young PhDs in the workplace

[Nigel Goodwin]

Glasgow would be good! 60 miles up the road! he could get home weekends to clean my car

He could get home to BORROW your car

 

[KeepItSimpleStupid]

One of the "bright" EE students wanted to know if he could jump his car using an extension cord?

At least he asked.

 

[ghostman11]

One of the "bright" EE students wanted to know if he could jump his car using an extension cord?

At least he asked.

It would probably jump with 3 phase

 

[mdanh2002]

Break's my heart to see something i worked hard for to obtain, and actually meant something special (i did mine in 1993), has now become a commodity to be brought and sold. Only the very best of university's, such as St Andrews, Oxford,Cambridge, MIT over there and a few other's , are in a position where they can apply strict criteria for entrance.

This reminds me of my time at university. I did not get a scholarship back then and have to take loans from the school to pay the tuition fees and worked for a few years after graduation to pay back. Worked hard to earn my degree, and even harder on modules where I really had an interest in. Most of my programming/hardware knowledge nowadays has been self-taught, using basic knowledge I acquired from a C programming course at university, a digital electronics course which taught me to flash LEDs using 555 timer and that 5V TTL is digital 1, and another PIC micro-controller course where we used a serial JDM programmer to build a remotely controlled toy car. Every debug attempt was a struggle as the chip needed to be removed from the breadboard and placed into the programmer socket. Nowadays with the PICKit it's much easier.

It also breaks my heart now to see some young PhDs in electronics who can't even tell what an oscilloscope is. We have a few at office and one day a colleague who has a PhD degree in electronics asked me if that device is a computer-controlled soldering station because the probes look like soldering irons to him. Yet many of those are being paid high salary by their school. Is this a waste of taxpayers' money if those present or future PhDs don't have the required expertise to join the workplace? For sure 99% of the papers that they wrote would never turn into something meaningful to life, other than being filed by their school and contributing to part of the statistics to measure the school's success or ranking, whatever you call it.

 

[ghostman11]

All this presupposes, however, that those doing the hiring are themselves qualified to discern the education/talent/experience needed for the job at hand.

I missed this earlier, it's a valid point. My situation is slightly different to most people, i own a business and i also work for other's, either as a consultant, or on odd occasion's i will do paid 'favor's' for universities and the royal society. Somehow i have also been put on a, "ethic's advisory panel". This fortunately dosnt take much of my time, but i do get to see alot of companies, i also speak with alot of senior management.
i would say in almost 80% of the companies i visit, 99% of the middle to lower senior management, are a complete shambles!
Talent gets bottled necked below these level's, because those that hire for the position directly below there's, will not hire someone better than they are! And unfortunately as the saying goes, SH@T floats!

 

[Brian Griffin]

This reminds me of my time at university. I did not get a scholarship back then and have to take loans from the school to pay the tuition fees and worked for a few years after graduation to pay back. Worked hard to earn my degree, and even harder on modules where I really had an interest in. Most of my programming/hardware knowledge nowadays has been self-taught, using basic knowledge I acquired from a C programming course at university, a digital electronics course which taught me to flash LEDs using 555 timer and that 5V TTL is digital 1, and another PIC micro-controller course where we used a serial JDM programmer to build a remotely controlled toy car. Every debug attempt was a struggle as the chip needed to be removed from the breadboard and placed into the programmer socket. Nowadays with the PICKit it's much easier.

It also breaks my heart now to see some young PhDs in electronics who can't even tell what an oscilloscope is. We have a few at office and one day a colleague who has a PhD degree in electronics asked me if that device is a computer-controlled soldering station because the probes look like soldering irons to him. Yet many of those are being paid high salary by their school. Is this a waste of taxpayers' money if those present or future PhDs don't have the required expertise to join the workplace? For sure 99% of the papers that they wrote would never turn into something meaningful to life, other than being filed by their school and contributing to part of the statistics to measure the school's success or ranking, whatever you call it.

"Research paper chase" is real common in universities nowadays. To be honest especially the project managers, some headed the projects without knowing much of the details, and then let the students fumble on them. They wanted to churn out research papers as fast as possible and finally, even the stuff in the paper couldn't be even replicated.

Still it pains me to hear that even good, high CGPA students struggled really bad in Final Year Projects (or Graduation projects). I had a bunch of my coursemates who have that 3.5++ CGPA, and they were doing some sort of health monitoring system as their project, and they begged me to help do the entire thing for them. Well, of course, I have to say no.

I'm a graduate in Medical Engineering, but I learned many of the stuff like microcontrollers and digital electronics myself. And I kept on practising and never give up.

 

[ghostman11]

Many universities now outsource project management, and hire consultants to oversee the technical aspects. Dont knock it! i make good money out of this
Now if i take my living out the equation, something is seriously wrong when a PhD program, needs to hire outside help to oversee research, it is a direct indication of the quality of there teaching staff.
Not every University does this of course, as Nigel will tell you. at some universities things are very different .

 

[MikeMl]

Hey, my PhD kept me from going to Vietnam...

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Hey, my PhD kept me from going to Vietnam...

Phd in "draft dodging"

 

[MikeMl]

Phd in "draft dodging"

I prefer to think of it as a means of having two lovely daughters (one is an Appellate Court Judge, other is a Chemist), five grandchildren, a career in electronics where I published scores of papers, have my name on dozens of patents, taught thousands of students, helped hundreds of newbies on these forums, contributed at the highest possible tax rates to fund our government.

 

[cowboybob]

I prefer to think of it as a means of having two lovely daughters (one is an Appellate Court Judge, other is a Chemist), five grandchildren, a career in electronics where I published scores of papers, have my name on dozens of patents, taught thousands of students, helped hundreds of newbies on these forums, contributed at the highest possible tax rates to fund our government.

Very few of my generation (boomer), at least by my admittedly non-reproducible data collection method (mostly in EM Clubs, on cocktail napkins), begrudged those that managed to avoid the draft (as I did not).
I think this is primarily because few of us bought into the "why" of the Vietnam war in the first place and, quite frankly, couldn't find a way out of the draft. Would have if we could have...

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Very few of my generation (boomer), at least by my admittedly non-reproducible data collection method (mostly in EM Clubs, on cocktail napkins), begrudged those that managed to avoid the draft (as I did not).

Likewise, obviously the UK wasn't involved, but over here we thought it wasn't something America should have been doing - notice my Smiley above, I wasn't 'knocking' Mike in any way.

 

[cowboybob]

I know, Nigel. I was just musing...

 

[ghostman11]

Someone has yet to show me a worth while war, funny how those that start them, never die in them, then have the cheek to thank the families for there sacrifice. Should be a universal law, if you start a war then the prime minister/president, king or whatever. Should lead the battle. I can think of more than a few wars we would have avoided

 

[jpanhalt]

Someone has yet to show me a worth while war, funny how those that start them, never die in them, then have the cheek to thank the families for there sacrifice. Should be a universal law, if you start a war then the prime minister/president, king or whatever. Should lead the battle. I can think of more than a few wars we would have avoided

In the 20th century, we had WWII. Few would argue that that was not a worthwhile war to fight against Nazi oppression. Hitler and his commanders all died or were killed as a result.

On my side of the Atlantic, we also consider the American Revolution as worthwhile. The British lost. George Washington was the military commander who led the troops.

John

 

[JoeJester]

Should be a universal law, if you start a war then the prime minister/president, king or whatever. Should lead the battle. I can think of more than a few wars we would have avoided.

The last president that led troops in battle as a sitting president was George Washington against the Whiskey Rebellion.

 

[Brian Griffin]

Many universities now outsource project management, and hire consultants to oversee the technical aspects. Dont knock it! i make good money out of this
Now if i take my living out the equation, something is seriously wrong when a PhD program, needs to hire outside help to oversee research, it is a direct indication of the quality of there teaching staff.
Not every University does this of course, as Nigel will tell you. at some universities things are very different .

No worries - I didn't knock them. It's usual for universities to outsource project management too and it has been going on a few decades or so, if I can guess it. Some industrial companies work with university together to develop a product and such.

The main problem is, some superiors/supervisors who lead postgraduate projects don't have (any) knowledge on that project and let their students fumble on them. The worst part is, that some of these refuse/reluctant to help at all and only concerned about publishing papers. Even the most hardworking student would put off by their attitudes and being very demotivated afterwards. In short, it's blind leading the blind. It's all the "impact factor thing", and frankly speaking, that's an obsession nowadays.

I read about a recent article about a professor talking about the "Nature" journal thing. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/09/nobel-winner-boycott-science-journals

 

[jpanhalt]

The term when I was working was "MPU" or minimal publishable unit. That dilution has been going on for some time. And as stated above, I believe the root cause is the mechanism science has for funding that has evolved since the 1950's. If you want to be impressed with how it was, pull out Annalen der Chemie or any other German chemistry journal from before WWII. You will find single articles of 50 to over 100 pages that really cover a subject of primary research, not review articles. There will be dozens of new compounds described. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that today, each new compound would likely be published in a separate article.

As for outsourcing project managers for university research, I find that concept very foreign. How are graduate students supposed to learn to manage a project or investigation? Maybe that is why we see graduates who can't focus on getting the primary job done. Maybe that is why we have professors who are not looking to solve important problems, but rather just doing a series of trivial projects.

John

 

[mdanh2002]

The main problem is, some superiors/supervisors who lead postgraduate projects don't have (any) knowledge on that project and let their students fumble on them. The worst part is, that some of these refuse/reluctant to help at all and only concerned about

On a similar note, here in Singapore, many teaching assistants at many universities, big or small, have no ideas about the subjects which they are assigned to teach. The education system at most universities is designed to have around 2 lecture sessions (conducted by the professor in charge) per module per week, and another tutorial session (conducted by a teaching assistant appointed by the professor). One of my friends who is doing a Masters in EE at a local university is assigned by her supervisor to conduct tutorial sessions in C programming for first year students. It has been years since she last touched any kind of programming language as her research is mostly on circuit design! Yet she can't refuse (and has no reason to refuse as she's being paid reasonably well for this). She has to conduct at least 5 such sessions a week. Before every session she would look through the questions, memorize the answers and write it on the board, pretending to explain the answers to the students. Towards the end of the course the tutorial attendance sometimes falls to as low as 1 student (out of around 20 students) per session and yet nothing is done about it.

I'm not saying this is always the case - there are nice and responsible teaching assistants which I encountered back then. But I wonder how the education quality would be like if more and more teaching assistants don't even know the module they're going to teach. The professors only focus on getting their research papers published while the teaching assistants simply conduct frivolous tutorial sessions because they are forced to do so. Obviously you would argue that self-learning is a must in higher education, but if that is the case, why do we even need professors and teaching assistant at all if they are not willing to teach?

 

[mdanh2002]

Basically what you are seeing in your new workers is the results of our modern day diploma mills. The guys put in their 4 - 5 years and many $10's of thousands of dollars of money and in return they gt a piece of paper that says they are hireable. The rest of their relevant education to make them actual useful workers falls to the fools that hire them.

I forget to add, the thousands of dollars to get that piece of paper most likely does not come from their pockets. More often then not, it's from scholarships given by the schools which in turn come from government funds for postgraduate programmes. Those that pay the tuition fees using their own money are usually dedicated people who study to enrich their knowledge, and not just for a certificate