| I'm a neuroscience PhD candidate finishing up my degree and transitioning to gov/'industry' in ~ a month. I've had a great experience with great mentors, but there are MANY problems with the current system (at least in bioscience/medicine). 1. Academia is a feudal system. To get in, you need a glowing letter from 'Someone Important We Know' from 'Big Name University'. Sure there are some admits with letters from less important people/schools, but if we are being honest, we know that is a big minority (I think this also accounts for the lack of diversity in science, but that is a different topic).
To advance in your career (get a postdoc/faculty job), guess what is also the most important thing? 'Glowing Letters From Important People We Know'. The next most important thing is 'Big Paper From Journal We Know (Cell/Nature/Science (CNS))'. The dirty secret of biomedical science is that getting 'big' papers very often depends on who you work for. Anectdata, but I've seen many garbage papers in CNS, where I can't believe it is in this journal, only to see ohhh it is because 'Big Name Lab at Stanford/Harvard/JHU' with a track record submitted it... I see. Glam journals like glam authors, if you don't believe that you are unusually optimistic or uninformed. 2. There is little or no opportunity to get validate-able credit for any of your work. The only way you get document-able credit for work is your (maybe 1 or 2) publications and any fellowship/small token grant you managed to get (there are very few). I mentioned this in a comment below, but I have spent months of my life creating data and figures for grant applications (that were won or not), and I practically get 0 credit or recognition for that work. My name is not on the grant, despite me doing virtually ALL of the work for it (ideas and experiments) because I am phd candidate and cannot actually receive the funding from an NIH R01. The vast majority of my work will go completely un-credited (both inside and outside of academia) unless someone inside academia that I might want to work with happened to see my mentors talk where they gave me a shout-out on a slide. If I leave academia, I have no 'proof of work' for anything outside my paper and thesis (no one will read it). I can't claim authorship on the very important $500K+ grants that I practically wrote and won myself. Those don't go on my CV/resume, and if they did then people looking could look up the grant and see I am not in fact listed as an author or contact. So in the end, what is a student or post doc in a bad situation going to do? You can leave after 3/4 years as a PhD student with no savings, and very few marketable skills, and start over in another lab or try to find a non-academic job that values half a phd? It is worse for postdocs, who have 'invested' 10+ years and either have to suck it up to get that letter, or leave with nothing (also no savings). I think a lot of it boils down to the feudal system of letters+publications = value [edit] wording |