Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs(insidehighered.com)
insidehighered.com
Faculty member issues dire warning to grad students about jobs
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/12/07/faculty-member-issues-dire-warning-grad-students-about-jobs
22 comments
> Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends
Half of the trading quants on my team are physics/math PhDs. Very few econ/finance degrees. Not that there are an ocean of these jobs available, and these are probably outliers compared to the 95%+ of people graduating with those degrees, but it is still a data point.
Half of the trading quants on my team are physics/math PhDs. Very few econ/finance degrees. Not that there are an ocean of these jobs available, and these are probably outliers compared to the 95%+ of people graduating with those degrees, but it is still a data point.
Most places I know hiring PhDs to do AI/ML are hiring people with phds in a non-AI/ML field. Why? Because it is a lot easier to teach someone how to string together pytorch or tensorflow or whatever codes then it is to teach them physics, hydrology, sociology, etc. Certainly this is how my company hires.
I think it's more likely because PhDs in AI/Ml are extremely expensive to hire. A PhD in AI generally does more than string together pytorch and tensorflow.
Maybe in US? PhD AI/ML hire in UK is ~£33k salary.
An AI PhD from a reasonable university will easily make 200k + at SV companies
Again, in US? I'm from a Russell Group uni, so are friends. Most I've heard of is 37 from a friend that spent over 3 months applying and did some hard negotiating. Can you give some example companies hiring with this salary in UK? I'd be genuinely interested, as I believe would many friends/colleagues.
In the US, though I imagine DeepMind and FAIR pay a lot more than 37k pounds in the UK too
I don't think it's quite 200k and I wouldn't describe getting into DeepMind as easy
Don't think it's easy but yeah those are the kinds of places that would pay 200k in the US
PhD in AI/ML is no longer a good bet, hasn't been for about 5 years.
if you had a tool that manufactures tesla parts, could you assemble a tesla?
I received a bachelor’s in International Relations from a low tier liberal arts program. I always found it curious that our professors had received PhDs from Ivy League and similar schools, and here they were at an unknown tech school. If going to an Ivy was needed to teach here, where were the PhD candidates at my school going to teach?
Oversupply. I hate to be a heretic against the orthodoxy, but viable academia needs to be startup- and business-focused on delivering useful, productizable impact rather than pure research. (Stanford Med School is like this, as are some other departments.) Publishing is still perishable if it doesn't result in concrete utility.
Google Translate's live camera font changing.. was Word Lens and was a Stanford thesis before that.
Lytro field camera... was Stanford research.
Impossible Burger... was Stanford GMO heme.
Google... Stanford.
Cisco...
VMware...
HP...
Nike, TSMC, Trader Joe's, Netflix, PayPal, Nvidia, Varian, Charles Schwab, Atari, WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat, ..
Google Translate's live camera font changing.. was Word Lens and was a Stanford thesis before that.
Lytro field camera... was Stanford research.
Impossible Burger... was Stanford GMO heme.
Google... Stanford.
Cisco...
VMware...
HP...
Nike, TSMC, Trader Joe's, Netflix, PayPal, Nvidia, Varian, Charles Schwab, Atari, WhatsApp, Instagram, SnapChat, ..
^ It's no coincidence: it's mindset, talent, support, and connections that comprise a superorganism / ecosystem.
Various non tenure track positions at entry level colleges, with no research.
and therein lies the quandry that sinno exposed.
what an honest and rare stance.
In math, chemistry, psychiatry, physics, etc, a person with a PhD will be much faster and more effective at getting things done that relate to their area of expertise. As such there is a strong job market for PhDs in those areas in general, though of course most of those jobs aren't academic.
Does a political science degree actually indicate a similar quantifiable increase in capability beyond just having more writing experience? I don't know much about what professional political scientists do so perhaps someone can enlighten me.
Does a political science degree actually indicate a similar quantifiable increase in capability beyond just having more writing experience? I don't know much about what professional political scientists do so perhaps someone can enlighten me.
While it is true that getting a traditional tenure track job is very tough in the current market, programs like the one in the article can make modest changes to better prep students for other roles.
For a simple example, pretty much all of the PhD students could get a quantitatively oriented job with "analyst" in the title (why is the kid with an econ degree working a call center job?!?). That requires nothing besides telling students where to look.
For private sector data science gigs programs need to typically do a better job with training programming skills, but many govt research positions and think tanks they will be qualified for as is. Likely the case students can independently pursue projects that make them better qualified for data science positions or take courses already available in other departments at Bloomington to make up for gaps in the current PoliSci curriculum.
For a simple example, pretty much all of the PhD students could get a quantitatively oriented job with "analyst" in the title (why is the kid with an econ degree working a call center job?!?). That requires nothing besides telling students where to look.
For private sector data science gigs programs need to typically do a better job with training programming skills, but many govt research positions and think tanks they will be qualified for as is. Likely the case students can independently pursue projects that make them better qualified for data science positions or take courses already available in other departments at Bloomington to make up for gaps in the current PoliSci curriculum.
Physics and mathematics are other economic dead-ends.
If you want a steady career become an MD: plastic surgeon, cardiologist, anesthesiologist, perfusionist (doesn't necessarily require becoming an MD), or endocrinologist.
Most PhDs have a net negative lifetime earnings opportunity cost.
Biotech, data science, AI/ML are also good bets. What's not a safe bet is generic "programmer" likely to be automated out of a job and salaries are likely to crash when there's an oversupply of lower-skilled talent. Most programming will become trivial or eliminated by automation, as is already beginning to happen with AI code completion.