Why am I still in academia?

[Mr. Bloom]

About 10 yrs ago, I was on a business trip in Minneapolis in FEBRUARY

I stayed at a hotel downtown with a great health club and had a couple of great workouts.

There was a woman from North Dakota on a treadmill going very slow.
She asked me, "what does the '1' mean?"
I said, "that's the number of calories you're burning"
She said, "Great! I'm burning 1 calorie/minute?"
"No", I replied, "that's 1 calorie/hour".

Then, she explained to me that she was overweigh because of North Dakota winters.

Mel, Bloomington on the other hand......and your sister is here!

[Tweet]

Its funny to read this because I want to get my PhD. If and when I get it though I always planned on working in the industry and as adjunct faculty. I just love to teach. Do you still have to write your own grants in that kind of a position?

[Melalvai]

Tweet, no, get out while you can! Well, at least please stop after grad school and don't become a bitter disgruntled and cynical postdoc. That position is filled.

Mr. Silver, I can think of a lot of towns that beat the heck out of Grand Forks, ND. Lawrence, KS (where my folks are). Springfield, MO (where I did my undergrad). Bloomington, IN (where my sister is...for the moment, and the Silvers). Urbana-Champagne, IL--a lot of researchers in my field, well, in just about every field (and Geonz). Omaha, NE--where my main collaborator is, who I have yet to meet. You notice these are all small midwest college towns...there is a reason for that.

madscot13, I'm in breast cancer prevention. For the moment. Two years ago it was herbal alternatives to hormone replacement therapy. I did my graduate work in endocrine disruptors. I dabbled in neuro...hated that. It's all molecular and animal studies, although my soon-to-be-former boss is a clinician I shy away from clinical trials (besides I'm not an MD so would have to collaborate with one to run one.)

Oakleaf, tell me about your frostbite.

Queen, is your UI...indiana? illinois? idaho? iowa?

Latest update is, it looks promising that I'll have a place here, I talked to a prof today who can probably fund me and my rats. Nothing for sure yet. My boss is awfully disappointed that I don't want to go with him and thinks I am making a terrible mistake for my career. Everyone else I've talked to thinks I'd be stupid to go! Well, what would have been best for my career is if he weren't leaving, but he is, and so I have to make a tough choice.

5 years ago I chose to go to Chicago for my postdoc. We were absolutely miserable in Chicago. We had so many problems--no job for my husband. Terrible school in Evanston (the burb we lived in). Way way too far away from all our family and friends. And finally, my job at UIC turned sour when a senior lab member turned on me. We left unhappy and in debt after one year. We've hardly recovered financially and emotionally from that disaster. I am not about to make the same mistake again. I realize financially it is not the same, but there are too many potential similarities.

[Pax]

Queen, is your UI...indiana? illinois? idaho? iowa?

Illinois, I live in CU near Geonz.

[Melalvai]

I thought I'd put out an update on this situation.

My proposed new mentor can take me but doesn't have money for my rats. My current mentor said he would continue the rat project if I went with him to ND but will not pay for it if it is done here, even though he'd get a paper out of it. I got a more positive answer from the dept chair: on Thursday they will "tell me their plan". That doesn't sound like a "no" to me, though it is not quite a "yes" yet.

My salary funding (80% from my postdoc fellowship, needs 20% from the proposed mentor) hit a new, unexpected snag. I thought the biggest hurdle would be to get my current mentor to sign off on it, and I alerted the folks at the funding agency to his possible resistance. My new mentor found out though that he is expected to commit to 2 years, and until he knows the outcome of some pending grants he can not do that. I am scheduled to meet with him Friday morning and I hope to find out when he'll know about those grants.

One other possibility is that my own pending grant (a K99, for the NIH lingo-savvy) will come through...I find out about that ~May 19.

I'm pretty unhappy not only that my current mentor turned me down flat about the collaboration, but was completely unhelpful. He can't understand why I don't want to uproot my family to accompany him to ND, and is very angry about it. I'm heartbroken at his unreasonableness because I got along with him so well for the last 2 years, and all of this was completely unexpected.

Someone else commented that it's starting to sound like there's a hidden war going on and I was caught in the crossfire. Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like.

[Savra]

I'm in my first year of a PhD program for social work and quickly getting the impression that social work academia and life sciences academia are somewhat different. Of course, I may just be naive in this but I get the impression a lot of social work graduates go right on to associate professor positions once they finish their dissertations.

[mimitabby]

If this life is so bad why do both of my sons want to be PhD's???
(one in music, the other in math)

[Blueberry]

Shoot - I'm thinking of leaving a law career to get a PhD. Hmmm.....

[Aquila]

Before you leave a career to get a phud, make sure you look at a couple statistics for your field:

% of students who enter programs who actually finish
average time to degree

And this is the big one:

% of phds who get tenure track jobs within 3 years of finishing their phud. (In the sciences, it may be a bit longer, since many people in the sciences do post-docs.)

In my field, English, last I checked, it looked like this:

70% actually finish their degree
average time to degree is 8.4 years

And only 70% of people who finish get tenure track jobs within 3 years.

What's worse, some 1/3rd of people who get tenure TRACK jobs don't get tenure.

In some field, there's lots of work outside academia. In others, pretty much none.

(I'd love to convince Microsoft or Google that they need a resident Shakespeare person, but so far, no luck!)

Academics looks GREAT from the outside, but a bit less great from the inside. If you're lucky enough to be one of those who gets a decent job (as I am), you can really love your job. (It's still hard work, but if you love it, it's good work, too.)

[farrellcollie]

I mostly quit practicing law to teach legal research and writing (the least favorite subject in law school). I am not tenure track so there is not that pressure or stability. I still handle some appeals and probate matters as a court appointed atty.
I really enjoy it for the most part. The money is not great but I don't have a lot of needs (no kids, no real debt etc). I was really surprised to see how the attitude of students changed in the 20+ years since I graduated - that was an eye opener.

[Bad JuJu]

If this life is so bad why do both of my sons want to be PhD's???
(one in music, the other in math)

As Aquila's post demonstrates, a lot has to do with the field and what career opportunities it offers. But there's also the question of what you want to do with that degree (teaching, research, etc.)

My field is English, too. I'm ABD and probably always will be because, at the tender age of 55, my priorities have changed since I did my grad coursework (and, this is my second career). At some schools, there are still some full-time instructor positions that don't carry the research/publication requirements that come with tenure-track jobs. That's what I've got. These jobs can be less than stable, but I've got a little more stability than some, since I'm directing the freshman writing program--and nobody else on my campus wants to do that.

Aquila is right about another thing--it can be hard, hard work, but not a semester goes by when I don't realize that I LOVE THIS JOB.

[Beane]

anyone currently in grad school who needs moral support -or- anyone considering grad school and wants a realistic idea of what it's like should read phd comics:
www.phdcomics.com

...and now i'm going to procrastinate working on a fellowship application by reading bike snob and TE posts :-)

[Melalvai]

anyone currently in grad school who needs moral support -or- anyone considering grad school and wants a realistic idea of what it's like should read phd comics:
www.phdcomics.com

...and now i'm going to procrastinate working on a fellowship application by reading bike snob and TE posts :-)

I heard that Jorge Cham was astounded and amused because people told him that his comics actually inspired them to GO to grad school. Hello?? He's realistically depicting grad school as living hell. This is inspiring?

I am glad to see he's added a postdoc to the cast (Mike Slackernerny's new job). I was afraid postdoc life was too depressing to make fun of.

I find it interested that Micella de Whyse (blogger on Sciencecareers.org) is leaving her first postdoc and academia right now.

[Geonz]

Its funny to read this because I want to get my PhD. If and when I get it though I always planned on working in the industry and as adjunct faculty. I just love to teach. Do you still have to write your own grants in that kind of a position?

Um... if you love to teach... it can be hard to find a U where that's at all valued.

(Trying not to let my community college biases get too obvious here )

I also recall Herr McNabb, in my freshman year, who did *not* like it when people slipped and called him Dr. McNabb. Mr. was fine - but he considered it an honor to have gotten a teaching position without a PhD.

[Melalvai]

I had a difficult meeting with my boss today. To recap:
When I told him I was not going to North Dakota with him, he all but threatened to sabatoge my career. I believe he got carried away and went further than he intended with what he was saying, but I wasn't sure exactly what he meant.

When I asked to continue the current study, he flat out said "I will not give any money to MU after I leave". Which meant the research program I had worked so hard to develop and which I intended to use as the basis of job applications for the future was dead.

I thought that was the end, but another prof suggested I talk to the dept. I didn't tell my boss I was doing that because I wasn't sure if his refusal was a stab at my career, a stab at MU, or some other reason. If the dept was a potential source of bridge funding, why hadn't my boss suggested it? Why the flat-out refusal and no effort to work with me to find another solution?

Today I got an initial favorable response from the dept, followed up with instructions to talk to my boss. I thought it was likely he would be angry that I'd gone behind his back. I was angry too. It was a difficult meeting, I like to say an animated discussion (a bit of an understatement), but we cleared the air. He was upset and believed I had acted unprofessionally although he was willing to consider that perhaps I was in survival mode. I had a whole lot of accusations about his behavior which I flung right back at him and...

amazingly, he apologized. He explained why it wasn't possible for him to fund my rats even if he wanted to, and that he didn't make an effort to find another solution because he didn't think it through.