As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc.
I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, but it’s not obvious to me that would help. First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. Second, the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.) I’m not sure if it even is burnout or a deeper issue.
Therapy and medication has only been marginally helpful. I’m really not sure what to do at this point.
I suspect there are many jobs you would do, but you have to allow yourself to let go of the dreams, the ambitions, the identity you have built in academia.
A few years ago, almost seven, I decided to leave academia, after a PhD and many years as a post doc, more than 50 journal papers published, awards and recognition in my field. I loved doing research, writing papers and thinking about the new advances I would make.
Why the change of mind and career? First, it seemed that my time as a researcher had passed, and that I was becoming an old postdoc with little appeal to universities and research institutions. Second, I was growing tired of earning little money. Third, it was beginning to look like I was doing similar research to what I was doing 5 years earlier, and I had a feeling that it would be the same research I would be doing 5 years down the road.
I started interviewing for positions in (tech) industry, got a monetary offer 5 times what I was making as a senior postdoc, started a new career, and never looked back. The last part is not entirely true. At times, I look back and regret the last 5 years I spent in academia. I could have had a faster career in tech, earned much more money, and would have met bright and motivated people sooner. The world is full of interesting technical problems that need to be solved.
This sounds like you're describing a system that is a failure but that the solution is not to fix the system but to give up and do something else. Can we not fix academia? Is the signal of so many people, especially in CS, abandoning academia for industry not as clear of a sign as you can get? I feel crazy because it feels like everyone either does not want to admit the system is broken or will admit it but not want to do anything about it (which maybe is simply fatigue).
First, a postdoc on the way out of academia is not going to fix academia.
Second, how is the system broken? There are mismanaged resources, some nepotism (in the U.S., a lot of nepotism if we look at countries other than the U.S. or the like), some research questions that are (wrongly) favored, but it doesn't change the fact that many more PhDs with academic career ambitions are being produced than there are (and will be) positions available. And this is not just an academia problem: the same mismatch between supply and demand is found in many other creative and aspirational careers, think actors, singers, sports. Only a small percentage of those who want that life can get it, and those who are left out are often frustrated by the perceived unfairness of life. But that does not change the fact that many aspiring creatives, because of that massive mismatch between supply and demand, will not be able to pursue those careers.
Sure, more permanent research positions could be thought of instead of forcing careers through the very narrow bottleneck of tenure track positions, but the vast majority of PhDs with academic ambitions (at least 8 out 10) will not have the opportunity to make that career, and they are (or are themselves) being bread-crumbed for years and years hoping that their dreams will, one day, come true. But they won't come true. And, as soon as they find another fulfilling occupation, they will find out it was not a real dream anyway, just a dream they thought they had.
I want to d my best to respond, but can you help me determine my audience? That way I can be clear? Are you coming from inside or outside academia? If inside, what field? If outside, have you gone through a graduate program? Which decade? No need to give highly specific answers, I'm just trying to get some additional context to best respond. There are problems more visible to those inside and often nuanced and problems that are invisible to outside.
I was referring to "system broken" with respect to many PhDs with ambitions of an academic career having to leave academia because there are not enough tenure-track positions available. With respect to that problem, it would be equivalent to say that "Hollywood is broken" because many talented aspiring actors cannot find stable work in films and tv shows. It is a supply and demand mismatch problem.
I was not referring to the paper review and publication process, funding, grants, teaching etc.
Your audience is someone with a PhD in the biological sciences, with more than 10 years of postdoc experience (before leaving for greener pastures a few years ago, after having realized that I was not interested in tenure-track positions anymore and in any case no position had been offered to me) in Europe and in the US, who won grants, awards, competitive scholarships, and have dozens of first-author papers published in some of the most prestigious disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals.
I see. I don't think this makes the system broken and I don't think a large portion of people going into industry is a bad thing. At the end of the day, schooling, even at the PhD level, is training. I am not concerned that we do not have a high retention rate, though I am concerned that the retention is not targeting the best of the best (but that's a different conversation). I do not think this is what most academics are referring to when they mention a broken system.
My complaint about the system being broken is more about the incentive structures and metrics that are used within the academic setting. This is the more frequent usage of this phrasing that I see, so I was quite surprised at the mention of your background. The problem I am more concerned about is the entire existential question of academia. It is being treated like a business but academia is explicitly about not being subject to such things like a short term return on investment. I think an important aspect of academia is being able to do risky and low level research where the returns are going to be years or decades. So I think we have a broken system when we are trying to perform high pace output with high impact. I simply do not think you can be fast and revolutionary at the same time (at least consistently). It seems that h-index is of greater concern and this is a compounding metric that does not requisite the highest quality work but rather is more dependent upon frequency and highly influenced by publicity.
In my mind, the system is broken when the it is not encouraging academics to be the best scientists they can be. When the system encourages bad science and when a noisy process is held up as if it is the arbiter of truth (journals and conferences are even given the misnomer of "peer review" when this, as you know, takes place before and after venue publication and peers still review "preprint" works that never end up getting "published." The whole language is misleading when you break it down). I'm sure a lot of my feelings come from working in ML where the signal to noise ratio of venue publications is exceptionally low (nearly all CS domains target conferences rather than journals and so there is little to no rebuttal period. The number of submissions in each conference is well over 10k now and you cannot assume a reviewer has domain knowledge in your subfield), but I do believe that it still parallels other domains and that the problem is growing not shrinking. I think the system is broken when we discourage foundational research and the pursuit of knowledge for scientific value. Certainly something is broken when we hire a ton of administrative staff and the administrative tasks given to researchers only increases.
I disagree: just found an edtech startup for tertiary education or (post-)graduate level research.
Honestly if I knew how to do this I would do it. How do I convince a bunch of billionaires to hand me money to do very fundamental research? Dream would be to have it be very open too and hire people from multiple domains but keep a high focus on being nuance and detail oriented. Honestly, I don't think companies like OpenAI are going to end up being the first to AGI because they get caught in the profit stages and so just pivot to say that more data and more compute is all you need. Maybe it is true, but I doubt it. And most certainly there are other ways considering a 3 pound piece of meat does it using less than a kW per day.
Do an MVP in your spare time.
I guess if you have a normal programming job in most countries (even in countries where programmers are not paid that well), you will likely be able to pay the bills for, say, server renting, domains, ...
For things that you will do likely badly by yourself like design drafts (if you are bad at visual design), ask some friends whether they would be willing to do it for you in exchange for something that you could do for them (so that you don't have to spend money).
Start with kinds of research that can be done with little money, but have a possible insanely high impact.
Iterate until your platform cannot be ignored anymore.
I don't often hear people complaining that sports, music, theatre are broken because of this supply/demand mismatch. (People certainly complain about other problems, e.g. streaming music royalties). It's generally accepted that it's a rare and special thing to make a good living in those industries. Why do we view academia differently? Is it because it seems more like "work"?
When I was still a PhD student, my advisor lamented that he couldn’t find postdocs to hire because big tech was paying them more for the same role with minimal constraints. If that kept going for a while, I imagine it’d put pressure on at least some parts of academia (CS and engineering don’t expect you to do a series of postdocs like biology does, and pure math has their own system of seniority I only know a little about). The money dried up though.
I literally went through this recently with someone in my department. They wanted to know what professors did similar research to me at R1 universities of comparable rank. I told them no one and they didn't believe me. I sent them an annotated version of a bibliography to a survey paper I had recently written, writing down where each person worked. I just don't think they understand that right now, as an intern for a big tech company I am making more money than some of our junior professors. When I can get a full time position my cash in hand compensation goes up, plus equity and more benefits (like 401k). Who the hell would go into academia? You have lower pay, fewer resources, and more bureaucratic BS. There's lots of bureaucracy in industry too, don't get me wrong, but it's easier to deal with when you're getting paid more.
A post doc position wants me to move across the country, into a major city, and pay me $50k/yr for a position with low growth opportunities and where I will have to move again in another few years? No thanks.
If it is work that some industry is highly interested in, and this industry has deep pockets, it is very hard to compete with it in academia. Look for more fundamental questions to research (there exist insanely many, just don't follow the hype) that can be investigated with a lot less ressources.
Fwiw, this is the route most academics take, but it is still not easy to publish in this domain. I've seen workshop papers get rejected from very clearly academic work because they don't use real world or large datasets. I've seen theory papers get rejected because they don't have experiments. Yes, read that last one again. And mind you, these big companies also do a lot of theory and foundational work too. The process is just noisy.
I think having trouble finding a postdoc is a good outcome of the process, the incentives in this case are working properly. Postdoc positions were designed as a short bridge between a PhD and a tenure-track position, not as a long-term crutch for people who are not ready to leave academic research.
When postdoc positions first were created, they were illusive and of high prestige. Then the idea got abused to add labor for professors to varying degrees depending on the field.
We are in the big science phase of biology using AI. Individual labs and researchers will be hard pressed to compete but the worse part is the lack of original thinking.
The problem with academia is basic mathematics. In a system where there are a fixed number of tenured professorships, where each tenured professor has the job for life, each professor should produce only a single tenure-track PhD student in their entire career.
OK, so to deal with attrition and other unforeseen circumstances, perhaps 10 tenured professors should produce 11 tenure-track PhD students. But definitely not the situation we have now, where each professor produces dozens of PhD students in the course of their career who go on to attempt to get tenure.
The people trying to get tenure don't want to admit the system is broken, because that would be to admit they just weren't good enough to get tenure.
The people who have tenure have every incentive to keep it going, because it means they have an army of highly-skilled and highly-motivated postdocs willing to work long hours for peanuts for a decade or two.
It's a bit worse than that. Prestige matters a lot too. General rule of thumb is that you can only apply to a position at a university of equal or lesser ranking than the one you were previously at. (obviously can still climb the ladder, in many ways, but this is a strong pattern all throughout the process from High School to Tenure) You're exactly right about the number of positions problem too. Because clearly the result of this is that the quality and methods from higher ranking institutions diffuse into lower ranking ones. Hell, when I was at a community college I had a professor from Harvard and several from Berkeley. Prestigue doesn't make sense in a system like that because you can't maintain an edge when you are literally telling the people you trained to go work somewhere else.
I think you're exactly right about the reasons people keep quiet. But this is not helpful to anyone, especially the universities. They are certainly losing a lot of money and even prestige from all of this. You don't make Nobel laureates with publish or perish. But no one wants to shake things up, which is weird because academia is __explicitly__ supposed to be the place where you can focus on things that aren't profit driven. Or at least short ROI. It is a loss for the country too, as it means a lot of academics move away from low risky TRL research and follow a model much closer to industry research (which is profit driven) Historically industry has (generally) relied on academic research doing low TRL and then they bring it to mid and high TRL.
We've lost sight of what we're trying to accomplish.
I just wanted to comment regarding the rule you mentioned and wanted to say that I was always told that, unofficially, you can always move up but only a tier at a time and you don’t want to move down if you can avoid it because then you likely have to move back up. The calculus does get harder though the longer you’re in the game — you might elect to move down because you’re significant other gets a promotion or you don’t want to uproot your family, etc.
For sure, they aren't hard rules. There is also the aspect that locations matter to some people. It's worth noting though that universities have a unique negotiating token, in that you can also negotiate for a job for your partner as well. I think universities are often forced into this because of the natural location constraints.
I think they may have been commenting a bit more about the incentive structure and that any "prestigious researcher" or institution typically got there via questionable ethics, etc.
Not enough people have left yet. Until enough people leave that academia has a hard time finding talent that it needs, as far as they're concerned there's no problem.
That's going to be a long time. If by talent you mean people who can do the job. But that doesn't fit the story that universities sell, which is about learning from the cream of the crop.
In the academic system, positions are globally accessible and therefore hyper-competitive. Moreover, headcount grows slowly as it depends on funding and attrition through retirement/death. As such, demand outstrips supply. Strip everything extraneous away and that's the heart of it.
If enough post-docs leave, it will reduce the demand for tenure-track positions. Eventually fewer PhDs will become post-docs, further decreasing demand.
This is true for a surprisingly large number of people. It's very easy to lose time in a post doc that's not either fun science or advancing your career in a high ROI way. Many post docs don't have the experience and diversity of perspective required to recognize this trap, and nobody around them is incentivized to help. This is true whether you're planning to stay in academia or not.
This is one of the reasons I stopped informally mentoring postdocs. It was an exercise in frustration. It was like telling someone who had only had one husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend in their life (and now has left or is leaving) that there were many other people in the world with whom they could have been as happy as they were with their ex (willy-nilly), and even much happier, if only they had allowed themselves to experience their new world.
"They (the research/partner) are all I have loved in my life," "I can't imagine myself with anyone else/with any other job." The arguments were remarkably similar and equally frustrating to deal with.
There is only so much one can do for people in that situation. They need to close the chapter themselves. Their Stockholm Syndrome [1] is a mix of helplessness and Sunken Cost fallacy [2].
People invest heavily, are encouraged to believe by the power structure, and suffer as they slowly begin to see that they have been beguiled (scammed).
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
[2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
Well I should clarify. There are jobs that I can do certainly, but very few that I’ve thought would given me the internal satisfaction of what academia used to give me (and I think could give me again). Before I was hired as a postdoc I applied for various research scientist positions at places that would still let me publish, but then all the hiring freezes happened. Whether that counts as academia is in the eye of the beholder but at least they pay better.
The only other gig I can think of that would excite me is being a statistical analyst for a baseball team. I know more than one person who made that transition after getting their PhD. Something else is probably out there, too, but I haven’t discovered it for myself yet.
My comment is not meant to be advice-column material, but I get the impression that as long as you think that “[there are] very few [jobs] that I’ve thought would give me the internal satisfaction of what academia used to give me," you are unlikely to resolve or leave behind your current frustration. This is not an invitation to try all the jobs for which you might be qualified, but until you have tried some of them, you cannot know.
Before I left academia, although I was a fairly well-rounded person in general, looking back at what I thought at the time, I didn't have a clue about the tech industry, the private sector, the tools used, the money I could make, the weekends spent doing things that weren't trying again to run a simulation model that no one was interested in anyway.
But, as I said in another comment, it's like listening to someone say "I'll never find a man like him again" while you think that that man, who you know, is for you in the bottom 15% of men with IQ>70. You are incredulous, you can't understand how someone could say that, but here we are. She has to broaden her perspective to understand what you now know, and all the words said in the meantime will be forgotten, like wind in the pines.
Hello, I'm in a similar sort of transition position. May I ask where you applied (US/UK/EU-based?) and what your main experience was in adapting your academic CV to industry?
(Feel free to reach me by email or matrix too)
Academia is a recipe for burnout. It’s like pro sports, unless you are the top 1% of the top 1% you may be able to keep eeking by but will never be in a comfortable position. There is always more to do and you do not get paid well for your time. You are surrounded by people who pour their lives into their work and it will be expected of you. The culture is extremely toxic and dysfunctional.
Your lack of imagination as to another job is part of the trap. Work can be enjoyable, pay well, and you can still have a personal life, but academia sells itself as the only possible trajectory for a certain type of person. Most people leave academia and many of them find meaningful work outside of that.
The problem in Academia is that its too crowded. With crowding, in many fields, the de facto way to progress has become to play corridor and department politics. I know completely clueless and incompetent researchers that made an effortless transition to faculty positions at top 10 universities, whereas some great postdocs were stuck forever, burnt out, and left. Ironically, some of said postdocs did the work the others took credit for in order to be promoted.
Some fields are more prone to this kind of behavior and power structures than others. Plus, in the past, it was much easier for recent PhD graduates to progress to tenure-track positions, without needing to do a postdoc (or many!) in between.
Actually, some countries have established regulations to try to prevent postdoc abuse, as faculty is typically interested in getting them to do all work, giving them little credit, etc. Some of my postdoc friends were supervising students, designing studies, and writing grants but their names were never officially on paper! Their PI used this as a way to getting them trapped. Without e.g. supervision experience, they would not be able to move to tenure-track positions, thereby getting stuck with him (as cheap labor) forever.
I've seen this, and it's happened to me. I'm at a much lower ranking uni and we partner with higher ranking unis and I can tell you that I know quite a number of people at top 5 universities that do not know what an expectation value, probability density, or covariance is. They get attached to my papers but I do not get attached to their papers, even if I put in more work than the reverse situation (I can't tell you what some of my coauthors did). I wrote an entire NSF grant, that we won, and my advisor told me I only played a small role. Even if true, that should be a red flag that the system is broken. Why is this so much about politics?
What we're seeing is the meritocracy-metric paradox. Where metrics are literally the biggest killers of any meritocracies. Every metric can be hacked and the more reliance you place upon them, the more they will be. The problem is people think metrics perfectly align with objectives and that this alignment is static throughout time. Neither of those is true and it is baffling to me that people either aren't willing to admit it or are willing to and then just continue as if it didn't. The world is fuzzy and metrics are just guides. I thought the difference between humans and machines was that we could generalize instructions to the intent and not the letter.
In bureaucracies like this, the fish inenvitably rots from the head. The people who offer the faculty positions are incompetent or indifferent. And the people who hired those people are incompetent or indifferent.
As such, it's a mess that literally can't be solved from within, it needs to be solved by the administration, and the boards who appoint them. The tenure system means it'll take generations to resolve.
Academia in the U.S. has seen systemic issues like this in the past (see: eugenics). Unfortunately the implication is that it'll continue to get worse until it's mostly made better by people retiring.
What do you mean by eugenics? That academics studied eugenics? Or that eugenics was widely popular among academics?
I guess the pendulum always swings to the extreme other direction. Today, the more disadvantaged your intersectional identity, the better your prospects in academia.
That eugenics was widely popular among academics, especially in certain disciplines like Psychology (the founding members of the APA were all eugenicists).
As an example I'm familiar with, the first generations of academics at Stanford University were socially-active eugenicists (see the founding President, David Starr Jordan, who hired people like Ellwood Cubberley and Lewis Terman).
Many buildings, awards, dorms, department chairs are still named after these people.
I agree, and I think that is the essence of the meritocracy-metric paradox. Those that hacked the metric become those in charge. I think that only reinforces the idea of metric hacking. I really think this concept is playing out at large and not just academia.
I think there is a kind of grief associated with growing up that people don’t talk about. When you are young and inspired it seems like life is long and you can do anything, branching paths with unlimited doors. Once you're an adult, your past choices narrow down your future paths, and your sense of age starts to set in. In some way you mourn the paths not taken. This is called mortality, and can be a nasty combo with other depressive factors.
As you get older, you realize some doors not yet stepped through are now closed, and less doors are opened by others for you. Life can start to feel like a hallway with the investable at the end. While less doors are open now, life is still very free. You may now be able to see decades into your past, but you still cannot see into your future. There are many open doors still hidden, they just take a bit more searching. Good news, you are an adult with years of life experience, you can go find them.
I need a support group for this idea. Can't seem to accept it and walk through some doors, abandoning the other paths. It's sparked a major depression in me.
I just wanted to say thank you for this comment, it helped a lot of with some general anxieties plaguing me lately.
Coincidentally, I was rewatching the first season of True Detective last night and they were talking about this in the show. I almost turned it off because it was too real for me at the moment.
I totally agree with your comment. I should add that, as the Romans used to say quite some time ago, 'Audentes fortuna juvat' (fortune favors the bold). With this I mean to say that some more optimistic and unmindful attitude usually helps in finding those doors, or at least in forgetting the ones that did not eventually open.
As I have grown older I have come to see a similar effect not just in my own life but in the shape of the world around us; humanity has closed the doors to certain kinds of futures I once hoped and worked for, and "mourning" is a good term for those feelings. There are many open doors remaining in humanity's future, to be sure, but the scope of change seems narrower than it once did, since the bright new possibilities of the future always seem to get swallowed up by the ugly messes left over from the past.
Before I left academia, I felt that I would be a terrible failure. The people I was surrounded by looked at leaving the academy as a sad admission of defeat. In retrospect, I think this was largely a reflection of their own insecurity and lack of perspective because most had never been outside of the academic bubble.
Life on the outside is different. Having been gone over a decade, there are some things I miss and that are definitely hard to find in other environments. On the other hand, I feel immeasurably better about myself not having to beg to toil away on projects of questionable significance that happen to have funding and be stuck in the precarity of borderline poverty in the service of supposedly higher ideals.
It’s quite telling that you never see people in industry long for their time in academia.
Eh I think there’s a good chance they’re less vocal about it. My father is a lawyer and he chose between going into a legal career and doing a PhD in philosophy. If you asked him, he’d tell you he wished he didn’t latter now that he’s nearing the end of his legal career. I think that 1) there’s a smaller percentage of people that made the choice between academics and industry and chose industry 2) they’re not vocal about it for one reason or the other. Most of the people I went to undergrad with whom I thought could succeed in academia had zero interest in doing research at any level.
Academia is definitely not for everyone, but when I weighed my options I am happy I did my PhD regardless of how I feel at the moment. It’s a peculiar thing for peculiar people and the attraction does not correlate with intelligence.
I certainly do. Plenty of people do.
What things do you miss in academia that you didn't find in industry?
Not sure it would help, but it may: adopt a rescue animal, if you're a pet oriented person, and don't already have one, and it may jar your perspectives in multiple dimensions as to what is fun, what is entertaining, what is meaningful.
That worked for me when i felt like you describe.
I do love animals, but I’ve always been intimidated about the responsibility of being the person solely in charge of that animal’s life. I’ve always struggled with routines and such (I found out in adulthood I have ADHD).
I have thought about it lately, though. Maybe having that responsibility will cause other things to click into place? However, I’m worried about it not working and impacting a life beyond my own.
Your concern is more of a sign that you'd be a responsible pet parent. I don't have experience with dogs (rescue or not), but caring for a cat is relatively straightforward and can bring lots of joy. Writing this with a cat sleeping on my lap, who showed up in my backyard a few years ago.
Caring for two cats is even easier because if their human is boring because of concentration, they can entertain each other. Works here, and with rescue dog in the mix too.
Also, if the dog is fond of walks and hikes etc, that’s possibly super healthy for a break from sitting and working. As the joke goes, "Ask me how I know." :)
Only do this if you're serious. Depending on the animal you could very well just add another negative thing to your life. There are upsides, sure, but there's nothing that feels great about walking into your bedroom and getting a nasty look from an animal you put hours upon hours of work in per week for because they don't like humans.
burnout = depression
You are right, but the hard part for me is determining the causality here. Am I depressed because I’m burnt out, or am I feeling burnt out because I’m depressed?
I suspect treatment will be much the same in either case.
I usually try to avoid engaging in armchair psychology, but "the burnout has penetrated so many facets of my life (various hobbies, etc.)" makes me think it's depression causing the burnout rather than the other way around.
I thought I was burnt out and just recently found out I had an undiagnosed chronic illness, so that’s a possibility too…
Man, I feel you. I'm not an academic, but I'm just feeling out of breath and defeated lately. I grew up loving to build software. Reading programming books, keeping up with tech. It's the closest thing to work + passion that I think I've ever felt. Joined the military to get out of my hometown. Worked in whatever field I could remotely relate to while I finished my BS:CS. Moved from non-IT fields into whatever IT-related field I could hoping it'd get my resume closer to what I wanted to do.
Now I'm just pigeon-holed into some boring bureaucratic IT admin gig with just enough perks to keep me around, and big enough dollar signs to prevent me from starting over in a junior capacity. Then I see all of the discussions from people that don't enjoy development after just a short time, get laid off, etc - and it makes the reality that I'm just destined to rot bored to death for 40hrs a week for the next 25+ years all the more real.
I also realize I am extremely fortunate compared to plenty of others, but that "tug" telling me I was destined for much more gets stronger the older I get.
Incredibly relatable
I think that one of the problems of us humans is that we want to accomplish something, we tell our self storys about our self how we should have become that or done that. But in the end it really doesn't matter, even if you were Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman or Marie Curie, in a few billion years none of all the work any human ever did, everything accomplished, won't matter, no one will be here to remember anymore. I think the best one can do is to look at this world with some sort of an observer mindset and be curious about the things happening in this world, try not to judge the things happening, just think "Oh, that's interesting, I wonder why it is like that.". And of course, always try to be friendly to other living beings, even if there might be no afterlife after the end of the universe and you can't trade in your browniepoints anymore, ther is no excuse for making other peoples life worse than it already is. ;)
That's the alarm system telling you to wake up and start looking around for a change. For whatever reason, we seem to have a meta-cognitive system that watches for stagnation and creates unease when it is detected. Am convinced that you can't disable it entirely, but you can self-mediate or ignore it. Either route is not great, as you're aware on some level that you're refusing your destiny (of sorts).
I think about this quote a lot:
"i keep re-encountering with a shock the way that most people do not know, at all, that the problem the entire universe is devoted to, that it crashes us into walls, throws us off cliffs, tortures and murders us to try to solve, is that of escaping local maxima"
- https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1248861223501942784?re...
Thus, I'd implore you to stick with the feeling and use it as impetus to change for something new.
I'm in a similar boat. Not a postdoc yet, but will be starting a postdoc in July (assuming I graduate in May, which I'm on track for).
I've always been interested in the intersection of AI and interactive storytelling. Worked in the game industry for a while, then came back for a PhD when ML really started taking off.
With the current frenzied climate in NLP research, I just feel demotivated. Mainly because I think my research outlook is very different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets undervalued or ignored entirely.
I spent over a year and a half on my last published research project [1], and it's been largely ignored. Despite having strong reviews after rebuttal, the paper was relegated to the Findings of EMNLP, likely because my research was video game related.
I'm usually the kind of person that focuses on things because I care about them, rather than because others do, but the reality is that hiring decisions in academia (or even industry) require that others value your work. If I truly thought I could do research I cared about and get paid a living, without having to worry about whether others accepted it, I think I'd be much more motivated.
[1]: https://pl.aiwright.dev
My site is a static site hosted on sourcehut, which is having an outage. If it's still down, try https://web.archive.org/web/20240110040908/https://pl.aiwrig...
I started my postdoc in August, but the burnout started earlier, a few months before writing my dissertation. Congrats on finishing your degree (almost)!
I also have kind of esoteric interests in my field but it mostly hasn’t bothered me. It certainly doesn’t help with matters though when sometimes I’m trying to motivate myself and go “what’s the point?”
I will say that one thing I’ve learned as a researcher is that it’s hard to know what people will and will not like. I’ve received compliments on some of my least favorite papers I’ve written. My advisor always told this story about how, as a student, he won a best paper award for a paper that almost decided not to publish because they thought the results weren’t strong enough.
You're not alone.
One of my first papers was in normalizing flows and I focused on a niche area in there (if I said, I'd dox myself. Even this limits the search a lot). Reviewers came back and asked why my images weren't as good as SOTA GANs and just rejected. Half my experiments were on density estimation... The other reviews said I should be applying my methods to GANs instead, but that wasn't even possible because I was explicitly exploiting the distributional properties at each flow step.
My most cited paper is unpublished and the reviews I got back were about why someone would want to train from scratch instead of tuning a large model. Why we cared about such things as small number of parameters or how to quickly train models without overfitting because "bigger models generalize better."
Fwiw, I'd have no issue accepting your work. It looks useful, it advances domain knowledge, and is clearly written. I think a lot of people lose sight that experiments are proxies and that the tools we are working with are more general than the specific applications we demonstrate.
I'm in a similar position. At the end of my PhD I feel like I want to drop out. I do ML research and I just lost faith in the academic system.
Research is my absolute favorite thing to do but everything else surrounding it I just absolutely hate and it feels draining and worthless. Ideas get dismissed without explanations (even after asking), publication process is incredibly noisy and when you get a nonsensical review (I can share) people just say "shit happens" or "weird" and then it happens again and again, and advisors and managers want weekly updates but visible progress in a project goes through wild cycles of lots of work with little to nothing to show vs low work where it looks like lots of progress is made (e.g. tuning models). It just feels like hell. I'm always thinking about my projects because they sincerely interest and captivate me but I feel like the systems we have built around what is entirely a creative process is structured for routine work. I'm being asked to do things that have never been done before -- and I love this, it is the ultimate puzzle -- but how the fuck do you expect me to give accurate ETAs and to do this 3-5 times a year and launch ground breaking work with some 2080Ti nodes and maybe one A100 node? How ground breaking of work can it be if it is done in a few months? I am supposed to do this by myself and compete against a team of Google engineers? This publish or perish paradigm is absolute bullshit and we're at a point where fucking Nvidia asked for a new PhD to have 8 top conference 1st author publications.
Therapy and medication definitely help, and I were I not to start them I, without a doubt, would have dropped out. But I think we need to have a very serious discussion about the systems that we have in place and how we're continually shooting ourselves in the foot with this fucking rat race. Maybe I'm just a bad researcher, because it does seem that there are a lot of highly successful people. But if I'm being honest, when I talk to those people I can't see anything that they are doing different other than opportunities/resources and possibly better mentoring. There are of course people that stand out and I can definitely see their genius when talking to them, but for the vast majority of researchers I really can't tell what makes the difference between making it and breaking it. I can't tell what makes a paper work and not work.
I really just want to spend my days reading math books, hacking away at ML systems, and trying to understand what this whole thing around consciousness, intelligence, and sentience is. But I don't know how to make this life. It isn't academia and it isn't industry. So how do I be born rich? Can we get to post scarcity yet?
Sounds like we are in a similar boat :-/
I'm really sorry to hear that. It's fucking rough. But I'd encourage you to speak up if you do agree about the systematic issues. I think the existing momentum is strong and because there is enough success most people do not feel the need to improve the system and failures (like me) blame it on themselves (like me). But I think I can be a failure AND the system can be bad too.
I think this is something… I dunno, it ought to be obvious, but maybe we miss it in the general public? The tenure system is partially there because it is actually good to give smart people the latitude to screw around and play with problems.
And good ideas have the element of play. If academics have to retreat to complexity, nobody will be able to follow…
The tenure system doesn't work like most people think it does. It is not "I made it, now I can just do whatever I want without getting fired." You still have publication quotas and you end up having more bureaucratic work. Even with all the admins that schools have hired, there is just more work for professors.
And? The world in complex. Simplicity is the goal, but it is the simplest description that also adequately explains the thing. That's not going to end up being very simple and there's a reason you see physicists learning very complex mathematics. It should absolutely make sense that complexity takes over as we advance our knowledge as a species because the simple things are easier to understand and are understood first. If things are not getting more complex over time, that's a sign that we are either really fucking dumb (having missed many simple things) or that we simply understand things with higher resolution. Simplicity is for the Luddites (this is literally a key part of that history).
You could try going on an adventure, ideally a real one that is a little bit dangerous.
That does always seem to work in the movies
As academic with the tenure job, I don't think it gets easier with the tenure -- you'll have to do more non-research stuff, admin, teaching, supervisions, grading, grant writing etc. (some people like it, but I just prefer research)
I do have burn-out certainly that appeared after I had a faculty job for a few years. That mostly has affected my overtime research work, which previously would take most of my free-time, but now I try to spend more of my free time on hobbies.
My advice is that unless you can overcome burnout somehow, not to try tenure positions in the states, because there you'll have to work really hard to get to tenure. I think positions in Europe tend to be often tenured from the beginning (i.e. UK) so it may be easier.
(throwaway account)
Yeah I’m not sure I’d go the tenure route anyway. I’d rather do research than manage people doing research on my half-baked ideas. Fortunately, in my field, there’s options to publish as an industry research. Unfortunately, those jobs dried up last year along with all the other tech jobs when I was searching.
I guess the tricky thing (maybe it suggests it’s not burnout but some other source of depression) is that I haven’t been motivated by my hobbies either. It’s been hard to find much joy in anything as of late.
As someone who initially started my career in academia I've been much happier since leaving. There are opportunities across industrial R&D that are far saner in terms of compensation and while they are slightly more restrictive in terms of what you work on there are still chances to do interesting research.
There definitely are, but to be honest, my passion is research at low TRL. Industry is saner, but they necessarily work at a higher TRL because they are not just profit motivated, but need to make profits from your research in 6 months to 3 years.
There are a couple of approaches to life I have used at various times:
1. Have fun. Limit productive activities to 2 hrs a day.
2. Go all out on a new idea. Succeed or fail.
If there is no risk of failure, you are really in mode 1. 2 is only possibly for short bursts, upto 1-2 weeks. if you feel burnt out, it’s time for zone 1 for sure.
It might help a lot by giving you a break from thinking about the kinds of things you currently think about a lot. Seriously consider it. You don't know what you don't know. Perspective helps.
Not relevant -- you can come back to research later, and when you're burn out or depressed you inherently have a hard time imagining how new things could be fun
Well, as a researcher you can appreciate that there is one way to find out -- experiment. But if it started with work and later spread, work probably had a lot to do with it. Besides, burnout is really common in academia.
Personally, I never made it very far in academia. Never even finished out undergrad. That said, I'm now at a point in my life where I'm mostly surrounded by Businesses Majors and I do truly miss my time as a philosophy student, despite being very burnt out when I left.
Academia is a weird field, that, in my experience, is wonderful to have connections to, but for the most part is exhausting. Frankly I think things can be more exhausting when you love them enough to be consumed by them.
Even now, I have projects that I work on in my free time that I'm so engaged and miss sleep for, and while I'm proud of whatever is produced, it does often lead me feeling frustrated and burnt out. It helped me quite a bit to start setting boundaries for myself, as in: I'm going to work on this project until this time, and then I'm taking time to disconnect from it. Even though it can be frustrating to interrupt a flow state, it's still important to take care of ones own needs.