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Joined: Mar 2013
Posts: 1,489
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It's also debabtable whether academia is that great a career anyway. That is because academia is not a life for everyone, it's still a job and it really varies from field to field what it's like. You have to have to be good at many different skills. It's more than just sitting in a lab doing research on your own. To be successful as an academic you not only have to do interesting research but you have to be able to write well, give talks on the subject, be very self directed, teach classes to undergraduates, graduates, and do service to the university that can include administrative work and contentious committee meetings. And what you spend your time doing varies quite a lot depending on what your field of study. One rarely gets rich as an academic, unless ones does outside consulting or starts your own business. And depending on where you get a job can either give you a comfortable living, or afters years of schooling still be struggling financially while working 60+ hours. Full time tenure positions are becoming more rare. And more PhD's end up with adjust positions that pay poorly. I know many very happy very successful academics, and I have also known many whom after 2-5 years leave for the business world because it's not the right place for them.
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Joined: Feb 2010
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Some of us have kids that seem naturally headed towards academic careers, and it might be hard to see what else they could do. Let's brainstorm about alternatives, because we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket.
There are two parts to this.
1. What are those other careers?
2. How do we prepare to be versatile for this wider range?
(The answers depend on the kid of course.) Some PhDs in the sciences with programming and modeling skills are leaving academia to become "data scientists". The money is very good. Big Data's High-Priests of Algorithms By ELIZABETH DWOSKIN Wall Street Journal August 8, 2014 For his Ph.D. in astrophysics, Chris Farrell spent five years mining data from a giant particle accelerator. Now, he spends his days analyzing ratings for Yelp Inc.
Mr. Farrell, 28 years old, is a data scientist, a job title that barely existed three years ago but since has become one of the hottest corners of the high-tech labor market. Retailers, banks, heavy-equipment makers and matchmakers all want specialists to extract and interpret the explosion of data from Internet clicks, machines and smartphones, setting off a scramble to find or train them.
"People call them unicorns" because the combination of skills required is so rare, said Jonathan Goldman, who ran LinkedIn Corp.'s data-science team that in 2007 developed the "People You May Know" button, which five years later drove more than half of the invitations on the professional-networking platform.
Employers say the ideal candidate must have more than traditional market-research skills: the ability to find patterns in millions of pieces of data streaming in from different sources, to infer from those patterns how customers behave and to write statistical models that pinpoint behavioral triggers.
At e-commerce site operator Etsy Inc., for instance, a biostatistics Ph.D. who spent years mining medical records for early signs of breast cancer now writes statistical models to figure out the terms people use when they search Etsy for a new fashion they saw on the street.
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While a six-figure starting salary might be common for someone coming straight out of a doctoral program, data scientists with just two years' experience can earn between $200,000 and $300,000 a year, according to recruiters.
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Joined: Feb 2013
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Thanks, Bostonian. I suppose there are all sorts of jobs 15 or 25 years in the future that we can't envision now, just as ther are things now that we didn't envision 15 or 25 years ago.
As parents, how do we prepare our children for the future?
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Joined: Feb 2011
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Bostonian, that's a great write-up! Data science is what I think my DD is most likely to go into. It appeals to her on every level, and plays to all of her strengths intellectually. 
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Joined: Feb 2010
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Bostonian, that's a great write-up! Data science is what I think my DD is most likely to go into. It appeals to her on every level, and plays to all of her strengths intellectually. Thanks, but the sentence At e-commerce site operator Etsy Inc., for instance, a biostatistics Ph.D. who spent years mining medical records for early signs of breast cancer now writes statistical models to figure out the terms people use when they search Etsy for a new fashion they saw on the street. makes even a market fundamentalist like me wonder about how brainpower is being deployed.
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Joined: Jul 2012
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It is a disturbing question, in general. Such as: How much new science is being missed by brain-power sequestored in IT departments making a decent income re-writing programs to calculate taxes on teddy bear sales?
At least in theory, data scientist may be generating techniques and models relevant to multiple applications (if those applications are made or allowed to be made.) I could easily imagine population linking models being used to increase the understanding of epigenetics. My futurist projection is that the hottest area in 10-15 years will be cross-pollination.
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Joined: Feb 2011
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It is a disturbing question, in general. Such as: How much new science is being missed by brain-power sequestored in IT departments making a decent income re-writing programs to calculate taxes on teddy bear sales?
At least in theory, data scientist may be generating techniques and models relevant to multiple applications (if those applications are made or allowed to be made.) I could easily imagine population linking models being used to increase the understanding of epigenetics. My futurist projection is that the hottest area in 10-15 years will be cross-pollination. Exactly-- and this isn't really news to anyone in STEM, or shouldn't be, anyway. It's been true for the past three decades that one of the hottest tickets in all of STEM is to be a cross-disciplinary polymath. The smartest, most capable people in new/emerging/cross-disciplinary fields aren't the ones trained in that specialty, but the ones that have trained using the supporting or related ones (plural) since their understanding is deeper in both domains. Better leverage. This is, when you get right down to it, what informatics specialists and quants are doing as well; leveraging multiple training domains and formidable intellect on a different, unrelated domain and tasks.
Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.
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Plenty of precedent for it, too: modern genetics was re-made into a rigorous discipline in the 1950s by disenchanted post-bomb physicists, re-made again into molecular genetics by chemists in the 1980s & 90s, and is in the process of being re-made yet again, into genomics, by information specialists from various disciplines.
...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...
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Joined: Oct 2011
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ETA: Well, look at what our society pays businessmen vs scientists... You get what you pay for. The market is people, and people are often irrational.
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Joined: Jul 2011
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ETA: Well, look at what our society pays businessmen vs scientists... You get what you pay for. The market is people, and people are often irrational. How is that irrational? The market simply values businessmen more highly than scientists. If businessmen are more valuable, then it logically follows that businessmen are more highly compensated. You first have to make a value assertion so that you have something upon which to perform your rational operation upon. If people within a market prefer businessmen more, because businessmen are inherently awesome or because businessmen shimmer with financial glory, then you rationally pay them more. Maybe people value basking in the reflected dollar-saturated glow of their local wealthy businessmen.
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