Odds of a Career in Science in Academia

[Andy Resnick]

Anecdotal facts: From my program, no one who graduated since 2001 is in an academic position. It's about 50 students total. About 1/3-1/2 of any given class ends up at one of the national labs, most of the others are in staff scientist positions at universities as full time researchers. A few are in industry.

Andy, your post is particularly illuminating to me. Just to add to his bit, here's what the other side looks like: I live 20 mins from CSU. I saw some of those postings but didn't apply. 'PhD in physics or closely related field, demonstrated teaching experience' - My graduate program didn't allow TAing and I didn't get much teaching experience as a postdoc other than subbing in for a few sessions and team-teaching one seminar. Further more, many departments have a limited enough research focus that if you don't complement it, you are probably wasting your time applying. Plasma physics ≠ medical physics.

After chasing the teaching career for several years and seeing the results, I'm probably not going to get "at least one person to stand up and argue on your behalf" due to my lack of real teaching experience or due to my research specialty. I could send in an application for these opening, but I'm going to get tossed in the 'didn't meet minimum requirements' pile.

I'm not sure how to respond. A program that results in 100% employment for the graduates is an extremely successful program.

I don't want to comment on your particulars other than to remind you that nobody owes you a job doing precisely what you want to do.

 

[kinkmode]

I don't want to comment on your particulars other than to remind you that nobody owes you a job doing precisely what you want to do.

Haha. Thanks for the advice. The 'dream' of doing precisely what I want to do left so long ago I don't remember what it's like to have it.

I was just offering a view on the other side, not making a value judgement on your department's hiring practices. It's easy for the young job seeker to interpret "doesn't meet minimum qualifications" as someone who doesn't have a degree, or has it in the wrong field, or any number of other things. It can come down to the exact definition of 'demonstrable teaching experience' or exactly how your research specialty does or does not relate to the department's.

Grad students are taught to think RAs are better than TAs, and if you happen to be 'lucky' enough to get an RA upon entry in graduate school, you might be doing yourself a disservice down the road when it comes time to apply for prof jobs.

 

[Pythagorean]

Grad students are taught to think RAs are better than TAs

That's not my experience at all. In my experience, most grad students naturally prefer RAs to TAs because they don't want to deal with people, and our advisors encourage us to get teaching experience.

In my current school, you're always on RA and you have to do 3 TA assignments a year.

In my last school, first years do TA's, then you start doing more RA's and no TAs during thesis completion (ideally, your RA and your thesis are under the same roof or at least highly reinforcing of each other).

 

[kinkmode]

That's not my experience at all. In my experience, most grad students naturally prefer RAs to TAs because they don't want to deal with people, and our advisors encourage us to get teaching experience.

In my current school, you're always on RA and you have to do 3 TA assignments a year.

In my last school, first years do TA's, then you start doing more RA's and no TAs during thesis completion (ideally, your RA and your thesis are under the same roof or at least highly reinforcing of each other).

Maybe I should restate what I meant - TAs are often viewed as a distraction by graduate students.

Every program is different. In mine, we were heavily advised NOT to do a TA.

 

[Pythagorean]

Probably depends on adviser, too. Some might be selfish and just want to you to put more hours into grinding out the tedious aspects of their own research.

 

[Pythagorean]

Counting the last year of grad school, this is a paper every 4 months. That's not crazy. To ensure these papers are not just fluff, they want to see that they are cited, and are looking for about 1000 cites -- 50 per paper on average.

??

That's not crazy? I can't imagine writing good quality publications once every four months without a team of graduate students. To do the experimental research can take a year sometimes!

 

[AccAcc]

How are you counting papers? Lead author-only, or just being included on papers by groups of what size? Three lead-author / year sounds completely insane.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I'm counting total papers, but that's not as huge a number as people seem to think. This is not an easy job - you're always scrambling to put papers together, grant proposals together, referee reports together, lectures together...

 

[ModusPwnd]

Sounds like what the post-doc in my lab did, 4+ a year. Not all as first author. He did have a group of students under him, but he also worked his *** off. We were an experimental group that was able to put out papers faster than most groups though, due to the nature of our research.

 

[Corpuscule]

I know many students who publish 5+ papers a year in prestigious journals (from Phys Rev to Nature), never mind postdocs (who often publish 10+ or even 15+ a year).

50 citations per paper is a much harder part, and seems to be mostly luck based. I actually don't know any scientists (either postdocs or professors) who have 50 citations per paper on average.

But then it all may be different in different subfields. Maybe in some areas it takes longer to prepare a paper, but you are more likely to get more citations...