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: 3, Interesting) by Hawkwind on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:11PM
Should note this suggests it's more than a war or science question as Japan's military expenditures are rather low.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:32PM
I've spoken to a Japanese post-doc applying for faculty positions in the US and he said that, even though it is incredibly competitive in the US, there is at least a chance at a future as an independent scientist.
In Japan, he says, seniority is the most important thing and that junior and more senior professors are still micro-managed by the most senior scientist and that the hierarchy only changes when someone retires or dies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:27AM
Japanese Scientists need to read the entire story archive of BOFH. Then combine it with any number of snuff/horror movie plots from Japan, and their opportunities to rise will increase! At the very least, they might be able to place a boss with seniority who will understand that autonomy will be best for everyone, especially his personal health and sanity :)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday October 28 2016, @01:03AM
If your Japanese post-doc can speak English without sounding like s/he has 10 dicks in his/her mouth, then they already have a significant advantage.
Even with advanced degrees, here in America FOB-speakers are relegated to the bowels of process engineering trying to figure out what a "GPIB" is for the first 3 months of their careers. The mistake the H1-B sponsors make is that a foreign Ph.D knows more than an uneducated citizen with 15 years experience who could be trained for the job in weeks, and they waste money appropriately.
It's why courses in English, geared specifically towards Asians, are offered here. It's kind of like the trick the Indians use - put a marble under your tongue to sound more Anglo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:15AM
The post-doc could speak fine, but he has been a post-doc in the US for almost 12 years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Friday October 28 2016, @05:52AM
When the truck and taxi drivers are put out of work by automation they're supposed to reeducate for higher positions, but apparently there's already a glut of doctorates. What hope do they have?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:12PM
Counterexample: The Manhattan Project
(Score: 5, Touché) by takyon on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:14PM
That cost $26 billion in 2016 dollars...
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:17AM
And was part of a war...
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:25PM
And they're competing for the few positions that will let them do speculative research. How many of them only did their PhD because their families expected it?
(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).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @05:34AM
Not me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @10:51PM
You must be thinking of physicians. With Ph.D.s, one's family is very proud of them for graduating college, but when it comes to going after a Ph.D., it is the opposite. They pressure you to go and get on with your life, to get a "real" job, etc., etc. "Are you going to be a student forever?"
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:45PM
An article in Nature from a few months ago calculated the numbers and found that ~55% of people graduating with a PhD 40 years ago attained a faculty position and that number today is around 10%.
The percentage of NIH grants funded is also around a third of what it used to be.
Established laboratories with connections (peer review for research articles, conferences, and grant reviews) greatly out compete more junior laboratories for grant funding even though they are less productive when normalized to the amount of grant money they get.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 27 2016, @11:50PM
For me, it would have been a mid-career shift. I actually started - got back into studies, made sure the numbers lined up and all that, so I could get into the right places, started getting to know professors - all the stuff you'd expect.
Then I realised a few key facts:
First, science only pays for itself if you build a business on it, which requires engineering, marketing - all that uncool dad pants sort of stuff.
Second, science is only paid for by other people (maybe) if you do what they say, not what you want. If you're incredibly lucky, those can overlap, but the usual answer is no.
Third, most actual academic science is incredibly bound up in politics (the usual sort), academic politics (of course), and turf wars (kind of overlaps the academic politics, but makes it damn near impossible to do sensible cross-disciplinary work).
Fourth, the competition is insane. What's actually worse from my perspective is that a large proportion of Ph.Ds more or less seem to have ended up there by sheer inertia. If you talk to them about why they did it, many sort of shrug their shoulders, and the more articulate ones say something about staying clear of the corporate mess. Sure, there are some who duct-tape you to a chair while they explain in lavish detail why they find the scales on an insect's wing utterly fascinating - but they're the minority.
I realised, in the end, that if I wanted to do research I'd be better off doing it as a hobby, paid for by my day job, and not seeking some grant or permission from a dean who may or may not want me to succeed that week.
We already know the reasons, of course. Idiotic corporate law that encouraged short term returns over long term research; a ludicrous over-supply of postgrads owing to a progressive hollowing-out of the school system, then the progressive devaluation of the bachelor's degree, while universities work like crazy to produce lots of people for fat cash.
But that doesn't make it suck any less.
My primary proposal would be to sort out some kind of tax credits for establishing and running research programmes. That alone should motivate companies strongly. That will change the short time while we get back to fixing the schools and universities.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday October 28 2016, @12:03AM
This one is my favorite problem, because even with decent funding and a cadre of talented scientists telling others what they don't want to hear and then becoming subject to marginalization or even smear campaigns doesn't further the cause of truth. Big businesses will squash your findings or even murder you if your research has potential to take too much out of their bottom line, and of course the climate* and PC useful idiots with make a lot of duckspeaky noise as well. The truth is not "politically correct."
Look what they did to James Watson [wikipedia.org] and William Shockley [wikipedia.org] -- both too brilliant for their own good. In fact, Shockley is still on the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Extremist List."
* Note: I believe that dumping millions of tons of toxic shit into the environment is bad and changes it for the worse, however, I also believe that the issue of climate change is an overly-exaggerated and overly-politicized ruse used to further other gains under the guise of altruism.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by zugedneb on Friday October 28 2016, @12:23AM
The Watson guy is an idiot...
While speaking at a conference in 2000, Watson had suggested a link between skin color and sex drive, hypothesizing that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos.[86][87] His lecture argued that extracts of melanin – which gives skin its color – had been found to boost subjects' sex drive. "That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English Patient."[88]
The white and asian people are farthest from the monkeys, but they also have the most brutal and cunning form of warfare. We have evolved, for better or worse. The way out of barbarism is a type of cold mind who does not fear it's own death or gets devastated by random pukanas, and is mentally capable to handle the conflicts that you can read about in the history books... Thus, more thinking + less emo...
So I believe, or rather, observe, that the white man has the most "agent Smith" like character, that is general intelligence, that is not very tightly connected with the emotional needs of mankind of earlier versions.
In genetics, this would relate to the density of neurons connecting certain things with others, but nowdays this is "common" knowledge. The effects of it is not so common.
I also tend to mention to women that one of the reasons of their freedom is the rather cold + intelligent nature of the north-european man, that this type of man is not emotionally complicated enough to want slaves, but they get kind of angry.
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday October 28 2016, @12:45AM
Generally speaking, you don't see as many uncivilized Asians as you do uncivilized Africans nowadays. A major exception is in China, where people literally defecate in the middle of shopping malls, but that's a problem of overpopulation per Calhoun's mouse experiments rather than an inherent barbaric trait of Asians. In fact, Asians have perfected a rather civilized behavioral trait - repression. Asian salarymen may spend every night of the week getting trashed at titty bars with their bosses after work, but that's the worst they're gonna do.
Those with darker skins, however, lack the subtleties of repression. They are rapists, beheaders, cannibals; and all because they have the vestigial remnants of violence the ancient Orientals do, but without the executive control that Orientals have maintained over the years through their strict adherence to heirarchy and tradition. Orientals have violent tendencies, but are orderly. Swarthy humans have violent tendencies and behave in a chaotic manner.
In certain circumstances, aggression and chaos can be a good thing, adequately controlled and harnessed. For example, the Italian or Portuguese is just aggressive and chaotic enough, but civilized enough, to harness his more negative traits to his advantage whether or not he is consciously aware of that. Inbreed a few hundred generations, and you get the Arabs, who lose all ability of self-control and break out into perpetual violence. The explanation of Africa's situation goes without saying, although Blacks have a stronger instinctual intelligence. Hillary Clinton herself is courting Blacks though her understanding of their culture: Urban barbershops, jive talk, upright basses, and bongo beats. [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday October 28 2016, @07:13PM
You're trying too hard, Eth. Good trolling is very much fire-and-forget. You want easily and quickly-reproducible snippets you can more or less cut-and-paste. This looks like you got entirely too invested in it. Careful, or you might start believing what you post; there is a reason drug dealers don't usually sample the goods.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:25AM
Ah, I'm not surprised to see your Nazi scientist side finally come out. Eugenics is bad for a variety of reasons, and only arrogant blowhards think differently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:42AM
"They" didn't do anything to Watson or Shockley, both of them said some stupid racist shit that wasn't backed up by scientific evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and controversial extraordinary claims with a long, dark history require incredibly convincing evidence of the highest standard. Old fossil scientists/emeritus professors are kept around for institutional prestige and will be dropped if they are more trouble than they are worth.
This isn't limited to racist shit either: Lynn Margulis prompted the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" to stop the preferential treatment of National Academy members because she pushed through some stupid extraordinary shit claims to be published and lower the reputation of the journal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis#Metamorphosis_theory [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @02:36AM
Ironically, Shockley probably started to suffer from the effect of heavy metals poisoning right around the time he decided to abandon semiconductor research.... As you probably know semiconductor manufacturing was quite messy....
(Score: 2) by zugedneb on Friday October 28 2016, @12:08AM
...a ludicrous over-supply of postgrads...
This, and others mentioning "insane competition", is a proof that most of us are fairly capable, and we live with wrong economic system. Or?
One remedy is (since you do not like new economic ideas) is that we dismantle the education system, and let only a selected few get it, so that we can return to the good old times when the plebs (95+% of population) could be addressed properly: namely as _trash_.
Or?
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:17AM
Read again.
Nowhere did I propose not educating the masses. In fact, I proposed fixing high schools; raising their standards to the point that all those prerequisites in current colleges are superfluous. What we currently think of as AP courses should be the norm.
To think of it another way, if a bachelor's is the new high school diploma, let's make high school diplomas the new bachelor's. And then let's stop wasting so much time and money on an idiotic, inefficient way of running the credibility of our colleges into the ground.
In fact, let's make that the new slogan: educate the crap out of the masses. Educate them until they cry. They'll thank us eventually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:24AM
95% of the population is already trash, since we provide them with an abysmal level of education. A grand majority of colleges--and certainly K-12 schools--are horrendous; only people without a proper education don't see this.
(Score: 1) by zugedneb on Friday October 28 2016, @12:29AM
dunno, if we speak about the "civilized" world and not the "devastated/colonialised", the education if good.
I come from commie country, and education was good.
Now live in scandinavia, and education is good...
Compared to the problems they inherited, chine and most of asia is also ok.
Usa and Canada is not the dumbest either...
So I would not call 95% trash, but it is kind of strange, that "fuel the shopping" is still the main mentality behind stuff, even in private conversations amongst the 1337...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:56AM
The problem is that people who received a terrible education are less likely to recognize that their education was terrible, so you end up with uneducated people defending abysmal school systems which rely too much on rote memorization and refuse to recognize the rote memorization. The gap in quality between the greatest schools and the mid-range schools is far too large.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @12:51AM
Oh gross.. and work for those greedy soulless bastards?
Well there you go. Adult life is different from what they tell you when you're 9 years old.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:21AM
The industry job market is also incredibly competitive because that is the next obvious option. Now, an academic post-doc of at least a couple years is required for most entry-level PhD jobs.
Part of the problem with the situation is that new graduates, who always wanted to go into industry, have to continue in academics to be competitive with the glut of formally-academic track post-docs that are applying for the same job with additional academic experience. It also doesn't help that many industry jobs are being cut because the ROI on research isn't good enough for MBAs.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Post-Nihilist on Friday October 28 2016, @01:29AM
Once uppon a time I was a researcher it. But then I saw the light and I became a member of the bureaucracy, I traded some sense of purpose for stability but kept most of the perks of academia.....
Be like us, be different, be a nihilist!!!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @03:45AM
https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html [caltech.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @04:18AM
Mod the parent up. The linked piece is actually insightful unlike the links in TFS.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Friday October 28 2016, @05:48AM
They did fix the PhD pipeline, which is the problem. Today, if you stick around long enough at a University, you get a PhD. It actually means nothing, except that you stuck around long enough.
So yes, it is quite difficult for PhDs to get jobs these days because there is 5 or 10 for a job in their field and the rest are spinning Postdocs in an ever larger pool of PhDs. It's actually quite a sad state of affairs where not the best are promoted, but everyone that just sticks around. Kicking someone out of PhD program is quite unheard of.
No student left behind has reached the PhD level, few years ago already.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 28 2016, @06:38AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @11:04AM
Yes, I could have stood the problems mentioned in that article. It was that no one seemed to know wtf they were doing and for me to produce anything of value I needed to redo the jobs of 100 people or so (who had previously half-assed their work; to be fair they probably had no choice). At some point I just could not take it anymore, it is too depressing to see that level of waste being held up as a paragon.
(Score: 2) by SubiculumHammer on Friday October 28 2016, @02:11PM
says the Anom
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @03:47PM
All you have to do is read the papers in a skeptical manner (eg that astronaut spinal cord one). If these problems were limited to the particular area related to my project, it would be a different story. It is the same issues, over and over, everywhere you look in biomed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fritsd on Friday October 28 2016, @01:31PM
I think it was about 15 years ago, when I read an interesting Post-Doc job application.
Unfortunately, at the bottom of it was the requirements: IIRC "give us an A4 with at most 60 of your most important papers".
OK..
Perish it is, then :-/
I'm trained to solve problems, but I'm not good enough to write scientific articles that really stand out a lot amongst the rest.
So I followed another branch of my career.