Why Are Grad Students Expected to Work Extreme Hours?

[twofish-quant]

From my anecdotal information (talking to older professors and older phds), graduate school WAS quite a bit different before the big crunch happened in the 70s. It might not have been friendlier, but it was a shorter experience with less of a focus of cranking out X papers in Y impact level journals.

This may be adviser dependent since I didn't get this huge pressure from my adviser to publish. Also, one thing that I've noticed is that the people that tend to be most "hardcore" are the people that end up in positions of authority so that there is this attitude of "well if I did, so should you."

Getting this to physics models. One thing that I've found to be useful in looking at non-linear system is to identify places where there are positive feedback loops (i.e. advisers go hardcore, become professors, who then demand that their students get even more hardcore). Once you see a positive feedback loop, the next question is to extrapolate the loop at ask where does it stop. For example, if you increase the number of hours in a week that people work at, you hit the limits of human exhaustion.

Looking for positive feedback systems and barriers to positive feedback is something that Karl Marx did in Das Kapital. Once you see where the feedback systems are, then you can true to figure out where to change them, and how long you have.

The thing that was very different in the 1970's was that in the 1970's, people didn't do two postdocs. They usually did one. In the 1960's, postdocs were rather unknown. It's something that you can use queuing theory to look at.

Also, because grants were easier to get, professors had substantially more time in the lab/at the computer, which means that grad students weren't simply a source of cheap labor to implement the professors ideas.

One other difference that I'd like to explore is that looking at the papers of David Kaiser, one thing that strikes me is that the average Ph.D. student in 1955 *didn't* seem to expect to go into academia. Something else that strikes me is that there seems to be this idea that people that go into industry are somehow "lesser Ph.D.'s", but in the papers that I've seen of Kaiser, that didn't seem to be true in 1955.

Also one big problem was that the 1950's physics infrastructure was built for an industrial economy, whereas we are living in a post-industrial one. Talking about physicists "going into industry" is an interesting example of how out of touch the system is. Something that has happened is that as the general economy has moved from manufacturing to services, it makes sense that the employers should also shift. One thing that strikes me about looking at the 1950's is how Rayethon and Westinghouse look like Goldman-Sachs and Morgan-Stanley today.

Finally, one of my projects is to recreate Bell Labs. Bell Labs existed because you had a government regulated quasi-monopoly perform essential services and partly in exchange for government regulation, you had the need for Bell Labs to work on basic research. That ended when the telephone system changed in the 1980's. But then you look at to see what other government regulated quasi-monopolies are out there, and I think I found one.

 

[johng23]

Curiously one of the things that I liked about graduate school is that there were no regular hours. You could get whatever you needed done during the day, and come into the lab at 1 a.m. if that's what you felt like doing.

Yeah that's awesome. Sitting in the lab at 3 am, choosing which scan to try next, feeling like you can work until you drop and then just not come in until 3 pm the next day. It feels impulsive, inspired - the polar opposite of being a 9-5 drone for somebody else. The closer my days get to 9-5, the more apathetic and lazy I feel.

Think about what you're being asked to do in graduate school: find interesting problems and address them however you see fit. Develop your own approach to being a scientist. It's a tall order but it's also one of the most intellectually stimulating things you could ever be asked to do.

(Disclaimer - I'm going into my third year, so maybe I just haven't become jaded yet).

 

[gravenewworld]

Grad school is hardcore because there aren't many jobs in science, and there is a large crowd of people that want to work in it. When you have a glut of labor, people are willing to work excessive hours at low pay for the "privilege" of having any job at all.

Working 60-80 hours a week for several years, keeping your head down and focusing on research to the exclusion of every other aspect of your life is the ONLY way to get a ticket to the postdoc lottery. Keeping those hours up, etc is the only way to get a ticket to the second postdoc lottery, which is in turn the only way to get a ticket to the professor lottery.

The real question is- why do people keep going into science? You spend a decade on education and the median career length is less than 6 years. For immigrants the answer is easy (ask them, the answer is usually "a visa"). For everyone else (who number fewer and fewer) its some combination of idealism and bad advice given by high school and undergraduate teachers.

^

Pretty much this.


Academia is highly exploitative at many levels, I don't know why people think it is some sort of ivory tower.

 

[atyy]

Lab meetings and a lab coordinator (can be a technician or a master's student)

Because research is messy. Inspiration doesn't hit 9-5. Also it's not like a job in which you can tell people to put item A into box B. If you could issue clear instructions on what to do, you wouldn't have to do it.

Curiously one of the things that I liked about graduate school is that there were no regular hours. You could get whatever you needed done during the day, and come into the lab at 1 a.m. if that's what you felt like doing.

Experiment versus theory?