I find it annoying when people defend things (such as space travel) that they really have no clue about and are completely trusting some government types on.
The PhD is a bit of a handicap and at the same time hugely valuable in a job search. It promises a depth of analytic skill that a hirer can't be sure of in other candidates.
@JohnRennie The thing I keep hearing about that is, after spending years and attaining my PhD, I would be less qualified for a lot of those fields than some engineer or computer scientist who got their MS
@EmilioPisanty Well this is an issue. It's a standard "fact" that a density matrix has an expansion $\rho =\sum_{i\ge 1}\lambda_i |\psi_i\rangle\langle \psi_i|$ with $\lambda_i\ge 0$ and $\sum_{i\ge 1}\lambda_i=1$. The reference seems to be Simon's book on traces, but there he talks about compact operators.
@SirCumference PhDs are valued because they are clever people. The PhD is taken as evidence that they're clever people (though many here will feel that's not necessarily the case :-)
most research at universities is not done by professors. More importantly, the set of people with PhDs is much smaller than the set of people working in research.
@DawoodibnKareem And few people have cause to be deeply familiar with varidac functions. I know about the c behaviro because when I was done with Crenshaw's compiler tutorial I wondered about extending my little language to handle varidacs and started trying to understand how it would be done.
@SirCumference Honestly, none of your statements seems to have anything to do with the one before that. What has the pressure to publish to do with the fact that there are many more people at a university doing research than professors?
@ACuriousMind That is, somewhat, a feature of the late 20th and 21st century. It was very different in the 19th century and morphed during the 20th and the scale of things ramped up.
My dad is down as inventor on a couple of petants that made his company considerable cash and that makes him a hot consulting property now that he has gone solo.
@EmilioPisanty Yeah, I didn't meant that the profs do nothing, I meant that the research not done by professors is not "unpublished", but just done by other people. At this point I'm entirely uncertain what the actual issue here is, though
@SirCumference for cosmologists GR is a tool these days. There's not much research in GR itself. For an employer the fact you know GR is just evidence you're a clever chap.
@SirCumference But grad school is almost the only way to really work on those cosmology problems. You might not get to keep doing it after, but you will get to do it for a while
@SirCumference So now I'm confused again - do you want to do research, or do you want to have the best possible resume to get employed in industry? You gotta decide what you want here - you constantly refute "you could do research" with "but then I'm not the perfect employee" but "you could go into industry" with "but I want to do cosmology".
@EmilioPisanty The way I read it, it seems @ACuriousMind was saying "do you want to do research, xor do you want to have the best possible resume to get employed in industry?"
@SirCumference Well, it's not a hard "xor". It's more like a sliding scale, but in the end you can't both get the best possible resume for employment and the best possible chance to do research.
@Semiclassical Industry to academia is really hard unless the uni believe there's something in it for them e.g. you can bring industry funding with you.
@Semiclassical the problem is you lose your place in the network when you move to industry and if you want to go back you're competing with people still embedded in the network.
@Semiclassical But companies often end up with bright people who just don't fit any more (maybe the company strategy changed) and they quite often get eased into academic jobs with a bit of financial lubrication from the company.
@SirCumference so... maybe this is where you conclude that both academia and industry have significant hazards on your financial security, and that while there is a slight imbalance with more security on the industry side, the imbalance isn't that pronounced when you consider the uncertainty involved on the career path at the level of choice you're at, so that therefore it shouldn't matter as much at your current juncture?
@SirCumference there is no wrong decision. The different choices all have the plus sides and down sides. My advice (worth what you pay for it!) is to do what you enjoy doing i.e. enjoy doing now.
@EmilioPisanty I mean, the significant difference is, if the quality of work is compromised because of "publish or perish", in academia versus routine jobs. :)
@SirCumference that's precisely what I was not saying. Life is hard and full of financial hazards and deep uncertainties no matter where you go. So maybe chill out somewhat.
My point was more that if you're expecting to have a precise roadmap for your career while you're still in undergrad...well, no. That's not going to happen.
@SirCumference I don't want to seem trite, but you'll face struggles anyway. It's extraordinarily hard to predict what's going to happen. My life has been completely different to anything I expected as a fresh young undergrad. If you allow your vague attempts to predict the future to run your life I suspect you'll regret it.
@SirCumference At your age (doing my wise old man impression now) allowing yourself to be utterly obsessed by your academic interests seems an entirely healthy option.
@SirCumference Yeah, but you are trying to decide this based on the strange idea that what you decide now somehow uniquely and irreversibly determines your entire future life. It won't.
@EmilioPisanty My point is, if let's say e.g. G. 't Hooft decides to investigate something fundamental in Physics, he can do it because aside from being ready for it, he can also afford to do that at whatever time cost. He doesn't have to compete with plenty of other ordinary mortals who can "outperform" him simply by publishing a larger number of less important papers in the same time.
@TheDarkSide This is an argument in favor of tenure. It's not an argument that 'publish or perish' is somehow a special condition for academics.
The thing that sets the academic workplace apart from industry isn't the uncertainty and competition, it's that the uncertainty and competition ends eventually.
Even with tenure, if you are in a heavily grant dependent field (like, say, experimental particle physics) there continues to be uncertainty and competition on that front.
But you can leverage that all important network to mitigate the costs.
@ACuriousMind Although the one thing I'm curious about is, how could undergrads and grad students do more research when assistant professors are seemingly under much more pressure to research?
@0celoñe7 it is genuinely a mystery. It has no function that anyone can find, and it doesn't seem to be a sexual stimulus. So why it persists is unknown. It could just be an accidental side effect of having beard and head hair.
@SirCumference In addition to the number the thing to understand is that the faculty are fining the starting places, securing the funds and steering the research done by their juniors in the directions likely to pay off.
@SirCumference If your worry is about how employable you'll be if and when you decide to leave academia, then just worry about that, i.e. think about what transferrable skills you should be learning that are good for both academia and industry (examples above). And then start learning those.
@EmilioPisanty but people capable of doing something meaningful be jobless if they were continuously "outperformed" in terms of progress metrics. Progress in more fundamental Physics would be slow.
@SirCumference no-one knows for sure, but a plausible suggestion is that it's a marker of good health like the peacock's tail. If a man can grow a big impressive beard that shows he's in good health and a potentially good father.
@TheDarkSide The point is that when you opt for a career in academia you are essentially saying "I would like my research output, i.e. my publication record, to be the metric by which my job performance is gauged"
@dmckee Historically aristocrats grew intricate beards to show they had the free time to groom them, or could afford to pay someone to groom them. It was a mark of status.
I spent a happy few months at Unilever studying the structure of hair and what makes it curly or straight. Absolutely fascinating though ultimately useless.
