Originally Posted by deacongirl
Originally Posted by Bostonian
Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
e) NON-competitive and collaborative environment-- this is critical because of DD's kneejerk reaction to that kind of environment-- she actively recoils and responds VERY negatively to people she perceives to be self-promotional, glory-chasing, insufferably arrogant gits. You know, to use the technical term.

I was a science major at Harvard. The environment was collaborative, with students discussing problem sets and not trying to show off in class (which would be pointless, since grades did not depend on class participation). But the element of competition, though latent, was there, and I think it's unavoidable. There aren't many tenure track professorships at research universities and staff positions at national labs. The world does not need many mediocre research scientists. Therefore only academic superstars should try to get PhDs. An advantage of going to a Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford etc. is that you get to compare your abilities to those of the best students in the country. Finding out that you are only mediocre in that crowd is painful but can save you half a dozen years of your life trying to get a PhD unless you have blinders on. Ahem.

You cannot be serious. I would like to put you in a room with my SIL who has her PhD in genetics and is teaching high school science (happily) now. She doesn't consider the years obtaining her PhD wasted because she isn't on tenure track at a major university.

If her goal was high school science then she wasted years of her life in underpaid servitude getting a PhD. Yes, we need more academic superstars teaching high school, but they are wasting their time getting a PhD to do it.