The Woes of Academia from Two Experts

You like your subject, you're good at it, maybe you even like to teach it, you should get a PhD and become an academic!

Maybe, maybe not.

This might sound ridiculous, but I have recently discovered YouTube and when you click on something on YouTube, apparently you get a lot more links related to whatever you clicked on.

In the course of doing research on STEM academia I came across the following link from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8

Now I get lots of these sorts of videos about how much academia sucks. I agree with much of what I have seen, but I still think that plenty of good research comes from academia (thank you scientists for antibiotics and vaccines for example) but there is a lot of inefficiency as well, often resulting from a herd mentality where everyone follows the latest hot topics and fads.

As far as I can tell the world champion about complaining about Academia is Andy Stapleton and the first video of his I came across was

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl164GrHcM0

and he has many, many, many such videos.

Apparently, I should have been making videos instead of teaching all of those years. The truth is these videos look good and were obviously a lot of work. 

Both of these people are funny and smart and I recommend them if you are planning to pursue doctoral work, especially in STEM.

I was actually quite naive the first time I did thesis work and really thought all of this was done in the Socratic spirit of "Come, let us reason together", so I probably could have benefitted from these videos if they had existed. I was ABD during my first go at a thesis.

The second time I was far less naive about doctoral work and finished, but I was still quite naive about academia in general, so I still could have benefitted from the reality check in these and similar videos.

I will probably add some details in future posts.