Timeline for Careers advice for Ph.D.s without current postdocs or university jobs
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
11 events
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| Apr 24, 2017 at 13:45 | comment | added | Neal | This answer is several years old, but I'd like to add a point. Good industry jobs pay well, give reasonable vacation time, and confine themselves to workdays. One inclined to continue to pursue mathematical research can do so as a hobby, with the added bonus of not needing to chase publication, citation counts, or job-oriented networking. | |
| Apr 1, 2014 at 17:55 | comment | added | Jose Capco | I also think that marketing and connection (unfortunately) plays a big role in what is considered "fantastic". Many mathematician did wrote fantastic "papers" that we know now but didn't during their lifetime. Sure, internet and all does help but we still face discrimination and bias even from the (ironically) mathematical community in this time and age. Still it would be great to work on a fantastic paper while you are idle (or while doing mediocre jobs) because your chances increases (my situation). | |
| Mar 31, 2011 at 11:40 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | Pete, I didn't mean to imply anything about you. I didn't even looked at your list of publication. What I meant to say is that in most cases you can see the quality of a mathematician's work within the first few publications. So a fantastic paper is not likely to come if you didn't have very good papers before. | |
| Mar 31, 2011 at 3:03 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @Najdorf: faced with many things to respond to in your comments, I will content myself to point out that I am 34, not 35. I agree that it's good to be clearheaded about the possibilities for the future, and at every stage of one's career it would be good to reflect on whether it's worthwhile to continue. At every stage, one should ask: "Do I still love math to the exclusion of lots of other stuff?" The answer needs to be yes for an academic mathematical career to be worthwhile and satisfying. | |
| Mar 31, 2011 at 2:55 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | ...But what he has to show for his years of hard work is much less than I do. I believe his success would be greater if his work was more mediocre and mainstream. Math is not like this. About my own work: that's a kind of personal question, but if you're pointing out that there's no Annals/Inventiones paper with my name on it and asking about the future, I would say: sure, I hope to write a really fantastic paper one day like any good fisherman wants to catch a really big fish. But I am in no sense counting on that, and neither are the people who hired and promoted me, I presume. | |
| Mar 31, 2011 at 2:48 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @Yiftach: I agree that one should not hold on to a bad career in the hopes that the fantastic paper which has not yet been forthcoming will come. What I was getting at with this part of my comment is that the mathematical world is in this respect reasonably fair: if you write a fantastic paper, you can expect good things to happen to you. Compare this to other fields. My closest friend from childhood is a musician who has been, in my opinion, at least as talented and productive in his chosen field as I've been in mine.... | |
| Mar 30, 2011 at 19:36 | comment | added | Najdorf | @Pete: Looking at your CV I am not surprised: PhD from Harvard (2003) then assistant prof in UGA at the age of 30 (2006). My point is that your case is very exceptional. Right now you are 35 with a stable job and a decent wage doing what you love. There are people your age for whom another 2-year postdoc that pays 40K/yr is a best case scenario. The median age of getting a PhD in math is 30.3 (2003), I don't have data on total time spent as postdocs before getting a faculty position but I believe it is higher than 3. And these stats tend to be worse among people that the OP describes. | |
| Mar 30, 2011 at 6:55 | comment | added | Yiftach Barnea | Pete it seems to me that you are very optimistic. The chance of writing a fantastic paper out of the blue is very small. For instance, if you look at say your first 5 papers do you feel they are a reasonable sample of the rest of your papers? | |
| Mar 30, 2011 at 6:02 | comment | added | Najdorf | I am not bitter, just realistic. If you write one fantastic paper lots of things might happen. But among graduating PhDs who can't get a postdoc or teaching job how many of them get to write that career changing paper? Lets look at the downsides as well: one might do 3 postdocs in 3 different cities over 8 years. What are the odds of having a stable relationship in those years? What if you hate the cities you have to spend 8 years of your life in? Have you ever looked at the financial loss? By the end of it you will be in your mid 30s making what a BSc in CS makes in his mid 20s. | |
| Mar 30, 2011 at 5:18 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | "There is a temptation to think that by hard work you can compensate for the bad start in your career, resist that temptation." -1: I'm sorry, but this just sounds bitter to me. The mathematical profession is far from perfect, but persistent hard work and talent can be parlayed into a decent career more so in mathematics than in many other walks of life. If you write one fantastic paper, your career will turn around lickety-split. | |
| Mar 30, 2011 at 3:07 | history | answered | Najdorf | CC BY-SA 2.5 |