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On March 07 2013 07:46 TallMax wrote:Show nested quote +On March 04 2013 10:27 Hydro033 wrote:On March 04 2013 03:33 TallMax wrote:On March 04 2013 02:59 Hydro033 wrote:
How many publications do you have and how many publications do those other people have? You need over 20 after your postdoc to get a job at a major university. That's not exactly true. They look at quality and quantity, also the type of research is fairly important. Certain subfields are booming with candidates, so while they make for good graduate studies because something is a hot field, eventually you have a lot of people competing for the same position when they all try to become professors. Also, a lot of people will start out at smaller schools, do high-impact research, and move to other, more prestigious universities. So there are ways of moving around. In chem, I've known faculty with as few as 6 publications getting professorships, starting at a major university. Especially in synthetic chemistry, you can spend a lot of time optimizing and running reactions, that shiz just takes a long while. Well of course there is a quality/quantity tradeoff. A publication in Science can probably net you a top position whether you even have any other publications or not. It wouldn't, you'd need at least 2-4 others if you have one in Science/Nature, otherwise it could be a fluke. Plus, it depends upon whether you're first author, and how groundbreaking the work is.
I'll second that. After I got my first publication in a proper journal, there wasn't a single professor at my university who thought it wasn't a fluke. They came up with so many ridiculous explanations of how this "fluke" has occurred. A couple of guys even accused me of fraud and theft. Not even my PI believed me it was legit. Even though I was the only bloody author. So then I spent a full year of my life working on nothing but the research that yielded another publication in a properly rated journal. Then everybody suddenly shut up, gave me shitload of respect, job offers started flowing in, and all went much smoother than before.
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Its a little different here in the UK, I WISH I had seven years for my PhD. Here you generally apply for a specific project in a specific lab and get funding for that exact thing usually from an external funding body. Then you get three years to do the research and an extra year to write up.
If it helps anyone, from the perspective of a current third year PhD student (and the impression I've gotten from talking to postdoc colleagues of mine), here the process is something more like:
1st Year - Establish yourself in the lab, learn procedures, start to try and get preliminary data. Complete compulsory "personal development" stuff.
2nd Year - Panic that a year has gone by. Start actually trying to get stuff done. Start to make some progress at some point and pull a small amount of data together.
3rd Year - Continue with progress from the second year, speeding it up to try and produce as much data as possible. Most likely your funding will only be for three years so this is your last chance to get it. Start considering writing some up at some point.
4th Year - Write up thesis. Viva.
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This is crazy cool thanks for the info!
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Love reading these, looking forward to part 5 especially. On that note, I wonder if anyone could offer me a bit of advice or general info to help me make up my mind.
I went into work straight out of school for a few years as I wasn't really sure what was going on with my life. At 24 I went to Uni and completed a foundation year in order to gain access onto a degree program. I'm currently finishing the 3rd year of an integrated physics masters (MPhys). I'm really really struggling to decide what to do when I finish. I feel it's a total waste to not continue to do something that utilizes a large amount of the knowledge I will have gained by the end of the 5 year programme, and I obviously love physics.
If I had gone straight to uni from school, I would have done a PhD in a heart-beat, having no commitments, never having known what having real money was like and given that I would have had more years in front of me. From there I would probably have gone on to post-doc work, looking to go onto a faculty position.
However, when I graduate next year I will be 29. Luckily PhD's here are only 3/4 years long, however the down side is the pay is horrible. Some of the PhD's at my uni go for as little as £13,800 with the average being £15,000. While this is tax free, it seems ludicrous to me to go from earning £20,000 in a office job with only school grades to earning £5,000 less after studying for 5 years! Money aside, I would be finishing my PhD by the age of 33, about the time a normal person would be looking to start their first faculty position. From this point, slaving away at post-doc work for another 3-4 years before looking at a decent pay grade and position really seems too far down the line for me. You may be thinking I'm being a bit greedy or I'm not that old, but I'd like to get a mortgage, own my own house and look to have a family by my mid 30's. I don't want to be barreling towards 40 in a bit of a uncertain and unstable position.
Ideally, I would love to walk out of my masters next year into an industry job doing something I'm interested in, but that seems like something that would be very hard to do ?
The question is, if I want to work within the science industry how key is that PhD? Is it worth putting my life on hold even longer in order to secure a position I really want or can I get their a better way earning as I go? I'm just looking for a more informed and/or outside perspective.(I'm happy to hear from people stateside, I'm sure some things are different but I'm sure it would be helpful still.)
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United States24761 Posts
On March 18 2013 01:21 Dknight wrote:Interesting piece from NPR on too many STEM PhDs? Some nice discussion in the comments too.
There seems to be a big disconnect between what students are told to do if they are interested in science, and what people must do to work in science.
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EPT
