Kudos to you for writing such a long ordeal in a humorous manner or at least that’s what I felt while reading it.<p>On topic, it’s probably another example of why scaling a system is so hard. Especially when it comes to tasks that require deep thinking. I can’t help but notice the government policy of sponsoring mass PhDs in the hope of raising a knowledge based society is itself changing the definition of knowledge here.
Oh I thoroughly enjoyed this post.<p>We were the friends and family attending my cousin defending his thesis. He spent half his time title-ing, naming, and thanking Professors, chairs, heads, and what not. When it was all over, I asked him why did you name them all? He answered, "because they like the sound of their name."
This was very painful to read. Thanks for sharing. It hits a nerve to hear someone say, "I start to develop a faint feeling that I sleep better at night when I play along and nod approvingly to things I don't actually agree with instead of being pigheaded."<p>Look what they've made us do.
A friend who completed their PhD went from<p><pre><code> "he is the best professor, I am so glad he is my supervisor"
</code></pre>
to<p><pre><code> "he is the worst supervisor, I am wondering how I can get the university to transfer me"
</code></pre>
to<p><pre><code> "he is the best professor, he helped me get a job after I graduated"
</code></pre>
Which I think is a fairly normal rollercoaster ride.<p>I never got my PhD, my first day as a lowly research assistant in a university in central london (which shall remain nameless) I was given a professorial suite to camp in, and I remained there for 3 months, imposing furniture and a giant oak table and all. Another staffer used to sleep on the floor and park his bicycle there. Eventually I was evicted and sent to the top floor, an ex-statistics research unit teaching room, like army Barracks, where I and a fellow research assistant opened a cupboard to find the 10 Brunsviga calculators left over from a mechanical actuarial risk calculation exercise the department did for money up until the advent of electronic computers. Their entire previous 5 years work was completed in under 1 days run of the machine code on the new University of London computer in the early 60s. Oh, the Joys.
While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.<p>“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
<i>> "You know C++?" I ask enthusiastically, as I am looking to become a software engineer myself at this point. "I don't," she informs me, "but there's enough time until Monday to learn it."</i><p>Suddenly, everything about my professor's bizarre lack of development skills in my computer science course makes sense.
The writing style is really good. Having gone through a non-terrible PhD that still shared elements of this, it captures the essence so well, even with some technical detail. Even the admin assistant shenanigans brings back memories to similar events in my days long ago in some other institution. So enjoyable.
What we have is an ignorance-based society. The more blind-spots you have, the higher you rise.<p>The higher your rise, the easier it is to maintain your blind-spots because nobody will dare question your worldview. Even those few who do, they're a nobody, so what could they possibly know about anything? Surely, it's only the people on top who have a bird's eye view of the big data, who know what's going on... Everyone else is like an ant following breadcrumbs laid out in front of them. What is there to learn about the real world that you cannot see from above?
My experience from the academia is that there just isn't enough research topics. It wasn't as bad as in this article but I can't imagine how bad it would be if somebody dumped hundreds of millions of EUR into it to mass produce PhDs.
I was bracing for the bit where Professor pokes his head into the tiny office and says "Hey Mihai, what's happening. We're gonna have to move some more of these boxes in here, so if you could just push your desk back there, against that back wall to make some room, that would be terrific. Thanks."
> The only constant human presence in the whole building during the warm summer days is the cleaning lady.<p>Hit a little too close to home with that one. Had to finish reading despite how painful a mirror can be. God does it make me wish something would change.
This was a depressing read. Now I desperately need some examples of Phd candidates who had a great time and managed to do well from a scientific point of view. To restore my faith in humanity.
On one hand, there is probably much value locked up in things we don't understand whose research is unlikely to be funded.<p>On the other hand, humans are pretty terrible at organizing and planning projects without pressures like profit.
Reading this gives a bad feeling that the commonly accepted claim that modern science frontier is too large for a single person to grasp actually applies only to obscure depths of mathematics, physics, and maybe chemistry. Anything beyond that could well be 90%+ sham papers like the ones described in the article with the rest being relatively trivial to grok.
I wonder what the ratio of good:bad professors is.<p>Someone should write a list of "Power Gradients Considered Harmful", eg Crew/Cockpit Resource Management
I had a slightly better experience on my PhD in Central-Eastern Europe. My supervisor - a politician with little academic results mostly cared about the formal part of my results.<p>I used the PhD to get into a new field (statistics) just in time for me to get into Data Science as it started being cool. My papers weren't interesting, but I got to try things out on real data and report on them.
The broad lesson here:<p>If you want to do a PhD, DO NOT limit yourself to your home country. Many countries simply are not capable of properly training researchers. The US can. China mostly can by now, I expect. Northern Europe can, to some degree, in some fields. Elsewhere, you are at risk of wasting important years of your life.<p>Trump might end US dominance, but the general point that academia is international and entire countries can simply not have a functioning pipeline for new researchers.
Preserved by some unknown savior who probably shares the same value for it and doesn’t want it to vanish, but here’s the link anyway: <a href="https://archive.is/gAh4E" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/gAh4E</a>
Yet another example of how academics serve no purpose in real life. Yes, there have been ground breaking innovations and discoveries from academic folks but that's likely 10% of the good ones. Rest is just pure misery, like the one OP describes
How much of this account is realistic? If this is the writing of an educated young person. Imagine how despondent must the average young person be? And are we to presume this is the material that will help Ukraine?<p>It seems the pendulum of the world has reached its opposite climax. There was a time when young students fought communism, sacrificed theiir lives for ideals (egged on by unfullfilled promises from the west - remember Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50s?). Now the enemy is not ideological but generational. The old guard seeing the base of the pyramid's numbers eroded, realize they dont have enough meat to do the work. So the old prey on the young - even making them dance for entertainment.<p>But do not despair my Romanian friend, you are not alone. Millions of PhDs in America and the west are also in your shoes. Spending the best years of our lives in the service of our masters, publishing papers and writing grants, we were hoping for a 'career' of even a job. But now we see the world turned inside out. The budgets of the NSF and the NIH are being sacrificed and burned on the altar of a new 'reich'.<p>There is a saying - 'idle hands are the devil's workshop'. Payback is a bitch.