A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
This just confirms what every young person in academia knows: gotta get on uppers to be competitive.
My partner is a PhD candidate and at a recent party a postdoc was telling us how he acquired a giant crack rock at the beginning of his grad career and whenever he needed to finish a big assignment or something he would lick it.
Are doctorate/grad school programs distinctly competitive? My impression was that they were more challenging but similar in nature to undergrad insofar as loads of coursework to stay on top of to complete courses and ensure you got some of the most expensive, "You endured it!" paperwork in the world.
Getting a. PhD isn’t super competitive (speaking from the US), but if you aim to get a professorship at an R1 it’s somewhat competitive across the board. The program coursework vs undergrad depends on the program too— I would say most differ somewhat substantially though. For most humanities degrees you’re doing coursework for 2-3 years and teaching undergrads while you prepare for qualifying exams, then you teach and write your thesis for a few more. The graduate courses are often in seminar (circle discussion) format rather than lecture.
Thanks for some detail! What you describe reassures me in my decision not to get further into it, particularly as a professor path seemed one of few traditional options with what I studied.
Yeah it’s not the best path for everyone, and some subject areas just don’t have enough teaching positions to reasonably expect to get one
It's fucking terrible. I was on something by year 2..
Having a PhD is awesome. Getting one is awful.
Being dumb is being happy.
Ignorance is bliss
You can be dumb as rocks and still get a PhD. I've worked with some special "doctors".
Is the paper itself product of a PhD study?
And they only managed to finish because of all the meds.
Sometimes you are forced to change the subject part way through a PhD, and this subject was already on the author's mind.
It's difficult to know if this might just be a correlation to age of onset, plus the effect of new project or work. Maybe other graduates of similar careers (i.e. chemists going into big pharma) that doesn't go into PhD programmes would be a nice control. But there's no curve there.
Alas, I know academia is difficult. But I wouldn't dare drawing conclusions without a proper comparison.
Maybe it's Sweden?
Stockholm syndrome?
I completed my chemistry PhD with the sole purpose of landing a job in big pharma (which I did). The curve is accurate with regard to my experience
maybe it is the graduate students that are giving the phd's programs depression
Millenial graduate students are ruining PHDs!
Well if it was fun everyone would do it