I’m not saying that they should, or that conditions shouldn’t improve, but if academia is that stressful to you, why stick with it? The only potential outcomes sticking with it are that you will fail later on, or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors.
A couple of things. Once you leave, you're not going back. So it's a profound decision with a big unknown on the other side. Your publication output drops to zero. You won't have time to develop your own program. You won't keep up with the literature. (Maybe you're not doing those things already, in which case you should try to jump ship).
Maybe you're an academic spouse, in which case you're probably living in an area that's already crowded with like minded PhDs.
Maybe it's not really all that much better on the outside. Depending on your field of course. Even as a grad student, I noticed that acceptance into grad school doesn't necessarily select for the traits that are needed in a research or R&D leadership role, such as being outgoing, self confident, and competitive.
Disclosure: Physics PhD, graduated early 90's, went straight to industry, never looked back.
A lot of them leave. A lot of them stay because they think the effort will be worth it when they have a better position.
It's also important to note that people who want stay in academia tend to do it because they love research. It doesn't pay more, it's harder, it's more unstable... So a lot of them will enter knowing already they're going to be facing a lot of difficulty and stress.
There are more industry roles than academic roles for people with phds but there are FAR FAR FAR fewer research roles in industry than there are in academia and in some fields academic postdocs (or in some cases there are industry post docs) are required for even industry research positions! You can always off-ramp from research but very very hard to get back into if you do. Which is all to say the PI grant writing postdoc + grad student “exploitation” complex is reaffirmed from within and without. Like many self-reinforcing systems, change is... hard.
> there are FAR FAR FAR fewer research roles in industry than there are in academia
I'm not sure this is true. How many PhDs does Google alone employ in research roles? Many hundreds I'd guess. That's many many many university faculties. And that's just Google. Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, etc etc out into the long tail.
We're both just guessing but I'd reckon there are far more research roles in industry than academia.
I don't understand why this is downvoted. Sure it's short on evidence, but it seems a plausible argument made in good faith. If "Google research" doesn't sit right with you because showing people more ads shouldn't count as research, think Pfizer, or ABB, or Lockheed Martin.
It’s very humane to be trapped around our own mental/emotional constructions, and getting out of them is very very hard. It happens all the time and it happens at every level.
I think it’s more to do with lack of protections. The rulemakers know fulfilling work lies in research, but doesn’t demand much to be done. Apply basics of microeconomics and you have contemporary US academia to a T.
It took me years of trying before I could find a decent job to jump ship to. Employers are very skeptical of someone still in academia who has never had a "real" job before. Even if you've been doing crazy advanced research, the HR bots don't recognize that when scanning your resume.
A lot do (but they don't get surveyed by Nature). I quit physics after one postdoc - never thought that would happen - but reality and expectations often don't match up.
A simple change of career? Not so simple (as a software developer how do I just leave? It might actually be hard to get menial work as I’d need a cv for that)
> or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors
I think when you gain a fellowship or professorship in academia it does suddenly get a lot more relaxed and you get time and space to do what you want - which is the goal these postdocs are working towards.
This is not at all the case in the fields I work in. Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather be a professor than a postdoc but it is way, way more stressful.
The biggest worry for most professors I talk to in grant-funded fields (which is most of the natural sciences and engineering) is not getting grant funding and having to lay off some or all members of our research group. In Canada, biomedical grant application success rates are around 14% so this is a pretty big worry.
People who are pre-tenure or in organizational units where there is no tenure (which includes a lot of medical researchers) also have to worry about losing their job.
In the U.S., very few professors can get paid their whole 12-month salary without getting some grant funding to pay for it. Some universities will commit 75% of the professor's salary as "hard money"—these are the ones with the bigger teaching loads. Others will provide only 5% of the salary and expect the professor to get the rest through grant funding. If you can't do it, expect to get a pay cut or lose your job. This is the prevailing model at elite medical research institutions like Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, or University of California, San Francisco.
Becoming a professor is called getting your 'chair' isn't it? I don't know any professors who don't also have tenure - that seems a contradiction in terms to me.
But if you don't know what I mean we're probably talking about different things and possibly talking at cross-purposes.
Yes, it is true that there are SOME professors with chairs. Not that all professors have a chair. analog31 already explained this in response to your last comment.
The professors I’ve worked with usually only get that title when they have a couple of decades of experience and are at the very top of their fields with international recognition and will of course be funded and tenured. It sounds like you’re using ‘professor’ to mean something far more junior which is why we aren’t understanding each other.
The terminology gets even stranger. ;-) A "chair" is a professorship that is funded by an endowment, that gets naming rights. So for instance, you might see someone like: "Bob Smith, Alice Q Hammond professor of situational metaphysics." What it means is that Alice Q Hammond gave a bunch of money to endow a "chaired" professorship, that Bob Smith occupies.
There are "chairs" like this in professional orchestras too.
The taxonomy of academic titles could fill a book.
An "endowed chair" is the best type of full professorship, but it's an exception rather than the norm. There are elite institutions where most full professorships are endowed chairs, there are very wealthy institutions where that happens for lower titles, but in general most professorships are not as such.
Furthermore, it's not something that's available right away (exceptions do happen for exceptional people, but they're exceptions).
For a random example of a successful professor, look at the carreer ot Terrence Tao (https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/preprints/cv.html), James and Carol Collins chair in mathematics at UCLA. He got his PhD in 1996, got full professorship at 2000, and was a non-tenured non-chaired Assistant Professor for the four years in between.
Seriously, just look up a random professor from your local community college (not something like Stanford) and take a look at their CV - how many years it took for them until the full professor position.
Yes and no. First of all, you don't get tenure right away, so your first few years are brutal -- 80 hour weeks. You typically get "start up" funding, which eventually runs out. Then you have to come up with your own money. The basic salary is 9 months. Your summer salary comes out of your own grants. Also, if you stop making research progress, your promotions and pay raises evaporate, and it becomes difficult to promote yourself by job hopping.
Think of it like you're a shopkeeper at the mall, and someone is paying your rent for you, which is nice, but you have to figure out how to actually make money.
Perhaps. It might be a matter of terminology, and each country may have its own system. In the US, a faculty member on the tenure track has the job title of "professor," but "with tenure" is an additional distinction that they hope to earn. This web page explains it as well as any:
A fresh postdoc able to secure an academic job joins as an "Assistant Professor". Fresh Assistant Professors usually cannot recruit PhD students, have limited funds to establish their lab, and no job security. It takes several grades and 15+ years to reach the position of "Professor", which comes with tenure.
I don't understand how you can go from being a postdoc to being a professor. That seems to really diminish the value of the title 'professor' to me, if people can get it as basically their first permanent academic job.
In my home country (India) the academic job hierarchy used to be "Lecturer" --> "Reader" --> "Professor"
Somewhere in the last decade or so this nomenclature was revised to "Assistant Professor", "Associate Professor", and "Professor". I can't speak to the rationale for this, but it brings it in line with the naming convention in the US.
While the minimum requirement for an Assistant Professor job in India is a Masters, in practice now you really need at least 2+ years of Postdoc experience. To move up to an Associate Prof. position, the minimum requirement is at least 5+ years of post PhD experience, to have guided at least one PhD student, and n number of publications with x Impact Factor. A Professor requires at least 10 years of post PhD experience, and at least 3 PhD students. Of course, these are minimum requirements, and I know of several people who far exceed those qualifications and still waiting to move up the ladder. For example, a senior from my graduate lab has been an Assistant Prof for about 14 years now, has 15+ publications, and 3 PhD students who've gained their degrees.
For what it's worth, the job titles can be ambiguous.
The formal progression in the US/Canada is usually "Assistant Professor" -> "Associate Professor" -> "Professor." However, someone in any of these positions can be called a (lowercase-p) "professor", with the most senior job referred to as a "Full (or University) Professor."
They can, just not right away. An Assistant Prof. in Philadelphia I had interviewed with for a postdoc position told me that since his lab is new, the school won't let him recruit PhD students for the first year. He can take postdocs and trainees, though.
I think there's also a practical problem in attracting students to a new lab. Another Assistant Prof I'd interviewed with at a premier research institute in New York had established her lab over 3 years ago, and still hadn't managed to recruit either a PhD student or any postdocs. She may be an outlier, of course.
I really wish Tulane had enforced that on the two starting assistant profs I tried to work for before they took their NSF CAREER awards and ran as far away from New Orleans as their legs could take them. You were in biomedical research or math?
> "I don't understand how you can be a professor and not be tenured"
Sound like you are laboring under considerable misconceptions about the way academia works. To the best of my knowledge, there are no institutions that automatically grant tenure upon being hired as a professor, let alone a chair, which is considered prestigious.
Indeed, getting hired with tenure, much less into a chair, is rarely or ever your first job. But if you already have tenure, then you are likely to be hired with tenure if you switch to another university. You don't have to start from scratch, otherwise nobody in their right mind would ever switch jobs. The grade level and tenure are always negotiable.
It depends on the field, but in several fields (eg life sciences) if you do not keep output up, you will be unable to attract grant funding or industry funding. Without funding, you cannot really do any work. Additionally, without funding or papers, you will not be able to recruit students because students want to get their name on papers and want to work for prestigious groups or labs. Without students, you will be doing all the grunt work on every project you take on yourself which will eat up all your time.
You will also have newfound responsibilities such as teaching classes, and the university will expect you to teach more classes if you are not bringing in grant funding or doing prestigious research. It is not a free ride, and universities will take space from you and give it to people who can produce if you can't as space is scarce.
The confusion seems to be arising because in the UK the levels are named "lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor" and in the US the levels are named "assistant professor, associate professor, (full) professor". In the UK "professor" is a very high ranking position that most academics don't attain. In the US "professor" just means that you teach, basically.
If you get lucky in academia you get the possibility of tenure track which is a made race to publish and that means not only doing your research, but grant writing, dealing with internal politics and discovering life as a manager of grad students... oh yea, and can you lecture these undergrads too?
This isn't what I see in practice. Most professional researchers at the level of being a professor teach a couple of masters lectures for topics they're genuinely interested in and the rest of the time enjoy working on their research.
There's a significant gap between the experience of a bunch of elite research-oriented universities, and the vast majority of universities where the professors are not "professional researchers at the level of being a professor" but rather teaching staff that might try to get some minimal research done but don't get much support and aren't really expected to succeed.
The professors we read about on HN are the exception rather than the norm. The median professor working in a mid-rank institution (not a top-100 institution, not even close to that) does have academic freedom, but most of their time is taken with non-research duties, they do not have an a research group under him/her as they do not have an active research grant which would fund that, and so the median professor does a very limited amount of research which comes out, if I recall the statistics correctly, to approx. 1 paper per year.
At Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, an explicit part of the system is that almost every senior academic teaches common, first/second-year "core" courses and spends a significant amount of time -- 6 or 12 hours a week in full term -- directly teaching 18-21 year olds. In addition to running a group and everything else. It is very rarely negotiable, and usually not.
Why don’t they leave?
I’m not saying that they should, or that conditions shouldn’t improve, but if academia is that stressful to you, why stick with it? The only potential outcomes sticking with it are that you will fail later on, or you will fill a role with an increasing amount of stressors.