Share your PhD life!

[crazillo]

Hey there,
I was wondering who else is in the PhD boat and would like to have a place to share about the suffering :D

I'm on a half position at a European university in social science. Unlike grad schools, this means closer collaboration with your boss but also an additional workload. Your PhD is not as lonely due to teaching but there are times during the term where things can become too much to handle and you will start feeling bad about a lack of progress. Add in tight deadlines and you'll feel the pressure.

Right now we have no lectures and I'm precisely in the situation of the next GIF just that it's not summer here :D

It can feel bad to take some time off to recharge batteries but then you can't really do it during the semester either! I've reached the phase of my PhD where I'm starting to write more rather than the acquire data and review literature phase. But time is still flying and I wish I had an additional month before the next semester starts.

How's everyone feeling about their PhD life? How's life with colleagues? Do you plan to stay in academia or do you want to pursue other career paths afterwards?

A randomn thought I had the other day: The publications in good journals actually matter much more than your PhD thesis while you put so much effort into that one... Most papers stem from your thesis but it certainly seems like it matters less these days than it used to.

—

*UPDATE* I'm days before submission of my PhD! Lots of thoughts on page 5.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

Publications matter (for biology at least) if you're trying to get a job related to your field in academia, or for just making your resume look more impressive when entering industry. No one is ever going to read your dissertation outside of your thesis committee. And publications make your defense much easier, because any critiques of your data will have been presumably been raised by the reviewers before it was accepted anyway, so you should be ready with answers.

 

[Dennis8K]

Was on the PhD boat.

Am now on the last parts of the post doc boat.

Looking to board the tenure track faculty boat.

I don't know which field you are in but in Science what matters is your publications. I don't think anyone ever read my thesis but when I was interviewing for the post doc positions the publications were all important.

And of course publications are also pretty much all that matters if you want to go the academic job route (again, talking science fields here).

 

[crazillo]

Was on the PhD boat.

Am now on the last parts of the post doc boat.

Looking to board the tenure track faculty boat.

I don't know which field you are in but in Science what matters is your publications. I don't think anyone ever read my thesis but when I was interviewing for the post doc positions the publications were all important.

And of course publications are also pretty much all that matters if you want to go the academic job route (again, talking science fields here).

Click to shrink...

Social science, but it's the same in any discipline I guess.

Just increasingly getting the feeling that the thesis and title itself are more or less the springboard you need to progress further, apart from that it doesn't matter too much especially in relation to the amount of work and thoughts you put into it. Anyways, publications are on their way for me, and luckily we can also (re)-use them in our thesis.

 

[NeoBob688]

Finished PhD few years back. Overall, the most intellectually stimulating period of my life. Also helped me grow as a person to come out of my shell.

 

[Burbank]

Just started my PhD so I'll be very interested to hear what your boats are like.

What background did you come from?
I've done consulting for 4 years in my field before coming back to school, and the aim of my PhD is probably to go back to industry.

My PhD doesn't include any teaching atm. I can apply to do it if I want but that would prolong the PhD. Seems like it could be fun, but would suck a lot of energy?

How much did you/are you planning to publish during the four years?

 

[ibyea]

So far, 90 percent boring work on computer. Sometimes, I discuss the science with people and that is the fun part.

 

[lmcfigs]

I was dismissed from my PhD program a year ago :(

no longer in the boat

 

[Fevaweva]

It is kind of awkward because I have to wear baggier trousers in order to not feel embarrassed or for people to think I am showing off.

Spoiler: Spoiler

Shout out to Kanye and The College Dropout

 

[crazillo]

Finished PhD few years back. Overall, the most intellectually stimulating period of my life. Also helped me grow as a person to come out of my shell.

Click to shrink...

Yes, this is something I also cherish about my current life. I have time to devote to a single topic for many years, in depth (at least when I don't have my other duties... :D). It's like pregnancy or climbing the Mount Everest at times, you feel progress, at other times you struggle - but you learn a lot about yourself, too.

As for newbies: I'd advise anyone to be really careful about topic selection. Sometimes professors will suggest stuff that you might not like very much yourself. That's why it's important to align well and have overlapping research interests, IMO. You need to be able to identify with your topic.

 

[PeskyToaster]

I work in the tech field with my computer science bachelor's but my dream would be to work in the history field. It just wasn't super feasible financially but I'd go back to school for it.

 

[wisdom0wl]

Can't imagine PhD life. A Master's for Computer Science is already making me lose my mind.

I'm out after this, not worth it to me imo. Not enough money to be made either (at least I don't think)

 

[Eila]

Still a little baby here, working on a MS. Not sure if I'll stick around to a PhD. 4 years commitment + stuck working for the academia!

 

[Deleted member 8463]

I'm fully funded so don't need to teach like many of my comrades, but have been anyway. If anything it's nice to have some semblance of structure in the void.

Can't imagine PhD life. A Master's for Computer Science is already making me lose my mind.

I'm out after this, not worth it to me imo. Not enough money to be made either (at least I don't think)

Click to shrink...

Whilst neither have been particularly good for my mental health, I'd definitely say that the Masters was more work and more stress. Doing one thing for research is far more preferable to doing lots of different things.

re: publication. I know a lot of universities in the US basically make this a mandatory part of the PhD which I think is a much better tact. Here in the UK it varies depending on uni/department but many don't encourage publication until after the PhD, which generally means a lot of people finish and then can't find a job because they haven't published.

 

[Deleted member 4090]

Finished PhD in Physics, left for Data Science. Grad school fucking sucked, corporate life is a tremendous improvement. I get treated like a person. No more lapses in insurance! No more missed pay checks! Better salary! More geographic mobility and flexibility! Better hours! Better office!

Everything I had ever been told about corporate life by people in academia was a shameless boldfaced lie.

 

[Deleted member 47843]

I'm a tenured professor at a research university. I couldn't be happier! It's just a perfect fit for me as I enjoy most of the work (especially research and working with doctoral students) and love the flexibility on what I work on and when I work. I just don't do well with structure and would be miserable in a 9-5, having to be in the office every day etc.

Yeah, I may work more than 40 hours pretty often (though much less often, and rarely more than 50 hours, since getting tenure as I don't care about being a star in my field or anything), but I love the flexibility. I tend to start working sometime between 10am and noon as I'm not a morning person, can work from home pretty regularly if I want, can blow off non-teaching days when I want to binge a game or whatever and just catch up on the research or admin work on the weekend etc.

It's also just great not really having a boss. I just teach my couple of classes a semester, do the admin tasks assigned to me and do whatever research work I want to do. I'm in a middle of the pack department in my field so the it's pretty low pressure here. As long as you're getting an article or two a year published in decent journals, doing your admin work and getting solid teaching evaluations there's nothing to worry about with annual reviews and what not. And I'm good at all that and it comes pretty easily to me. So low stress, solid wage (around $100k depending on grants, consulting work etc.), good benefits, great work environment and lots of flexibility. So like I said, I couldn't be happier.

I also recognize how lucky I am as I know lots of people with Ph Ds that can't get tenure-track jobs and are stuck in non-tenure line teaching positions with 3-5 classes a semester and no job security, or just adjuncting at multiple universities/colleges for like $3-4k a class and so on. I got my Ph D from the top-ranked department in my field, worked with a huge name in my field and had a couple very good publications and great letters of recommendation when I was on the market.

The market is also MUCH tougher than it was when I came out a decade or so ago. Even as a mid-tier department the new assistant professors we're interviewing and hiring have WAY more publications (like 5-10+ and mostly in top tier journals). And the associate and full professors we've hired the past few years are superstars that the university threw huge salaries at as part of the presidents plan to boost rankings. So that floor for being qualified to even get an interview in a doctoral-granting department has gone way up, and it's harder to move to other decent departments if you aren't a super start with tons of publications and huge grants. As an ABD/new graduate, if you're not getting a degree from a top ten program and have 5+ good pubs you probably aren't getting an interview these days.

 

[Power Shot]

PhD Candidate here, should defend and graduate in Fall 2019.

I'm actually already full time faculty at a nice community college (we don't have tenure, but pretty much guaranteed job security). I study video game rhetoric and hypertext theory, which is pretty neat. Research can be fun, but tough, when you make your hobby your career.

 

[Affinity Purification]

This is a classic.

 

[crazillo]

mooshie78: Great to read you enjoy your work! I also find the working environment at present pretty enjoyable. Besides devoting time to a topic I'm interested in, a PhD can be quite lonely and I don't have that given I work with students and we have a team at at the chair. You also got more freedom compared to many other jobs my friends have. Now with finishing up I wish there were more stipends/grants for the final year to get a sabbatical or something, but these are quite rare.

I do think you are in a fortunate position. You seem to be doing well while keeping yourself a nice balance between work demands and your personal goals! Seeing many junior professorships here though who have to work their ass off just to get the terminated position extended, and then after seven years it's not guaranteed it will be a full professorship. For us junior lecturers, the future looks pretty bleak, too. Student numbers here in Germany have absolutely SOARED (doubled from 2000, millions of more students) yet the full professorship positions have remained about the same. I've read the ration from PhD to Post-Doc positions is like 8:1. And if you do go the post-doc way, it's a pretty big gamble if you can ever get a position that is permanent. There's even a state law here that you cannot get employed longer than 12 years unless it's permanent. So you will simply not be employed any longer, as there is only very few lecturer positions here. Basically, they keep the system and high student numbers running with people on positions that they can replace with easily - at lower cost, as a new PhD is always going to be cheaper. In the end, you have to make a hard choice after the PhD. Further pursuing the academic route can lead to being unemployed at 40, 42 - even when your qualification is top-notch, simply because competition is crazy and the money put into education system is still mostly project-based rather than upping basic finances for universities.

I've always stated that I'm all for healthy competition, but I do feel it's way beyond that and that is shame if we always claim to live in times where the demand for knowledge, progressive technologies and ideas to solve high-stake social issues is higher than ever.

For me personally, it's also the biggest hurdle why I might call it quits after the PhD (although I like it!), because I've also got some other ideas. Not sure yet though.

 

[Power Shot]

Oh, I'd also like to add that, for anyone considering getting a PhD, you'll honestly go pretty far in community colleges. Like I said in my earlier post, I work at one and I pretty much decided early in my career to stay at community college forever. There's less stress to publish, which means I can concentrate on teaching (which I love) and the students are way more interesting. You get a lot more diversity at community college, which gives you more experience. Don't be afraid to teach beginner classes, too. I'm part of my English department, and teach exclusively 1301 (my favorite), which makes me very desirable because a lot of faculty hate teaching that course.

Presently, I'm trying to decide if I should continue as faculty or try to go into admin (such as department chair positions). Do we have any admin on the board that can speak to that experience?

(Oh, and for those of us who have permanent posts, never forget your life as an adjunct and what you had to do to climb out of that pit- it makes you a better mentor)

 

[Deleted member 47843]

mooshie78
I do think you are in a fortunate position. You seem to be doing well while keeping yourself a nice balance between work demands and your personal goals! Seeing many junior professorships here though who have to work their ass off just to get the terminated position extended, and then after seven years it's not guaranteed it will be a full professorship. For us junior lecturers, the future looks pretty bleak, too. Student numbers here in Germany have absolutely SOARED (doubled from 2000, millions of more students) yet the full professorship.

Click to shrink...

Yep, I'm super fortunate.

I will say that one of the few area the US is better than most of Europe is in how Academia works. I work with a lot of European colleagues and it's just worse over there. The "Lecturer" thing you mention that we don't have as part of the tenure/promotion pathway, generally much lower salaries, no guaranteed permanent position and so on.

Here if you're hired on a tenure-track line you have to go up for tenure in promotion after a set number of years (after 5th year is standard, after 6th is longest you can wait most places). If you get awarded tenure and promotion to Associate Professor that's a guaranteed permanent position as a tenured professor. You either get awarded that, or you're out of the job. That's hugely stressful, but at least it's a big reward to work toward in terms of being a guaranteed job with among the strongest job security in any industry anywhere. There's another promotion you can go for from Associate Professor to Professor (sometimes called Full Professor). But there's no pressure to do that and you can stay at Associate your whole career with no repercussions other than missing that raise (10-15% usually) that comes with that promotion.

Salary wise, even being in a social science, we start assistants in the $70-80k range (just talking nine-month salary, not any summer salary from grants, teaching summer courses etc.). Associates are in the $80-$110k range mostly, and Professors $120-200k. Super stars make more at each rank of course, as they're often bringing in tons of grant and mostly paying their own big salaries through the indirect costs the university takes from grants.

 

[Deleted member 47843]

Presently, I'm trying to decide if I should continue as faculty or try to go into admin (such as department chair positions). Do we have any admin on the board that can speak to that experience?

Click to shrink...

I can't speak to how it works at a community college setting, but in a research university the department-level administrators are still faculty. They're still expected to publish, get grants, mentor graduate students etc. The position just comes with reduced teaching loads and summer pay to help with the extra work.

For instance, our department chair just has a 1/1 class load instead of the usual 2/2 and is on a 12-month salary, rather than 9 month. Graduate and Undergraduate Program Coordinators are on 1/2 teaching loads and get one month of summer salary.

Even at the college and university level here, even people like the Deans, President and Provost have to each 1 class a year and most still do research (though they may not be expected to). That varies by state, as here the Board of Regents requires all faculty to teach at least one course a year. You can't get to a 0/0 load via administrative positions or buying out classes from grants.

As for my take on it, I don't have any interest in administrative stuff above the department level. I'm considering taking on the graduate program director position. It's a lot of work, but I'm not a big fan of teaching undergrads and it would be nice to get a month of summer salary through that position and not have to teach a summer course for it. That said, with having just bought a house I'd probably still teach the summer course the next few summers anyway to have a 2nd month of summer salary to help get savings built back up.

I could also see doing the department chair position down the road. But not until I get my research record buffed up more and get promoted from Associate Professor to Professor, so that's a ways off.

 

[Baccus]

I'm thinking of doing a PhD after my MBA, but I want to do it in an alternative kind of science, as social science or philosophy. I don't want to study for making money anymore. The MBA is enough for being an above average functional corporate drone. If I ever do my phD it's gonna be for fun.

 

[Power Shot]

I can't speak to how it works at a community college setting, but in a research university the department-level administrators are still faculty. They're still expected to publish, get grants, mentor graduate students etc. The position just comes with reduced teaching loads and summer pay to help with the extra work.

For instance, our department chair just has a 1/1 class load instead of the usual 2/2 and is on a 12-month salary, rather than 9 month. Graduate and Undergraduate Program Coordinators are on 1/2 teaching loads and get one month of summer salary.

Even at the college and university level here, even people like the Deans, President and Provost have to each 1 class a year and most still do research (though they may not be expected to). That varies by state, as here the Board of Regents requires all faculty to teach at least one course a year. You can't get to a 0/0 load via administrative positions or buying out classes from grants.

As for my take on it, I don't have any interest in administrative stuff above the department level. I'm considering taking on the graduate program director position. It's a lot of work, but I'm not a big fan of teaching undergrads and it would be nice to get a month of summer salary through that position and not have to teach a summer course for it. That said, with having just bought a house I'd probably still teach the summer course the next few summers anyway to have a 2nd month of summer salary to help get savings built back up.

I could also see doing the department chair position down the road. But not until I get my research record buffed up more and get promoted from Associate Professor to Professor, so that's a ways off.

Click to shrink...

Our department chair is still a nine month contract, with a 4/4 load (the usual is 5/5). Deans and above have 0/0, but my dean teaches a few classes online to stay sane. My college has a pretty big emphasis on teaching, which is nice. I'm not really sure I would do well in a research-oriented place.

 

[Deleted member 17435]

I've been a slave of my supervisor for two years. I traveled across my region (and outside of it) at my own expenses to promote the BA programs of my department, I did the delivery boy and the attendant for the labs. During the christmas party I served the students and prepared the food.
I published on class A scientific journals and attendend national and international conferences.
Lately I got invited to some conferences and asked to write for books and stuff, but I've always declined, because I'm feeling unprepared scientifically speaking.
Now I have to write my thesis but my supervisor checked my status only once in three years, never helped me (when I asked her for some texts she told me to use google) and used to contact me only when she needed a little monkey to do those humiliating tasks, and I have 0 motivation to keep going with this useless phd.
I'm doing a phd in game studies by the way.
This is my personal hell

 

[Deleted member 47843]

Our department chair is still a nine month contract, with a 4/4 load (the usual is 5/5). Deans and above have 0/0, but my dean teaches a few classes online to stay sane. My college has a pretty big emphasis on teaching, which is nice. I'm not really sure I would do well in a research-oriented place.

Click to shrink...

Yeah it's just very different mindsets and preferences when it comes to wanting to work in a teaching university/department or a research one. I love research and would honestly go do a manual labor trade or something before doing a high teaching load position. I just don't enjoy teaching undergraduate courses much at all. I care and put a lot of effort in, but just don't enjoy it or find it rewarding.

I love teaching graduate classes though, and thankfully I've transitioned to doing more of that. My load this year was 3 grad classes and 1 undergrad. I need to get some grants and buy out of courses more often.

 

[StrangeRoboMemory]

I enjoyed it in many ways - mainly the social aspect. I made incredible, lifelong friends, met my wife, and grew a lot as a person. I was intellectually sharpened and I learned a lot. I also really loved teaching (Dean's Prize for Distinguished Teaching and bunch of other teaching awards, yay!), and I was very fortunate to be in a program that allowed me to create my own classes from scratch and to do basically whatever I wanted, as long as it interested the students.

However, over time, I lost a lot of respect for the profession and my field (English literature). Tons of infighting, bad faith politics, pettiness, and selfishness...and above all, tons of awful work out there, because people were desperate to publish. I didn't respect what I was reading and working on, and I realized that I was writing the same sort of crap. I was giving papers and attending talks at conferences where nobody cared because they were too busy angling for job security. On top of that, I sat on several departmental advisory committees, and it was disheartening to realize that faculty members that I respected so much - faculty members that professed humanistic values - became defensive, shrill, and accusatory when big budgets came into play.

I decided not to go into academia. I had been offered a post-doc, but I turned it down. It was a scary choice because I didn't know what I would do next. The job market is dreadful for humanities PHDs because you're trained for one specific thing and 99% of jobs aren't interested in hearing that you gained certain skills that can be transferred. It comes down to, how many literal, actual years have you held X position. I don't know what's worse - the academic job market or the civilian job market. In the academic job market, there are so few jobs (the year I defended, there were, I believe, 14 early modernist jobs in that year's MLA posting, and a chunk of those were for senior faculty), but at least you're trained for them. In the civilian world, there are lots of jobs, but you're not trained for them.

I decided to aim for the publishing world and landed a few part-time gigs, but I had to teach at small colleges and do odd jobs to pay the bills. It took me almost five years to work my way into the field as a managing editor. It was a brutal slog. Many of my friends are way worse off and they're not doing anything even remotely connected to books. One of us, out of a group of about 15 friends, is a tenure track prof. Everyone else is doing a grab bag of things. They're mostly unhappy and unsatisfied. It's really a shame. Brilliant group of people, and their excellence is totally untapped.

 

[Power Shot]

I was very fortunate to be in a program that allowed me to create my own classes from scratch and to do basically whatever I wanted, as long as it interested the students.

They're mostly unhappy and unsatisfied. It's really a shame. Brilliant group of people, and their excellence is totally untapped.

Click to shrink...

I would like to highlight both of these points. Modern universities in particular are doing a terrible job prepping faculty to teach. The PhD program I am in insists that everyone take the "teach 1301 and 1302" course, but mandates that everyone learn to teach the same way. Similarly, graduate instructors teach the same courses, without exception, and are told what to do and given the assignments. In many ways, I'm glad I immediately went into adjuncting at the local community college because it allowed me to develop my courses the way I wanted to without a mandate.

I also fear that unhappiness and dissatisfaction will continue to grow, particularly as opportunities shrink. I sometimes think our generation of academics will be the last with any meaningful job security, particularly as tenure goes away. I'm honestly opposed to tenure (as it is practiced today), but at least it gives some hope to develop creatively.

 

[Deleted member 47843]

I would like to highlight both of these points. Modern universities in particular are doing a terrible job prepping faculty to teach.

Click to shrink...

Yep. Like I said above, I got my Ph D from the top program in my field. I didn't take, and they didn't offer, a single class on how to teach. I taught one summer class during my whole time in graduate school that I prepped myself, and then got this job and have taught 2 classes a semester for going on 11 years. That said, I get high evaluations and figured it out pretty quickly after a little bit of a bumpy start. But some training in grad school would have helped.

At least in my department we require our doctoral students to take a teaching seminar, their mentors have to observe one of their classes and evaluate them every semester and so on. So they're getting some instruction and guidance on improving as teachers. But most programs don't have that type of course in my field. We also encourage them to take workshops from a center on campus that provides lots of pedagogical training sessions for free to students and faculty.

But yeah, teaching just isn't a main focus at research universities. It's rarely taught in graduate programs outside of education and you have to have truly awful teaching evaluations, student complaints etc. for it to matter in tenure and promotion decisions for faculty who are productive in research. It would be better if there were a lot more pure research positions out there so that university lines could be for teaching focused people, but society just doesn't work that way and people aren't willing to pay for knowledge creation if it doesn't have profit potential. Hence most research being done at universities and researchers salaries paid mostly through tuition dollars.

 

[StrangeRoboMemory]

I also fear that unhappiness and dissatisfaction will continue to grow, particularly as opportunities shrink. I sometimes think our generation of academics will be the last with any meaningful job security, particularly as tenure goes away. I'm honestly opposed to tenure (as it is practiced today), but at least it gives some hope to develop creatively.

Click to shrink...

You know...sadly, It's already happened. I think the generation above us was the last cohort with any security (I'm 35). Everyone defending now, and anyone who has defended in the past 3-5 years, is getting crunched.

Mind you, I think everyone with this sort of sob story is from the humanities, heh...the sciences seem just fine. My wife did her PhD in microbiology, she immediately got an amazing postdoc and then a great industry job. Don't do an English PhD, kids! :P

 

[Deleted member 24907]

6th year PhD in Computer Science. I just wanna finish to GTFO. It's been great in many ways, extremely emotionally draining in others. I'm pushing to graduate by pushing out the main publications I need and just going off somewhere.

Not going into academia, at least not yet. Unless you're a literal genius with 10+ papers in top-tier publications you're not getting a tenure-track position in CS. And if you WERE that smart you'd be working in industry for the mad cash anyway (in one of the very few industry positions that actually appreciate research PhDs and know what do with them, which is quickly dwindling in number).

 

[Deleted member 47843]

Mind you, I think everyone with this sort of sob story is from the humanities, heh...the sciences seem just fine. My wife did her PhD in microbiology, she immediately got an amazing postdoc and then a great industry job. Don't do an English PhD, kids! :P

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Yep. The real key is being in a discipline where there's a lot of grant money, and especially federal grants (as Universities get to charge their full indirect rate on those), available. Be it STEM or policy relevant social sciences with lots of grant opportunities.

That's where the security is as those departments party or entirely pay for themselves via those indirects and tend to have large number of majors and thus bring in lots of credit hour dollars. It's the smaller departments that get little research funding and fewer students that are more at risk of being disbanded or having tenure removed etc. as states continue slashing public funding to universities.

 

[RedSparrows]

Doing a history PhD. Intellectually wonderful. Career wise, not convinced - academic work culture isn't great, even as the work itself is often amazing. Also hyper competitive and not sure I have the effort in me.

Still, I love the topic. Love love love.

 

[Thordinson]

I'll be applying to Clinical Psych PhD programs next year and hopefully I'll be joining all of you! I'm learning quite a bit. I'll keep watching this thread.

 

[Power Shot]

For the academic culture, it really depends where you end up. My department is pretty small but we're all friends. There's no weak link in the group. Other places are nightmares, just full of competition and bitterness. One of my old gigs was like that- I had someone backstab me when it came time for promotions to full time. It can get ridiculous.

 

[crazillo]

Doing a history PhD. Intellectually wonderful. Career wise, not convinced - academic work culture isn't great, even as the work itself is often amazing. Also hyper competitive and not sure I have the effort in me.

Click to shrink...

This is probably the most accurate sentence I've read describing my current work life.

Also, regarding teaching, it's quite baffling. In Germany, school teachers have the highest job security you could imagine. They're state officials mostly and a lot of people study a teaching degree because the job security is a high incentive to them, leading many of them to become quite mediocore teachers. I know it's quite different elswhere and teachers are actually underpaid and they have a tough job anyways. At the same time, lecturer/teaching careers at university are simply not possible. I even feel punished for putting in effort to design a good course students will love. Yes, evaluation will be great but it's not what will keep you the job or offer new possibilities. Saying this as somebody who really enjoys teaching. Also, the demand for teaching is there and needs to be fulfilled by people who often do not even enjoy this task while others are denied a valuable career path. I'm not saying you shouldn't have a good research record as well, but people have different strength and they are not being utilized under the current system.

Also, you can teach on a contract basis but this actually earns you less than minimum wage because preparation and term paper correction is not paid.

Reading this thread I've also noticed there are quite stark differences between the US, UK and continental Europe. I knew they existed but they even seem to be larger than I thought.

 

[RedSparrows]

Teaching is often undervalued in my experience. I did my first last year and I enjoyed it. Want more.

Casualisation of PhD teaching contracts (UK) is an issue.

 

[Optional Objectives]

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[Bedameister]

I'm in the last month of my chemistry PhD now. It was a fun time, love my co-workers. I was drunk most off the time. I never really cared much about academic pressure or publishing many papers but now in the end I regret that I was that lazy most of the time.

 

[Deleted member 47843]

For the academic culture, it really depends where you end up. My department is pretty small but we're all friends. There's no weak link in the group. Other places are nightmares, just full of competition and bitterness. One of my old gigs was like that- I had someone backstab me when it came time for promotions to full time. It can get ridiculous.

Click to shrink...

This is very true. Our department is mostly great. I'm friends with several of them, there's no competition here, we all just mostly get along, do our work and care about the department running well. There's one senior faculty member who's a bit shady, doesn't come through on stuff and has screwed some people over on research projects--but he's a known commodity and is kind of pushed to the outside at this point and not around much. There's not really a weak link (that person is productive generally)--one career associate who rarely publishes (like one article the past 12 years), but they put him on a heavier teaching service load and he's happy doing that and taking care of a lot of the shit work the rest of us don't want to do. So that's still invaluable.

It wasn't always that way. There was a lot of drama when I first started between senior faculty who'd been here a long time and had a lot of bad blood and lots of tension as the university and especially department had been transitioned from more of a teaching and service focused one to a research one (i.e. our Ph D program started my second year in the department). All the trouble makers left or retired and we did a really good job in hiring people who are productive while being nice people and good colleagues over the past several years. It's a great place to work now.

Around my field I have friends in both similar places and friends in very toxic places where colleagues are competitive, hate each other, have workplace violence and harrassment issues and all kinds of shit. It's really just like any job and it just depends on who your colleagues are and what the culture is like. Perhaps there's a higher prevalence of toxic environments in academia though, a lot of academics have a weird mix of having a huge ego combined with a lot of insecurities and need to prove themselves. Thankfully we don't really have that here, that one person aside.

 

[Deleted member 47843]

...and I have mostly been met with rejections from journals.

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Just so you know, that's the norm even for successful faculty. Some of my most cited papers got rejected 5+ times before finding a home. One ended up winning article of the year from the 7th journal I sent it to and finally got it accepted.

I work with some of the most successful people in my field, Distinguished Professors with hundreds of articles and they still usually get a rejection or two on most of their papers even in these late stages of their careers. Especially from the top 5-10 journals in the discipline as their rejection rates are all over 90%.

Publishing just takes a thick skin and ability to shrug it off, make changes you think are good suggestions and try somewhere else and hope for different reviewers. No harm in going down to mid-tier journals either. Some of my most cited work is in those kind of journals and it still counted for a lot during my tenure and promotion process. A well cited article in a solid journal is more impactful than a top tier article with a handful of citations.

 

[Deleted member 9237]

Right now: I've worked every day this year and I'm getting pretty fed up. Haven't really played any games in forever.

At least I'm working on something I enjoy, I get to sit around and think about things I find genuinely interesting, and I have lots of smart people around me with whom I can spit ball ideas. I can say "I want to learn this" and then spend a week or possibly a lot more learning it, it's a bit of a privilege honestly. Still, I have zero desire to stay in academia, I think it's just rotten, and I'm worried that whatever I do next will be intellectually under-stimulating in comparison. I'm horrible at performing tasks I don't find personally interesting, so I suspect I'd perform quite poorly at a company.

 

[Massicot]

I got my PhD in Materials Science in 2015. I decided to go into industry instead of academia because it felt far, far more suited to the sort of lifestyle I want. Working 8-4 salaried without having to worry about funding or grants or leading a rotating crop of lab members felt like a win to me. At the expense of probably not authoring anything anytime soon. I'm currently a Senior Engineer at an electronics manufacturing company.

 

[Unicorn]

This is a classic.

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What's a technician in this context?

 

[Necromanti]

What's a technician in this context?

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Research technician/research associate, or any equivalent position. (Someone who usually has a bachelor's degree, or up to a master's in some situations, often doing the grunt work.)

 

[Spine Crawler]

Finally finished my oral exam this january.. thesis was submitted january last year and i still need to do some editing before piblishing but im glad its done

 

[Deleted member 9237]

Finished PhD in Physics, left for Data Science. Grad school fucking sucked, corporate life is a tremendous improvement. I get treated like a person. No more lapses in insurance! No more missed pay checks! Better salary! More geographic mobility and flexibility! Better hours! Better office!

Everything I had ever been told about corporate life by people in academia was a shameless boldfaced lie.

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Could you elaborate on how you transitioned, prepared for the interviews etc? Did you work in something data heavy for your PhD, like experimental HEP?

 

[Dennis8K]

Fun fact: I have never experienced getting a first-author paper rejected from a journal. Always published in my first choice journal.

I have experienced papers on which I had secondary authorships getting rejected though.

Lesson people should learn. Always put me as the first author. We want to get accepted, right?

 

[ty_hot]

I wish I had all those great experiences you guys are writing about. There are 2 things I enjoy in my PhD: my supervisor and my thesis (the theme itself). I have zero friends at University, for a while I was ok with a guy that turns out is a creepy homophobic sexist that I now suspect is a homosexual. Other than that all of the people in my department do not drink beer, do not like football and will only talk about studies all the time. There is this secretary/assistant that is supposed to help us but she will complain about anything you will ask her to do, specially when she has nothing to do. On top of that the International Students thing that should help you with Visa renewal don't know anything and they made me be kicked to my homecountry - luckily I already had a flight scheduled, so I went back and got another Visa. Add to that losing my vacation with trips to the consulate, to the notary, paying for a second annual health insurance, Visa fees, and all the stress this brings. Obviously my latest Visa renewal took 5.5 months to be processed (they say it takes 2 weeks...), during which period I can't leave the country or risk deportation because I would be illegal - in fact this is still true until I get my new ID, which should take more 2 months. Oh, I don't have any classes and I don't participate in any teaching. It really feels like I am trapped in here.

I took part in a project with a company that is related to my field and it was quite great, but it also showed how companies don't care about the Academia (can't go into detail because of an NDA, but at the same time that they would push you to do more and more, it was always more evident that they didn't care at all about what you were doing).

I'm starting my 4th year now and more often than not I think about the day where this nightmare will be over.

 

[All Possible Ways]

Oh man this thread, I can relate so much! I got my PhD in high energy physics in 2013, and was stubborn enough to stick around instead of trying to get a "real job", because I can't imagine myself doing anything else. The experience itself was mostly positive, and I made some real friends and learned a lot. I've been on postdoc limbo since, but starting last year, actually got a teaching position, but no tenure.

I've been doing a lot of teaching and trying to juggle it with publishing, but to be honest, although I publish in top journals, my average of 1.5 papers/year is like a third of what one needs for a good position.

Nevertheless I keep trying, let's see how long until I get pushed out. My wife actually got tenure (getting a job is hard enough, solving the "two body problem" of getting a job near your spouse is far worse), so at least I can rely on her for a while if I become unemployed. Honestly I'm not about the nomad life anymore and really want to settle down and have kids and what not. We'll see.