<story><title>Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Back to School, Usually</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/science/phd-post-doc-positions-study.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;smtyp=cur</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>scott_s</author><text>I found some of the phrasing in the NYT article odd, and this sentence clued me into why: &amp;quot;The authors, who did not get postdoctoral degrees themselves ...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I think the NYT reporter thinks that people in postdocs are pursuing another degree. They are not. It&amp;#x27;s just a way for people with PhDs to remain in academia, doing research, so that they can build up their publication list to land tenure-track academic positions. (And, sometimes, even industry positions.) Perhaps what the study authors told the NYT reporter that they did not do postdocs, and the NYT reporter translated that to &amp;quot;did not get postdoctoral degrees&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I agree this is a holding pattern, as the author says it is. But it&amp;#x27;s not quite &amp;quot;back to school&amp;quot;, as the title implies. (I know the person who wrote the article probably did not supply the title, but I suspect they both have the same confusion.) They&amp;#x27;re not pursuing another degree.</text></comment>
<story><title>Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Back to School, Usually</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/science/phd-post-doc-positions-study.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;smtyp=cur</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>pmiller2</author><text>Academia, as a career path, is a non-starter for the huge majority of people who even want to go down that path.&lt;p&gt;Universities are not growing at the same rates that they were in the 60&amp;#x27;s and 70&amp;#x27;s.  If you&amp;#x27;re a graduate student, not only are your classmates your competition, but every professor who supervises more than 1 PhD thesis is actually contributing to the overpopulation of PhDs.  These two things in combination are why we have so many adjuncts on campus doing most of the teaching of undergrads.&lt;p&gt;Even if the above weren&amp;#x27;t true, the path to a tenured position is not something I&amp;#x27;d wish on a mortal enemy.  Start off with several years in grad school making poverty-level wages.  Add on 1-3 postdocs at a minimum, making probably 3&amp;#x2F;4 or less of what an assistant professor would.  Then, there&amp;#x27;s the 6 year job interview (i.e. the tenure process). And, then, factor in that you don&amp;#x27;t get to choose where you live during all this.  You have to go where the jobs are, and there might only be a handful of jobs in your subfield any given year.&lt;p&gt;That all amounts to about 6-10 years of post-baccalaureate slog before you can even start a career and begin living like an adult.&lt;p&gt;If you come out the other end without a job, then your next search becomes even harder.  If you get the job, then, yes, congratulations, it&amp;#x27;s now very hard to fire you, but good luck finding another tenured position if you decide you want to move.  Oh, and the people you work with, you&amp;#x27;re going to see most of them every day for the next 10, 20, or 30 years.&lt;p&gt;In spite of all that, I might have actually ridden the train to the end, had I not realized that I was preparing to enter a field where I&amp;#x27;d literally have to wait for someone to die before I got a job.  Nobody told me any of this until I was already in grad school for a couple of years, and even then I ended up figuring most of it out on my own.</text></comment>