Is working in academia as shit as they say

[Anonymous No.12765490]

Like I guess if you are Witten you will have a pretty good time but from what I’ve heard working in academia is extremely stressful with low pay and low job security

[Anonymous No.12765497]

>>12765490
Even the most exceptional people you meet during undergrad/grad will really only land positions at mid tier unis at best. So long as you're content at a lower-tier uni, you should be okay

[Anonymous No.12765513]

>>12765497
Who gets the top tier jobs then?

[Anonymous No.12765561]

>>12765513
mediocre people with the right connections. its all a cult at the top.

[Anonymous No.12765568]

>>12765561
I wouldn't call them mediocre, but this isn't far from the truth. The academia is corrupt and nepotic. Having clout (i.e. getting published in prestigious journals and jerking your citation index off) is way more important than actual talent or work ethic. That said, name me a single large human institution that doesn't suffer from this. It all went downhill after the second industrial revolution when science was no more about a bunch of rich aristocrats leisurely discovering how the world works, but about MUH INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY. You see this today with people worshiping STEM like their panacea.

[Anonymous No.12765581]

>>12765561
I guess that makes sense. That’s sort of how it works for most fields

[Anonymous No.12765596]

>>12765568
ok, but do you think it above an individual or group of individuals to steal from people andthus block their visibility?

if someone is really fucking good and publishes some insanely impressive shit, they deserve to continue working on that instead of having their work taken and kept in the dark until they feel like they want to let a person in.

[Anonymous No.12765599]

>>12765568
Ya I’ve seen people say a lot that today’s scientific world is better now that it’s not just the rich who do science

[Anonymous No.12765616]

>>12765599
The reality is, there is not really a way to compare them. Back in the 19th century one could make scientific discoveries in their backyard or at most go on a voyage to some distant lands.
Today, not only science has been proletarianized to the core, but it requires large collaborations and government funding due to the sheer size of the project. As a physicist, fields in my department that experience this the most are high-energy physics and cosmology. Atomic, molecular, and optics suffers the least, but you still need extremely niche and expensive equipment that one can't just set up in their backyard. A lot of the people who work in these collaborations don't even really do any science: they're engineers in disguise who construct apparatuses that they themselves don't use. Sometimes you even see people having their entire theses about programming software for data analysis without ever doing any. Nothing wrong with that, but I feel like the modern scientist is detached from science like never before and the institutionalization of science has alienated him/her from the craft.

[Anonymous No.12765629]

>>12765596
I believe that all these "hurr durr I published first/my name appears before your name" things are really petty and are something from a bygone era. The internet gave us an opportunity to have people publish on an equal playing field via things like arxiv.org. Yeah, there's tons of trash and pajeet nonsense, but it's better than this rampant corrupt system that scientific journals have cultivated. People like Alexandra Elbakyan are based in that they recognize how shitty the whole thing is when nobody today buys physical journals and just needs to google a paper for their research.

[Anonymous No.12765710]

I think this is mainly a thing that exists in stem. Working in philosophy has been very enjoyable even at a lower ranked school. The stem people seem to be in a state where the questions they can answer are getting smaller and smaller, and many can’t seem to be answered at all. But the humanities is great. You can do all your work with limited equipment and can make progress all on your own. Also the question we get to answer are still really interesting. You feel less constrained in what you want to answer compared to stem. Maybe that is something.

[Anonymous No.12765737]

It's only a problem if you set your sights too low or don't take enough risks desu
>there's no jobs in marine biology
Tell that to polar researchers doing crazy shit and making 6 figures

[Anonymous No.12765813]

>>12765710
>But the humanities is great
that's because there's no reason to the madness you people call "social science" and people fit their results to the narrative rather than the other way around.

[Anonymous No.12765831]

How good is CS grad school? It seems like all you require is a computer and mathematical knowledge to publish a CS research paper

[Anonymous No.12766061]

>>12765831
It’s a step up from a programming boot camp

[Anonymous No.12766074]

>>12765490
>with low pay
bullshit

[Anonymous No.12766567]

>>12765490
> academia
> working
Anon, I ...

[Anonymous No.12766852]

>>12765490
it depends but in my field (chemistry) it's basically slave labour thus I will never do a PhD after my master's

[Anonymous No.12766855]

>>12765561
this, who sucks some professor's cock / tits more gets more opportunities

[Anonymous No.12767040]

>>12765490
yes, generally

[Anonymous No.12767223]

>>12765490
>I’ve heard working in academia is extremely stressful with low pay and low job security
Correct. You can game the system though if you have charisma, a network, and good knowledge. I know quite a few professors who paid stuff like laptops and expensive machinery for their side companies from university money, as well as computers for their families. They also choose conferences based on where they happen (for ultra cheap vacations multiple times a year) instead of choosing the most sensible.

[Anonymous No.12767447]

>>12766855
Gosh,I really wish to join academia to get some mommy khazar milkies

[Anonymous No.12767489]

>>12765490
Academia is basically realising that all the top journals have editors that form an American-UK-Dutch cabal which only publishes the research from certain select paper mill groups (half their research is also trash and they accept no critique). If you're a top researcher at ETH Zurich you will (almost) never get published in Nature (enjoy your Scientific Reports consolation prize though). Similarly if you're a top researcher at Caltech there are certain elite journals that are simply closed to you if you don't have an Oxbridge co-author.

So if you're not in these groups you are fucked. You can literally, and I mean fucking literally, find a cheap cure to Lukemia and not get published in Nature (not me, but an author I know and they ended up in Scientific Reports).

Academia is just cucked. Just learn an actual useful skill like daytrading or whatver. Don't work this hard for a position that pays like absolute shit anyway.

[Anonymous No.12767510]

>>12765629
So much wrong with this post.

> "hurr durr I published first/my name appears before your name" things are really petty and are something from a bygone era.
They are not petty. It's about recognition. The next job someone gets depends on their publication record. If you are the first author it implies you did nearly all the work on the paper. Your publication record is the primary evaluation of your CV in the research community. Someone who did not contribute a lot to the project should not have their name listed near the start and take full credit for the work of others competing for the same positions.

This is also why things like "joint first authorships" exist.

>The internet gave us an opportunity to have people publish on an equal playing field via things like arxiv.org.

These are pre-print servers, not "publications". No hiring comittee will care about them.

[Anonymous No.12767511]

>>12767447
>what is figure of speech

[Anonymous No.12767565]

>>12765561
>>12765568
>>12765581
Go back to pol, you fucking salty retards. You're just mad that you're too stupid to understand math and science, but that shouldn't really be surprising given that you are a bunch of angsty, young right wing losers who haven't accomplished anything in life. So please: just go back to pol. People are getting sick and tired of right wingers everywhere trying to stir up trouble, whether it be online, and recently, even IRL (e.g. with the proud boys, QAnon, January 6th, etc.).

[Anonymous No.12767607]

>>12765490
One thing that doesn't get mentioned enough is that the academic job market is extremely oversaturated and that's the real reason why academia is so competitive. Departments ask for candidates with at least 3 post-docs and 2 publications per year simply because they receive hundreds of really good applications for one open position and they need some way of narrowing it down.

To put it another way: the average professor has between 10-50 PhD students he advises over the course of his ~30 year career. Employment of post-secondary teachers (this includes shit like adjuncts and community college instructors) is only expected to grow by 9% over the next 10 years. Even if tenured academia has an unprecedented 5x increase in the number of jobs over the next 30 years (400% growth), that still leaves 5-45 of those PhDs who aren't getting a job in academia.

[Anonymous No.12767623]

>>12767607
2 publications a year for a postdoc is super low...

[Anonymous No.12767652]

>>12767607
>60% of undergrad students actually graduate
>50% of graduates get into a Masters programme
>20% of Masters students go on to do a PhD
>1% of PhDs eventually find a permanent faculty contract

You might be better than 40% of those dropouts, better than 50% of your graduate class. You could even be better than 80% of Masters students.

But are you really better than 99% of all PhD grads? It is a really stupid fucking risk to take and that is why reasonable and intelligent people actively discourage and despise people who do it.

[Anonymous No.12767658]

>>12767565
Ever wonder why the medias is always on your side and right-wingers are censored, if you are on the side of the oppressed?
Academics are sellouts who would lose their jobs as soon as they find and say any dangerous truths.

[Anonymous No.12767693]

>>12765561
>>12765513

At a lot of the top tier unis it is luck.
>be exceptional student
>be exceptional grad student
>get job at prof as mid tier or researcher at top tier
>win a large grant or publish a major result
>become prof at top tier uni

Whether you publish a major result or win a major grant is depends a lot on luck

[Anonymous No.12767712]

>>12767693
There are people that published papers in their postgrad that went on to win the Nobel prize who couldn't break into academia immediately after publishing it. Grants are major brownie points, but as a PhD student you won't be the corresponding author on that grant application, the glory will go to your professor.

I don't know, I've seen the randomest people end up as facutly at MIT etc. One guy was in the Grecian military for 6 years and then magically got an assistant professorship. This happened 40 years ago of course.

Anyway it's all more than just luck. It's some kind of destiny that the powers of fate bestow on certain individuals at birth.

[Anonymous No.12767737]

>>12767712
40 years ago it was different, but now it is all dollars and impact scores. But yeah you can’t get either of those as a grad student, so you need to be in a position to run your own research program and that means non-tenure at a prestigious institution or tenure at a no-name. And even then most people will never make it to the top tier institutions.

[Anonymous No.12767844]

>>12767658
>Ever wonder why the medias is always on your side and right-wingers are censored
this must be because people can't handle what you have to say, right? even if it's the "truth", right?
>Academics are sellouts who would lose their jobs as soon as they find and say any dangerous truths.
I study math, faggot, we don't have "dangerous truths." I think by academics you mean social scientists, psychology, and other meme fields, which is a completely different ball game, and hardly a hard science

[Anonymous No.12767862]

>>12767844
>we don't have "dangerous truths."
Uhm, excuse? Your entire field is literally racist

https://gregashman.wordpress.com/2020/06/17/decolonising-maths-and-science-degrees-at-oxford/

[Anonymous No.12767933]

>>12767565
>everything I don't agree with is right wing

[Anonymous No.12768045]

>>12767489
Is this schizo rant true?

[Anonymous No.12768096]

>>12768045
Yeah

[Anonymous No.12768284]

>>12765629
>The internet gave us an opportunity
The internet has given us a lot of opportunities, many of which haven't been taken. People have forgotten about the original vision of the web.

[Anonymous No.12768392]

>>12768045
It's a bit hyperbolic but there is definitely an incestuous nature to the publishing racket. For example if you look into papers for some niche topic you will see the same 3-4 groups citing each other back and forth over the course of a few years. It's not so much that the groups are driving innovation but rather a reinforcing echo chamber. These cliques stick together and continue to get their friends papers published and drive up citation indices. It's a system set up to propel itself.

[Anonymous No.12768703]

>>12768392
Yeah I was a bit hyperbolic, but the problem is that these cliques take over top journals and then become overly biased towards the importance of their own fields, drowing the general journals like Nature in their topic while drowing out others. This self-perpetuating cycle only ends when the editors retire. And it is not possible to get into these cliques without direct collaboration (which is another catch 22 to get into).

[Anonymous No.12768918]

>>12767489
This, but without daytrade-cucking. Daytrading is a scam as much as academia and peer-review.

[Anonymous No.12768920]

>>12768703
>only ends when the editors retire
kek they all work til they drop dead

[Anonymous No.12768924]

>>12768045
Yes, it has been peer-reviewed.

[Anonymous No.12768966]

>>12765561
>mediocre people with the right connections. its all a cult at the top.

You might even call it a clown cult

[Anonymous No.12768970]

>>12767565
go back to red dit libtard

[Anonymous No.12769010]

>>12767933
keyed. People that say that do look like the pic. Libtards are such pathetic people

[Anonymous No.12769743]

>>12767862
nigga you know damn well this is nitpicked garbage. the nigger writing the article is a retard, stop trolling you gamer

[Anonymous No.12769787]

>>12765490
CONS
Everyone has Trump derangement syndrome
The female faculty have never been put in their place in their life, so they are unbearable cunts
Paperwork
When I need to buy something there's never money
Paperwork
When someone else needs something, there's money out the ass
No job security, no other prospects when you have to bail the sinking ship
Everything breaks
Paperwork
PROS
Office hours with fuckin fine female undergrads

[Anonymous No.12769860]

>>12767565
He's right you dumb faggot

[Anonymous No.12770102]

>>12769787
What fied has pretty undergrads? You obviously aren’t in math or physics. Def not engineering

[Anonymous No.12770429]

>>12769743
It's literally already happened at Oxford university.

[Anonymous No.12770579]

>>12769787
>The female faculty have never been put in their place in their life, so they are unbearable cunts
This. The fact that they are AA placements just makes them even more cunty too. Most of them are cunts who are impossible to work with so men just avoid them altogether and then they write more victimhood discrimination shit to try and get even more handouts than society has already given them. It's the only way they know how to advance.

[Anonymous No.12770697]

>>12770579
Not all women btw. It's very obvious who earned their position and who's a qouta placement.

[Anonymous No.12770698]

>>12769860
>faggot
Why the homophobia?

[Anonymous No.12770741]

>>12770698
He can't help his nature. Please be more tolerant of homophobes and don't trigger them with your gay presence. Thank you.

[Anonymous No.12770759]

>>12770741
God I love how people just keep taking this bait

[Anonymous No.12770907]

>>12767489
Can confirm

[Anonymous No.12770932]

>>12765490
It's very risky going into academia due to the chance of not getting a job and being less employable for many industry jobs. Working hours are usually flexible, but the pay is not commensurate with the effort and shit you need to handle.

[Anonymous No.12770971]

>>12770932
Yeah this. I also thought that it would help me break into a research career, but quickly realized that most industrial researchers just hold a Masters or even a bachelors.

The whole "you need a PhD to learn how to be a researcher" thing is the most dishonest part of it all. You do need it for very specific lab positions, but usually those positions are reserved for people from the lab/company who are actually funded to complete a PhD specifically on the topic. The problem is they have to legally advertise the position to the public and this is how we outsiders are tricked into thinking there are good industry jobs that require a PhD.

[Anonymous No.12770974]

>>12765490
>working for someone
lmao

[Anonymous No.12771098]

what kind of industry research is there for math? would I need a PhD for it? Or would it be better to stay in academia for maths?

[Anonymous No.12771100]

>>12771098
also, what countries would you say it's worth going for research in mathematics?

[Anonymous No.12771136]

>>12768918

If you want to earn money with finance, then buy nasdaq and an etf world.
If you want to trade, do it every day and just follow the herd. You sell what other people sell and buy what other people buy.
Dont try to invent some crappy martingale or go against the herd.
Once you keep day trading for a few months, you try to time the market on a few stocks and also follow the herd (there is always money in following the herd)

[Anonymous No.12771154]

>>12769787
you will never touch them

[Anonymous No.12771163]

>>12771154
Man you have no idea how creepy Profs are. One 40 year married prof in my department was caught fucking all 3 of his female grade students. People used to joke about him being a creep for only accepting hot female grad students and then it stopped being funny. I knew one of the boyfriends of these girls personally, I felt bad for him.

[Anonymous No.12771175]

>>12771163
Also I unironically support the #metoo crowd now

[Anonymous No.12771315]

>>12771163
what a fucking chad holy shit

[Anonymous No.12771331]

>>12771315
He was a balding manlet, but yeah objectively pretty Chad I guess. He made a particularly Chad when power move when, right after the scandal broke, he kept fucking one of the girls and more than once people walked into his office to find her sitting on his lap in broad daylight.

Didn't cost him his job or his marriage either, but he was in line to be the next HoD and was passed over though it's probably more to other factors than the scandal.

[Anonymous No.12771339]

>>12771331
>He made a particularly Chad power move when, right after the scandal broke, he kept fucking one of the girls and more than once people walked into his office to find her sitting on his lap in broad daylight

I-is it possible to learn this power??? What's his area?

[Anonymous No.12771721]

>>12771163
lmao based
poor cuckholds tho
hypergamy is real

[Anonymous No.12771873]

>>12765490
I have dropped out of Grad School (Cancer Medicine) because Academia is fucked. I was actually doing good but was just miserable suicidal mess.

In academia there is no HR, there is low pay, but still many retards (like me) that want to enter it, no academic freedom (highly political and repressive, not creative), everyone is miserable and thus make each other miserable.

The reason is because from undergrad on you are told to enter academia so sheep will keep going there. There is probably also a bunch of grandiose fantasies and narcissism involved. This system is in place so the (per lab) poorly funded academe can keep on getting cheap science workers. See, nowadays as a PhD "studfent" you are more of a cheap technician, no freedom or adequate supervision. Postdoc stands for "postdoctoral student" so they dont have to pay you full scientist wage or benefits.

Outside of the academe bubble, the real world, there is few demand for most scientists so many people are forced to stay in the academe if they dont want to de-qualify.

At least the talented people enter the academe because of the brand of some institutions like Harvard or Uni Heidelberg (where I went) but they usually dont know that they will be treated much better in other places. To get into those ivory towers is also very luck and narcissism-dependend. I know two absolut fucking retards that got internships at Harvard, one is now PhD student at Oxford. If you dont have any illusions about academic freedom and are fine to just slaver away as a technician for no money nor future job, its the place for you. Maybe only entering an ivory tower will give you any benefit. But in those Ivory towers the people are even bigger asssholes and you are even worth less. So pick your poison.

[Anonymous No.12771891]

>>12767489
makes sense. There are many more reasons against academia but thats also a biggy.

[Anonymous No.12771913]

>>12770429
oh rlly? you go there? and noticed a change?

[Anonymous No.12771953]

>>12771163
Based chad. You call it creepy out of envy.

[Anonymous No.12771979]

>>12771873
How much do you think the progress on cancer research gets fucked by this toxic environment? Is there ant hope outside of academia, like for instance, in industry?

[Anonymous No.12772014]

>>12771979
there is always hope in the free market. But unfortunately new ideas are also repressed there by crony corporations and sclerotic regulator agencies.

Maybe look into the field thats often called "alternative therapy". Cancer is mostly a metabolic syndrome, maybe also a pathogen-based. So nutrition therapy can work almost wonders in that field.

The academe of now is fucked and will not reform before it dies, I'm pretty sure. Thats usually how it works out. So true progress will come only from the small slither of industry that is still free.

[Anonymous No.12772032]

>>12772014
i mean just look at alphafold form deepmind company. They just solved the biggest question all computational biology departments in the world tried to solve. Poof. Just invalidated the thesis work of thousands of sheep PhD students. Love it

[Anonymous No.12772083]

>>12771873
>Uni Heidelberg (where I went)
Don't they pay you TLV-13 there?

[Anonymous No.12772189]

>>12772032
Really AI seems like a great science accelerator. I wonder if they will keep discoveries open of if they will go the fucked up cyberpunkish route of paywalling everything. Not to mention, this makes me think of what a bioterrorist with could do with some computational power.

[Anonymous No.12772225]

>>12767565
>Rich people BAD

What if I told you you had to redistribute your 4.0 GPA to help students with 2.0 GPAs make it ahead in life?

[Anonymous No.12772265]

>>12772083
not if you are the lucky recipient of the Helmholtz Stipendium then you get fewer than you colleagues.

WHo get 50-65% TLV-13. Which is a 20h part time contract for a job that takes at least 60h per week in one of the most expensive german cities.

[Anonymous No.12772287]

>>12772225
The appropriate comparison would be distributing my 27374.0 GPA down to a 4.0 to help the students I cheated off

[Anonymous No.12772366]

>>12765616
its further and further and further layerings of atomization and specialization.
Im of the opinion that it is disastrous for the human soul, probably mankind as a species as well.

[Anonymous No.12772369]

>>12767565
Imagine correlating Papa Ted with republicans or right-wingers. How dare you.

[Anonymous No.12772381]

>>12767510
Are you arguing that the deep level of social politiking going on at those levels are justified by their own existence, or that it doesnt exist?

[Anonymous No.12772392]

>>12767652
>But are you really better than 99% of all PhD grads?
This. Its really fucking digestible when you break it down this way for people.

[Anonymous No.12772409]

>>12767510
See>>12767489

[Anonymous No.12772433]

>>12765568
I remember waiting for an office hour where some students were talking, and one of them (older than me, was going to cornell for graduate iirc) Began talking shit about his fellow undergrads, calling a lot of them retarded and that they wouldn't amount to much. Are people at the top really like this, because i've always felt a certain degree of discomfort whenever around professors and grad students because of shit like this

[Anonymous No.12772456]

>>12772409
Lol'ed

[Anonymous No.12772467]

>>12772381
My argument with that post was that people should receive appropriate credit. Not more not less. There are good, objective guidelines for authorship to follow like the DFG guidelines. It is actually precisely bad actor political groups that do things like gift authorship etc.

[Anonymous No.12772476]

>>12772433
Yeah people are this. I'm like that guy too. People talk shit about me too, but I mostly enforce respect.

The political game is a very ugly one. Perception is far more important than anything. Your actual objective success is just a minor tool to try and alter perceptions with.

[Anonymous No.12772489]

>>12772456
LEL, I'll go home after this but one last question:
Why do you seemingly defend the upper level academic and publishing process while acknowledging how rotted it is?

[Anonymous No.12772519]

>>12772476
Thats so disheartening and disillusioning and I never even had any intentions of going for a PhD

[Anonymous No.12772589]

>>12772489
I think that rewarding fair authorship is a step in the right direction like I mention here >>12772467. Those same elitist groups that I mentioned also give everyone in the group authorship. The Profs also strip first authorship from postdocs more often than in other groups. I've heard some nightmare stories.

[Anonymous No.12772632]

>>12772519
Honestly before I started my PhD I worked at a private R&D lab for a year and found the same culture. Sadly I think that anywhere where high salaries are at stake you will unfortunately find the same culture. I think researchers are even nastier than investment bankers in general (who have more objective metrics for performance than we do). I wish I could tell you it was different somewhere, but unfortunately I think it is a feature of any competative system. Some of it is even healthy even, you have to prevent retarded engineers from getting to a position where they build bridges in the same way that the nasty competativeness of medical doctors also serve to protect the public in the end.

By far the nastiest sociopath I've ever met a very well paid Chemical Engineer that worked for a pharma company.

[Anonymous No.12772658]

>>12772632
what is with pharma and Sociopaths?

[Anonymous No.12772677]

>>12772658
Money attracts sociopaths

[Anonymous No.12772730]

>>12772287
While I do agree some people get ahead by cheating and stealing it is very rare and a lot of them end up dead or in jail. >>12772658
being an example.

Would you rather that lottery winners redistribute their winnings? Who wins the lottery anyway? What's it to you that someone won the lottery? Why not just work hard and make your own wealth?

[Anonymous No.12772984]

>>12772730
Lottery winners do redistribute their earnings, it's called taxes and they pay a significantly higher amount for that.
>why not just work hard and make your own wealth
Because wealth doesn't come from working hard. True wealth never comes from a full time job. You may make enough to get by and save up enough to buy a cheap yacht and pretend you're rich, but the ones we have issues with are billionaires and you cannot work enough and not severely exploit others to get to that point.

[Anonymous No.12773650]

>>12770579
I've noticed that the women live for complaining about other people. They need it like oxygen. If there's no interpersonal drama of the day to cluck about, they'll make up microaggressions. Meanwhile it's not the people but the relentless crapouts and unreliability of instruments that hold us back, and the men are all aware of it.

Oh, and academic women don't have interests. They have bfs, husbands, children, and enemies, and that's it. That's all that they will talk about.