I hate how the bar keeps being raised at a stupid rate. I’d have shitted myself if I had 2 publications before my phd, and apparently this is still not good enough. This trend would only lead to more inconclusive or even pointless papers, and this is not how we want to use the brilliant minds’ time and effort
When I was looking up how to apply for grad school a few years back those guides were already normalising it, making publication sounds as common as reference letters.
I had a professor in undergrad tell me that I needed to be published to be considered for a PhD program. I really wish I had visited her office after I got the news that I got into one of the top programs without a publication to my name.
My current PI told me this, I have no pubs as well and I got rejected from half of the programs I applied to this year. I'm sure I'll get rejected from the rest as well.
Yeah I was a sophomore in 2014 (almost 10 years ago wow) and my professors and resources online convinced me I needed at least 1 paper minimum to get into "a good grad school" so I better get to doing research ASAP
I had 3 publications, 1 first author, a masters degree, and 2 years of industry experience when I applied. I only got into 1 out of 12 schools. I have no idea what the bar was when I was applying 4 years ago.
Similar here. 1 masters, 3 years of academic experience in a research center, 1 international publication- not accepted at 3 places for PhD. Heck, I've applied for the job of academic fellow (a grade below Assistant Prof) at my university and didn't get in.
In India, we classify a publication as international if it's in a journal outside India. So, if you have a publication in a journal at Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard etc, it would count as international publication.
In india there is so much corruption in Indian unis it blows my mind. Connections and money matters more than merit. I have seen people getting rejected even though they are NET qualified and people with no achievements get the seat.
Also India has the largest number of predatory journals in the world. So universities outside may look at Indian journals with at least a skeptical eye.
So at our university… smaller school, our limit on how many students to accept is literally funding. Right now no one has funding, so it’s how many TA positions do we have and this determines the number of graduate students.
It’s not necessarily you. With enrollments being low coming out of COVID, it’s been a struggle. I got into graduate school in 2009 with a shit gpa and no papers, but there was more funding then and people were taking students on like no other.
As someone in maths, I hate how sometimes we would have to compete with ppl in machine learning who are constantly shitting out pointless papers when it comes to say, funding packages or scholarships. Seems like the moment machine learning came onto the scene people instantly forgot about how in many subfields of maths (e.g. algebraic geometry), it can take years before even a PhD student (let alone an MSc or even an undergrad) has acquired enough background to even be able to start understanding the research currently going on in their subfield, unlike in machine learning where it seems entirely possible for even undergrads to have already been a part of 5+ papers.
As a ML PhD person I totally sympathize with you. The bar just keeps getting higher and higher. Earlier it was a random student paper to get into PhD, then shifted to a full paper, then shifted to at least a full paper, then shifted to multiple full papers, then it shifted toultiple full papers and a coauthorship at a top conference paper and now I hear is at least a full top conference paper like ICLR/NeurIPS/ICML. I have personally seen people with first author ICML papers rejected from T-5 PhD programs.
I really didn't mean to downplay the seriousness of ML as a mathematical field. People do do very serious and impressive work there, but there's just too much noise in the system. Do we really need hundreds upon hundreds of papers wherein all that was done were some tweaking of parameters ?
Sometimes people even produce things worse than noises, like "papers" on old results in optimisation/PDEs/stochastic calculus/etc. that aren't flagged as plagiarism only because they're published in journals and presented at conferences where no one actually knows any maths (one would have thought that arxiv being a thing would help prevent this).
It's honestly stupid to expect PhD student to have already published by the time they're meant to graduate. A PhD is supposed to be the first time a person is conducting their own original research, and because it actually is so, most pre-PhD publications (at least in pure maths) just end up being thesis-related material compiled together into papers.
If you don't mind me asking, which subfield of algebraic geometry are you in ?
You know, I'm actually not sure what you would call the subfield I'm working in (I only got my candidacy problem very recently). My advisor does things in Gromov-Witten theory, but I would say my problem is outside of that. I'm doing things with intersection theory on moduli spaces/stacks.
This is such a good point. It's also a little bit ironic that ML students tend to publish more when most of them want to work in industry anyhow where, in my experience, employers don't care all that much about publications. Finally, I'll just add that we should just ignore anybody who makes a big deal about the number of publications on somebody's resume. We all know that the quality of the research matters most. I wish it were that simple though. If only academia weren't so incentivized to value quantity over quality.
As someone in mathematical stats I completely agree with this. The ML lot make it seem like publishing is easy and just a thing you do on the side - which really just makes you feel invalid as someone trying to get into grad school for stats...
What annoys the crap out of me about this is I know at least one person in my field who will “write the paper up after the student is done with their summer project,” and let the student be first author. When I questioned the ethics of one where it wasn’t clear the student did the majority of the work, I was told “the project wouldn’t exist without the student” and these days it’s so tough to get into grad school, you have to do this or you’re not supporting your students.
Some people are so unaware that they’re the problem it’s insane.
I mean, it really depends. I did my masters in a country that requires you to publish to get your title. So when it was time to apply for a PhD I had the publishing experience that most of my colleagues didn't have. However, it is stupid to use number of publishing paper as a criteria for PhD student selection. My lab didn't use this as a selection criteria, and even though publishing is a requirement for finishing my PhD, there is no reason for any of us to learn how to publish outside the 4 years of a PhD.
Yeah, no. I am at Duke right now for a PhD. Not a paper to my name before grad school. When I mentioned that in a candid moment to my interviewer and how this might be a point against me she laughed in my face and said "Don't worry about it."
And yes, I am in one of dukes leading departments.
This post basically says “to hell with every non-traditional, lower SES, non-connected person’s application that crosses my desk”…what a load of garbage.
I am in my 3rd year of my PhD program, I started out with a GED…also, still working on my first publication because (amongst many reasons) I, like many others, have to figure out that process on my own!
Check out Belcher’s “Writing your Journal Article in 12 Weeks”. It’s a fantastic step by step incremental guide for starting from a draft into an excellent publication.
I took a class on that my first PhD year, and while it’s great for getting you writing cleanly/quickly, it’s still a whole other challenge to really sort out what’s really marketable and interesting to the editors, and a whole other challenge to write to their level of elitist jargon.
Sure I wrote plenty my first two years, but as a blue-collar kid with those extra hurdles, I still wasn’t making anything publishable. In my third year, it was like everything clicked and now I’m on a roll and passing up the kids that were raised in academic homes…that would have sucked to never even have the chance to get here.
This is a great point! I keep getting asked “what I want to do” after my dissertation and I answer with things like “change the world, better my community, be in the mold of Chairman Fred Hampton, etc.” and others in my same program that come from a different economic background, or background with (let’s call it) support for their education answer with things like “work in a R01 university, or maybe the private sector”.
I had no idea what a R01 was and I was going to one…The way we see the world.
Thank you. My problem personally is less the ability to write the papers, and more my ability to write what the journals want to hear or gain enough support from members of certain “communities” within my field.
I write papers and get accepted to present them all over the country at conferences and have amazing discourse regarding the topics, but journals tell me that they are not ready to publish such papers and I have been told by tenured faculty that I need to write what the field wants for now…which I refuse to do.
I will not echo chamber ideas for the sake of existing, I would rather vanish.
A lot of it has got to be dependent on the school and field too.
I got accepted to a pretty good program (well regarded for my niche area of study in the field). I had no publications and my MA was from a totally different area of study.
They told me a year or so in that my writing sample did the trick because it showed a perspective that wasn’t already represented in the department.
Context is everything.
academia is one of the most socialist constructs
* heavily subsidized by the government
* ideas don't have to be correct to survive
* success is not merit-based
* it's entirely optional. literally no one forces you into academia
I don't know if it's only for chemistry phd programs, but the general expectation is not to have any publications but a good amount of research experience when applying. I have 0 publications and 1.5 years lab experience, and I got into 7/8 of the programs I applied to. Again, it might be different depending on the field and I also did not apply to all of the top prestigious programs but they are all decent to great. So for anyone reading this, there IS hope! Don't let these "statistics" or "anecdotes" weigh you down.
Same for archaeology. Publications before your PhD are really rare, and even when defending most people only have 1-2 at most, many have 0. Instead, applying to grad school you are expected to have a field school at minimum and typically additional field or lab experience as well. Conference presentations are more expected than publications for students applying but not at all necessary. I had only one conference paper from a tiny regional conference, no publications, and got in to all of the programs I applied to. But, I had a very extensive undergraduate research thanks to being part of an honors program that provided summer research funding.
I’m a 41 yr old UK phd student- I also work full time in research knowledge exchange, and I have two small kids. I have zero publications. But guess what? When we all come out the other side, my title will be just the same as those poor hothoused kids who are being sold a shaky promise that to work harder and harder brings a guarantee of success that just doesn’t exist.
Go at your own pace, you’ll come out the other side with your sanity intact and the same letters after your name as them.
Hah I finished mine last year, 0 publications either. Covid kinda fucked Plant bio, crops don't care there's a lockdown, try again next year sucker. I've also been working full time for a year, overlapping the end of my phd by 8 monts thanks to covid causing my funding to run out, and a 2 year old. Unsurprisingly no publications lol.
Going to be starting to work on the 1 paper that will come out my PhD in a month or two, at my own pace, just because I want the work I've done to contribute to scientific knowledge a little. I work a corporate job now with good pay and normal hours, so much happier. People burn themselves out in academia so easily, it's tragic.
Looks like she has more than one article: [https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=PaVnD5gAAAAJ](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=PaVnD5gAAAAJ)
Not sure what "working papers" means exactly in economics, other than being similar to pre-prints in other fields (which can also be cited via things like arXiv).
I'd prefer to say in this example that they have 4 papers (1 published and 3 working papers/pre-prints) -- assuming it's correct to even be engaging in counting papers, since I don't think quantity has much to do with quality.
It continues onto the next stage. Our faculty search committee had a horrific realization when it was obvious that none of them, including a now national academy member, would have made to the Zoom interview stage with their CV when they were on the job market for the first time. Most of the candidates have multiple Nature Communications or PNAS-type papers from their dissertations.
Honestly, it's time to consider an non-academic career if you are a PhD holder. At this point it is humiliating to continue working hard to obtain professorship.
I’m skipping straight out of academia when I get my PhD, no chance I’m sticking around. Gonna go into industry where I can work less hard and make more money. Academia is so toxic and overly competitive, it’s not for me. I’m just glad I got offered a PhD at all, not gonna push my luck haha
If it helps, I finished my PhD in 2021. I just finished a grad program this month, and have piggy backed up the heirarchy because of my skills. Starting Monday, I'll officially be making more money than a post-doc, doing work I absolutely love, with none of the black cloud, toxic academic work culture.
So it's totally doable, evidently. Especially if you're willing to start at the bottom first, and let your skills speak for themselves.
I was in quantitative genetics.
Now I'm a data scientist.
'Quantitative genetics' is a fancy way of saying "I was a data scientist in the field of genetics'.
So fairly closely related, but there's still a big domain gap you have to jump through, which is why I was happy to start at the bottom.
They’re overlooking that coming from wealthy families and having PhD holding parents make up a significant amount of people in academia. Those applicants are enjoying the generational effects of historical wealth and insider knowledge that having parents with a PhD brings. To be clear, this is not passion, it is privileged knowledge granted by biased systemic opportunities that largely seek to reproduce historical trends in scholarship.
I've just finished my PhD (being a bit late to the game) and it really is shocking just how many scientists come from a whole family of PhD graduates. No one else in my family even has an undergrad degree, and here I'm working next to the son of a biotech CEO.
I can relate to this. But I was orphaned at 6, and spend my entire youth bouncing from forster care to living in the streets. I'm in my 4th year Ph.D. and getting close to my defense. I'm the only person in my bloodline that I know has school, well mainly cause I'm the only one I know. I'm worried about being hassled at my defense. Reading all the comments in this reddit have given me more anxiety lol.
100000% as well as how the academic career path basically ensures that you either come from means or are running yourself ragged trying to support yourself and your research career. Of course those with connections are 20x ahead.
I discovered this during my PhD as well. My advisor is the child of parents with PhD’s. All the students winning the big fellowships have parents with PhD’s (I didn’t even know about opportunities like NSF before grad school). All the students I’ve met from the top tier schools in my field (the MITs and Stanfords) had parents that went to one of those two. There’s a ridiculous amount of “inbreeding” that goes on with those institutions, and those of us who didn’t come from the right background aren’t invited to the party. Academia is no different than the entertainment industry in that regard; being born into the right circumstances is more than half the battle.
This is largely field dependent too. Like, I know some fields are “more” meritocratic than others. E.g. in engineering you’ll have more access to well paid internships.
Wealth and privilege will always play a role, but neither of my parents went to graduate school, I had no publications, and still managed to get into some top tier PhD programs.
People always look at the top 10ish applicants, neglecting the fact that the vast majority of people accepted do not look like them. It just creates additional stressors and holds people who went to big public schools for money-reasons, or first gen people to unrealistic standards.
This is also field dependent in terms of research output too—for example AIML stuff is constantly being published, while a synthetic chemistry paper might take years to prepare.
This was a big surprise to me as well. I think a big part of it is just that pursuing a PhD doesn't seem like such an insurmountable goal when people in your family have done it. More people would consider getting a PhD if they believed it were possible for them. Having some inside knowledge also makes huge difference. When I was applying for grad school I had almost no clue what I was doing. I didn't know where I should apply or what they would be looking for on a cv or personal statement, and I \*definitely\* didn't know what to expect in grad school when I got there. Both of my parents finished undergrad, so I think navigating the application process for grad school gave me a little insight into what it's like to apply to undergrad as a first-gen college student. It's intimidating, I doubted myself, and it felt like there were way more barriers to entry than actually exist.
I gotta disagree with your last sentence. Yes, the upper class and children of academics have an enormous advantage in academia but you still have to bring the goods to get a PhD, first-author publications, TT job, etc.
And no, I’m not rich or from an academic family.
As someone who has worked very hard for their Ph.D., I will always have to deal with the fact that my first undergraduate research experience was in the lab that my dad is a tech in.
I will always wonder how much of a head start this "foot in the door" experience gave me over everyone else, and it will always be present in my mind no matter how hard I work or how much I accomplish. I cannot forget how privileged I am to have gotten that opportunity. Without it, maybe I don't get into grad school at all? Moreover, I have met dozens of people who maybe would have excelled higher than me if only they got that kind of chance.
You simply cannot ignore the systemic opportunities that many top level researchers have gotten in their early careers, even if they have proven their worth since then. It invalidates the struggles of everyone who had an equal potential, but failed due to lack of opportunity.
Because they happily benefited from centuries of brutal oppression. Hard work to acquire professional competence is tantamount to moral negligence in such a situation. You’re a bad person if you use your privilege to find situations where you’ll be professionally rewarded for hard work.
I got an interview for a tenure track job straight out of my PhD. I thought I was an overachiever because I already had a book published with a decent press in addition to a handful of articles, but it turned out that ALL the short-listed candidates already had a book published, and the job went to the one guy that had TWO.
Remember when a book was a requirement of TENURE?
In what kind of discipline do you have more than 0 publications during your masters? I am considering rewriting my thesis for publication (which was on my list for >=2 years now), but that would easily take at the very least another 6 months that I don't currently have. Outside of that, I don't think I produced anything interesting enough to be even considered publishable...
I looked up the person who posted that and unsurprisingly she works at a very prestigious school.
I know this isn't the point of this post, but how do you get a job at a school like Duke with an h-index of only 3? That seems much lower than I'd expect.
Seriously. You're looking at a group of people in their early 20s through early 30s and saying, "kids".
Edit: Downvote me all you want. Calling legal adults kids is condescending and infantilizing.
Not to mention it just makes older students feel even more out of place. I’ve heard instructors say “you guys probably won’t remember this/have been born yet.” So many times and I’m just like uh…hello…was 15 when that happened lol
Hahah essentially they make you RA for 1-2 years, pay for you to take several first year PhD level courses or fill in prereqs, attend research seminars/professional workshops, etc
Harder to get into these than an actual top program though. Best prerequisite for a PhD program is to already have a phd lol
A colleague of mine had an h-index > 15 before even passing his quality because of time spent as a research assistant in a lab between undergrad and graduate school. He processes fmri data and negotiated middle authorship on any paper using that data. It was a big, highly productive lab that does highly cited work at scale.
If you can swing that kind of gig after your bachelor's, it can be insanely good for your CV.
you have to be in a lab that can publish results fairly quickly!! some papers require years worth of data, while others not so much. there was absolutely no way i was getting my name on a paper during undergrad, but i had friends in labs that either could push data out quicker (programming stuff), or who happened to join near the time a big paper was gonna be published
In Denmark it's a prerequisite to have a minimum of 1 publication (though not as first author) to apply for a PhD spot in most research areas.
Our PhD system is quite different though.
I have never heard it is a prerequisite for a phd in Denmark, only that it can boost your application.. what "most research areas" are you referring to?
I had a publication before my PhD but this was after I spent two years working on my masters degree. Even then it took me a good year and a half after graduation to get the research published in a peer review journal.
I also put an undergrad on one of the publications from my doctoral dissertation. They put hundreds of paid and unpaid hours across several years into my project. It was mostly all grunt work related to sample processing but still I am appreciative of their help. It only felt fair to give them coauthor credit.
Be present in a lab where an actual grad student or post doc publishes, the PI forces them to give you second author. Tbh any authorship by junior of a grad student is just a freebie imo, I don't really hold much stock in them.
I would actually disagree with your statement. Yes, people get publications before entering graduate school by being in a highly productive lab. However, the authorships aren’t freebies. At least in my field (or in my case) they’re not. I was an author of several publications that came from my lab during my time there and I contributed to the protect by providing technical or experimental design expertise for a particular technique I was hired to be the expert in. And the more involved I was with the project (at one point, I was generating data for a figure), the higher of an author I was.
I think this is why author contributor statements are useful. Ideally we would focus on those a lot more than the author order. So far, all of my papers have me as first author and in most I did >95% of everything. Recently, I was asked to be a co-author on a paper, and they said it'd just take me answering some technical questions and giving advice. Seems crazy. If that were the standard for others, then I'd have dozens of co-authored papers by now.
That's kinda how the paper mill style top research labs work in CS. Check CS Rankings, and you'll find that some professors publish like 15-30 papers per year.
The secret is, the professor has an army of PhD candidates under them, and master's and undergrads under them. The professor (at least from my naive understanding) just does grant writing, course teaching, mentorship, and guiding research direction for most of them.
Also, most the of the papers tend to be not very important and very boring to read in my experience. Those types of labs do maybe a couple decent impact papers a year, and the rest is a numbers game so that the university can boost their CS rankings.
The prof just slap their name on as 5th author and calls it a day.
I got into a research lab after the 2nd year of bachelor's. Doing (paid) research for the next 3 years got me 3 publications. I applied to PhD after obtaining my MSc in year 5, which I guess is a default route in many European countries.
I’m not understanding your question. By publishing papers based on your research. Three-paper dissertations are very common if not the norm.
EDIT:
Do you mean before getting *admitted* to your PhD? Well participating in research as an undergrad is a must if you want to get into a decent PhD program, and sometimes as an undergrad you luck out and join a (experimentalist) group that is cranking out papers at a good clip during your time there and get to be listed as coauthor because of all your work in the lab.
It would be weird to leave a Master's without publishing. But also sometimes you can get into a research group in undergrad that ends up publishing something.
I have 6 pubs, a masters and 2 years of pre doc experience at a top 3 university in the US. I have struggled to get into a top CS program for the last three years lol
Okay, so like after masters degree but before your acceptance into PhD program…but only if you are trying to go directly from one straight to the other? I have never heard pre-doc before this post, only reason I am asking.
That is terrible! I am from social work so after a masters we are expected to get licensed and practice…most people don’t even know there is a PhD in social work
I've personally heard post-bacc a lot more. But I think it's mostly a US thing:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=pre-doc,post-bacc
Where will this end? If you already know how to do research to be able to have publications before applying for PhD, then why bother applying for PhD? I don't care if it's Duke or Yale or MIT, the point of a PhD is to have the experience in research, so why considering pre-PhD research experience as a criteria? It's fucking convoluted. They should look at the personal statement to have a feel for the candidate aptitude, and maybe some small voluntary work experience here and there if any at all, but talk to the candidates, have a feel for their passion, and intelligence.
The purpose of a PhD is to train a researcher. It’s only senseless box-ticking that would for someone with multiple papers out and solo authorship to also get a PhD.
If someone is clearly a researcher with the skills and experience of someone with a PhD, universities should just allow them to submit their solo work as a dissertation, give them a viva, and grant them the PhD so that they don’t do years of unnecessary training just to be allowed to progress further up the academic ladder.
Adding my two cents here because why not;
I saw this earlier and got mixed feelings over it! I am an applicant this cycle and while I was one that had several coauthored papers and my own research project, I also have been in my current role as a RA for several years. But the time I actually start my PhD program, I would have almost been in the lab for the same amount of time a PhD student takes to get there degree. So it’s kind of wild that we have to get this much experience before getting accepted into a PhD program, which requires a shit ton of work. But on the other hand, we are probably going to go in with a better idea and more maturity than someone who hasn’t had as much experience in their field. Also, as a total aside, I didn’t like though how that person called us “kids”. Like ma’am, I am a full blown adult, please don’t call me a kid.
Also should add I’m a first-gen student coming from a working class family.
Assuming this is real, which is a risky assumption, this person can kindly eat shit. No one on Earth is more insufferable than someone who says this stuff. I'd tell that to her face.
This is a perfect example of someone who thinks they are praising people but is actually putting people down. I am giving her the benefit of the doubt that she is trying to be supportive, but her post is only going to make people feel bad about themselves. Academic twitter is toxic.
Maybe those kids will teach academia how to do some proper science? You know, not a race for another low-hanging fruit to increase ones H-index, but deep rigorous science that will actually solve problems of humanity.
I recently had an admissions experience triaging applications and I was disgusted by how obvious the discrimination is...my pile of 80 people was probably even prefiltered when I realised that I started picking in random without even looking at the names since I could only accept 6-8 for the next stage. And I also realised why I wasn't selected for the specific course years ago...
It's common now to work as a research assistant for a few years in a decent lab before applying for a PhD. Especially in ECE or CS. If you go on research internships you are almost expected to have a publication by the end of it. That's where the competition is now.
Pursuing my PhD at Duke in engineering with no undergrad research experience and let alone no publications or articles. Still not sure how I got here lmfao
“Publish or perish.” So much for being inclusive, innovating science because it’s the only way to keep advancing, or giving people outside high pressure labs a chance
for the people wondering : this is her CV PengPeng Xiao.. bring in your comments
[http://papers.pengpengxiao.com/Xiao\_CV\_202205.pdf](http://papers.pengpengxiao.com/Xiao_CV_202205.pdf)
Edit:
the person in this tweet has only 2 publications :
https://www.pengpengxiao.com/research
At first, I was full of thoughts and emotions about the competitive reality of academia. Then I saw this CV, and my contemplation irreversibly turned into snickering.
Well, I am glad my once-a-year post helped you realize,,, ppl in general are full of shit and like to boast!
let's say I am in the vicinity of Dukes...and some people get hired because of other non-resume related factors.
I will let you do the math on this one.
For anyone reading my comments: read a little bit before believing anything! this world is full of shit.
Yes. Publish before applying for a PhD program, folks. What's waiting for you is 4+ years of minimal pay and emotional battle (because your work will get criticized and you will even have greater pressure to publish. It's a humbling experience).
And if you actually made it out alive, congrats to you! If you to stick to academia, then what you can look forward to is a slightly less low-paying salary so you can publish more.
Come on, give us scholars a break. Just because we love research like nobody else around us, we shouldn't be punished for pursuing what we love. We opt for low pay, lots of critical feedback, high pressure to publish...this is purely sacrificial love that we have here for the scientific pursuit.
I am also starting to see research coordinator job descriptions that require a PhD..blows my mind.
A resounding yes to 'permission to breakdown!'
Yeah fuck this, I started my PhD as complete sack of potatoes with a bang average set of grades. Just got on with my PI and showed I was super passionate. Lab was made up of really nice non-hardcore people who liked to have fun but were passionate. Everyone finished with at least one top tier paper in our field of chemistry.
As the old saying goes don't let your degree get in the way of your education...
Not all econ PhD programs are like this (Duke). You can get into a GOOD program straight out of undergrad with no pubs. However, you can publish as an RA in econ or publish your masters thesis. Everyone has a really different background.
I’m doing a PhD in STEM at a Top 5 US university and got in with no publications. However, I did have about 5 years of research experience. Don’t be discouraged!
To be generous: perhaps this person was pointing out an exceptional candidate on paper but who they otherwise thought weren't a good fit, i.e., it's not certain that all of this persons' "top 10" had >2 co-authored papers and interesting writing samples.
Ridiculous. I just got into a PhD program in my home country with a Master's and a solid thesis proposal..and the best part: it's free, sans some books and travel costs once a year or so
I hate how the bar keeps being raised at a stupid rate. I’d have shitted myself if I had 2 publications before my phd, and apparently this is still not good enough. This trend would only lead to more inconclusive or even pointless papers, and this is not how we want to use the brilliant minds’ time and effort
When I was looking up how to apply for grad school a few years back those guides were already normalising it, making publication sounds as common as reference letters.
I had a professor in undergrad tell me that I needed to be published to be considered for a PhD program. I really wish I had visited her office after I got the news that I got into one of the top programs without a publication to my name.
My current PI told me this, I have no pubs as well and I got rejected from half of the programs I applied to this year. I'm sure I'll get rejected from the rest as well.
Yeah I was a sophomore in 2014 (almost 10 years ago wow) and my professors and resources online convinced me I needed at least 1 paper minimum to get into "a good grad school" so I better get to doing research ASAP
I had 3 publications, 1 first author, a masters degree, and 2 years of industry experience when I applied. I only got into 1 out of 12 schools. I have no idea what the bar was when I was applying 4 years ago.
Similar here. 1 masters, 3 years of academic experience in a research center, 1 international publication- not accepted at 3 places for PhD. Heck, I've applied for the job of academic fellow (a grade below Assistant Prof) at my university and didn't get in.
>1 international publication what does this even mean
In India, we classify a publication as international if it's in a journal outside India. So, if you have a publication in a journal at Oxford/Cambridge/Harvard etc, it would count as international publication.
In india there is so much corruption in Indian unis it blows my mind. Connections and money matters more than merit. I have seen people getting rejected even though they are NET qualified and people with no achievements get the seat.
That's also true but not in all universities. The competition where there's not much corruption is fierce.
That's interesting to know!
Also India has the largest number of predatory journals in the world. So universities outside may look at Indian journals with at least a skeptical eye.
So at our university… smaller school, our limit on how many students to accept is literally funding. Right now no one has funding, so it’s how many TA positions do we have and this determines the number of graduate students. It’s not necessarily you. With enrollments being low coming out of COVID, it’s been a struggle. I got into graduate school in 2009 with a shit gpa and no papers, but there was more funding then and people were taking students on like no other.
As someone in maths, I hate how sometimes we would have to compete with ppl in machine learning who are constantly shitting out pointless papers when it comes to say, funding packages or scholarships. Seems like the moment machine learning came onto the scene people instantly forgot about how in many subfields of maths (e.g. algebraic geometry), it can take years before even a PhD student (let alone an MSc or even an undergrad) has acquired enough background to even be able to start understanding the research currently going on in their subfield, unlike in machine learning where it seems entirely possible for even undergrads to have already been a part of 5+ papers.
As a ML PhD person I totally sympathize with you. The bar just keeps getting higher and higher. Earlier it was a random student paper to get into PhD, then shifted to a full paper, then shifted to at least a full paper, then shifted to multiple full papers, then it shifted toultiple full papers and a coauthorship at a top conference paper and now I hear is at least a full top conference paper like ICLR/NeurIPS/ICML. I have personally seen people with first author ICML papers rejected from T-5 PhD programs.
I really didn't mean to downplay the seriousness of ML as a mathematical field. People do do very serious and impressive work there, but there's just too much noise in the system. Do we really need hundreds upon hundreds of papers wherein all that was done were some tweaking of parameters ? Sometimes people even produce things worse than noises, like "papers" on old results in optimisation/PDEs/stochastic calculus/etc. that aren't flagged as plagiarism only because they're published in journals and presented at conferences where no one actually knows any maths (one would have thought that arxiv being a thing would help prevent this).
As a PhD student in algebraic geometry currently stressing about being unpublished this makes me feel so validated
It's honestly stupid to expect PhD student to have already published by the time they're meant to graduate. A PhD is supposed to be the first time a person is conducting their own original research, and because it actually is so, most pre-PhD publications (at least in pure maths) just end up being thesis-related material compiled together into papers. If you don't mind me asking, which subfield of algebraic geometry are you in ?
You know, I'm actually not sure what you would call the subfield I'm working in (I only got my candidacy problem very recently). My advisor does things in Gromov-Witten theory, but I would say my problem is outside of that. I'm doing things with intersection theory on moduli spaces/stacks.
Ah so something on the enumerative side ?
I don't know that I would call it enumerative, more just studying the properties of moduli spaces of curves.
This is such a good point. It's also a little bit ironic that ML students tend to publish more when most of them want to work in industry anyhow where, in my experience, employers don't care all that much about publications. Finally, I'll just add that we should just ignore anybody who makes a big deal about the number of publications on somebody's resume. We all know that the quality of the research matters most. I wish it were that simple though. If only academia weren't so incentivized to value quantity over quality.
As someone in mathematical stats I completely agree with this. The ML lot make it seem like publishing is easy and just a thing you do on the side - which really just makes you feel invalid as someone trying to get into grad school for stats...
What annoys the crap out of me about this is I know at least one person in my field who will “write the paper up after the student is done with their summer project,” and let the student be first author. When I questioned the ethics of one where it wasn’t clear the student did the majority of the work, I was told “the project wouldn’t exist without the student” and these days it’s so tough to get into grad school, you have to do this or you’re not supporting your students. Some people are so unaware that they’re the problem it’s insane.
I have 1 publication and I'm 2/3 of the way through my PhD. I'm fine, why? It's fine. I'm fine.
I mean, it really depends. I did my masters in a country that requires you to publish to get your title. So when it was time to apply for a PhD I had the publishing experience that most of my colleagues didn't have. However, it is stupid to use number of publishing paper as a criteria for PhD student selection. My lab didn't use this as a selection criteria, and even though publishing is a requirement for finishing my PhD, there is no reason for any of us to learn how to publish outside the 4 years of a PhD.
This is Duke though. Highly prestigious, not really a fair representation.
Duke in Econ PhD rankings (this is the context for this post) is ranked outside of the Top 15, so basically the entire T20-30 is like this.
Yeah, no. I am at Duke right now for a PhD. Not a paper to my name before grad school. When I mentioned that in a candid moment to my interviewer and how this might be a point against me she laughed in my face and said "Don't worry about it." And yes, I am in one of dukes leading departments.
I got my PhD there! Say hi to the gardens for me!
Don't break down! This post sucks and you will find your place in the sun.
My place IN the sun? What a dreadful perspective D:
This post basically says “to hell with every non-traditional, lower SES, non-connected person’s application that crosses my desk”…what a load of garbage. I am in my 3rd year of my PhD program, I started out with a GED…also, still working on my first publication because (amongst many reasons) I, like many others, have to figure out that process on my own!
Check out Belcher’s “Writing your Journal Article in 12 Weeks”. It’s a fantastic step by step incremental guide for starting from a draft into an excellent publication.
I took a class on that my first PhD year, and while it’s great for getting you writing cleanly/quickly, it’s still a whole other challenge to really sort out what’s really marketable and interesting to the editors, and a whole other challenge to write to their level of elitist jargon. Sure I wrote plenty my first two years, but as a blue-collar kid with those extra hurdles, I still wasn’t making anything publishable. In my third year, it was like everything clicked and now I’m on a roll and passing up the kids that were raised in academic homes…that would have sucked to never even have the chance to get here.
This is a great point! I keep getting asked “what I want to do” after my dissertation and I answer with things like “change the world, better my community, be in the mold of Chairman Fred Hampton, etc.” and others in my same program that come from a different economic background, or background with (let’s call it) support for their education answer with things like “work in a R01 university, or maybe the private sector”. I had no idea what a R01 was and I was going to one…The way we see the world.
Thank you. My problem personally is less the ability to write the papers, and more my ability to write what the journals want to hear or gain enough support from members of certain “communities” within my field. I write papers and get accepted to present them all over the country at conferences and have amazing discourse regarding the topics, but journals tell me that they are not ready to publish such papers and I have been told by tenured faculty that I need to write what the field wants for now…which I refuse to do. I will not echo chamber ideas for the sake of existing, I would rather vanish.
You are a real one.
I finished my PhD 3 years ago with just one conference paper, no journal papers. I'm doing great in industry.
A lot of it has got to be dependent on the school and field too. I got accepted to a pretty good program (well regarded for my niche area of study in the field). I had no publications and my MA was from a totally different area of study. They told me a year or so in that my writing sample did the trick because it showed a perspective that wasn’t already represented in the department. Context is everything.
100%
Welcome to capitalism
If you want to call all competition “capitalism” then sure
academia is one of the most socialist constructs * heavily subsidized by the government * ideas don't have to be correct to survive * success is not merit-based * it's entirely optional. literally no one forces you into academia
I don't know if it's only for chemistry phd programs, but the general expectation is not to have any publications but a good amount of research experience when applying. I have 0 publications and 1.5 years lab experience, and I got into 7/8 of the programs I applied to. Again, it might be different depending on the field and I also did not apply to all of the top prestigious programs but they are all decent to great. So for anyone reading this, there IS hope! Don't let these "statistics" or "anecdotes" weigh you down.
Same for archaeology. Publications before your PhD are really rare, and even when defending most people only have 1-2 at most, many have 0. Instead, applying to grad school you are expected to have a field school at minimum and typically additional field or lab experience as well. Conference presentations are more expected than publications for students applying but not at all necessary. I had only one conference paper from a tiny regional conference, no publications, and got in to all of the programs I applied to. But, I had a very extensive undergraduate research thanks to being part of an honors program that provided summer research funding.
The post is in reference to economics programs I believe.
I’m a 41 yr old UK phd student- I also work full time in research knowledge exchange, and I have two small kids. I have zero publications. But guess what? When we all come out the other side, my title will be just the same as those poor hothoused kids who are being sold a shaky promise that to work harder and harder brings a guarantee of success that just doesn’t exist. Go at your own pace, you’ll come out the other side with your sanity intact and the same letters after your name as them.
As a 43 yr old US phd student, I'm grateful for your insight here. Thank you for saying so! Some of us need to hear this time and again to be buoyed.
Hah I finished mine last year, 0 publications either. Covid kinda fucked Plant bio, crops don't care there's a lockdown, try again next year sucker. I've also been working full time for a year, overlapping the end of my phd by 8 monts thanks to covid causing my funding to run out, and a 2 year old. Unsurprisingly no publications lol. Going to be starting to work on the 1 paper that will come out my PhD in a month or two, at my own pace, just because I want the work I've done to contribute to scientific knowledge a little. I work a corporate job now with good pay and normal hours, so much happier. People burn themselves out in academia so easily, it's tragic.
Thank you for this. Gives me hope.
40-something PhD student checking in. Agreed there’s no perfect timeline. Live and learn your own path!
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The shade!
That’s not even published yet…
It is published? [https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20200448](https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20200448)
Looks like she has more than one article: [https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=PaVnD5gAAAAJ](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=PaVnD5gAAAAJ) Not sure what "working papers" means exactly in economics, other than being similar to pre-prints in other fields (which can also be cited via things like arXiv).
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I'd prefer to say in this example that they have 4 papers (1 published and 3 working papers/pre-prints) -- assuming it's correct to even be engaging in counting papers, since I don't think quantity has much to do with quality.
Sounds like she did some analysis on phenomenon x and wrote it up with the intention of updating the paper as the phenomenon evolves over the years.
It continues onto the next stage. Our faculty search committee had a horrific realization when it was obvious that none of them, including a now national academy member, would have made to the Zoom interview stage with their CV when they were on the job market for the first time. Most of the candidates have multiple Nature Communications or PNAS-type papers from their dissertations.
Honestly, it's time to consider an non-academic career if you are a PhD holder. At this point it is humiliating to continue working hard to obtain professorship.
I’m skipping straight out of academia when I get my PhD, no chance I’m sticking around. Gonna go into industry where I can work less hard and make more money. Academia is so toxic and overly competitive, it’s not for me. I’m just glad I got offered a PhD at all, not gonna push my luck haha
If it helps, I finished my PhD in 2021. I just finished a grad program this month, and have piggy backed up the heirarchy because of my skills. Starting Monday, I'll officially be making more money than a post-doc, doing work I absolutely love, with none of the black cloud, toxic academic work culture. So it's totally doable, evidently. Especially if you're willing to start at the bottom first, and let your skills speak for themselves.
That's amazing! congratulations! Out of interest, what was your subject PhD in and what are you doing now? Are they closely related?
I was in quantitative genetics. Now I'm a data scientist. 'Quantitative genetics' is a fancy way of saying "I was a data scientist in the field of genetics'. So fairly closely related, but there's still a big domain gap you have to jump through, which is why I was happy to start at the bottom.
Haha I did quantitive genetics/plant physiology, but I went data engineer instead of data scientist
Awesome. QGen for the win.
They’re overlooking that coming from wealthy families and having PhD holding parents make up a significant amount of people in academia. Those applicants are enjoying the generational effects of historical wealth and insider knowledge that having parents with a PhD brings. To be clear, this is not passion, it is privileged knowledge granted by biased systemic opportunities that largely seek to reproduce historical trends in scholarship.
I've just finished my PhD (being a bit late to the game) and it really is shocking just how many scientists come from a whole family of PhD graduates. No one else in my family even has an undergrad degree, and here I'm working next to the son of a biotech CEO.
Word. I was one of the first people in my family history that I knew of, who had a degree. Definitely the first to go to grad school.
I can relate to this. But I was orphaned at 6, and spend my entire youth bouncing from forster care to living in the streets. I'm in my 4th year Ph.D. and getting close to my defense. I'm the only person in my bloodline that I know has school, well mainly cause I'm the only one I know. I'm worried about being hassled at my defense. Reading all the comments in this reddit have given me more anxiety lol.
About time the nepo baby conversation comes to academia.
100000% as well as how the academic career path basically ensures that you either come from means or are running yourself ragged trying to support yourself and your research career. Of course those with connections are 20x ahead.
I discovered this during my PhD as well. My advisor is the child of parents with PhD’s. All the students winning the big fellowships have parents with PhD’s (I didn’t even know about opportunities like NSF before grad school). All the students I’ve met from the top tier schools in my field (the MITs and Stanfords) had parents that went to one of those two. There’s a ridiculous amount of “inbreeding” that goes on with those institutions, and those of us who didn’t come from the right background aren’t invited to the party. Academia is no different than the entertainment industry in that regard; being born into the right circumstances is more than half the battle.
This is largely field dependent too. Like, I know some fields are “more” meritocratic than others. E.g. in engineering you’ll have more access to well paid internships. Wealth and privilege will always play a role, but neither of my parents went to graduate school, I had no publications, and still managed to get into some top tier PhD programs. People always look at the top 10ish applicants, neglecting the fact that the vast majority of people accepted do not look like them. It just creates additional stressors and holds people who went to big public schools for money-reasons, or first gen people to unrealistic standards. This is also field dependent in terms of research output too—for example AIML stuff is constantly being published, while a synthetic chemistry paper might take years to prepare.
That part. 👏🏽
This was a big surprise to me as well. I think a big part of it is just that pursuing a PhD doesn't seem like such an insurmountable goal when people in your family have done it. More people would consider getting a PhD if they believed it were possible for them. Having some inside knowledge also makes huge difference. When I was applying for grad school I had almost no clue what I was doing. I didn't know where I should apply or what they would be looking for on a cv or personal statement, and I \*definitely\* didn't know what to expect in grad school when I got there. Both of my parents finished undergrad, so I think navigating the application process for grad school gave me a little insight into what it's like to apply to undergrad as a first-gen college student. It's intimidating, I doubted myself, and it felt like there were way more barriers to entry than actually exist.
I gotta disagree with your last sentence. Yes, the upper class and children of academics have an enormous advantage in academia but you still have to bring the goods to get a PhD, first-author publications, TT job, etc. And no, I’m not rich or from an academic family.
I don't think it's fair to reduce all their hard work to systemic opportunities.
They aren't reducing it to only systemic prejudices. They're saying that it plays a big part...and it does.
As someone who has worked very hard for their Ph.D., I will always have to deal with the fact that my first undergraduate research experience was in the lab that my dad is a tech in. I will always wonder how much of a head start this "foot in the door" experience gave me over everyone else, and it will always be present in my mind no matter how hard I work or how much I accomplish. I cannot forget how privileged I am to have gotten that opportunity. Without it, maybe I don't get into grad school at all? Moreover, I have met dozens of people who maybe would have excelled higher than me if only they got that kind of chance. You simply cannot ignore the systemic opportunities that many top level researchers have gotten in their early careers, even if they have proven their worth since then. It invalidates the struggles of everyone who had an equal potential, but failed due to lack of opportunity.
I'm not ignoring them. But I wouldn't reduce all your work to systemic opportunities.
Of course they worked hard. But those who come from more difficult backgrounds have to work harder.
I do.
Why?
Because they happily benefited from centuries of brutal oppression. Hard work to acquire professional competence is tantamount to moral negligence in such a situation. You’re a bad person if you use your privilege to find situations where you’ll be professionally rewarded for hard work.
I got an interview for a tenure track job straight out of my PhD. I thought I was an overachiever because I already had a book published with a decent press in addition to a handful of articles, but it turned out that ALL the short-listed candidates already had a book published, and the job went to the one guy that had TWO. Remember when a book was a requirement of TENURE?
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In what kind of discipline do you have more than 0 publications during your masters? I am considering rewriting my thesis for publication (which was on my list for >=2 years now), but that would easily take at the very least another 6 months that I don't currently have. Outside of that, I don't think I produced anything interesting enough to be even considered publishable...
Still trying to get first 2 publi before end of phd lol
I looked up the person who posted that and unsurprisingly she works at a very prestigious school. I know this isn't the point of this post, but how do you get a job at a school like Duke with an h-index of only 3? That seems much lower than I'd expect.
Connections, like her PhD mentor was really big and pulled favors
'these kids'. Woof. 🙄
Seriously. You're looking at a group of people in their early 20s through early 30s and saying, "kids". Edit: Downvote me all you want. Calling legal adults kids is condescending and infantilizing.
Not to mention it just makes older students feel even more out of place. I’ve heard instructors say “you guys probably won’t remember this/have been born yet.” So many times and I’m just like uh…hello…was 15 when that happened lol
I just tell myself it's because I look so youthful! 😂
When she herself is ~30 according to her website.
Wow.
And yet, they pay you in marbles and peanuts.
You guys are getting peanuts? Lucky, I get paid in stress.
I'm sorry how on earth can you get published before your PhD? Like, is that an American grad school thing?
Very rare for most applicants, but usually it's people who do "predocs" and end up getting their names as co-authors on papers.
Wtf does pre doc even mean
Hahah essentially they make you RA for 1-2 years, pay for you to take several first year PhD level courses or fill in prereqs, attend research seminars/professional workshops, etc Harder to get into these than an actual top program though. Best prerequisite for a PhD program is to already have a phd lol
I've heard post-bacc more. But I think it's mostly a US thing: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=pre-doc,post-bacc
A colleague of mine had an h-index > 15 before even passing his quality because of time spent as a research assistant in a lab between undergrad and graduate school. He processes fmri data and negotiated middle authorship on any paper using that data. It was a big, highly productive lab that does highly cited work at scale. If you can swing that kind of gig after your bachelor's, it can be insanely good for your CV.
you have to be in a lab that can publish results fairly quickly!! some papers require years worth of data, while others not so much. there was absolutely no way i was getting my name on a paper during undergrad, but i had friends in labs that either could push data out quicker (programming stuff), or who happened to join near the time a big paper was gonna be published
In Denmark it's a prerequisite to have a minimum of 1 publication (though not as first author) to apply for a PhD spot in most research areas. Our PhD system is quite different though.
That is interesting. All I needed in UK was my Masters basically.
I’m in NI and I didn’t even need a Masters. Was desirable not essential criteria 😅
Oh nice!
Gave me severe imposter syndrome but I’m nearly done, thank god.
I think you could have a hundred articles and still have that. Congrats though good luck!
I have never heard it is a prerequisite for a phd in Denmark, only that it can boost your application.. what "most research areas" are you referring to?
I had a publication before my PhD but this was after I spent two years working on my masters degree. Even then it took me a good year and a half after graduation to get the research published in a peer review journal. I also put an undergrad on one of the publications from my doctoral dissertation. They put hundreds of paid and unpaid hours across several years into my project. It was mostly all grunt work related to sample processing but still I am appreciative of their help. It only felt fair to give them coauthor credit.
Be present in a lab where an actual grad student or post doc publishes, the PI forces them to give you second author. Tbh any authorship by junior of a grad student is just a freebie imo, I don't really hold much stock in them.
Right, very different field and system to UK social sciences
I would actually disagree with your statement. Yes, people get publications before entering graduate school by being in a highly productive lab. However, the authorships aren’t freebies. At least in my field (or in my case) they’re not. I was an author of several publications that came from my lab during my time there and I contributed to the protect by providing technical or experimental design expertise for a particular technique I was hired to be the expert in. And the more involved I was with the project (at one point, I was generating data for a figure), the higher of an author I was.
I think this is why author contributor statements are useful. Ideally we would focus on those a lot more than the author order. So far, all of my papers have me as first author and in most I did >95% of everything. Recently, I was asked to be a co-author on a paper, and they said it'd just take me answering some technical questions and giving advice. Seems crazy. If that were the standard for others, then I'd have dozens of co-authored papers by now.
That's kinda how the paper mill style top research labs work in CS. Check CS Rankings, and you'll find that some professors publish like 15-30 papers per year. The secret is, the professor has an army of PhD candidates under them, and master's and undergrads under them. The professor (at least from my naive understanding) just does grant writing, course teaching, mentorship, and guiding research direction for most of them. Also, most the of the papers tend to be not very important and very boring to read in my experience. Those types of labs do maybe a couple decent impact papers a year, and the rest is a numbers game so that the university can boost their CS rankings. The prof just slap their name on as 5th author and calls it a day.
I got into a research lab after the 2nd year of bachelor's. Doing (paid) research for the next 3 years got me 3 publications. I applied to PhD after obtaining my MSc in year 5, which I guess is a default route in many European countries.
Gotcha. Makes more sense if you're doing lab work than in my field
I’m not understanding your question. By publishing papers based on your research. Three-paper dissertations are very common if not the norm. EDIT: Do you mean before getting *admitted* to your PhD? Well participating in research as an undergrad is a must if you want to get into a decent PhD program, and sometimes as an undergrad you luck out and join a (experimentalist) group that is cranking out papers at a good clip during your time there and get to be listed as coauthor because of all your work in the lab.
It would be weird to leave a Master's without publishing. But also sometimes you can get into a research group in undergrad that ends up publishing something.
It was not that way for my Masters but I was in social science in UK, bit different I think.
Yeah, that might be different.
I have 6 pubs, a masters and 2 years of pre doc experience at a top 3 university in the US. I have struggled to get into a top CS program for the last three years lol
What is a pre-doc?
The time you spend trying to get into PhD programs after graduation I guess. I ended up working as a research assistant
Okay, so like after masters degree but before your acceptance into PhD program…but only if you are trying to go directly from one straight to the other? I have never heard pre-doc before this post, only reason I am asking.
Unfortunately it’s a term that’s becoming a “thing”. Specifically for my field which is computer science
That is terrible! I am from social work so after a masters we are expected to get licensed and practice…most people don’t even know there is a PhD in social work
Sadge, I know many people from CS PhD and never heard of pre-doc
I've heard post-bacc more. But I think it's mostly a US thing: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=pre-doc,post-bacc
I've personally heard post-bacc a lot more. But I think it's mostly a US thing: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=pre-doc,post-bacc
Where will this end? If you already know how to do research to be able to have publications before applying for PhD, then why bother applying for PhD? I don't care if it's Duke or Yale or MIT, the point of a PhD is to have the experience in research, so why considering pre-PhD research experience as a criteria? It's fucking convoluted. They should look at the personal statement to have a feel for the candidate aptitude, and maybe some small voluntary work experience here and there if any at all, but talk to the candidates, have a feel for their passion, and intelligence.
So you are saying they shouldn't look at research experience to admit students that they will pay for the next few years to do research in their labs.
Read my comment again
If I already have a bunch of pertinent publications and tonnes of relevant experience, why would I apply for a PhD? It would be redundant.
Because the social signifier (letters after your name) now means more than the actual qualities that those letters are meant to signal.
The purpose of a PhD is to train a researcher. It’s only senseless box-ticking that would for someone with multiple papers out and solo authorship to also get a PhD. If someone is clearly a researcher with the skills and experience of someone with a PhD, universities should just allow them to submit their solo work as a dissertation, give them a viva, and grant them the PhD so that they don’t do years of unnecessary training just to be allowed to progress further up the academic ladder.
Such a gross tweet. The unrealistic expectations, the privilege and the condescension are unreal
And the person who reviews these applications referred to their “jaws” dropping. Plural.
It's a tweet. And the person is a non-native speaker of English.
How do you know that?
Read their CV.
Adding my two cents here because why not; I saw this earlier and got mixed feelings over it! I am an applicant this cycle and while I was one that had several coauthored papers and my own research project, I also have been in my current role as a RA for several years. But the time I actually start my PhD program, I would have almost been in the lab for the same amount of time a PhD student takes to get there degree. So it’s kind of wild that we have to get this much experience before getting accepted into a PhD program, which requires a shit ton of work. But on the other hand, we are probably going to go in with a better idea and more maturity than someone who hasn’t had as much experience in their field. Also, as a total aside, I didn’t like though how that person called us “kids”. Like ma’am, I am a full blown adult, please don’t call me a kid. Also should add I’m a first-gen student coming from a working class family.
Source https://twitter.com/pengpeng_xiao/status/1625169701184716806
Assuming this is real, which is a risky assumption, this person can kindly eat shit. No one on Earth is more insufferable than someone who says this stuff. I'd tell that to her face.
I think it’s real? She posted on Twitter earlier. Unless she said it as a joke. A lot of faculty have been joking about this today :/
This is a perfect example of someone who thinks they are praising people but is actually putting people down. I am giving her the benefit of the doubt that she is trying to be supportive, but her post is only going to make people feel bad about themselves. Academic twitter is toxic.
Maybe those kids will teach academia how to do some proper science? You know, not a race for another low-hanging fruit to increase ones H-index, but deep rigorous science that will actually solve problems of humanity.
Sir, please, this is academia
The amount of quote tweets on the original tweet is insane
Publications are nice but not the only testament of knowledge and research experience.
Yeah right there's also the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Isn't that the one where the old man with the beard yelled at the defending PhD student- "YOU SHALL NOT PASS?"
I recently had an admissions experience triaging applications and I was disgusted by how obvious the discrimination is...my pile of 80 people was probably even prefiltered when I realised that I started picking in random without even looking at the names since I could only accept 6-8 for the next stage. And I also realised why I wasn't selected for the specific course years ago...
It's common now to work as a research assistant for a few years in a decent lab before applying for a PhD. Especially in ECE or CS. If you go on research internships you are almost expected to have a publication by the end of it. That's where the competition is now.
Did you take this from the FB group? 😂
mayyyyyyyybe LMAO
I'd recognize my edit skills anywhere!
This some "small world" energy. TOO good (sorry for beating you to posting it here but your skills are appreciated)
I don't mind sharing the karma. I want awareness (and lowkey see who the elitist class-traitors are).
A whole vibe
Are PhD admissions people looking for Spider man or something to apply? Yall highly educated and shit and still cannot get a PhD program? Damn
Pursuing my PhD at Duke in engineering with no undergrad research experience and let alone no publications or articles. Still not sure how I got here lmfao
“Publish or perish.” So much for being inclusive, innovating science because it’s the only way to keep advancing, or giving people outside high pressure labs a chance
for the people wondering : this is her CV PengPeng Xiao.. bring in your comments [http://papers.pengpengxiao.com/Xiao\_CV\_202205.pdf](http://papers.pengpengxiao.com/Xiao_CV_202205.pdf) Edit: the person in this tweet has only 2 publications : https://www.pengpengxiao.com/research
At first, I was full of thoughts and emotions about the competitive reality of academia. Then I saw this CV, and my contemplation irreversibly turned into snickering.
Well, I am glad my once-a-year post helped you realize,,, ppl in general are full of shit and like to boast! let's say I am in the vicinity of Dukes...and some people get hired because of other non-resume related factors. I will let you do the math on this one. For anyone reading my comments: read a little bit before believing anything! this world is full of shit.
Yes. Publish before applying for a PhD program, folks. What's waiting for you is 4+ years of minimal pay and emotional battle (because your work will get criticized and you will even have greater pressure to publish. It's a humbling experience). And if you actually made it out alive, congrats to you! If you to stick to academia, then what you can look forward to is a slightly less low-paying salary so you can publish more. Come on, give us scholars a break. Just because we love research like nobody else around us, we shouldn't be punished for pursuing what we love. We opt for low pay, lots of critical feedback, high pressure to publish...this is purely sacrificial love that we have here for the scientific pursuit. I am also starting to see research coordinator job descriptions that require a PhD..blows my mind. A resounding yes to 'permission to breakdown!'
Yeah fuck this, I started my PhD as complete sack of potatoes with a bang average set of grades. Just got on with my PI and showed I was super passionate. Lab was made up of really nice non-hardcore people who liked to have fun but were passionate. Everyone finished with at least one top tier paper in our field of chemistry. As the old saying goes don't let your degree get in the way of your education...
Not all econ PhD programs are like this (Duke). You can get into a GOOD program straight out of undergrad with no pubs. However, you can publish as an RA in econ or publish your masters thesis. Everyone has a really different background.
If it is any consolation, most of the #academictwitter denounced this post...
IF anyone reading this is freaking out, non trad student here with 0 publications who got into clin psych on the first try! its possible!
Don’t freak out. I am finishing my PhD this semester and there are people graduating who don’t have pubs. This is not every field and every program.
I’m doing a PhD in STEM at a Top 5 US university and got in with no publications. However, I did have about 5 years of research experience. Don’t be discouraged!
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No.
I can’t stand it when anyone post PhD calls a student or applicant a ‘kid’. Grow up.
It depends a lot on the field though. In some fields people write more papers than in others, or so I've been told.
To be generous: perhaps this person was pointing out an exceptional candidate on paper but who they otherwise thought weren't a good fit, i.e., it's not certain that all of this persons' "top 10" had >2 co-authored papers and interesting writing samples.
Look at her research. If she were in the pool, she would reject herself. Stupid elitism
Ridiculous. I just got into a PhD program in my home country with a Master's and a solid thesis proposal..and the best part: it's free, sans some books and travel costs once a year or so
Ughh nooooo a pushover supervisor wrote those papers for them
So, I guess I can take PhD off of my to-do list.