Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in experimental methods, intractable theoretical adventures, publish-or-perish culture, and the better alternatives available for someone with a skill-set enough to pursue grad school, it's hardly any surprise grad students have mental health issues.
> Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income
Early in my career, I considered (with an MS in Electrical Engineering, but with 4 years of professional programming experience) a switch into law. Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school.
When I joined the big firm, there were about 25 people in my role. I was the only with with an EE or CS degree/background, the only one without a PhD, and the only one with actual post-academic work experience. For me, it was a 10% pay cut before accounting for law school tuition, similar benefits, and an small increase in hours. For all of the PhDs, it was essentially a 100% raise, substantially less work, and superior benefits.
I think the part about "unrealistic goals" is applicable to a lot of spheres of life and exacerbated by the social media. Social media after all inflicts high expectations and pressure to convert your life into a performance on everyone irrespective of profession, culture, age, country.
And ofcourse the Titans of social media - zuckerberg, chamath, tiktok and 1000s of engineers, PMs will not pay for the harm their engineered products have caused because waters have been muddied enough and no true accounting of the harm can happen.
It is kind of like inventing a new synthetic highly addictive drug which is technically legal but very harmful and you can sell it to everyone.
All reward and prestige of being a researcher has been lost and the people in the study have a slim chance of being able to work with their degree.
Which I understand is about the opposite of what this article wants, but you shouldn't trust the people who have broken science to fix it.
Research itself gets locked behind tightly walled journals and are written with obscure and difficult language laymen can't understand, peer review has become a hoop jumping scam that let's bad research through.
Medical review and other ethics boards are suffocating the ability for researchers to actually do things in a massive overcorrection from the early days of research.
Media is in a continuous game of misrepresentation of everything researchers say and trust in scientific truth had lead to instructional actors getting their fingers in the process and corrupting it to suit their ends.
ARXIV and the likes are the future of science. Where literal discord servers are getting together to publish studies. Yeah. Bunk gets published all the time, but peer review can just happen dynamically through good old regular unchecked skepticism.
I would never in a billion years engage in the academic side of research. If I wanted to be a scientist I'd do it as a hobby, buying the tools to do it in my garage and publishing to open journals where ethics boards and bureaucrats cannot touch me beyond the reach of actual law.
In all hopes, academia will start to crumble and this sort of garage philosophy will grow into a network of people that replaces it with a fresher and more dynamic outlook.
I had a tenured faculty position at an R1 university and left it in part because of a completely dysfunctional institutional environment with no insight. My best friends include full professors at well-known institutions, though, and I've continued to be involved with academics and research.
I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that. It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are often questionable or even fraudulent, and the incentives are structured to reward collecting new data that are very predictable rather than new ideas or exploring unknowns.
The characterization of science as just being "stressful" or "competitive", as opposed to being broken and corrupt, does disservice and deflects from real change by implicitly putting the responsibility on those who are affected the most.
It's as if you had a city full of crime, white collar as well as otherwise, and then discussed the problems in terms of victims being anxious, rather than the fact there's no police in the the city and the court system is corrupt.
I've heard a lot of complaints from a lot of different people working in lab science (in my case, my interest was in bio & chem) and none of them were about "tightly walled journals" (working academic researchers generally have institutional access, and when the logins are annoying to manage they just sci-hub like everyone else) or IRBs.
Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a cell line only to have the PI show up at 2PM, throw the experiment in the garbage, threaten the student's livelihood, and then demand they stay until 11:30PM redoing the experiment. Over and over again, at random intervals.
I asked around about this stuff because a family member now works in the field and had some startling experiences, only to find that this is apparently almost universal, and that what I'm describing is on the lighter end of it. There are stories about labs at elite universities where the grad students have set up secluded spaces to go hide from their PIs and cry. It's everything you've heard about working as a developer at a video game company, dialed up to 11.
A part of this is that in academia there are often few positive career rewards. You're under pressure to publish frequently, in high impact factor journals, and that is to keep your job. You don't get pay rises or bonuses, or any other career improvements, and job security can be until your next contract, at best. If you don't make it to tenured professor, and have good grant funding, then you are staring down the barrel of starting a new career at an older age and with few contacts.
The place to start is by having far fewer PhD students, but more masters students and technicians. A 60% reduction in PhD student numbers would reflect job opportunities, and student aptitude, more accurately.
This would help on some level, although it would definitely make the stress on applicants much higher.
E.g. there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year).
So you better get a good research assistant job as an undergrad so you can do that. It has to be early enough in undergrad that you have time to get the paper out before applying to grad school. So you need to be prepared to get a professor to work with you freshman/sophomore year…
So you have to have evidence of skills basically coming in to undergrad. Either be really brilliant and stand out in class, or, better, have some experience in high school to make you credible…
These pressures would only increase with fewer PhD slots. Maybe that’s fine long term but it does have a distorting effect on people’s lives if you have to make high stakes decisions that early.
As someone who loves my career as a researcher and scientist, but was denied admittance when I applied from 2003 - 2005, I'd be opposed to denying the career opportunity to those who want careers in research and to follow their dreams.
Academia isn't the only career path for those with a PhD (I worked in industry and at NASA as well), and I think students should be taught that early on. I think we deny the opportunity to learn how to conduct research to too many people due to limited resources.
Regarding student aptitude, that's hard to measure. Already we highly prioritize students who have already published as undergraduates. If we do more to ensure student aptitude, it would hurt those who may excel but were held back by a lack of mentorship during their undergraduates in how to get into a PhD program. This would also negatively impact efforts to increase diversity in science as well.
If anything, with increasing automation we need more PhD students and more research being done.
The problem is the gatekeepers such as journal corps profit from the artificial scarcity they create. There's no reason for them to only publish a certain number of "papers" in the paperless world.
An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup. The PI is given seed money to validate an ambitious idea and has limited time and resources to do it. The work is extremely labor intensive and in the early stages the PI will be in the trenches with the early employees working in the lab and setting an example for them to follow. Fast failure and pivots are extremely common. Furthermore, at any time the research idea could get scooped by another hard-working research lab, resulting in publication in a lower-tier journal. The PI must get early results that can be used to obtain further research grants.
A good PI in this situation will set expectations accordingly that 60+ hour weeks will be required and hopefully those who are not willing to do so will self-deselect. From their perspective I completely not understand not wanting to invest $50k/year of their startup funds in a graduate student who is not putting in the necessary time to succeed.
The prospective graduate student's maximum power is at the time when they are choosing a research advisor. Choose wisely, and remember you are always free to choose not to go if you don't see a good situation. I advise that people think long and hard about whether or not they truly want to do graduate school. There are far better ways to spend your 20's than in a lab. I had two great experiences in "intense" labs in my field (organic chemistry) after a very poor experience with a prestigious but absentee graduate advisor in another field - but it is definitely not for everyone.
> An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup.
The problem is you also see this behavior in well established lab, where the PI has very little to lose if he quits research altogether.
In my experience, the correlation with whether the professor was an assistant professor seeking tenure vs a well established full professor and the amount of work they make PhD students do is almost nil. It's mostly purely driven by the will of the PI, not the demands of the funding situation. A lot of professors choose to have few graduate students so they don't have to stress too much about funding.
Remember: Once you get tenure, your job is not at risk if your research output is low (although it does affect compensation). If you get a $1M grant and end up with no research papers out of it, there is no accountability - except the granting agency will deprioritize you in the future (if even that).
If you're seeking an advisor, ask his/her current students what life is like. Also find people who graduated under him/her and ask them.
This is the understandable part of researcher and grad student abuse and the sense I get talking to people is that they do indeed enter the field expecting to duck in on weekends to tend to experiments, and expecting not to be well compensated.
The part that doesn't fit is their PIs being continuously abusive, or, worse, destructive: the PI's goals are ostensibly those of a supposed startup founder, to drive a team to the redline to get something delivered in an unreasonably short period of time, fair enough. But PIs deliberately fuck things up, disrupt experiments, chase team members out of the lab for no apparent reason, berate team members to the point where they can't be productive.
The culture is much more reminiscent of a 1980s fine dining restaurant kitchen than of a startup. The chef paid his dues, and if having a pot half-filled with hot stock thrown at his head was something he had to deal with, by god, so will his line cooks and stages.
What I found interesting of this article is that most of it is also applicable to a many tech sector jobs. High pressure to deliver something (because we squeeze the last of people), hire-and-fire practices everywhere, politics and toxic environments (because that is what people do and what is the current social perspective on what is okay).
Developers, like scientists, are very outcome driven (number of lines, number of features, RoI, ...)
Having now two lab scientists living under my roof, there is nothing even in the stories I've heard of the video game industry that compares to how toxic research culture is. It is next-level, as if being vexatious was a goal on its own --- which, given the culture generation after generation of PIs have come up through, might at this point actually be the case: students and employees are threatened, berated, harassed, and coerced into ludicrous hours as part of a dues-paying process.
Tech job hunts are easy in good times. (e.g. leave one employer, take a day off, interview at another employer the day after that, start working the week after)
I would say the job market is another stark differentiator. People with BS or MS degrees in CS would end up owning a job that an academic would have to wait until a tenure-track job to earn. The difference is CS jobs are obtainable right off the bat, while the tenure-track professorship requires a solid 8-10 years post graduation.
It's what you get when you put intelligent, ambitious and arguably insecure people in a high pressure environment with status/economic rewards and punishments. Also yes you are judged based on output not how cordial you are in the workplace or whatever. Sales I guess would also qualify.
Others are hinting at the same thing, but toxic culture (by itself) is probably only part of the problem.
If a single research job is toxic, that's stressful in the short term, but will just motivate someone to leave eventually; stress relieved.
If the entire 'industry' is toxic, there's no job change that can relieve the stress. Also, research jobs are attained after people make some hard-to-reverse decisions about money, time investment, and lifestyle. If someone is in loads of student debt, has spent a decade learning a very niche topic that can't be easily leveraged elsewhere and doesn't have enough money to just quit and be okay, it's easy to see where the stress comes from, and it doesn't seem easily resolved.
It seems like this is a symptom of a larger problem, rates of anxiety and depression have been going up in recent years in pretty much every facet. I always hear that social media is to blame, but I wonder if that is really the case? I feel like something else is going on, maybe it's just a totality of smaller issues rather than one big problem.
I’ve worked with groups of juniors and college students every year for a while now. I agree that something is going on, but I don’t think there is a single explanation.
Social media is a big part of it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy people I see aren’t the ones talking to their friends on Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities.
The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-ending stories filling their feeds. They’re also filled with unreasonable expectations about the workplace.
In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that “nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day”, citing Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I’ve had a concerning number of conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company, only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking advantage of them because they haven’t been promoted to senior with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit, Blind, Twitter)
I don’t know how this translates to academic contexts because that’s not my mentoring domain. I imagine it’s at least contributing, though. That said, academic environments are known to be grueling so it’s not entirely a singular issue. They really are grueling.
In a recent Ezra Klein show interview [1] with social scientist Jean Twenge on the documented rise in teenage depression, Twenge found it correlated with a rise in social media use, but also found that increasing social media use was correlated with fewer hours of in-person social interaction among teens than previous.
While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her conclusions), I found it pretty thought-provoking to focus on the drop in in-person social interaction as the driver. Social media use can quite likely lead to lower in-person socialization (I do think it's likely causation, and in that direction). And there may be other social factors doing such too. Covid obviously. (note that rise in teen depression trend started well before covid though). Over-protectiveness (for teens) or general fear of risk of "the world"/focus on risk reduction. (They talked about this a bit).
To me it seems pretty clear (just my intuition/perception, not from actual social science) that our society is having a crisis of lack of meaningful relationships/community and lack of feeling of purpose in one's life, and this is leading to depression and anxiety. (As well as possible political disaster). What exactly is causing that lack of meaninful relationships and purpose, and what can be done, is harder. I think the internet is a (large) part of it, but so are other parts of the social/political/economic system.
According to Tim Urban’s latest book "What’s our problem?", modern Western society also has other problems such as an increase in groupthink, which is for example visible in the aggressiveness of current US politics.
Overall, it’s difficult to have much hope for the future. We’re in a new cold war where collaboration decreases rapidly between the West and, I guess, East. That’s wildly different than 2008 when China and Russia appeared to warm up to the West and taking some more democratic stances.
What does excite me is the continued improvements in hardware and software. Let’s hope those things will continue improvements in entertainment, medicine, travel, and education.
I definitely think social media has a large share in driving down the mental health of the majority of users. No two lives are comparable, yet it induces people to compare their lives to someone else's often resulting in an unreasonable amount of envy, jealousy, and a general dissatisfaction of their lives. People pick their best moments while sharing, but it's never the true picture. It sets unrealistic expectations.
It's being coddled in a sense. You have an entire generation that had very little required of them. Many of them never heard the word no and were just given what they wanted. Additionally, k12 schools told them that any slight or disagreement put towards them was bullying and unacceptable. No one should have to hear opinions they don't agree with.
Imagine growing up that way and then being sent off on your own. Of course your mental well-being will plummet. It's like being in a nice climate controlled house for 18 years and then being thrown out in the wilderness. When your expectation is to never have to deal with any discomfort.... well it's a shock.
As far as the social media part, I think many of these kids were raised on smart devices. They were receiving constant dopamine hits from a young age and no parenting on emotional regulation. If your brain is wired for an easy dopamine hit that doesn't require work, the real world is pretty harsh and depressing.
It’s not social media, it’s social awareness of the exploitation of youth to prop up elders who contribute nothing but marching orders that, conveniently, prop up elder investments.
It’s being mocked over the environment. All they get is tough love as a generation dies off leaving behind the worst ecological mess any dying generation has left behind.
It’s being swindled by one socialized loss to enable private gain after another; sports stadiums, healthcare… etc
It’s teen women watching bodily autonomy taken from them by a bunch of leches.
And, the worst part, it’s the apathetic public following orders. Feckless society afflicted by learned helplessness; all the white collar workers who can’t provide anything real for themselves. Imagine being on the hook to coddle that?
This culture is a joke of self absorbed primates who ramble in high minded praise of their intelligence. War is peace and exploitation by aristocrats is freedom.
Social media does sound like a decent theory though. To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have not changed that much over the past four decades. What did change is relative access to information, which exacerbated and maybe even hastened some trends. The small factors were always there, but were not as commonly seen for a variety of reasons ( social stigma, exposure to media, 'toughen up' message from society being but a few examples off the top of my ehad ). And even now, we only are aware of it as a potential trend due to social media exposure ( in this case, HN ). Would we be as aware of it even 10 years ago?
The days of providing new products to the eager market are gone. It simply no longer pays to hire more people and let them solve other people's problems. It's an all-out class war (fighting against unions, bribing politicians, colluding to suppress wage growth and so on) with capitalists infighting about who gets how large share of the emerging rent economy (communications, housing, transportation, food).
I'm sorry to say it and you probably mean well, but your response sounds like the very kind of victim blaming that perpetuates and reinforces the abusive culture the article is talking about.
Instead of the victims or the culture, I'd rather look at the systemic issues that scientific institutions struggle with: debt, lack of social mobility, being underpaid and overworked, etc.
Fundamentally, the research industry requires continuous exponential growth to accommodate everyone working there. Each PI trains 10+ grad students in their career. Where do those students go? They all want to become PIs themselves. Otherwise why would they get a PhD? Ultimately the majority must be disappointed and leave for positions outside academia.
But leaving academia is a process that takes some time. First cognitively as you give up on your dreams and decide to leave. Then as you search for a new job with no real-world experience and few or no connections.
In the mean time, the pipeline between grad school and professorship gets longer and fuller. Postdocs were once extremely prestigious positions, a sort of "finishing school" for the elite. Now they're standard, and most people need to do more than 1. In practice it's a holding pattern, giving PhDs something to do while they try to struggle to the top of the heap and find an assistant professorship.
And the actual experience of a postdoc! Leave all your friends and move to a new city. Work 60 hours a week for $45k a year. Have the rest of your career controlled by your PI, who you maybe met a few times before you decided to work for them, who has never had any kind of management training, and is under their own severe pressure to publish and bring in new grants. Compete against other brilliant, driven people, many of whom are abusing stimulants, and/or are immigrants with no safety net and willing to work 80+ hours.
How could this system NOT create a mental health crisis?
In biochem, the norm is for people who intend to work seriously in the industry to go to grad school; that is, academic research in that field is not a competition for a tiny number of academic jobs. But bio and chem have two of the worst reputations for academic research culture.
Low pay and an insecure job. It's like a pyramid scheme and many end up either forced to leave science or remain an eternal postdoc, and in countries like Germany postdoc funding is restricted once you reach a certain career stage so even the eternal postdoc isn't an option.
Rather than focusing on research, we should look at "careers that are considered prestigious or rewarding in themselves" : fashion, entertainment, sports, medicine, tenured teaching. In all of those, there are more applicants than there are jobs. Hence, lousy salaries and poor treatment.
On the other hand, jobs that won't impress anyone you meet tend to have fewer applicants and much better treatment, because they can't afford to drive people away.
Speaking as a tenured PI in the (applied) physical sciences, everything here is true but a lot of it boils down to a lack of perspective and imagination by many faculty running labs.
There are many positive examples out there of ensuring student career success in a supportive lab environment while also producing good research. These need to be amplified as role models.
I know a very intelligent woman: graduated in 4 years having a 4.0 with a double major in CS and Chemistry. She was extremely gung-ho about going to university and achieving her PhD, and I naively believed at the time that she'd have no trouble accomplishing her goals.
Enter competitive research academia. She felt constantly defeated by classmates and advisors who seemed to be working against her at every turn. One advisor, whom she trusted, moved to take a job with another university. She followed in the hope that she could shed the toxicity of the current working environment. Turns out that the new place was just as toxic.
She finished with a 4.0 through grad school but never defended the dissertation due to burnout, tired of the constant struggle for resources, attention, and just plain basic humanity. She now has a subservient role to PhDs she could run circles around intellectually.
I'm a current PhD student in a coveted top-3 program. We have one of the better stipends in the country, and I've been fully funded by fellowships. My advisor thinks highly of me and isn't abusive. I have a perfect GPA (not that that matters), some publications, and pretty broad technical skills in "hot" area(s). Nevertheless, graduation feels hopelessly out of reach, and I'm getting closer and closer to dropping out.
Academia is full of cronyism, perverse incentives, idea theft. Never mind work-life balance, there is no distinction whatsoever between work and life. There's no "out" if you're in a bad situation; you can't just change jobs like in the real world; your advisor is your "third parent". The incentive structures make it nearly impossible to meaningfully collaborate without some petty authorship conflict arising. It's isolating and seemingly designed to create unhappy, atomized, paranoid, jealous, mean-competitive people. At the end, there is ultimately no reward, materially speaking: all but the very tippy-top academic job tracks are no better.
Academia's clerical heritage is not its only monastic quality. I'm on the wrong side of my 20s and still living in a tiny, crappy apartment with a roommate. At this point I implicitly believe I will never get close to owning a home. That a family is out of the question. That the future is always worse than the present. I've gradually turned into a learned-helplessness "sorry I exist" person, without ever noticing.
Suddenly I see how pathetic that is. I'm ready to change back. I'm ready to be optimistic and ambitious and self-confident again. I'm ready to live a life of improvement, not stagnation. I'm ready to build something meaningful. Not to mention, my eyes are finally opening to how much I could be making in industry if only I hadn't been so proud/idealistic/willfully ignorant... And how much better that kind of salary can make your life.
For the right offer, I am so ready to break free (DMs open (just kidding (but actually though))).
I've seen this toxic culture tear people apart first hand. 80+hr weeks, 52 weeks a year, barely enough pay to make rent, while being berated by emails at 3am by the PI for poor data. It's sickening.
Scientists are exploited the same way game developers are exploited: their love for the area, and the intangible rewards they get from working in it, are used to depress wages and benefits.
High school-to-college pipelines need to be improved in many areas. The undergraduate pipeline is failing in gender overall: ~60% women + ~40% men. Universities that gender rebalance effectively make it harder for women to get in and easier for men. STEM (except biology and nursing) is bad at attracting women, with computer science and electrical engineering being possibly the most imbalanced fields compared to psychology and nursing at the other extremes. There's nothing wrong with individual major overall preferences but there is a problem when 2x the number of women are being educated than men. That's a strategic human capital loss and likely signals future underemployment. Phil Zimbardo (Stanford Prison Experiment and community college lecturer by telecourses broadcasted by KCSM) wrote a number of books and gives a TED talk on this subject.
Prescriptive formulas at the point of college entrance isn't the correct place to apply pressures. Mentoring, programs, resources, and subject public relations need to happen where there is great need and especially in areas with fewer resources.
I grew up in a family of scientists and professors. It's really disheartening to see how much trouble it is to make a living nowadays. My grandfather was an entomology professor, and was able to support a wife, 3 kids, and a nice house though they were no means wealthy. If you can't support yourself or a family in 2023 working in academia, why would anyone pursue it as a career?
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[+] [-] abhayhegde|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fatnoah|2 years ago|reply
Early in my career, I considered (with an MS in Electrical Engineering, but with 4 years of professional programming experience) a switch into law. Big firms hire (or did in the past) people with tech degrees to do patent work and will pay a salary plus pay for law school.
When I joined the big firm, there were about 25 people in my role. I was the only with with an EE or CS degree/background, the only one without a PhD, and the only one with actual post-academic work experience. For me, it was a 10% pay cut before accounting for law school tuition, similar benefits, and an small increase in hours. For all of the PhDs, it was essentially a 100% raise, substantially less work, and superior benefits.
[+] [-] qazpot|2 years ago|reply
And ofcourse the Titans of social media - zuckerberg, chamath, tiktok and 1000s of engineers, PMs will not pay for the harm their engineered products have caused because waters have been muddied enough and no true accounting of the harm can happen.
It is kind of like inventing a new synthetic highly addictive drug which is technically legal but very harmful and you can sell it to everyone.
[+] [-] bioemerl|2 years ago|reply
All reward and prestige of being a researcher has been lost and the people in the study have a slim chance of being able to work with their degree.
Which I understand is about the opposite of what this article wants, but you shouldn't trust the people who have broken science to fix it. Research itself gets locked behind tightly walled journals and are written with obscure and difficult language laymen can't understand, peer review has become a hoop jumping scam that let's bad research through.
Medical review and other ethics boards are suffocating the ability for researchers to actually do things in a massive overcorrection from the early days of research.
Media is in a continuous game of misrepresentation of everything researchers say and trust in scientific truth had lead to instructional actors getting their fingers in the process and corrupting it to suit their ends.
ARXIV and the likes are the future of science. Where literal discord servers are getting together to publish studies. Yeah. Bunk gets published all the time, but peer review can just happen dynamically through good old regular unchecked skepticism.
I would never in a billion years engage in the academic side of research. If I wanted to be a scientist I'd do it as a hobby, buying the tools to do it in my garage and publishing to open journals where ethics boards and bureaucrats cannot touch me beyond the reach of actual law.
In all hopes, academia will start to crumble and this sort of garage philosophy will grow into a network of people that replaces it with a fresher and more dynamic outlook.
[+] [-] nenrkkfn|2 years ago|reply
I'm frankly tired of science being characterized in terms of competitiveness and abuse. That's true, but it's deeper than that. It is now structurally corrupt, in the sense that nominal credit does not reflect actual contributions and results are often questionable or even fraudulent, and the incentives are structured to reward collecting new data that are very predictable rather than new ideas or exploring unknowns.
The characterization of science as just being "stressful" or "competitive", as opposed to being broken and corrupt, does disservice and deflects from real change by implicitly putting the responsibility on those who are affected the most.
It's as if you had a city full of crime, white collar as well as otherwise, and then discussed the problems in terms of victims being anxious, rather than the fact there's no police in the the city and the court system is corrupt.
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
Rather, it was very basic stuff, like being told to come in at 5:30AM to feed a cell line only to have the PI show up at 2PM, throw the experiment in the garbage, threaten the student's livelihood, and then demand they stay until 11:30PM redoing the experiment. Over and over again, at random intervals.
I asked around about this stuff because a family member now works in the field and had some startling experiences, only to find that this is apparently almost universal, and that what I'm describing is on the lighter end of it. There are stories about labs at elite universities where the grad students have set up secluded spaces to go hide from their PIs and cry. It's everything you've heard about working as a developer at a video game company, dialed up to 11.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dbcooper|2 years ago|reply
The place to start is by having far fewer PhD students, but more masters students and technicians. A 60% reduction in PhD student numbers would reflect job opportunities, and student aptitude, more accurately.
[+] [-] currymj|2 years ago|reply
E.g. there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year).
So you better get a good research assistant job as an undergrad so you can do that. It has to be early enough in undergrad that you have time to get the paper out before applying to grad school. So you need to be prepared to get a professor to work with you freshman/sophomore year…
So you have to have evidence of skills basically coming in to undergrad. Either be really brilliant and stand out in class, or, better, have some experience in high school to make you credible…
These pressures would only increase with fewer PhD slots. Maybe that’s fine long term but it does have a distorting effect on people’s lives if you have to make high stakes decisions that early.
[+] [-] chriskanan|2 years ago|reply
Academia isn't the only career path for those with a PhD (I worked in industry and at NASA as well), and I think students should be taught that early on. I think we deny the opportunity to learn how to conduct research to too many people due to limited resources.
Regarding student aptitude, that's hard to measure. Already we highly prioritize students who have already published as undergraduates. If we do more to ensure student aptitude, it would hurt those who may excel but were held back by a lack of mentorship during their undergraduates in how to get into a PhD program. This would also negatively impact efforts to increase diversity in science as well.
[+] [-] RobotToaster|2 years ago|reply
The problem is the gatekeepers such as journal corps profit from the artificial scarcity they create. There's no reason for them to only publish a certain number of "papers" in the paperless world.
[+] [-] jamesash|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BeetleB|2 years ago|reply
The problem is you also see this behavior in well established lab, where the PI has very little to lose if he quits research altogether.
In my experience, the correlation with whether the professor was an assistant professor seeking tenure vs a well established full professor and the amount of work they make PhD students do is almost nil. It's mostly purely driven by the will of the PI, not the demands of the funding situation. A lot of professors choose to have few graduate students so they don't have to stress too much about funding.
Remember: Once you get tenure, your job is not at risk if your research output is low (although it does affect compensation). If you get a $1M grant and end up with no research papers out of it, there is no accountability - except the granting agency will deprioritize you in the future (if even that).
If you're seeking an advisor, ask his/her current students what life is like. Also find people who graduated under him/her and ask them.
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
The part that doesn't fit is their PIs being continuously abusive, or, worse, destructive: the PI's goals are ostensibly those of a supposed startup founder, to drive a team to the redline to get something delivered in an unreasonably short period of time, fair enough. But PIs deliberately fuck things up, disrupt experiments, chase team members out of the lab for no apparent reason, berate team members to the point where they can't be productive.
The culture is much more reminiscent of a 1980s fine dining restaurant kitchen than of a startup. The chef paid his dues, and if having a pot half-filled with hot stock thrown at his head was something he had to deal with, by god, so will his line cooks and stages.
[+] [-] oaiey|2 years ago|reply
Developers, like scientists, are very outcome driven (number of lines, number of features, RoI, ...)
The only - very big difference - is pay.
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|2 years ago|reply
Academic jobs are nothing like that.
[+] [-] abhayhegde|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fullshark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gorjusborg|2 years ago|reply
If a single research job is toxic, that's stressful in the short term, but will just motivate someone to leave eventually; stress relieved.
If the entire 'industry' is toxic, there's no job change that can relieve the stress. Also, research jobs are attained after people make some hard-to-reverse decisions about money, time investment, and lifestyle. If someone is in loads of student debt, has spent a decade learning a very niche topic that can't be easily leveraged elsewhere and doesn't have enough money to just quit and be okay, it's easy to see where the stress comes from, and it doesn't seem easily resolved.
[+] [-] _fat_santa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|2 years ago|reply
Social media is a big part of it, but from what I’ve seen it’s not in the way people usually describe it. The most unhappy people I see aren’t the ones talking to their friends on Instagram and Facebook during their lunch break. To be honest, those people seem to be thriving socially simply by virtue of keeping up with their friends and coordinating social activities.
The most unhappy people I see are the ones consuming hours of Reddit and Twitter every day. They have a never ending stream of ragebait, outrage headlines, tragedy stories, and world-is-ending stories filling their feeds. They’re also filled with unreasonable expectations about the workplace.
In recent years multiple juniors have confidently told me that “nobody can do more than about 2 hours of work per day”, citing Reddit or Twitter threads that explain it. Then they get into a real job that requires a full day of work and feel like they’re being taken advantage of. I’ve had a concerning number of conversations with juniors who are getting paid $120K or more to do entry level work with great mentoring at a local company, only to be outraged at some idea that the industry is taking advantage of them because they haven’t been promoted to senior with $300K total comp after their first year. The source of these expectations is always some form of social media (Reddit, Blind, Twitter)
I don’t know how this translates to academic contexts because that’s not my mentoring domain. I imagine it’s at least contributing, though. That said, academic environments are known to be grueling so it’s not entirely a singular issue. They really are grueling.
[+] [-] jrochkind1|2 years ago|reply
While Twenge wanted to talk about both things (and I'm somewhat suspicious of the certainty of her conclusions), I found it pretty thought-provoking to focus on the drop in in-person social interaction as the driver. Social media use can quite likely lead to lower in-person socialization (I do think it's likely causation, and in that direction). And there may be other social factors doing such too. Covid obviously. (note that rise in teen depression trend started well before covid though). Over-protectiveness (for teens) or general fear of risk of "the world"/focus on risk reduction. (They talked about this a bit).
To me it seems pretty clear (just my intuition/perception, not from actual social science) that our society is having a crisis of lack of meaningful relationships/community and lack of feeling of purpose in one's life, and this is leading to depression and anxiety. (As well as possible political disaster). What exactly is causing that lack of meaninful relationships and purpose, and what can be done, is harder. I think the internet is a (large) part of it, but so are other parts of the social/political/economic system.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
[+] [-] huijzer|2 years ago|reply
Overall, it’s difficult to have much hope for the future. We’re in a new cold war where collaboration decreases rapidly between the West and, I guess, East. That’s wildly different than 2008 when China and Russia appeared to warm up to the West and taking some more democratic stances.
What does excite me is the continued improvements in hardware and software. Let’s hope those things will continue improvements in entertainment, medicine, travel, and education.
[+] [-] abhayhegde|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrThunder|2 years ago|reply
Imagine growing up that way and then being sent off on your own. Of course your mental well-being will plummet. It's like being in a nice climate controlled house for 18 years and then being thrown out in the wilderness. When your expectation is to never have to deal with any discomfort.... well it's a shock.
As far as the social media part, I think many of these kids were raised on smart devices. They were receiving constant dopamine hits from a young age and no parenting on emotional regulation. If your brain is wired for an easy dopamine hit that doesn't require work, the real world is pretty harsh and depressing.
[+] [-] bendango|2 years ago|reply
It’s being mocked over the environment. All they get is tough love as a generation dies off leaving behind the worst ecological mess any dying generation has left behind.
It’s being swindled by one socialized loss to enable private gain after another; sports stadiums, healthcare… etc
It’s teen women watching bodily autonomy taken from them by a bunch of leches.
And, the worst part, it’s the apathetic public following orders. Feckless society afflicted by learned helplessness; all the white collar workers who can’t provide anything real for themselves. Imagine being on the hook to coddle that?
This culture is a joke of self absorbed primates who ramble in high minded praise of their intelligence. War is peace and exploitation by aristocrats is freedom.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mordae|2 years ago|reply
The days of providing new products to the eager market are gone. It simply no longer pays to hire more people and let them solve other people's problems. It's an all-out class war (fighting against unions, bribing politicians, colluding to suppress wage growth and so on) with capitalists infighting about who gets how large share of the emerging rent economy (communications, housing, transportation, food).
[+] [-] nvahalik|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] mensetmanusman|2 years ago|reply
Scientists also seem to be more anxiety prone than the general population. Also, it doesn't help if you take your work too seriously.
[+] [-] Lutger|2 years ago|reply
Instead of the victims or the culture, I'd rather look at the systemic issues that scientific institutions struggle with: debt, lack of social mobility, being underpaid and overworked, etc.
[+] [-] ProjectArcturis|2 years ago|reply
But leaving academia is a process that takes some time. First cognitively as you give up on your dreams and decide to leave. Then as you search for a new job with no real-world experience and few or no connections.
In the mean time, the pipeline between grad school and professorship gets longer and fuller. Postdocs were once extremely prestigious positions, a sort of "finishing school" for the elite. Now they're standard, and most people need to do more than 1. In practice it's a holding pattern, giving PhDs something to do while they try to struggle to the top of the heap and find an assistant professorship.
And the actual experience of a postdoc! Leave all your friends and move to a new city. Work 60 hours a week for $45k a year. Have the rest of your career controlled by your PI, who you maybe met a few times before you decided to work for them, who has never had any kind of management training, and is under their own severe pressure to publish and bring in new grants. Compete against other brilliant, driven people, many of whom are abusing stimulants, and/or are immigrants with no safety net and willing to work 80+ hours.
How could this system NOT create a mental health crisis?
[+] [-] tptacek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ykonstant|2 years ago|reply
Continent.
[+] [-] schnitzelstoat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juujian|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|2 years ago|reply
On the other hand, jobs that won't impress anyone you meet tend to have fewer applicants and much better treatment, because they can't afford to drive people away.
[+] [-] contemporary343|2 years ago|reply
There are many positive examples out there of ensuring student career success in a supportive lab environment while also producing good research. These need to be amplified as role models.
[+] [-] Balgair|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|2 years ago|reply
Enter competitive research academia. She felt constantly defeated by classmates and advisors who seemed to be working against her at every turn. One advisor, whom she trusted, moved to take a job with another university. She followed in the hope that she could shed the toxicity of the current working environment. Turns out that the new place was just as toxic.
She finished with a 4.0 through grad school but never defended the dissertation due to burnout, tired of the constant struggle for resources, attention, and just plain basic humanity. She now has a subservient role to PhDs she could run circles around intellectually.
[+] [-] wat_do_phd_923|2 years ago|reply
I'm a current PhD student in a coveted top-3 program. We have one of the better stipends in the country, and I've been fully funded by fellowships. My advisor thinks highly of me and isn't abusive. I have a perfect GPA (not that that matters), some publications, and pretty broad technical skills in "hot" area(s). Nevertheless, graduation feels hopelessly out of reach, and I'm getting closer and closer to dropping out.
Academia is full of cronyism, perverse incentives, idea theft. Never mind work-life balance, there is no distinction whatsoever between work and life. There's no "out" if you're in a bad situation; you can't just change jobs like in the real world; your advisor is your "third parent". The incentive structures make it nearly impossible to meaningfully collaborate without some petty authorship conflict arising. It's isolating and seemingly designed to create unhappy, atomized, paranoid, jealous, mean-competitive people. At the end, there is ultimately no reward, materially speaking: all but the very tippy-top academic job tracks are no better.
Academia's clerical heritage is not its only monastic quality. I'm on the wrong side of my 20s and still living in a tiny, crappy apartment with a roommate. At this point I implicitly believe I will never get close to owning a home. That a family is out of the question. That the future is always worse than the present. I've gradually turned into a learned-helplessness "sorry I exist" person, without ever noticing.
Suddenly I see how pathetic that is. I'm ready to change back. I'm ready to be optimistic and ambitious and self-confident again. I'm ready to live a life of improvement, not stagnation. I'm ready to build something meaningful. Not to mention, my eyes are finally opening to how much I could be making in industry if only I hadn't been so proud/idealistic/willfully ignorant... And how much better that kind of salary can make your life.
For the right offer, I am so ready to break free (DMs open (just kidding (but actually though))).
[+] [-] cush|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sacnoradhq|2 years ago|reply
Prescriptive formulas at the point of college entrance isn't the correct place to apply pressures. Mentoring, programs, resources, and subject public relations need to happen where there is great need and especially in areas with fewer resources.
[+] [-] jdlyga|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baja_blast|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winderxxx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stainablesteel|2 years ago|reply
yeah, its outdated, has been for a while