🤡 We've all been played for fools. 🤡

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• x00z@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Where I live this is always mentioned. There are also many resources that list what jobs have too many people or not enough people. These are often linked to on the websites of schools right next to the degrees they offer. I remember being happy because the degree I went for had a gold star next to it telling me this is would lead to good job opportunities and a high pay. Also, the jobs with not enough people often have cheap or even free courses that are subsidized by my government. There was a big need for (well paid) underwater welders for example, and the full courses were completely free.

  God I love socialism.

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  • fiftyfour@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That sounds awesome. What country is that? Was it just your school or is it regular practice where you live?

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    • x00z@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Belgium. For the Dutch speaking part there’s VDAB, which handles the path from unemployment to employment. They are the ones that help you get a job, which is a requirement for unemployment benefits, so they are quite active. They currently have 246 different types of jobs listed that need more people. This list is actively referenced to by schools, especially on the degrees that lead to a job in this list, as well as all the school counselors that help you figure out what you want. There’s also many jobs in the list that do not require a degree or course, often for less wanted jobs that are harder to find people for.

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• logicbomb@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’ve said it before, but one reason I didn’t pursue a PhD is that there appeared to be an element of hazing in the entire thing.

  Several of the PhD students I knew were languishing for years trying to get their thesis together, in what can only be described as poverty.

  Meanwhile, half of the professors were miserable, and if they made good money, it was because they were very focused on how to make money. The happiest postgrad I knew was a senior lecturer who had given up on becoming a professor.

  The best you can hope for is that your personal area of interest happens to have a lot of funding.

  Yet these people almost universally seemed to think, “Well, that’s just how it is. The nice thing is that if you can get an academic position, it sucks less than being a PhD student.”

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  • Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I have a PhD because I thought I wanted to go into research. And while I loved research, that didn’t come close to cancelling out how much I loathed all the non-research shit you need to do for funding and keeping a job.

    Then I went from academia into corporate R&D, and realized I basically started to hate doing chemistry in general. Mostly because it reminded me of all the stuff I hated.

    Im now super happy as a safety consultant, and my PhD sometimes helps in convincing people that I do in fact know more than them. It also covers an ugly spot in the wallpaper, a purpose it fulfills much more frequently.

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    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      thats what i heard in college and in other discussion boards, basically just grant chasing for yourr career. and then i recall while i was in courses with these professors, they said they spend most of thier time chasing grants.

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  • Warl0k3@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yeah, I got my current teaching position by essentially volunteer professoring while doing some grad work. Super exploitative on paper, though that wasn’t the intention of anyone involved (tiny college hated by the conservatives so they kinda had to wing it every time legislative fuckery happened). But it’s rough, I don’t make enough to pay my (incredibly cheap) mortgage so I’m in the awkward position of having been financially unemployed for a year while still working full time. Not to sound too whiny but man, the culture of “Guess I’ll starve because I just love my students so much” is absurdly toxic. And that’s coming from someone firmly part of that culture.

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    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      they abuse the use of part-time professors/PHD for instrunctors, so they dont get tenure, to cover all thier neccesary classes.

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  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    not to mention the dozens of PAPERS(fluff pieces) you need your resume to get certain positions in a faculty positon in a university. thats where im hearing the complaints coming from. Plus PHD spends alot of thier time chasing grants in universities( at least for the most part), Also they have to frame certain research in a way that does blame “anthropromorphic causes”.

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• Droggelbecher@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I have never met a PhD student who didn’t realise this before starting. You’d think someone who qualifies for grad school has better critical reasoning skills than this.

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  • pigup@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Like I tell everyone, PhD doesn’t mean you are smart, it just means you can take more abuse and humiliation than most. This is the thorny path to become an expert.

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• ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  As a CS grad I can confidently say: No! They are absolutely worth your time.

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• LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  When I was in college I got a science-related scholarship and as part of it they literally made us all chant together that we would go on to get a pHd.

  Thankfully that was obvious enough cult behavior for me to tap out and take my career in a different direction.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s weird af

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  • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Meyerhoff?

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• Zerush@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You just have to observe how many McDonalds employees are cursing their life in Latin

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• Frostbeard@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  TBH if you attend 5 years at uni and don’t catch on how few professors there are to literally everyone else at the university perhaps your reasoning skills are not that great.

  I mean I did 5 years with a master in thermodynamics (physical chemistry) and my section had 20 offices. Three had a professor in them.

  Top sciencetists are is like top athlets. The same drive, dedication and forsaking other things to be best.

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  • Sc00ter@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    True, but not everyone there is vying for an academic job. Especially like something in thermodynamics. I work in the aerospace industry and every engineer has at least a masters in a science/engineering field, a lot have PhD.

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• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This is why I dropped the dream of being a French professor. By the end of my first year I realized there were only 2 or 3 on my campus and I’d have to work with them for many years and still not score a job.

  Funny story about my first professor: When I would speak French in class the girls would all giggle. WTF?! One night I got invited to an all-girl study group at the dorm next door.

  “OK, why do you all giggle when I speak French?”

  They got real quiet, looked around at each other. Finally one girl pipes up.

  “We’re sorry, it’s just that your accent is so much better than the professor’s, it’s embarrassing for him.”

  And that’s the man I would have had to work with for years. :( (BTW, he spoke 5 other languages and his grammar and vocabulary were unmatched. He just couldn’t speak worth a shit.)

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• TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  With so many things going on in life outside of work and academics, there is only so much you could research and pay attention to to fully know what you could get into. Only practical experience will tell you if it’s worth it. As they say, experience is the best teacher. And even then, don’t regret and blame yourself. You made the decision based on what was the best available information at the time. I tell this to any people who tend to be anxious about decisions.

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  • Krono@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Your heart is in the right place, but I think “no regrets” is an insane take.

    As a fellow unemployed CS grad, I once thought software engineering was my best shot at a middle class life.

    Now after 5 years of unemployment, the financial reality is setting in. I will never be able to afford a home. I will never be able to afford a family. I will never be able to afford retirement. I will never be able to afford a vacation. I will never be able to afford most things that make life worth living.

    I thought I was going to be an engineer. I thought I was going to be a professional. Now I’m fasting at the end of every month bc food stamps always run out, and the electric company is threatening to shut off my power.

    Choosing CS is deeply regrettable.

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• ryedaft@sh.itjust.works ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This is a computer sci PhD. They rarely even finish their degrees and most bugger off directly to industry if they do. Couldn’t have picked a better degree of you want to be a professor.

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• prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’d love to go back to school full time… But the only way that could ever happen is if I somehow get enough money so that I never have to work again

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• taiyang@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Interestingly enough, I only got my PhD because the job market sucked after Bushes recession and I was promised 5 years of funding. I did get some great data analytic skills out of it, but academic positions are indeed far and few between.

  One of the main factors after my graduation a few years ago was that professors just refused to retire, leaving very new faculty positions; that changed slightly right after my kid was born but by that point I was and am ok with an adjunct part time and homemaker full time situation.

  Now it’ll mostly be a lack of funding, though, unless I leave the US. Meh.

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  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    i said many times in other forums, people think thier career is a tenure track, but they underestimate the competitiveness of the tenure positon, plus tenures tend to not retire until they CROAK, or become to ill, old to teach and thats expected 20-40+year wait.

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• Sergio@piefed.social ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I dunno... getting a PhD just teaches you how to do research. If you want to get a faculty position, there's a whole other set of skills on top of that; in the US for CS at larger universities it's mostly about getting funding and becoming "respected" in your field. But you have to tell people that you want to learn those additional skills. That's the part that's hard to know about beforehand.

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  • TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Yep, my buddy is finally on a tenure track at a really nice school and it’s the accumulation of like 15 years of stressful work that might have never really paid off.

    You have to be good at getting published, attending conferences, creating conferences, building relationships with different universities and that’s just to keep up with the competition. I think what seals the deal is not only getting funding for yourself, but showing universities how employing you would actually be a sound investment.

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    • Sergio@piefed.social ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The one "secret" I wish I'd known a lot earlier is that you don't have to do it alone. In fact, the more you collaborate the more successful you'll be: more research ideas, more publications, more committee memberships in workshops/conferences, more participating on teams being put together to apply for research funding, more people to reach out to when you're looking for a job, etc. The most successful scientists I've known had huge networks of collaborators.

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    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      its pretty painful, just having to put dozens of publishing research on CV is a huge task on its own.

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  • mineralfellow@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Hard to say what exactly a PhD teaches. It is a unique type of qualification that varies radically between situations, even in the same department. I can definitely say there is a difference between people with and without a doctorate, but many of the skills gained are soft skills.

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• HugeNerd@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  You never “do your own research”. You trust the experts and listen to them.

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  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Doing your own research involves trusting experts, but if the findings are easy to verify, like looking up number of open positions to students ratio, then it’s a good idea to just check.

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• skisnow@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I thought one of the fundamental principles of a PhD was that you were no longer expected to have information spoon-fed to you. Dude failed two different tests at the same time.

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• spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I find it hard to believe that someone who entered a PhD program wasn’t given a heads up immediately about the competition for professor positions.

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  • Eq0@literature.cafe ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I don’t. It’s the sort of thing that is “evident” so no one talks about it much. Plus, professors don’t want to point out how much the whole system sucks

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  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    they probably were, but it was OFUSCATED or they dont actually “address people on the issue” its also the same with undergrad and MASTERS level. the university benefits by not telling so they can keep the cash cows coming into as undergraduate, masters, or PHD. if they warned them in Undergrad, people will just not take a certain major, or dont even go the university altogether.

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• limer@lemmy.ml ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Well, what a surprise. For the first time I feel smug about not having a phd, much education or common sense

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• enbiousenvy@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I still got my pizza hut delivered the last time I tried. but that was several years ago. maybe they stop delivering.

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• JizzmasterD@lemmy.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s a tough dilemma. Takes a PHD to understand the tenure track.

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  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    its brutal even if your not a phd, apparently universities would rather not hire them, instead try to use part timers instead, so they can avoid giving them benefits.

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• oyfrog@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I felt that in the bone. Postdoc life is one foot getting ready to move and the other foot dreading every decision that led to the thought “A PhD is a good idea”

  It was a good idea, but holy shit is it all sorts of miserable.

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• sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Me fr

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