Is the Job Market Getting *WORSE* for PhDs?

[twofish-quant]

I'm just pointing out a similarity between me and him that may have made it for difficult to get a job.

One thing about Einstein is that he had no particular problem in getting a job, and as far as physics goes he was a social butterfly. Physics is a very bad field to go into if you have difficulty with social skills, since you find yourself interacting with people constantly. Science is an extremely social activity.

Mathematics seems to be different, but that's something I don't know much about.

I'm also pretty sure he got the patent office job from a friend, so he got rather lucky.

Something that you have to be careful about biographies is guessing. You get into this bad circle in which you guess facts based on your preconceptions, but then you use to assumed facts to to reinforce your preconceptions.

And noone(it seems) really cares if the smart people don't have jobs.

You have to look out for yourself. Also part of the game is to figure out how to make people care.

It seems that they only care about the majority of idiots(I'm not trying to be rude, but I do try to give them some credit. However, I'm constantly surprised by the idiocy around me. A group of students in my homeroom class in high school didn't even know where the Battle of Midway was!

Something that you have to realize is that people may be smarter than you in certain ways. If someone has better social or political skills than you, that's a form of intelligence that you have to learn to respect and learn from.

I'm nice to idiots, being one myself.

 

[twofish-quant]

While we were talking about jobs for Ph.D.'s. I found this article about "celebrity tutors" in Hong Kong. It would be really nice if the environment in the US was changed so that physics Ph.D.'s started being seen as rock stars...

http://www.slate.com/id/2302695/

Here's the home page for one of the "glamour tutors."

http://www.modern.edu.hk/teacher-Dr-Vic-Chan.phtml

http://www.modern.edu.hk/MO_summer_course_landing_2011-Dr_Vic_Chan_v4.phtml

 

[MrNerd]

Maybe I should just stop digging myself deeper into the hole(or whatever the expression is).

At least I did learn something, though. That's the whole point of science, after all. I can deal with social interactions. I'm not like Cavendish, who was just bizarrely shy(I made sure to check this on wikipedia this time!). I can get along with others most of the time. So it shouldn't be the biggest problem in the world.

Hopefully, though, the market will eventually improve for PhDs.