your Man" more than anything in Forbes
@@gavinjenkins899 gavin bro, I keep seeing you in the comment sections of a few of acollierastro's vids. You always have this *interesting* opinion to espouse, usually directly opposing the perspective presented in the video. I'm not disagreeing nor agreeing with what you're saying, I just want to know what exactly you're getting out of this? do you believe you have a "duty" to ensure propriety, or that many of these people simply "aren't getting it" and that you're helping? In this case you're pointing at a "logical flaw". Does this make you feel better? Have you fundamentally changed the discussion around the (please notice the quotes) "exploitation of postdocs" in society? I'm just interested.
@@AryadevChavali I watched like 3 or 4 videos, got fed up with how she has a trend of saying random super negative, confidently wrong stuff about topics she isn't expert in (the actual physics content seems all good to me, just not AI etc) and then commented as such in those 2 or 3 videos. And then stopped watching more and have been replying to those who replied back to me since then. I'm confused what you think comment sections SHOULD be used for if not discussing the content/topic of videos.....?
I'm a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering. I made a (liveable, before the pandemic) slave wage, with mostly subsidized health insurance and free tuition. Why would I want to do a post doc for $50k when I can go straight to a job in my field for $110k? I gain nothing, unless I absolutely wanted to be a professor. And after seeing the culture, it's really not for me
I think having the privilege of seeing your name in print is really appealing to a lot of people. But I sated that need already when I worked as a blogger and a freelance reporter for my local area.
I would say 90k to 110k range cause the company will require you industry experience but it's still way more than a post-doc. You do a post-doc in the rare circumstance when you already have a job lined up. I have a friend that did his PhD in mechanical engineering, travelled around the word thanks to the PhD just doing internships. Returned to the states and got a job at on of the best research labs in California. He is making probably 200k - 300k, his skills were so unique he got the just in a government position being an international. That's the caliber you need to be at to make money as a PhD
I am a full successful professor (science) at a UK University in my 50s. But there is no way I would enter this sector as a younger scientist now. Your observation of difficulties in Post-Doc hiring is real. We also have Universities full of professors in their late 60s who will not retire. So there are no new positions and there has been a vacuum of hiring we have not seen before probably stretching over the last 10 years. Thank-you for making this video. I am in the UK but I would say the same problems exist here. Meanwhile we have woefully under-qualified (mentally) VCs making poor institutional decisions to justify their newly elected positions. Don't think of academia as an ivory tower of achievement, think of it as the most poorly run example of a 'business' you can possibly imagine.
I just left a comment on your "the adjunct problem" video saying "I left my PhD program ABD because I was forced to acknowledge how bad the situation is getting... this was over three years ago and it still tears me up inside". I was at Kansas State University in Manhattan, KS. I just felt that the coincidence merited the redundancy. Thank you for your kindness and the cogency of your message.
I love videos that weigh ethically murky quandaries. As someone who isn't in academia and didn't pursue a PhD, it feels like professors have no choice but to continue perpetuating the current system. Publish or perish, even if it's at the expense of your own morals.
@@squaredcircle9009 But that is the thing..."Publish or Perish" is a cliche with 30-40 years of history...but they don't say WHERE you have to publish...because different journals in different fields count very differently. Many have 0 value whatsoever and you need to be an insider to know which are the best ones and what their preferences are e.g. in some fields don't event try to publish in a good journal with less than 20k data points. Also for many journals it literally takes years and several rounds of revision - that's writing the same thing over and over again - before the dammed thing gets published...Then you have naming order...depending on the field there are lengthy fights over who's name goes where on each paper. You either fight your corner or... if you are unlucky it no longer counts as one of your papers at all...but the big big thing...is workload...Yes they say "Publish or Perish" but where you get the time to do that with modern loading is unclear...people are happy to give you loads of teaching, loads of marking loads of admin...but at the end of the year say "What? You've only published those few papers?!! Lazy people like you don't deserve a place in the academy." Meanwhile they know very very well that if it wasn't for people like you, they would have to have done that work themselves.
Speaking about PhDs at CERN. I happened to know, that your financial comfort in the process heavily depends on your country of origin. You mostly don't work for CERN directly, you're a PhD in some university in France/Germany/.../you-name-it, and just come to CERN for shifts, meetings, etc. When I worked in Russia, students were very hyped to get into such projects, cause money one was getting, while at CERN, were more than enough and one could make good savings (up to buying a car, which was not that easy with the average salary in academia). From the other side, working in Germany I learned, that although the CERN is still very prestigious, doing a PhD here is financially difficult for locals, cause your money support won't increase a cent, while your life costs are growing dramatically. I mean, in some circumstances doing your PhD at CERN might be quite a crazy idea, too 😅 People in CERN, who are golden are staff. The rest are happy with their science and mission, I guess.
If you're from a member state (so a country that funds CERN in europe) or even if not, you should really look into the CERN Summer Student program! It's for if you have finished your third year of undergraduate or doing a masters, and it's honestly a ton of fun + means you are more likely to work at CERN in the future. And honestly, from the people I talked to there, their salaries were good. A lot of jobs are temporary to give chances to people from all over europe, but from a temporary post you can sometimes find a permanent one. Plus it's an amazing culture. Dream on!!
I was PhD tracked after my BS, had everything ready to go. I watched a UA-cam Video about the opportunity cost of 5 years in school on a 23k stipend, and the math just doesnt check out. I ended up backing out and jumping straight into industry, I still got my higher education as I am doing my M.S. part time (Paid for by my employer), and I make almost 4 times what my friends doing their PhDs are making now, its criminal. I can see this will ultimately decline the amount of people that pursue PhDs, and it wont get better until they actually get paid.
I am also thinking about getting an MS at some point. I already made a bad decision with getting my bachelor’s(lots of debt now, even when graduating early) so I can’t afford to go back to school.
Mazel-tov! My sons are following the same path. They are working full time and doing grad school remotely and online. By the time they hit 30, they'll each have a graduate school degree and at least 5 years of work experience each.
I’ve been bingeing your videos over the past few days and I think one of the reasons I find them so compelling is your compassion. Your compassion for the tomato, the cleaning service, the makers of the Morbius movie, and those who are exploited by academia. Your video on adjuncts too, it was lovely. And so, speaking of compassion and adjuncts, I would love to hear you talk about those Malazan books behind you! (Love the lord of the rings video too!) In any case, cheers!
Hearing her describe post doc and describe how brutal and exploitative it is really made me shook as a resident doing pretty much the same thing lol. I guess we have the bonus of a more certain job market afterwards but still 4 years of this treatment is brutal.
I'm a PhD student, and I come from a home with 3 generations of academics. My dad saw all of this happening, looked at me, and basically forbade me from doing a postdoc. If I really want to do it, just join a startup, ideally one which a professor is engaged with, if not a direct founder and executive. The second option is working at a national lab if I just love academic research that much. Otherwise, I should do what he did and spend a decade or so in industry before returning to academia.
@@cannaroe1213 My main fields are electrochemistry, molecular physics, materials science, and chemical engineering. But my work is quite evenly split between theoretical and experimental work. And the theoretical side has required me to start learning all I can about CS related topics.
@@cannaroe1213 I'm learning that the hard way LOL. Don't get me wrong, I'm having fun. It's just difficult to teach myself all of these things. Trying my best not to fall into the trap of tutorial hell.
Good points! As a grad student doing my Ph.D. I found this super helpful! There are other things too that I would like to add. Specifically, the publish or perish culture. A lot of people end up taking postdocs because they want to get their publications up. But the reality is that publishing even in a decent journal is a very difficult proposition. You might work hard for 6 months on a project and labour over how to write it up for publication. Once submitted to a journal you might not hear back from them for months. And then it can get rejected for trivial reasons such as reviewers don't share the same sentiment about your research, not enough explanation etc etc.. So you might end up doing lot of work, but because it has not been published you will have little or nothing to show for it, this perpetually keeping you in the post doc loop.
Great point. I do feel if postdoc positions were more permanent (maybe 7 years instead of three??) you would be guaranteed time to actually get research done. As it stands you spend the first year of your postdoc finishing up papers from your PhD and your 3rd year applying for jobs so you really only have one year to do research. Good luck with your PhD!
Not to mention you will never get paid a single dime for any of the papers you work so hard on and do manage to get published. You probably won't even own the copyrights to the research or the writing. You don't even get to have the copyrights on your own PhD paper.
@@almishti that's not the point of publishing papers though. They're not patents or commercial products, and never were intended that way. You do own the rights to the pre-prints and can send the accepted version to anyone by request as per most journal's policies.
Organize start a union , get help from the European student union. Phd and postdocs in Europe are treated much better. One can live on the salary, benefits and job security is much better. One of the problems with US unions is that management aren't allowed in the Union, pitting management against workers. Whereas in Europe managers belong to the same trade union as their employees. If the workers are payed better, then the union will get better working conditions for the managers too. Solidarity is what got the US good wages in the 20th century, we became complacent and Reganism put dioxin inthe union soil.
My oldest brother works in the army, and he has to uproot every one to three years. He knew that would be a big ask from a partner, so when he found someone who was down for it, he married her quicktime. But even tho there is the challenge of having to move often, the army pays the moving expenses, covers the costs if they have to temporarily own two houses, comes with reeeeaaally good family benefits, opportunities for education advancement (they pay my brother to get a masters degree), and a good salary. If a job is going to require you to move that often, they better have some really strong pros to back up such a big ask.
@@samiamgreeneggsandham7587 depends what job they have in the army. 90% of the military is support and a lot of it doesn’t require you to go overseas for combat. My friend works in the marines and all he does is work in an office lmao and he’s being paid to go to college
Yep about the last point. When I tell professors that I don't intend to be a professor, they are shocked: "Why on earth would anyone not want an amazing job like ours?!?". I reply, "Because ruthlessly exploiting others is mandatory for a professor, while I have no taste for that." These professors just gasp, screech and panic. Hilarious every time. One of these times it was on my presentation for a panel of world-class academics that evaluated my research center. They got so mad that they devoted an entire paragraph of their evaluation report to me, like: "Your researchers are delusional about the academic environment worldwide". That's how deep in denial these profs are.
I think this mentality exists because of a selection/survivorship bias: those that got lucky and successfully deluded themselves will continue to stay in academia while telling themselves that academia is the best, while those that don’t buy the lie already left academia.
I just discovered your channel. After listening to your string theory video, I landed here. You are the first person I saw on YT discussing this. You presented the great frustration every single one of us has giving it full justice, congratulations! Most academics I speak to just look at me as if I was crazy when I vent about this like you did in the video. I graduated last year from my PhD and stayed to work as a postdoc with my PhD avdisor while I was trying to convince myself to do the scary jump and quit. I recently resigned from the postdoc even though I have been told by many that, given my talent, I belong to academia. My last paper was published in Nature last month and this month I have been awarded three important prizes for my PhD research. Even though it hurts leaving, the academic job marlet is a joke and will hurt my private life too much on the long run. Next month I'll start my new job in the real world....
yeah, mine was published on the cover of Nature, wasted two years in postdoccing, happier in industry. I realized after a while NorCal labs were crammed with permanent postdocs with tons of high level pubs
I’m in the exact situation you gave in the example in the video. I did my post doc in chemistry at MIT right after I finished my phd, and convinced my wife to leave her high paid job to go with me. So we left cali and came to Boston. Life was tough with low income and high rent. And worst, I didn’t see the light in the tunnel. So I gave up my chemistry research career and moved into IT. Maybe I’m lucky, I bumped my salary from 48K to 300 K within 2 years. And I’m so happy I made that decision , otherwise, I might still be stuck in that post doc infinite loop.
I quit my Ph.D. program 7 years ago because I saw the writing on the wall. I looked at the salaries offered at postdoc positions. I worked with postdocs in the lab and saw the squalor by which they carried themselves. I don't mean this in a bad way to them. I'd have been exactly the same way if I had been subjected to that kind of work environment. My advisor ran on the whole notion of being tough and doing the proper thing and whatnot, telling students that his fiancee died during his ph.d. studies and yet he continued, as if I'd somehow be inspired by that. Quite the opposite. It had this undertone of "you better be able to handle a whole lot worse." These kinds of positions, this kind of chaotic lifestyle worked in an environment that once had stronger systemic support structures, safety nets, etc. Things were more affordable as less money was being funneled away to corporate coffers and raising shareholder value. The risk of uprooting your life and moving from place to place was so much lower. That lifestyle CANNOT exist without strong societal support.
Sadly a lot of foreigners can't get into industry as they need visa sponsorship but postdoc is the easiest to get into and has great promise of preparing you for getting an academic job such as professorship
Undoubtedly. I as a postdoc ( in one of the top 10 university in world ranking) was made to work double than my colleagues on the account that my visa was tied with that position ( I was the only foreigners). I was questioned when I had covid and I couldn't come to lab. At last, I gathered enough courage and left it, left the country.
@@acollierastro But isn't that happening in a lot of fields right now? Nursing for sure. Now teaching. But in IT and software, the independent contractors are often H1 visa holders- they have little to no job security. This system is a race to the bottom, where even the foreigner will turn down the position eventually.
@@acollierastro Yup. The only reason I took up a postdoc that was 4,300 miles away was because of the work permit. Didn't even consider the pay. I was lucky to survive in 3 sequential postdoc positions because the professor was an emotionally manipulative abusive narcissist with an Elon Musk complex. So you'd be right that I only did it for the opportunities, except those opportunities were all immigration status related - shortly after becoming permanent resident, I quit academia altogether because by that point there was really nothing in the whole sector that I found compelling enough to warrant staying.
Heres the thing about academia, at least in a historic sense: it's not supposed to be a career. Its supposed to be a hobby. Look at Newton, Gauss, Euler, Fermat, Tycho Brahe, Bohr, Lorentz, Röntgen, Becquerel, etc, all of them had either rich or, at least, rich enough parents and political contacts to be able to have enough spare time to do academic work. Academia has only become a profession in the late 20th century. It has not changed in a structural way. It's still something you do INSTEAD OF work. The fact some positions are paid for research now is something new. There's a reason the stereotype of the philosopher prince exists: that was what academia was for centuries, if not millennia.
And people lived in caves for more millenia. If you want quality work by educated people at your demand, you should pay them fairly. Otherwise have your rich philosophers do the research for you at their time. Why promise a career and exploit passion for profits, let's see how quickly research happens if only the select few geniuses with money did the research. Physical data collection, analysis and repairing something broken by understanding it is still a human faculty, why require PhD for a menial job with menial pay?
When I was a Masters student more than a decade ago, I had the option of becoming a programmer and making a shit ton of money, or continue to subsist on ramen for another 4-5 years while being totally dependent on the whims of an advisor. I already knew a few PhD students who had lost the spark of joy in what they did daily. I chose the sensible option, and though I often think about going back and doing that PhD, the rational side of my brain reminds me that I'd be stupid to abandon what I have right now. I like what I do and get paid a decent amount for doing this. I know what PhD students make and I know what postdocs make. It is all a scam.
I moved to the US from British academia to be closer to family. British academia isn't perfect, but you have a good pension and are paid okay relative to the cost of living. When I moved to the US, I was shocked at how little you made as a postdoc. For a number of other reasons (including the institution) I was absolutely miserable and unhappy, and left after only 9 months to go into industry. And oh boy, I have never been happier! I earn almost 3x the amount of compensation with far more career mobility on a team that I enjoy being a part of. And I work fewer hours! My advice to anyone who feels 'stuck' in academia is just to make a change. There are soooo many opportunities out there for people with your talent and dedication it's unbelievable. So many academics shun or look down on industry or other career paths -- but the reality is that people in academia are in the minority. PS, this was actually in Boston, so I feel the pain.
Yep that's the way it is right now. Academia has a LOT of dead weight but very little of it is performance based. The sports coaches and the researchers are performance based, so they get worked like dogs. But only one of those two gets payed accordingly, the other is playing a lottery where they hope to perhaps make some major breakthrough but the number of people playing that game has grown exponentially while the number of major scientific breakthroughs left to make gets smaller and smaller.
Unless you're a postdoc in London during the cost of living crisis. Also, in practice there's no such thing as tenure in British academia. After my 3rd postdoc, when I got promoted to "permanent" academic staff, I was faced with a potentially infinite number of lecturer positions that were essentially postdocs in all but name. Same responsibilities of a postdoc but now with a draconian publication target and a teaching load.
@@robertduluth8994 I work in R&D in pharma. Pharma and biotech are the two big ones. There are also CROs (contract research organizations) and various suppliers. Each of these will have its own unique feel and pros/cons. There are also non-profit options (although I wouldn't class them as 'industry' per se).
Anecdotally, I'm pretty sure these numbers are much worse in the humanities. I lucked into a FT position my first year out of grad school or I would not be in academia. I have friends who are just now starting FT positions, EIGHT years after grad school--that runway is way too long, especially on postdocs paying 30-40k instead of the 50 estimated in this video. Thanks for breaking this down so clearly.
Oh lords this rings true. I was a postdoc in the UK, decent (for academia) pay, really great group, but I felt I stalled out. Then I moved to North America, the working conditions dropped like a stone, and I am now looking at a nice, comfy industrial position in a few months time. I really, really, really love my research . I really, really, really, hated having to do it at a university. I have five generations of academics to look back on, I really wanted to become a professor, and I do feel like I am betraying myself by quitting. But staying would be worse.
This was so depressing and hilarious at the same time. I binge this like it was an opening day at Oppenheimer in 70mm. Thank you for the lols and hope you are okay
Really appreciate this video and the comments. I'm one-and-a-half years deep into a 2-year postdoc in the social sciences (I write about debt). I was on track to start another postdoc for a 1-year contract since I haven't succeeded in the academic job market. This past week, I got an industry job offer starting at 130k (with amazing benefits), double my postdoc salary. However, I've had such a hard time deciding to leave academia because my identity has been so wrapped up in it. Reading through these comments and taking a step back to consider academic labour conditions has made the decision to leave universities easier.
This channel is going to get big! Academia in general doesn't make a lot of sense right now. Why sacrifice your financial future and time with your family for a narrowing and under-appreciated career path? Why sacrifice those for anything??
looks like you hitting a life crisis with what you love doing and reality. Same for me. I love doing research but I had the same thoughts when I started my PhD. How is this supposed to work? I feel being lied to. I feel tricked but at the same time I just want to do research. It really crushed me these to contradicting parts and needs in side of me. Its not worth sacrificing your total life for a job. Thats insane. Still haven't figured out what to do. Things should change...
I hope things do change! I know a lot of people are leaving so perhaps that will inspire change for a future generation of researchers. If it helps I do not regret my PhD at all and I have found fulfilling research in industry. Leaving academia was weird but now that I am out I know I made the right decision.
Man, this hit so hard... you're 100% correct about your sense of post-docs being like an MLM. I looked at opportunity costs while mid-PhD and decided to "pursue other opportunities" outside academia. It's so exploitative and gross, modern-day indentured servitude. Edited to add: at 27:35 my experience was so similar, more or less universally and regardless of what I was trying to accomplish. I'm not proud of it, but at one point I let my frustration get the best of me and asked someone, "Okay... so, just for my own reference, what the fuck do you actually do here?"
Thank you for this video. I currently work on my family farm and download videos to listen to during the workday, and your videos have provided excellent educational content that is intellectually challenging yet easy for a novice physicist to understand. I’d love to continue my education someday but I worry about the cost/benefit analysis of going back into academia; videos like this help with decisions that will be integral to my future, and certainly for the futures of other viewers. Thank you for what you do.
This depressed me because it was a largely a recap of what drove my decision to stay out of academia (despite a PhD and a being a descendant of multiple generations of tenured professors, not like I didn't know the option). The depressing part was that I made the decision in the 1980's and 90's (I'm in engineering, it's not necessarily a one-time decision there.) The pandemic effects are a new complication, but even then, when student loan loads were lower and tenure track positions more numerous, the only advantage to a post-doc was a headstart getting on the publication hamster wheel. I will also second the conclusion that the Ivy League way oversells their cachet, at least from industry's point of view. I have decades of visibility now in the industry side of hiring decisions and the marginal advantage of Ivy League is tiny. Harvard or Yale might get you a few more interviews right at graduation, but you'll be in the same salary band as the ones who got decent grades and in-state tuition at their local public university, and probably net less after loan payments. (This is true for STEM; maybe for some other disciplines [law?] it could be different.) My advice is to pick the school you can afford--if you can get a full scholarship at an elite school, that's fantastic, but if your choice is to pay by mortgaging the house you don't own yet, you're way better off at your local Wassamatta U with tuition you can pay as you go. At the PhD level, it gets more complex because of specialization. In my specific esoteric area of expertise, there are a dozen state universities I'd rank above any Ivy League school. That's because they have faculty who've chosen to specialize in particular topics (and chances are I know them; sub-specialties in science and engineering are amazingly small communities.) Pick your graduate school based on what the professor and who they know.
"Is your job just emailing out relevant PDF's to make everyone else do your work?" You know, you run into these types across all industries, and I feel like we all collectively just need to sacrifice them on an altar.
Agree, but I think in industry there's an understanding that each person has a specific role to fulfill, and they don't have time to do your job for you.
@@jasonquigley2633 Okay, but if you mail out PDFs explaining your supposed work to others and try to get them to do your work, its the others that don't have time to do your slop, jason, so stop being a whiny slacker and do your job :P
@@fy8798??? I wasn't defending this practice. You do your own work, you don't ask others to do it for you (unless you're a manager, and it's your job to delegate).
I worked 3 years ago for a company that refused to offer a flexible/remote schedule for a job that absolutely didn't require physical presence. They paid ~$31,000 in the heart of Tempe, Arizona (right near ASU), but it was my first salaried job as an artist. I literally moved into my SUV and one of the "benefits" they gave me was the ability to park my car in the company lot at night while I slept in it. I lived in my SUV for 379 days while I worked full-time, also doing gig-work during the weekends in a coffee shop. The whole time I felt like they were doing me this massive favor by letting me sleep in my car every night instead of them just paying me a fucking livable wage (after I left, I found out the person two positions above me was making $350,000 before bonuses). Large organizations get away with this shit because there are just enough people like me who need the work and are willing to throw themselves under the bus for what they perceive to be a star on a resume. I'm nearly 34 now and probably beyond the point where I'll ever be able have kids because I'll be too old by the time I can afford it. I'll be lucky if I ever make enough to lease a house at this rate. Fortunately, my partner is going into the medical field, so at least one of us has job security. I guess the joke is on me for being such a hopelessly optimist artist in late-stage capitalism.
Yep, late-stage capitalism sure loves to sh*t on us "geriatric" millennials (whoever coined that phrase needs to be publicly shamed) when the reason we "killed" an industry is almost always because we couldn't afford it. I never wanted kids, but I don't see it happening even if I did. The reality is that parenthood is out of reach for a lot of us (unless they do what my other 8 siblings do and just keep pumping out babies and staying on government assistance).
I know a PhD getting an NIH fellowship as the fellowship review committee read he published in "Cell" (the premier journal), while he published it in "Cells". Dude is a Harvard postdoc now. Prestige is worth a sack of peanuts.
I appreciate the things you are saying about the postdoctoral route, and compensation in academia generally. Some of it corresponds to my experience, though there are also some differences. I definitely empathize with the temporary lifestyle that graduate school and a postdoc brings. Having run that gauntlet, I would just like to say a few things. The situation of postodocs is unfortunate, and I'm not trying to sugar coat it. But there are a few things that one could do to optimize it, at least. First, there are a variety of job opportunities with distinct pros and cons. For example, if you get a postdoc at a national lab, the pros include a higher salary (often substantially higher than academic postdocs), the potential to become a full-time hire (this comes with a major pay bump as well, with regular cost of living raises and merit increases, though ymmv), very nice Federal benefits, decent work-life balance, etc. The cons include being subject to mercurial funding issues like Congressional squabbling (eg., furloughs happened when the gov't shut down in 2018-19), having to deal with constant and very frustrating red tape/paperwork/delays/busy-work (this is true of any Federal job), being in a more sterile environment that lacks the youthful energy/creativity universities have, and so on. Every national lab is different, and I've personally worked in some capacity at 2 different ones over the years, so I can say the pros and cons are quite different from one national lab to the next. Some pay be better fits than others. But still, based on the items you brought up in this video, I suspect a national lab postdoc might have been a better fit for you personally. (There are also industrial postdocs, which sound like they would pay even more, but I don't know anything about those personally.) Second, people who are interested in industry should identify that goal as soon as possible. It's the most direct route to somewhat permanent, well-paid life which may or may not feature good work-life balance. It's generally known which companies are slave-drivers and which are good to work for, so it's possible to aim at the latter if it's a priority. As you laid out nicely in your video, time is money when it comes to the decision of going into industry. Third, even if your goal is to become a tenure-track professor, there's no rule that you have to go into it right away, as long as you continue to publish in the meantime. In my case, I was able to work in higher-paying jobs for awhile to amass considerable savings, before circling back around and getting an academic position at an R1. Now, in a sense, I have my cake and eat it too: I have my dream job as a professor, meanwhile the growth of my investment portfolio covers the academic salary penalty. Fourth, and this is only an opinion, but I think that one can only come to recognize the good things about academia after having stepped away from it. Outside of the ivory tower, people are often more interested in filling out checklists than satisfying curiosities. It sounds cliche, but it really is true. Working in a national lab, I really missed standing in front of a white board with several interested coworkers puzzling out some esoteric detail or devising some apparatus, with people yelling out suggestions, joshing around, having fun. It's a lot of work, and it's underpaid, but it's also your lived experience for however many hours per week, what is that worth in USD? For me, it was worth a pretty substantial pay cut. But what I'll say is, once you've made enough money to be alright, then it stops being so much of a priority and you can start caring more about how you're actually spending your time. (And that doesn't necessarily mean everyone wants to spend it in academia. I'm a sample size of 1.) It's hard to boil this down to actual advice, for someone just now applying for a phd program or graduating from one, but what I would wholeheartedly recommend is for people in these positions to contact an organization like the ACS, ask to be connected to mentors who are further along in their career. Just bounce some ideas off these people in terms of career goals. They will have some insight about how different career routes really are, what goals are realistic or fanciful, what specific action plans would be to optimize the chances of realizing a particular career plan, what non-standard career paths are available, etc. I'm active in my local branch of the ACS and this in my opinion is the most important resource it offers younger people.
Thank you for expressing publicly what many graduate students, postdocs, and adjuncts say to each other in private all the time. The public needs to know, and so do those students who are made to feel guilty or lazy for being annoyed or feeling loathing for the institutional exploitation and runaround, the BS that we don't have to pay you as much because you love your work (also a line used to excuse bad teacher pay in schools).
Very true and accurate! I moved across the world to do a postdoc, even though I made great friends, it was the wrong lab I realised at the end. I am now in industry. As much as I would like to have my own lab, I will not go back to academia unless things change. I also experienced bullying in academia, which is never addressed and is common. Also what put me off is if I got an assistant professor position, you are kind of stuck with limited opportunity to move or change positions or institutions!
This hit the feels hard. The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was moving from the UK after my PhD to a prestigious US (public) university. The reasons are numerous, like the ones you mentioned low pay ($42K a year in 2014, in the SF Bay Area, competing with techbros for apartments), moving costs etc. Plus I ended up in a really bad academic environment and that did not help my career (directly). I am now in Australia, and while I am still "just" a post-doc, I am much happier. I am paid a good salary ($100k AUD), live in the nicest, cleanest, most friendly place I have ever lived and my career is (mostly) going well. After years of pain, it lead to a great discovery with publication, I now (co-)supervise two PhD students (who are great) and I am teaching a class (which I am finding really enjoyable). Is academia and doing post-docs an MLM: yes. And I am the sucker that is deep into it. But in Australia, I find it a lot better than in the US (or UK).
@@cuthbertallgood7781 So my point was more generic that life as a post-doc in academia in America is harder than it should be, and there was no additional help for being in an expensive area like the SF Bay Area (as there is additional pay for living/working in London in the UK). But the problems I had were not purely because of where I lived and when I have travelled around other parts of the USA, I cannot say that any other part of it was more appealing. The stats back this up, with Mississippi literally have more than twice the rate of infant mortality than CA. CA is at least a developed country, unlike many parts of the USA. The nicest part of the USA I visited wasn't even in the content (Hawaii). But in contrast, I am in Perth, Australia, which according to many in this country is the backwards, small rural town part of Australia. But in reality it is a beautiful, civilised place that is a pleasure to work and life in, and across the whole country, post-docs are paid a good salary that allows them to live with dignity. Not easily achieved in any part of the USA on a post-doc salary, and that is a SHAME!
@@williamdang137 I am in Perth, WA but I have colleagues in South Australia and everything there seems the same and is healthy. Sydney is where I think even the generous postdoc salaries in Australia can get stretched thin but pretty good across the country.
This is why I took a “leave of absence” from my PhD program after three years to go to Navy officer candidate school. Out of ~400 in my class, well over half had masters or doctorates. I ended up finishing my degree on the government’s dime (years later, granted), retired from my naval career after 23 years, and was young enough to start a second career. Plus, I escaped departmental budget wars (well, university departmental budget wars, anyway), being treated as an indentured servant, and a future that you are describing.
As someone who is likely going to be leaving their current program with an MS, thank you for making this video. I’ve been disillusioned to a lot of the crap and it’s not fun. It’s already difficult having to deal with not finding fulfillment in your research but then having to witness all the other BS makes it worse. I’m hoping to either change programs or get out and not look back because I have grown sick of a lot of the crap in my field/academia for years.
I just want to comment that I went through the exact same thought process and came to the exact same conclusions after applying for postdocs in late 2021 and being rejected for all of them. It was, without a doubt, the best thing that has happened to me on my 10 year academic journey in high energy physics. It made me see academia for what it truly is and I'm really happy that I've found a new career in a national lab doing R&D. It's been a night and day difference between how academia treats me as an employee (and human) to my current lab, including a real 2023 adjusted living wage and work-life balance. It's great to know that we as PhDs and PDs are waking up and realizing our market value.
Late comment, but what sort of work did you do in high energy physics? Mostly theoretical? How did you use the skills you developed in high energy physics to get a job in the industry?
Man, I was so lucky. My mentor helped me get a few of interviews with his professor friends. They dispelled the mystique of post-grad and PhD work real fast. Another one of my mentors called her PhD "just a membership card." If I went after a PhD, I'd have set myself back a decade: 4+ years of schooling for a PhD, 4+ years of post-doc work trying to get a professor position, no chance of a family or home or stability. Instead, within that first 4 years, I've been promoted twice and make six figures. There is no possible way the PhD could ever be worthwhile. The value will never catch up. I can literally just go get a PhD later, after retirement, for fun if I want.
It's so funny this was recommended to me, my partner has a postdoc in boulder at the moment (probably where you went). We're a little luckier in that I work from home, so I could actually follow her without quitting my job, and I earn a lot more than her (engineer in industry), but even still money is tight given the cost of living here compared to what we're used to especially given our savings goals. Renting our 3 bedroom house costs 30% more than buying a 5 bedroom house on 5x the land where we're from, and groceries are nearly double the price. I can't imagine living here on 1 income. She also hates the job. I've been trying to convince her to apply like crazy so we can leave ASAP and stop wasting money on rent, buy a house, etc, but the mindset of needing a good postdoc to get a good professorship can be hard to get away from. I don't know anyone could ever make this work without outside financial support (my income), which is insane because she has a PhD. Twice the schooling, half the income. Insanity.
I wish I had found this video sooner! It puts into words why I left academia way better than I ever could have. I've been struggling with guilt over "selling out" ever since, but seeing this video is a great reminder of just how bad academia was. My life is so much better now than if I had stayed.
Thank you for your honesty. It's refreshing to hear someone articulate my thoughts so eloquently. I've been delaying entering the real world for so long. Much appreciated!
Academia is where you get the best minds working on the most complex problems, solving them for the first time in the world, and then you pay them a sustenance wage.
I grew up dirt poor. My first contract research position in/after undergrad paid me twice as much as my family had growing up. Going into grad school, I figured be financially comfortable because of this (the position had been DOE/DOD). It was only a few months of living in a decent-sized city on grad student pay that I realized I had made a huge mistake in not just going into industry.
Man i have no idea how expensive stuff is in the US, so when i saw 50 000 i was like "oh that's pretty big" because here in france rent for a one bedroom appartment in the center of the biggest city can be as low as 400/500 euros, so when you wrote 2000 for a one bedroom appartment en 4000 for daycare i almost fell from my chair
Your description of a university taking the lectures and materials of a staff member who had passed away and using them to deliver the course throughout the pandemic literally happened in Australia. I'm so heartened to see that some STEM people actually get it. In my undergrad, economics was such a struggle whenever a STEM person had chosen a humanities elective.
What a powerful video essay. My best friend was manipulated by this very same system. Took him 10 years to become a professor at a good school. But during that time, i bought a house. 2 nice cars had 2 kids, and I started my own business (with 2 other fellow graduates). My best friend was, at the 10 year mark, renting a room in Boston above some old lady.
I never got to that point of being a post-doc because I worked as an undergrad student in exciting early cancer detection research and even got that paper published along with the PI, a post-doc, a graduate student, and volunteer undergraduate. While I was getting paid an okay amount, I knew they were not getting paid much more. I was already married and with a child. I loved the research but not the constant uncertainty, so I decided to get a job in something I love and still am envolved in research in some way. I throughly enjoyed your video.
I mastered out mainly because of this problem. So stressful, I haven't met a PhD student without mental health problems. (For the case you described, single, or couples w.o. kids)
I worked in the national lab system (linked to a number of Universities) in Australia for many years. I don't care about citation counts, etc. I'm now basically retired. I remember our CEO coming back from a conference saying how everyone was talking about how one of our employees had proved an important theorem. I looked up the paper and discovered that our employee was SIXTH author and yet they were getting all the accolades...
My friend left Math post-doc he was stressing about for some reason (lack of progress towards full professorship) to take a chill Big Tech job in the Valley that pays 5x as much. Big Tech loves quantitative PhDs, because it's much easier to teach programming to a mathematician than math to a programmer, and there is a lot of mathematically intense code out there, especially with big data and ML. Academia is a giant scam if you care about financial security at all.
I know this video is old but I wanna share the situation in Brazil. Fresh off of a PhD, you basically have two options: a postdoc or a temporary teaching position (2 year contract). The postdoc will allow you to publish and inflate your curriculum so you can have a better chance at a tenure position, however a postdoc here is different than most places. It's basically a PhD position with a slightly larger scholarship. Depending on the funding organization you can get a higher salary, but it is in general slightly lower than a temporary teaching position. And oh, the grants for postocs here are one year plus one year (not two plus one), and you have all the (non) perks of a PhD scholarship: no paid vacation, no medical or grocery benefits (somewhat common perks to regular jobs here in Brazil), no transport expenses. It's basically an extension of your PhD for one (or two) years so you can focus on publishing your research. Then there's the temporary teaching position, where you have a decent salary plus regular benefits from a normal job here in Brazil (paid transportation, grocery benefits, a healthcare plan if you're lucky, paid vacations, the ''thirteenth'' salary as we call it lol it's an extra salary a year you receive by the year's end, also pretty common benefit in Brazil). This might seem as the better option. However, you are so overworked with teaching you basically have no time left for research, and as with the postdoc, there's no stability. Every two years you have to take another test to apply for the position again (and there's a law prohibiting you from applying to the same institution twice in a row, which honestly most institutions don't follow or else they'd be understaffed, but some do). And you never know if the position you applied for will be open again in the following years, since the government is always cutting down on university staff (I should've mentioned this before but most serious research universities in Brazil are government funded). Since tenure positions are more expensive than these temporary contracts, there has been fewer and fewer openings for tenure positions. In the university I'm currently teaching (with a temporary two year contract) there hasn't been an opening for tenure since 2014 (edit to clarify: not just in physics, in ALL departments)! Then, we see bizarre scenarios like teachers that have been on these two year contracts for 10+ years and are already doing very important research and administrative work in the university because the government won't give openings for tenure positions. And the sad thing is that the few tenure positions openings there are are often left for those more privileged who've had the financial stability to basically pay to publish by doing post-doc after post-doc and inflate their curricula. Apart from that, the other option one has is to move to very small and often isolated cities which have newly opened universities. One can often find tenure positions in these places, but even applying for the position is an investment (the last one I've seen was in a remote city north of Brazil, around 1000km away from where I live. There were three rounds of tests/interviews, each of them weeks or months apart, and were I to do them I'd have to spend around R$15k just on travel expenses, which is roughly three times my monthly salary...). Apart from that, if you work on any of the basic sciences, you are, let's say, isolated research-wise. There's no incentive to form any sort of department or laboratory in these small city universities, which are more focused on applied sciences and what we call here ''technical courses'', whose undergraduates go on to work on first line jobs in the industry. So you see a lot of PhDs stuck on these two year temporary contract positions waiting someday for the golden pot at the end of the rainbow that is the tenure position, only to see it be taken away by someone else who's had the financial privilege to basically fund their own research by doing years of post-docs around the country. It's funny cause ten years ago the situation was so different. Even in the most prestigious universities there was a lack of workforce to fill tenure positions, and the government during the 2000s offered lots of PhD scholarships, and lots of students could get their PhDs and find a tenure position right afterwards since there was little to no competition. My PhD advisor told me there was literally no one else applying for the tenure position he eventually got back in 2010. At the same time, tenure positions didn't increase at the same rate. In fact, it has been decreasing for the last few years, and there's a load of PhDs who are not going the academic route simply because there's no place for everybody. The scenario has changed so much in recent years and a traditional academic career is looking more and more like an illusion. And Brazil is not a heavily industrialized country (it has actually lost so much of its industry in the last fifty or so years due to the neoliberal takeover) that the market for PhDs outside of academia is extremely scarce. Thanks if you've read it all the way down. TLDR: the future of a PhD in Brazil is looking grimmer by the second. If that's what you want to pursue, know what you're getting into.
This video speaks to me very deeply. I'm a mathematician, and I did two postdocs, each for two years, before finally getting a tenure-track job. I did not expect how emotionally and financially taxing it would be to move every two years, uprooting my whole life repeatedly, without even knowing if my career had a long-term future. As for the question you posed at the end, of whether professors are complicit in the exploitation of grad students and postdocs. I'm not sure, but fortunately pure mathematicians don't need grad students and postdocs to get research done. And I'm working at a teaching-oriented university, because I like teaching and because my research output was never impressive enough to get a job at an R1 - and even if it was, that's not the career I ever wanted. Our department only has masters students, not PhD students; I don't think we have postdocs either. I like where I ended up, and I think a lot of academics don't realize that there's more to academia than the high-powered R1 career path.
Some professors definitely are complicit. There is now a well documented case at Imperial College where the professor pressured a world class researcher (Stefan Grimm) into committing suicide. At many institutions you cannot rise to be head of a research dept by caring about a rotting tomato
Thanks for this video, I was very much a person biding time in a postdoc. In industry now and my mental health is vastly improved. I could not handle the precarity of postdocs, I couldn’t get out of my head the anxiety about ‘what happens next.’ My performance as a scientist went down the toilet. Now I’m thriving in industry. Looking back, depression and anxiety really sapped my ability to do work in my postdoc. Class isn’t takes about enough in academia. I grew up middle class and I worried about money, but in grad school I was surrounded by people who didn’t really have to think about it. They didn’t act snobbish or upper class, but having that safety net changed their whole outlook.
So damn glad I left academia two years ago. Nowadays, one of my greatest joys is laughing at my old inbox full of publication/conference emails and sometimes reporting them as spammers.
I went to grad school in the UK and noticed that the professors (I'm not going to go through the full list of everything they go by here, let's just call them professors) were always stressed. Like all of the time, and now I have connected the dots. These men and women don't make much more than what you describe and they have to make that money go really far. Most of them are in their forties, married, with kids. So they make up the difference by writing and publishing books (called readers in the UK, or monographs if it is just one author). So on top of doing their day jobs, they are writing their books and sending them to publishers, just so they can like, go on vacation and live full lives. Pretty messed up.
The bitter reality is that there's no such thing as tenure in the UK. The lecturership positions that are supposedly "tenure track" are really just postdocs in all but name*. The professors in charge of research departments can create infinite levels of them for their staff to battle through so that they never ever obtain any position of stability. * same responsibilities of a postdoc but with a stricter publication target and a teaching workload
3 years BSc, 2 year research MSc, 5.5 year PhD. 1 year research assistant. 3.8 years postdoc. 14 publications (STEM) started postdoc in 2018. Went "absolutely not" and and quit postdoc to get a job in the pharmaceutical industry. Love my position here, and already have a publication submitted and one in writing after a year. It's fantastic and so is the science. For the first time in years I have loved science and I don't have to worry about ridiculous admin, grants and all the insecurity, and poor pay. I won't look back to those dark days of academia.
@@dream1430 The actual title is an odd one due to it being obtained in Sweden. It translates to "doctor of medicine", but is the same as any other scientific PhD elsewhere in the world. The subject was cancer drug discovery. Whether my MSc, PhX or postdoc, I always focused on cancer biology, cancer drug pharmacology or directly on cancer drug development.
I finished a BS in physics and a BS in computer science a couple weeks ago from a prestigious school. Up until my sophomore year there I had wanted to get a PhD in physics, but I started to hate academia and decided I would be better off working as a software engineer. I still have my physics textbooks (which we never finished in my classes - I don't know if this is normal) as well as other textbooks which were not required for class but are useful and interesting (Jackson's E&M, Levi-Civita's Absolute Differential Calculus, to name a few). My feelings toward academia have only gotten worse since my sophomore year, so I've decided to work full time as a software engineer and study physics, math, and language on my own time. I'm ok with doing no research - I just love learning and studying the physics.
Not finishing your book is "normal" nowadays because nowadays universities are about making cash off from students rather than sharing knowledge so yeah. Universities dont even care about making relevant discoveries or research anymore, all they want is students who pay insane amounts of cash for their degrees and professors who will mass produce insane quantities of papers no matter how worthless they are because they still generate cash. For the university ofc, nobody else is really going to benefit from any of this. Im glad you decided to get away from academia, it truly is a piece of waste these days. I originally wanted to study physics but my parents were completely against it and recommended i study CS instead. Im glad i went down that path rather than my original plan, because knowing what i know nowadays about academia really shatters my soul and makes me shudder when i think about how misserable i could be if i had decided to pursuit physics like i wanted. Regarding your CS studies, i would like to know if your university also started cutting off courses like mine has done. For example we no longer have courses on compilers and language processors, which seems fucking absurd to me, because now there's people who are going to graduate and become software engineers without even knowing how to fucking parse text. We live in really stupid times to tell the truth, nothing makes sense anymore.
I worked for a state university in a staff position for a number of years. The job opened my eyes to what really happened in academia. I couldn't recommend it to anyone after my first year. I stayed because I thought it would be job stability but the closed my department almost exactly 3 years into my employment with the university.
33:00 That exploitation describes not only academic life, but corporate life as well. The deal used to be "suffer for years but then you will probably get a good TT job," but that is no longer the case. For many PhDs today, there is no industry job either.
@@sumsarsiranen It used to be that with hard work, a smart, hardworking white male could start in the mailroom and end up in the C-suite. Not anymore. The smart, hardworking guy in the mailroom will stay in the mailroom. There is no path up.
I'll never forget how for pretty much my entire life, from like 1st or 2nd year on (that's around age 11-12) I was so sure I wanted to do a PhD. The idea of being a Dr. felt so cool and I just wanted that. Then I was still sure I was going to do a PhD right up until the March of my graduation year of my bachelors degree, and after working on my dissertation, speaking to others in PhD's currently and further I was like no, I absolutely don't want this. I started applying for jobs and am now thrilled with the work I'm doing, feeling like I'm making an actual difference (I work in public healthcare) and being able to earn enough to buy a flat. Whereas my friend did a PhD, actually started his PhD a year before I graduated as a result of various things, and has now just managed to make it into a job that still pays less than I get paid, whilst living in a much more expensive area. He loves his job and I'm so proud of him for doing what he's doing, but I think we'd both agree that Academia can be such a scam in so many ways. 7:30 This whole section is why I laugh when people say "America is so good because median pay is so high!" Like $4357.50 is, after conversions, roughly 1.75x what I make living in Scotland after tax. However I save more than what you listed per month, pay less in Student Loans, pay WAY less than that rent to actually own my home, and even pay less than that in utilities despite us having a cost of living crisis right now. So I just find it baffling when people will use raw take home pay as some indication it's more prosperous to live in the US when, to stay in any major city, your rent is higher than my monthly salary. Whereas I can own a 3 bedroom flat, 10 minutes from the centre of a major city, and also still afford to save on way less than that. It's crazy. I always think of my friend that lives in LA, making my annual pre-tax salary in like 3 or 4 months, and the only flat she can afford is significantly worse than mine. How is that a sign of a strong economy? Anyway sorry I know that's not the point of the video but I always find it interesting!
I'm not in STEM or Academia, and still have no clue what I want to do but I find this fascinating. Definitely a good heads up with all the associated and hidden costs for when you move somewhere, the opportunity costs other than money that you have to consider, etc. Your financial awareness are critical thinking are really making me realize how much I'm ignoring at the moment >.
I started working in Academia as IT (Data & Analytics support) and the sheer amount of work the PhDs (and especially the PhD candidates through non-tenured professors) have to do for absolute crap pay is insane. I don't make a lot for my area anymore ($63k in a major city on the East coast) but realized that while even a tenured research position *could( make 6 figures they have to run like a dozen research projects while I got home at 5 PM and no one ever sent me emails on the weekend.
This is the first time I ever watched an UA-cam video over 15 mins long. It was like staring at a mirror… That being said, I do take some solace that I am not the only one who feels this way. On top of all you said, I have a family to take care of (parents). It is honestly so difficult sometimes.
I was a postdoc for more years than I'd like to say. I loved the work and the publications I put out, and I was paid pretty well for a postdoc, but I still tended to be broke and the instability was crushing. Once I gave up on the idea of getting a good permanent position, I just left, and now I make more than double what I did as a postdoc....but I still don't regret my time as a postdoc. The transferable skills I picked up during my postdoc were countless in my new role.
I never considered doing a postdoc. I just wanted to teach what I learned to the youth of today and I wanted the PhD as a personal goal. I can bounce back and forth between teaching and industry as a contract software guy. I would never recommend academia as a total career path. I did get a research grant that picked up tuition and a stipend but still had to spend savings to do it. I spent 7 years full time teaching and now am back in industry surprised at how the PhD increases my worth -- probably because they can bill more for me 😀
The question is : who say that industry is stable? I did PhD and work in industry..you get to work as R&D engineer...and R&D job in industry is insecure as well unfortunately. The best option is to find R&D in international big companies and not small compagnies. Those opportunities are rare and hard to get so that postdoc come as obligation and not as choice.
i would just like to say tysm as somebody who is about to apply for undergrad & is considering a career in academia. i totally assumed that ivy leagues would pay more and it's nice to know that is not true at all!
okay honestly watching this, it's good to know the best thing to do if you want to do research is just get a job in industry b/c i don't want to put up with that BS
You're commenting on your comments to help yourself and other prioritize; this is community service. Academia is missing out as you slip between it's grubby fingers, but I wish you the best on this lovely journey Godspeed
It's interesting to hear this perspective. I'm a grad student in a developing country, and honestly? The pay isn't amazing but it's pretty good compared to the median income. It's far less prestigious than being in an Ivy League school and there are problems with it, but here there is demand for talented STEM people for teaching and research, the universities are eager to to get their name out there. The cost of living is also drastically lower (you can rent a pretty good place for less than 500 bucks a month, for instance). I don't think I'll stay here forever but sometimes it honestly feels like I might have better prospects at home than in a developed nation, which is absolutely wild.
I'm defending my dissertation in particle physics tomorrow (eek!), so of course I watched several of your videos today when I should have been studying. I decided years ago now not to go the post-doc route. I'm still hunting for industry jobs, but all the ones I'm looking at pay a lot more than a post-doc and many of them are remote. Thank you for making this video. Too many people I know tried to stay in academia and are now either adjuncts making hardly anything, or eventually quit their post-docs to take jobs in industry.
It's so heartening to see young PhDs figuring out that academia is a scam before they invest 25 years into it, like I did. The other point to make is that the reward for doing one or more postdocs is a chance at a crappy academic position with continued low pay (relative to your skill set) more work, insane expectations and colleagues, etc. This is coming from a tenured full professor at an R1 university who resigned his position after twenty years.
What are you up to now?
Damn son...you a real one
An honest-to-God Ponzi scheme.
Yeah… I pivoted to a masters when I realized that academics spend a good portion of their time on what boils down to busy work.
I was on board for doing research and teaching. I was not on board for writing 30 page grants that people would only read two pages of… sometimes it’s necessary for accuracy to have that level of precision but not always. It definitely needs some work though I’m glad that academic research exists for various reasons, without the work and research of Kati Kariko many more would have died of COVID 19 before we could have developed a vaccine. But she was treated like 💩in the academic system despite her work saving millions of lives and the companies who further developed her research into the vaccines are the ones who make all the profit. Definitely needs an overhaul ….
It depends on your academic field. My PhD is in business and literally 98%+ of us get tenure-track jobs directly after leaving university. In other words, it’s extremely rare for business PhDs to do a postdoc.
The most depressing thing about this video, is that it is actually an understatement for how bad it really is for a lot of postdocs. You make all of these great points about how exploitative postdoc positions are, assuming that they make around between 50-60k. That salary is absolutely far too low given the level of expertise and training a postdoc has under their belt. But here I am, on my 3rd postdoc at my 3rd university and my salary is 38k, at one of the largest universities in the US. I had to get an apartment 45 miles away from campus just to afford a roof over my head, as the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city of my university is 80% of my monthly take home salary.
This is atrocious. Robbery.
Modern slavery
@@b_8103 How is it slavery? Surely, they could just work somewhere else with their level of expertise?
@@PieMaster2425 they can surely escape from their landlord. That doesn't make it less outrageous to have a system that slowly cooks you to financial ruin and have you work for Walmart cashier salary after 15+ years of days and nights. That's just my opinion.
Which city is this? I hope you can share this information so we all can avoid that university.
I feel like the clown meme fits well with this video like:
"Sure, I'll move across the country"
"Leave my spouse and kids or uproot them too."
"For minimal pay."
"For a temporary position."
"Because it will be worth it in the end."
When I proposed doing what I called a "postdoc tour" to get experience in multiple fields, my advisor said immediately "I hope you like poverty". That says it all.
But why should that pay? I'm just confused. You're doing whatever you want in order to be "kind of sort of decent" at multiple different fields? Specialization is the only way to make money in current times. I'm sorry it's like that, but it is. People good at several things get paid nothing. You end up poor because you basically just did all of that because you felt like it, not because it matched with someone who would actually pay you money for knowing said things. Ultimately just knowing stuff is worth nothing; It's just you having fun for your own benefit, which is fine, but don't go off from there and get angry because no one wants to pay you for your hodgepodge of random skills...
I see this a lot in academia where people care way more about their supposed "experience" overall than, you know, matching to an employer who VALUES your skills. Like, you just get paid for knowing things and trying hard and messing around for 15 years in various random postdocs? That is not how ANY of this works.
That being said the core problem being presented in the video is 100% true and horrible. I'm just saying your viewpoint is ridiculous. Why should anyone pay you for that? Legitimately would love to hear your answer, cheers.
@@nuggyfresh6430 It depends on the field. If you're in something interdisciplinary like cognitive science, varied experiences could be an asset. Not many people have concurrent training across natural sciences, behavioral sciences, and philosophy.
That said, most academic fields are sufficiently siloed that you're correct a majority of the time, though you could have made your point a bit less aggressively.
@@NonSequitur15bullshxt.
@@nuggyfresh6430 In the trades the reality is the opposite, but the climate is the same. When you know about other trades as a carpenter, you do better work. The same is true for the plumber, the electrician, etc. They all work together to build the same house, the same apartment complex, the same office building. So when they specialize to the same degree as academics... we get shitty construction. We get uncritical builders who just do what they're told regardless of the shitty outcome. And you know what? When you look at academia it's the same situation. People just doing they're small tasks and ignoring the big picture in order to protect their finances. Information and data serve lies more than truth, because of this negligence. It's the same crumbling effect that you can see on our infrastructure, which is due to the same specialization without compensation.
I mean if they treat you like s. Leave and let the industry get its own medicine. One day they will increase money but too late
I didn't accept a postdoc offer at Harvard (2011) because they offered me 34k. The rent alone was more than 20k. That would mean earning $30/day.
I know it's 13 years later, but I make more than that as a starting metal bender.😅 Pay rises from there
Your hypothesis about classes being taught by a dead man online happened in my city. Back in 2021 it was revealed that students in a class at a local university were watching recorded lectures and notes from a teacher who had died in 2019 without knowing he had died. They just... didn't inform the students... or take his name off the course... so the students only found out he was dead a few weeks into the semester after one of them tried to look up his email and found his obituary.
Did the school get sued?
@@melelconquistador No, I'm not sure there was grounds for that. No students pushed for that to happen in any case. There was an actual teacher 'teaching' the course (answering emails, responding to questions and grading assignments), and they were using the dead professors' lectures with permission. After the school realized that they failed to properly update the course description they changed it but kept using his lectures, and the whole thing mostly just caught a lot of headlines because of how strange the situation was.
I ran into the same thing at Kent State. At least two classes I took towards the end of the pandemic were "taught" through recorded lectures and graded by TAs, with no evidence that the professors on the video were in any way involved with the class; no office hours, email contact only through Blackboard, no feedback on assignments, nothing. In one of them, the syllabus hadn't been updated since Windows 7 was a thing (and referred to several university sites/systems that hadn't existed for over three years), and the class notes were just *full* of dead links to nonexistent sites or UA-cam videos that we somehow had to answer questions about. I asked about it in an e-mail and the response I got back so terse that it bordered on hostile, but at least I could be sure the dude wasn't dead.
I could accept this if it actually made classes cheaper. Somehow though tuition just keeps going up
The equivalent of that, before the invention of recording media, was to read out a dead professor's lecture notes. A notorious exponent of this was Alexander Monro III, who had inherited the Chair of Anatomy at Edinburgh from his father and grandfather. AM I had been appointed in 1720, and AM III retired in 1846. The latter read his grandfather's lectures out word for word, including anecdotes of "his" experiences as Herman Boerhaave's student in Leiden, which usually provoked a riotous response from his mostly teenage audience.
I was a postdoc in physics at Harvard from 1986 to 1990. When I adjusted my salary to 2023, I got $82K. It sure looks like salaries have not kept up. I did really enjoy my postdoc, but I might not if I was paid 25% less.
That's crazy. It's so sad how education is being devalued on multiple fronts in the US :/
@@Ruffles2012 Read Noam Chomsky. You will know why all this is happening.
wild considering that tuition increases have outpaced inflation
@@DipayanPyne94 Can you be more specific? It's not like Noam chomsky's only ever written one thing.
@@audreymcknight Well, it's just that corporations have taken over the world. Financial institutions, in particular, are responsible for the lack of funding necessary for salaries of academics and scientific infrastructure.
Advice from an "old guy": If you aren't in the top 5% of the graduate students in your field (and can "prove" it with papers that are already becoming heavily cited) then you should forget about academia. Get a postdoc position with the (USA) federal government. You'll have to put up with way more bureaucracy than in academia or private industry, but the pay is twice academia's and the academic freedom is way more than private industry. And the federal S&E workforce is older than the general population, so there's a decent chance of a permanent job at the end of the postdoc, instead of an entire career as a postdoc. AND, you are generally expected to work 40 hours per week, like a normal human being. (US citizenship helps with your long-term prospects.)
[btw: I never did a postdoc. PhD --> feds. 30+ years now. Not famous, or rich, but have done interesting work in a half-dozen fields. (At least, I thought my work was interesting. Not the citations I'd like, though. Feel free to fix that for me before I retire!)]
I think you should forget about it period except for using it to acquire (useful) knowledge. Get a contract gig with a government contractor. That's what I tell my students. A secret clearance is nice too.
@@billp4 Secret clearance is very important for military and energy areas. So, don't ruin your chances for this in grad school. (Basically, don't do crimes, and don't get involved with people who want to overthrow the US gov't.)
Academia can be a great life, IF that's what you want to devote your life to, and IF you can perform at the needed level. There is a LOT of pressure for the first 5 to 10 years. But, some people thrive on it and are pretty happy doing it. There is some luck involved, tbh. Kinda like show business.
To be honest...I get people telling me they are in the "Top 2%" of their field all the time...all in institutions that only care about that for the purpose of hiring...very quickly they aren't in the Top 2% of anything...
I think this is VERY field dependent. In my field (neurobiology), federal postdoc is basically NIH postdoc, which...
pays about the same as other postdocs
expected to work as much as your PI expects you to
May give you enough prestige to get a TT job, but not necessarily (I've seen K99/R00 folks go not get ONE tenure-track position)
And I can say with confidence that it seriously isn't how many papers you publish and in what tier. I've seen people from my department I did my PhD in get positions with one paper with less than 10 citations (tenure track, not postdoc). It is really about who your advisor is and how much clout the person has.
Academia at the moment is sort of like the Trump administration. Corrupted and very based on nepotism with how much you can do not saying much. You want to succeed in the "Trump" administration? You have to know who to suck up to.
You can write papers while working in a company - and with much better pay.
Average salary of a tenured professor in the US: $145,000.00
Average salary of a MSL (one of possible entry roles for a PhD in pharma): $175,000.00.
One needs multiple postdocs, luck, and many years... to earn less than entry positions in industry.
The thing with professors are, you get part of your funding at the end of the term, which is a lot of money. Well, assuming that (1) You got big enough fundings and (2) You got leftovers.
You are quite wrong that the average salary for assistant, associate, and full tenured Professors is 145k.
Only tenured FULL Professors at private universities make that 145k
A word from an ex postdoc: Get a government job as was already stated. I gave all my twenties and thirties to my academic career just to notice I have to get out of here and get a real stable job before 40. If I would have done this 5-10 years earlier I would even earn more money. As I realized: Those people with the high salary do not nearly have, if any at all, as many academic achievements as I do: research money, patents, publications, students. So what can you do? Built your own niche, challenge yourself academically, rebuilt your network and try to avoid being the donkey for others. And remember always: If you come from a non academic family background and did a PhD you are already the 1% compared to other non academic children. Postdoc even more unlikelier. So do not be bitter if you cannot achieve the further 1% of postdocs making it to prof. If you now have a stable decent paying job try not to be bitter or envious. Enjoy life and built your career from where you are now.
As an employment law attorney serving STEM employees, I love that you’re bringing light to these issues. Helps me and my paralegals understand our clients’ challenges a lot better so we can better represent them. ❤
PLEASE PLEASE help support student legally because they are being discriminated against, exploitation, and black mailed. Im glad some are taking a legal stance. HOLD these institutions accountable!
Can post-docs afford lawyers?
@@PatrickDunca A LOT of employment attorneys have a I-get-paid-if-we-win. So, they take in solid cases. And it works.
@@PatrickDunca Only probono vultures
You're doing God's work
Yes! "Talk about money with your friends, it's important." The social taboo against this needs to go. I find your videos amazing. Thank you!
I can't say how I agree with this. Since I was a child I didn't understand this. I still don't, I NEVER had any problem saying how high or low my wage was. Even between my family members this is a taboo, I guess I'm just a black sheep.
I can't give this enough upvotes. UA-cam only lets me give 1 but I would give a thousand if it didn't block all my bots.
Facts, facts, facts
This is just an thing in America. People in other countries are like, "Hey, nice to meet you. What do you do? Oh, that's great and how much does that pay?"
Amen!🎉
I’m a physicist and while working on my PhD dissertation I realized I was making the highest earning research student at $22K annually, mandatory health insurance had to be budgeted out of that, school was in DC so I needed a car to commute from the more affordable suburbs, and I finally looked at the post doc in my group at 3 am asked him his salary he said $36K and I left the school a week later and got a federal job for $75K starting. I’m at $150K ten years later with benefits. The post doc is now an adjunct professor.
What job?
@@joeld.k.7652 patent examiner at USPTO
wow
@@WhatTheFriedRice einstein also worked in a patent office, so maybe you'll also do breakthrough research in your spare time lol
Cool stuff you do
I left uni after an MSc in physics and started in applied research in underwater acoustics for the Canadian navy. Not only did I enter the work force 3 years earlier (by not doing PhD), I was making real money, and three years later I was well established in my field, writing journal papers, and attending conferences. I received several professional distinctions during my career, and was able to retire at age 55 with a decent pension. That was 15 years ago, and I have enjoyed myself in amateur astronomy since then (my first love).
Great video! I'm from Argentina and did my physics PhD in Manhattan Kansas! I saw many of my postdoc friends leave and fly to some other country just to do another postdoc. Great minds and awesome people with kids in charge and no prospects. When getting into my PhD, I thought that postdocs were the only path worth following, I realized I was so wrong. I finished my degree and changed career path
I was a postdoc for 7 years, came out of it with no academic job, no money, having probably lost my opportunity to have children, and ruined mental health. Thank you so much for this, breaking down the financial side alone is incredibly validating.
Which part of that, exactly, were you "tricked" or "lied to" about? You knew beforehand what ages people can have children at, that wasn't a surprise or a secret. You knew what the average salaries were, too. "Bad ideas" are not "scams". "Scam" implies FRAUD, which means someone had to give you fabricated numbers about what to expect ahead of time. Who did that? What numbers did they lie about? How, precisely, were you scammed? (I am assuming you think you were, since you're agreeing with the video all about claiming that)
@@gavinjenkins899 That's a great point, obviously your idiosyncratic requirement that a scam involves someone misrepresenting with numbers is totally true and not made up, and definitely invalidates my experience. That's why people who are invited to participate in rigged carnival games aren't actually scammed, no one specifically told them a lie about their odds of winning! You have defeated my experience and that of thousands of other young academics who feel like their chances of a viable and stable career were badly misrepresented to them. Thank you, great mind! Academia is saved.
@@gavinjenkins899shush
@@gavinjenkins899stay based
Your message is harsh. You had a bad time. Sorry to read that.
I'm a postdoc at MIT. You told the entire story dead on. A LOT of postdocs have help from their parents. If you really really want to be faculty, then do it. I can't say I regret it, but I'm happy I took an industry position and will have the freedom to enjoy the other facets of life that matter. I can have my garage machine shop and maybe get a pilot's license one day!
If you want to be really pissed off, ask about how much how much you cost your grant! Even though you take home 40k-70k per year, the cost to your grant is deep into the six figures. The overhead the university charges is truly insane.
What's a garage machine shop? Might be an American description for a place to fix up cars?
@@zatarawood3588it means you have a milling machine, a metal lathe, possibly a cnc machine, along with other sundry tools that enable.you to fabricate metal parts. It's like a woodworker shop except for metal.
I don't like negative people and I keep watching your videos convinced from the thumbnail that your just an angry little girl, but then you make good points . I find smart girls attractive then I seen your video about sexual harassment. And I'm a 60 year old dropout crackpot and found your video a little mean . But you make me laugh so I will keep watching 😊
I don't like negative people and I keep watching your videos convinced from the thumbnail that your just an angry little girl, but then you make good points . I find smart girls attractive then I seen your video about sexual harassment. And I'm a 60 year old dropout crackpot and found your video a little mean . But you make me laugh so I will keep watching 😊
Hey Evan, as an undergrad in physics who wanted to go into academia I've been getting disillusioned with it as well. Could you tell me what someone can do as an industry job after getting a PhD? Do you just mean working at a research center for a company?
I'm a retired boomer, but saw this coming from miles away. In my grad school work in computer science & engineering, I saw what the academic route entailed, and mastered out to work at the most prestigious place I could find at the time (Bell Labs, in the 1970s, with a similar offer from Hewlett-Packard, which was then not a synonym for crap). I did marry a DVM who was getting her PhD (and did a postdoc in industry), but for a *very long* time I out-earned her, supported her through the frustrations of getting the PhD, becoming an adjunct and a postdoc, and eventually entering industry herself. After that, I followed her unique career around the country, but had far less frustration in my career moves. A generation later, and we've counseled our kids (one with a PhD from University of Chicago, the other with a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon) to get out of academia and into industry, where they've been for a decade or so each.
I've met people in their 50's and 60's who are still occupying postdoc positions, subsisting in college towns in low-cost areas in the Midwest, who yearn to get out of the trap.
Get out now. Never subject yourself to it to begin with.
Bell Labs? I'm a bit envious. I'm in government R&D and although I know Bell Labs was a private consortium it's kinda the poster child for that sort of high impact research.
Commenting to bookmark your comment. I'm a cloud architect and have to show this to my fed and academic friends 💯
Post-doc at 50-60 is shocking... some people's life decisions, omg.
What does mastering out mean? What is the difference between masters and academics?
That's a horrifying trap. Sounds like a more aggressive version of a starving artist.
To those of us still in academia: unionize, and unionize across job categories! Worker-led unions in partnership with their surrounding communites (including students, in the case of academia) are the only way any sort of effective and positive systemic change will happen.
Exactly. Academic doesn't care about its employees. I am hoping unions start to come through for their workers (or that they just run out of people to exploit because people stop excitedly showing up).
I'm in a union and it honestly doesn't change much. As a postdoc yhe university still only pays me just barely enough to afford the luxury of paying rent AND eating (with 0 job security on 1 year contracts). But thanks to the union, I also get to pay compulsory union dues for the privilege of being lectured on unrelated international political issues that the union executives happen to be obsessed with.
@@hobowithashotgun48 That's rough. :( I take it your union isn't member run, at least not by postdocs?
@@andresmorera6426 it consists of research assistants (i.e., grad students), postdocs, and non-permanent faculty. I think the problem isn't as much the lack of postdoc representation, as it is that membership in the union is mandatory for employment at this university, and we cant stop paying dues. As a result, the union leadership has little incentive to actually work in the member's interests, and is instead too busy pushing their pet political agendas and increasing their own power and leadership perks.
Oh there’s another way, bud
Something about a red star rising or some such
Legend has it that Angela is still deleting lloans and re-typing lloans to this day.
Erasing student lloans from her exepenses
I lol’d
@@adder2488 you mean llol'd
My quandary is whether *lloans* is Spanish or Welsh
I have no sympathy for her.
I work in industry doing work R&D on thin films, materials science, things like that. Recently hired a physicist who was looking to escape his n'th postdoc position. I think he had a bit of shell shock after his first day when I showed up around. Samples for an experiment that would have taken months or years to produce at a university he can build in literally an hour or less. If one morning an instrument breaks, or some vacuum equipment is acting up, there is an entire pit crew of people who will fix it for him by lunch. He doesn't have to publish a single paper unless he wants to...just do the experiments and come up with something that works. He asked about TEM and when I showed him that there were four at his disposal + dedicated staff for running them I think he cried a little. Fact is, for the research he is interested in and good at, a university is a shit place to do it, even if they paid as much as we do. This wasn't always the case. The post doc exodus is just one of many ongoing consequences of the hollowing out of public research.
00
@@bilbo_gamers6417 That was gorbechav in the 60's but yes
@@Bookofshavings '80s you mean?
@@bilbo_gamers6417 no
@@Bookofshavings Gorbachev went to the US first in 1987, then again in 1988, and then in 1990.
Ironically, you actually form more work relationships when you job hop every 2-3 years because you meet so many more colleagues in your field. I’ve known so many people who were able to tap previous coworkers for knowledge of positions at other companies before they were advertised that it’s not funny.
Not even academia, my wife is a chef and thats what they told her to do in culinary school, except it was more like 2-3 months. And with the way more jobs todays are asking for demanding people wear many hats, you almost have to. I have friends who were looking for Comp Sci gig, and apparently the running meme when you see a lot of their job posts, is "my dude, you aren't looking for an employee, you're looking for a while damn IT department!" Its the "you can't get a job without experience and you can't get any experience without a job!" We thought getting a degree would get us past that problem, but no, it only makes the problem WORSE!
I'm a master in Physics from Brasil. I gave up on PhD here cause it's on an even worse scenario. The crowd of grads keep going into an academy path because teachers tell them it's the only way since there's no national industry around here. Truth is there's no path. I'm teaching on High School now, but studying to get into the police. Wish a PhD was worth it.
That's how I've felt for years coming to terms with my career as a teacher in the US...I don't want to lie to my kids about the promise of the path knowing the path is a funeral parade that is nearly impossible to escape
I got told "it'll get better" but they meant "you'll break eventually", and 23 years in they're starting to regret having numbed me to the pain, cause I don't forget.
Careful there, buddy. Smart people don't get hired to work the force, neither do veterans, cuz they've actually been trained on rules of engagement, and that'd make the rest of the cosplaytriots look bad.
There's a specific psych profile they look for. If you're dead set on that path, you should look into it and figure out how to wear that hat to find yr passing grade.
Here in Seattle (SPD are fucking croocked, lying thugs. I've WATCHED them murder someone and then, swept under the rug) new hires come on at $90k. Over half the force makes over $200k. And I can only imagine how much they confiscate that never makes it to storage. "Asset forfeiture" they call it. I call it theft.
I just want everyone to be treated like criminals when they break the law. Including the amoral affluenzant, politicians, judges, attorneys (cant wait for AI to take that job over) AND police.
Police should have to carry insurance as well, and payouts due to negligence or lawsuits should be paid from their retirement fund, not tax payer money.
In Indiana, and only in Indiana, so far, it's legal to return fire at police during a no knock raid or if they aren't in uniform.
Cops shoot their guns a whole lot less there. Maybe that should go nationwide.
Idk, man. If pressed, I'm saying ACAB. Dance with the Devil, devil don't change, devils changes you.
Fuck the police. Disband the entire force and create a new community emergency response team, with embedded officers, journalists amd/or civilian oversight, paramedics and social workers. And make sure all of which report to different people/departments.
The loss of trust in our government is at least 50% their fault. Business's breaking the social contract and politicians kicking cans instead of governing Def cover the rest.
Man, some days I consider bailing out. I'm a physics PhD and I have no interest in doing a postdoc anytime in the future. I'm on my fifth year as a university teacher under temporary contracts. You know, the two year ones, with no stability and no growth potential... And I basically see no way out. There are colleagues in my department who are going on their tenth year, with no tenure position in sight (last opening in my university was in 2014, and not only for physics, for all departments!). Publishing under these conditions is not really ideal, as us temporary teachers are the ones which get the most classes to teach. At least the salary is better than a postdoc position. But honestly I see no future, no possibility of growth or change... I may be one of your competitors in the next police exam if things don't change lol.
@@johnsmoak8237 I'm a teacher also; I tell this ^^ to my students, because often no one else will. We do calculations on how much school will cost you, vs what kind of salary you might receive. Much simpler math than needed to get into college, but not enough folks do it.
@@tetrazole567 Unfortunately, no.
We're seeing this across all jobs that if you break down cost of living in (whatever city, throw a dart at the board) that the salary you're earning against the expenses of rent, utilities, food, and other bills is leaving people with basically nothing for themselves to even save.
We're experiencing an unprecedented crisis of compensation today, and there isn't an excuse that it's the depression. It's that all the money is going up and never, ever coming back down.
The daycare cost is so real. When one of my parents was a postdoc and the other in residency, daycare put my dad in the red, needed my mom’s salary to help even it out. Eventually it got too much, they sent me back to live with my grandparents in China for a year. That certainly saved money, ha
offtopic but i love your profile picture
I just spreadsheeted out a potential Boston postdoc today, hahahaha. That's exactly what happened. The other aspect is the uncertainty of the advisor. You could get a good one, like the one you mentioned. You can also get a sociopath, like my first PhD advisor. I've already turned down a few PIs that looked and talked like sociopaths. Many are out there. We get locked into a non-negotiable deal for 2-3 years, with little knowledge of what we're walking into.
Why would anybody smart take that deal....?
@@TooManyBrackets Exactly. That's why postdocs are walking away. If the PI is a sociopath - not uncommon - then it's just a scam to exploit highly skilled and specialized labor. The whole postdoc experience is even more dependent on having a good boss than a PhD experience.
@@TooManyBrackets perhaps someone like and old friend: her and her family valued academia A LOT (even though they liked to pretend to be hippies for ~the people~) and was able to get almost a free ride to a nice, liberal arts college. She chose to take one of these because it looked like a nice star on her family's "my daughter did a thing" wall, and daddy would give her money and a car and health insurance. She was also a female in STEM so got a few grants. She's now a well paid professor who likes to claim she was "so, so poor" in and post college, while she mainly ate all organic and went on trips paid for by daddy and her partner of the moment.
@@moxxibekk Aha...you mean because of stories like hers. People think they can beat the system...and as long as there are enough people motivated by that tale to join the pyramid it will continue. Academia like being an actor in Hollywood movies is a glamour profession.
@@TooManyBrackets yeah, and also people may be more likely to take these if they have family to fall back on financially (also like Hollywood)
My mother is a tenured professor and has been for the entire time I've been alive. Her position pays well but the culture of overwork and unpaid work is so toxic it never ends. Even if you get a tenured position, how are you going to maintain your personal work life balance while you're asking your grad students and postdocs to forgo theirs for poverty wages? You don't. You're also going to overwork.
She loved her research but it doesn't change that her work hours kept her absent and now that research funding has dried up she's realizing how little she did to cultivate other parts of her life. Academia just seems like an endless grind in service to an antiquated ideal of what a university used to mean.
I don't mean to come off as an anti intellectual, I just think the system is totally busted
Why would you overwork yourself once you have tenure? That's the whole point of tenure that you don't have to overwork yourself or bend over backward to hit unreasonable external expectations once you have it. She didn't have to do that, she WANTED to do that.
I was pretty furious when I read a Forbes list on least stressful jobs and they named university professor as the #1 least stressful
@@captainspirou Those magazine lists are based on their readers' OPINIONS, not on any sort of objective research. I would trust Cosmopolitan's list of "The Ten Best Ways to Please Your Man" more than anything in Forbes
@@gavinjenkins899 gavin bro, I keep seeing you in the comment sections of a few of acollierastro's vids. You always have this *interesting* opinion to espouse, usually directly opposing the perspective presented in the video. I'm not disagreeing nor agreeing with what you're saying, I just want to know what exactly you're getting out of this? do you believe you have a "duty" to ensure propriety, or that many of these people simply "aren't getting it" and that you're helping?
In this case you're pointing at a "logical flaw". Does this make you feel better? Have you fundamentally changed the discussion around the (please notice the quotes) "exploitation of postdocs" in society? I'm just interested.
@@AryadevChavali I watched like 3 or 4 videos, got fed up with how she has a trend of saying random super negative, confidently wrong stuff about topics she isn't expert in (the actual physics content seems all good to me, just not AI etc) and then commented as such in those 2 or 3 videos. And then stopped watching more and have been replying to those who replied back to me since then. I'm confused what you think comment sections SHOULD be used for if not discussing the content/topic of videos.....?
I'm a PhD candidate in Mechanical Engineering. I made a (liveable, before the pandemic) slave wage, with mostly subsidized health insurance and free tuition. Why would I want to do a post doc for $50k when I can go straight to a job in my field for $110k? I gain nothing, unless I absolutely wanted to be a professor. And after seeing the culture, it's really not for me
I think having the privilege of seeing your name in print is really appealing to a lot of people. But I sated that need already when I worked as a blogger and a freelance reporter for my local area.
I would say 90k to 110k range cause the company will require you industry experience but it's still way more than a post-doc. You do a post-doc in the rare circumstance when you already have a job lined up. I have a friend that did his PhD in mechanical engineering, travelled around the word thanks to the PhD just doing internships. Returned to the states and got a job at on of the best research labs in California. He is making probably 200k - 300k, his skills were so unique he got the just in a government position being an international. That's the caliber you need to be at to make money as a PhD
I am a full successful professor (science) at a UK University in my 50s. But there is no way I would enter this sector as a younger scientist now. Your observation of difficulties in Post-Doc hiring is real. We also have Universities full of professors in their late 60s who will not retire. So there are no new positions and there has been a vacuum of hiring we have not seen before probably stretching over the last 10 years. Thank-you for making this video. I am in the UK but I would say the same problems exist here. Meanwhile we have woefully under-qualified (mentally) VCs making poor institutional decisions to justify their newly elected positions. Don't think of academia as an ivory tower of achievement, think of it as the most poorly run example of a 'business' you can possibly imagine.
I just left a comment on your "the adjunct problem" video saying "I left my PhD program ABD because I was forced to acknowledge how bad the situation is getting... this was over three years ago and it still tears me up inside".
I was at Kansas State University in Manhattan, KS. I just felt that the coincidence merited the redundancy.
Thank you for your kindness and the cogency of your message.
I love videos that weigh ethically murky quandaries. As someone who isn't in academia and didn't pursue a PhD, it feels like professors have no choice but to continue perpetuating the current system. Publish or perish, even if it's at the expense of your own morals.
It's kind of like saw...nobody tells you that you need to do it, they just trap you in a situation until you realise that that is the only way.
What I heard from all the professors at my school: *publish or perish.* School pushed it heavily, too.
@@squaredcircle9009 But that is the thing..."Publish or Perish" is a cliche with 30-40 years of history...but they don't say WHERE you have to publish...because different journals in different fields count very differently. Many have 0 value whatsoever and you need to be an insider to know which are the best ones and what their preferences are e.g. in some fields don't event try to publish in a good journal with less than 20k data points. Also for many journals it literally takes years and several rounds of revision - that's writing the same thing over and over again - before the dammed thing gets published...Then you have naming order...depending on the field there are lengthy fights over who's name goes where on each paper. You either fight your corner or... if you are unlucky it no longer counts as one of your papers at all...but the big big thing...is workload...Yes they say "Publish or Perish" but where you get the time to do that with modern loading is unclear...people are happy to give you loads of teaching, loads of marking loads of admin...but at the end of the year say "What? You've only published those few papers?!! Lazy people like you don't deserve a place in the academy." Meanwhile they know very very well that if it wasn't for people like you, they would have to have done that work themselves.
Capitalism has a way of doing that. Self perpetuating slog of misery.
This doesn't look murky at all to me. It's quite clear that being a postdoc is the wrong choice for almost everyone.
I did my PhD at cern and it was crazy seeing folks doing close to if not more than 10 years of postdoc and moving around the world with wife and kids.
What are you up to now?
I was a physicist at NASA for awhile and now am a senior physicist at a DOE lab.
Speaking about PhDs at CERN. I happened to know, that your financial comfort in the process heavily depends on your country of origin. You mostly don't work for CERN directly, you're a PhD in some university in France/Germany/.../you-name-it, and just come to CERN for shifts, meetings, etc.
When I worked in Russia, students were very hyped to get into such projects, cause money one was getting, while at CERN, were more than enough and one could make good savings (up to buying a car, which was not that easy with the average salary in academia). From the other side, working in Germany I learned, that although the CERN is still very prestigious, doing a PhD here is financially difficult for locals, cause your money support won't increase a cent, while your life costs are growing dramatically. I mean, in some circumstances doing your PhD at CERN might be quite a crazy idea, too 😅
People in CERN, who are golden are staff. The rest are happy with their science and mission, I guess.
I wanted to go to CERN since I was a kid but these stories are bringing my motivations to even go to graduate school 😓
If you're from a member state (so a country that funds CERN in europe) or even if not, you should really look into the CERN Summer Student program! It's for if you have finished your third year of undergraduate or doing a masters, and it's honestly a ton of fun + means you are more likely to work at CERN in the future.
And honestly, from the people I talked to there, their salaries were good. A lot of jobs are temporary to give chances to people from all over europe, but from a temporary post you can sometimes find a permanent one. Plus it's an amazing culture.
Dream on!!
I was PhD tracked after my BS, had everything ready to go. I watched a UA-cam Video about the opportunity cost of 5 years in school on a 23k stipend, and the math just doesnt check out. I ended up backing out and jumping straight into industry, I still got my higher education as I am doing my M.S. part time (Paid for by my employer), and I make almost 4 times what my friends doing their PhDs are making now, its criminal. I can see this will ultimately decline the amount of people that pursue PhDs, and it wont get better until they actually get paid.
I am also thinking about getting an MS at some point. I already made a bad decision with getting my bachelor’s(lots of debt now, even when graduating early) so I can’t afford to go back to school.
Mazel-tov! My sons are following the same path. They are working full time and doing grad school remotely and online. By the time they hit 30, they'll each have a graduate school degree and at least 5 years of work experience each.
The University doesn't care how much you make afterwards. They care how much they can make off of you
I’ve been bingeing your videos over the past few days and I think one of the reasons I find them so compelling is your compassion. Your compassion for the tomato, the cleaning service, the makers of the Morbius movie, and those who are exploited by academia. Your video on adjuncts too, it was lovely. And so, speaking of compassion and adjuncts, I would love to hear you talk about those Malazan books behind you! (Love the lord of the rings video too!) In any case, cheers!
Second a malazan talk
Hearing her describe post doc and describe how brutal and exploitative it is really made me shook as a resident doing pretty much the same thing lol. I guess we have the bonus of a more certain job market afterwards but still 4 years of this treatment is brutal.
I honestly wonder if being a GP is the way to go
I'm a PhD student, and I come from a home with 3 generations of academics. My dad saw all of this happening, looked at me, and basically forbade me from doing a postdoc. If I really want to do it, just join a startup, ideally one which a professor is engaged with, if not a direct founder and executive. The second option is working at a national lab if I just love academic research that much. Otherwise, I should do what he did and spend a decade or so in industry before returning to academia.
@@cannaroe1213 My main fields are electrochemistry, molecular physics, materials science, and chemical engineering. But my work is quite evenly split between theoretical and experimental work. And the theoretical side has required me to start learning all I can about CS related topics.
@@cannaroe1213 I'm learning that the hard way LOL. Don't get me wrong, I'm having fun. It's just difficult to teach myself all of these things. Trying my best not to fall into the trap of tutorial hell.
@@me0101001000what're you working on? I'm a chemical engineering undergrad doing some Computational Catalysis work rn
Good points! As a grad student doing my Ph.D. I found this super helpful! There are other things too that I would like to add. Specifically, the publish or perish culture. A lot of people end up taking postdocs because they want to get their publications up. But the reality is that publishing even in a decent journal is a very difficult proposition. You might work hard for 6 months on a project and labour over how to write it up for publication. Once submitted to a journal you might not hear back from them for months. And then it can get rejected for trivial reasons such as reviewers don't share the same sentiment about your research, not enough explanation etc etc.. So you might end up doing lot of work, but because it has not been published you will have little or nothing to show for it, this perpetually keeping you in the post doc loop.
Great point. I do feel if postdoc positions were more permanent (maybe 7 years instead of three??) you would be guaranteed time to actually get research done.
As it stands you spend the first year of your postdoc finishing up papers from your PhD and your 3rd year applying for jobs so you really only have one year to do research.
Good luck with your PhD!
@@acollierastro Agreed! Best of luck on your job hunt!
Not to mention you will never get paid a single dime for any of the papers you work so hard on and do manage to get published. You probably won't even own the copyrights to the research or the writing. You don't even get to have the copyrights on your own PhD paper.
@@almishti that's not the point of publishing papers though. They're not patents or commercial products, and never were intended that way. You do own the rights to the pre-prints and can send the accepted version to anyone by request as per most journal's policies.
Organize start a union , get help from the European student union. Phd and postdocs in Europe are treated much better. One can live on the salary, benefits and job security is much better.
One of the problems with US unions is that management aren't allowed in the Union, pitting management against workers. Whereas in Europe managers belong to the same trade union as their employees. If the workers are payed better, then the union will get better working conditions for the managers too. Solidarity is what got the US good wages in the 20th century, we became complacent and Reganism put dioxin inthe union soil.
My oldest brother works in the army, and he has to uproot every one to three years. He knew that would be a big ask from a partner, so when he found someone who was down for it, he married her quicktime. But even tho there is the challenge of having to move often, the army pays the moving expenses, covers the costs if they have to temporarily own two houses, comes with reeeeaaally good family benefits, opportunities for education advancement (they pay my brother to get a masters degree), and a good salary. If a job is going to require you to move that often, they better have some really strong pros to back up such a big ask.
The army has to do a much harder job of convincing people to join than a post doc seems to need. Look at all their ads.
Yeah, about that, I had attended six schools by the time I entered the fifth grade. Thanks Army...
"Sick of being exploited by academia? Join the imperialism industry!"
Interesting comparison. So one pathway requires one to run the significant risk of sacrificing their life. And on the other hand, there’s the army.😂
@@samiamgreeneggsandham7587 depends what job they have in the army. 90% of the military is support and a lot of it doesn’t require you to go overseas for combat. My friend works in the marines and all he does is work in an office lmao and he’s being paid to go to college
Yep about the last point. When I tell professors that I don't intend to be a professor, they are shocked: "Why on earth would anyone not want an amazing job like ours?!?". I reply, "Because ruthlessly exploiting others is mandatory for a professor, while I have no taste for that." These professors just gasp, screech and panic. Hilarious every time. One of these times it was on my presentation for a panel of world-class academics that evaluated my research center. They got so mad that they devoted an entire paragraph of their evaluation report to me, like: "Your researchers are delusional about the academic environment worldwide". That's how deep in denial these profs are.
great liar detected
I think this mentality exists because of a selection/survivorship bias: those that got lucky and successfully deluded themselves will continue to stay in academia while telling themselves that academia is the best, while those that don’t buy the lie already left academia.
And everyone clapped
I just discovered your channel. After listening to your string theory video, I landed here. You are the first person I saw on YT discussing this. You presented the great frustration every single one of us has giving it full justice, congratulations! Most academics I speak to just look at me as if I was crazy when I vent about this like you did in the video. I graduated last year from my PhD and stayed to work as a postdoc with my PhD avdisor while I was trying to convince myself to do the scary jump and quit. I recently resigned from the postdoc even though I have been told by many that, given my talent, I belong to academia. My last paper was published in Nature last month and this month I have been awarded three important prizes for my PhD research. Even though it hurts leaving, the academic job marlet is a joke and will hurt my private life too much on the long run. Next month I'll start my new job in the real world....
yeah, mine was published on the cover of Nature, wasted two years in postdoccing, happier in industry. I realized after a while NorCal labs were crammed with permanent postdocs with tons of high level pubs
I’m in the exact situation you gave in the example in the video. I did my post doc in chemistry at MIT right after I finished my phd, and convinced my wife to leave her high paid job to go with me. So we left cali and came to Boston. Life was tough with low income and high rent. And worst, I didn’t see the light in the tunnel. So I gave up my chemistry research career and moved into IT. Maybe I’m lucky, I bumped my salary from 48K to 300 K within 2 years. And I’m so happy I made that decision , otherwise, I might still be stuck in that post doc infinite loop.
Congratulations, this really is inspiring to hear!
Did your wife ever recover her career losses? What is she making now?
I quit my Ph.D. program 7 years ago because I saw the writing on the wall. I looked at the salaries offered at postdoc positions. I worked with postdocs in the lab and saw the squalor by which they carried themselves. I don't mean this in a bad way to them. I'd have been exactly the same way if I had been subjected to that kind of work environment. My advisor ran on the whole notion of being tough and doing the proper thing and whatnot, telling students that his fiancee died during his ph.d. studies and yet he continued, as if I'd somehow be inspired by that. Quite the opposite. It had this undertone of "you better be able to handle a whole lot worse." These kinds of positions, this kind of chaotic lifestyle worked in an environment that once had stronger systemic support structures, safety nets, etc. Things were more affordable as less money was being funneled away to corporate coffers and raising shareholder value. The risk of uprooting your life and moving from place to place was so much lower. That lifestyle CANNOT exist without strong societal support.
Sadly a lot of foreigners can't get into industry as they need visa sponsorship but postdoc is the easiest to get into and has great promise of preparing you for getting an academic job such as professorship
Yes this is a huge problem. It means that international workers are being exploited on more than one level.
Undoubtedly. I as a postdoc ( in one of the top 10 university in world ranking) was made to work double than my colleagues on the account that my visa was tied with that position ( I was the only foreigners). I was questioned when I had covid and I couldn't come to lab. At last, I gathered enough courage and left it, left the country.
@@acollierastro In other news, water is wet.
@@acollierastro But isn't that happening in a lot of fields right now? Nursing for sure. Now teaching. But in IT and software, the independent contractors are often H1 visa holders- they have little to no job security.
This system is a race to the bottom, where even the foreigner will turn down the position eventually.
@@acollierastro Yup. The only reason I took up a postdoc that was 4,300 miles away was because of the work permit. Didn't even consider the pay. I was lucky to survive in 3 sequential postdoc positions because the professor was an emotionally manipulative abusive narcissist with an Elon Musk complex. So you'd be right that I only did it for the opportunities, except those opportunities were all immigration status related - shortly after becoming permanent resident, I quit academia altogether because by that point there was really nothing in the whole sector that I found compelling enough to warrant staying.
Heres the thing about academia, at least in a historic sense: it's not supposed to be a career. Its supposed to be a hobby.
Look at Newton, Gauss, Euler, Fermat, Tycho Brahe, Bohr, Lorentz, Röntgen, Becquerel, etc, all of them had either rich or, at least, rich enough parents and political contacts to be able to have enough spare time to do academic work.
Academia has only become a profession in the late 20th century. It has not changed in a structural way. It's still something you do INSTEAD OF work. The fact some positions are paid for research now is something new. There's a reason the stereotype of the philosopher prince exists: that was what academia was for centuries, if not millennia.
And people lived in caves for more millenia.
If you want quality work by educated people at your demand, you should pay them fairly. Otherwise have your rich philosophers do the research for you at their time. Why promise a career and exploit passion for profits, let's see how quickly research happens if only the select few geniuses with money did the research.
Physical data collection, analysis and repairing something broken by understanding it is still a human faculty, why require PhD for a menial job with menial pay?
When I was a Masters student more than a decade ago, I had the option of becoming a programmer and making a shit ton of money, or continue to subsist on ramen for another 4-5 years while being totally dependent on the whims of an advisor. I already knew a few PhD students who had lost the spark of joy in what they did daily. I chose the sensible option, and though I often think about going back and doing that PhD, the rational side of my brain reminds me that I'd be stupid to abandon what I have right now. I like what I do and get paid a decent amount for doing this. I know what PhD students make and I know what postdocs make. It is all a scam.
I moved to the US from British academia to be closer to family. British academia isn't perfect, but you have a good pension and are paid okay relative to the cost of living. When I moved to the US, I was shocked at how little you made as a postdoc. For a number of other reasons (including the institution) I was absolutely miserable and unhappy, and left after only 9 months to go into industry. And oh boy, I have never been happier! I earn almost 3x the amount of compensation with far more career mobility on a team that I enjoy being a part of. And I work fewer hours! My advice to anyone who feels 'stuck' in academia is just to make a change. There are soooo many opportunities out there for people with your talent and dedication it's unbelievable. So many academics shun or look down on industry or other career paths -- but the reality is that people in academia are in the minority. PS, this was actually in Boston, so I feel the pain.
Yep that's the way it is right now. Academia has a LOT of dead weight but very little of it is performance based. The sports coaches and the researchers are performance based, so they get worked like dogs. But only one of those two gets payed accordingly, the other is playing a lottery where they hope to perhaps make some major breakthrough but the number of people playing that game has grown exponentially while the number of major scientific breakthroughs left to make gets smaller and smaller.
Unless you're a postdoc in London during the cost of living crisis. Also, in practice there's no such thing as tenure in British academia. After my 3rd postdoc, when I got promoted to "permanent" academic staff, I was faced with a potentially infinite number of lecturer positions that were essentially postdocs in all but name. Same responsibilities of a postdoc but now with a draconian publication target and a teaching load.
What industry?
@@robertduluth8994 I work in R&D in pharma. Pharma and biotech are the two big ones. There are also CROs (contract research organizations) and various suppliers. Each of these will have its own unique feel and pros/cons. There are also non-profit options (although I wouldn't class them as 'industry' per se).
Anecdotally, I'm pretty sure these numbers are much worse in the humanities. I lucked into a FT position my first year out of grad school or I would not be in academia. I have friends who are just now starting FT positions, EIGHT years after grad school--that runway is way too long, especially on postdocs paying 30-40k instead of the 50 estimated in this video. Thanks for breaking this down so clearly.
Oh lords this rings true. I was a postdoc in the UK, decent (for academia) pay, really great group, but I felt I stalled out. Then I moved to North America, the working conditions dropped like a stone, and I am now looking at a nice, comfy industrial position in a few months time.
I really, really, really love my research . I really, really, really, hated having to do it at a university. I have five generations of academics to look back on, I really wanted to become a professor, and I do feel like I am betraying myself by quitting. But staying would be worse.
This was so depressing and hilarious at the same time. I binge this like it was an opening day at Oppenheimer in 70mm. Thank you for the lols and hope you are okay
Really appreciate this video and the comments. I'm one-and-a-half years deep into a 2-year postdoc in the social sciences (I write about debt). I was on track to start another postdoc for a 1-year contract since I haven't succeeded in the academic job market.
This past week, I got an industry job offer starting at 130k (with amazing benefits), double my postdoc salary. However, I've had such a hard time deciding to leave academia because my identity has been so wrapped up in it.
Reading through these comments and taking a step back to consider academic labour conditions has made the decision to leave universities easier.
This channel is going to get big! Academia in general doesn't make a lot of sense right now. Why sacrifice your financial future and time with your family for a narrowing and under-appreciated career path? Why sacrifice those for anything??
looks like you hitting a life crisis with what you love doing and reality. Same for me. I love doing research but I had the same thoughts when I started my PhD. How is this supposed to work? I feel being lied to. I feel tricked but at the same time I just want to do research. It really crushed me these to contradicting parts and needs in side of me. Its not worth sacrificing your total life for a job. Thats insane. Still haven't figured out what to do. Things should change...
I hope things do change! I know a lot of people are leaving so perhaps that will inspire change for a future generation of researchers.
If it helps I do not regret my PhD at all and I have found fulfilling research in industry. Leaving academia was weird but now that I am out I know I made the right decision.
Man, this hit so hard... you're 100% correct about your sense of post-docs being like an MLM. I looked at opportunity costs while mid-PhD and decided to "pursue other opportunities" outside academia. It's so exploitative and gross, modern-day indentured servitude.
Edited to add: at 27:35 my experience was so similar, more or less universally and regardless of what I was trying to accomplish. I'm not proud of it, but at one point I let my frustration get the best of me and asked someone, "Okay... so, just for my own reference, what the fuck do you actually do here?"
I have a very short fuse for such situations, my immediate answer would be along the line of "I won't do your job for you".
Thank you for this video. I currently work on my family farm and download videos to listen to during the workday, and your videos have provided excellent educational content that is intellectually challenging yet easy for a novice physicist to understand. I’d love to continue my education someday but I worry about the cost/benefit analysis of going back into academia; videos like this help with decisions that will be integral to my future, and certainly for the futures of other viewers.
Thank you for what you do.
This depressed me because it was a largely a recap of what drove my decision to stay out of academia (despite a PhD and a being a descendant of multiple generations of tenured professors, not like I didn't know the option). The depressing part was that I made the decision in the 1980's and 90's (I'm in engineering, it's not necessarily a one-time decision there.)
The pandemic effects are a new complication, but even then, when student loan loads were lower and tenure track positions more numerous, the only advantage to a post-doc was a headstart getting on the publication hamster wheel.
I will also second the conclusion that the Ivy League way oversells their cachet, at least from industry's point of view. I have decades of visibility now in the industry side of hiring decisions and the marginal advantage of Ivy League is tiny. Harvard or Yale might get you a few more interviews right at graduation, but you'll be in the same salary band as the ones who got decent grades and in-state tuition at their local public university, and probably net less after loan payments. (This is true for STEM; maybe for some other disciplines [law?] it could be different.) My advice is to pick the school you can afford--if you can get a full scholarship at an elite school, that's fantastic, but if your choice is to pay by mortgaging the house you don't own yet, you're way better off at your local Wassamatta U with tuition you can pay as you go.
At the PhD level, it gets more complex because of specialization. In my specific esoteric area of expertise, there are a dozen state universities I'd rank above any Ivy League school. That's because they have faculty who've chosen to specialize in particular topics (and chances are I know them; sub-specialties in science and engineering are amazingly small communities.) Pick your graduate school based on what the professor and who they know.
"Is your job just emailing out relevant PDF's to make everyone else do your work?"
You know, you run into these types across all industries, and I feel like we all collectively just need to sacrifice them on an altar.
Agree, but I think in industry there's an understanding that each person has a specific role to fulfill, and they don't have time to do your job for you.
@@jasonquigley2633
Okay, but if you mail out PDFs explaining your supposed work to others and try to get them to do your work, its the others that don't have time to do your slop, jason, so stop being a whiny slacker and do your job :P
@@fy8798??? I wasn't defending this practice. You do your own work, you don't ask others to do it for you (unless you're a manager, and it's your job to delegate).
Which god would be happy with such a sacrifice?
I worked 3 years ago for a company that refused to offer a flexible/remote schedule for a job that absolutely didn't require physical presence. They paid ~$31,000 in the heart of Tempe, Arizona (right near ASU), but it was my first salaried job as an artist. I literally moved into my SUV and one of the "benefits" they gave me was the ability to park my car in the company lot at night while I slept in it. I lived in my SUV for 379 days while I worked full-time, also doing gig-work during the weekends in a coffee shop. The whole time I felt like they were doing me this massive favor by letting me sleep in my car every night instead of them just paying me a fucking livable wage (after I left, I found out the person two positions above me was making $350,000 before bonuses). Large organizations get away with this shit because there are just enough people like me who need the work and are willing to throw themselves under the bus for what they perceive to be a star on a resume. I'm nearly 34 now and probably beyond the point where I'll ever be able have kids because I'll be too old by the time I can afford it. I'll be lucky if I ever make enough to lease a house at this rate.
Fortunately, my partner is going into the medical field, so at least one of us has job security. I guess the joke is on me for being such a hopelessly optimist artist in late-stage capitalism.
Yep, late-stage capitalism sure loves to sh*t on us "geriatric" millennials (whoever coined that phrase needs to be publicly shamed) when the reason we "killed" an industry is almost always because we couldn't afford it.
I never wanted kids, but I don't see it happening even if I did. The reality is that parenthood is out of reach for a lot of us (unless they do what my other 8 siblings do and just keep pumping out babies and staying on government assistance).
I know a PhD getting an NIH fellowship as the fellowship review committee read he published in "Cell" (the premier journal), while he published it in "Cells". Dude is a Harvard postdoc now. Prestige is worth a sack of peanuts.
😂
🤣 🤣 🤣
😂
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
😂
Felt pretty smug watching this as a med student until I remembered residency
Amen
I appreciate the things you are saying about the postdoctoral route, and compensation in academia generally. Some of it corresponds to my experience, though there are also some differences. I definitely empathize with the temporary lifestyle that graduate school and a postdoc brings.
Having run that gauntlet, I would just like to say a few things.
The situation of postodocs is unfortunate, and I'm not trying to sugar coat it. But there are a few things that one could do to optimize it, at least.
First, there are a variety of job opportunities with distinct pros and cons. For example, if you get a postdoc at a national lab, the pros include a higher salary (often substantially higher than academic postdocs), the potential to become a full-time hire (this comes with a major pay bump as well, with regular cost of living raises and merit increases, though ymmv), very nice Federal benefits, decent work-life balance, etc. The cons include being subject to mercurial funding issues like Congressional squabbling (eg., furloughs happened when the gov't shut down in 2018-19), having to deal with constant and very frustrating red tape/paperwork/delays/busy-work (this is true of any Federal job), being in a more sterile environment that lacks the youthful energy/creativity universities have, and so on. Every national lab is different, and I've personally worked in some capacity at 2 different ones over the years, so I can say the pros and cons are quite different from one national lab to the next. Some pay be better fits than others. But still, based on the items you brought up in this video, I suspect a national lab postdoc might have been a better fit for you personally. (There are also industrial postdocs, which sound like they would pay even more, but I don't know anything about those personally.)
Second, people who are interested in industry should identify that goal as soon as possible. It's the most direct route to somewhat permanent, well-paid life which may or may not feature good work-life balance. It's generally known which companies are slave-drivers and which are good to work for, so it's possible to aim at the latter if it's a priority. As you laid out nicely in your video, time is money when it comes to the decision of going into industry.
Third, even if your goal is to become a tenure-track professor, there's no rule that you have to go into it right away, as long as you continue to publish in the meantime. In my case, I was able to work in higher-paying jobs for awhile to amass considerable savings, before circling back around and getting an academic position at an R1. Now, in a sense, I have my cake and eat it too: I have my dream job as a professor, meanwhile the growth of my investment portfolio covers the academic salary penalty.
Fourth, and this is only an opinion, but I think that one can only come to recognize the good things about academia after having stepped away from it. Outside of the ivory tower, people are often more interested in filling out checklists than satisfying curiosities. It sounds cliche, but it really is true. Working in a national lab, I really missed standing in front of a white board with several interested coworkers puzzling out some esoteric detail or devising some apparatus, with people yelling out suggestions, joshing around, having fun. It's a lot of work, and it's underpaid, but it's also your lived experience for however many hours per week, what is that worth in USD? For me, it was worth a pretty substantial pay cut. But what I'll say is, once you've made enough money to be alright, then it stops being so much of a priority and you can start caring more about how you're actually spending your time. (And that doesn't necessarily mean everyone wants to spend it in academia. I'm a sample size of 1.)
It's hard to boil this down to actual advice, for someone just now applying for a phd program or graduating from one, but what I would wholeheartedly recommend is for people in these positions to contact an organization like the ACS, ask to be connected to mentors who are further along in their career. Just bounce some ideas off these people in terms of career goals. They will have some insight about how different career routes really are, what goals are realistic or fanciful, what specific action plans would be to optimize the chances of realizing a particular career plan, what non-standard career paths are available, etc. I'm active in my local branch of the ACS and this in my opinion is the most important resource it offers younger people.
Thank you for expressing publicly what many graduate students, postdocs, and adjuncts say to each other in private all the time. The public needs to know, and so do those students who are made to feel guilty or lazy for being annoyed or feeling loathing for the institutional exploitation and runaround, the BS that we don't have to pay you as much because you love your work (also a line used to excuse bad teacher pay in schools).
Very true and accurate! I moved across the world to do a postdoc, even though I made great friends, it was the wrong lab I realised at the end. I am now in industry. As much as I would like to have my own lab, I will not go back to academia unless things change. I also experienced bullying in academia, which is never addressed and is common. Also what put me off is if I got an assistant professor position, you are kind of stuck with limited opportunity to move or change positions or institutions!
This hit the feels hard.
The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was moving from the UK after my PhD to a prestigious US (public) university. The reasons are numerous, like the ones you mentioned low pay ($42K a year in 2014, in the SF Bay Area, competing with techbros for apartments), moving costs etc. Plus I ended up in a really bad academic environment and that did not help my career (directly).
I am now in Australia, and while I am still "just" a post-doc, I am much happier. I am paid a good salary ($100k AUD), live in the nicest, cleanest, most friendly place I have ever lived and my career is (mostly) going well. After years of pain, it lead to a great discovery with publication, I now (co-)supervise two PhD students (who are great) and I am teaching a class (which I am finding really enjoyable).
Is academia and doing post-docs an MLM: yes. And I am the sucker that is deep into it. But in Australia, I find it a lot better than in the US (or UK).
"SF Bay Area"
@@cuthbertallgood7781 So my point was more generic that life as a post-doc in academia in America is harder than it should be, and there was no additional help for being in an expensive area like the SF Bay Area (as there is additional pay for living/working in London in the UK). But the problems I had were not purely because of where I lived and when I have travelled around other parts of the USA, I cannot say that any other part of it was more appealing. The stats back this up, with Mississippi literally have more than twice the rate of infant mortality than CA. CA is at least a developed country, unlike many parts of the USA. The nicest part of the USA I visited wasn't even in the content (Hawaii). But in contrast, I am in Perth, Australia, which according to many in this country is the backwards, small rural town part of Australia. But in reality it is a beautiful, civilised place that is a pleasure to work and life in, and across the whole country, post-docs are paid a good salary that allows them to live with dignity. Not easily achieved in any part of the USA on a post-doc salary, and that is a SHAME!
@@cuthbertallgood7781 And to quote Lucille Bluth:
"I’d rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona"
Can I ask where in Australia do you live? I'm a student in Adelaide (1st year) and I wonder if it's the same across the states.
@@williamdang137 I am in Perth, WA but I have colleagues in South Australia and everything there seems the same and is healthy. Sydney is where I think even the generous postdoc salaries in Australia can get stretched thin but pretty good across the country.
This is an absolutely devastating takedown of the postdoc trap. Well done.
This is why I took a “leave of absence” from my PhD program after three years to go to Navy officer candidate school. Out of ~400 in my class, well over half had masters or doctorates. I ended up finishing my degree on the government’s dime (years later, granted), retired from my naval career after 23 years, and was young enough to start a second career. Plus, I escaped departmental budget wars (well, university departmental budget wars, anyway), being treated as an indentured servant, and a future that you are describing.
As someone who is likely going to be leaving their current program with an MS, thank you for making this video. I’ve been disillusioned to a lot of the crap and it’s not fun. It’s already difficult having to deal with not finding fulfillment in your research but then having to witness all the other BS makes it worse. I’m hoping to either change programs or get out and not look back because I have grown sick of a lot of the crap in my field/academia for years.
I just want to comment that I went through the exact same thought process and came to the exact same conclusions after applying for postdocs in late 2021 and being rejected for all of them. It was, without a doubt, the best thing that has happened to me on my 10 year academic journey in high energy physics. It made me see academia for what it truly is and I'm really happy that I've found a new career in a national lab doing R&D. It's been a night and day difference between how academia treats me as an employee (and human) to my current lab, including a real 2023 adjusted living wage and work-life balance. It's great to know that we as PhDs and PDs are waking up and realizing our market value.
What is R&D?
@@bradjiokba1396 Research and development
@@bradjiokba1396Research and Development
Late comment, but what sort of work did you do in high energy physics? Mostly theoretical? How did you use the skills you developed in high energy physics to get a job in the industry?
@@bradjiokba1396 Research and Development
Man, I was so lucky. My mentor helped me get a few of interviews with his professor friends. They dispelled the mystique of post-grad and PhD work real fast. Another one of my mentors called her PhD "just a membership card." If I went after a PhD, I'd have set myself back a decade: 4+ years of schooling for a PhD, 4+ years of post-doc work trying to get a professor position, no chance of a family or home or stability. Instead, within that first 4 years, I've been promoted twice and make six figures. There is no possible way the PhD could ever be worthwhile. The value will never catch up. I can literally just go get a PhD later, after retirement, for fun if I want.
It's so funny this was recommended to me, my partner has a postdoc in boulder at the moment (probably where you went). We're a little luckier in that I work from home, so I could actually follow her without quitting my job, and I earn a lot more than her (engineer in industry), but even still money is tight given the cost of living here compared to what we're used to especially given our savings goals. Renting our 3 bedroom house costs 30% more than buying a 5 bedroom house on 5x the land where we're from, and groceries are nearly double the price. I can't imagine living here on 1 income. She also hates the job.
I've been trying to convince her to apply like crazy so we can leave ASAP and stop wasting money on rent, buy a house, etc, but the mindset of needing a good postdoc to get a good professorship can be hard to get away from. I don't know anyone could ever make this work without outside financial support (my income), which is insane because she has a PhD. Twice the schooling, half the income. Insanity.
I wish I had found this video sooner! It puts into words why I left academia way better than I ever could have. I've been struggling with guilt over "selling out" ever since, but seeing this video is a great reminder of just how bad academia was. My life is so much better now than if I had stayed.
Thank you for your honesty. It's refreshing to hear someone articulate my thoughts so eloquently. I've been delaying entering the real world for so long. Much appreciated!
Academia is where you get the best minds working on the most complex problems, solving them for the first time in the world, and then you pay them a sustenance wage.
And every other job supports them and gets zero credit for it.
I grew up dirt poor. My first contract research position in/after undergrad paid me twice as much as my family had growing up. Going into grad school, I figured be financially comfortable because of this (the position had been DOE/DOD). It was only a few months of living in a decent-sized city on grad student pay that I realized I had made a huge mistake in not just going into industry.
Man i have no idea how expensive stuff is in the US, so when i saw 50 000 i was like "oh that's pretty big" because here in france rent for a one bedroom appartment in the center of the biggest city can be as low as 400/500 euros, so when you wrote 2000 for a one bedroom appartment en 4000 for daycare i almost fell from my chair
2k is for expensive big cities.
Your description of a university taking the lectures and materials of a staff member who had passed away and using them to deliver the course throughout the pandemic literally happened in Australia. I'm so heartened to see that some STEM people actually get it. In my undergrad, economics was such a struggle whenever a STEM person had chosen a humanities elective.
What a powerful video essay. My best friend was manipulated by this very same system. Took him 10 years to become a professor at a good school. But during that time, i bought a house. 2 nice cars had 2 kids, and I started my own business (with 2 other fellow graduates). My best friend was, at the 10 year mark, renting a room in Boston above some old lady.
Thanks for sharing
I never got to that point of being a post-doc because I worked as an undergrad student in exciting early cancer detection research and even got that paper published along with the PI, a post-doc, a graduate student, and volunteer undergraduate. While I was getting paid an okay amount, I knew they were not getting paid much more. I was already married and with a child. I loved the research but not the constant uncertainty, so I decided to get a job in something I love and still am envolved in research in some way. I throughly enjoyed your video.
I mastered out mainly because of this problem. So stressful, I haven't met a PhD student without mental health problems. (For the case you described, single, or couples w.o. kids)
I told all my peers, "make it make sense". Because it doesnt.
Exactly I pivoted to a masters when I realized I would have been both overqualified AND undertrained for most of the jobs I wanted
I worked in the national lab system (linked to a number of Universities) in Australia for many years. I don't care about citation counts, etc. I'm now basically retired.
I remember our CEO coming back from a conference saying how everyone was talking about how one of our employees had proved an important theorem. I looked up the paper and discovered that our employee was SIXTH author and yet they were getting all the accolades...
My friend left Math post-doc he was stressing about for some reason (lack of progress towards full professorship) to take a chill Big Tech job in the Valley that pays 5x as much. Big Tech loves quantitative PhDs, because it's much easier to teach programming to a mathematician than math to a programmer, and there is a lot of mathematically intense code out there, especially with big data and ML. Academia is a giant scam if you care about financial security at all.
I know this video is old but I wanna share the situation in Brazil. Fresh off of a PhD, you basically have two options: a postdoc or a temporary teaching position (2 year contract). The postdoc will allow you to publish and inflate your curriculum so you can have a better chance at a tenure position, however a postdoc here is different than most places. It's basically a PhD position with a slightly larger scholarship. Depending on the funding organization you can get a higher salary, but it is in general slightly lower than a temporary teaching position. And oh, the grants for postocs here are one year plus one year (not two plus one), and you have all the (non) perks of a PhD scholarship: no paid vacation, no medical or grocery benefits (somewhat common perks to regular jobs here in Brazil), no transport expenses. It's basically an extension of your PhD for one (or two) years so you can focus on publishing your research. Then there's the temporary teaching position, where you have a decent salary plus regular benefits from a normal job here in Brazil (paid transportation, grocery benefits, a healthcare plan if you're lucky, paid vacations, the ''thirteenth'' salary as we call it lol it's an extra salary a year you receive by the year's end, also pretty common benefit in Brazil). This might seem as the better option. However, you are so overworked with teaching you basically have no time left for research, and as with the postdoc, there's no stability. Every two years you have to take another test to apply for the position again (and there's a law prohibiting you from applying to the same institution twice in a row, which honestly most institutions don't follow or else they'd be understaffed, but some do). And you never know if the position you applied for will be open again in the following years, since the government is always cutting down on university staff (I should've mentioned this before but most serious research universities in Brazil are government funded). Since tenure positions are more expensive than these temporary contracts, there has been fewer and fewer openings for tenure positions. In the university I'm currently teaching (with a temporary two year contract) there hasn't been an opening for tenure since 2014 (edit to clarify: not just in physics, in ALL departments)! Then, we see bizarre scenarios like teachers that have been on these two year contracts for 10+ years and are already doing very important research and administrative work in the university because the government won't give openings for tenure positions. And the sad thing is that the few tenure positions openings there are are often left for those more privileged who've had the financial stability to basically pay to publish by doing post-doc after post-doc and inflate their curricula. Apart from that, the other option one has is to move to very small and often isolated cities which have newly opened universities. One can often find tenure positions in these places, but even applying for the position is an investment (the last one I've seen was in a remote city north of Brazil, around 1000km away from where I live. There were three rounds of tests/interviews, each of them weeks or months apart, and were I to do them I'd have to spend around R$15k just on travel expenses, which is roughly three times my monthly salary...). Apart from that, if you work on any of the basic sciences, you are, let's say, isolated research-wise. There's no incentive to form any sort of department or laboratory in these small city universities, which are more focused on applied sciences and what we call here ''technical courses'', whose undergraduates go on to work on first line jobs in the industry. So you see a lot of PhDs stuck on these two year temporary contract positions waiting someday for the golden pot at the end of the rainbow that is the tenure position, only to see it be taken away by someone else who's had the financial privilege to basically fund their own research by doing years of post-docs around the country. It's funny cause ten years ago the situation was so different. Even in the most prestigious universities there was a lack of workforce to fill tenure positions, and the government during the 2000s offered lots of PhD scholarships, and lots of students could get their PhDs and find a tenure position right afterwards since there was little to no competition. My PhD advisor told me there was literally no one else applying for the tenure position he eventually got back in 2010. At the same time, tenure positions didn't increase at the same rate. In fact, it has been decreasing for the last few years, and there's a load of PhDs who are not going the academic route simply because there's no place for everybody. The scenario has changed so much in recent years and a traditional academic career is looking more and more like an illusion. And Brazil is not a heavily industrialized country (it has actually lost so much of its industry in the last fifty or so years due to the neoliberal takeover) that the market for PhDs outside of academia is extremely scarce. Thanks if you've read it all the way down. TLDR: the future of a PhD in Brazil is looking grimmer by the second. If that's what you want to pursue, know what you're getting into.
This video speaks to me very deeply. I'm a mathematician, and I did two postdocs, each for two years, before finally getting a tenure-track job. I did not expect how emotionally and financially taxing it would be to move every two years, uprooting my whole life repeatedly, without even knowing if my career had a long-term future.
As for the question you posed at the end, of whether professors are complicit in the exploitation of grad students and postdocs. I'm not sure, but fortunately pure mathematicians don't need grad students and postdocs to get research done. And I'm working at a teaching-oriented university, because I like teaching and because my research output was never impressive enough to get a job at an R1 - and even if it was, that's not the career I ever wanted. Our department only has masters students, not PhD students; I don't think we have postdocs either. I like where I ended up, and I think a lot of academics don't realize that there's more to academia than the high-powered R1 career path.
Some professors definitely are complicit. There is now a well documented case at Imperial College where the professor pressured a world class researcher (Stefan Grimm) into committing suicide. At many institutions you cannot rise to be head of a research dept by caring about a rotting tomato
Thanks for this video, I was very much a person biding time in a postdoc. In industry now and my mental health is vastly improved. I could not handle the precarity of postdocs, I couldn’t get out of my head the anxiety about ‘what happens next.’ My performance as a scientist went down the toilet. Now I’m thriving in industry. Looking back, depression and anxiety really sapped my ability to do work in my postdoc.
Class isn’t takes about enough in academia. I grew up middle class and I worried about money, but in grad school I was surrounded by people who didn’t really have to think about it. They didn’t act snobbish or upper class, but having that safety net changed their whole outlook.
Professors are not to blame, they are also underpaid and overworked.
So damn glad I left academia two years ago. Nowadays, one of my greatest joys is laughing at my old inbox full of publication/conference emails and sometimes reporting them as spammers.
I went to grad school in the UK and noticed that the professors (I'm not going to go through the full list of everything they go by here, let's just call them professors) were always stressed. Like all of the time, and now I have connected the dots. These men and women don't make much more than what you describe and they have to make that money go really far. Most of them are in their forties, married, with kids. So they make up the difference by writing and publishing books (called readers in the UK, or monographs if it is just one author). So on top of doing their day jobs, they are writing their books and sending them to publishers, just so they can like, go on vacation and live full lives. Pretty messed up.
The bitter reality is that there's no such thing as tenure in the UK. The lecturership positions that are supposedly "tenure track" are really just postdocs in all but name*. The professors in charge of research departments can create infinite levels of them for their staff to battle through so that they never ever obtain any position of stability.
* same responsibilities of a postdoc but with a stricter publication target and a teaching workload
3 years BSc, 2 year research MSc, 5.5 year PhD. 1 year research assistant. 3.8 years postdoc. 14 publications (STEM) started postdoc in 2018. Went "absolutely not" and and quit postdoc to get a job in the pharmaceutical industry. Love my position here, and already have a publication submitted and one in writing after a year. It's fantastic and so is the science. For the first time in years I have loved science and I don't have to worry about ridiculous admin, grants and all the insecurity, and poor pay. I won't look back to those dark days of academia.
Could I ask what you have a PhD in?
@@dream1430 The actual title is an odd one due to it being obtained in Sweden. It translates to "doctor of medicine", but is the same as any other scientific PhD elsewhere in the world. The subject was cancer drug discovery. Whether my MSc, PhX or postdoc, I always focused on cancer biology, cancer drug pharmacology or directly on cancer drug development.
I finished a BS in physics and a BS in computer science a couple weeks ago from a prestigious school. Up until my sophomore year there I had wanted to get a PhD in physics, but I started to hate academia and decided I would be better off working as a software engineer. I still have my physics textbooks (which we never finished in my classes - I don't know if this is normal) as well as other textbooks which were not required for class but are useful and interesting (Jackson's E&M, Levi-Civita's Absolute Differential Calculus, to name a few). My feelings toward academia have only gotten worse since my sophomore year, so I've decided to work full time as a software engineer and study physics, math, and language on my own time. I'm ok with doing no research - I just love learning and studying the physics.
Not finishing your book is "normal" nowadays because nowadays universities are about making cash off from students rather than sharing knowledge so yeah. Universities dont even care about making relevant discoveries or research anymore, all they want is students who pay insane amounts of cash for their degrees and professors who will mass produce insane quantities of papers no matter how worthless they are because they still generate cash. For the university ofc, nobody else is really going to benefit from any of this.
Im glad you decided to get away from academia, it truly is a piece of waste these days.
I originally wanted to study physics but my parents were completely against it and recommended i study CS instead. Im glad i went down that path rather than my original plan, because knowing what i know nowadays about academia really shatters my soul and makes me shudder when i think about how misserable i could be if i had decided to pursuit physics like i wanted.
Regarding your CS studies, i would like to know if your university also started cutting off courses like mine has done. For example we no longer have courses on compilers and language processors, which seems fucking absurd to me, because now there's people who are going to graduate and become software engineers without even knowing how to fucking parse text.
We live in really stupid times to tell the truth, nothing makes sense anymore.
I worked for a state university in a staff position for a number of years. The job opened my eyes to what really happened in academia. I couldn't recommend it to anyone after my first year. I stayed because I thought it would be job stability but the closed my department almost exactly 3 years into my employment with the university.
Haha the “why didnt you just ASK to end your lease early” I’m having ptsd flashbacks
33:00 That exploitation describes not only academic life, but corporate life as well. The deal used to be "suffer for years but then you will probably get a good TT job," but that is no longer the case. For many PhDs today, there is no industry job either.
Corporate life and academic life are on opposite sides of the galaxy
@@billp4 They are similar in that Dilbert describes both pretty well.
You gotta be a janitor for many years before you get to be CEO. Everyone gets to be CEO!
@@sumsarsiranen It used to be that with hard work, a smart, hardworking white male could start in the mailroom and end up in the C-suite. Not anymore. The smart, hardworking guy in the mailroom will stay in the mailroom. There is no path up.
I'll never forget how for pretty much my entire life, from like 1st or 2nd year on (that's around age 11-12) I was so sure I wanted to do a PhD. The idea of being a Dr. felt so cool and I just wanted that. Then I was still sure I was going to do a PhD right up until the March of my graduation year of my bachelors degree, and after working on my dissertation, speaking to others in PhD's currently and further I was like no, I absolutely don't want this. I started applying for jobs and am now thrilled with the work I'm doing, feeling like I'm making an actual difference (I work in public healthcare) and being able to earn enough to buy a flat. Whereas my friend did a PhD, actually started his PhD a year before I graduated as a result of various things, and has now just managed to make it into a job that still pays less than I get paid, whilst living in a much more expensive area. He loves his job and I'm so proud of him for doing what he's doing, but I think we'd both agree that Academia can be such a scam in so many ways.
7:30 This whole section is why I laugh when people say "America is so good because median pay is so high!" Like $4357.50 is, after conversions, roughly 1.75x what I make living in Scotland after tax. However I save more than what you listed per month, pay less in Student Loans, pay WAY less than that rent to actually own my home, and even pay less than that in utilities despite us having a cost of living crisis right now. So I just find it baffling when people will use raw take home pay as some indication it's more prosperous to live in the US when, to stay in any major city, your rent is higher than my monthly salary. Whereas I can own a 3 bedroom flat, 10 minutes from the centre of a major city, and also still afford to save on way less than that. It's crazy. I always think of my friend that lives in LA, making my annual pre-tax salary in like 3 or 4 months, and the only flat she can afford is significantly worse than mine. How is that a sign of a strong economy? Anyway sorry I know that's not the point of the video but I always find it interesting!
I'm not in STEM or Academia, and still have no clue what I want to do but I find this fascinating. Definitely a good heads up with all the associated and hidden costs for when you move somewhere, the opportunity costs other than money that you have to consider, etc. Your financial awareness are critical thinking are really making me realize how much I'm ignoring at the moment >.
I started working in Academia as IT (Data & Analytics support) and the sheer amount of work the PhDs (and especially the PhD candidates through non-tenured professors) have to do for absolute crap pay is insane. I don't make a lot for my area anymore ($63k in a major city on the East coast) but realized that while even a tenured research position *could( make 6 figures they have to run like a dozen research projects while I got home at 5 PM and no one ever sent me emails on the weekend.
This is the first time I ever watched an UA-cam video over 15 mins long. It was like staring at a mirror… That being said, I do take some solace that I am not the only one who feels this way.
On top of all you said, I have a family to take care of (parents). It is honestly so difficult sometimes.
I was a postdoc for more years than I'd like to say. I loved the work and the publications I put out, and I was paid pretty well for a postdoc, but I still tended to be broke and the instability was crushing. Once I gave up on the idea of getting a good permanent position, I just left, and now I make more than double what I did as a postdoc....but I still don't regret my time as a postdoc. The transferable skills I picked up during my postdoc were countless in my new role.
I never considered doing a postdoc. I just wanted to teach what I learned to the youth of today and I wanted the PhD as a personal goal. I can bounce back and forth between teaching and industry as a contract software guy. I would never recommend academia as a total career path. I did get a research grant that picked up tuition and a stipend but still had to spend savings to do it. I spent 7 years full time teaching and now am back in industry surprised at how the PhD increases my worth -- probably because they can bill more for me 😀
The question is : who say that industry is stable? I did PhD and work in industry..you get to work as R&D engineer...and R&D job in industry is insecure as well unfortunately. The best option is to find R&D in international big companies and not small compagnies. Those opportunities are rare and hard to get so that postdoc come as obligation and not as choice.
i would just like to say tysm as somebody who is about to apply for undergrad & is considering a career in academia. i totally assumed that ivy leagues would pay more and it's nice to know that is not true at all!
okay honestly watching this, it's good to know the best thing to do if you want to do research is just get a job in industry b/c i don't want to put up with that BS
You're commenting on your comments to help yourself and other prioritize; this is community service. Academia is missing out as you slip between it's grubby fingers, but I wish you the best on this lovely journey
Godspeed
It's interesting to hear this perspective. I'm a grad student in a developing country, and honestly? The pay isn't amazing but it's pretty good compared to the median income. It's far less prestigious than being in an Ivy League school and there are problems with it, but here there is demand for talented STEM people for teaching and research, the universities are eager to to get their name out there. The cost of living is also drastically lower (you can rent a pretty good place for less than 500 bucks a month, for instance).
I don't think I'll stay here forever but sometimes it honestly feels like I might have better prospects at home than in a developed nation, which is absolutely wild.
Mind telling which country are you from?
@@jinta6210 Colombia
@@jinta6210 it seems UA-cam doesn't like me replying with the answer to that, so I'll just say it's the northernmost country of South America instead
I'm defending my dissertation in particle physics tomorrow (eek!), so of course I watched several of your videos today when I should have been studying. I decided years ago now not to go the post-doc route. I'm still hunting for industry jobs, but all the ones I'm looking at pay a lot more than a post-doc and many of them are remote. Thank you for making this video. Too many people I know tried to stay in academia and are now either adjuncts making hardly anything, or eventually quit their post-docs to take jobs in industry.