And the vast majority of farmers are working small farms.

I know this might seem like a minor point, but it really, really irritates me than Sean thinks farmers are in it for the money. (And I know “doing it for the money” isn’t the same as “earning lots of money”, but farmers could earn a lot more money doing something else. Any wage is higher than $0. No one ever loses $200,000 in a year by flipping burgers at minimum wage.)

And for the record, I’m an astrophysicist who doesn’t even have a garden. But farms are really important, because, you know, we all eat and stuff.

Are you f&*@ing kidding me?

Do you know anything about farming? About how many small farms disappear all the time? About how the average age of farmers is rather high, because it’s an incredibly hard job without monetary reward, and most of the kids are staying away?

“As the U.S. farm population has dwindled, the average age of farmers continues to rise. In fact, about forty percent of the farmers in this country are 55 years old or older (Bureau of Labor Statistics). The graying of the farm population has led to concerns about the long-term health of family farms as an American institution.”
http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/demographics.html

Before getting into the discussion as a response to Dave; in the last several years with an average of 2 open positions per year (in computer science) we get more than 250 applications for these openings. Per my experience, it is much more difficult to get a “good” (use your definition of good) job in academia than in industry.

Back to the tenure system I found out that many tenured professors, and non-tenured professors, students, and people from the general public have managed to forget that the tenure system is in place in order to protect academic freedom. So that people like Sean can “prove” that the sun is circling the earth (or vice verse) without being afraid of loosing their academic position (in the best case).

Related to this, many professors view the tenure as an early retirement or an early partial retirement. In any case, the tenure comes with unprecedented job security (in US terms). For some, this is a driving force for seeking the tenure.

I apologize for the negative tone; my intention, however, is to shade light on other aspects of the issue, beyond the prestige and the ability to combine work with passion.

Relative to what?

You really think everyone at the physics-grad level of intelligence who is NOT a millionaire just doesn’t want the money?

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Dave

I think Sean’s earlier specific notes about what might be going through a tenure committee’s collective consciousness during the review process are just the kind of thing we (as aspiring academics) need to hear. It took me till postdoc #2 before I feel like I really started to figure some of this out, thanks in part to a few excellent informal mentors who were both blunt and very specific. It’s one thing to know that being an academic involves thinking about the universe and writing papers, and another to know which personal strengths to exploit and weaknesses to shore up, how to spin and market your (already good, hopefully) work to the community, how to choose which problems to spend your time on, how to form and manage effective research collaborations etc. That takes not just stubborn tenacity, but also more self-awareness and initiative than many aspirants may at first realize.

Also, when advising undergrads and grad students, I tell them about the crap job market, but I also impress deeply on them that it’s their own sole responsibility to look after themselves in the context of that market. Mentors are out there, but you have to find them and cultivate the mentorship relationship. Supervisors and managers are not (necessarily) mentors, and often, whether intentionally or not, they may require things of you that get you off track — and it’s then up to you to negotiate and maintain healthy boundaries. And so on. All of which is probably just as true in any job market as it is in academia, for that matter.

It is relatively easy to earn a few million if you’re smart enough, and certainly physics grads are — perhaps society is saying something here.

Currently, when I advise undergrads who are thinking of pursuing grad school, I am very upfront with them. I stress that if there is any other option that is out there that they might find appealing, they should consider it. I try to explain that the job market is lousy, and that they need to be OK with their decision to pursue this, even if it doesn’t wind up with their being a faculty member down the road. So, some of us try to dissuade them, though frankly, it rarely works. (FYI, I’m more assiduous about it these days, as the market has gotten worse).

And it turns out that sometimes the students are right to ignore the advice — I know a number of students who were unexceptional as undergrads, but turned into really top notch scientists during grad school, and then launched themselves into reasonable careers.

So what are the odds that this trend will continue and that an amateur will avoid the tenure-track rat race and come out on top in the 21st century?

Second, given the large bottleneck that exists at the postdoc-to-faculty transition, does it even make sense for the (passionate) just-above-average grad students to pursue academia? The odds are certainly stacked against him/her.

The hiring situation is simply perverse. When you have a 10:1 ratio of the applicant pool size to positions, crazy, ridiculous things can happen. In some places, applicants are required to spend their own money on a transoceanic flight to come *apply* for the job. (not even interview, *apply*). In some of those, they have to take a written test, as though they’re thrown back to grad school. In others, applicants are given 10 minutes to summarize everything they’ve ever done, and in a marathon of ridiculousness, people have to sit and watch this trainwreck, all day long, as hundreds of applicants come though, in some poorly thought-out idea of fairness. In other places, a small number of applicants are invited at the same time, as if they were on a dating show, each trying to one-up the other, in the hopes one candidate doesn’t try to scratch the eyes out of another. It’s easier on the university, but disrespectful to the candidates. In many other places, the desired candidate is a foregone conclusion, but a call is put out anyway to satisfy university or funding requirements. Applicants put their time and hopes into a fixed game. In most circumstances, people hire their friends in circles (and students of their friends), which can create self-propagating circles of idiocy, never having to face a critic. In many, many places, there is unstated competition between senior and junior candidates. (senior = already has a faculty position) It should come as no surprise that people who *already* have a faculty position, postdocs and graduate students have published more, and look a lot better on paper. But in actuality, this is used by the senior candidates as a game to get more money or other concessions out of their existing employer. I’ve seen many hires cancelled because the university unwisely selected a candidate that was playing this game. I’ve seen candidates do it over and over again, and somehow universities don’t get wise to it. That sexy long CV wins over a more rational evaluation of whether this person would actually come to North Idaho State… And of course universities are secretive about who the senior candidates might be, because each person on the committee secretly wants to play this game too.

I claim that the difficulty of getting a faculty job has mostly to do with the size of the applicant pool, and the need to reduce it. The hoops put in place select only the determined or uninformed. The hoops do not, in general, improve the quality of physics being done by the community. Anyone *that* determined to be a physics professor, is spending too much time satisfying other people’s expectations, and is not working on his or her own ideas. It reduces the amount of serious thought going on. It increases the publication rate, and increases the amount of time we have to spend evaluating ridiculous ideas. If you have been to a conference with a show of hands on how many people believe in e.g. supersymmetry, you’ll know that the numbers are dismal (~10%) and all other theories are less than that. Everyone publishes on it anyway, and shelves their skepticism, in order to make it through one of these hoops. In the process, other ideas are simply not investigated, because they’re too risky, and won’t get you a faculty job. Why are we here again?

I look forward to the coming data from the LHC, dark matter, and cosmology. Data, ultimately determines who is best at physics, and which one of us can explain the universe. Any psychoses that arose in unfortunate periods without a lot of data, will melt away in the face of it. (mostly)

Does YOUR hiring procedure improve the quality of physics done by the community, improve the likelihood that candidates will make a fundamental discovery, or improve our understanding of the universe? Or are you just creating flaming hoops to see if a caged animal will jump through it, because you need to reduce the applicant pool?