Graduate student here. Would love to talk about this stuff.
>There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists.
The first part is true, but the mediocre scientists aren't necessarily politically-connected. More often, they're just busy, so consistently busy doing their own research and supervising their own students that one day some new and improved methodology, instrument, or statistical tool leaves them in the dust. This happens because, frankly, nobody pays them to keep their methodology, instruments, and statistical tools up to date, and it's not like anyone will refuse to publish their papers if they don't keep up-to-date. They get grants because they publish papers, and they publish papers because they keep doing experiments and/or proving theorems -- the fact that they could be learning more and quicker by working some other way isn't built into any incentive structure except their personal hopes and dreams (which are the first thing any young scientist learns to repress).
>Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science.
This is quite true. I find the advising structure in graduate school strange with respect to its stated purposes. The definitional requirement of a PhD is that it be a large piece of original research (stereotypically, about three papers' worth) that charts the course for the young scientist's early career. The best PhD dissertations open up whole new subfields, and those are the young scientists who get the good jobs. But how do we allocate labor to produce these "brilliant new ideas"? Largely by assigning the graduate student to work on their adviser's existing research program, which they can slowly transform into something at least partially their own depending on their level of supervision.
(The worst PhD dissertations are basically just longer MSc dissertations: fully supervised research work done in total peonage with little to no original input by the apprentice graduating to become a real scientist.)
>There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.
Absolutely, completely, entirely, 100% true. The vast majority of professional science is legwork. Theoreticians can spend plenty of time constructing models or proving theorems to feel brilliant, but ultimately, they mostly just do legwork as well. Experimentalists and engineering researchers have to actually do experiments and actually produce artifacts. Mind, many of us find even the drudgery and legwork plenty fascinating to set-up and do, but almost never so much that we'd object to your taking it away somehow.
Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications).
I would add only one quality: a professional scientist is defined not only by religious devotion to doing loads and loads of legwork for little compensation, but also by an emotional ability to withstand being constantly graded, measured, and stack-ranked against everyone else in your field, in time periods ranging from each semester to every few years. From the beginning of undergrad through tenure and up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating, you basically never stop having to pass yet another set of exams (each one calibrated to fail some percentage at the bottom, forcing them to find other careers) to continue doing your existing job or to receive a promotion that other skilled professionals would usually get by virtue of experience alone.
While I've heard that many decades ago, funding and positions were plentiful, and so the system was not nearly so burdensome as today, now I am always a little amazed that scientific advancement manages to happen at all, since almost everything a scientist does professionally is connected to keeping his job instead of actually getting and sharing research results.
>The first part is true, but the mediocre scientists aren't necessarily politically-connected.
I got my PhD at an international research lab. I was a research fellow in nuclear physics at a Russell Group (i.e. top-16) university in the UK for 7 years. I was a guest scientist at CERN. I know whereof I speak ;-)
[EDIT: Let's assume that if you are mediocre and not politically-connected, you don't get tenure and you don't stay long. You don't supervise students in an official fashion. This is mostly true, I think.]
I can assure you that when (if!) you come to apply for tenure, it will matter more who your friends are and whose bags you carried than the papers that you produced or the students that you mentored. I agree that most scientists are incredibly busy. Sadly, because they are all incredibly busy, it's the extra stuff (the handshakes, the dinners, etc.) that come to matter. The technical stuff (the tooling, the methods) don't matter precisely because the group heads don't understand them - but they do understand who they had dinner with last week, or who gave a nice talk at that pleasant conference. They do understand that their friend was their prospective employee's supervisor, and they do understand the concept of political favours. They understand prestige and status and how to obtain it, almost by definition. That speaks to your last point too.
> Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications).
I disagree slightly, with the benefit of experience. The most brilliant people I knew all left science. They (we, now) went to draw larger salaries in industry, working half the hours and with more pleasant colleagues. The people that were left were those without brilliance but with the tenacity to hold on and without the skills to get a decent job in a mid-career switch. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions, but they're rare (again, only in my experience).
> up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating
Well, at this point you've failed, you see - you've given up doing science :-) But you still get graded - there are departmental quotas and budget forecasts and student surveys and now you're a middle manager. But you get paid less.
On a completely unrelated note, is M.S. work in the CS world really: "fully supervised research work done in total peonage with little to no original input"?
For us, an M.S. thesis was supposed to be largely independent, publishable work. Is it that different in different fields?
At least in the geosciences, M.S. research is basically your adviser saying "Here's an idea/interesting problem that I haven't thought much about but looks promising. Have at it."
You do your M.S., publish, switch schools and start a Ph.D. (Or go into industry... An M.S. is a very common working degree in geology.)
A Ph.D. is "Come up with three different, relevant, original ideas that work* and see them through". (*Obviously, most don't work, so it's largely an exercise it trying different things until something does.)
I know we have a different academic culture than CS (and a wildly different industry culture), but is it really that different at the M.S. level?
It's my hypothesis that as you rise through the academic ranks (i.e., from kindergarten through gradual school etc.) that you are given increasing independence to forge your own path, but one of the paths open to you is mediocrity. You can arrange matters so that you're virtually guaranteed to receive a degree for mediocre work, and to graduate with no prospects.
I don't want to sound like an "internet tough guy" but rising up above that level is laid on the student to pursue.
Sorry, I had to edit this again. I have a PhD in physics. My dire warning to graduate students is: You might be given a degree even if you didn't do PhD level work. I hope that's sobering, but at the same time motivating.
At least in my experience, an MSc is constituted by "tackle one interesting idea/problem, under supervision and guidance from your advisor". The exact degree of peonage or independence you are given varies with how the advisor and student get along, and with their goals. However, generally, MSc research constitutes one paper's worth of output (two if you're good, or sometimes even quite commonly nowadays, since two papers' worth means more labor got done for the same "price" in stipends and degrees), and is more closely supervised and less independent than a PhD (but still more independent than a BSc thesis).
On the other hand, my experiences have been weird, in that I had near-total independence for my BSc thesis (which, as a result, simply was not very good even though it was accepted with honors) (because my undergrad thesis advisors were involved in administration and I was doing a topic politically disfavored in that department), and an uneven degree of supervision for my MSc research (I've had a lot of guidance on what experiment to do and what statistics to run, but my advisor has never told me how to find the previous literature on our subject, even when I ask).
From my personal interaction with PhDs, basically you have to leave the profession. I'm not kidding. I wish I was. Eventually you'll find a job that may be somewhat related to your interests, in "industry" as it's called, or you'll have to start out in the field where there actually are jobs for STEM graduates: Teaching.
Frankly, I've watched the cheapening happen for the past 15 years, and at first it was schadenfreude. Me, a person with a liberal arts degree, was having a really hard time getting my career going, getting a living wage - and even with a Masters, 10 years of solid work experience, references, technology skills and no piercings, tattoos or felonies. Basically I'm a textbook employee on paper, and it still took me something like 200 applications to "earn" my first career gig.
All the while, people in STEM put me down for having a useless degree. Well, after watching the 2000s tech bubble pop, watching H1-Bs come in and drive down the wage faster than 50 somethings trying to take any job they can just to keep up with their lifestyle (and thereby rob a 20 something of the chance to start gaining the requisite experience), I no longer take solace in how hard it is to be in STEM. It's a family thing now, but fortunately, my experience and my "take no bullshit, this is fucking business" attitude toward employment is very helpful.
I am a creative and intellectual mercenary. I fight for myself. I did not choose this path.
There's pretty much nothing that you can do, I think. At the point where you are a graduate student, you have the least power in the academic hierarchy. You're not going to leave, because programs are generally not transferable and you've already sunk X years into your degree. You have no money and, what's more, you're usually ineligible for getting any money because research agencies only fund in a meaningful way tenured professors. So you're dependent on someone who has been trained to be quite politically ruthless (if not always necessarily competent) and you've a massive sunk cost. Finish your degree as soon as you can and remember that you likely have no friends on faculty - when you finish your degree, they lose cheap, experienced labour ;-)
I left a chemistry program with an MA and managed to be admitted into a physics PhD program. Such things are not impossible, but you'd better have people willing to get your back when the time comes.
I had
a) physics professors at the previous school (UCSB) willing to write letters, make phone calls
b) solid unpublished work that raised some eyebrows
c) professors on the admitting end willing to shepherd my application
>There's loads of kids going to graduate school to become servants for mediocre, yet politically-connected scientists.
The first part is true, but the mediocre scientists aren't necessarily politically-connected. More often, they're just busy, so consistently busy doing their own research and supervising their own students that one day some new and improved methodology, instrument, or statistical tool leaves them in the dust. This happens because, frankly, nobody pays them to keep their methodology, instruments, and statistical tools up to date, and it's not like anyone will refuse to publish their papers if they don't keep up-to-date. They get grants because they publish papers, and they publish papers because they keep doing experiments and/or proving theorems -- the fact that they could be learning more and quicker by working some other way isn't built into any incentive structure except their personal hopes and dreams (which are the first thing any young scientist learns to repress).
There is especially no shortage of scientists in the sense that, simply put, there are not enough permanent jobs for the PhDs and post-docs we already train. http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030909s.gif
>Then, once they have spent the X years and $Y in opportunity costs to get a PhD, they have to figure out a career for themselves. This is a bad, not a good, thing. It reduces early-stage career experimentation and encourages low-quality science.
This is quite true. I find the advising structure in graduate school strange with respect to its stated purposes. The definitional requirement of a PhD is that it be a large piece of original research (stereotypically, about three papers' worth) that charts the course for the young scientist's early career. The best PhD dissertations open up whole new subfields, and those are the young scientists who get the good jobs. But how do we allocate labor to produce these "brilliant new ideas"? Largely by assigning the graduate student to work on their adviser's existing research program, which they can slowly transform into something at least partially their own depending on their level of supervision.
(The worst PhD dissertations are basically just longer MSc dissertations: fully supervised research work done in total peonage with little to no original input by the apprentice graduating to become a real scientist.)
>There are loads of theories and ideas in any given field about the way that things may be. What you need, as a minimum, is the ability to stick the course to figure out a way of testing those theories and ideas and do the (extraordinarily boring) legwork to get it done. I know a lot of scientists (physicists and mathematicians) and all of them are stubborn, but not particularly brilliant. 99% of physics and mathematics are made up of people who will do drudge work for years with very little recognition or reward. Very, very occasionally, one of them hits the jackpot. It's not brilliance that defines a professional scientist; it's a willingness to be bored and work weekends for very little compensation.
clap clap clap http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6odkq8jNo1qbolbn.gif
Absolutely, completely, entirely, 100% true. The vast majority of professional science is legwork. Theoreticians can spend plenty of time constructing models or proving theorems to feel brilliant, but ultimately, they mostly just do legwork as well. Experimentalists and engineering researchers have to actually do experiments and actually produce artifacts. Mind, many of us find even the drudgery and legwork plenty fascinating to set-up and do, but almost never so much that we'd object to your taking it away somehow.
Also mind: some scientists are brilliant. They're just not the mode, or even always the shining stars of the field, since professional scientists are mostly selected (and therefore optimized) for tenacity (being bored and working weekends for very little compensation) and consistency (producing 110% the desired results, from elementary school through grant applications).
I would add only one quality: a professional scientist is defined not only by religious devotion to doing loads and loads of legwork for little compensation, but also by an emotional ability to withstand being constantly graded, measured, and stack-ranked against everyone else in your field, in time periods ranging from each semester to every few years. From the beginning of undergrad through tenure and up until you move from doing research to mostly teaching or administrating, you basically never stop having to pass yet another set of exams (each one calibrated to fail some percentage at the bottom, forcing them to find other careers) to continue doing your existing job or to receive a promotion that other skilled professionals would usually get by virtue of experience alone.
While I've heard that many decades ago, funding and positions were plentiful, and so the system was not nearly so burdensome as today, now I am always a little amazed that scientific advancement manages to happen at all, since almost everything a scientist does professionally is connected to keeping his job instead of actually getting and sharing research results.