Fuck academia

I've been in academia for 6 years now as a MS and PhD student at two major tier 1, AAU universities.
I made the decision to quit my PhD (or "master out" as we call it - drop out of your program but leave with a masters) after realizing how much of a racket academia and the research market are.
AMA

What did you major in? What is your masters thesis about?

I did my BS in biology with a minor in statistics and my MS in genetics; my thesis looked at an algorithm to identify translocations during species hybridization events. My PhD is in biostatistics so I'll master out with a nonthesis MPH.

So you quit academia, what's next?

>after realizing how much of a racket academia and the research market are.

There is your first question. Explain what you mean.

Yeah they don't recommend anyone to go for a PhD these days, anymore

What field? I'm PhD at an Ivy+ with an MA as well.

I know a few ABDs but usually they stick around and force themselves to complete their dissertations just for the sake of having one.

Holy shit you're qualified as fuck and in the USA. What will happen to all those qts currently studying biology at my uni today? Will they have to whore themselves?

I'm about to complete my PhD and continue on doing a post-doc.

Everyone competes for money; so what? How is that any different to the way the rest of the world works?

Oh shit, didn't see No idea how it works in STEM. Why did you drop out? What hurdle wasn't worth the piece of paper? Toiling away at lab research for several years, or something?

In the Humanities/SocSci, it's easier to BS a dissertation at least.

Just hurry up and get on with the juicy stories, user. Tell us the bad stuff that made you lose your marbles.

The non-research industry, aka a real job. In the US there's a huge shortage of statisticians, especially in hospitals, healthcare, biotech, and other fields. I've already been contacted by at least a dozen headhunters since I updated my profiles on LinkedIn and my universities' career pages, all of whom were offering me jobs paying more than what my PI currently makes after 10 years at this university.

The pic I posted in my OP isn't far off. Basically, there are no tenure track positions anymore. You have a better chance of getting into Harvard, Stanford, or the military academies than you do landing a tenure track after 5-15 years of doing a post doc. Because of the scarcity, professor and researcher salaries have gone down significantly. This is all a direct result of the sequester from 2011, which drastically cut federal research expenditure to universities, think tanks, research firms, etc. Industry was not affected by this, but they still lowered researcher wages because they could.

What does this mean? Professors aren’t retiring because they need to work longer (or they simply want to die on the bench, more on that later) as there’s less money. Less money means they need cheaper labor. This is where PhD students come in. We’re paid the cost of living in real dollars but on paper we’re paid the same as state workers, but part of our “salary” is waived tuition and fees. So basically we’re cheap labor who don’t have any job prospects when we graduate.

If you think “Who the fuck would want that?” the answer is the Chinese and Indians. The pay they get here is significantly higher than what they make in their home countries, as is the quality of life here, so they gladly take meager pay to be robotic grunt workers.

Not related to the racket, but I also realized I’m not completely obsessed with research and do not want to sacrifice my life to the alter of science.

can someone translate into english please

Basically I'm a SAS and Matlab god and the companies Bernie hates want to pay me all the monies for it.

My first week one of the other grad students down the hall collapsed. She'd been in lab for almost a week straight and had barely eaten anything in that duration. She was sequencing 1,000 fecal samples and was so into it that she lost track of time. She didn't want us to call the ambulance.

After a month my PI asked if I was ready to publish. When I told him I was still collecting data he threw a binder at me, called me a fucking retard, and told me to work harder.

You must be 18+ to use this site

Was your advisor banging his grad students?

Girlfriend is currently a PhD student is experimental psychology with a stats emphasis. Works with SAS, SPSS+ etc.

She's trying to decide between teaching at a liberal arts college or going private industry. The cohorts before her all either got VAPs or tenure track positions, but at shitty HBCU or regional colleges.

That's great user. Glad to see one of us is doing something with their lives.
I'm not your mom's dad but that won't stop her from calling me daddy.

I'm done with biology too, M.s. in wildlife bio, trying to get into a trade union now. OP is speaking the truth

I'm currently writing my masters thesis

Any advice? I have an idea what to write but I can't get that shit on paper

No. He's Chinese and if you should only jerk off to your data and loli p values. His wife divorced him because he cared more about the lab than her (srs) and didn't want to have kids because "they're a distraction." He called one of my labmates a slut because she wanted to spend Friday night with her fiance instead of in the lab.

Liberal arts is a completely different ballgame. Brb, no funding but we still expect you to publish even with a 40% research load. Even then with something like psych it's going to be crazy competitive at schools in good locations.

>In the Humanities/SocSci, it's easier to BS a dissertation at least.
For STEM every chapter has to be a publishable paper.

Hmm, looks like I dodged a bullet there. Could it be just your lab or is it a state-wide thing? Were you actually interested in the stuff you've been working on or did it seem like irrelevant crap to you?

>SAS
>spending years learning outdated trash that's already half a decade obsolete compared to R or Python

>Not related to the racket, but I also realized I’m not completely obsessed with research and do not want to sacrifice my life to the alter of science.

I'd say its more this than realizing science is a racket. I just finished my PhD (Biosciences) and the biggest mistake I see for most incoming students is that they went straight from undergrad to graduate school without ever considering what it actually entailed ("What?!? I have to work AT LEAST 50 hours a week for shit pay to get things done?!?!?").

As for the other stuff, you are right about the lack of tenure track positions, but that alone shouldn't discourage anyone from getting a PhD. More than ever, you just need to seriously consider what you actually want to do with your PhD or if you even need one at all to do the work that will make you happy. I'll add that a lack of funding doesn't really make this a racket, it is just the state of the field right now.

>and if you need to get sexual you should only jerk off to...
Fucking Macs

Wildlife and marine have zero funding right now. Best of luck brah

Read papers written by your PI. Read the theses that have already been written by people in your PI's lab. Be on a first name basis with the people at your university's writing center. I got a 5 on the GRE writing but cannot write science or academic papers to save my life; I was practically living at the writing center during my last semester of my masters.

>tfw I work IT and have to install Matlab and SAS for people like you all the time
>tfw don't know what to feel

You're smarter than me though, thats for true.

I'm an undergraduate maths major planning on moving on to a graduate degree in mathematics or a related field. What advice would you give me moving forward?

>tfw its 4am in germany and i have to hand in my bachelor today and I've been writing all night to finish it up, but now somehow I'm just shitposting on Sup Forums

Literally me m8. Had a technical report to write for my Networking class due at midnight today and barely finished it like 20 minutes ago, but still revising it before I submit it. I could have had it done totally yesterday too, but I choose to shitpost here instead.

What the hell is wrong with us?

It's a state wide thing. I know a lot of people at other universities who have profs and research settings like this. It's the "old way" and is dying out, but it's still at least 20 years from being fixed.

As for the actual research, I was interested in it when I start but the bleak job market and asshole PI killed it for me.

Biomed still uses SAS (along with SQL), but they do also use Python, which I'm learning right now. R being open source is still too unreliable for most of the companies I've looked at.

I'm not saying science is a racket, I'm saying academia is. Just going with what I know, but I do know that outside academia the pay and hours are shit and I want a life away from the bench.

If you don't use it why do you care?

STEM should be renamed TES - tech, engineering, and statistics. Math is still in demand but it's not what it was 5 years ago, as my roommate from undergrad is learning the hard way (has a PhD in inter-three dimensional linear algebra and is teaching 7th grade math).

dontforgetyourehearforever.jpg

>tfw 3rd year history undergrad
>tfw fell for the "take what you're interested in meme"
>tfw I don't even go to class anymore this stuff is so fucking simple

looks like I can look forward to the soul-crushing existence of law school and law practice

Somehow shitposting is quite addictive...
Would really like to know what the hell is wrong indeed. If I would have focused i could have been done like 1-2 weeks ago easily

Still have to write up some more shit for my conclusion. And make some graphs more pretty... And check for spelling mistakes etc.

I mean i stil have until the afternoon, but I'm slowly getting a bit tired and I'm not sure if i can really be productive in like 5 hours anymore or not

I concluded from my time in grad school that in order to be successful in the sciences you have to be fucked up in some way. I.e. autistic, Narcissistic, psychopath, or just a huge self esteem issue.

They're all fucked up

>Biomed still uses SAS (along with SQL), but they do also use Python, which I'm learning right now. R being open source is still too unreliable for most of the companies I've looked at.

Seriously? In biostatistics saying SAS is derided is a heavy understatement (pretty much everyone uses R, also some Stata). It's just not sufficiently extensible for the sort of models a lot of people are using these days.

If it's that important, get some 5 hour energy (if they sell it over in krautland), or whatever equivalent. Trust me, makes you like 5x more efficient at least for the duration of the task at hand.

Shit works wonders.

>What will happen to all those qts currently studying biology at my uni today? Will they have to whore themselves?
Yes. Srs, every bio classmate from undergrad who didn't go to grad school is either a secretary or got a job as a realtor, retail store manager, or something you need any college degree to get.

Too much truth in this post.

I'm just going off what the job listings say. I don't deny R will eventually take over (I even had two semesters of R programming), but from what I've seen businesses and hospitals are sticking to SAS for whatever reason.

>Working in (((Acedemia)))
>Not working in the for profit sector

Sadly it's necessary, but not sufficient.

Yup. I did my BS and MS at a very conservative public school and got whiplash when I moved north and saw what the rest of the (((universities))) were like.

I love Russian humor

How is it going to be fixed? More cash injected? Thinning of the research population? H1B banned?

Seems like you went for a phd for the wrong reasons. If you're in it for the money you'll fail. You got to be completely concerned with understanding and advancing a very small part of the field. All the great professors are batshit crazy and have a neat complete disregard for money. Oxford/Cambridge cap most their professors out at 60 gbp, but rop people come just for reputation and prestige

Also Positions in industry or government labs pay loads, and often have a tenure type system.

>>(((95315964)))

More cash eventually, but also the old way of thinking (toil in the lab and fuck everything outside the department walls) is literally dying off, as the current profs either retire or kick the dirt.

I went in for altruistic reasons and I wanted to be a scientist and leave this world a little better than when I came into it. Actually working with researchers and going the not-so watered down stuff was painful and not at all what I thought it would be. So I guess I did come in for the wrong reasons, since I didn't know I'd have to give up my entire life for it.

I'm really fucking happy I'm in microbiology instead of biology.

Everyone's scared shitless of drug resistant bacteria, and we're getting more government funding to fight it.

Worst case scenario, I can get a job working with either beer of cheese.

Some of us aren't autistic and just want job skills, but there's no way to do that without fucking academia.

I don't think it'll ever be fixed before a collapse. Another thing that pops up is the globalisation of research, especially on a professorship level. My department is filled with professors who, 40 years ago, did their undergrad, masters and phd here and then became professors. Nowadays most of the new professors are Ivy League tier, leaving the local ones SOL and scrambling after teaching-track positions.

I am a sociology major and want to kill myself. I was a hippie in college and majored in it but then dropped out and got into real life shit and other projects but left with 4 classes remaining to get my degree. Well this year I decided to re-enroll just to finish it since work now requires everyone have one (good paying job, want to keep it, and they'll let me finish online and keep the job)

But wew lads. Sociology the most fucking cringeworthy psuedo intellectual bullshit you can imagine. Even when I was blue pilled I thought this shit was rough but now that I'm redpilled I can't fucking stand it. It's all brainwashing. I don't even want to get into it because you would simply just have to be in these classes to understand but it literally praises every left wing ideology while slamming and conservative one.

Cooties are where it's at

Because because any PhD in a non STEM field is pseudo intellectual bullshit

what do I need to be a statistician

Can a BS in EE apply?

show tits

thanks man.

wow you seem really interested in your life user. Too bad you can do nothing about that. Shame.

Same OP, except I got forced out of one (pissed off the wrong guy, and suddenly I wasn't able to pass exams after passing the hardest quals the department had ever given), and I quit my second program because two professors were literally harassing me.

In each case I had zero recourse because it was "my word against theirs" (even when I had emails from pricks from the second program!), and they had tenure.

Fuck academia.

When I was an undergrad it was about 70% white and 20% Chinese/Indian. Jump to grad school and it's 20% white and 75% Chinese or Indian. The Asian countries will pay students' tuition, fees, and living expenses if a university admits them, so the university gets free labor and they can pocket the stipend and pay. Since there are only so many seats on the bus, they've already been filled, so that money goes back into the "general endowment fund," i.e. the admin petty cash drawer.

Fuck I am trying to go into academic medicine after graduating from med school

Do they perform better academically? What's your observance with asian and especially Chinese students? Pls respond

Come up with a formula relating to the likelyhood of characteristics of animals when they interbreed

Nice bragging faggot.

>Because because any PhD in a non STEM field is pseudo intellectual bullshit
Not necessarily, but I do work in STEM.

ACTUARY
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A
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Yea you're lacking the drive, the tolerance for bullshit, and the crazy
Get an MBA cunt

I'm going to drop out of my m.s. program because my advisor and I were fucking the same student (I didn't know+ he's married), and he was fucking up my funding. I can't prove anything and just want out

I dropped out of my PhD program too. Good for you. Fuck academia.

Everyone competes for money, yes. But when it's easier to get into the top universities in the world than to get a tenure track position (one of my post doc friends has applied to over 40 universities and hasn't gotten an interview anywhere) they can drop the wages even lower. Hell, you'd be making more if you just skipped grad school and started working as an undergrad. Maybe it's different in the Ozzy Troll Land, but here in the States you'd have to be completely insane to want to go into academia.

NP; good luck brah.

If you have good math skills and know some coding (R, SAS, Python, etc) you can apply. But if you're an EE I don't know why you would, since y'all seem to be the most in demand engineering field right now.

Yeah, once you get tenure you're officially in the old boys club and get a free pass to harass students short of raping or beating them.

At the University of Toronto I'd say that the undergrad asians (Orientals) on average do about better than the undergrad Chinese because the Orientals (who are ethnically Chinese but come from countries like Malaysia) normally undergo rigorous examinations before getting scholarships to come here.

The Chinese are split into two groups: the rich ones are usually dumb as rocks but managed to get in because their parents could afford to pay a company to "prepare" their application for them. Also, they pay triple the tuition as locals. The poor ones move to Canada in grade 11 or 12 and apply through the local Canadian system, so they are generally quite capable.

PhD should be known as slave labour. Do yourself a favour and don't cuck your life doing a PhD; there is no demand for professors. In fact, forget college, there is no demand for STEM jobs either.

So you're Eskimo brothers with your advisor? That's pretty fucking weird.

Grad student doing biochemistry here. Worked at a top lab in America as a research assistant before starting grad school here (University of Tokyo, very highly ranked school for science research). You're 100% on the money. Academia as an industry is disgusting. I'm going into industry the second I finish.

Chinese are fucking robots and will basically live in lab if you ask them to. That girl who passed out from not eating for almost a week? Chinese.
And they cheat like fucking crazy. Most of the students who get kicked out of the university for plagiarizing and cheating are Chinese.

Be very careful with that one. Depending on your university they can go Mattress Girl on you.

Too much real life

>there is no demand for STEM jobs either.
As I said earlier, it really needs to be renamed TES - tech, engineering, and stats.

Well at least you can Look down on the working class huh! Like most of you So-called well educated fork do

Yeah, pretty not cool. He wouldn't remove himself from my committee either. So I took off with all the data I collected. Some other hott female student dropped out over harassment too.

Fuck academia

ITT: failures

We have a faculty member who did his PhD at Tokyo here and whatever funding he asks for he gets. In the US it's up there with Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

Know how I know you voted "stay?"

is med school fucked too? Im doing bme undergrad and am considering doing premed

The chancess of being a failure in the pursuit of academia is very high, so folks take good care and make the right decision.

I'm just confused as to how it takes so long for people to realize academia's a con.

Every biology teacher I've met while getting my bachelor's has told me how horrifying it is.

Why would medicine be fucked? It's a professional degree, unlike a PhD.

>Leaving
Better pay, better work life balance, better benefits

>Staying
Shit pay, no life outside lab, dealing with people just as arrogant and demented as you, literally cucking yourself to federal research funding

You do raise a good point, though.

A lot of academics brand anyone who leaves the tower as a failure because they didn't want to live and breathe the research. Even when there are too many PhDs in the US, to little funding, and much greener pastures away from the tower. As I said, I'll be making just as much on day one as my PI did after years of playing the academic game, in a better city or town that's not in the middle of bumfuck US, and have plenty of time to spend my life outside the lab not waiting for incubations, gel runs, etc.

Strong cope, cuck.

Med school is fucked for a completely different reason. It's four years of sleepless mental exhaustion and buttrape, but they payout is worth it. Although you will eventually become an alcoholic or chainsmoker due to all the death and fucked up shit you'll see, until you eventually become numb.

I know. I worked at an MIT lab before this and finished on great terms with everyone. 60-70 hour work weeks were the norm for me but I soldiered through. It's bad here, but not as bad, plus Tokyo is fun. Plan is to work industry here since Todai grads are sought after here, and I'm fluent in English (America, fuck yeah) and I'm willing to travel to the Boston area several times a year for work where most big company's sister branches are (family is around there so it's all good).

Basically I survive the PhD and I SHOULD be all set. Your stories and claims are spot fucking on, though. I've experienced much of what you said firsthand. It's nuts, isn't it?

I'm from Denmark (living in Japan currently), and I want to start a PhD program in Denmark. The positions are fully funded; am I still fucked? I just want a PhD since I enjoy the work, and a dissertation is a tangible goal to work towards. I have little interest in becoming any sort of professor.
I feel like everyone has a goddamn Master's degree. How can I be proud of myself or feel accomplished without a PhD degree?

My Master's degree is in the humanities, so it's worrying, but at least humanities in Europe is slightly less fucked than in the US.

There is a lot of shilling, isn't there? I mean the past two decade seems to have perfected the pop-scientist, who paint the world of science to be some jolly wonderland where breakthroughs just fall out of trees. The reality of science is that it is a harsh political nightmare, and people just can't seem to grasp that due to years of conditioning.

Yeah, the Japanese researches here are all much more laid back until you royally fuck something up, but they still expect you to churn over 60 hours a week. The Chinese and Indians are massive pricks, though, as are about 2/3 of the white profs.

Oh, and good fucking luck talking to ANYONE in the department - grad student, post doc, staff scientist, or prof - about anything unrelated to research. They don't know or care and judge the ever-living hell out of you for having interests unrelated to your research.

No clue; I know the European schools expect you to finish out in 3 or 4 years, whereas in the US it can take up to a decade.

It's a lot of cheap labor, since grad students don't cost as much as post docs or staff scientists. Why anyone would want to go in and deal with the grant hunting, admin dick sucking, and horrible lifestyle are beyond me.

completely different

you will still be practicing medicine which is a service people cannot go without.

we don't need more people investigating the reaction of mice lymph cells to chemical x when chemical y is present

No more than 3 years, yeah.

It's up to you, honestly. Each situation is different and you might be a true genius, who knows. The reason most people do a PhD is so that they can become a lecturer or a professor, but it doesn't always harm your job prospects (importantly it sometimes can).

>It's a lot of cheap labor, since grad students don't cost as much as post docs or staff scientists.
Bingo, I mean these students are doing work that would cost $ 45-50k for nothing. Worse, they do not even get union protection or safety laws.

I recently finished up my undergrad in physics/astronomy. Hoping to start my climb of the tower soon.

I was somewhat involved with the grad students and faculty in the astronomy department, and found a lot of support. I was even able to publish several works.

I've heard that biology is a very saturated field, and I could see your lab being so harsh and competitive.

Did I get this nice treatment because I went to a west coast school, or is all acadamia as you describe, did you have any exposure to other programs/labs at your university?

What the fuck is an AAU university

You either went to CHYMPS or you're a retard.

Where do you plan to start? And where will you apply physics?

>I was even able to publish several works.
I think you got good treatment because you are pretty good at what you do.

The stats department was pretty laid back until news broke that there was a shortage, and after that they got swarmed.

Physics I know nothing about.

Grad school is only for those people who are defined by their parents telling them they were the smart kid, so they do anything to prove themselves.
They dont care about being succesful, they only care about being (or seeming) smart.

Geology BS and Hydrogeology MS and the fucking oil price needs to go back up so I can get a fucking job REEEEEEEEE

Good, professors shouldn't be paid shit. Drain the swamp until universities cut all the gender studies bullshit that are a waste of money.

>You either went to CHYMPS or you're a retard.
I wish this meme would die.

AAU is a group of 62 universities in the US and Canada that are widely considered the top research universities out there. CHYMPS is among them along with schools like Michigan, Virginia, W&M, etc.

You should write a big badass article about the shit state of higher learning. Under a pseudonym and omitting identifying details of course.

The lack of EHS here is hilarious. Shorts, no gloves, no coat, mouth pipetting. The fucking works. My PI is super chill compared to most, and my last boss was an insane Chinese guy, so I'm actually more meticulous and organized in my work than the other people here. I'm also not big on making mistakes. Failed experiments, sure, but I'm not the guy who leaves samples at the wrong temperature and kills them or who measures chemicals out wrong and fucks up the buffer or media and skews results.

The other thing I've noticed is that they're all pretty interested in American stuff and all really friendly with me. We go out and do fun things as a group and we actually talk about games and manga and shit. I'm on a scholarship too, so I'm OK on money. Basically my situation is as good as it realistically gets, and I knew this while applying. I'd scouted this lab before applying, and it's the only program I applied to. Had I not gotten in, I wouldn't have tortured myself with an American high tier school. I would have gone right into industry, as I had some connections.

Your commentary on foreign students in America is on the money, if anyone else reading wanted a second opinion.

I'm luckily a fast learner. I planned to study string theory, but I realized two things my senior year of undergrad after working in a couple research groups in widely different areas of physics and math.

1. Academia is a vipers' nest of cunts.

2. If taxpayers understood research papers, scientists and mathematicians would be swinging from lamp posts for defrauding the public.