Sup brahs. Listen, there’s other paths. Do admin at yer university and pivot to some kind of finance shit. Worked for me. My salary is like $230K these days.
PhD Grads
Submitted 3 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/8a320125-1227-4a75-9853-f6f0f9bbfc49.png
Comments
cabron_offsets@lemmy.world 3 months ago
MBM@lemmings.world 3 months ago
What if I don’t want to sell my soul?
berryjam@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I want to pivot from tech/engineering to finance, any advice for me? Been thinking of doing an MBA but don’t want to go back to school
vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
Step one: Be really good at numerical methods for partial differential equations.
Step two: apply to HFT company
Step three: There is no step three.
MBA is a distraction.
cabron_offsets@lemmy.world 3 months ago
MBA ain’t gonna do shit for you except mark you as a sucka. Especially if you already have a PhD. Only tip is find a niche that you can fill. Mine was nonprofit accounting and asset management. And like the other guy said, learn some math if you don’t know it and learn to code. Shit, just an understanding of ODEs and dynamical systems is enough. PDEs if you want to be a quant.
kofe@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This is why I’m comfortable looking into soft sciences like social work or mental health. Ain’t gon replace therapists with AI anytime soon.
kylie_kraft@lemmy.world 3 months ago
oh my sweet summer child
kofe@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Hm? I’m sure people are trying, and not to say AI won’t be incredibly useful, too. I just think there’s quite a few avenues to go down with it.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
They will, for the simple reason that the average person won’t be able to tell the difference in the short term. AI isn’t about “replacing” people in the entirety from cause to result. It’s about providing a plausible facsimile of any role such that company X makes money while relegating the actual role to a niche.
lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
“Have you thought about a postdoc? Well how about second postdoc?”
Drewfro66@lemmygrad.ml 3 months ago
Don’t worry, you’re still serving an important role in the economy!
As part of the “reserve army of labor”, by your very existence you drive down the wages of other workers in your field, based on the threat that they could be replaced with you.
Mothra@mander.xyz 3 months ago
😭
Mothra@mander.xyz 3 months ago
Been looking for work for almost two years
shneancy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
PhD grads? My guys, I’m in the same situation with a flipping Bachelor of Arts in my pocket.
I recently got rejected from a shop that sells cheap and poor quality items for being “underqualified” (the listing required 0 experience and basic education so I’ll go ahead and assume this is the only rejection email template they use and it’s actually the opposite)
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
It took me about 5 years to really transition into industry. It will, of course, vary greatly by industry specifics (mine ended up being tech, but my background is in Linguistics).
My best advice to anyone in this position is: stay in academic positions as long as you can (I lectured for nearly 10 years), but take on contract work concurrently until you find your foot in the door. A PhD is not really a “get a job out of academia” degree, and it really needs more work/networking to be respected in industry.
The_v@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I spent most of a decade in industry doing what is generally thought of as a PhD’s job. In order to fill in some gaps, I took a ton of graduate classes on the companies dime and looked at doing a fully funded PhD. I didn’t end up doing it.
Why?
The industry paid better than academia. So the brain drain was real. The informal training I had from PhD’s in the company was vastly superior to the graduate level training at the university. Anyone who was any good at the applied side was not in academia. The ones left in academia were a very odd group with zero applied knowledge.
Most PhD hires failed miserably in the field. 9 out of 10 of them could not make the transition to the practical application of knowledge.
I saw a trend where smaller companies where hiring mostly industry experienced people for the positions (like I was).
So for me the time and investment was not worth it.
One of my friends made it halfway through his PhD. He then got sick of the politics and drama and noped out.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
Interesting observations. Intent here is not to offer disagreements but just comparisons to my experience:
Yes, industry pays much better. The wage gap in academia is a huge deal and one which will not get attention until the general issue with low wages in the US is handled. That said, I make about twice as much in industry as I would have as a tenured professor in my field had I started at the same time.
This resonates with me in that I have heard it a lot. I think every person is different, but academia has a habit of supporting a kind of pretentiousness that is not conducive to pragmatic work. I would suggest this is highly field dependent, though.
Industry experience trumps academic, 100% of the time.
I came at it from a different path than you. I wanted to be a professor, through and through. The tenured professorship is generally unattainable, since the number of positions is nothing compared to minted PhDs. For that reason, I explored switching to industry. I ended up in a good space, but I am not at all suggesting that someone should get a PhD to go into industry.
frobeniusnorm@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This all sounds so weird coming from germany since here you do you bachelors degree, then your masters degree and then optionally your PhD. While the usefullness of the PhD and its duration vary between subjects (in IT it takes 3-5 years and is not really worth it money-wise if you go in the industry afterwards, while in medicine it can be done in a year or even less and is basically necessary). Also while you do your PhD you are usually employed by the government (since universities are public institutions) and paid well. A PhD earns you social prestige and prestige in the industry since - besides in medicine - nearly no one has one.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
Yes. A very different story in the US. I was consistently jealous of some colleagues experiences in Europe.
I should edit my original comment to specify specifically I am talking about the US.
BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one 3 months ago
Fuck yes. This is the kind of informative wisdom I missed about reddit. Thank you for sharing your knowledge here!
circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 3 months ago
And: fuck spez. Thanks!
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’m a retired programmer and the only time I faced a situation where a PhD (or Master’s) would have made any difference was when I worked for a company that was involved with defense contractors. In this situation we had a pay scale where the hourly rate at which we were billable to the client was based on our degree, something like $110/hr for a bachelor’s, $140/hr for a Master’s and $185/hr for a PhD. The fun part was that it didn’t matter at all what field the advanced degree was in, so if I’d finished my Anthropology PhD way back when it would have meant I was billable at a much higher rate and correspondingly worth a much higher salary to my employer, despite its complete irrelevance to the actual tasks I faced.
We had a number of absolutely useless employees with PhDs who nevertheless brought in a lot more revenue than I did. It turned out later that some of the PhDs were made up - they had just put it on their resumes and nobody ever checks that shit. FWIW we also had a bunch of retired Air Force colonels on staff and nobody expected them to even show up to work on a regular basis. The corruption in that sector of the economy is just massive.