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linkstream

To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees

To: Professors; Re: Your Advisees.  So many PhD advisors are so bad at academic and career advising, that there’s now a cash market for consultants who will do their job for them.  Paid by graduate students of course.

Categories
linkstream

The PhD factory

Nature notes that the world is producing more PHDs than ever before.  And asks it time to stop?  Graduate education isn’t like a pyramid scheme, it is a pyramid scheme.  And like all such schemes, it will eventually end in ruin for most of the participants.  Something has to change.  Why not sooner, and pro-actively, rather than later and in shambles?

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journal

What’s (socially) wrong with graduate school?

My Final Report Card

I say to you that we are full of chemicals which require us to belong to folk societies, or failing that, to feel lousy all the time. We are chemically engineered to live in folk societies, just as fish are chemically engineered to live in clean water—and there aren’t any folk societies for us anymore. (Kurt Vonnegut)

Wolfgang Pauli apparently once said of a student’s work: “This isn’t right.  This isn’t even wrong.”, to deride it for being unfalsifiable.  Grad school isn’t quite that bad.  We’re all running the experiment together every day.  We can tell whether or not it’s working, at least in theory.  But only if we’re willing to look.  I’m looking; I say it’s not working, at least not for graduate students, not on average (mean or median, pick your poison).