Chris, I think people need the advice Eszter’s offering. Certain comments here suggest an interesting thing about good advice: For some, there are various unfortunate barriers to making good use of it. That was my main point.

She had to throw herself into the new job—it was quite demanding, she wasn’t just dropping down to something easier. She had to reeducate herself in terms of the needs of the job.

I think that one key is convincing the headhunters that you really want the new job and aren’t just desperate. Giving yourself credit for what you’re able to do is important—for example ability to write effectively is really quite rare, and while computer literacy is pretty widespread now, not a lot of people have mastered some of the sophisticated software packages. One guy used his Pol Sci stat-computer skills analyizing billings his clients received to find overcharges.

That would describe me also (for certain values of ‘doing well’).

Well, as I implied, I don’t think that is necessarily true. For example, I’m not sure that a world in which lots of people are worrying about how to get tenure in the the first year of their Masters is obviously a better world than one which only a few are.

Insofar as you’re correct (my university’s program really does seem designed to be supportive and help every student succeed), I agree that this is a fairly stupid way to design an educational system.

There’s a lot of expertise (even just “how to learn a specific way of thinking” expertise) being gained by graduate school students that I imagine goes to waste. You’d think our society would be able to put those people to good use so there isn’t this absurd overcrowding for academic jobs, but nooo…

You just can’t tell me the world doesn’t have any use for lots of people with the skill set developed by pursuing a doctoral degree, who have developed strategies for learning a “way of thinking,” for familiarizing themselves with existing research and contributing specific new research, etc.

Maybe market economies just suck at human resource allocation. :P

I get what you mean, but disagree that it counts against Eszter’s efforts. This is because I figure that transparency is always fairer than obliqueness, and efforts to improve transparency are always good.

Exceptions exist, and of course improving transparency doesn’t automatically improve the other unfairness or the inequality in a system or structure, but I think it’s always better for more people to better understand how something currently works.

Maybe by making these expectations and assumptions explicit and openly and widely acknowledged, more will be done by the next generation of academics to change the least fair expectations and assumptions.

I want to step back from the anti-Eszter interpretation of what I started off saying, which is not an unreasonable one on the face of it. I’m saying what I always say when this kind of thing comes up. Everything she said was good and it will make the world a marginally better place.

But grad school is an abbatoir designed to decimate the entering grad students (actually worse than decimate, which is only 10%, according to some interpretations at least), and a lot of people don’t realize that when they go in and have trouble getting used to it.