/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10794992
Stop it OP, I can't keep crying this hard for too long.

>>10794992
If you were really passionate about it, and really believed in the cause, you wouldn't have a problem with it becoming your whole life, the concomitant difficulties and all. You would see them as hurdles to overcome, mountain peaks to conquer at any cost, no matter the sweat of your brow or the suffering they bring, not as impenetrable walls that stand in your way. You simply discovered you did not care about the field as deeply as you thought.

>>10794992
And as for your last point, if they don't care that deeply either, perhaps you should be the one who does. Like it or not, it's the only game in town. You should rather accept that and push the field forward than give up. Giving up accomplishes even less.

>>10794992
I'm not super happy with it, but I've never really seen any of the problems on your list.

>Environment is hostile/cuthroat
Everyone here gets along fairly well (at least at the student level, I don't really pay much attention to inter professor relationships).

>Work overtakes life
I often don't see people in the office and have no idea where they are- it doesn't bother me in the slightest and no one seems to pry too much (particularly because there are a lot of places someone could be). I personally work from home a number of days. Theoretical though, I imagine it's different in experiments.

>No/few relationships to make
There's a lot of reading groups where a bunch of students get together to learn a subject. And they seem friendly enough with pub nights and events, although I'm not super involved. A number of colleagues I've talked to have some relationships, but I don't pry.

>No love of research
Not sure how to quantify this because I think I'm on the side who doesn't particularly love it. That said I don't really care about the publication side of things, I often wish I could have gotten into some more applied style stuff like in engineering or CS.

>>10795026
It's true that engineering-tier brainlets should never attempt physics. You won't like it and you'll hate yourself even more.

>>10795050
Maybe. I guess it wouldn't have been hard to apply to engineering PhD's with my credentials, but I was hoping a subfield change would offer some more exciting opportunities. Mentally jacking off with mathematics and physics is fun but at the end of the day I am not a person who would be happy doing physics in a cave, I enjoy technology.

>>10795062
Ideally, you'd be actually advancing physics with your work. But I suppose only the elite few ever manage to do that.

>>10794992
That's because 99% of all "research" consists of braindead trash that isn't really advancing anything. It's just spam. And every. single. person. involved. knows it.
You could delete 99.9999% of all papers published and nobody would notice because they are inherently worthless.
Especially "studies", "measurements", "data collections" etc. etc.
I've got plenty of stories where people tried to lure me into their "Project" and use me as a lab monkey/data collection nigger and I just outright refused and told them to fuck off.

If you want to do honest, good research, then you have to do something that 1. sells , 2. that's cutting edge (new technologies that are/can be used and sold) 3. the people involved all need to contribute something that makes them irreplacable (otherwise they are just dead weight)

>>10794992
Not all fields are like this. Physics is particularly cutthroat and insane.

>>10795067
>advancing physics
I'm pretty sure most people think of this as something to do with hep-th. But to me that's just a complete waste of time, it literally has no use. You can claim all you want that it advances our understanding but there is literally nothing you can do now with this advanced understanding that you couldn't do before, except excite people who are also in hep-th who also don't do anything. No matter how amazing your work is your limit is just the niche number of people who are interested in that particular branch of physics that usually (when people talk of advancing physics) is useless.

>>10795080
Why is it that physics tends to be like this? I've met plenty of former physics students that regret their choice or felt scorned by their area of study. Seems like physics is not for the faint of heart.

>>10795080
Other fields just have more deadbeats that have given up long time ago to find something new and are content with cataloguing the subprotein nr 123456 of something pointless.
Theres nothing more lifedraining than biochemistry/biology/chemistry and repeating the same experiment for 1000s of times knowing the results beforehand and just doing it for the sake of doing it.

>>10795084
Because the bar is too high, most people will never contribute anything noteworthy, even most professors don't and they are paid to research. And you could argue that few people spend more time and energy and are more talented than them.
People think if they spend more time in a field they will be more likely to come up with something, truth is usually people just repeat what is already known in 1000 different ways and never come up with something genuinely new.

>>10795081
>useless
Usually but not always. That once in a decade "useful" advancement can't come without the grunt work of nameless, faceless peons who build the groundwork. If you're passionate about physics, you're just as passionate about the long view as you are about your own work.

>>10795088
this isn't the case in certain fields in the life sciences but biochem yes definitely, genetics to a degree, cell bio very much so. not the case for cross-disciplinary fields though

>>10794992

Who fucking cares mate you don't help humanity by doing a PhD you help humanity after you get the PhD if you're any good.

University is just for learning. Get a job with a company that's actively developing technology to help the world if you want to do your bit.

>>10795129
What about Academia?

>ITT undergrads who think science is only progressed by true genius level talent
Im getting hard engineer cope vibe from a lot of you.

>>10795756
Christ. Good luck anon. Maybe you will be the one to start fixing things. Someone has to.

>>10794992
Yikes. Glad I'm studying to be a teacher. They're authoritarian nutters but at least I'll have some free time, and I can just teach English overseas at a uni if it sucks.

>>10794992
>No love of research
This is criminal and has inspired greater and lesser men to genocide.

I am half considering strapping myself to a giant golden throne and just, absolutely launching a gigantic First Crusade.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhduvvA_Xpo

>>10795013
>t. 18 year old

>>10794992
this is all bretty accurate desu. I wonder if it's especially bad for physics cause it's a dying field. Gotta keep begging for money for another large boner collider. Gotta keep getting glamour mag pubs to persuade folks to give you money. Gotta slave in the lab to get the pubs.

Most professors are looking to get tenure so they can spend the rest of their lives making others as miserable as they've been spending 10 years in school being a research slave to someone that spends more time writing grant proposals than actually researching anything.

>>10794992
I quit my phd program after 4 months (not physics, but definitely physicsy) when it became apparent that I'd be spending most of my time "marking" the absolutely useless and borderline insulting nonsense material being "taught" to undergrads, constantly attending unproductive meetings, and dealing with endless redtape/paper work - all for less than I'd be making working at mcdonalds.

The dead and vacant look in my supervisor's eyes and the eyes of many of the people who'd been there a while also helped encourage me to move on as soon as possible.

The nearly impossible to decipher and jargon filled papers being constantly churned/excreted out by the people working there didn't help either.

Never ever EVER accept a phd opportunity because you need the work. Only do it if it seems like you'll get along socially with your supervisor and will have fun working there.

>>10795073
Is CS the best field to get involved with? It seems like it has the most advancements in research (such as AI, virtual reality, and blockchain)

>>10796213
>Only do it if it seems like you'll get along socially with your supervisor and will have fun working there.
Pretty much. Thank god my advisor is a fun guy to be around and I am starting to enjoy the work (after a year).
The lab atmosphere is really awful, grad students don't talk to each other or just don't show up (this is math so we don't have to work from the office), it's just bad.
Now I think this is specific to my department. From what I have seen in other places, it can a be pretty nice experience but in my case, I just can't.
On the other hand, I quite enjoy teaching. I hate grading papers, but the rest of it is fun.

>>10795019
At some point you need to cut your losses, and move on. Grieve for the tragedy of the situation, but move on. Many colleges/professors are completely lost and irredeemably corrupt.

>>10795019
If they don't care they'll stymie you at every turn. You'll spend your life miserable and accomplish nothing. You gotta move on if you're in that situation.

At that point the entire institution just needs to be put out of its misery. The students know. The faculty know. The politicians funding it know. The only thing keeping it going after a certain point is pity and nostalgia.

>>10795013
>I think reality is like my favourite shounen anime
When does school start again?

>>10796220
> AI, virtual reality, and blockchain

These are all fad. There is definitely stuff in CS much more interesting than that, which is not marketed that recklessly.

>>10796139
your not alone brother

>>10796222
Grading papers is actual cancer that doesnt even need to exist in the first place, im pretty sure its been getting worse over time as each generation of proffs ensures their grad students have to deal with the same retardation they did.

>>10795013
Can't tell if boomer or underage

I'm an undergrad and reading the stories on /sci/ has really given me perspective. I'm also an older student (26) - went military - I think I might just get a masters (biochemistry) and be done with it.

>>10796213

Do you plan to go to another phd program?

>>10794992
That's just capitalism for you

>>10794992
I think this is just physics. Is it just me or do all physicists seem like they are just one bad day away from going full Jonathan Tooker?

>>10794992
like john connor freeman would say...

get in thermodynamics, fast, while you still can, there is something called infinity loop.

there is technology called heat pump, and there is heat to energy converter you can build from piezoelectric stuff from aliexpress.

build a house with heating so you can run a heat pump on elektricity

connect the hot end of heat pump into piezeelectric heat "engine" from aliexpress...

then you can finance your living from mining crypto out of elektricity, you need a large heat pump, and a lot of piezo, but still, you have food from elektricity...

don't be a programmed human. programmed humans are more dangerous than machines, they act like arms of skynet.

research the warp drive.

some crystals are "magnetic" but there is way to make gravity gun if you make one more iteration ... like coil out of magnet... ( I'm not fucking kidding )

don't get programmed.

>>10795073
all you capitalist pigs do is sell and you're fucking sellouts, you'll sell ebola to terrorist for a burger you fucking pig.

>>10796874
I lowkey would.

>>10794992
Im another physics PhD student, specifically in particle physics. I wouldnt say we have that culture at all (accept the workaholism)

I have heard horror stories from people specifically in condensed matter. Because your experiments can be done in quite a few labs, with minimal specialized setup, I have heard that even saying the wrong thing to a close associate can lead to them stealing your idea and scooping you.
In particle physics, experiments are larger, and can't be copied so easily, so its not so cut throat.

I dont know what to tell you if you are far into it. I would hate the cut throat nature like that too. But you have to like doing research

>>10796874
Not a burger but I'd sell ebola to a terrorist for about 1 million dollars. The only bad side is that it's going to be a pain in the ass to launder it.

>>10796841
fuck no. the whole experience left the most horrible aftertaste.

>>10796220
CS somehow finds a way of making math and computers unbearably gay

>>10794992
This is all by design - physics has been turned into an endless game of mathematics that doesn't lead anywhere.

This creates desperation among those who wish to pursue it as a career, and they will do whatever necessary to continue having a salary.

The very conceptual foundations of modern physics is flawed, yet this is nearly impossible to see unless you study philosophy, particularly metaphysics, which is why you're lied to about philosophy being irrelevant to science nowadays. It poses too much of a threat to the status quo.

If you want to get the spark back again, you will have to go independent, perhaps join up with others who also feel the same. Forget the majority of what you've been "taught" and start from the beginning so you can form your own theories on solid foundations. You will obviously need to study philosophy first to build those solid conceptual foundations. Get any job that pays the bills and focus your spare time on physics.

>>10797036
>study philosophy
lol

I feel like an empty shell, I barely even remember what it's like to feel things. Every day is just the same cycle of waking up in dread of not accomplishing arbitrary milestone #2024924 or complete apathy and not even caring about deadlines for papers and shit, either being ignored by my Very Busy (tm) advisor or having a pointless meeting with him that leads nowhere and that makes me feel like he hates me because I'm done with his fluffy bullshit harebrained suggestions that lead nowhere, and goingback home to try to forget about the previous day. Even fridays don't pick me up as much anymore. My affect is flat and my will to live and continue my studies dwindles by the day. I sacrificed my body and my social life for this degree and all I'm getting back is a predisposition to dying (not a desire, as that would imply emotions which I can no longer feel). This is to say nothing of the leeches in the system which, as others have already said, just exist to produce spam and blend a few buzzwords into barely coherent papers that are of no practical use to anyone anywhere for any reason.

Academia is fucked. I think I'm going to go to sleep now so I can stop thinking about my life for a few hours. I hope whoever ends up reading this mildly enjoys it, at least.

>>10795013
Partially this OP. The real world is different from whatever you do first imagine. However, your stated passion was physics, so even if all the external variable are terrible, you should feel happy you still get to do physics.

>>10795073
Salty business major who doesn't actually get science,or had to drop out from a program out of my incompetence.

>>10797100
>doesn't realise that modern physics is metaphysics, albeit illogical

>>10797176
>literally doesn't understand some math describing small movements so it's metaphysics

>>10794992
Yes, I felt very happy with my grad school experience. I solved Dark Energy and like five other very important problems in cosmology in 2009, and then they expelled me in 2011. Then, in 2013, they approved the 50% salary increase of the President of my university for 2014 from ~$700k to ~$1.1M. Also, right after I wrote my paper, the president of the College of Engineering at GT had a meeting with Obama ABOUT WHO KNOW WHAT!?!?!?!

>>10797190
What math? It's modal logic.

>>10797201
>Differential Dynamic Logic for Hybrid Systems

>>10797199
I think you may be reading too much into that. It sucks that you got kicked out though, what happened?

>>10797216
It's a logic created from formal/propositional logic (which is metaphysics).

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Differential-Dynamic-Logic-axioms_fig1_301873832

>>10797141
Get back to work or no funding, bitch.

>>10797241
So can you philosokeks design train systems like in the paper listed or are you aping another subfield as your territory?

>>10796411
Curious what you’re talking about. I find AI research interesting.

>>10797201

Axiomatic modal logic, at that. tfw it's the 21st century and people are still unaware of the paradigm shift of the Curry-Howard correspondence.

>>10797319
>I find AI research interesting
midwit faggots find stupid pointless shit interesting very often. its a strong sign of being an empty worthless insect to find stupid pointless shit interesting

>>10797319

AI research has turned into cargo cult engineering. "I have all those knobs, let's turn them haphazardly so as to enhance the recognition of cats in an adversarial context and write papers about that". We don't have the least beginning of an idea on how to create general AIs, and all the hype we have is around models whose principles have been around for decades.

The only thing I find interesting in current AI trends is the study of the emerging patterns in neural networks to understand how the network classifies things.

>>10794992
>Work overtakes life
>I know people who work 12 hours a day minimum, and come in on Saturday. Its not even a matter of profs imposing it on their students, it's so ingrained in the culture that if you don't work like this then others will assume you're lazy and mock you.
Well I get to the lab at 9:30 and leave around 4:30 so I can go the gym before it gets too crowded then have dinner, fuck gf and read about maths, physics, coding for my own enlightenment (t. biology PhD). No one else in my lab works so little and I wonder what they're thinking about me leaving early everyday. I am a fairly good experimenter and have most of my shit working so this kinda compensates for the supposedly short hours I put in.

>No/few relationships to make
>People don't even want to talk to you unless you can help advance their career or help them in making a paper. That's not even to mention how it's deeply implied that you shouldn't try to get married or start a family (as it'd be a "waste of time")
I don't mind working hard like a madman but a paper is a lousy reward. Fuck this shit there is a whole world to explore outside the lab and women to fuck, families to start new things to experience. Autistic labrats can suck my big fat cock as far as I'm concerned.

>No love of research
>This one hurts me the most. People don't seem to give a shit about the physics or anything besides getting published. It all seems like a career game.
Yeah here I agree. I used to be extremely passionate now I just do to motivate my PI to keep paying me salary, so I just do the bare minimum to keep him happy and not get bored. But I won't work a single minute more without financial remuneration. Fuck working for free.

>>10797694
>biology PhD
what (sub)field do you work in?

>>10797700
>what (sub)field do you work in?
Molecular biology of heterochromatin in flies

>>10797704
have any interesting research you could point me towards or papers you've read recently?

>>10795013
>t. bright eyed zoomer

>>10797721
>have any interesting research you could point me towards or papers you've read recently?
Not really concerned with my field (at least not directly) but I found this paper to be of significant importance. Protein concentration in the cell varies anywhere between 300-500 mg/ml and such a high concentration in vitro would cause instant protein precipitation. So how does the cell manage? It turns out ATP (and probably many other metabolites) act as hydrotropes, which is similar to detergents but not quite. The adenine in ATP interacts with the solvent exposed hydrophobic patches on proteins and the triphosphate interacts with the aqueous milieu thus promoting solubility at high protein concentration. I was trying to purify a protein that kept phase separating and it was driving me crazy, then I found out about ATP, added 10 mM to the dialysis buffer and god damn it was beautifully soluble (one of the rare instances where I stayed till 11 in the evening being excited as fuck).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28522535

>>10795088
>>10795122
N-n-neuroscience isn't like this is it?

>>10797742
That's actually really interesting

>>10797665
Crab detected.

>>10797892
there's nothing to be gained from AI or ML that's interesting sorry

>>10794992
This is hauntingly quintessential to the extent I can’t tell at all if you’re another victim of the system or just making this thread satirically.

>>10796864
>Jonathan Tooker
Who is this and what did he do?

>>10797141
I enjoyed it anon

>>10797141
A bit heavy handed also flat affect is real, and not something to make fun of.
>>10797982
mediocre not very creative desu

>>10797694
Absolute chad

>>10797987
I probably enjoyed it because im extremely sleep deprived right now because im studying for my chem final

>>10797989
>chem
which chem class are you taking anon?

>>10795013
That's easy to say if you're a zoomer kid who FUCKING LOVES SCIENCE (subscribes to Veritasium on youtube), but when you're sacrificing your family, your friends and your hobbies just to do busywork and try to suck up to people to get published, your passion will disappear.

>>10797742
thanks mate ill try this

>>10798178
>family
>friends
I think people like you weren't meant for it in the first place. If you have those kinds of important things in your life, you're better off working some other kind of job. Research is for people who have nothing better to do with their lives.

>>10797742
Not bio. This is a nice example of deductive reasoning at work. Congrats.

>>10798213

imagine sacrificing anything and sucking up to irrelevant profs to get published with what amounts to mindless experiments

i can see you doing that you fucking retard

>>10797956
IIRC hes some guy who just got his physics PhD and had an engineering certification but could only find a minimum wage job after graduating, so he killed himself

>>10797319
AI is a meme, compressed sensing and big data is where it's at.

>>10798285
>he killed himself
god how I wish this were true, I really do

>>10794992
>>10797141
>>10796213
>>10797036
>>10797694

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wigC_mtYhy0

>>10798306
>big data
Now THAT's a meme, and an old one at that.

>>10798285
>Jonathan Tooker
wrong dude, this is the schizo who couldn't make it in grad school and is now a crazy hobo, was in jail for a while

>>10799074
My bad, thanks for the correction

>>10794992
Same position as you OP.

My goal now is get a Masters at current UNI, then go for a PhD under an advisor with no grants or credentials who does research purely for fun, then settle in to a perhaps low paying and non prestigious yet comfy lecturer position at a community college or charter high-school or something.

I worked at a community college before as a tutor, and there were a lot of lectures there who loved math and physics and were smart but had a similar mindset that you and I had. It was honestly a lot of fun working there, no one had real research to do so they weren't stuck and didn't take themselves too seriously but we still challenged each to solve problems and had friendly competitions. You don't need grants or a high h-index to do and appreciate physics.

>>10794992
My research consumes my entire life and I'm happy. I get to read and learn about really cool things and the culture my professor has created is that of self-driven learning and exploration.

I do however agree with your last point that most people are there because they made a crappy decision and have very little interest in their work

I'm doing experimental physics (spectroscopy shit that's interdisciplinary enough that I could also be a chemist or whatever) and I quite like it.

Advisor is not a big name but is a nice person. Group is mostly nice and people get along although it is a bit large. Some amount of shit-talking behind backs which I dislike but is probably unavoidable in any workplace. Most of the people are fairly normie, I'm among the more autismal ones. I work about 40h per week and I've been complimented on how much I've gotten done which I don't quite understand.

The specific projects I'm working on is cool enough, I'm not necessarily super thrilled about making this technology 5% more efficient or whatever but that provides at least a real-world motivation. What I actually like is the methodology for finding out things that at first seem impossible to ever experimentally verify.

However, what I'll do afterwards is a big mystery.

>>10799141
Sounds very comfy

>>10794992
>environment is hostile
These people were handed a silver platter in life, and were raised to steal, cheat, and ruin others to get ahead. Anytime someone gets something, that's something you could've had.

>work overtakes life
Chink and abuse culture. Work to hide emotions. They're not usually working, and nowhere near an optimal rate. Nearly 100 years of works studies show only 30-40 hours of a work week can be mentally productive, and even physical labor becomes extremely slow, destructive, and error-prone.

>no/few relationships
They aren't people. They just use others to get ahead. The fleeting percent that might be humane were born into rich and important families. They've known no hardship, and never had any stressors, leading to a complete lack of empathy for anything negative.

>no love of research
They do it for money. All of them.

At my uni I had a mixed 400/500 class, and literally the grad students were constantly cheating, including on a test when the single TA left the room. Uni did jack shit. They know exactly what's up, exemplified by the horrendous quality of professors, but guess what, they were research professors that brought in money.

Grad school is a fucking great time and lifestyle. You've obviously never had a real job

>>10799438
This, I've worked before I started studying physics, now in a kick ass PhD program working on ultra-relativistic regime laser-plasma interactions in a big ass national lab doing jack shit and getting big bucks for it as well.

It's fucking great

How do I get my uni to pay me for my work, providing me a research assistant position or something like that? I'll greentext so it's shorter
>2 year undergrad
>gets into professor lab just by asking him
>see and eventually assist experiments
>we get along well, I show up multiple times weekly and often stay up late, even when doing paperwork, just cause I genuinely enjoy it (not required work, he didn't ask me to come and no one is paying me or something)
>near the end of 2year
>working on what will be my thesis (his research obv) when suddenly gets an idea
>tell him, he says it's interesting and says he will help me carrying out my research, so new thesis

Now, I don't want to sound arrogant, but I believe in the few ideas I have, and I think it will give results and could be published easily.
And that's for my thesis. This study could possibly have some interesting developments (new antitumoral proteins) which hopefully I'll investigate after the first paper (thesis=isolation and characterization of those new proteins). But the idea of doing all this work, all those hours for free really bums me out. After I prove them (and myself) I can do reaserch with the first paper and tell them I have other ideas, will they consider me? Maybe after I graduate? Should I or should I not publish like that, for the sake of boating my cv for future occasions? I'm lost, I need your help guys

>>10799521
You should literally ask him, it's advisors' obligation to pay their students, if he won't give you anything then find someone who will, there are plenty of people who search for students and will pay for them, they're usually the ones who are not teaching though and are in some national labs or institutes, try just contacting people and asking for some possible work.

>>10799521
Go to another university/research group first, and give them enough detail to understand why your idea can make money. Get an offer to go there. THEN ask your current department and tell them you've had an offer from someone else. They're not paying you now, and you're doing work for free under someone who'll have their name all over it and yours will be a footnote, why the FUCK would they jeopardize that?

>>10795013
lmao dumb zoomer

>>10799528
Meybe in America, I'm in europe. No one gets payed here it seems... It's already surprising for a professor to let a student invatigste what he wants. But I don't want to be a literal retard who works for free
>>10799536
As I said i forgot to add I'm in yurop sadly.
I mean I'm not doing it totally for free, my professor always give us students coauthorship (we have alredy 2 papers on which there will be my name on when they'll get published) , and he'll probably give me first author in my project (he's a really nice guy).
So it's all good, he'll also will give me his letter of recommandation when I'll need it, so.im doing it to get experience and publications under my belt to be competitive in the future.
And I don't know abut my idea making money. It's biology obv, I can't guarantee more than a publication and so more prestige to the uni, Its something but not groundbreaking discoveries... I mean I have seen many antitumorals that no one gives a shit about...
Do you think I should speak to my department? Will they laugh at my face?

>>10798283
Should have done pure maths then haha

>>10799569
Ask for money, and when they say no, say at least put your name on the paper first, and let you write it.

>>10794992
Just do like I did and become an /out/ hobo and stop whining like a bitch. Learn to eat fried earthworms (more protein than beef, per oz) and dig roots so that the whole world is free to kiss your ass. You don't even know jack shit about power converters, you were just taking up working on that old hunk of shit land speeder in the desperate attempt to dispel the local gay rumors. Hell, that's really why you wanted to "join the rebellion" before you had the slightest clue what that even meant! All you could think about was "Shit, they know I'm a faggot."

>>10799428
>These people were handed a silver platter in life, and were raised to steal, cheat, and ruin others to get ahead. Anytime someone gets something, that's something you could've had.
Gosh, this is so absolutely true. Currently in a top 10 graduate program in my field, and it seems everyone there is born of a rich family, with their parents both having PhDs, or something of similar status. It is insane really. And here I am, from a rural lower-middle class family.

>>10796220
Don't worry, plenty of spam research there too. I'm currently stuck in a lab where my dissertation will be on something so worthless that I don't think I could ever get another academic job.

>>10795013
people who use the word "concomitant" are usually poseur twats

>>10799597
Based worm-eating schizo

Wise up and get out. The only reason to do a PhD is if you're aiming for a solid job. For example, doing a thesis on a new measurement technique. Otherwise, you better be a genius among your peers and have a solid shot at tenure.

The schmucks here talk about shit like "being passionate about physics", but those are the empty words of not-yet-adults who are still racing full speed against the wall. The only ones who can afford education for entertainment purposes and soul-searching are trust fund kiddies. So aim for something concrete.

>>10799597
is this a quote from the new onions wars movies

>>10794992
What broke me is when I had reviewers keep trying to get my paper rejected simply because the code was open source and better than commercial solutions (in a multi-million dollar industry). There were very objective metrics showing how much better it was and worthy of publication. Eventually the chief editor had to step in and tell all the lower tier editors and reviewers to knock off the bullshit. I just wanted to solve an important problem. I thought other resesrchers would be ecstatic (one of the 3 reviewers were tbf)

I did well enough that my HoD wanted me to stay for a junior lectureship, but I want to find industry work and start a family with my gf before we get too old. Eventually I might start my own company and then try to fund my own grants and get back into academia. The biggest irony for me is that corporate culture has more honest team work these days. The academic culture is really all about a bunch of stupid people who manage to support each other in citation networks. They will never solve anything important.

>>10795080
I see a lot of Physics researchers who 3000+ citations who are only in the 5 or 10th year of their career (since starting their PhD).

I have no idea how people do this. It seems that you need to make some kind of minor breakthrough in a hot experimental field. Maybe citations are mostly a luck game though. The more a paper is cited the more it is likely to be cited by people new to the field.

>>10795088
You don't actually get published for doing this unless there are potential commercial applications or something. This is a major problem in life science in general because researchers start generating false data.

>>10796170
Are you kidding? Physics is extremely big right now. Grants of this magnitude hasn't been seen since the atomic bomb dropped.

>>10797141
Buy monero

>>10796864
I don't think it's that bad, but the reality is not great either. The fact is you could have good research and still fail due to bad luck/a lack of networking resources.

That doesn't mean you won't have a good life. Lot's of PhDs end up in high paying jobs in or outside of STEM including finance etc. That being said if you look at the statistics about half end up in a decent-ish job while around 10% go Tooker and can only find work in a call centre.

But in general I believe that if you don't give up you'll eventually find something. Postgrads have the worst mental health of any segment of the population though. So that in itself is probably part of the reason so many PhDs fail to make anything of themselves after graduation.

>>10796881
There are 2 ways about this. If you specialise enough no one will understand your work enough to scoop you, on the other hand no one understands your work enough to hire you so if that one other reaearch group on the planet doesn't have post doc funding it's over.

I think the best balance is to work in large teams with equipment that no one else can have. So high energy in general, but do your own theory papers to get a leg up on others.

>>10797141
Have sex

>>10797666
You're talking about machine learning research, the field literally identifies itself as a splinter from hard AI researchers who are _not_ looking for AI, but smaller applications NNs, SVMs etc.

There is nothing wrong with ML other than the fact that it's extremely overvalued and investors are pouring way too much into it.

>>10797036
>you will have to study philosophy
anddddd dropped

>>10797199
Great, the schizo is back and still complaining about getting expelled for a double rape charge.

>>10798213
>projecting this hard
Have sex and get a friend pls

>>10797694
I can tell you that they look down on you because I used to work 80-100 hours and cucks gossip about everything. However, those same fucks are sitting in their office playing video games or watching series for most of it. Not to mention the constant chatting about non-work related bullshit. Especially the girls always want to create some kind of community in the department to socialise after hours etc. because they have no boyfriends or family.

My work became more and more theoretical so I told my adviser about the situation and how much productivity it costs me and I've been living across the country with my gf ever since (if your work is good enough here you don't have to TA anymore etc.)

I'm almost done with my thesis, then I'm just going to find any work I can. I would regret missed networking opportunities, but when I used to do this everything that people promised me always fell through, mostly due misfortune in the real world markets, but still, you have to make your own way.

>>10799498
National labs are great since you probably don't have too worry too much about finding something full time after this.

>>10799569
If you're an undergrad you're unlikely to get another prof to pay like some people here have said. Paying undergrads is not rare, but if your prof can't afford you're probably out of luck.

Still the first authorship and LoR will get you into a good gradschool so it's worth it

>>10800960
>That being said if you look at the statistics
which ones?

>>10798515
This meme is complete bullshit. I was a NEET for like 3 months and nearly went insane from not doing anything but shitposting on /g/, /sci/ and /k/. It really inspired me to do well in this my last semester is I don't end up like that for the rest of my life. I think NEETs are literally just projecting their misery onto others and pretending their existence is worthwhile when it's far from it. I'd rather be a bit uncomfortable for like 8 hours (but ultimately doing SOMETHING) than do nothing and lose my fucking mind. Plus, I love doing research and teaching so I'm having fun in my "wagecage"

>>10801019
Would you recommend to move out, even out of my country to do a master degree somewhere fancy?
Cause if I stay here my professor will for sure let me help him and so I'll get more publications done, but idk if it's worth it... Should I wait to move out until I get a master degree to get a postgrad position/phd/job?

>>10797141
>his fluffy bullshit harebrained suggestions that lead nowhere
Does yours also tell you your ideas are awful, so you have to do it his way, and then his way fails because of the reasons you gave for your ideas, resulting in doing what you originally wanted to do but with a month of wasted time and him thinking it was his idea?

>>10797252
If he's like me, it's no actual funding either way. My advisor hooked me in with "we have a grant coming in for this project", which became "we didn't actually get the grant but we're submitting it again", and is now "we think we got a grant, but it doesn't include the project you've been working on, you wanted to be a TA for five years, right?".

>>10800900
Damn, Onion Wars would make for a great alt fan fic!

>>10800841
>makes me wonder if am schizo
Thanks!

>>10801039
AIP

>>10801180
Do a Masters degree at the best institution possible.

I stayed in my home town to do mine because I got a project I was very passionate about and it was the biggest mistake of my life. I only found out after it was too late at conferences how many Profs at top unis would've taken me.

>>10800933

> you have to advertise and play the jew game to get ahead

ahh yes, be dishonest and lie or perish nice life

>>10802084
Damn, he really fucked you over. You have my sympathy, if it's any consolation I don't think many of us would've seen that coming because non-shit advisers would hook you to their other grants.

>>10802832
I don't think this is true. I'm in material science and the Physics grants have a lot of industrial applications. Most of the money thrown at physics research is from the electronics manufacturing industry.

In my other field (optimisation/operations research) firms are raking in millions and they pump a lot of directly back into research, but we've never seen grants of the magnitude that physicists get.

>>10796220
blockchain is literally just a shittier database, only used by cryptocultists and their ponzi schemes

>>10795013

I give you like 5 years to finally realize how bleak the real world is

>>10795013
If you discover that there is actually little physics in physics research you'd be right to be disgusted.
It's normal to not question the validity of a commitment if you realize it goes against the reasons that determined your commitment in the first place.

>>10797201
Modal logic is pretty much math that pretends to be philosophy.

>>10801180
The place you do your master's at doesn't matter much. What matters is your phd.

>>10794992
Grad school is pretty toxic to me

>>10797694
This has been my modus operandi from literally day 1. Actually, the university had some "clerical error" where I wasn't going to be paid for my research for about a month and I had to sit down with my PI and tell him I wasn't going to work. He simply said that he didn't understand my logic but that he respected my decision.
I think the fact that I went back to grad school after working in the industry and actually experiencing a bit of life has given me an edge. First, I actually work and don't pretend to work. I'd say most grad students pretend to work in that there are around long hours but don't accomplish much. Secondly, I don't have a problem saying "fuck you". If, for some reason, there's a falling out and I need to leave the program I wouldn't be pleased but I still have 60+ years to live and this small issue will pass.
All my other cohorts don't understand how I've gotten ahead while "working so little". It's pretty damn funny to me.

>>10795081
Something can be permitted to be useless if one adores it greatly

>>10795073
Senile boomer who did economics

>>10797694
I have trouble believing you work in a bio lab, as does anyone else who works in a bio lab.

>>10797176
Oh please, KeYmaera is used solely for verification of controllers for cyber-physical systems and no matter how much you wish it would reveal some deeper truth, it is an engineering tool.

i'm not "disillusioned", but i wish things were different. it's full of people publishing nonsense for the sake of publishing, people without curiosity, people with large egos, people with no ego, and a distinct lack of fellow compatriots.

>>10794992
>some general idealistic sense of helping humanity
>how to spot scrubs
You should go into yout PhD to get paid vacation when going to conferences, following whatever ideas you have without worrying that it may no end up in a usable product for your company while having a consulting job as an easy way out if my research career fails. If your advisor/field is well-known for 12 hours shifts - don't go there. I never understood people who went into a lab without talking to the people there about their working conditions.

>>10794992
Grass is always greener. I dropped out of a PhD with a master at a top 20 university after two years because despite working my ass off, I was already falling behind the top students by not having enough papers and being stuck with bad projects. I could see that I would never end up in the top 10% of students which is what confers worthiness to a PhD.

But I still regret it to this day. Unless you have your life together, working a monkey corporate job that is not in a high tech company in an explicit R&D role is infinitely more soul crushing. My biggest regret is actually not to have worked my ass even harder during these two years in order not to have been "forced" to drop out.

>>10803562
Why is it easier for you guys to believe that you work for me and I am telling you take make life into literal dogshit than it is for you to believe that you work for my enemy?

You don't work for me. Jacob is Satan.

>>10803581
Jesus Christ that’s a high level of schizo

>>10803581
Tooker from your pictures it seems you have improved your quality of life quite a lot. I’m happy for you man, will you ever tell us the story of your comeback?

>>10803524
He's right though, machine learning, big data and other trendy fields are like that where companies are interested to pour in money.

>>10795081

>tfw you'll never be like Karl Schwarzschild, who advanced quantum physics and contribute to the general theory of relativity while fighting 1WW and raising to the rank of lieutenant

>>10796726
Don't listen to sci on this one. I'm doing a STEM (physics) PhD and MBA program and at 29 (former infantry). Pay is shit but I don't have fights with any profs of students. My focus is on biomechanics of the musculoskeletal system. You don't get treated like shit and people are actually competent at my school. You need to have a high GPA to even get accepted. Work your ass off in undergrad and go to a top school. I'm using school to get myself where I need to be, use it to your advantage.

>>10803893
>the army nigger is actually researching an interesting worthwhile topic
so what are you working on right now?

>>10794992
To be frank, helping humanity is a retarded motivation. Janitors help humanity too. The only reason to become a scientist is if you want to do research.

>>10796847
Communist nibbas be like "I stubbed my toe. Thanks, capitalism."

>>10796874
Please tell me how the communist utopia would allocate resources to nonproductive research.

>>10804109
It's only nonproductive to you if it doesn't make you money (or even result in you making less) There is no nonproductive research as long as you learn something new.

>>10797694
I wonder if anyone's done research into the quality of research done by people who slave away. I can't imagine such a shitty, unhealthy lifestyle leads to productive research.

>>10804226
Yes, I've seen papers on this, only general consensus is that people aren't more productive working over 40 hours a week.

However, this is also to say that people working over 100 also produce high quality research, while other 100+ hour workers produce low quality. It's largely irrelevant.

if you were less intelligent you would have become disillusioned earlier. you were blissfully going through your studies probably achieving great marks and enjoying a self-reaffirming cycle of success -> energy and motivation -> more success. I think a lot of teenagers are probably more mature than you.

>>10797199
wow i knew who you were before even seeing the filename

>>10794992
I honestly had the same thing with mathematics.

>>10795013
t. undergrad

>>10794992
It bothers me as well, I think we are at a point where there are very few if any new discoveries to be made in Physics with the current technology, anything that is being discovered currently is either super speculative or not very useful, unless it is in very particular applied fields. So it's became a game of soaking up grant money.

These guys are banging their head against the wall investing decades of their lives solving esoteric problems of very limited usefulness, they would be better spent building new rockets

>>10799074
He's in jail now? Damn it

>>10796220
All of those are overshilled and overhyped to death and boomers in companies who are stuck in excel eat it all up, right now it's all going into place and the hype around it will drop soon enough which is good because the process will be standardized and rationalized.

T.auditor

>>10795013
BASED
MONK
STOIC

>>10804226
>>10805438
It depends on where you're working, what field, what you're doing etc.

I would say ime people who work 100+ hours who do well (they obsessively/autistically work on experiments all the time) almost inevitably make shit supervisors and rarely make it to PI, it's generally a poor strategy. In most subjects it's rare to do a normal 9 to 5 as well, engineers tend to be a bit obsessed with it because of it being a profession, but if you're in something like biology flexitime is the norm. It's not uncommon to have to pull one super long day or have to come in at the weekend to do a little bit of work that helps everyone out. It's also not uncommon to have computing guys hold weird as hell hours because that's part of the culture, if you do a hackathon or something you're staying up for a long time, if you're working with someone in a different timezone you resync your circadian rhythm to that.

>>10800933
Great, more large boner colliders.

>>10795013
t. teenager
Don't worry. I thought that when I was 16 and grew out of it eventually.

it shouldn't be like this.

>>10805628
Lol. You can't, you absolutely can't. The moment you even as much as suggest to invent implement or develop a weapons technology you will be "blacklisted" and get fucked immediately from all the possible sides.

Scientists are some of the most extreme and fanatic basedboys you will ever meet (mostly because the ones that were pragmatic died in the world wars).

>>10806123
Well I'm in chemical engineering working in a numerical science field and I'm probably the only one in my lab who has reasonable hours in that while I don't have fixed hours I more or less only spend 8 hours a day working. The experimental guys literally sleep there (many of them -also quite literally- have no home to go to), the girls tend to take coffee from 8-10am and lunch from 12-4pm then come back to pack up and leave.

That being said if my gf is on a late shift I will probably get some open source coding work done in the evenings. But in general I can't see myself being more productive by working on campus longer. Also I take weekends unless there is a pressing deadline. Fuck cucks that don't take weekends.

Anyway my point is engineering researchers doing experimental work have autistic hours, especially in biochemical engineering, but that's pretty understandable since they need to feed some weak strain every 2 hours.

>>10808018
Google von Neumann, read his bio, realize you're an idiot.

>>10808196
>read about a dude 80 years ago
>it applies today

>>10795088

Computational chem is comfy, I just sit in an air conditioned room and let molpro do the work.
Oh whats that? Optimize at triple AND quadruple zeta? Say no more

>>10803533
>I have trouble believing you work in a bio lab, as does anyone else who works in a bio lab.
How come?

>>10808193
>the girls tend to take coffee from 8-10am and lunch from 12-4pm then come back to pack up and leave.
Do you mean the girls take 6 hours worth of breaks or do they just take breaks within those intervals

>>10795013
Thinking like this greases the wheels for everything in the world to become unreasonably shit.

>>10794992
It's actually amazing how I'm a grown adult and I have very little understanding of how academia past undergrad works.

It seems like there's like 5 years of study between undergrad and becoming any kind of established academic with a real job in it. And its not like undergrad where you probably have time for a part time job. It's full time plus plus by the sounds of it.

Where do you get money to do this? Are you operating on like 9 years of student loans? Is it rich parents? If so that's an appalling class barrier to something so important. This can't all be scholarships.

Does your subject really hold your interest that much? I feel like one of the reasons I never really considered academia was that even if I was generally interested in something like history, I wouldn't want to commit to becoming this comprehensive expert in like the American Civil War in particular. What if 5 years down the line I want to get super into Rome, but then any time I spend reading about Rome I'm falling behind on the constant stream of new civil war research I have to be perpetually up to date on or risk jeopardizing my job? Granted I spend my days right now in a normal office job I dislike, but my interests are completely my own business and in that magisteria I can roam however I want.

>>10809919
>Where do you get money to do this?
Most schools will pay you a stipend (not that much, around 20k+/year). You are technically an employee of the school, and your job is to do research and various teaching duties.

>>10809795
6 hours

>>10808920
That was during the worst anti war hippie era spearheaded by Carl Sagan and his ilk.

>>10806123
If you aren’t working 100+ hours a week you won’t produce anything. It has to be everything or you are just playing a role

>>10795129

>Wage slave for some kike to help him sell a toy to man-children if you really want to make intellectual contributions

Top kek anon

>>10797036
This is the most /sci/ post in the thread. Congrats.

>>10809209

lol yes. this is exactly what im talking about. People who are smart and not completely dellusional know that what they are doing is completely POINTLESS.
Wow, you spent 25 years cataloguing proteins? Holy shit what an achievement!
It's just a scam at this point, and an obscene amount of wasted talent. Most kids that can legit do science and invent new things, never make it to university anyway. And those that do often drop out or do something much easier.

>>10796551
kek

I did my PhD in statistical physics at the German Aerospace Center (the German ESA/NASA) in a satellite city behind the woods of a bigger city. My boss was also a prof but I didn't have to tutor or anything like that. It was overall a great time. I work 40h now but my free time only consists of personal research and project (and a little bit of sports). Just to counteract the general mentality here, with a light variation on the setting.

>>10810914

Yes. This is exactly how it should be. You should never ever have 1. a boss and 2. somebody who "tutors" you. The moment you have any of those, you can be 100% sure what you are doing is trash and dishonest or something that could be done without you.

>>10810735
That's fucking ridiculous
How do they get anything done? Or not get reprimanded?

>>10795013
so many underachievers who never met person who actually wanted something are replying to this post
if the idea of spending 100h per week on thing you want while sacrificing pleasures is scary than you simply don't value your goal that much

>>10796365

you tell me, PhDlet

>>10810752
>thinking 100 is even close to the minimum
There's 168 hours in a week. Why are you slacking so much?

>>10794992
I abandoned my PhD in Astronomy.

>>10810850
Ah, the "smart-but-lazy" roaches are crawling out of the wood works again.

yes, it is an extremely toxic culture
it doesn't get better and only very few make good money afterwards
t. tenure track asst prof looking for a way out

>>10808193
>chemical engineering working in a numerical science field

stop wasting your time
also, i hope you're not cooking these results because no one understands your """breakthrough code"""" lmao

>>10811364
Well the one girl didn't do anything for the last 3 years, her bf found a job in Canada so she's just leaving the wasted grant behind. One who is a good friend of mine got 3 publications in 3 years and is almost done with her PhD, but there have been some...incidents..., they literally found her sitting on her adviser's lap. She is pretty intelligent and I can see her doing the work alone, but she worked too closely with her adviser for years. No one really knows how much work is her own. I didn't ask her about it, but I don't think she would've gotten her PhD so quickly under normal circumstances. It cost her her first relationship. The other girl, also a friend, actually works really hard and gets no help from her PI. She takes those massive breaks to bitch about life. She at minimum has a 2 hour coffee and 2 hour lunch break every fucking day. Still she did good work in her Masters and unlike most people she doesn't disrupt the office by chatting all day, but actually works. She got another PhD opportunity in Sweden where her bf also found a position.

As for the rest I don't really know them, but they all dropped out without finishing.

>>10811364
>Or not get reprimanded?

Forgot to address this. Most PIs don't care. Some even join them on these long ass breaks. That's why we aren't even breaking > 1 papers/(staff+grad students) in some research groups. Then they whine when they lose their funding.

>>10814463
What are you talking about? The entire profession is just numerical science these days. All I did when I worked in industry was modelling and simulation for controllers and process design. Half of the profs at all top unis are just doing pure operations research work at this point.

It's also the only kind of work that still pays well outside of petroleum field work. And as a fall back you can always move into software development which pays higher than chemical engineering anyways.

> i hope you're not cooking these results because no one understands your """breakthrough code"""" lmao

You can't "cook results" when you publish the open source code and any idiot can run it.

Smh are you another biochemfag hoping to make millions with "E. Coli. spliced spliced with X" patent no. 47297394749? Now experimental work is where actual result cooking happens.

>10814458
Just do industry work for a few years. It will help you get grant money through your network later anyway.

>>10814491
It is a bubble of disgusting groupthinkers

>>10814523
I'm really curious as to why you think this. I work with a lot of other groups in the department, especially materials science and control guys. Even physicists and chemists.

I do modelling and simulation for them and often the work leads their experiments in a better direction. In any case most papers in Chemical Engineering Science and other leading journals will not take raw data publications without some kind of modeling these days.

Maybe you're talking about the nuts who do nothing but self cite improvements on stochastic algorithms? We are aware in the OR community and we despise them too, but when papers like Storm's differential evolution paper has over 20000 citations you're not gonna stop people from pushing their luck. There's probably a few people who, as we speak, are using SciPy's DE implementation to write some fad about some arbitrary "nature inspired" shape opimization as we speak.


Unless by "bubble" you meant there are too many people in the field? I kind of disagree since most employers I'be personally spoken to say there is a shortage of engineers with good coding skills, but that might just be my own biased network. Besides, it doesn't matter, because like I said we can move into software dev work (unlike other ChemEs who have to fall back to banking etc).

This place is so shit for your mental health.

>>10814465
makes me think of my advisor's strangely close relationship with one of the girls in our group (an undergrad). She was pretty, wouldn't blame him for being attracted but eh..

>>10814638
At first it wasn't too weird. She would go to his house, but when his wife and kid was there. It was more like she was part of his family. He made some sexual jokes especially to the guys, but in a way that didn't seem creepy. Tbh I don't know if the lap sitting rumour was even true. I didn't see it, I didn't read any disciplinary report, must just be some jealous cunt spread it about them and it got worse and worse. The only reason I mention it is because we're all anonymous anyway and it was kind of important to the discussion.

>>10814638
Also not that this doesn't happen. Especially the female PIs sleep with their students a lot.

>>10794992
Is academia really this bad? Last time I checked the statistics they said that there are something like 3 academic positions opening for every 10 graduating PhDs.

This seems very reasonable, a 30% shot, and most STEM PhDs want to go industry anyway so it's closer to a 50%. Just be better than 50% of your generation.

Yes. I studied pure math and I really didn’t like the cutthroat environment. My issue was mostly to do with that department had 0 probabilists or statisticians, which is very rare in a math department. I’m sure if I went to a decent school I’d have had a better experience.
I decided academia’s not for me though

>>10814679
That number is VASTLY inflated by the people who get PhDs in women’s underwater basket weaving studies.
And then you have people getting PhDs in Biology or Neuroscience, and similar fields where there aren’t a lot of openings for the grads because it’s specialized and requires a lot of expensive lab space.

>>10814712
Is neuroscience a dead end after grad school?
t. Undergrad neuroscience major with decent coding/ML experience

I want more gossips about lab members n shit

>>10794992
Is physics grad school really that bad? I had the exact opposite experience with geology

>>10814660
>Especially the female PIs sleep with their students a lot.
Shit, really? With how unattractive most female PIs are, I can't imagine most guys would exactly be up for the occasion

>>10814679
no way is it a 30% shot, it is probably within the 5-10% range if you are not from an MIT/Berkely/Harvard etc

30% is probably realistic though for MIT/Caltech etc PhDs

>>10814546
I have a phd in chemical engineering and i work in the area of petroleum catalysis/unit design

operations research (not everyone, but a lot of them) does very little to relate to other areas of the field and they bombard everyone with their very esoteric and unrealistic ways to improve things, without actually going all the way to explain the details or tackling realistic technological challenges

I have been to operational research conferences with chemical engineering focus, and they seem to recycle a lot of ideas with very little incremental improvement

anyways, being in this field will definitely open doors for you to join the likes of Mickinsey more than working in catalysis for example.

Since Phds here aren't distributed like candies here in Europe, have phds more valueable and do they find better employment opportunities than in america?

PhDs in STEM is for people with near 200iq
It's a waste of time for anyone else. Go get a job already.

>>10814910
USA will always ALWAYS have better financial prospects than europe for STEM PhDs

Although euros arguably do better science on average

>>10814916
Not with republicucks gutting all science and research funding.

>>10814916
But how if everyone in us has a PhD these days

>>10811560
sooner or later you'll realize you wasted your life probably not till you're very old lol

>>10814928
its much easier to bullshit your way to more money in the US

>>10814926
Good. Go get a job.

>>10812539
Be honest how many papers a day can you read with just an 8 hour work schedule?

>>10814947
In my field it takes at least a week to really read and understand all the math in a single paper.

>>10799780
Kick their asses, Anon.

>>10794992
At some point everyone gets to that phase. Then you complete your thesis. And yes, it is a lot more cut throat than is healthy but with a Physics PhD you are fortunate enough not to be beholden to feudal academic warlord professors.

Do at least one post. doc and in a different country. And enjoy.

That is what I did. I went to Japan for two years, it was awesome. And I would have done it again.

>>10801158
Probably because you didn't exercise/get sunlight.

I ended up being a neet this summer (had an internship last summer but didn't want to go back) and it has been pretty /comfy/

I can exercise, go for walks, study, and shitpost all on my own time. Of course leading a healty neet life is difficult because it's all self-imposed, but still better than a wagie if you ask me.

>>10814938
>Go suck Bezos's cock with me
No thanks

>>10814883
They aren't attractive, they're ok looking if young enough and get off on homewrecking their young students by trying to force them into it, being viscious with rumours to their wives etc.

Most people refuse and get out or get fired. I've seen this happen more than once.

>>10814904
Man half the people at INFORMS work for Exxon. I think you just haven't been involved in a lot of scheduling and control engineering projects.

Those incremental improvements are funded for a good reason. Almost always it's because an algorithm just wasn't good enough to solve a particular problem. To give you a more explicit example there's something like a 10 million dollar grant up for grabs to find the most tractable algorithm to deal with grid instability.

Although I think it's important I don't work on incremental improvement of McCormick relaxation #97947 myself. I started doing computational thermodynamics and we didn't have an algorithm that could solve the model (and also I needed to map the entire energy surface, not just find a minima). Not even the commercials ones at the time came close to converging. So that's what motivated the research to begin with. We use this model in nano materials design for polymer additives. It had commercial value to led to new technologies and startup companies. It has so many application including catalyst design by solving the inverse energy surface problem for finding the right model


Goddammit my work isn't useless I swear!

>>10814910
Oof, there are far more PhDs in Europe than USA.

>>10815308
Yup. It's the ultimate power position for an ugly woman. Because they are PI/Prof they believe they are entitled to a guy on their level, and since the student is below them in the academic hierarchy if he refuses that's an insult if anything.

>>10814971
Tell me your secrets anon. I wish to follow your path.

I'm from one of the worlds top rated Institutions (ETHZ Switzerland), and I actually don't know a single person who hasn't done a meme PhD. It's incredibly rare that people come up with something original, and if they do they are set for life.
What's becoming more and more common however, is that people who just spammed irrelevant crap (studies, data collections) are getting positions which they shouldn't. And yes, they usually make up some flimsy bullshit as to why they should be doing what amounts to nothing and get away with it because of kike magery.

>>10814916
It can sort of look like that but you have much higher costs of living in much of the US and you usually get taxed more to boot. It can sort of be useful if you can remotely work in the US or if you're coming back to Europe wanting a similar looking salary to before.

>>10815343
I highly doubt that this is true

>>10814971
Anon I'm a physics major and I want to do this. Tell us how. I want to be a weeb boi

>>10794992
>I initially pursued this degree out of a simple love of physics and some general idealistic sense of helping humanity.
Focus on helping the planet instead. Go vegan and turn other people vegan. Humans suck.

>>10815381
ayyyyyy its ya boi from EPFL calling in.
Most ppl here just stick to Masters.
From the few ppl doing PHD that ive spoken to, its mostly the workload that's beyond absurd, and the pay is pretty shit by swiss standards.
One of my supervisors for a robotics course said that he does a lot of lecture related stuff and is still excpected to make time for his own phd related projects.
Robotics masters student here.

>>10816002
Then kill yourself faggot

>>10795026
Statistics is honestly the best applied field to get into postgrad. It opens the doorway for any applied passion you can think of.

>>10796871
Yar Yar Binks

>>10814951
so do you see my point?

>>10816106
>faggot
Why the homophobia?

>>10795013
you have never paid rent in your life

>>10795073
BS ME here working at Lockheed Martin. I turned down a master's program because I agreed with the above post. Fuck wasting time on dead end BS.

I find the issue to be accountability. There needs to be constant feedback loops where individuals are evaluated and then reiterate their approach based on their progress.

Just dont am hero promise me

>>10814926
Only dumb climate change shit.

>>10816135
Why the homosexuality?

>>10813049
Tell us more. I'm thinking of doing a phd in Astronomy next year

>>10794992
op, this is the winnowing
the forging in the fire to temper your metal
you will find this in every pursuit, to some degree, but the higher the technical complexity in the field, the higher potential of challenge. its axiomatic

you must fight the good fight every moment
every minute every day
make it worth the price we pay

>>10815373
>Tell me your secrets anon. I wish to follow your path.
There is no big secret, you just have to grind through it until you have that PhD. There is always a struggle and nobody is really informed about how it works unless you are from a family with PhDs.

Same with post. doc lifestyle, little career advice. Thing is, the academic pyramid is tall and narrow with a huge base of grad students and post docs. Get in with a viable option of getting out and into industry. experimental physics, especially solid state physics is a safe bet.

Never do a PhD where you graduated. Staying on means you will forever be treated as the professor's student, not a post doc, nor even when you get tenured. Move between each post doc, and try different countries.

Build network. Avoid any place with academic inbreeding. That is a giant problem around here.

>>10815971
>Anon I'm a physics major and I want to do this. Tell us how. I want to be a weeb boi
Japan has a lot of fellowships. I did a STA Fellowship years ago, might be changed now.
https://www.jsps.go.jp/english/e-ippan/index.html
It was fantastic, can recommend. Did also Nihongoryokushiken 4th and 3rd grade.
There are also many other relevant fellowships you can apply for. Tenure is often 2 years but you might apply for a second fellowship. Some get full tenure.

Oh, and about a third of my colleagues who were not married got married while in Japan.

lmao

>>10797894
Not even if it's applied to something?

>>10819208
>"Oh, and about a third of my colleagues who were not married got married while in Japan."

BASED
Also how much Japanese did you find yourself needing to speak or needing to know?

>>10816122
Anyone doing a Ph.D in stats confirm?

>>10795013
>You have to be 18 years old or older to browse this Website

Fuck off and die

>>10819228
>Also how much Japanese did you find yourself needing to speak or needing to know?
Unexpectedly little but then again I was in Tsukuba which has the highest density of foreigners in Japan, last I heard.

Learn Katakana, that alone helps immensely. Learn the culture, that helps a lot too. Learn normal phrases for being polite to avoid being seen as a berk. Listen, look, pay attention to what happens around you and avoid falling into cultural traps.

Japanese language is hard. Still, learn as much of it as you can. and take the official proficiency exams. One of the best ways to learn is to get a Japanese girlfriend.

Like most things, but probably even more, I think it really depends on which group you end up and who your supervisor is.

I am really glad (second year phd in physics) of being where I am. I work ok hours, the atmosphere in the lab is great and all the people are friendly and I met some great friends as phd companions. My supervisor follows me a lot and is very helpful. I am already said thinking about when I will have to leave. But I see people in the very same group who are desperate cause their supervisor is a fucking asshole. Luck of the draw on where you end up and most of all with whom is so big in your phd experience.

>>10814928
>everyone in us has a PhD these days
the absolute state of these fucking undergrads

>>10819229
Not him, but there's so much you can do with it. Want to go into chemo-informatics? bioinformatics? Big data applied to physics? It's a good capstone, and a masters and phd in math/stats with experience will make you more qualified than 90% of the other graduates in the field. We've come to the inevitability where there's so much data already out there in every scientific field, and nobody, for the most part, has any clue what to do with it. Also, a masters in stats/math turns a biology, psychology or sociology degree from a meme to an actually respectable degree. It also avoids the overspecialization of computer science, since mathematical modeling is more relevant to science than total efficiency in algorithms/sorting, you'll need to know some, but it's not IMPERATIVE that you need to implement a sorting algorithm with 100% efficiency. Science, as well, is experiencing exponential increases in the complexity of data analysis, engineering fields are hitting saddle points in processes, physicists have mindbogglingly, soul-crushingly, large data sets, biomedical researchers not having a single clue in what they're doing, ect.

>>10794992
It really sucks. After a few years I had enough. I got a real job and worked on my thesis only on weekends at home because I couldn't stand walking into that dreaded University building anymore.
All I wanted was to finish and therefore submitted some half-assed shit I didn't care about. In the end I got my Phd with really bad grades.
The whole thing was the worst waste of time ever. You can't make money with neutrinos ever.

To everybody thinking about becoming a PhD student: If you don't belong to the best 2-3% in your field, don't do it. The competition is insane and will certainly destroy your life.

>>10800909
>The academic culture is really all about a bunch of stupid people who manage to support each other in citation networks. They will never solve anything important.

This. Wouldn't say they are all stupid, met some very bright people in academia, but 90% lack a soul

>>10800917
You have to be the first to be cited many times.
There is also a lot of fraud going on since people are measured by this metric. Since also departments are measured by this there is an incentive not to stop fraud and abuse.

>>10800917
>I see a lot of Physics researchers who 3000+ citations who are only in the 5 or 10th year of their career (since starting their PhD).
>I have no idea how people do this

There are people who work on a large collaborations and get buttloads of citations

>>10819739
That is mainly in high energy physics, astronomy etc. In most fields 2 - 5 authors is the norm, anything more suggests departmental heads attempting to muscle in.

>>10819525
You did well to complete, anon, it would have been worse if you didn't.
In any case you will benefit from the otehr skills you learned about research. I was in the same situation after my field collapsed but thankfully I could apply these skills elsewhere to great effect.

>>10808018
>Hey guys, will you help me develop weapons to drone strike weddings during dubious wars or set up a surveillance state to spy on our own people?
>No fuck off
Absolutely based. Shun the Uncle Toms.

>>10795026
>>10794992
>>10796213
>>10796222
what tier of uni do you go to? I'm curious to see how or even if the social quality of the research
environment correlates to a university's prestige in the field.

>>10804159
welp, communistan is now funding social sciences equally with the hard sciences.

>>10799498
how are you getting paid to do jack shit? How would you explain the disparity between your experiences and the majority of the rest of the thread?
I would appreciate any advice which could help me getting a job where I get paid big bucks to do jack shit.

>>10819720
They had to do PhDs. Can you really blame them?
>>10800909
Which open source code if you don't mind me asking?

>>10802841
How are you doing research in two fields?

>>10821806

probably not the only reason you won't get support for public, independent weapons research.

generally, public research can ruin competitive advantage. the academic landscape would look very different if academia and public research were even half as philanthropically motivated as it claims to be

>>10803951
>nibbas
kys nigger

>>10815340
Which model? Also, would you recommend ChemE as an undergraduate major? What do you think of all the people who say there's no jobs for Chemical engineers?

>>10819208
Any ways of determining if a department is inbred or not before doing a postdoc or PhD there?
And when you say they got married in Japan, do you mean with their American partners or with Japanese?

>>10819485
but wouldn't a CS phd with research in data analysis be just as good as a stats PhD?

>>10821901
>Any ways of determining if a department is inbred or not before doing a postdoc or PhD there?
There are many ways. First of all you can check by googling something like "academic inbreeding site:[country]" which in the case of my country bring up enough hits that I know there is no point for me even trying. The delusion of grandeur here is out of control, so a PhD from Oxford might qualify for a position as a technician, but under doubt. Other keyword is "nepotism", also gives a lot of hits around here.

Secondly you can check the careers of the academics there, are they graduates of their own university? Did they go elsewhere? Around here few even go for sabbaticals in fear of having their resources taken the minute they leave. If they did their bachelor, masters and PhD degrees all at the same place plus also post doc before getting tenure, just drop the place.

Finally, check if the place have rules in place that go so far as to forbid employing their own students without having spent years elsewhere. I believe Taiwan has such rules, strictly enforced too. Ethics is important, especially when they are enforced. Around here professors were forbidden from having sex with their students but it was never enforced. Instead one faculty had professors where nearly all of them had married their own students. So they "fixed" the issue by removing the rule.

>And when you say they got married in Japan, do you mean with their American partners or with Japanese?
I meant researchers (mostly westerners from the US, Europe, Australia) got married to Japanese young ladies, aged around 30 give or take. I had a GF but my field was in decline and I knew I would be having a hard time getting a new job which I just could not drag a wife into, and she had a promising career in front of her, meaning years of travelling.

>>10821907
>CS
>Math
stfu codemonkey and get back to your cubicle.

>>10821820
I'm the first guy you quoted. My university ranks in the top 30 in almost all of those academic rankings for x subject you see, if not 20. I think it's pretty good.

>>10822059
An applied stats PhD involves plenty of programming. Either way, I was asking for evaluation based on applicability to other fields, not how much it appeals to juvenile notions of "purity".

>>10794992
No matter how bad or stupid you think your life decisions are remember it could be worse. You could've gone to law school.

>>10822093
Do you know what response surface methodology is? Do you know the intuition behind formulating a statistical/deterministic mathematical model? Do you know about experimental design? The field of CS, to me, seems only able to spit out half-baked machine learning models as of late, and tries to call that "data-mining" or whatever word they use.

>>10822089
looks like good unis have good students.
>>10822108
You make a good point. However, must one spend six years getting a PhD to learn these concepts?
I agree that a lot of ML research is half-baked, but then a lot of statistics research is half-baked as well. Sturgeon's law applies to all fields.
It seems to me that the ability to create computational models while also having an understanding of the significance of any outputs is what would really set apart a researcher.

>>10795013
The mistake your making is assuming that the academic organization in its current state IS PHYSICS. This is just garbage. Hopping through artificial hoops, is not overcoming challenges for the sake of physics.

>>10822124
I just doubt the ability of the field of CS to be helpful in expanding humanity's body of knowledge. Admittedly, those concepts can be self taught, but I don't think a CS degree alone can prepare you for entering independent research. Of course, bioinformatics has done some great work over the past few years, but only with heavy input from the math/stats researchers, it seems.

>>10794992
Go to Europe during post doc or PhD.
Go to China for assistant prof and tenure track.
Don't go into hyper competitive fields.
Also as a PhD it's almost impossible to get fired. Life is as horrible as you make it.
>Western european condensed matter phd

>>10822143
>hyper competitive fields
Could you name any of those except hep-th?
>condensed matter
Theory or experiment?

>>10822143
Have there been any hyper competitive fields in physics since the High Tc implosion?

>>10822143
>Western european condensed matter phd
I'm planning to do this next year, I heard it has the most job oppenings and most vast field

is it true? and what should I expect in terms of competition ?

>>10822539
Yes, it is true, especially this is experimental research. Still, theoretical or simulation work towards a PhD will also do the trick.

The semiconductor industry will need process work and improvements for the foreseeable future. Fields like nanotech will also need people. Also if High Tc superconductivity makes a return the field will explode, ref. the Woodstock of Physics.

>>10795013
>>10798213
6/10 bait

well, shit. i'm going back to get my masters in stats this semester. my advisor does mostly applications for health and my thesis will likely be something around data science. i like this threads title since after almost 2 years of being a software developer i would describe myself as disillusioned with industry. i wonder if a thread titled as such would've received a similar response.

i'm viewing grad school as something similar to joining a very small startup. you sacrifice salary in return for accumulating knowledge very quickly. the end result i hoped would be the chance to do more interesting work in industry. the thing is, i'm no longer certain the sacrifice of 2 years will be worth it (in terms of the work i'll be able to do)

anyone here gone from the software industry back to grad school? was it worth it?

>>10821865
Most people have 2 or more fields Anon...

>>10821891
There are no jobs for Chemical Engineers and no sign that this will improve within the next 10 years.

If I could have any degree instead of a ChemE PhD it would be a computer science masters in data science/ML.

>>10822055
I stayed at my inbred home town university so that I could be with my girlfriend while she finished her degree.

Do you have advice for me? I'm about to finish my PhD at the same university I did my Masters and Bachelors, but I really, really want to start a new one at a better university, or just any university in another country. I'm 26 so I'm getting a bit too old, but I'm hoping that some PIs are still willing to take me based on my publication record.

>>10827204
>There are no jobs for Chemical Engineers and no sign that this will improve within the next 10 years.
There is always a need for well qualified patent attorneys and patent Examiners.

>>10827360
This is nonsense. My friend finished a law degree while working for a petroleum company and he still hasn't found work at a patent firm.

Chemical engineering got oversaturated and it's not going to recover because people are still under the false impression that it has a healthy job market.

>>10795013
hhhhhhhhhhhhhHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAH

>>10827208
I also did the PhD at the same place as my BSc, but afterwards I moved to other countries. I am in industry now but were I to return to academia I would probably not return to my old university.

>>10794992
I feel disillusioned as well. After working on a project for a year and publishing something, you are informed that some other group published about the same subject a week before, and suddenly all your work nearly worthless. This is not science but a speed competition.

>>10803951
Thank you

>>10808193
>the girls tend to take coffee from 8-10am and lunch from 12-4pm then come back to pack up and leave.
That's my experience with the Chinese girl I'm currently working with. Very little work output. I need to help her with almost everything, then she'll make a file path change after being instructed not to (by me), fuck everything up, and have me come to the rescue only to find a new error she created. She's on her phone 24/7

>>10811364
Women in STEM are untouchable, at least in the US (imo)

>>10827373
>This is nonsense. My friend finished a law degree while working for a petroleum company and he still hasn't found work at a patent firm.
Is he a patent attorney, patent agent or something else? Where did he apply?
In any case this sounds strange.

>>10814916
Not to mention that being white + having PhD from US school = $$$ in foreign countries. Go to a high-end school in another country. Sure it's foreign, but research cash gets practically thrown at you and it's pretty comfy from what I've heard

>>10822124
>must one spend six years getting a PhD to learn these concepts?

Yes if you want to do anything that matters long term. Of course most good CS grads (rare btw) can piece together stuff that works from work already done, but it takes a surprisingly long time to get comfortable with truly advanced math or statistics or whatever.

Honestly this is more due to a severe lack of this stuff outside of math, in a perfect world CS degrees would include algebraic geometry applications (Groebner bases for example) which is huge and growing, but this requires a lot of background knowledge of abstract algebra. Similarly "real" probability and statistics requires measure theory, which again requires a lot of formal analysis background most people don't even know exists.

>>10795081
Not true. You can convince other people you are smart pretty easily (assuming some basic social skills of course). Real life isn't like sci, people love engineering, cs, math, physics, stats, whatever. From here you can get hired in finance, medical physics (MRI etc), etc. There's a reason why so many hedge fund managers are physicists or algebraic geometers.

It's fun too (except for brainlets). You might not consider this "useful" though. Some applications show up in math occasionally. I think high energy is dying by the way, but it's what I know best unfortunately.

>>10829099
Well, I wouldn't consider finance very useful (although it's something that I've been considering quite a bit as a possible future career path). But I'm pretty sure that all of those options are far removed from that poster's concept of advancing physics (and also from the focus of most physics research in graduate school, although there is a medical physics program here that I should probably try to get more in touch with), not that they're not interesting jobs to work.

>>10829128
Sorry I misunderstood what you meant by useful. The problem with hep theory is that the theory is far beyond experiment. This has happened a few times before. One interesting case is that when general relativity was being formulated, there was a competing scalar theory. The huge difference between them is that Einstein's tensor theory predicted light bending from gravity. Eventually we found that light did bend and the scalar theory along with whoever worked on it was left forgotten in history.

The case right now is much more severe. Our most successful fundamental theory right now is string theory, which is a huge mess and requires supersymmetry (not in good shape). Even basic observations require immense energy scales, and strings (if they do exist) are practically impossible to find. High energy fundamental physics is truly a mystery right now. However other fields like cosmology or condensed matter are consistently coming up with new and interesting ideas that are actually being found.

That being said I would not say that it's useless. Just as I would say that the scalar theory of gravity isn't useless. (or even scalar QED as well). When studying physics the only real way to progress is to make strong assumptions about things and work from there. The effect is much more pronounced now only because of how far behind experiment is. Before we could have chemistry we must first have alchemy. Before we have modern medicine we must have the four humors. Actually high energy theory is much more useful than these, because even if it is wrong it has led to applications outside of physics

>advancing physics
I can't say much about dealing with this because I never really cared. I just like learning physics. In this sense I think pessimists are correct, it's very unlikely anyone other than a dozen people at most will be considered to have advanced physics in the future. The people who do will of course have the mindset described in >>10795013

>>10797036
philosophy is just religion for pseuds. learn qft instead
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/A+first+idea+of+quantum+field+theory+--+Symmetries

>>10798213
based dirac

>>10799438
this. if you love physics nothing is more fun than grad school. no more boring undergrad shit, can research and fuck around, don't have existential dread from writing grants.

>>10827778
How did you get an industry job in another country? My degree is supposed to be internationally accreditted, but either you need to already have a work visa for a professional job or people just ignore your application. I even have citizenship in a European country, but they seem to strongly prefer degree holders from their own country.

I can't even find a shitty minimum wage job. The irony is that it was so fucking competative to get into this programme because ChemE was in such huge demand.

>>10827906
He applied to other firms as well as internally to his company's own patent division.