Many jokes about afterlife go like this: a deceased person is given a preliminary tour of heaven and hell. Life in heaven, at the outset, seems so-so, a bit boring, a little undramatic. Hell, against all his expectations, turns out to be the stuff of dreams: a place where gorgeous women serves him strawberries and wine while he sunbathes on picturesque white beaches. The deceased is then given a choice as to where to spend the rest of his afterlife; and without a second thought, as you might guess, he chooses Hell. The next thing he knows, he finds himself shackled in chains, getting tortured in burning flames while demons mutilate his genitals with pitchforks. Usually this is part of a bigger joke or moral lesson, but the micro-lesson is this: appearances are deceptive, and our choices in life have consequences.
I remind myself of this trope every time I feel the lure of academia, which happens often enough. I feel it, for example, whenever I read a profile of some inspiring mathematician (e.g. Maryam Mirzakhami) - Watch her do math!, or watch a movie where mathematicians and scientists play an important role (Contact, A Beautiful Mind, Proof), or when I read an article like this: To Live Your Best Life, Do Mathematics or this: Why did Grigori Prelman refuse the Fields Medal? or What is it like to understand advanced mathematics? I am immediately filled with visions of a future where I am leading a life of the mind, pursuing ideas pure and noble and lofty, where I fill up whiteboards with equations and windows with scrawls, where the floor of my room is covered with papers and scratchpads, with abstractions and figures from the depths of my deepest imagination.
“Mathematics as a pursuit is uniquely suited to the achievement of human flourishing, a concept the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, or a life composed of all the highest goods. All five basic human desires that are met through the pursuit of mathematics: play, beauty, truth, justice and love.”
But by now I am well aware such visions of a good life often turn out to be a mirage. Much of our suffering arises from the mismatch between the ideas we chase in our heads, and the reality of lived experience. So I ask myself: I like the idea of living a life pursing maths, but do I like the lived experience of it? Would I love muddling and struggling my way through research problems, the experience of repeated failures and dead-ends, of facing the existential angst that would inevitably arise when I am not making progress, in work and in life?
“A colleague summed up the way many researchers feel about their profession. When asked why he spent so many hours in the lab, he noted that the alternatives were to go home, where he would do the same things that millions of others were doing, or to work in his lab, where he could discover things that no other human had ever discovered. The smile on his face told the story: for him, working on research was sheer joy.””
For a brief while a year ago, while preparing for job interviews, I took up maths once again and started working through some CS proofs and problems. Freed from any external pressure of exams or promise of external rewards, I pursued maths for its own sake, and found it to be an experience much like meditation. It filled me with a sense of purpose and inner fulfilment. Whenever I reached a point of clarity and understanding on a problem, I felt a moral happiness that I realised I hadn’t experienced in a while, that I do not experience in any other activities.
So maybe, just maybe I would be fine with the math struggle. But that is only one of the concerns you face when you decide questions of career and how to lead your life. What about the rest? If I go for academia, would I even get to do much maths, or would most of it spent applying for funding, correcting papers, supervising undergrads, and so on? Would I be able to provide for others and my family? Could I find similar fulfilment in some other activity: for example, private math tutoring or R&D work in a company? What are the opportunity costs?
So I looked around the Internet for other people’s experiences with this, very much like a public consultation, and it painted a gloomy picture: going for a PhD in Maths would be an anxiety-laden experience, spent in poverty, in an atmosphere where success would partly depend on how well you sell yourself and politics and a lot of admin work; would get little validation or recognition and not lead to much impact on the outside world at large in any case, and at the end of it all I would be less employable than I otherwise would be.
So I treat the lure and fantasies of academia as a siren song, seductive and tempting, but dangerous and something to stay away from.
Here’s the case against academia…
“The problem is that, as time advances and your priorities start changing (want a real life / job, date people who don’t date people whose lives aren’t together, etc.), reality starts to intrude. Many grad students have an unacknowledged Peter Pan complex.”
“You should expect to invest years of your life into making progress on some hard problem with little encouragement in the meantime, this takes a tremendous toll on the mind and not for someone who falls easy prey to self doubt.”
Ability to ace exams back in IIT was in no way correlated with being creative in scientific research. Overwhelmed by the expanse of information I had to grasp and apply, I read aimlessly and haphazardly for many months. While this enabled me to acquaint myself with a lot of jargon, it did very little by way of educating me to think critically, to develop independent ideas and hypotheses. Time passed and despite my sincerity, there were no intellectual breakthroughs. I became frustrated and unhappy for lack of a sense of productivity, which is very important in domains of creativity.
“I started a Econ PhD but left soon after as I realized that much of the economic theory which is taught is not realistic and not even a good proxy for how economic systems work. Computer Science has allowed researchers to build much more realistic models using agent-based modeling. When looking for econ PhD programs, make sure this is something they will allow you to research. The best skills you can get out of most traditional Econ PhD programs are econometrics and programming skills. Outside of that it is pretty much a waste of time. Yes, you can probably get a job quickly, but you will spend a lot of the time learning non-applicable skills.”
“I studied Finance but had a work study with an econ professor and was amazed at how much hand waving existed in their economic models. I felt like I was charting very simple things (gdp, oil prices, ect) and he would come up with his own suspect analysis off that limited info. The worst part was that this guy had had a high ranking position in the presidents cabinet!”
“The very best possible outcome for your research is that someone at Google or Microsoft or Facebook reads one of your papers, gets inspired by it, and implements something like it internally. Chances are they will have to change your idea drastically to get it to actually work, and you’ll never hear about it. And of course the amount of overhead and red tape (grant proposals, teaching, committee work, etc.) you have to do apart from the interesting technical work severely limits your ability to actually get to that point. At Google, I have a much more direct route from idea to execution to impact. I get to hack all day, working on problems that are orders of magnitude larger and more interesting than I can work on at any university. That is really hard to beat, and is worth more to me than having “Prof.” in front of my name, or a big office, or even permanent employment. In many ways, working at Google is realizing the dream I’ve had of building big systems my entire career. “
Even David Karger, who has had remarkable and ground-breaking accomplishments in Algorithms, decided to leave Academia for this very reason.
“Sometimes even after you publish your top result that took a lot out of you, it may take many years before people appreciate, let alone understand, your work- the vast majority of papers are never going to be read.”
“46% of papers will never be looked at outside of the authors, reviewers, and the editors. The articles are not only never downloaded, but the pages are never even loaded. ~half of all papers are effectively lecturing into the void.”
“To compensate for this horrible feedback mechanism you need to basically play the popularity game and try to give many talks and talk up your result when you meet people, so there’s a lot of salesmanship involved here as well.”
“The career path is so twisted you have to either be insanely good (at math and at managing time) or just hate yourself enough to sacrifice your best years working essentially in the metaphorical darkness well outside the spotlight and most likely alone and poorly paid.”
“I dropped out of a top 10ish econ phd program… “The risk of failure is low.” Yeah right. Even his own statistics don’t back that up. “which doesn’t force me to work 80 hours a week” But if you’re a tenure track professor, you most certainly still will be. There seems to be a Lake Woebegone effect: Everyone thinks they’re going to be above average. The publish or perish incentive system in academia means that people are often focused more on delivering publishables than intellectual exploration. Even if you personally resist this, people around you may not, and therefore you may not find much of a peer group for intellectual exploration.”
“When I was post-doc at a well-respected university, the Profs treated me with a combination with disrespect and contempt (when they were not outright ignoring me). I switched to industry; my pay went up 3X-fold, and my talented colleagues praised those problem-solving abilities that I developed over the course of my academic career. My advice to you; fck academia! Its a petty pointless prison where you’ll never do anything worthwhile. Switch to industry in order to work and projects that actually have some impact on the world. Only then will you be treated with respect.”
“Being a professor is not the job I thought it would be. There’s a lot of overhead involved, and (at least for me) getting funding is a lot harder than it should be. Also, it’s increasingly hard to do “big systems” work in an academic setting. Arguably the problems in industry are so much larger than what most academics can tackle.”
“How long can you afford to work for $20-30,000 a year? Most people can’t for very long. What are your financial obligations? What are your financial goals? Who relies on you to make a living? Who else is contributing to the running of the household? For me, I thought a PhD was a path to a middle-class lifestyle. I wanted to live in a nice house, drive a reliable car, drink decent whiskey, eat fresh organic food, and travel. I did not get a PhD to worry about my finances, rent crappy apartments, drive a shitty car, and make $12.50 an hour as an adjunct. No, money does not buy happiness. But not having enough money isn’t the pathway to happiness either. In fact, more stress and anxiety and unhappiness comes from not having money. Don’t underestimate the importance of making a decent income. There are other things you can do that will allow you to live the life you want and make a comfortable salary. Go do those things instead.”
“I was a fully funded grad student at MIT. Worked at the mall on the weekends for fun money. Also did it to not be around grad students. Being poor sucks. I didn’t feel good eating ramen and siting on IKEA furniture when my “dumber” friends mades hundreds of thousands of dollar every year.”
“Doing a PhD costs you a house.” (in terms of the lost salary during the PhD years - these days it’s probably more like several houses.)”
“Anecdotal evidence, but I found my MASc to be a very hard sell for most employers. That is even if it was very applied, the goal at the end of my project was pretty much to have a good enough prototype to get funding for a startup. One company thought it was interesting and made an offer, but I ended up accepting a second offer from another company, a position which had already been offered to me after undergrad.”
“I look at my high school classmates who I know went on to get Phds. (Sample size of 8) All of them were among the smartest few percent in the class. Every success that they got through the end of undergrad was due to academic performance. But afterwards things slowed down. Only 2 of 8 stayed through to tenure. The two smartest got Phds in math and wound up in non-faculty positions. One other got a science industry job. One wound up at a hedge fund. And two teach high school. All things considered it’s not a bad lot in life, but these were amongst the best and brightest of my peer group. Five of Seven would have been better served taking other paths to their end destinations.”
“Going to grad school in the humanities is an idiotic life choice that will likely fuck up your life. Of the people I know who were my approximate peers, two live at home; one works at an Apple Store; another works in a preschool; another is teaching the SAT, LSAT, and the like for one of the big companies that pay $15 – $20 an hour for such work; and a couple are adjuncts. A few have short-term contracts. Only one or two have the tenure-track positions they were training for.”
“I left academia in the UK as a postdoc in robotics, joined Firebase via H1B visa to San Fransisco, got aquired by Google, worked for 4 years. I found working for Google stressful, but lucrative and so it was the best decision i made. It totally change the course of my life for the better. I learnt so much about building teams, scaling impact, productionizing software, dealing with public. I missed academic problems, they are fun, but knowing your software has millions of users feels better and its nice having family vaguely recognize what you do. The medical and financial stability let me start a family without fear, not having to stress about money is a huge weight off my shoulders. I feel very lucky. Not sure how repetable that is. I was lucky to get a h1b, and i was lucky picking a winner like Firebase early stage, but i genuinely beleived it was the future of development. So great move, and i think i could go back into academia if i wanted, so its left me in a stronger position”
“I did my PhD in physics, and worked as a SWE right after graduation. Halfway through grad school, I started to feel academia is not my thing, but I cannot quit for all sorts of reasons (at least if thought so at the time). I used Matlab/FORTRAN/python for data analysis in my research work and intentionally looked into CS stuff along the way. I loved it, took a lot of MOOC and managed to eventually get a job in the industry. I loved it in the beginning, spent a lot of personal time doing work and had no complaints. The industry has amazing stride of coming up new technology/ideas, there is always something I can learn which never makes me bored. Most of the people seem generally smart and love their job. Over time I start to realize work is work and there are many factors in the play. I have to find a balance among interesting work, nice colleagues and good pay, but it is not too hard given the amount of opportunities the industry offers. Overall I am happy I made the move. My academia background wasn’t in the CS field, so I am not sure how relevant my experience is. I did often need to look up and read CS papers to help with my job, obviously not the same way as in research. I hated paper reading in grad school but start to enjoy it now, one of the reasons is the interest and motivation are stronger and also the for-fun mindset. Strangely it came to me that maybe things would work out as well had I stayed in academia.
As someone that got married during their PhD and is now finishing up and reflecting: it isn’t worth it. Neglecting the people in your life that love you in the pursuit of “science” is no different than neglecting them because you have a drug habit or because you’re an inveterate gambler or because you’re chasing fame and fortune. The science will get done regardless and the only thing you accomplish is ensuring your own interests.
As a PhD, I now believe that pursuing a career in science is an enormously selfish and entitled life choice for anyone who doesn’t have a trust fund. It’s not just neglect during the PhD. Even a non-neglectful academic is asking a lot of their partner. Stipends are low. Post-docs require chasing term-limited positions around the country, often with little to no savings, for up the half a decade. Building wealth is impossible, having a family is just barely possible, and the process takes you well into mid-life depriving your partner of a career and a real relationship. I have seen more divorces during post-docs than during PhDs. Everyone I know who made it through PhDs and post-docs without scars fell into one of two categories: unmarried or wealthy. I think academia’s biggest open secret is that a HUGE number of academics – especially in and around large metros or in nice climates – are chasing a prestigious and comfortable job because their trust funds allow them to not care about the money and their upbringing makes it difficult for them to deal with having a manager.
References
Some accounts of the lived experience of a PhD
Quotes from the following articles
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