is academia a scam?

dipole

So it sounds like if you want to get a PhD and aren't the next Feynman, you should do it in a field that is valuable to people other than other Physicists?

Threads like this scare me.

ParticleGrl

But that doesn't answer the fundamental question- how can they possibly have better information on where my advisor's former students are than my advisor does himself? It seems like the proposal information has to be mostly self-reported.

Also, consistently professors I interact with seem to be in touch with their students still in the field (for obvious reasons), but rarely do they know what the students who left are doing now. If this knowledge is lucractive I would assume they would at least keep a spreadsheet somewhere with what their students are doing. Is keeping track of students normal behavior, and I just had a particularly strange subset of collaborators?

Pyrrhus

ParticleGirl,

Why don't you try consulting?

Many of the big consulting groups hire PhDs (in pretty much any technical area).

twofish-quant

US and UK have very, very different financial systems, and in the US it's pretty straight forward to be a stockbroker, but because it's not that hard, it's not a particularly high status position. (I'll avoid the temptation to explain why the US and UK systems are so different, but there are deep cultural, historical, geographical, and legal reasons for it.)

In the US, stock broker jobs are relatively easy to get, but they don't pay very well and aren't high status, and involve skills that I'm awful at. In the US, most retail stock brokers are glorified bank tellers, and you aren't going to make big bucks being a stock broker.

Yes and no. There is a balance here, because if you keep money and power *only* for your kids, then eventually people on the outside will form their own counter-elite and you lose. So you have to keep the bulk of money and power for your kids, but you have to keep the system open enough (or at least provide the illusion of openness) so that people try to preserve the system rather than overthrow it.

Also, you are in trouble if your kids are idiots, and don't have the brains to preserve the system you hand down to them.

In China about a 1000 years ago, they figured out a way around this by creating an examination system, which evolved over the years and in my case "getting a Ph.D." became the functional and social equivalent of "passing the imperial examinations."

twofish-quant

Or research technical fields.

A lot of the barriers turn out to be psychological. There is part of me that says "finance.... eehhhhhhwww", but after a lot of effort, I've managed to get that part of me to shut up.

Now getting around psychological barriers turns out to not be the easiest thing in the world, since you are going against decades of socialization. But it's doable, and changing the way that you look at the world is easier than changing the global economic and political system, and in a lot of situations, it's not as if you have much of a choice.

twofish-quant

Yes you do.

Once you have a department that is mostly long term researcher, then the next question is why those people aren't on the major committees and in administration. Once you put those people in positions of power, then the question comes up as to why the tenured professors have tenure.

Now you can reach a deal in which *current* tenured faculty are grandfathered, and tenure is dead for *new* hiring. But make no mistake, that this is the end of tenure. In some industries, notably the auto industry, this was the "grand bargain" that was reached in the 1980's, and even there you had to do a lot of financial stuff to keep paying pension and retiree medical benefits.

One thing about tenure is that if you go back to the 1950's, it *wasn't* that unusual. Most unionized industrial workers in the 1950's were under contract with tenure like provisions. These mostly disappeared in the 1970's and 1980's.

OTOH, maybe it's not such a bad thing. The reason those provisions disappeared was the belief that inflexible labor regulations prevented economic flexibility by making it difficult for people to go into the industry where they would do the most economic and social good. One reason this argument needs to be taken seriously is that it might be true. I'm not doing exactly what I want, but it's hard to make an argument that I'd be generating more economic or social value working in university versus what I'm doing now.

I don't think there is politically. One other problem here is that one has to look from the point of view of society. My personal job satisfaction really isn't that important to most people in the grand scheme of things.

One other problem is that if there were a politician who could credibly argue for fewer tenure protections in exchange for better treatment of non-tenure faculty and graduate students, I'd at least listen to them, but the politicians that are anti-tenure are also strongly anti-academia, so I'm going to side with the tenured faculty when there is a dispute (and it's been a major issue in Texas.)

twofish-quant

Because most university administrators come from the tenured faculty, and political power in most universities is in the hands of the faculty committees who are composed of tenured faculty. The other thing is that professors aren't line workers, and if they get pushed too hard, they will strike, and get the President removed.

In the case of public universities, you have some power in the hands of politicians, and at least in Texas, there's been a major war on tenure, which Governor Perry (fortunately) has been losing.

Also *new* universities have effectively gotten rid of tenure. Witness University of Phoenix, that has a ton of adjuncts, and a very, very few permanent faculty.

twofish-quant

I don't think it would be bad. Everybody has something to teach, and everybody has something to learn.

Personally, I think that the world would end up better off if instead of graduating 1000 physics Ph.D.'s/year it was graduating 100,000. Part of what I've been trying to figure out is what that sort of world would look like.

It really depends on what else they end up doing. It's worked out pretty well for me.

atyy

Isn't it a good thing that most PhDs don't stay in academia? What good is it to society if they stay in the ivory tower? I think as long as students get realistic career advice, they won't be so bitter. (But really, are most bitter about academia because of bad career advising, or because of unfair treatment?)

If they didn't know, they should have said they didn't know. They must have at least known how many students they had, and how many they knew and didn't know about. So they probably knew they didn't know, in which case they were fabricating numbers.

chill_factor

what if your math is anywhere from horrible to average? how is finance even remotely an option for those in experimental fields?

i do not think this is just a psychological barrier. sorry. most people in experimental aspects of biomedical engineering, materials science, condensed matter physics and chemistry would not be able to go to finance because they do not know enough math and programming.

twofish-quant

The trouble is that this starts looking a lot like how business and law schools work, and to me it seems that the cure is worse than the disease. Personally, I think that we are going the wrong way when we start talking about *reducing* the number of physics Ph.D.'s. We really should be talking about *vastly increasing* the number of physics Ph.D.'s.

There's an old joke. A genie shows up and tells a farmer that he can wish for anything. "My neighbor has a cow and I don't, I want you to kill his cow." If we are going to do fundamental social engineering, it would be better to increase demand than reduce supply.

If the problem is definitions, then just tell my boss to change my business card to read "econophysicist." As far as I'm concerned, I'm doing physics.

You know you have a good system when good things happen even though people didn't intend for it to happen. I need to point out that I don't sell insurance. I'm actually doing pretty cool physics research. My one big annoyance is that I can't publicly tell anyone exactly what I'm doing without getting into trouble with my boss and the SEC.

But it's cool.

A lot depends on what you consider a "great career." I've had a great career so far, and it doesn't look like its going to stop anytime soon. Some of it is personal. For me "adventure" is more important than money, and it's been a wild and interesting adventure so far.

If I wanted a "connect the dots" life, I wouldn't have gone physics.

I think that people stopped talking about a shortage of American scientists around 2005. Also, none of my professors talked a lot about the shortage of scientists, because they came from the generation that was screwed over in the physics crash of the 1970's.

And physics Ph.D.'s that work in investment banks are industrial physicists.

twofish-quant

It depends on the meaning of average. If your math skills are "average or somewhat below average for a Ph.D." that's not a problem. Also people from experimental fields usually have lots of experience in computer programming, instrument design and statistics which is very, very useful in algorithmic trading.

There are some issues with finance:

1) People in finance are extremely closed lipped about what they are doing. Part of this is cultural (i.e. would you put your money in a bank that gives out account numbers to anyone that asks) some of it legal. For example, if you are working on an algorithm for a new financial product, even *hinting* that you are about to market the product will get a ton of lawyers, regulators, and compliance people on your case.

2) It changes from month to month. Asking someone about the employment situation is like asking about the weather.

3) The only near absolute requirement for physics Ph.D. finance is that you have to be winning to move to NYC, London, or some city in Asia.

ParticleGrl

That implies its better for society to have trained physicists doing something other are than physics. That isn't obvious to me. Isn't it better for physicists to be doing physics/engineering and laying the ground work for tomorrow's ipads than for them to be doing jobs that require no knowledge of physics?

Sure, a physicist can learn to do data mining or finance, but what does society gain from paying to teach someone physics, only for them to leave and teach themselves some other field? Sure, a physicist can learn finance or data mining, but what does society gain from the superfluous training? They could have totally skipped the learn physics step.

atyy

It's not superfluous - it's basic facts about the universe that everyone should know - just like knowing the sun goes round the earth;) - ok, maybe not now, but in 20-30 years. By the same token, I assume that by now, physicists all know about the double helix and action potentials, which 60 years ago was cutting edge biology.

chill_factor

A PHD in what? what if its not physics? what if its some other science or in engineering? and even if it is physics, there's alot of things different now.

i am working with a Physics grad student. He takes pictures with an AFM and measures DC conductivity. i'm responsible for device fabrication. These are commercial instruments. There's no need to design anything new with them, just know how to use them. i've never seen an experimentalist in materials science program much. everything is on commercial instruments. just know how to use them and interpret their results.

what statistics? we use excel and find mean, median, mode, standard dev and fit it to a curve. i don't think this is the type of statistics you had in mind, it certainly isn't enough for finance.

twofish-quant

I think "keeping the world financial system from collapsing again" is socially useful, and trying to do that involves a ton of "econophysics." I know fairly senior people with physics/math Ph.D.'s that are involved in these sorts of "fate of the entire world" discussions.

Because everything in finance has already been written down in textbook, the typical physics Ph.D. can learn in about a month or so. The important stuff isn't in a textbook, because either it's "tacit unwritten knowledge" or its stuff that no one knows. Also the textbooks are often wrong.

So what you need is someone that is good at research and mathematical modelling. It also makes sense to train these people on "known unknowns." I can't train someone to do mathematical modelling of the world financial system of 2020 or even 2015, because I don't know what the problems are going to be. So have them work on black holes or stellar nucleosynthesis, so that they have the skills necessary to work on whatever comes up in 2020.

If investment banks didn't have to hire Ph.D.'s, they wouldn't. The have to so they do.

ParticleGrl

I think you have an over-optimistic view of the speed of information propagation, at least in physics. Grab a dozen condensed matter physicists, and maybe 1 or 2 can describe the standard model, and that's decades old. Grab a few dozen college grads and ask them to describe general relativity and probably none can, and that's approaching a century old. You'd be lucky if half could get the laws of thermodynamics.

But what does society gain if the guy pricing financial derivatives once calculated a 2 loop diagram?