[citation needed]

There’s a long tradition in the academic blogosphere (and the offlinesphere too, I presume) of complaining that academia is a pyramid scheme. In a strict sense, I guess you could liken academia to a pyramid scheme, inasmuch as there are fewer open positions at each ascending level, and supply generally exceeds demand. But as The Prodigal Academic points out in a post today, this phenomenon is hardly exclusive to academia:

I guess I don’t really see much difference between academic job hunting, and job hunting in general. Starting out with undergrad admissions, there are many more qualified people for desirable positions than available slots. Who gets those slots is a matter of hard work (to get qualified) and luck (to be one of the qualified people who is “chosen”). So how is the TT any different from grad school admissions (in ANY prestige program), law firm partnership, company CEO, professional artist/athlete/performer, attending physician, investment banking, etc? The pool of qualified applicants is many times larger than the number of slots, and there are desirable perks to success (money/prestige/fame/security/intellectual freedom) making the supply of those willing to try for the goal pretty much infinite.

Maybe I have rose colored glasses on because I have always been lucky enough to find a position in research, but there are no guarantees in life. When I was interviewing in industry, I saw many really interesting jobs available to science PhD holders that were not in research. If I hadn’t gone to National Lab, I would have been happy to take on one of those instead. Sure, my life would be different, but it wouldn’t make my PhD a waste of time or a failed opportunity.

For the most part, I agree with this sentiment. I love doing research, and can’t imagine ever voluntarily leaving academia. But If I do end up having to leave–meaning, if I can’t find a faculty position when I go on the job market in the next year or two–I don’t think it’ll be the end of the world. I see job ads in industry all the time that looks really interesting, and on some level, I think I’d find almost any job that involves creative analysis of very large datasets (which there are plenty of these days!) pretty gratifying. And no matter what happens, I don’t think I’d ever view the time I’ve spent on my PhD and postdoc training as a waste of time, for the simple reason that I’ve really enjoyed most of it (there are, of course, the nasty bits, like writing the Nth chapter of a dissertation–but those are transient, fortunately). So in that sense, I think all the talk about academia being a pyramid scheme is kind of silly.

That said, there is one sticking point to the standard pyramid scheme argument I do agree with, which is that, when you’re starting out as a graduate student, no one really goes out of their way to tell you what the odds of getting a tenure-track faculty position actually are (and they’re not good). The problem being that most of the professors that prospective graduate students have interacted with, either as undergraduates, or in the context of applying to grad school, are precisely those lucky souls who’ve managed to secure faculty positions. So the difficulty of obtaining the same type of position isn’t always very salient to them.

I’m not saying faculty members lie outright to prospective graduate students, of course; I don’t doubt that if you asked most faculty point blank “what proportion of students in your department have managed to find tenure-track positions,” they’d give you an honest answer. But when you’re 22 or 23 years old (and yes, I recognize some graduate students are much older, but this is the mode) and you’re thinking of a career in research, it doesn’t always occur to you to ask that question. And naturally, departments that are trying to recruit your services are unlikely to begin their pitch by saying, “in the past 10 years, only about 12% of our graduates have gone on to tenure-track faculty positions”. So in that sense, I don’t think new graduate students are always aware of just how difficult it is to obtain an independent research position, statistically speaking. That’s not a problem for the (many) graduate students who don’t really have any intention of going into academia anyway, but I do think a large part of the disillusionment graduate students often experience is about the realization that you can bust your ass for five or six years working sixty hours a week, and still have no guarantee of finding a research job when you’re done. And that could be avoided to some extent by making a concerted effort to inform students up front of the odds they face if they’re planning on going down that path. So long as that information is made readily available, I don’t really see a problem.

Having said that, I’m now going to blatantly contradict myself (so what if I do? I am large! I contain multitudes!). You could, I think, reasonably argue that this type of deception isn’t really a problem, and that it’s actually necessary. For one thing, the white lies cut both ways. It isn’t just faculty who conveniently forget to mention that relatively few students will successfully obtain tenure-track positions; many graduate students nod and smile when asked if they’re planning a career in research, despite having no intention of continuing down that path past the PhD. I’ve occasionally heard faculty members complain that they need to do a better job filtering out those applicants who really truly are interested in a career in research, because they’re losing a lot of students to industry at the tail end. But I think this kind of magical mind-reading filter is a pipe dream, for precisely the reasons outlined above: if faculty aren’t willing to begin their recruitment speeches by saying “most of you probably won’t get research positions even if you want them,” they shouldn’t really complain when most students don’t come right out and say “actually, I just want a PhD because I think it’ll be something interesting to do for a few years and then I’ll be able to find a decent job with better hours later”.

The reality is that the whole enterprise may actually require subtle misdirection about people’s intentions. If every student applying to grad school knew exactly what the odds of getting a research position were, I imagine many fewer people who were serious about research would bother applying; you’d then get predominantly people who don’t really want to do research anyway. And if you could magically weed out the students who don’t want to do research, then (a) there probably wouldn’t be enough highly qualified students left to keep research programs afloat, and/or (b) there would be even more candidates applying for research positions, making things even harder for those students who do want careers in research. There’s probably no magical allocation of resources that optimizes everyone’s needs simultaneously; it could be that we’re more or less at a stable equilibrium point built on little white lies.

tl;dr : I don’t think academia is really a pyramid scheme; more like a giant cesspool of little white lies and subtle misinformation that indirectly serves most people’s interests. So, basically, it’s kind of like most other domains of life that involve interactions between many groups of people.

I’m back from CNS in Montreal (actually, I’m not quite back; I’m in Ottawa for a few days–but close enough). Some thoughts about the experience, in no particular order, and with very little sense:

• A huge number of registered attendees (basically, everyone from Europe who didn’t leave for Montreal early) couldn’t make it to the meeting because of that evil, evil Icelandic volcano. As a result, large swaths of posterboard were left blank–or would have been left blank, if not for the clever “Holy Smokes! So-and-so can’t be here…” notes taped to them. So that was really too bad; aside from the fact that the Europeans missed out on the meeting, which kind of sucks, there was a fair amount of chaos during the slide and symposium sessions as speakers were randomly shuffled around. I guess it’s a testament to the organizers that the conference went off relatively smoothly despite the loss of a large chunk of the attendance.
• The symposium I chaired went well, as far as I can tell. Which is to say, no one streaked naked through the hall, no one went grossly over time, the audience hall was full, and the three talks I got to watch from the audience were all great. I think my talk went well too, but it’s harder to say. In theory, you should be able to tell how these things go based on the ratio of positive to negative feedback you get. But since people generally won’t tell you if they thought your talk sucked, you’re usually stuck trying to determine whether people are giving you well-I-didn’t-really-like-it-but-I-don’t-want-you-to-feel-bad compliments, or I-really-liked-it-and-I’m-not-even-lying-to-your-face compliments. In any case, good or bad reception, I think the topic is a really important one, and I’m glad the symposium was well attended.
• I love Montreal. As far as I’m concerned they could have CNS in Montreal every year and I wouldn’t complain. Well, maybe I’d complain a little. But only about unimportant things like the interior decoration of the hotel lobby.
• Speaking of which, I liked the Hilton Bonaventure and all, but the place did remind me a lot of a 70s porn set. All it’s missing are some giant ferns in the lobby and a table lined with cocaine next to the elevators. (You can probably tell that my knowledge of 70s porn is based entirely on watching two-thirds of Boogie Nights once). Also, what the hell is on floors 2 through 12 of Place Bonaventure? And how can a hotel have nearly 400 rooms, all on the same (13th) floor!?
• That Vietnamese place we had lunch at on Tuesday, which apparently just opened up, isn’t going to last long. When someone asks you for “brown rice”, they don’t mean “white rice with some red food dye stirred in”.
• Apparently, Mike X. Cohen is not only the most productive man in cognitive neuroscience, but also a master of the neuroimaging haiku (admittedly, a niche specialty).
• Sushi and baklava at a conference reception? Yes please!
• The MDRS party on Monday night was a lot of fun, though the downstairs room at the bar was double-booked. I’m sure the 20-odd people at salsa dancing night were a bit surprised, and probably not entirely appreciative, when 100 or so drunken neuroscientists collectively stumbled downstairs for a free drink, hung out for fifteen minutes, then disappeared upstairs again. Other than that–and the $8 beers–a good time was had.
• Turns out that assortment of vegetables that Afghans call an Afghan salad is exactly what Turks call a Turkish salad and Israelis call an Israeli salad. I guess I’m not surprised that everyone in that part of the world uses the same four or five ingredients in their salad, but let’s not all rush to take credit for what is basically some cucumber, tomato, and parsley in a bowl. That aside, dinner was awesome. And I wish there were more cities full of restaurants that let you bring your own wine.

• The talks and posters were great this year. ALL OF THEM. If I had to pick favorites, I guess I really liked the symposium on perceptual decision-making, and several of the posters in the reward/motivation session on Sunday or Monday afternoon. But really, ALL OF THEM WERE GREAT. So let’s all give ourselves giant gold medals with pictures of brains on them. And then… let’s melt down those medals, sell the gold, and buy some scanners with the money.

The guy in the cubicle next to me is showing signs of leaving work later than me again. Which of course makes him a better human being than me, again. This cannot stand! Lee, if you’re reading this, you’re going down. Today, I stay till midnight! Dinner be damned; I’m going to eat my desk if I have to.

Well, I don’t really hate learning new things. I actually quite like learning new things; what I don’t like is having to spend time learning new things. I find my tolerance for the unique kind of frustration associated with learning a new skill (you know, the kind that manifests itself in a series of “crap, now I have to Google that” moments) increases roughly in proportion to my age.

As an undergraduate, I didn’t find learning frustrating at all; quite the opposite, actually. I routinely ignored all the work that I was supposed to be doing (e.g., writing term papers, studying for exams, etc.), and would spend hours piddling around with things that were completely irrelevant to my actual progress through college. In hindsight, a lot of the skills I picked up have actually been quite useful, career-wise (e.g., I spent a lot of my spare time playing around with websites, which has paid off–I now collect large chunks of my data online). But I can’t pretend I had any special foresight at the time. I was just procrastinating by doing stuff that felt like work but really wasn’t.

In my first couple of years in graduate school, when I started accumulating obligations I couldn’t (or didn’t want to) put off, I developed a sort of compromise with myself, where I would spend about fifteen minutes of every hour doing what i was supposed to, and the rest of the hour messing around learning new things. Some of those things were work-related–for instance, learning to use a new software package for analyzing fMRI data, or writing a script that reinvented the wheel just to get a better understanding of the wheel. That arrangement seemed to work pretty well, but strangely, with every year of grad school, I found myself working less and less on so-called “personal development” projects and more and more on supposedly important things like writing journal articles and reviewing other people’s journal articles and just generally acting like someone who has some sort of overarching purpose.

Now that I’m a worldly post-doc in a new lab, I frankly find the thought of having to spend time learning to do new things quite distressing. For example, my new PI’s lab uses a different set of analysis packages than I used in graduate school. So I have to learn to use those packages before I can do much of anything. They’re really great tools, and I don’t have any doubt that I will in fact learn to use them (probably sooner rather than later); I just find it incredibly annoying to have to spend the time doing that. It feels like it’s taking time away from my real work, which is writing. Whereas five years ago, I would have gleefully thrown myself at any opportunity to learn to use a new tool, precisely because it would have allowed me to avoid nasty, icky activities like writing.

In the grand scheme of things, I suppose the transition is for the best. It’s hard to be productive as an academic when you spend all your time learning new things; at some point, you have to turn the things you learn into a product you can communicate to other people. I like the fact that I’ve become more conscientious with age (which, it turns out, is a robust phenomenon); I just wish I didn’t feel so guilty ‘wasting’ my time learning new things. And it’s not like I feel I know everything I need to know. More than ever, I can identify all sorts of tools and skills that would help me work more efficiently if I just took the time to learn them. But learning things often seems like a luxury in this new grown-up world where you do the things you’re supposed to do before the things you actually enjoy most. I fully expect this trend to continue, so that 5 years from now, when someone suggests a new tool or technique I should look into, I’ll just run for the door with my hands covering my ears…