It sounds very academic. You are a "student" "attending" graduate "school". You have an "advisor", or "mentor". You receive a "stipend" or a "scholarship". There are classes to take and exams to pass. It all ends with "graduation" when the diplomas are "awarded".
I am talking about PhD programs in chemistry, biology and the like. What exactly is this process you have to go through to get a doctorate? Is it...
Education?
Kind of. Sort of. Not really.
The classes? Haphazard and inconsequential. You "get them out of your way" in the first year. At Scripps they actually told us not to worry about getting good grades. Passing is enough, nobody really cares. In the end, research work is what counts.
That's right, work. They expect you to put in 50-60 hours a week for 5 years. And they require you to be productive. Teach yourself what you need to do the work. Learn what you can while working. All that repetitive, routine, brain-numbing lab work is not going to do itself. Frustrated, you might start wondering if trained monkeys could replace you. Sorry, those are expensive. You, on the other hand, are not.
Since so much work is involved, perhaps being a graduate student is...
A job?
It better not be!
It can't be a real job, can it? A job is supposed to pay money. You are smart, educated and trained. You went to a university for 4 years, remember? It must be good for something. You know, 17-year-olds working at KFC make $12 an hour. Surely, your time is worth more.
$12 an hour, 50-60 hours a week, 52 weeks a year... At $12 an hour a PhD student would earn $31,000-$37,000 a year. Scripps is a relatively wealthy school, PhD stipend is pretty high there. As they say, nationally competitive. I believe it is $27,000 this year.
No, no, of course it is not a job. Don't be so materialistic, not everything is about the money. The magic of science is priceless. Down with fried chicken, you are going to have a PhD! Eventually. And meanwhile, movie tickets are $2 off with your student ID. There might also be free pizza, donuts or some other junk food every Friday at your department. Enjoy!
Alright. So it is not education and not a job. What is it then? What do you sign up for when you enter that PhD program? And the answer is...
Serfdom
You are tied down, you work a lot, and have little. Not quite as bad as slavery (slaves can be sold), but medieval nonetheless.
Here is a quote from someone you might know:
[Science Ph.D.] students have effectively become serfs. And who would become a serf when you can work for Goldman Sachs and get paid $300,000 a year to become a serf? Why drive a Chevy when you can drive a BMW — and now you're condemned to driving a car from Malaysia or something. Life should be fun.
— Dr. James Watson, 2007 (source)
I drove a 1996 Honda Civic. And the man has a point.
Further reading:
- Do scientists really need a PhD? Nature 464, 7 (2010)
- Japan's Ph.D. Glut Leaves Many Jobless The Chronicle of Higher Education 50, 49, A40 (2004)
- The Future of the PhD Nature Special 472 (2011)
comments for this post
I've been a student of science for over 10 years. Most of that time I worked in academic research labs. The last and the longest time – in the laboratory of Dr. 
I drive a 1996 car right now! And I'm a postdoc who makes a lot more money now. Well, being a serf is not that bad if you have simple tastes and are easily entertained. I imagine it would be a drag if I had a wife and kids though. But 27,000 grand a year can get you a one room in a shared apartment in an expensive metropolitan area, a Netflix subscription, a passable girlfriend, nights downtown once a week and three times a week trip to the regular cheap bar beside the chemistry building that has all the locals. Plus you'll have some money left over for plane tickets to visit family two times a year. Just don't eat out at restaurants and you'll be fine. The key is not to buy a car, as that is a major money sink with gas/insurance/repairs. That means you're limited to doing a Ph.D. in places with a good metro/public transit system. Similar to the lives of my parents in the Soviet Union I suppose, except they had actual children and other responsibilities. And there was no Netflix.
It's not that terrible. It was actually rather fun if you're not worried about wasting years of your life. Beats not having a job in my home town and you get to do dangerous reactions with 800 ml. of tBuLi. Don't be such a hater.
so how much are you saving? And are those savings inflation-proof for when the great wave hits? My college roommate trolled around after graduation without a job. He first worked for a very sketchy company that was calling surgeons in the OR trying to get them to come to conferences. Then he managed to get a temp job in a hedge fund. He stayed there, running the short book and, getting promoted to vice president (albeit on a technicality) - but after six years has enough money saved up so that he can cover him and his freelance-writer wife for TWO years. Much of that is saved as precious metals, so if inflation hits, he'll STILL be okay.
It's actually quite fascinating. Basically when describing his job, he said what he was doing was researching companies to discern when their CEOs were bullshitting or too stupid to notice a structural deficiency in the way they were running their companies. You know, doing something like that is actually doing society a favor. So, he deserves the money that he made.
I can't even say that about what I did. Over the course of the six years I was a grad student, the best thing that I did for society was give blood twice a year.
Is this blog going anywhere? Lots of promise but no delivery. Please don't let it fizzle out!
Looks like it is going in the direction of a multi-part rant. I hope I am wrong, because it did have promise.
I would be very curious to see the "dalayed" manuscripts, for one.
Because the story is really not complete without seeing the papers.
As for the manuscripts, Dr. M. Reza Ghadiri is still a co-author and the principal investigator. Email him at ghadiri[at]scripps.edu if you like. If he decides to provide you with copies, it's fine by me.
I would like to see a movement toward abolishing the PhD, it's mostly Serfdom. But there are plenty of blogs on this problem already. The security and steady paycheck of graduate school is given in exchange for your freedom. You are enrolled in a Catch-22 situation. Get the PhD, than post-doc, incur lots of opportunity costs and land in an imploding scientific job market. Don't get the PhD, and you basically don't exist anymore. Most Americans have figured out this game in college, opting for professional school in the still profitable Med School and Pharmacy schools, but those are getting extremely expensive also. Foreigners have much lower debts and can compete more effectively on the job market than many grads in the U.S. who may need a bigger pay check.
You should join Society for Amateur Scientists, see how you can contribute without your PhD. Forrest Mims has made a career in science for himself without any scientific degrees!! (Though he does have some "creationist" leanings, he's not a biologist obviously). You could also try to invent things, patent and market them. Or just start a business with the skills you have.
There is not much difference between you and the "PhD'd", the graduates just drank the Kool-Aid for much longer, that's all. I'm a graduate student who thinks the PhD is BS also. It's just a way to recruit people, pay them abysmal wages for years to steal tax money from the government, than blame the low demand for their skills on them. It's a dirty system and the few who succeed in it do not want that truth talked about.
Good luck and I hope your blog begins to evolve into something positive in the science blogosphere. Most science blogs are very bitter, we need people that can show us another way.
I agree completely. That is why I am quitting my PhD. I am not learning anything new. I do the same mind numbing experiments every day. Some people tell me I earn more as a PhD. That's a bunch of BS. First, I would be losing out on several years of normal salary. Plus, it's not a guarantee that I'll be hired as PhD without first doing more years of low salary post doc work. Academia is a Ponzi scheme. Lots of grad students and postdocs, but not much promise that they obtain faculty positions.
Since we are talking about Middle Ages here, I would like to point the attention of the audience to another word from medieval history.
The word in question would be "apprentice".
Webster's dictionary defines an apprentice as "a person who is learning a trade from a skilled employer, having agreed to work for a fixed period at low wages". This should sound familiar to any grad student reading this blog and comments. A "serf" is something completely different.
"Apprenticeship" in a Ph.D. program allows you to learn skills such as designing hypothesis-based experiments, navigating the literature, compiling and presenting your results, and leadership. I do not believe that much, if any of this can be taught in a regular classroom, with a slide projector, textbooks, and exams. It simply is not possible.
I know that I learned a lot from my experience in grad school (yes, at Scripps). I learned even more during my two postdocs. Now I am a faculty member, and I can assure you that the knowledge I gained in graduate school is essential and enabling. I will also confess that I only came to understand how much I learned, and how important these things are only a couple of years after my graduation.
The "haphazard" classes in Scripps are mostly there to introduce you to the research of the faculty members and broaden your outlook on science. I had to take some of these many years ago, and the classes were fun and valuable. The classes are not there to make you memorize March's Organic Chemistry, or to teach you how to reprogram the Bruker Avance console in octal with your eyes closed.
As for the questions of money and flipping burgers, I have to ask: did you ever have a low-wage, hourly job? I did (though not at KFC). And I can tell you that this experience completely sucks in comparison to any graduate school. You actually have to show up on time (gasp!) and punch in. If you are late a few times in a row, your jerk middle manager will have a "motivational" talk with you. There are also staff "meetings", 2-3 times a week, with Powerpoint presentations on the importance of good customer service, and mandatory drug tests. The work is more mind-numbing than anything you have to do in the lab. You are surrounded by high school dropouts. What's more, there is a general sense of fatigue and hopelessness in the air, because the job is a dead end, and many people know they will be staying there forever. Finally, $12 an hour is a pretty darn good wage. That would be what your manager will be making.
In grad school, you are actually given a lot of freedom. You do not really have a fixed schedule, and Reza is not making you punch-in and punch-out. You are paid reasonably well (in fact, better than, say, social workers, or grocery store clerks - and I am not even talking about benefits). You have plenty of spare time. In your case, you used this spare time to work on *********, and on the endless social events. I can't imagine how many hours have gone into that, but I can tell you that when I was in grad school, I would not have been able to pull off a project of that magnitude, because I was actually doing experiments, reading the literature, and working on papers.
What is really laughable is your sense of entitlement. Four years of undergraduate education do not make you a big-shot scientist. You still have plenty to learn, and plenty of experience to gain. And if you don't like science and its "magic" (which is entirely real and palpable to any scientist worth his salt), don't go to grad school. Nobody is making you.
Hey, nice pitch, professor, are you recruiting? Just kidding.
Yes, grad school is similar to apprenticeship in the Middle Ages as well. Except, I believe, those master craftsmen would be working alongside with their apprentices and give them personal hands-on training. I could be wrong, I wasn't there. But anyway, I can't imagine apprenticeship back then to be much of a picnic either. Did those kids really need 7 years to learn how to bake? Sounds like another exploitation scheme to me. But I'm sticking with James Watson's "serf" analogy because it's more to the point.
Here are a few more things to think about.
1) Three years is typical for a PhD program in Europe (as opposed to five years in the United States). I'm sure you met some European postdocs at Scripps. Did they seem less capable? And what about European professors? Somehow they are managing without two extra years in grad school or multiple postdocs.
2) Say you get a Master's degree first, and then start a PhD in a different academic institution. They will require you to do the same amount of work as if you only had a Bachelor's degree. Why? Wouldn't you have already learned something during the two years of lab work in the MSc program?
3) Learning is not the same thing as getting an education, and work experience is not the same as professional training. You live, you learn and become more experienced at whatever you do. In or out of grad school.
I got the $12/hour KFC pay rate from here. As for the horrors of burger flipping (no, never done it, but I can imagine) and the rest of the red herrings (?) — give me a break. If you need to convince yourself you made the right choices in life or get an ego boost, take it up with a psychologist. Don't try to do it at my expense here. Keep your conjectures and insinuations to yourself and off this site.
I will have to rebut this. This is hearsay, but one reason why it's rumored that Donna Blackmond moved from Imperial College to Scripps was that she felt like the 3 year grad student program was not enough to craft real chemists, and also that the postdocs that she was getting were not competent in the same way that an american-trained postdoc might be.
...and when you give the example of european-trained professors, there's some pretty significant sample bias in the anecdotes you're gonna be drawing from.
Yeah, I put those question marks there to cover my ass. ) None of this is easy to quantify and compare. I've also recently heard that, at least in some places in Germany, you need to have a Master's degree, and only then you can do a 3-year PhD. Which presents a problem for American students with a BA.
But anyway, more years = more experience, higher expertise, better efficiency, productivity and so on. That's the natural order of things, and our whole lives, one could say, are very "educational". But still, jobs pay salaries, not stipends. Except in grad school.
Sorry, d139, but as someone who successfully made it through the PhD/Postdoc process in the US, I agree much more with Andrei than with you. Your posts are very self-serving. Question for you: how much time do you expect your graduate students to put in? Do you ever get angry at them for taking nights or weekends off? Ever dress people down for not working hard enough?
I think you mean ac54, not d139. They are different people (and d139 and I know each other offline). But I also get confused by the variety of Anonymous. Might be the time to make putting down some sort of a (nick)name a requirement...
You're right of course, I got them confused ;)
apologies, it doesn't help that I think those autonicks are made from IP addresses, and I've checked this site from more than one computer. Although it seems to have gotten my icon correct in both cases - maybe autogenerated by the email?
Thanks successful prof, but no thanks. As a graduate student I really find the captivity of graduate school unnecessary. It would be much better if the ivory tower got over its medieval methods and just treat research as a normal job now. What do I mean by that exactly? No more PhD. We are given a job to do, if we don't like it or feel we are no longer getting much out of it, we can leave to the next job. If you don't like us, you can fire us. But no more PhD hanging over our heads damnit!! No more justifying low pay, long hours and other abuse with the PHD!!!
NO ONE is saying they should be a P.I. after getting their bachelors, that is utter non-sense thrown in by profs who just have not read into the issue. I know mechanics have to go through apprenticeship and other forms of certification. But the process is much more efficient, they are mechanics, get paid and take continuing education along the way. After many years, they may finally be able to own their own business (I know some!). But they were never held captive at a place in a weird form of indentured servitude like we are. They took their career with them. There was no five years required at a certain place, narrowly training on a certain topic. Nor more two year stints as "Post-Docs". No one asked a mechanic what great master P.I. mechanic they trained under. Their work and experience spoke for themselves. There is a lot less of the over-qualified/under-qualified catch-22 stuff also.
Nature recently ran an article "Do Scientists Really Need A PhD?", in it you'll find that other nations have coped well without this PhD nonsense. The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) is getting along without this weird PhD thing. The Japanese were also doing fine with the Ronbun system. When the Japanese adopted the PhD more heavily, it became a disaster (Nature 309, 659 (1984) and http://chronicle.com/article/Japans-PhD-Glut-Leaves-Many/7914/) and it has been a disaster for U.S. science. Driving people towards more flexible and secure professions.
The PhD is leaving a lot of scientist's, even good ones, to rot. And all the successful, tenured profs have to say is "Sniff, not good enough" Wow, people with ten years of experience and six pubs are just shit!? I know people in that situation. Industry doesn't know what to do with all these people and their narrow training anymore. Look at Pharma, the news is depressing. GET OVER THE PHD! It's ruining the science profession.
Sorry for the long comment everyone, I wish I could get this profs ass. What a dumb fuck.
Thanks for the links! Added to post.
Thanks, we need to raise the profile of these issues. Don't stop Andrei, these profs have to pay for stealing all this tax money from the public for shit no one wants!
I love this spirit of yours. At one point I was very devastated with constant failures in research, made me think why I chose this path.
I grew up as the first born child and I had always been the one who fix or make things and always amazed with mysterious chemistry world. Being able to learn and understand chemistry during undergrad years, it was simply not enough, I challenged myself to take the real course of chemistry research. and here I am, a final-year grad student in Australia, million miles away from homecountry, planning to join more rigorous and productive research group in a different country. To be honest, I really still don't care what project is thrown to me, all I wish for is to be able to do chemistry and synthesis.
I have to say, I am grateful to have this passion ad hang out in a very intellectual and inspiring environment. In many years, I will not work in KFC if I could avoid it.
So that's exactly the problem. It's not about what you want, it's about what other people want or need. If you have this haughty opinion that "you will not work in KFC", you will always be miserable. We live in a social world, the point is to do something that someone else wants. You're lucky if it's something you also want to do, but there's always hobbies.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/12/the-fable-of-market-meritocrac
Seeing it's a year old there is probably no point, but I could pick apart every point this winner has made. I won't do them all but I'll provide evidence. 1. It is never the right thing to ask a winner about the merit of the game. 2. $12 might be good for KFC but it is not good for someone in grad school where KFC is NOT the correct control. 3. You can't say that grad school provides a lot of training AND complete freedom. What you learn in grad school you teach yourself, which is fine, except that a lot of what you are learning is only good in academia which most people even if they finish will not continue in. Etc.
"And actually there probably aren't any very smart people working at Walmart, low paid high IQ people work at bookstores and Starbucks."
http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/07/when_humans_bec.html
I think the KFC comparison is inappropriate. Bookstore and Starbucks employees are a better comparison for the intelligent demographic that applies to grad school (that just reflects people into liberal arts).
So do you think working at Barnes & Noble or Starbucks is a better option financially than being a grad student or post-doc? At least you'll retain your dignity because you not work with proles at WalMart or at a fast food joint?
Brilliant blog, I work at a DOE national laboratory in a non research engineering position and I constantly say PhD students are slave labor.
NIH Report Urges Greater Emphasis on Training for All Graduate Students
Jeffrey Mervis
It's a familiar complaint: Academic researchers intent on cranking out another paper and obtaining their next grant sometimes see their students as little more than another pair of hands rather than as scientists in training. Now comes a new report that attempts to redefine the goals of graduate and postdoctoral training and prods biomedical scientists to become better mentors. Similar exhortations have been made before, but the report comes from an organization with significant financial clout: the flagship training institute at the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
Full story at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/331/6017/525
I know your frustration is mostly with the Ph.D. process - something which many of us graduate students can relate to. You sacrifice an enormous amount of time and labor, and forfeit many of life's opportunities for a process that may or may not yield those magical three letters - PhD, that is - and which, even if does, gives you diminishing opportunity to become gainfully employed after graduation.
I would like to bring up another issue altogether. The issue of educational inflation.
A kid going through college today can expect more for the same education than you and I did when we first started - and it has been only a few years.
Inflation in educational costs leads national average inflation rates by 4-fold, and this includes not only tuition and fees and room and board, but also textbook prices. Textbook prices like $194.30 for a new Pearson pre-calc textbook - or $88.00 for a one-semester rental.
The development of calculus began with Renee Descartes in the 17th century, and reached maturity with B. Riemann in the middle of the 19th century. Calculus, the way we know it today, has remained mostly unchanged for roughly 150 years. Yet, a new edition for a pre-calc textbook comes out nearly every year - mostly with a few inconsequential changes - and textbook prices continues to soar.
I take the issue of educational inflation seriously. Education should be a tool for success, yet it has become one of the biggest financial burdens you might take between the day you are born and the day you die.
In this forum for graduate students, I am wondering what your position might be on educational inflation?
the true is that academia is nasty place, academics are dicks, and the phd is the dick's nest of academia. The phd is just a degree of recent invention, but it is not different to any other job, a job where you require a high intellectual level. I think the phd should be eliminated, it is an artificial construct made to benefit academics who get all the money from very lucrative projects, and do not give a fair salary to those who are doing the hard work. One more think, you may say that these people do not have to be compensated becomes they are being paid for living "the life of the mind". Stuff and nonsense!!! The truth is that is that those who handle the money want you to believe that, so that they get away with everything. In the meantime, you are getting older, losing the chance of have a fair salary and a normal life and accumulating all the frustration of a very smart loser.
As an insider who just left academia I couldn't agree more. I am looking for any suggestions on how to exchange my PhD for time I wasted doing it. It is a good thesis but my PI made it so that only him benefited from it. He is still delaying my publications for no reason. Postdoc experience has confirmed and reinforced all fears I had about academic environment after PhD. A typical PI from outside looks happy, smiley and very enthusiastic. This mask hides a parasite who sucks blood from young inspired people.
I really emphasize with your guys. I do. And I think you raise some excellent points - which I thank you for, because it gives me a basis to stop my education at the M.S. level, and to pursue greener pastures.
But - this website makes a good point that will be lost if it degrades into a forum for cheap insults.
Kids contemplating a graduate education in science will read this forum. And when they read a thoughtful, balanced critique of academia they will pay attention to it. Yet, if all they see is a bunch of "my adviser sucks because he didn't let have hot cocoa in the lab" or "my adviser stole Christmas and didn't give it back" they will discard everything they just read.
I guess that's the sad part. We have legitimate concerns with academia. There are real reasons we're not staying. And for the sake of both academia and students, it would be constructive to discuss these concerns.
But we're not going to do it by taking cheap shots at advisers simply because they had standards. Can any of you articulate the actual reason you're so frustrated with academia? I know you feel it, but can you articulate it? Because that's what you need to be doing.
Articulate!? Would it be right to put it this way? If we omit personal qualities of a PI the big picture would be the following. There is a clash between time scale of a living person and time scale of science. Basically, every living person wants to see some results of his/her activity in a reasonable time, say few years. For science time does not matter at all. What matters for science is expansion of sphere of knowledge. As long as this is achieved any system providing it, even modern academia, is good enough. Even efficiency does not matter as long as you have infinite time. Science does have it.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. But you just articulated (I think) a good reason why a PhD is so frustrating - it is unduly long. That is not only a good reason, it is one of the best too.
That is exactly what I meant by articulate. And I brought it up because I see an increasing number of kids jumping on the bandwagon crying "my adviser sucks too!", without a real reason for it.
I can write down ten reasons my adviser sucks ass. But I know that when I do it, most are just personal dislikes - and not legitimate problems with the academic system.
That's what I think is important to prevent. We don't want to make the mistake of confusing a personal dislike for an academic problem - because if we do, we lose credibility.
It's hard to change something after you've lost credibility. That's all.
The big things you need to know are really only 3. (1) They don't inform you how much it sucks because they control the salesmanship of the program. (2) There aren't enough academic positions to meet the number of PhDs they produce and you probably don't realize it (and you don't need a PhD for industry and why would you be in pre-professor training with no chance of wanting to be a professor?) and (3) Even if you are the lucky ones to get an academic post, it is a lot worse than you think it is (again, they control the salesmanship info) but now you are locked in, not a slave but very high switching costs.
Specific example, since I've been here, the department head tells the incoming crop that it takes an average of 4 years to complete a PhD here. It is more like 5.5 or maybe even higher. It's not that you can't go dig for better data, but it's not like this is they only thing they shade the truth about.
Thank you Cato. Those are good reasons to be wary of a Ph.D. education.
I think it's important to realize that education is important. It's just that it can be done better.
...and in the midst of crying out "academia needs to improve", it's easy to get lost in nonsense noise - like "my adviser had a nervous twitch that made my Ph.D. unduly stressful". Or the like.
My point is - there are very real reasons why it's important to analyze academia and improve it where needed. And nonsense whine-and-cry obscures that.
I don't think there is much nonsense whine-and-cry. Let's talk about hot cocoa, just to start with the silliest example. Well, there are reasonable reasons not to allow hot cocoa in a lab. But, most other jobs allow you to have hot cocoa. In most labs, it is the laziness of professors and administration to define where there are actual safety issues against food. It is pure CYA and they tend to say "no food in labs" even though a lot of labs could be computer labs for example. It's this kind of lazy idiocy that prevails, not in all places, but as a general rule.
From observation and theoretical pondering, I think you need to push forward publication yourself. You might have to do more of the legwork like selecting journals, but the PI is as likely to drag his feet resisting you as he is dragging his feet in helping you.