Realistic Mentors Say 'I'm Telling You This For Your Own Good' (3)

Or: And this has what to do with mentoring?

Part 1: Funding
Part 2: Publishing and Grant Writing
Part 3: Realism

A few further cheering statistics: Of the 30% of sci/eng PhDs who are in academia, only about 50% of them get tenure. (This reminds me of the 5% tenure rate among humanities profs here; they all think they'll get tenure, but 95% of them are wrong.)

And, if you factor in, say, gender?

• After accounting for controls, women are less likely than men to be tenured. Gender differences in tenure rates decline if we exclude from our samples doctorate recipients employed in nontenure-track positions.
• Our analysis suggests that women's chances for earning tenure are influenced by family characteristics, both directly and indirectly through the relation of family characteristics to the likelihood of being employed in tenure-track positions.
• Having young children later in their careers is positively related to women's chances for earning tenure.
• Estimates of gender differences in tenure rates are relatively insensitive to the characteristics of the employer or to the primary work activity.

Oh, and female PhDs in the same academic positions as men earn, on average, $8-20,000 less than the men.

So what does this have to do with mentoring? These are all things your advisor should tell you, and judging from the sample around here, likely hasn't.

I'm not saying: Nobody should go into academia. If you love science and want to be an academic researcher, great! Good for you! Hip hip hurrah. And all that. I'm saying: Nobody should go into academia blind.

A good mentor is realistic. He or she will do their best to help you write a good grant application, or help come up with productive ideas, or just supply decent letters of reference. But your advisor should be straight with you: You have a 16% chance of being funded.

It's the difference between, oh, going somewhere new when you know how far it is, and driving along lost with a burnt-out headlight in the middle of nowhere. In the first case, you can check your speedometer; you know how much gas you need, when you need a tune-up, etc. In the second case you have no idea what you're going to need. It's easier to do hard work when you know how hard it's going to be. If you know it's going to hurt, it hurts less. (Plus, apparently you're less anxious. Hmmm.)

I think part of what happens is the best scientists leave. Anyone who is too frustrated with the Byzantine grant system, the old-boys' club,the long postdocs and the cult-like work culture, leaves. Only thosewhose determination to play the game is greatest become NIH-funded
researchers (or HHMI, or NSF, or whatever). This does not necessarily overlap with the most innovative minds, though sometimes it does. But it surely does not SELECT for it.

What can a mentor do? Teach you how to play the game. Tell you the tricks. Encourage you through the difficult bits, because funding is tough. Tell you straight up you'll have a 1 in 2 chance of getting tenure, and that only 15% of science PhDs end up with tenure. Give you a realistic picture of what your path will be like, and give you enough data to make an informed decision.

Good mentoring is honest. But also: not deluded.

If you want to be faculty and your mentor hasn't talked to you about money, here's what I think you should do: go talk to three junior professors at your school, and at the kind of place you want to work. Ask them how their funding really works. Ask what they wish they'd known X years ago. Ask them how arbitrary they've found the tenure process, and what helps. Then go ask your advisor, armed with a slightly expanded perspective. Get advice on negotiating your salary. Start writing your grant as soon as possible.

Now you'll have some idea of where the bumps will be in your road. At least you'll be warned.

scientiae-carnival

Realistic Mentors Say 'Play the Game (And If You Want To Innovate, Game the System)' (2)

Or: Science Assessment and Publishing: Was It Perhaps Set Up By Monkeys?

Part 1: Funding
Part 2: Publishing and Grant Writing
Part 3: Realism

This whole funding and publishing system largely rewards brick-in-the-wall science (so to speak), because it has continual publishable payouts. It's the moral equivalent of school testing: each PI creates their own little empire, and their people can only work on things that fit into the grant. There is no chasing of interesting asides; I can't work on the bizarre RNA suppression phenomena that I observe, because we're not an RNA lab. Everyone has to pursue a 'publishable story' to get money/ papers/ PhDs. And, to sweeten the pot, papers are frequently rejected if the results are, and I quote, 'Too different and new.'*

As Henry so feelingly expressed in the comments, you have to have preliminary data to get a grant, but you can't get preliminary data without money, so everyone (well, at least almost everyone) fudges their grants (by including a fraction of the results).

And then further grants are judged by your citation index.

"It is fun to imagine song writers being assessed in the way that scientists are today. Bureaucrats employed by DAFTA (Ditty, Aria, Fugue and Toccata Assessment) would count the number of songs produced and rank them by which radio stations they were played on during the first two weeks after release. The song writers would soon find that producing junky Christmas tunes and cosying up to DJs from top radio stations advanced their careers more than composing proper music. It is not so funny that, in the real world of science, dodgy evaluation criteria such as impact factors and citations are dominating minds, distorting behaviour and determining careers."

This is exactly what's happened to biology. Supervisors write grants all the time; almost no senior professors do bench research. They are glorified lab managers, and my boss for one has virtually no contact with the day-to-day operations of the lab. There is no funding for 'risky' projects; many arise as some grad student's (or postdoc's) on-the-side unmentioned thingummy.

The NIH recently started a new award for daring projects and young researchers, but there are only a tiny, tiny number. Meanwhile, the mean age at first NIH grant has risen to 42, and 4% of grants go to people under 35. Yes, that's right: FOUR PERCENT.

Somewhere around 30% of all science and engineering PhDs work in academia. Half of all PhD scientists work in non-science, or only tangentially scientific, jobs- consulting, business, law, whatever. Cause, or effect? Hard to say.

*This happened to someone I know. Or: why many truly groundbreaking papers appeared in PNAS rather than the Unholy Trinity; it publishes any solid work, and with more words; there's even a non-reviewed track, though that's cheating. The Unholies also have enormously high retraction rates, for obvious reasons.

scientiae-carnival

Realistic Mentors Say 'Chances of Funding Are Slim, Check Magic 8 Ball' (1)

Or: How Science Funding (Doesn't) Really Work (What Your Mentor Should Tell You But Probably Hasn't)

Part 1: Funding
Part 2: Publishing and Grant Writing
Part 3: Realism

A friend set me off by sending me this. The current Scientiae's theme is mentoring, so let's talk how to mentor honestly and effectively on careers and money.

The NSF gets about $4.5b for research funding, currently. A good chunk of this goes to permanent and/or large initiatives: telescopes, education projects, grad student training grant. The NSF 'receives approximately 40,000 proposals each year for research, education and training projects, of which approximately 11,000 are funded'.

The NIH gets about $30 billion total, half of which goes to research. Approximately 20% of all grants are funded, including 'competetive' renewals. Only 17% of new grants are funded, but 37% of renewals and 30% of supplements are.* You will note that established labs have a two-fold advantage. Applications are sometimes semi-blinded, but everyone in the field will know who wrote it anyways. This ensures that some labs may coast on their reputations.

'Average grant sizes have grown by 40% since the doubling began, from $275,000 in 1998 to $400,000 today', which is part of why- ironically- success rates are lower now that the NIH has more money.

Equally ironically, more money doesn't correspond to more productivity, in part because papers now have six figures and ten pages of supplemental, and in part because of... inefficiency? Expensive clinical trials? 60% overhead?

At Snooty U, we get over $300 million from the NIH alone, and 90% if it goes to the med school. Internal med all by its little lonesome gets 25%, and Psych gets 15%. Biology gets the remaining 10%, and another $180 million goes straight into the university's pockets. Per year. (By the way, this handy little tool will show you your tax dollars at work.)

When Leo Szilard was asked how to slow science, he said:

"You could set up a foundation with an annual endowment of thirty million dollars. Research workers in need of funds could apply for grants, if they could make a convincing case. Have ten committees, each composed of twelve scientists, appointed to pass on these applications. Take the most active scientists out of the laboratory and make them members of these committees. …First of all, the best scientists would be removed from their laboratories and kept busy on committees passing on applications for funds. Secondly the scientific workers in need of funds would concentrate on problems which were considered promising and were pretty certain to lead to publishable results. …By going after the obvious, pretty soon science would dry out. Science would become something like a parlor game. …There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashions would get grants. Those who wouldn't would not."

You know the old joke: 'What's a camel?' 'A horse designed by a committee.'


*My skepticism about the competetiveness derives in part from the supplement my lab got last year. We wrote a two-page thing about how we wanted a super-fancy electronically controlled brick baking oven with automatic feedback and bells on. We got $200,000. Noncompetetive.

**Or: why many groundbreaking papers appeared in PNAS rather than the Unholy Trinity; it publishes any solid work, and with more words; there's even a non-reviewed track, though that's cheating. The Unholies also have enormously high retraction rates, for obvious reasons. (Edited: Whoops, this one belongs with the next part...)

scientiae-carnival