This link has been bookmarked by 7 people . It was first bookmarked on 12 Jun 2012, by Jenny Bankie.
-
29 Apr 23
-
01 Sep 14
-
12 Jun 12
-
get out there, take a little vitamin C and do something interesting. You can sleep when you're dead. And for god's sake, do something about that gut. It's really slowing you down.
-
I discovered the incredible pain which comes to the soul from such broken trust, I discovered that I had enhanced most of my dastardly habits and trampled right over my sensitivities to ethics and morality, and then I discovered that I missed them tremendously. One of the most astonishing realizations came when I finally saw through the illusion that this culture paints.
-
In a nutshell, graduate students in all technical fields are in a "barter system". That is, you supply a tremendous amount of skilled but cheap labor to the school. In turn, the school waives your tuition, gives you a small stipend to teach and/or perform research, and hopefully eventually grants you a PhD.
The problem with all this is that, because schools want highly skilled yet cheap labor, they tend to "pack the house" with graduate students. Hence one of the origins of the so called "scientist shortage".
Therefore, I would recommend that we make PhD programs much more similar to programs in law and medicine. A structured PhD program would be instituted where research techniques would be taught. Tuition would be charged, and a student would not be able to obtain any job with the university he or she attends while a graduate student (although a job outside the university while enrolled might be acceptable).
-
But just as man does not live on bread alone, so man does not live on an MBA alone. The attainment of knowledge is what distinguishes us from animals whose sole objective is the attainment of resources.
-
I call into question the value to one's life that a technical education may have. My opinion, shared by Dr. Bill Siebert at MIT: it is not enough.
-
Do you want to get married? Do you want to be able raise children in a clean environment? Do you want your parents to be taken care of when they are old? Or do you want your life to culminate in a dissertation on quarks, photons...etc.? Desperate times call for desperate measures. Don't get me wrong though. A post-secondary education(B.Sc, B.Eng, B.A, B.Com, M.D.) is worth almost any sacrifice, however, when considering post-graduate studies, one must question what they truly want in life. A Ph.D. is a huge risk. Can you afford take that risk?
-
In this age and time, at least in my country (spain) this means working your ass off 10 to 12 hours a day for four years for a miserable salary (around 840 euro/month)until you get your phd, after that if you are exceptionally lucky you might just find a junior professor's post open (profesor adjunto), if not, the only way to continue researching is to look for research posts in other countries. After some years hopping around the planet from project to project, if you are brilliant and LUCKY enough, you might find a real professor's post when and if you come back.
-
Having a Ph.D. greatly limits your real world options to "intellectually pursue" things outside of academy. You are automatically being considered as a loser for applying. To be polite, they will use the word "overqualified" instead. 2) Modern science is not as much "intellectual pursuit" as brain numbing grunt work. Low market value of fresh Ph.D.s in postdoctoral trap invites the increase of the ratio "grunt jobs"/"intellectual pursuit" beyond any reasonable limits. An example from the national lab (not the last place to be): $55k/year technician (HS! graduate) does NOTHING all day long for weeks (3 weeks in a row was a record) because "he's too expensive" for PIs compared to the "prepaid" 10K cheaper!! postdocs. As a result, all grunt jobs are done by the people who have gotten their Ph.D.s to pursue the knowledge. Lots of intellectual excitement indeed. And it's not an isolated case. After getting out of the postdoc swamp (if you are lucky), you'll find out that writing countless proposals/papers just to survive is as much mind numbing as your postdoctoral "pursuits". 3) To "succeed" in modern science, one needs to be single-minded zombie with limited interests beyond his narrow field and work 24/7 (or somebody else will submit that paper/proposal 1 day earlier). Somehow, I fail to associate zombies with "intellectual pursuits" and "creativity". 4) Joe, you forgot to mention that science related jobs are not only low paid, but they are difficult to get hold of (except for postdocs, first 5 years upon graduation). Without that job, it's hard to "intellectually pursue" a lot even if you do not need those despicable $. 5) The saddest thing in my life is seeing postdocs in their late 40th. It's sadder than seeing a bum. Walking cemeteries of dreams/wasted youth/lots of work. Those people have no future anywhere, and they know it. And, trust me; "intellectual pursuits" is not #1 on their minds.
-
People with interests in family, art or recreation are the most likely to bail. As well-rounded minds, they're also potentially the best scientists.
-
At 40 he has an ulcer, bad conscience, no family, but a permanent job that nets him about half as much as A made at 25. Does B regret that he did not take the path of A or that he didn't stick to his guns and found the solution to world poverty in an unheated hut in Montana?
-
if things are like that in the future I won't let any of my sons to study exact sciences like me but Medicine, Economics or something like that. More rewarding with the same stress or less.
-
Tinkerers, no matter how qualified, will always be that weird geek monkey in the backroom.
-
trying anything at all will get you somewhere as most people just don't bother, they sit back and expect things to come to them or simply do nothing because they don't know what to do next. Well life is tougher than that, but not much
-
Being smart is a lifestyle, not a one off effort. Work hard at it everyday. Get up and do something smart today, then do something smart again tomorrow, just make sure that each day you move forward a little, momentum will build up quite rapidly.
-
-
24 Aug 06
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.