The author of the article isn't on a tenure-track, it is the author of the article excerpted in the above article. This author (Tom Coates) does make an excellent observation: "The aim of doctoral work is not - no matter what anyone tells you - to think up good stuff and write great works and reveal your genius to the world. The aim is to make professional people who can teach undergraduates, deliver papers and - yes - also (subsequently) push the discipline further in one direction or another. You have to approach your post-graduate work in this way. The most successful doctoral students in my experience are the ones that are thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline too much. They're the ones that finish their doctoral work and go on to useful teaching positions (and then may or may not start exploring more widely). It's definitely not the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas that get through. If they get through it's because they're thorough and they're careful and they're professional and treat it as it should be treated - as a job of work rather than a calling or an exploration."
This resonates really well with my personal experience. Conscientiousness is the word to keep in mind.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the 22-year old kid just starting graduate school is very different from the 27-year old standing at the other end with a burnt wick. You cannot predict how your interests evolve, but you should at least try and gauge if your current interests run deep enough to allow for the sacrifice of four, five, or six years.
The relevant question, for one who does want to produce great work, is not whether grad school is suited more towards conscientious professionalism than truly novel, ambitious work, but whether it is a better day job than your other options. There are many circumstances where grad school is a fine place to stabilize the ebb and flow of creativity. There are smart people, exciting people, young people, old people, quiet spaces, interesting places, filled libraries, helpful secretaries, lab space, scholarships, grants, cafeterias, late cafes, open projects, secret projects, rich people, hackers, artists, scientists, writers, politicians, playwrights, music, sports, and a reasonable story that you can use to answer family questions about 'what you're doing with your life'.
There are problems, though. There's a lot of pressure to do things that are either in the academic norm, or are part of the academic fashion. Unfortunately, such things tend to get popular after the first people start getting interested in it, who often cover so much ground that there's little to do. So you need to stay away from academic groupthink if you want to do good work there -- but otherwise, it's a good place.
That graduate school is increasingly viewed as training for a professorial or teaching position is the greatest failing of the system. The noble pursuit of knowledge, which I think is the ideal of graduate study, has been supplanted by the stark economic realities, ie. you don't get paid to do research without producing anything. But research can sometimes yield nothing of significance for years.
So now academia has been reduced to an industry that produces mountains of useless, trifling research to justify the academics' own positions. The technocrats at the top of the system put unit prices on conference and journal papers, but they're not judged on quality, just the amount that can be eked out. To get more funding, you need to produce. I remember reading essentially the same paper 10 times from different conference proceedings, as the author managed to squeeze out one trivial variation on the same theme after another. Hell, my supervisor was a prime culprit (and I an accessory).
Any graduate student will tell you that the first (and most important) skill to learn is how to wade through all the bullshit papers and find things of value.
In some ways it's great that post-doctoral work (if you can get it) has become a middle class profession, spawning an industry that employs people, but the dilution of academic work has made research much more time consuming.
I never finished my PhD program, dumping my scholarship after a year for an engineering career in oil and gas. 7 years on, and I'm actually thinking of going back part-time. I like research... just at my own pace. Without being saddled with the constraints of money (which is every poor graduate student's dilemma), there's no pressure to produce. Now that's what I call the ideal research environment!
success factors: [be] thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline too much.
irrelevant factors: [being] the best and the brightest, the most imaginative thinkers or the people with the great ideas
You can do great work outside a university, be an artist or industrialist, in poverty or in wealth. I love the idea of working in splendid isolation, but (I feel) you need something to push against, to measure yourself against, peers to celebrate or hate you. Each discipline in academia is all that (as are industries and arts). How can you rebel without a cause?
Make an independent university. That's what Moscow mathematicians did in the 1990s, when it became clear that the new democratic Russia no longer cared about fundamental science. http://www.mccme.ru/ium/english/index.html . I studied there for a couple years, fantastic place.
From my experience, the "PhD or not" depends entirely on the field being studied. In chemistry, the PhD is the union card that allows you to enter industry at a higher level and allows advancement if one's lucky/good to quite high levels. The BS/MS folks enters with lower ranks and face a ceiling about the point where PhD's enter. Similarly, the MD has all sorts of advantages to those who have studied medical-type fields at lower levels.
Conversely, nobody hired CS PhD's outside of think tanks or academia as far as I can tell. Similarly, engineering PhD's seem tracked to academia.
There are some companies that hire CS PhDs , or at least have divisions that do.
Google, of course. Xerox. A bunch of big DoD contractors have R&D departments. Video game companies have been known to pick up graphics focused Phds. Pixar.
There are lots of engineering PhD's in industry, but you have to pick the right industry. For example, there are many other electrical engineering PhD's at my current workplace (a microprocessor design company), but PhD's were very thin on the ground at my previous job (a software startup).
It's actually quite hard to move from industry back to academia as an engineering PhD. According to some academic friends, unless you've been publishing tons of papers while in industry, you're looking at an adjunct faculty position at best.
To put this in a historical perspective, Adam Smith's bitter comments on the fate of the academic still make sense today:
"But the usual reward of the eminent teacher bears no proportion to that of the lawyer or physician; because the trade of the one is crowded with indigent people who have been brought up to it at the public expence; whereas those of the other two are incumbered with very few who have not been educated at their own."
Great article. A friend of mine finally secured her first faculty position in English this summer; you need balls to slog through that many years knowing there's no guarantee you'll be able to find a job at the end.
On the other hand, if a person has an interest in grad school, I'd encourage them to give it a shot. At worst you waste a couple of years. Once you get out into the real world and start piling on a car, house, girlfriend, and then the 2.5 kids plus golden retriever, it becomes that much harder to go back and get that degree if you realize it was a path you wanted to follow.
This author is primarily talking about a phd in the humanities... ...does the same thing apply to science and engineering fields that aren't as ummm useless in the real world?
Yes, I'm afraid it does. Take two people, equally as smart, both in their late 20s, one did a PhD and one's a CEng (or PEng). They will have very different skillsets at that point and the CEng will be very much more employable. The PhD will have slightly more options however if they decided to move into another field.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only good reason for doing a PhD in any subject P is that you're so fascinated by P that you find youself saying:
"Holy shit, you mean somebody will actually let me sit around and just do research on P for a few years? And they'll even pay me a little bit of money while I do it? What a sweet deal!"
Nice piece, but I would go even further. I've heard of dropout rates of 80%. The person writing it is a tenure-track professor, and doesn't even get to the possibility of being denied tenure.
Anyway I'm one of those dropouts. If a Ph.D. counts for little outside academia, an ABD counts for even less.
Why does any Ph.D. student at any but the top graduate schools believe that he will get tenure at any university? The odds are so far against him, and have been for a generation, than he ought to realize that he is about to waste his most precious resource – time – on a long-shot. Investing five or more years beyond the B.A. degree, except in a field where industry hires people with advanced degrees, is economic stupidity that boggles the imagination.
As a society we massively overproduce people with "high" (e.g. theoretical or abstract) skills. Whether it's astrophysics PhDs or even just Bachelors of Engineering, there simply isn't the work that needs doing to justify the investment in educating them (us!).
Meanwhile, try getting a plumber or a plasterer. The UK govt. has the objective of getting 50% of school leavers into university. Formal education beyond a certain point is suboptimal both for the individual and for society as a whole in probably most cases. The great irony is that this is a Labour government, you'd think if anyone realized the value of traditional trademen, it would be them...
This resonates really well with my personal experience. Conscientiousness is the word to keep in mind.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the 22-year old kid just starting graduate school is very different from the 27-year old standing at the other end with a burnt wick. You cannot predict how your interests evolve, but you should at least try and gauge if your current interests run deep enough to allow for the sacrifice of four, five, or six years.