Does Publishing Matter? A Guide for Engineers in the Real World

[twofish-quant]

Look beyond the superficial! The Lab/university considers a postdoc as an employee, while a graduate student isn't! One gets medical benefits, the other doesn't!

I got medical benefits as a teaching/research assistant. In fact, I got the same coverage as my adviser.

I don't quite understand this. In view of what is an "employee" versus what isn't, there's more in common between graduate student in science and those going to Law school, versus graduate student and someone who is employed by an industry!

Disagree very strongly. People that are full time employed get more money, but that's it. All of the work that I did when I was in graduate school gave me more seniority once I started looking for work, and when I wrote my resume, the teaching/research assistant job that I got was just another job.

I still can't believe people still think that comparing a full-time graduate student with someone who is a full-time employee is a valid comparison.

Full time employees work less than graduate students.

 

[twofish-quant]

Your GPA largely doesn’t matter (modulo one high profile exception: a multinational advertising firm).

Your GPA also largely does not matter for anything beyond graduate school admissions.

I was once reduced to tears because a minor academic snafu threatened my ability to get a Bachelor of Science with a major in Computer Science, which my advisor told me was more prestigious than a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Academia cares about distinctions like that. The real world does not.

In fact, more often then not, they don't. A lot of research is interdisciplinary, and there are lots of examples of people that have crossed fields.

Remember, market wages for people capable of producing research are $80~100k+++ in your field.

They aren't.

The prof in charge of my research project offered me a spot in his lab, a tuition waiver, and a whole $12,000 dollars as a stipend if I would commit 4~6 years to him. That’s a great deal if, and only if, you have recently immigrated from a low-wage country and need someone to intervene with the government to get you a visa.

I think that's a pretty good deal. The thing about getting a Ph.D. is that if you know what to do with it, you can get a job that is much higher paying than something with a bachelors.

You can lead the life of the mind in industry, too — and enjoy less politics and better pay.

But it helps to have a Ph.D.

You can even get published in journals, if that floats your boat.

For physics it's very difficult/impossible to do.

 

[twofish-quant]

What if you are not someone's qualifying child, is there any distinction then? Or are all students qualifying children?

This is a bad example, because while you can be listed as a student, or you can tell the IRS that you are a full time employee. There are good tax reasons for not being listed as a dependent on your parent's income tax if you have your own earnings.

It also works the other way. I'm still a full time student. The fact that people pay me more money for being a student makes things cool, but I'm learning as much new stuff now as I was when I was in graduate school.

 

[ZapperZ]

Honestly, I think you are the one looking at the superficial. Your only point seems to be that some people have the title "student" and some people don't. We can all agree on that. Graduate students are "full time students" but most of those full time students spend 0% of their time in class, and roughly 100% doing value-added tasks for the university.

This is obviously hugely different from medschool and gradschool where students spend about 0% of their time doing value-added tasks for the university and 100% of their time in class.

If a graduate student stops showing up, the university has to hire someone to replace them in the lab and classroom. If a law student stops showing up, the school probably wouldn't even notice.

The problem here is that the comparison keeps shifting its shape!

Look at my original argument in which the comparison was done between a graduate student, and someone who is in a full time employment. Without knowing what that graduate student does, I can easily argue that the student makes ZERO money per year, while the full time employee can make way more. The fact that if the student also happens to earn a STIPEND (not a salary) only makes it a little better, but not by much (if one also ignores the fact that he/she gets a tuition waver which can be considerable). That is why I asked why not compare this to typical law or medical school students which typically make NO money while they are in post-graduate schools. But when I did that, somehow the comparison and criteria then shifted to "potential" possible future earnings, which was NEVER applied to the original argument and to the poor graduate student income as a factor! I can't play this game when the goal post keeps changing!

I would say that this is NOT a fair comparison because these are two entirely different situations. Both the IRS and the USCIS make the distinction. The employer, be it a university or a Nat'l Lab, makes a distinction. What is superficial is to simply look at what physical activity that person does, and declares it to be the same! I didn't say that there can't be situations where they do similar work. I'm saying that you have to look BEYOND just what you can see and look at the bureaucratic status!

At my old university the gradstudents got medical on a university plan, and the postdocs pay for their medical out of pocket. I don't think this is uncommon (I might be wrong).

Ah, but is this universal? Postdocs ALWAYS gets benefits. It is part of the job offer. Graduate assistance are never guaranteed of getting such benefits at all schools. Postdocs are full-time employees, even if temporarily. Graduate assistance aren't! International postdocs cannot be on F1 visa (at least, not for very long). International graduate students can and do! If I want to hire you as a postdoc, I have to check if you can LEGALLY WORK in the US. I have no such requirement to take you on as my graduate assistant. There labor laws that govern the hiring of a postdoc. Would you like to guess if such labor laws also apply to graduate assistance?

There are distinct differences, and there are official differences (beyond just looking at what they do) in these two groups of people! Don't believe me? Ask the HR people!

If someone is choosing between going to graduate school and working full time THEN THIS IS THE VALID COMPARISON OF OPPORTUNITY COST! Thats how opportunity cost works- you compare what you could be doing with what you are doing. What opportunities am I passing on in order to pursue what I'm doing now?

If someone is choosing between working full time as an engineer or pursuing their phd, do you really think how much they could make as an engineer doesn't matter?

There is a difference between these two situations:

1. I just graduated with my B.Sc degree. What should I do next? Should I got into graduate school? Or should I go and pursue a career?

2. Students A makes $12,000/year in stipends. Employee B makes $60,000/year in salary.

Those two situations are different! In Case 1, it is a valid question to ask when one is about to start the next phase of one's life. One has to weigh all the options, all the possibilities, etc.

Case 2, on the other hand, has already happened. The option has been decided! When that happened, the comparison being done, especially in terms of PURE INCOME ALONE (i.e. not having any discussion on earning potential, which was NOT part of the original equation) is not valid! The student has a huge amount of responsibilities that comes with being a student that isn't part of what he/she being paid for, such as going to class and studying for exams. He/she is NOT a full-time employee! That is why I said this comparison with a full-time employee is not valid!

Zz.

 

[twofish-quant]

Look at my original argument in which the comparison was done between a graduate student, and someone who is in a full time employment.

Teaching and research assistants are full time jobs. Except for making less money, they aren't any different from the work I do. Part of the reason I disliked the original article is that it made a distinction between "academia" and the "real world." Teaching and research assistants end up doing the grunt work of research like dishwashers and parking lot attendants.

Teaching assistants don't make much money, but neither do burger flippers, and I don't think anyone would argue that a burger flipper isn't a "real job."

That is why I asked why not compare this to typical law or medical school students which typically make NO money while they are in post-graduate schools.

Compare for what purpose? Situations X, Y, Z result in consequences A, B, and C. The economics of physics is very different than that of law and medical school. Personally, I think that the economics of physics works better than that of law and medical school.

Compare implies better or worse, and you can make up whatever standards you what. Sometimes seeing how people rank things is useful because it tells something important about them.

What is superficial is to simply look at what physical activity that person does, and declares it to be the same! I didn't say that there can't be situations where they do similar work. I'm saying that you have to look BEYOND just what you can see and look at the bureaucratic status!

Except that often bureaucratic status turns out to be bogus. Bureaucratic distinctions exist largely to keep bureaucrats in power, and if you take them too seriously, you are going to get screwed. In the Middle Ages, people in castles were "better" because they were "Lords" and the people working the fields were "peasants." Part of the purpose of academia, I thought was to move away from that. We can create a society of "workers" and "students" in which the workers order the students around. But that's not the type of society I'd like to live in.

People have different philosophies, and if you think what I said was bogus, that's fine. I'm just explaining to you how I see the world, and if you think it's silly, that's fine. It's been too engrained in me to change.

Bureaucratic status is bogus in another way. You can run off a piece of paper and claim to be a "Doctor" but I would consider you one. Alternatively, you could come up with some sort of system by which I would consider you a "Doctor" notwithstanding lack of credentials.

Graduate assistance are never guaranteed of getting such benefits at all schools.

And neither are post-docs. Neither is anyone else. It's a market and you are guaranteed nothing.

There labor laws that govern the hiring of a postdoc. Would you like to guess if such labor laws also apply to graduate assistance?

So what? If Congress suddenly passed a law declaring everyone a professor, that would be meaningless in my eyes. Conversely if Congress passed a law stripping me of my Ph.D., that wouldn't matter to me or anyone that really cares about me.

I don't let the law do my thinking for me. It comes from being in a background where the laws are even more bogus than in the US. There are numerous examples of dictators that have awarded themselves bogus credentials, and stripped credentials from people that actually have brains.

There are distinct differences, and there are official differences (beyond just looking at what they do) in these two groups of people! Don't believe me? Ask the HR people!

What you are saying makes no sense to me. When I was in graduate school, my checks looked the same as my professors, and I was given the same health benefits, and I have a formal job description. Labor laws apply to teaching assistants as much as to other employees.

One fellow astronomy teaching assistant was a union official in UAW Local 2865

http://www.uaw2865.org/

UAW Local 2865 is the labor union that represents teaching and research assistants at UC. I knew one of the people that started the union. What was the final straw was when the administration cut their hours to 19.5 so that they would no longer be eligible for health benefits. At that point they contacted the AFL-CIO and formed a union, and the person I talked about the contract negotiations he had with the university administration.

One problem the AFL-CIO was trying to figure out which union to put astronomy teaching assistants, and they ended up with the United Auto Workers because they also represent aerospace workers.

1. I just graduated with my B.Sc degree. What should I do next? Should I got into graduate school? Or should I go and pursue a career?

2. Students A makes $12,000/year in stipends. Employee B makes $60,000/year in salary.

Those two situations are different! In Case 1, it is a valid question to ask when one is about to start the next phase of one's life. One has to weigh all the options, all the possibilities, etc.

I just care about the money. I don't much care what you call it. Job A pays $12,000/year. Job B pays $60,000/year. However, sometimes Job A is better than Job B.

The student has a huge amount of responsibilities that comes with being a student that isn't part of what he/she being paid for, such as going to class and studying for exams. He/she is NOT a full-time employee! That is why I said this comparison with a full-time employee is not valid!

I don't see why not. Having said that given the choice between a $12K job as a teaching assistant and a $60K job pushing papers, I'd prefer the $12K job. There are lots of intangibles that make the $12K job better for me.

If your main consideration is profitable maximization, there is no way in hell that you should even think of physics graduate school. There's nothing wrong with being motivated through profit maximization, but obviously that's not the only motivation for me.

If you have people choose between physics graduate school and an immediate job, most people will choose an immediate job, which is fine. It's not what I want to do but I'm different. I'm different because everyone is different. Personally, I don't see the point in making physics graduate school more attractive than it is. You work for five years as an indentured servant, but for some of us, there is something fundamentally deep that makes it worth it.

 

[hadsed]

Something small that I'd like to note is that in software, if you have done internships, co-ops, or worked on any kind of project with tangible outcomes, it counts as work experience. Job descriptions that say intermediate level with perhaps 2 years experience are jobs that recent graduates of B.S. programs are eligible for.

I assume that if it is a comparison made by those in industry for B.S. holders, it is certainly a valid comparison to be made for graduate students as well. There are a lot of jobs where the required/desired experience is lessened for Ph.D holders than for M.S. holders -- this would indicate that graduate work also counts for work experience.

 

[twofish-quant]

Something small that I'd like to note is that in software, if you have done internships, co-ops, or worked on any kind of project with tangible outcomes, it counts as work experience.

It's not a small thing. The trend in education has been to try to move away from "book learning" to co-ops/internships/project based learning. Conversely, in any job nowadays, you have to keep learning or else you are sunk. Every month, HR and compliance assigns me some online courses that I have to take.

The idea that first you are a "student" and then you are "real" is something that doesn't fit the current workplace or university. I was no less an employee when I was a graduate student, and I'm no less a student now than I was when I was in graduate school.

One other thing to note is that once you get done with the master-level course work, the rest of your classes are typically "notational." When I was doing my dissertation, I had to sign up for X units of graduate research, which was a "notational" course that was listed in the catalog but wasn't a "real" course. The thing about public universities is that everything works off credit-hours, so those courses were actually bookkeepping conventions.

I assume that if it is a comparison made by those in industry for B.S. holders, it is certainly a valid comparison to be made for graduate students as well. There are a lot of jobs where the required/desired experience is lessened for Ph.D holders than for M.S. holders -- this would indicate that graduate work also counts for work experience.

It works this way for investment banks. If you get a job at an investment bank fresh out of school with an MBA, you get hired at the analyst level. With a Ph.D., you get hired at associate level. With a post-doc or junior faculty, you get hired at the vice-president level. Associate level is analyst + three years experience.

FYI, here is a list of links to graduate student employee unions

http://www.2110uaw.org/gsoc/union_links.htm

The history section of UAW local 2865 is also quite interesting. Apparently, in order to get representation, the UC students went on strike in 1998, and in the state of California at least there is an official ruling that graduate students are employees and therefore can form unions for collective bargaining.

http://www.uaw2865.org/about/2865-faqs

 

[twofish-quant]

There's also this page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_unionization

Apparently the current situation is that students at public universities have collective bargaining rights, but students at private universities do not, and there is a big effort centered at NYU to get the NLRB to change a ruling denying collective bargaining rights to private universities.

This is sort of important because if you are a physics undergraduate, I think it would be useful for your education to spend some time in the library reading about the history of the labor movement, since this may be part of your graduate education. One thing that I found interesting is that graduate students in state universities systems are able to unionize because state public universities are exempt from Taft-Hartley. When Taft-Hartley was passed in 1947, Federal union law was stronger than state law, however now the situation seems to be the reverse with some states providing more union protection than the federal government.

As far as the leaving it to the government to decide whether you are "really" a student or an employee, this leads to some absurd conclusions if you think of it as anything other than a bureaucratic label. Under that criterion, graduate students in public university in California are "real employees" but those in private universities are not except between the years of 2000 and 2004 when the NLRB approved the NYU petition and issued a new decision regarding Brown University.

If you think of it as a bureaucratic label then it makes sense. People want to label things to benefit themselves. University administration insist that graduate students aren't "real workers' so that they can screw them over, and if you just accept those labels without pushing back when you can, you too will be screwed. One trick with labels is to convince group B that they can sit back and watch group A be screwed over since the rules are different from group B. However, often this isn't true. If you think that as a post-doc you somehow "deserve" health benefits, you'll be in for a shock. The millisecond people think that they can cut your benefits without something bad happening, they will.

 

[ParticleGrl]

Ah, but is this universal? Postdocs ALWAYS gets benefits. It is part of the job offer

I don't know any graduate student who didn't get medical through their university. I only know one postdoc who gets benefits (he is a at a national lab). So I don't know if this is universal or not- but my limited, anecdotal data suggests that graduate students are more likely to get medical benefits than postdocs.

Graduate students at my university were union represented and signed a standard employment contract with the university. Postdocs did not sign such contracts, and were generally at-will employees with few-to-no benefits.

 

[twofish-quant]

People seem to be assuming that status is exclusive, which doesn't make sense. No one is arguing that graduate students aren't students, but in physics (and not law or medical school) it's standard for student to also be workers. I knew some geologists that were working on their Ph.D.'s part time, and no one argued that because they were students, they weren't also workers.

It's also worth noting that the compensation for teaching assistants at UT Austin is comparable to that of adjunct faculty at Austin Community College.

Ideas have consequences and one reason that graduate students have started to unionize now is that for decades people had this idea that eventually they'd graduate from a peasant to become a lord. If you are a peasant, and you think that in a few years, you are going to be a lord, then you aren't going to rock the boat. However, once we start telling people that they aren't going to be lords, and a peasant will stay a peasant forever, then they'll get restless.

 

[twofish-quant]

I don't know any graduate student who didn't get medical through their university. I only know one postdoc who gets benefits (he is a at a national lab). So I don't know if this is universal or not- but my limited, anecdotal data suggests that graduate students are more likely to get medical benefits than postdocs.

California public universities graduate students are unionized and the University of California graduate employees went on strike in 1998 and got the administration to recognize their union and a contract which included health benefits. California public universities graduate students can organize because of California state law and some rulings by the state government labor board.

So far, this hasn't extended to private universities which are covered under Federal law, although there seems to be some interesting things happening with NYU.

http://chronicle.com/article/NLRB-Officials-Ruling/127958

This is an example where your vote matters. The reason that the NLRB has come to different conclusions at different times was that Clinton was President, then Bush, then Obama.

Graduate students at my university were union represented and signed a standard employment contract with the university. Postdocs did not sign such contracts, and were generally at-will employees with few-to-no benefits.

Another example of the "if they can screw you, they will" principle in action.