Programs Questions About PhDs: What's the Process and How Long Does it Take?

[twofish-quant]

This same relationship has made it impossible to continue in academia. I don't think I am alone in this- the people I know who had the most balanced lives in graduate school are the ones who are leaving the field, both voluntarily and involuntarily.

Curiously, that's why I didn't end up applying for post-docs.

The moment I figured out that I really didn't want to go the academic route was when I was in a Babies R' Us buying stuff for our then unborn daughter. It was painful to realize that I couldn't afford most of the stuff there, and even more painful to realize that the fact that the store existed meant that most other people could.

 

[twofish-quant]

I'd like to note that I'm of the opinion that the very best researchers have a variety of interests and don't spend all of their waking hours on physics. Read some cognitive science/neuroscience articles on the modern view of how creativity works to see why.

In fact they likely do, even if they aren't aware of it. I've found that I'm found most productive when I stop consciously thinking about something and let my subconsciousprocess it.

When I say that I'm spending 80 hours in physics, it doesn't mean that I'm tied to a computer. I could be taking a walk, doodling in a coffee house, or in a bookstore. I figured out enough of how my brain works to be able to tell when it's thinking deeply about some problem, even if I'm not consciously aware of it. One way that I can tell I'm thinking deeply is that I get extremely absent-minded. which is why I avoid driving while thinking.

This is one reason it's hard to get an answer "how much time do you spend on physics?" It's not like there is a time clock. An outside observer will just see me staring into space, and there is no way of telling that I'm working. Sometimes I can't tell you that I'm working on physics although I am.

This is also why it's important for graduate schools to get people that *love* physics. There's no way for an outside observer to tell whether someone is "working" or not.

 

[twofish-quant]

I don't know how long he took. I was just using him as an example of someone at the relative "peak" for someone with the mind and personality to succeed in physics

I don't think Ed Witten has been particularly successful at physics at all, and I'm curious why you think he is. He is a brilliant mathematician, but he has been spectacularly unsuccessful at physics.

Not that this says anything bad about him. He is brilliant, but if the universe doesn't work via string theory, then the universe doesn't work via string theory. That's research for you.

hypothesized that someone like him could get a PhD in a really short amount of time in the right situation if he/she wanted to.

Wrong. It's like saying someone really smart could make it rain if they wanted to. When you are doing your Ph.D. you *will* run into unexpected and time consuming difficulties. This *will* happen because you are doing something original, and if you knew what all of the issues were, then it wouldn't be research.

 

[twofish-quant]

II can't speak for OP, but what I think he was getting at was that "total immersion" for a lot of people, maybe him, is perhaps spending 40-45 hours a week, occasionally 50-60+ when necessary, at work/school/lab/office with a lot of time outside of this arena (perhaps at home) studying, reading, and thinking about your work.

That's why most people would be seriously unhappy getting a physics Ph.D.

It's like being in the military. How many hours a week do people in the military spend being a solider? Answer: your entire life in the army is being a soldier.

Graduate school is like that. Your life revolves around your dissertation. Even when you are sleeping, you are working on your dissertation. Even when you are on vacation, you are working on your dissertation.

I don't think spending <60 hours a week at the office necessarily means you are not immersed in the PhD environment.

In graduate school. I spend hardly any time physically in my office. I was only there when I had office hours or when I had to get something.

I do think once you start expecting (and it is necessary to complete the degree) an average of 70-80+ hours a week at the office/lab

And most people in graduate school don't. There is no particular reason to work in your office. I spent most of my time in the computer lab, but that was "pre-wifi" so you can do work in the park or in the coffee house.

That's not necessarily a good thing. One good thing about people with office jobs is that you can leave the office. When the world becomes your office, you can't.

I also think OP may have been asking if it is possible, for some people, to do a PhD putting in something like 40-50 hours a week. My answer is that yes, this almost certainly has to be true, because as I said before there is a distribution of "physics ability" among physicists.

And I'm saying that this is totally wrong. Physics ability has nothing to do with it.

And it's not just me. Everyone else in this thread that has actually gotten a Ph.D. is saying pretty consistent things. This is one reason I think it's essential to get a Ph.D. if you want to do research, because it let's you see what physics research is like.

It is dangerous to assume you are one of those people though without some kind of evidence, so don't go to graduate school expecting you can complete a PhD with these hours if it is a necessary condition for you to matriculate.

It's even more dangerous to think that you will spend less time if you are smart. Smart has nothing to do with it. Also a lot of the really time consuming parts of physics aren't the parts that require a lot of brilliance. About 80% of my time was spending finding the @#$@#$#@ bug in the #@$@#$#@ program. The key "ah-hah" moment was something I figured out in a weekend. The next *two years* was spending debugging FORTRAN code.

It takes roughly nine months to produce a baby. There isn't much that you can do about that, and seriously bad things happen if you try. That dissertation is your baby.

 

[Reshma]

Nice posts twofish-quant and G01!

If it helps, one can read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://www.linkedin.com/news?actionBar=&articleID=407096883&ids=0Mdj4Pd38McjgIcPwUdzAMdP0Qb3kVdPAOejsMd2MUd3cTcjgUc3gId34UczAPcj4Q&aag=true&freq=weekly&trk=yiaag-68

 

[fatra2]

Hi there,

American PhDs are usually 5-6 years of intense study and research for your thesis. PhD students typically do not have other jobs while in their course of study.

I don't know about America, but I thought PhD students normally have an assistant position with their professor. Either as a teaching assistant or a research assistant are both possibilities.

Is it really that you have to work 60h/weeks on your personal research?

Cheers

 

[twofish-quant]

Nice posts twofish-quant and G01!

If it helps, one can read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://www.linkedin.com/news?actionBar=&articleID=407096883&ids=0Mdj4Pd38McjgIcPwUdzAMdP0Qb3kVdPAOejsMd2MUd3cTcjgUc3gId34UczAPcj4Q&aag=true&freq=weekly&trk=yiaag-68

The problem is that none of that advice really helps much in the end.

If you have ten people and one job, if one person listens to that advice and nine people don't, then that one person gets the job. However, it really doesn't work that way, because what happens is that all of the people will listen to that advice, they all will work their tail off, and in the end, only one person will still get the job.

 

[twofish-quant]

I don't know about America, but I thought PhD students normally have an assistant position with their professor. Either as a teaching assistant or a research assistant are both possibilities.

Is it really that you have to work 60h/weeks on your personal research?

When you are working as a research assistant (and also as a teaching assistant) then you are working on your research. The professor is a collaborator and an adviser, but in the end, its your work. He can give you advice, but in the end, you have to do the heavy lifting, because the prof is busy doing his or her stuff.

No one keeps a time clock, people don't monitor what you are doing. This is in part because it's impossible. If you see me drinking coffee in a coffee house, then how do you know what I'm thinking about. You can't. No one can.

The other thing is that you usually *wish* you had more time. You go to the library, start reading, and when you look at the clock, you suddenly realize that five hours have passed, and you still have a stack of thirty papers that you have to read. It's amazing how quickly time flies when you are doing something that you like to do.

 

[Diracula]

I don't think Ed Witten has been particularly successful at physics at all, and I'm curious why you think he is. He is a brilliant mathematician, but he has been spectacularly unsuccessful at physics.

The guy is a particle physicist at the IAS. It actually kind of boggles my mind that you think he's 'spectacularly unsuccessful' at physics. Even if string theory turns out to be incorrect, he's a physicist by most people's definition of physics and has put out an extremely large body of work that is considered important by a large group of physicists. If relativity or QM turn out to be 'incorrect' in 100 years because someone finds a better theory it doesn't suddenly make Einstein and Dirac spectacularly unsuccessful at physics.

hypothesized that someone like him could get a PhD in a really short amount of time in the right situation if he/she wanted to

Wrong. It's like saying someone really smart could make it rain if they wanted to. When you are doing your Ph.D. you *will* run into unexpected and time consuming difficulties. This *will* happen because you are doing something original, and if you knew what all of the issues were, then it wouldn't be research.

No, it's not like that at all. Different people work at different rates. If you've worked with anyone else you know this. Everyone runs into unexpected and time consuming difficulties at work, doing a PhD, whatever. Not everyone fixes those difficulties at the exact same rate. This is slightly different then making it rain if you want it to.

 

[Diracula]

And I'm saying that this is totally wrong. Physics ability has nothing to do with it.

And it's not just me. Everyone else in this thread that has actually gotten a Ph.D. is saying pretty consistent things. This is one reason I think it's essential to get a Ph.D. if you want to do research, because it let's you see what physics research is like.

No. Everyone in this thread is saying they put in something like 60'ish hours a week, and some weeks when things get crazy they can put in a lot more. And this happens relatively often. They're not saying everyone puts in the exact same hours and if you get a phd you are absolutely positively going to be putting in 60+ hours a week without exception. If the average amount of 'work time' per week of PhD students is something like 60 hours then this is to be expected. That doesn't change the fact that there are some which complete the degree that put in more like 50.

I mean, they keep stats on this stuff. 2% of physics PhDs complete their degree in 3 years or less.

It's even more dangerous to think that you will spend less time if you are smart. Smart has nothing to do with it.

I don't think I said "smart". If I did that's not exactly what I meant. I think I said "physics ability". And by that I just loosely meant "ability to complete the physics project you are working on". Different projects will require different abilities. A condensed matter theorist probably requires different mental abilities to do really well than particle experiment. And all I'm saying is different people have different abilities in different areas.

Also a lot of the really time consuming parts of physics aren't the parts that require a lot of brilliance. About 80% of my time was spending finding the @#$@#$#@ bug in the #@$@#$#@ program. The key "ah-hah" moment was something I figured out in a weekend. The next *two years* was spending debugging FORTRAN code.

And everyone probably has wildly different rates that they can debug FORTRAN code.

Look, you keep throwing around terms like 'brilliant' and are acting like I'm claiming if you're really really smart you'll get done way faster than these other chumps. That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact I've said numerous times (like you) that a lot of it depends on the research environment you are in and the nature of your project. All I am saying is a lot depends on how fast you work as well. I'm not even talking about "brilliance", although that probably helps. And if you want to argue everyone works on physics at the exact same rate and efficiency, I'm really not sure what to say.

 

[DrummingAtom]

(Disclaimer: not a PhD student nor graduate)

This isn't meant to slam you but how can you argue something you've never done?

 

[elfboy]

seems like too much work

 

[Mobusaki]

seems like too much work

It does seem a bit excessive, like a ridiculous ritual to get into some kind of cult. But I'm sure there are people who feel the same way about undergraduate.

I'm curious if the scientific community would pay any mind to someone who while tinkering in their garage discovered some new physical phenomena, researched it, and tried to publish their results. I want to say that they would, but the cult-like impression I'm given from this thread makes me think not.

It's fine that it's hard. Like someone said before, it would pretty meaningless if it wasn't. But other people mention how it is "easier" (less time and a more relaxed environment) to get one in the UK, for example, and I wonder why it takes longer in the US, where arguably the brightest minds from all around the world try to go for graduate school.

What I'm getting at is that maybe, for whatever reason, it is more difficult and longer in the US because it is made to be so, not because it needs to be so.

Unless UK physicists are sub-scientists because their phd's take less time to get. Since I doubt that's the case, it's probably something wrong with the US system.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I want to say that they would, but the cult-like impression I'm given from this thread makes me think not.

I think the phrase you are looking for is ""self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".

There is a long history of contributions made by amateur astronomers. However, these amateurs have put the time into become experts. There is no substitute for that.

Unless UK physicists are sub-scientists because their phd's take less time to get.

UK students are at a definite disadvantage over their US, German and other colleagues in applying for postdocs. STFC has in the last few years allowed for longer PhD-studentships, so it sounds like they have decided the UK should be more like Germany rather than the first.

 

[elfboy]

I'm curious if the scientific community would pay any mind to someone who while tinkering in their garage discovered some new physical phenomena, researched it, and tried to publish their results. I want to say that they would, but the cult-like impression I'm given from this thread makes me think not.

it's too bad , not much can be done about it though
It seems the USA, in particular, is prone to cultist behavior.

 

[Mobusaki]

I think the phrase you are looking for is ""self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".

There is a long history of contributions made by amateur astronomers. However, these amateurs have put the time into become experts. There is no substitute for that.



UK students are at a definite disadvantage over their US, German and other colleagues in applying for postdocs. STFC has in the last few years allowed for longer PhD-studentships, so it sounds like they have decided the UK should be more like Germany rather than the first.

Thanks for your response. That's the kind of information I was ignorant of, without which things do not make sense. I still wonder, though, if the length and difficulty of phd's in places like America and Germany is necessary. What if UK students are at a disadvantage not because the quality of their phd education is any worse, but only because people think it is, or want to punish them for getting it done quicker when they think it should have taken longer?

I don't know, and I'm not sure it really matters for a physics undergraduate student (which is what I am). If you want to do physics for a living you'll likely jump through any hoops necessary, whether they are actually necessary or not. And you should likely be studying physics instead of worrying about how long grad school will take, anyway. lol

You guys who are professors in academia can take an honest look at the situation and decide if it needs changing. But one thing I think many such people may fall into is the "It was such and such a way for me, so it should be for you as well" mentality. I see that everywhere. Don't do that. ;)

 

[Mobusaki]

it's too bad , not much can be done about it though
It seems the USA, in particular, is prone to cultist behavior.

Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure how one would gather information to come to a conclusion on that, or if a physicist or aspiring physicist would be qualified to do so. In any case, I'll keep it on topic and only talking about the PhD "society" or environment:

I do think that when you've spent so much time in academia you develop an elitist attitude. It is really hard to not look down on people who know less than you about a thing sometimes - you see mechanics, for example, do this to non-car people all the time. It's not unique to phd's! And as such I don't think in this particular case (academia) a cult-like attitude or elitism is in any way unique to America. That's purely anecdotal. As is everything I'll be saying in my post! :)

At my university, when you're doing research with them or in the office talking to them, the physics professors are extremely tolerant of what I would nicely call ignorance, or more descriptively "slowness." They will explain things to you multiple times, dumb it down for you, and always treat you like an equal and not an idiot - even if you are being an idiot.

There is one in particular that everyone goes to for their questions, and not just the physics students. I've seen mechanical and electrical engineers in there asking him for help on engineering homework or their senior project, what have you. He doesn't have to give these people his time, but he does. I'm not sure someone with a cult-like, elitist mindset would do that. Why do I mention this? Just to say that I don't think the system *has* to breed an elitist mindset. It just, overall, seems to.

Note also that I believe my university has a unique crew of physics professors. But maybe they are like that more as a rule? I don't know. I just know that I've not seen any professors from any other department be anywhere near that helpful, patient, and open-armed to students even within their own department, let alone outside of it. But it almost sounds like once you get to graduate school, they're legitimately trying to kill you by overworking you!

To be clear as to why I bring it up, I think talking about an elitist tendency in the phd community is relevant to discussing why it takes so long to get one in some places but not others, and why some people might insist that you have to make graduate school your entire life and that's just the way it has to be. (The "I did so you do too" mentality)

If you read this, thanks for hearing me out. :) Feel free to disagree! I'm trying to dig out nuggets of truth, not trying to be contentious.

 

[Choppy]

I'm curious if the scientific community would pay any mind to someone who while tinkering in their garage discovered some new physical phenomena, researched it, and tried to publish their results. I want to say that they would, but the cult-like impression I'm given from this thread makes me think not.

A lot depends on the how this new discovery is presented.

From time to time you'll see posts on these forums from people who believe they have some kind of new theory and want to know how to publish it, or what journal they should publish in, etc. - questions that indicate they have not read any journals that discuss the subject they are interested in and that they have little to no formal experience in presenting their information to the scientific community.

This does not necessarily discredit their work. But part of a complete scientific investigation is having done adequate background reading. You have to know what the state of knowledge is before you can identify what is new information in your own work, and what is important.

Secondly a garage-experimentalist needs to know how to present the work he or she has done. One of the things you learn in graduate school is how to write a paper - or more specifically how to present your new information in an efficient and formal manner so that peers in the field will understand it and be able to build on it.

If you've made a new discovery but present it in an 800 page manuscript - 799 pages of which are of no consequence - you're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that you've done anything at all.

 

[xGAME-OVERx]

At an open day at ICL I was told that people who do physics PhDs at Imperial are almost invariably not ready to postdoc in the US

 

[G01]

What if UK students are at a disadvantage not because the quality of their phd education is any worse, but only because people think it is, or want to punish them for getting it done quicker when they think it should have taken longer?

I've met a few post-docs from Germany in my time in grad school so far.

They are some of the most extremely independent scientists I've met. I say this as a grad student who is NOT a totally independent scientist yet. (I bug my adviser and the older grad students in my lab quite regularly.)

We have focused mostly on whether the immersion of grad school is overkill, but perhaps we should focus more on it's purpose.

There is something that happens to the way one thinks when you immerse yourself like one does in grad school. If you spend 60+ hours a week thinking about one topic, your brain becomes built to think about that thing. Your thinking process changes, permanently.

I'm noticing this happening to me now. I see the results in the older grads in my lab and in my adviser. For example, my adviser, the 6th year student, and the post-doc in my lab are all trained to think about science, all the time. They end up coming up with ideas that I find brilliant, to say the least. They are small things, like neat ways to align optics, and big things, like novel measurements we could run and then publish. They are all ideas that I would never have thought of, at my current stage of education anyway. Slowly, I notice myself having neat, new ideas the more I immerse myself in the field.

Everyone else in my lab has already thought of most of my ideas , but still, the point is that this immersion trains you to be a successful scientist. Without these novel ideas, my adviser wouldn't get grants, the grad students wouldn't publish, and science would not get done. And my personal experience tells me that this 60+ hour/week immersion is how you teach your brain to start thinking in this essential way.

So, before we go onto a tangent asking if the grad school work load is some strange, cultic, hazing ritual, let's ask if maybe there is method to the madness. Maybe there is a reason the system exists the way it does? Perhaps the intense immersion has an educational effect? I wonder what the other grad students and PhDs in this thread think about this point?

 

[Simfish]

Has graduate school become more intense than it was several decades ago? One thing's for sure: PhDs are taking longer and longer to complete. But thanks to technology and the Internet, we have all these new time-saving devices (Herbert Gintis said that it takes far less time to get papers than it was several decades ago). But since we now have a much larger knowledge base, it takes longer for us to absorb it all, so these time-saving devices only partially compensate for all the extra knowledge we have to take in.

And I see all these grad students and professors who have families, and I wonder - how much time do they really spend on their families? For people like me who will probably never get a family, won't we have some extra spare time just for ourselves?

===

I guess it's sort of funny, but I'm seeing some of the discussed effects right now. Almost every working hour of my day is now spent on studying, Wikipedia, research papers, and various science forums. I don't even have the patience or attention span for computer games anymore. I can load up Team Fortress 2, get fragged several times, then give up, lose patience, and return to reading planetary science papers. Which are far more interesting, than, let's say, the new changes that get introduced with each new game (be it Total War or FPS). It's really quite funny.

But there are so many amazing developments that are coming out of other fields (biology in particular) too, and I'd like to be able to keep up with them too. And of course, if I read those things too (which I do), the result is that I don't even know if there is anything beyond science, or the tools used to do science.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Has graduate school become more intense than it was several decades ago? One thing's for sure: PhDs are taking longer and longer to complete. But thanks to technology and the Internet, we have all these new time-saving devices (Herbert Gintis said that it takes far less time to get papers than it was several decades ago). But since we now have a much larger knowledge base, it takes longer for us to absorb it all, so these time-saving devices only partially compensate for all the extra knowledge we have to take in.

Grad school, in itself, has probably become more intense. But, that's only a symptom of the underlying problem (which you correctly identify)- it takes longer to learn enough to be able to make original contributions to science.

The most straightforward proof of this is the average age of a research scientist obtaining their first major grant- for the NIH, it's the R01 award (or it's equivalent):

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...sg=AFQjCNFmaRwKfB1SdjHpliwGu7pE4sv28Q&cad=rja

The age has steadily increased over time, from 40 in 1998 to 42 in 2000 (and leveling off between 42.5 and 43 since then)- by contrast, in 1970, it was 34.

This has far-reaching implications, because the majority of research-intensive positions are so-called "soft money" positions- 100% of a person's salary derives from grant dollars. Tenure-track positions, by contrast, are subsidized by the institution.

So, the increasing age of "independence" means that a person spends longer and longer in a post-doctoral or other temporary position- this means a person lives longer and longer with uncertainty about their future career prospects, the stakes get higher and higher (because people have a limited 'shelf life'), and the research environment *in general* becomes more and more stressful.

That's why it's so critical to realize that a PhD is not an endpoint. It's merely the first milestone on the path to becoming a scientist.

 

[Mobusaki]

I've met a few post-docs from Germany in my time in grad school so far.

They are some of the most extremely independent scientists I've met. I say this as a grad student who is NOT a totally independent scientist yet. (I bug my adviser and the older grad students in my lab quite regularly.)

We have focused mostly on whether the immersion of grad school is overkill, but perhaps we should focus more on it's purpose.

There is something that happens to the way one thinks when you immerse yourself like one does in grad school. If you spend 60+ hours a week thinking about one topic, your brain becomes built to think about that thing. Your thinking process changes, permanently.

I'm noticing this happening to me now. I see the results in the older grads in my lab and in my adviser. For example, my adviser, the 6th year student, and the post-doc in my lab are all trained to think about science, all the time. They end up coming up with ideas that I find brilliant, to say the least. They are small things, like neat ways to align optics, and big things, like novel measurements we could run and then publish. They are all ideas that I would never have thought of, at my current stage of education anyway. Slowly, I notice myself having neat, new ideas the more I immerse myself in the field.

Everyone else in my lab has already thought of most of my ideas , but still, the point is that this immersion trains you to be a successful scientist. Without these novel ideas, my adviser wouldn't get grants, the grad students wouldn't publish, and science would not get done. And my personal experience tells me that this 60+ hour/week immersion is how you teach your brain to start thinking in this essential way.

So, before we go onto a tangent asking if the grad school work load is some strange, cultic, hazing ritual, let's ask if maybe there is method to the madness. Maybe there is a reason the system exists the way it does? Perhaps the intense immersion has an educational effect? I wonder what the other grad students and PhDs in this thread think about this point?

I think that's definitely worth talking about. I see your point. I don't know if that really is the case, but your logic is sound. If it takes a large amount of time for the way someone thinks to change in order to learn a field (and I do think it takes a long time), then how much more must a person change to be able to make actual contributions to the field, and how much time must this take?

I'm not sure that alone explains the 60 hours per week, but to me it certainly is reason enough to need a graduate school education and experience.

If it actually takes 60 hours/week for 6 years to think like a scientist (I'm not convinced, but we can talk about it!) then that's just what it takes. However, what I took away from your description of your more experienced colleagues is that what made them scientists is that they were creative and original. I don't see how 60 hrs/wk for 6 yrs on a single thing makes someone more creative, though. Perhaps it's just experience and knowledge. In which case all that time would help.

Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge. If he was right, then I wonder how spending all your time from the moment you step into grad school until...well, forever, (since apparently it only gets 'worse' after grad school) on physics alone is helpful in that regard.

Grad school, in itself, has probably become more intense. But, that's only a symptom of the underlying problem (which you correctly identify)- it takes longer to learn enough to be able to make original contributions to science.

The most straightforward proof of this is the average age of a research scientist obtaining their first major grant- for the NIH, it's the R01 award (or it's equivalent):

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...sg=AFQjCNFmaRwKfB1SdjHpliwGu7pE4sv28Q&cad=rja

The age has steadily increased over time, from 40 in 1998 to 42 in 2000 (and leveling off between 42.5 and 43 since then)- by contrast, in 1970, it was 34.

This has far-reaching implications, because the majority of research-intensive positions are so-called "soft money" positions- 100% of a person's salary derives from grant dollars. Tenure-track positions, by contrast, are subsidized by the institution.

So, the increasing age of "independence" means that a person spends longer and longer in a post-doctoral or other temporary position- this means a person lives longer and longer with uncertainty about their future career prospects, the stakes get higher and higher (because people have a limited 'shelf life'), and the research environment *in general* becomes more and more stressful.

That's why it's so critical to realize that a PhD is not an endpoint. It's merely the first milestone on the path to becoming a scientist.

The "shelf life" you speak of is the most worrying thing I've read on this topic. What exactly do you mean by that? I'm 23 with 2 more years of undergraduate ahead of me. I'd like to be able to support a family once I hit 30, but I would have the uncertainties and low pay of graduate school, post docs, and a mysterious "shelf life."

I'm perfectly willing to work in industry, but so many of you make it sound like I could not be a physicist (or even an engineer!) if I did so. The examples I hear of are "financial, programming, analyst." I would be miserable. :/

Not to hijack, but if someone could address those concerns I would be most grateful.

 

[Andy Resnick]

The "shelf life" you speak of is the most worrying thing I've read on this topic. What exactly do you mean by that? I'm 23 with 2 more years of undergraduate ahead of me. I'd like to be able to support a family once I hit 30, but I would have the uncertainties and low pay of graduate school, post docs, and a mysterious "shelf life."

That's a fair question- what I say is based on my personal experience (including witnessing what goes on around me).

The first step in becoming a productive researcher is training- the PhD (and post-doc) trained me to do more than just design, carry out and analyze an experiment- it trained me to ask a question worth answering.

Postdocs are little more than hired guns- they come into apply what they already know to a new problem. Doing research means progressing beyond what you already know, and pushing into the unknown.

What I have seen is that people who do not push themselves into new territory, people who simply stay and re-hash the same techniques/questions over and over again, stop being productive. Over time, science progresses beyond what they are doing, and they get left behind- quite literally.

Why would someone continue to do the same thing, over and over again? Lots of reasons. A common one is that they develop a reputation for doing something new and sexy, and so they just keep on doing that same thing. Another is that they find it easier/safer to get a steady paycheck by becoming a glorified technician in a large, well-funded lab.

That's "shelf life". What's your shelf life? That's up to you.

 

[twofish-quant]

Even if string theory turns out to be incorrect, he's a physicist by most people's definition of physics and has put out an extremely large body of work that is considered important by a large group of physicists.

1) Most outside of physics have a very skewed definition of physics

2) The stuff that Witten has done is may be useful to a few people in quantum gravity, but very few physicists are working in that area, and his work doesn't have any obvious application to anything outside of that extremely narrow field.

If relativity or QM turn out to be 'incorrect' in 100 years because someone finds a better theory it doesn't suddenly make Einstein and Dirac spectacularly unsuccessful at physics.

Because relativity and QM are close enough to how the universe behaves so that you can do useful things with them. String theory has had absolutely no connection with observable reality that anyone has been able to come up with, and it's an example of a "spectacular unsuccessful" theory.

Also Einstein was a spectacularly unsuccessful physicist once he ended up at IAS.

No, it's not like that at all. Different people work at different rates. If you've worked with anyone else you know this. Everyone runs into unexpected and time consuming difficulties at work, doing a PhD, whatever. Not everyone fixes those difficulties at the exact same rate. This is slightly different then making it rain if you want it to.

And for Ph.D.'s the type of problem that you run into is pretty independent of the person that gets the problem.

 

[twofish-quant]

I mean, they keep stats on this stuff. 2% of physics PhDs complete their degree in 3 years or less.

And it's invariably either because they completed some of the Ph.D. work before they started the program, or they are using the English system which is different than the US. In the UK, the clock starts counting only after you do the coursework.

And if you want to argue everyone works on physics at the exact same rate and efficiency, I'm really not sure what to say.

I'm saying that at the Ph.D. level, individual efficiency and productivity doesn't matter because how long it will take depending on the magnitude of the setback which is pretty much totally out of your control.

Witten is a good example of this. It doesn't matter how brilliant or efficient he is, if he is one the wrong path because he is unlucky, he is on the wrong path.

 

[G01]

I think that's definitely worth talking about. I see your point. I don't know if that really is the case, but your logic is sound. If it takes a large amount of time for the way someone thinks to change in order to learn a field (and I do think it takes a long time), then how much more must a person change to be able to make actual contributions to the field, and how much time must this take?

I'm not sure that alone explains the 60 hours per week, but to me it certainly is reason enough to need a graduate school education and experience.

If it actually takes 60 hours/week for 6 years to think like a scientist (I'm not convinced, but we can talk about it!) then that's just what it takes. However, what I took away from your description of your more experienced colleagues is that what made them scientists is that they were creative and original. I don't see how 60 hrs/wk for 6 yrs on a single thing makes someone more creative, though. Perhaps it's just experience and knowledge. In which case all that time would help.

Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge. If he was right, then I wonder how spending all your time from the moment you step into grad school until...well, forever, (since apparently it only gets 'worse' after grad school) on physics alone is helpful in that regard.

I agree that creativity is important, but there is other stuff involved. You hit the nail right on the head in this post. Experience and knowledge are just as important as creativity. You need all three. In a sense it's like a painter without paint and an easel. They could be the most creative painter in the world, but they aren't going to paint anything if they don't have the necessary supplies.

 

[A. Neumaier]

I do think that when you've spent so much time in academia you develop an elitist attitude. It is really hard to not look down on people who know less than you about a thing sometimes.

You don't have to. It is enough to remember that you know extremely little about all the other subjects where trained people know everything about. You need not look down on people just because they are not interested to the same degree as you in the same things as you and hence know much less about it than you.

 

[A. Neumaier]

Slowly, I notice myself having neat, new ideas the more I immerse myself in the field.

Everyone else in my lab has already thought of most of my ideas , but still, the point is that this immersion trains you to be a successful scientist. Without these novel ideas, my adviser wouldn't get grants, the grad students wouldn't publish, and science would not get done. And my personal experience tells me that this 60+ hour/week immersion is how you teach your brain to start thinking in this essential way.

So, before we go onto a tangent asking if the grad school work load is some strange, cultic, hazing ritual, let's ask if maybe there is method to the madness. Maybe there is a reason the system exists the way it does? Perhaps the intense immersion has an educational effect?

''expertise is a characteristic of individuals and is a consequence of the human capacity for extensive adaptation to physical and social environments. Many accounts of the development of expertise emphasize that it comes about through long periods of deliberate practice. In many domains of expertise estimates of 10 years experience or 10,000 hours deliberate practice are common.'' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert )

 

[MissSilvy]

Okay, so this thread has been going on for 5 pages now and is essentially people who aren't even grad students yet clutching their pearls over imaginary scenarios. Look, if you have the goods and think you are a genius who can complete a PhD in 4 years while working less than 40 hours a week, fine! Go do it then, I'm sure no one will fault you for being too smart but at least stop hemming and hawing over a system you don't even have experience in, armchair grad students. There is a REASON grad school takes as long as it does and if you choose to believe that it's because all the grad students are lazy, inefficient, and stupid then that's your shortsightedness.

 

[Mobusaki]

Okay, so this thread has been going on for 5 pages now and is essentially people who aren't even grad students yet clutching their pearls over imaginary scenarios. Look, if you have the goods and think you are a genius who can complete a PhD in 4 years while working less than 40 hours a week, fine! Go do it then, I'm sure no one will fault you for being too smart but at least stop hemming and hawing over a system you don't even have experience in, armchair grad students. There is a REASON grad school takes as long as it does and if you choose to believe that it's because all the grad students are lazy, inefficient, and stupid then that's your shortsightedness.

I think you've greatly misunderstood the intent of the people posting in this thread.

 

[ParticleGrl]

Grad school, in itself, has probably become more intense. But, that's only a symptom of the underlying problem (which you correctly identify)- it takes longer to learn enough to be able to make original contributions to science.

The most straightforward proof of this is the average age of a research scientist obtaining their first major grant- for the NIH, it's the R01 award (or it's equivalent)...

The age has steadily increased over time, from 40 in 1998 to 42 in 2000 (and leveling off between 42.5 and 43 since then)- by contrast, in 1970, it was 34.

I actually think the rising age of R01 awards has more to do with the funding and job crunch that started in the 70s than an actual increase in the time it takes to become a productive scientist. I've known plenty of extremely independent, successful postdocs who were essentially idea-generators for their PI.

 

[Simfish]

I actually think the rising age of R01 awards has more to do with the funding and job crunch that started in the 70s than an actual increase in the time it takes to become a productive scientist. I've known plenty of extremely independent, successful postdocs who were essentially idea-generators for their PI.

Wow, could you care to elaborate more about this? Do the postdocs suggest a huge number of ideas, and leave the professor to choose which one is the best? And why does the professor use the postdocs as idea generators? Does generating ideas have to take that much time?

 

[Andy Resnick]

I actually think the rising age of R01 awards has more to do with the funding and job crunch that started in the 70s than an actual increase in the time it takes to become a productive scientist. I've known plenty of extremely independent, successful postdocs who were essentially idea-generators for their PI.

Not exactly- the increased competition has resulted in an ever decreasing percentage of successful proposals.

http://publications.nigms.nih.gov/loop/images/20051031_th2.jpg

This particular institute had a funding line of around 37% from 2000-2003 (meaning the top 37% of proposals received funding), and then that dropped quite precipitously to 25% in 2005. Current paylines NIH-wide are around 15%.

It's difficult to make sense of that number by itself, since in addition to the increased number of proposals, NIH has increased the number of funded proposals- plus, people could re-submit their proposal a second time (until recently a third time as well).

New investigators have consistently gotten a 5-10% bump in their scores just by being "new investigators"- NIH has done this specifically to encourage new investigators.

So there's two trends- 1) decreasing success rates overall, and 2) a longer period of time before a *first* successful proposal.

Finally, I'd argue that any post-doc who serves as an 'idea generator' for a PI is being taken advantage of. The post-doc gets nothing and loses everything by giving someone else a fundable idea.

 

[Simfish]

Finally, I'd argue that any post-doc who serves as an 'idea generator' for a PI is being taken advantage of. The post-doc gets nothing and loses everything by giving someone else a fundable idea.

The thing with generating ideas, though, is that scientists are oftentimes so resistant to new ideas that they think that people with new ideas are crazy - to the point that people with crazy ideas are often dismissed as crackpots (you can see more if you read articles about a lot of famous scientists - see Irene Pepperberg, Max Tegmark, Geoff Marcy, etc). If you're working under an established scientist, however, then the ideas are more likely to be given credence.

 

[G01]

The thing with generating ideas, though, is that scientists are oftentimes so resistant to new ideas that they think that people with new ideas are crazy - to the point that people with crazy ideas are often dismissed as crackpots...

This is entirely not true. Scientists have to be open to new, crazy ideas, else they wouldn't get grants or publish!

There is a huge difference between a scientist with a crazy idea and a crackpot with a crazy idea.

A crack pot is someone who proposes a crazy idea, with little to no evidence supporting the idea. The idea is analyzed by other scientists, and determined to not be true based on theoretical and experimental evidence. Yet, the crackpot still supports the idea and dismisses any valid arguments against it as "political bias" or something of the like. THAT is a crackpot.

A scientist can have a crazy idea, and go with it. This happens regularly. For instance, I would consider the metamaterial cloak designed by David Smith's group at Duke ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/5801/977.short ) to be a crazy idea, wouldn't you? Yet, it turned out to be backed up by sound theoretical and experimental logic, and they decided to run with it.

Instead if an idea turns out to NOT be supported by any good evidence, the scientist knows when to accept this and move on or modify the idea. This is the crucial difference between this scientist and a crackpot.

 

[Simfish]

This is entirely not true. Scientists have to be open to new, crazy ideas, else they wouldn't get grants or publish!

There is a huge difference between a scientist with a crazy idea and a crackpot with a crazy idea.

A crack pot is someone who proposes a crazy idea, with little to no evidence supporting the idea. The idea is analyzed by other scientists, and determined to not be true based on theoretical and experimental evidence. Yet, the crackpot still supports the idea and dismisses any valid arguments against it as "political bias" or something of the like. THAT is a crackpot.

A scientist can have a crazy idea, and go with it. This happens regularly. For instance, I would consider the metamaterial cloak designed by David Smith's group at Duke ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/314/5801/977.short ) to be a crazy idea, wouldn't you? Yet, it turned out to be backed up by sound theoretical and experimental logic, and they decided to run with it.

Instead if an idea turns out to NOT be supported by any good evidence, the scientist knows when to accept this and move on or modify the idea. This is the crucial difference between this scientist and a crackpot.

The thing is, though, that scientists often tend to be so over-suspicious to crackpots that the suspicion often takes legitimate theories as bycatch too.

Look at this, for example http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96897162:

Or at least that's what I argued in my grant proposal. Apparently, the review panel was not impressed. On August 19, just two weeks after the "by George he's got it" moment, I received a letter from the panel that essentially asked me what I was smoking. They implied I was crazy to even imagine that a bird brain could master the language and cognitive skills I was hoping to demonstrate. And they further implied I was even crazier to shun the accepted approach of operant conditioning and adopt this highly suspect method of social interaction.

And this http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/geoff-marcy-qa/#more-49005:

Geoff Marcy: You want the real answer? It’s personal. After I got my PhD at Santa Cruz, I was really lucky and I got a post-doctoral fellowship at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, which is in Pasadena.

And in brief, my research wasn’t going very well. A Harvard astronomer criticized my PhD thesis. And I felt pretty bad. Everyone seemed smarter than me. I felt a little bit like an impostor, like they haven’t figured out that I’m not as smart as them, that I’m not really smart enough to be a scientist. I thought okay, well now the jig is up. Maybe my career is over.

But I still have a year and a half on my post-doc! I remember one morning in my apartment in Pasadena, as I took my shower, thinking, I can’t suffer like this anymore. I’ve got to just enjoy myself, do research that really means something to me.

So I thought, what do I care about? I would love to know if there were other planets around other stars.This was a question that nobody was asking. It was 1983, and nobody was even talking about planets. Even our own solar system was considered boring at the time.
So by the time I turned off the shower, I knew how I was going to end my career. I quickly realized that this was kind of a lucky moment. By knowing that I was a failure, I was free. I could just satisfy myself, and hunt for planets — even though it was a ridiculous thing to do. At that time, I hadn’t heard of anybody actively hunting for planets.

Wired.com: How did people react when you started doing it?

Marcy: They were embarrassed for me. I might as well be looking for little green men, or how the aliens built the pyramids in Egypt, or telekinesis. Even professional astronomers at that time associated planets around other stars with science fiction.

It’s very hard to imagine that now. Look at this meeting. We have probably 500 talks and posters on extrasolar planets. It’s hard to put yourself in a mindset in which planets were considered the lunatic fringe. But that’s what it was.

 

[G01]

The thing is, though, that scientists often tend to be so over-suspicious to crackpots that the suspicion often takes legitimate theories as bycatch too.

First of all, these are outlier examples that make for good news stories. I don't think they can be used to judge the current state of science as a whole. I'm also not a psychologist, so I won't comment on the science involved in the first example.

Either way,
Legitimate crazy ideas should be subject to high suspicion and scrutiny. The fact that they made it through the scrutiny is what makes them legitimate crazy ideas.

The crazier the idea, the harder the scrutiny.

 

[Simfish]

Okay sure. Given that, then maybe it might be advantageous for postdocs to work as "idea generators" under PIs and not as "idea generators" on their own? Given that "idea generators" are probably going to generate a lot of ideas that will get tagged as crazy?

 

[Ryker]

I don't think there really are that many ideas that get tagged as crazy. I'm pretty sure most of those coming from academics/post-docs/PhD students are actually sane, but just, well, you know, good.

 

[Andy Resnick]

The thing is, though, that scientists often tend to be so over-suspicious to crackpots that the suspicion often takes legitimate theories as bycatch too.

Peer review is not a perfect system, but it's a lot better than the alternatives. Everyone has a story about how their (rejected) paper/proposal got an unfair review.

Even so, the stories you mentioned also serve as excellent examples, per G01, on the difference between scientists having a new idea and crackpots- the scientists, both of them, after getting rejected, *worked their a$$es off* getting proof of their ideas. They didn't sit around and moan about how some cabal is out to get them- they put in long days and years slowly building up *evidence* to support their ideas.

 

[Mobusaki]

Peer review is not a perfect system, but it's a lot better than the alternatives. Everyone has a story about how their (rejected) paper/proposal got an unfair review.

Even so, the stories you mentioned also serve as excellent examples, per G01, on the difference between scientists having a new idea and crackpots- the scientists, both of them, after getting rejected, *worked their a$$es off* getting proof of their ideas. They didn't sit around and moan about how some cabal is out to get them- they put in long days and years slowly building up *evidence* to support their ideas.

You make a good point. My counter point would be to ask why anyone who worked their *** off 60 hours per week for 4-6 years to join a scientific community would be ostracized by that same community for having an outrageous idea? I'm not saying we should all smoke dope and hold hands, but I also don't think we should be so quick to ostracize people who worked just as hard as everyone else to be able to voice their ideas.

I understand (and hope) that it happens rarely, but I do think there is a strong tendency to spit people out of the community who disagree with you.

Look at the scientists who disagree with global warming. An argument can be made the scientific community has tried to silence their voice. Let them disagree. So what if they're wrong? They'll offer their evidence, global warming supporters will offer theirs, and then people can decide themselves what to believe.

I think that's how it should be in all cases, instead of shutting people down because we're convinced their wrong. It surprises me how, with all the twists and turns in human knowledge up to this point, we can still be so sure in what we know so as to try to destroy others based on what they think they know.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I always marvel at the number of undergraduates who are certain that "the system is broken" without having even taken a close look at it. Here we have someone a couple days into their research program, and that's enough to tell.

Yes, a lot of unconventional ideas don't get through peer review. A lot of excellent ideas don't get through peer review. For those of us who have reviewed for the NSF, proposals are ranked in three categories - "must fund", "fund if possible" and "do not fund". At the last panel I was on the tentative "must fund" category was between 2 and 2.5x the entire budget.

Welcome to life in the big city.

I can remember the last three unconventional proposals I reviewed. Two of them had really clever ideas. Neither one had done the legwork to demonstrate that the proposal would actually address these ideas, and they both got turned down. The third one was maybe a little less clever, but the PI had outlined a plan that was well thought through, and would provide a definite answer one way or the other. He ended up at the top of our list of proposals to fund.

 

[Mobusaki]

I always marvel at the number of undergraduates who are certain that "the system is broken" without having even taken a close look at it. Here we have someone a couple days into their research program, and that's enough to tell.

Yes, a lot of unconventional ideas don't get through peer review. A lot of excellent ideas don't get through peer review. For those of us who have reviewed for the NSF, proposals are ranked in three categories - "must fund", "fund if possible" and "do not fund". At the last panel I was on the tentative "must fund" category was between 2 and 2.5x the entire budget.

Welcome to life in the big city.

I can remember the last three unconventional proposals I reviewed. Two of them had really clever ideas. Neither one had done the legwork to demonstrate that the proposal would actually address these ideas, and they both got turned down. The third one was maybe a little less clever, but the PI had outlined a plan that was well thought through, and would provide a definite answer one way or the other. He ended up at the top of our list of proposals to fund.

I hope you aren't referring to me. :( I'm not convinced the system is broken *or* working, just that some healthy debate about it can only make it better.

 

[ParticleGrl]

So there's two trends- 1) decreasing success rates overall, and 2) a longer period of time before a *first* successful proposal.

Both are indicative of a the funding crunch I was suggesting. My opinion is that the first trend is fueling the second. After all- the best indicator of future success is past success, which might create some bias towards established researchers.

Finally, I'd argue that any post-doc who serves as an 'idea generator' for a PI is being taken advantage of. The post-doc gets nothing and loses everything by giving someone else a fundable idea.

::shrug:: Having a big name as lead on a proposal might boost its chance of acceptance. I've never really dealt with NIH, as my field wasn't bio/health related, but I've seen it help on other proposals.

Peer review is not a perfect system, but it's a lot better than the alternatives. Everyone has a story about how their (rejected) paper/proposal got an unfair review.

My worry is that as funding and jobs get more competitive, the peer review system will start to break down as the incentives grow to torpedo other's work. Scientists are only human.

 

[twofish-quant]

The thing with generating ideas, though, is that scientists are oftentimes so resistant to new ideas that they think that people with new ideas are crazy

I've found that to be rarely true.

If you're working under an established scientist, however, then the ideas are more likely to be given credence.

That also may not be true. There are some idea that come from established scientists (Roger Penrose's ideas on neuroscience) that are bad crackpot.

 

[twofish-quant]

The thing is, though, that scientists often tend to be so over-suspicious to crackpots that the suspicion often takes legitimate theories as bycatch too.

He didn't have particular difficulty getting funding.

Also grant committees are a lot like admission committees, you sometimes get lucky and hit someone that likes the way that you approach problems, and you sometimes don't.

One problem with grant committees is that there just ain't enough money. In the NSF grant committees I've been on, there's usually one in ten proposals that wouldn't get funded if given infinite amounts of money.

 

[twofish-quant]

You make a good point. My counter point would be to ask why anyone who worked their *** off 60 hours per week for 4-6 years to join a scientific community would be ostracized by that same community for having an outrageous idea?

Because 1) you aren't ostracized for having outrageous ideas and 2) most outrageous ideas turn out to be bad ones. You need people that tell you what the flaws are with your ideas so that you can figure out whether to go ahead with them.

Also you need a pool of crazy ideas. The thing that separates someone who is productive from someone who isn't, is that the productive scientist figures out that crazy idea #324 doesn't work so they stop working on that and works on crazy idea #534.

I also don't think we should be so quick to ostracize people who worked just as hard as everyone else to be able to voice their ideas.

There's a difference between criticism and ostracism. The fact that your best friend is willing to spend three hours going into point by point why crazy idea #324 just won't work tells you that they are your best friend.

Also "hard work" doesn't mean much. You can work hard and be wrong.

I understand (and hope) that it happens rarely, but I do think there is a strong tendency to spit people out of the community who disagree with you.

Physicists love to argue. If I go to someone with my latest new idea and they tell me how brilliant it is, then I'm disappointed. The reason you have collaborators is so that they can tell you want a bad idea you just came up with is. Then if you still think is a good idea, you hit back, and after punching each other for an hour, you all shake hands and get something to eat.

I think that's how it should be in all cases, instead of shutting people down because we're convinced their wrong.

If you've going through a physics Ph.D. program, then merely having someone tells you that you are wrong won't shut you up.

It surprises me how, with all the twists and turns in human knowledge up to this point, we can still be so sure in what we know so as to try to destroy others based on what they think they know.

That's the whole culture of science. You get into a room of people that try to destroy your ideas.

 

[Andy Resnick]

Both are indicative of a the funding crunch I was suggesting.

Except there isn't a funding crunch- NIH's budget *doubled* in the 2000s and dollars allocated to research in general (including NSF, NOAA, NASA, DOE, Navy, AFRL, national labs, etc) has held fairly steady at 2.5% of GDP for the past 40-50 years:

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/82xx/doc8221/06-18-Research.pdf

"From 1953 to 2004, real (inflation-adjusted) spending for R&D in the United States rose at an average annual rate of 4.7 percent, faster than the 3.3 percent average growth of GDP".

You may have some correct elements in your idea, but "funding crunch" is not one of them.

 

[elfboy]

The problem with a lot of PHD material is that it's not that good. It tends to be boring, tedious minor regiments to larger ideas.

The outcome of attaining a PHD is to produce original work, but there's no guaranteeing this work will be interesting or useful. It doens't take a PHD to produce interesting, original research.