Timeline for How honest should one be with their students when talking about the realities of academia?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 12, 2017 at 3:25 | comment | added | Wildcard | "However, I never found it appealing when a professor, who I aspire to be like, tells me that I'm not good enough to ever do what they do without additional feedback." This is an exact quote from the accepted answer. Which came first? | |
| Jan 10, 2017 at 2:09 | comment | added | Pete L. Clark | @famargar: "Today in most fields, if you're an excellent postdoctoral you still have 1% chance or so of getting a professor job." Come now. The job market is very tight, but let's not make up statistics. I'll show you statistics for my field and country; see here: ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/…. We graduate (numbers are rounded a bit) 2,000 PhDs per year, and about 650 of these do postdocs. We fill 750 tenure-track positions per year: ams.org/journals/notices/201609/rnoti-p1057.pdf. One in 100 is clearly wrong. | |
| Jan 9, 2017 at 18:25 | comment | added | JeffE | "Not good enough" isn't the problem. The problem is that there are not enough academic positions for everyone that is "good enough", or even for everyone who is absolutely brilliant. | |
| Jan 9, 2017 at 16:30 | comment | added | Compass | This is a great way to send an ultimately unsuccessful prospective medical student on a two-year scenic route. What I needed back then was the truth, not sweet talk. Things are great now, but I shudder to think about what my life would be like had I actually made it in only to flunk out later. | |
| Jan 9, 2017 at 16:19 | comment | added | J.R. | Is that what they say? Or is that what you hear? Personally, I would find a remark such as, "You're not good enough to ever do what I'm doing" to be in poor taste. However, something like, "You're going to have to develop better work habits to make it in this career field" might be a fair warning to a student who consistently turns in shoddy work. | |
| Jan 9, 2017 at 10:29 | comment | added | famargar | It's not about you. Today in most fields, if you're an excellent postdoctoral you still have 1% chance or so of getting a professor job. You may resent it, but the only brutal part of the story is that several current professors would not stand a chance to become professors under nowadays competition. | |
| Jan 9, 2017 at 7:52 | comment | added | Sana | Trust me, professors don't find it appealing to say discouraging things to students, either. However, academia really is very competitive, and if there is a reasonable chance (say 99.9%) that a student will fail, despite the non-appeal, perhaps there is some value in discouraging (but not forbidding!) the student anyway. | |
| Jan 9, 2017 at 7:51 | review | First posts | |||
| Jan 9, 2017 at 8:17 | |||||
| Jan 9, 2017 at 7:47 | history | answered | Marten Casarez | CC BY-SA 3.0 |