Ancestors

Written by Else, Someone on 2025-01-19 at 16:28

Today in "casual reminders": #Academia is not an appropriate place to conduct research. It's corporate environment without corporate benefits. PhD salaries tend to be at least 10x below the market, easily worse.

Example at hand: after four years at the Computer Science department of Aalto.fi, the university prices an hour of my work at EUR18.24 gross or EUR14.00 net, which many consider "a good pay"

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Toot

Written by Else, Someone on 2025-01-19 at 16:37

The value of a university is the community: the opportunity to teach and be taught, the opportunity to collaborate.

Full time employment, vulnerability to a professor's whims, perpetual need to approve attendance of every networking event and to beg for each penny; the proliferation of bureaucrats and intermediaries; the metrics and expectations incentivizing meaningless grind for incremental improvements; these all but hinder one's personal development and poison the academic environment

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Descendants

Written by Else, Someone on 2025-01-19 at 16:50

Now I'll rather work directly with people I trust, people showing the capacity for mutual respect and empathy. Breakthroughs and ambitions can wait: I don't mind starting low and small, but on my own schedule and my own terms. I'll rather that than keep trying to manage an assortment of unbounded egos for the sake of being able to say "I tried, I survived, I get to rightfully call it out"

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Written by Else, Someone on 2025-01-19 at 17:09

I perhaps fail to emphasize the weight of this "good pay" attitude. I feel that all tissues of Academia are oversaturated with anti-materialist values and unhealthy heroic ethos.

Approaching a certain intermediary, advised they can help resolve a conflict, I was met with the "you must first prove (again) you are capable" rhetoric. Prove yourself every step of the journey, for one tenth of what other masters offer. Fellow students adopt this self-harm "it's an honour" rhetoric almost universally

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Written by Peder Bergebakken Sundt on 2025-01-19 at 16:41

@nobody A lot of these developments are IMO a result of the competitive incentives for universities. There are countless tales of work and research being stolen due to the first-author recognition and prestige it brings. A lot of the bureaucracy is there to ensure that the public money is being spent in first improving the ranking of the university rather than the steady scientific discovery and development of their own researchers. Academia should strive for cooperation not competition

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Written by Else, Someone on 2025-01-19 at 16:54

@pbsds Indeed, that's all understandable, and I don't even have any deep thought behind this other than that "Academia in a capitalist environment" is pretty much an oxymoron

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