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Tingley is one of many young scientists who are deeply frustrated with life in research. In September, Nature put a post on Facebook asking scientists who were starting their first independent position to tell us about the challenges that they faced. What followed was a major outpouring of grief. Within a week, nearly 300 scientists from around the world had responded with a candid catalogue of concerns. "I see many colleagues divorcing, getting burnt out, moving out of science, and I am so tired now," wrote one biomedical researcher from Belgium (see 'Suffering in science'). Nature selected three young investigators who voiced the most common frustrations; here, we tell their stories.
But are young scientists whining — or drowning? Our interviewees acknowledge that they are extremely fortunate to have an opportunity to direct their own creative, stimulating careers, and they are hardly the only professionals who are expected to work hard. It's easy for each generation to imagine that things are more difficult for them than they were in the past.
But some data and anecdotal evidence suggest that scientists do face more hurdles in starting research groups now than did many of their senior colleagues 20–30 years ago. Chief among those challenges is the unprecedented number competing for funding pools that have remained stagnant or shrunk in the past decade. "The number of people is at an all-time high, but the number of awards hasn't changed," says Jon Lorsch, director of the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) in Bethesda, Maryland. "A lot of people with influence on the system recognize this is a serious problem and are trying to fix it."
It seems we can spend trillions of dollars on wars, or on science, but not both.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:52PM
only did their PhD because their families expected it
Not as many as were encouraged by professors.
Professors are too far removed from the workplace to have any useful knowledge about how students should find work after graduating with an undergraduate degree. Professors will try to get all the top students into PhD programs because academic science is all they know.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Friday October 28 2016, @03:01AM
How true. I had some profs asking me to stay after grad school.. I had a funny feeling they wanted more cheap labor. Luckily I didn't stay.. somehow the dream of being able to roll around in a pile of cash didn't seem likely in academia and research. Still not that I'm rolling in a pile of cash now, but at least having enough disposable income to surround myself with cheap unnecessary short shelf live gadgets from China with time left over for friends and family is a good enough consolation =D
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday October 28 2016, @08:40AM
I had a funny feeling they wanted more cheap labor.
And part of the problem there is that funding bodies make it very hard to hire lab assistants at a sensible salary. In computer science[1], for a lot of projects you ideally want to have 2-3 full-time research programmers. If you go somewhere like MSR, you'll have them: they're paid industry rates and their job is to write the code that supports the research. Go to a typical university department and you'll have PhD students and poorly paid research assistants doing the same thing. The RAs then leave after a year because they realise that they can get paid a lot more in industry.
This also has a knock on impact on the quality of research and on tech transition. Most research artefacts end up being created by PhD students (who, almost by definition, are inexperienced) who then leave and don't pass on the knowledge. They're not high enough quality to be able to easily throw them over the fence for industrial exploitation or even for building future research on top of.
For bench sciences you need people to maintain the complex and expensive bits of equipment. Funding bodies are happy to fund a couple of million on the machine, but they won't fund someone to operate it for the decade or so of its useful life.
Part of the reason for the Japanese statistic from earlier up the thread is that research has changed. 100 years ago, a single person working alone could advance the frontiers of knowledge quite easily. 50 years ago, there were still a lot of places where that was true and in most other places you needed at least a team of 2-3 people. A professor and a couple of PhD students was fine. Now, most of the interesting problems need a much larger team and the role of professor has morphed from researcher to research manager, but academia hasn't adapted to replace the researchers (or, rather, has, but with postdocs on short-term high-stress contracts, which isn't sustainable).
[1] Computer science is not entirely representative, because it's one of the few subjects where there are a lot of non-academic jobs for people with PhDs.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kell on Friday October 28 2016, @06:24AM
No, not all professors. I'm tenured faculty at an R1 university. Yes, good PhD students are a godsend, but it does no good to mislead them or give them bad career advice. And certainly, I am not so removed from practice that I can't give them good advice, either (I co-founded a successful start-up based on my research). Maybe I'm unusual, but few of my colleagues would intentionally exploit a student that way since uninspired workers who are dejected by their life choices are not very productive. The best workers are the ones who feel they have a future in science or engineering practice and are excited about their work on its own merits. Give me a single passionate student over a dozen paper factory drones any day.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday October 28 2016, @09:47AM
While I agree on the general stance, I believe that it cannot be emphasized enough that any student needs to take in the fact that as you move upward one step 70%-90% of your cohort have to leave science. This makes it hard to keep students passionate - even those who make it in the end as they have to see others squeezed out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @02:08PM
I didn't say all professors - I said that the number of students that went on to a PhD because their undergraduate research advisor encouraged it exceeds the number that pursue a PhD because their family expected it (this is in contrast to those who pursue an MD).
I should've prefaced my post with the note that my experience is mostly from the biological sciences (you're probably in the physical sciences or engineering), which seems to be responsible for producing the most PhDs and post-docs. There are definitely some professors that will exploit students for their personal gain, but it is more common that well-intentioned faculty give poor advice that is rooted in the past (when the academic job market was a realistic option).