If you are taking a PhD, especially in the sciences, look away now. It may be stale news but I’ve just seen a graph from a 2010 Royal Society report suggesting that of every 200 people completing a PhD, only seven will get a permanent academic post. Only one will become a professor.
Stale, as in, 70+ years old.
I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking about something that we referred to as the "birth control problem," which was that each professor only had to produce one professor in the next generation, and the rest of us belonged to what could have been referred to as a glut.
I mentioned this to my dad, who got his PhD in the 1950s. He listened to my lament, and said: "Yeah, we knew about that when we were grad students too."
I finished my degree and went straight into industry. Just as my dad did.
But industry also has the same problem with management positions. The real problem is the terrible treatment of postdocs due to a lack of "non-training" positions. Imagine if your boss made 5x as much as you because the only two jobs at your company are intern and manager.
Indeed, post-docs are a whole 'nother ball o' wax. I skipped doing a post-doc altogether. In fact, when I knew that I wasn't headed for academia, then suddenly a lot of the hoops vanished, including the need to have a lot of publications.
Stale, as in, 70+ years old.
I got my PhD in physics, in 1993. At that time, science students were talking about something that we referred to as the "birth control problem," which was that each professor only had to produce one professor in the next generation, and the rest of us belonged to what could have been referred to as a glut.
I mentioned this to my dad, who got his PhD in the 1950s. He listened to my lament, and said: "Yeah, we knew about that when we were grad students too."
I finished my degree and went straight into industry. Just as my dad did.