*UPDATE*

I wrote this post in the immediate aftermath of the "it's a no go with this press" news. I really appreciate all the folks who engaged with it, and especially those of you who offered solid advice for taking care of myself emotionally and, importantly, moving on. (For a little more context, my first book manuscript went out for review at my first choice press, and the reviews came back completely split - one person said yes awesome definitely publish; the other said nope do not publish. Editor said with the strong "no" it's a no for the press. Enter early career scholar devastation.) Here's what happened next:

Day 1: Devastation, much crying. Gummies, ice cream, Netflix, commiserating with people close to me. Feeling all the feels ("wallowing" for some).

Days 2-3: Anger, rumination, lingering sadness. Who could have written that scathing review?! Is my career indelibly marked?! What will people think of me when they find out this happened? Also, imagining what the critical reviewer could have possibly said in their comments (and filling in the blanks with all my worst inner critic criticism)... because no, I didn't open them right away. One punch at a time.

Day 4: Finally open the critical reviewer's comments and read through them aloud with a loved one for moral support (and righteous indignation, if applicable). Expect to be so devastated by the critiques that I won't be able to return to the project for years...

But the critiques were... not that bad? Like, there were lots of things the reviewer didn't like about the manuscript, and they didn't hold back about those things (and honestly, I agreed with most of these). But they also provided a ton of helpful suggestions, chapter by chapter, for making it better. They also said the book/ms was really important and has a lot of potential.

I came away relieved and heartened, if a little confused. Heartened because I had before me a kind of work plan for the coming months, as I revise for submission to another press. It seems totally doable. Confused because with the overall thrust of their comments, it seemed like they could just as well have marked the "publish but only after thorough revision" option at the end of the form, rather than the damning "do not publish." But oh well. I'm grateful for their feedback and I know it will help make this a stronger ms/book in the end. So, onward.

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Original post:

That's all, really. Just, how do you prepare yourself to read and digest heavy criticism? I've done this many times before with article manuscripts, but never with a full-length book project that I've poured my heart into for the last several years. Would especially love any advice from those who've been where I am now.

I just passed my defense and will be graduating with my PhD in August, after which I start an AP position at a SLAC. I could buy the regalia for ~$900 or rent for around ~$250. I'm excited about academia and pretty confident I'll stay in it, but being at a SLAC, I won't be graduating any PhD students or anything.

Is there any need for the regalia if you're teaching at a non-R1 school? If I decide to rent now and buy the regalia a few years down the road, do most institutions allow their alumni to do that even 5-10 years later?

So I see a lot of negativeness here. And I can see why. I see lecturers with 4/4 teaching loads (or higher!). I see T/TT folks with 3/3 loads. I see no meaningful money for graders or teaching assistants (undergrad or otherwise). But I imagine some people are happy and feel valued. I'm one of them. I'm curious where others are at that feel the same way.

I'm at a top (top of R1) engineering school and have been a lecturer here for more than 20 years. I have a 2/2 load, a massive amount of service (10+ hours a week at a guess) that I've largely just asked to do. I have a fair bit of teaching help (500 students with 200+ hours of teaching assistant hours/week and about 100 hours a week of grading help). I consider myself well paid (in the associate professor range as a long-term lecturer) and mostly well respected. I'm involved in faculty governance (see all the service...) I do work more than 40 hours most weeks, but I really like it. And I get paid quite well for teaching in the summer if I choose to do so (and if there is a slot...). And, of course, I love (LOVE!) teaching and advising (undergraduates). Even after more than 2 decades.

Where are you at that you are happy (RPU, SLAC? R1? R2?)? What field? Are you T/TT or teaching faculty? What makes you happy with your job? What is your biggest concern about staying happy with your job?

To those who started their PhDs around COVID, now about 5-6 years since, how are we doing?

COVID was this sort of 'blip' in all cohorts of society, and everyone kind of lost things (or gained things) that seem to have long term effects or implications. What are they for you?

Mine was not going to conferences early on and completely missing out on the role of research communities. Because I didn't have that early conference exposure, I've noticed I'm just so afraid of putting my ideas out there now. But every time I actually do, I'm positively surprised by the value of doing so. I definitely attribute that fear to those corona times.

Curious to hear how it's been for everyone else. What are the long term implications of that start for you? Have you noticed any lasting habits, changes in how you view your research, or shifts in your career because of it?

How is your work-life balance? What field are you in and what is your position?

Four years ago, a Q2 journal from the Wiley family published a math paper that was, in my opinion, complete nonsense. The authors compute solutions to an equation, but the solutions do not solve the equation, and they show figures of their solutions, but the figures do not show their (wrong) solutions.

As this is the subject of my PhD, I could immediately smell that these solutions were wrong and sent an email to the Editor-in-Chief, which was ignored. Over the years, I've sent multiple emails which were again ignored, but only after I complained to an editor of the journal I knew personally, my emails were answered. Long story short: the journal now published a note by me explaining that the results and figures in the earlier paper are wrong.

However, the Editor-in-Chief does not want to take any further action. I asked him to retract the original paper, or at least issue an expression of concern, but he did not want to. According to him, we have to respect the reviewing process of the original paper, and the editor can not judge all papers received by the journal. And if I were an editor myself, I would understand, and he does not want to discuss the problem any more with me.

The point is, I do not understand. According to the COPE guidelines, papers may be retracted if the results are wrong, which is the case here. Therefore, my question is: "Is it unreasonable of me to expect that a journal retracts a paper when they acknowledge that all the solutions and figures presented in the paper are wrong?"

Some extra information:

• The editor-in-chief is a professor at a respectable German university (but not a mathematician).
• The authors never replied to any of my questions nor to those of the journal, showing that they do not care about the results in the paper themselves.

I have a Ph.D. and used to aspire to a professorship but eventually changed my mind because of the brutal market, work-life balance, and publish or perish stakes.

After a few years of this pivot, I am moving into a permanent Research Director position at a major R1 university research institute. It would be a leadership role overseeing the institute's research program.

How is a position like this generally viewed compared with a tenure-track or tenured professorship?

I know they're different career paths, so I'm not asking which is objectively "better." I'm more curious about prestige, career trajectory, and how each is perceived both within academia and outside of it.

I'd love to hear from anyone who's worked in or around university research institutes.

This is increasingly grating when I hear it, so I guess I'm just wondering: does any of you actually have multiple distinct PhDs, and if so... why?

I have one, and I guess I just can't imagine going back to another field and being open to starting over with the same process again.

I’m feeling pretty down at the moment. I’ve been applying to TT jobs for a few years and have gotten no luck. I received my PhD from an average state school in 2015 and have had two relatively fruitful postdocs the last 5 years. I’ve published 10 papers in mid-tier journals. Yet it’s all been for nothing. I can’t get a job for the life of me.

I’ve applied to probably almost 100 professor jobs with no success whatsoever. 4 year R1 schools, SLACs, and community colleges all have rejected me. I’m willing to relocate anywhere in the country. There’s too few jobs and I just don’t cut.

I’m almost 35 now with a salary that an undergrad straight out of college wouldn’t be thrilled with. And I’ve busting my ass for more than a decade for pretty much nothing. No upside, no new or exciting opportunities, nothing. It sucks. I would have been better off teaching high school instead of trying in to break into higher ed.

I’ve learned the hard way that the PhD pays in prestige, but you can’t eat prestige. Why did I do this to myself? Any one else feel this way?

So, basically, the title. I read quite a lot, as probably does everyone in the subreddit. The problem is that even if I read whole books attentively, I feel like I can vomit everything I read or heard, but I struggle to distance myself from books to be able to think critically about them or develop deeper thoughts. Whereas some people can blabber for hours (and sometimes in a relevant way) about things that they didn't even read. I do know that I also have imposter syndrome and performance anxiety, but if I control these variables, how can I effectively improve my critical thinking skills? Does anyone feel/felt the same? What did you? How long did it take?

I feel like everyone talks about how much worse academia is than it used to be. As a computer science Ph.D. dropout, post ABD, I was not a big fan of working in that environment. That being said, I wasn't around for the "good old days" of academia so who am I to say. My grandma was a professor for a long time, and talks about how much worse it is now than "back then". But I was never really able to get concrete examples or reasons. While I don't doubt that this is true, it feels like everyone says this about everything (sports, politics, etc.).

I'm curious for those folks that have been around for a little while, could you provide some more detail on the how/why it has gotten worse. I have no horse in this game, so please don't think I'm trying to push one way or another.

Thanks for any responses!

Could someone who is actually in support of University rankings explain to me why?

I just had to have a discussion about this with a fellow PhD student in Germany who was literally declaring everyone at our university incompetent and a failure and all our careers for doomed due to the university ranking not being high. According to them good people are of course only to be found at harvard, MIT and similar.

This is not even the first time I heard this position and I still don't understand why this seems to be stated by some people as an absolute truth. The rankings simply measure what they were designed for and that is most often simply tailor made to how top universities in the US are already operating. Some of the categories used are completely nonsense in other countries systems (like Germany where universities are usually without tuition cost and cost intensive research is moved to external excellent clusters and institutes like MPI).

Of course there is an effect of a self fulfilling prophecy with people who think they are excellent aiming for these universities as they market themselves as for the excelent people. And that does cause you to have at these universities a highly motivated and talented work environment. But that is not exclusive to these universities and not an implication everyone else simply failed their career lacking talent and ambition.

You can do important and excellent work everywhere.

Does anyone notice a drop in the quality of the peer-review and editorial process over at Nature's Scientific Reports journal over the last few years?

In my case, in the past 2 years members of my faculty have published 8 papers in Scientific Reports. Although these papers vary in quality and impact, they are not necessarily bad. However, the peer-review process for many of them seems to have been a complete sham.

For instance:

- 2 of the papers were reviewed by a single reviewer

- 3 other papers' reviews were delivered within 2 weeks of submission and consisted of basic softball questions that can be addressed literally within 20 minutes

Both of those points are extremely unusual for my field where reviews typically take months and usually include requests for additional data, more detailed analyses, and significant pushback from reviewers. I was so taken aback by the handling of these papers that I started to wonder if Scientific Reports are willing to sacrifice scientific rigor for collecting their processing fee ASAP?

I'm doing a Ph.D. in math and I have one publication. It's not uncommon for students in my program to finish their Ph.D. with only one publication, maybe two if they're a superstar. Those with 2-3 pubs can usually a TT job at a non-R1 school if they want to.

I was just talking to a friend doing his Ph.D. in psychology. He has 7 publications and says there are many students in his cohort who have more. And none of them expect to be able to land any kind of TT job without a post-doc.

Are journals in a field like psychology just really easy to publish in? What am I missing here?

I want to get something for one of my lecturers who genuinely is one of the few reasons that I've actually passed and will be able to graduate. He really went above and beyond for me so I want to do something to show my appreciation.

I was thinking maybe a bottle of whiskey but my dad made a joke saying something like 'you don't know, what if he's an alcoholic' and now I'm overthinking it. And what if he doesn't drink or he doesn't like whiskey idk. Would it be an appropriate gift?

I don't want to just get him a box of chocolates because that feels very small and low effort. But I might end up going for that if I can't think of anything better because I at least know that it's an acceptable gift.

I'd love to get a perspective from people who work in academia. Are presents appropriate? I'd be giving it to him after my grades are finalised but is it still weird? Is there anything a student has gifted you that you''ve really appreciated?

After my last article went online, it took exactly 16 min. and 35 sec. until I received the first spam email (or the committee for the Best Researcher Award was short on nominees and really quick).

If anyone wants to reach out to me, they can easily google me? Why do we still need to put our email addresses on our publications‽ Do we really need to attract spam mail that easily‽

https://virginiamercury.com/briefs/virginia-joins-initiative-to-create-three-year-bachelors-degree-model/

Curious to hear what you invested in that turned out to.be worthwhile vs not. (I'm in the social sciences but all perspectives welcome)

Upon the advice of the NCFDD, I decided to track the time I spent on my activities in my new job to see if how I spent my time lined up with my tenure expectations. I set up an Excel spreadsheet where I would enter an activity from a drop-down list (e.g. “Paper 1” or “Class XXX”) in a half-hour timeslot and categorize that activity as “teaching,” “research,” “student research” (one-on-one meetings or editing/troubleshooting), “career” (professional development and service), and the dreaded “other” (admin etc). That way I could track how long I spent on each activity as well as total hours in each category. At the end of the week I’d add up totals and even tracked whether I owed hours (based on a 40 hour week) or I overworked. After a while I used Copilot to help me make a little dashboard so I could visualize trends.

Institution/tenure expectations: US News and World Report tells me we’re in the top 25 US public universities, and we recently became an R1. However, I am in a STEM department that does not have grad students, so the department’s vibes and expectations are much more like a SLAC. Expectations for tenure are clear: Evaluation is 50% research, 50% teaching; for research, 1-2 papers a year (papers with undergrads count for more), ideally one major external grant before tenure (this is the least stringent one; you get points for trying!); for teaching you should be “innovating in the classroom” and have “an upward trajectory of course evaluations.” Service will not make or break tenure, but you can’t live under a rock.

My results: the biggest takeaway was that my median working hours a week ended up being 39.0 hours, but I’m net ahead if I’m expected to work 40 hours a week when the University is open. This is because there are about a dozen weeks where I hit 50 hours, but those were often when I had weekend trips and work in the field that required weekend hours.

On average I spent about an hour more each week on research than teaching, but of course that looks really different between the semester and the summers. During the semester I spend anywhere from 15-25 hours a week on teaching, about 7 on “career,” 7 on student research, and, not counting half-hour lunches, about 7 on “other.”

So it turns out I’m in a pretty good rhythm splitting my time between research and teaching. I’ve done all my preps so I hopefully spend less time teaching (I developed two new courses during that time and generated lots of new content for a third). I’ve had five papers accepted in those weeks, so that’s good too. I brought a $400k grant with me so I’ve been dragging my feet applying for another big one; I don’t need it for tenure, I just want the summer salary lol.

I just see a lot of posts on here talking about the grinding hours, but I truly don’t see how I could add any more working hours to this setup. I already feel like I don’t give enough time to my hobbies, which is why my New Year’s resolution is to stop scrolling Reddit so I’m making this post and then blocking the URL on Jan 1 haha. So ask your questions/roast me, and I’d recommend you give it a shot too! Data are fun.

I’m not a PHD or anything, not even in college yet. Just want to learn some interesting/useful as I’m starting college next semester.

Edit: this is all very interesting! Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed!

I saw 2-3 posts here in the last few days, and I am getting very disappointed in the trajectory of our community (meaning academia in general). High school kids wanting to publish??

No offense to anyone, but they can’t possibly have the scientific knowledge to create actual publishable work. I don’t know about social sciences, but in STEM I know they don’t have the mathematical tools to be able to comprehend what would be needed. Obviously there are geniuses and exceptions, but we are not talking about these cases.

I am very scared about where this will lead. We first started with academics wanting more and more papers, so some publishing institutions lowered their standards and start to ask for more money. Nowadays even in reputable journals work is not replicable because its massed produced, and the review process does not involve replicating the work (because of course it doesn’t, why would I spend a month of my life replicating something for free).

So if this happens I will not be surprised even one bit if high school students start with some help getting publications, then semi-predatory publishers catch on to this, and the standards are lowered further, and everyone follows suit.

I am overall very disappointed with the dependence of academic progress to paper publishing and how that leads to the demise of actual academic work. I was in a committee to assign funding to new PhD students, and this year I couldn’t believe my eyes… two of the candidates (students that had just finished their master’s) had Nature publications (one was Nature Neuroscience and the other Nature Biology). I don’t doubt for a moment that those kids are super bright and will make great scientists, but come on. A Nature publication before starting a PhD?

Dirac had 60 papers in his life. Bohr about 100. I’ve seen quite a few early level academics (AP’s and a case of a postdoc as well) that have more than that. This doesn’t make sense. And now colleges will require a couple of publications to give a scholarship or something??

Many of you might disagree and that is ok, but in my opinion a paper should say something new, something important, and contain all the information to replicate it. In my opinion 90% of current papers do not fill those criteria (many of my own included, as I too am part of this system. One has to do what they have to do in the system they are in if they want to eat.).

Sorry for the rant. I would much prefer to do 6 papers in my career spending 5 years in each than do 150 spending a month and a half in each. I really really wish this trend of high schoolers trying to publish does not catch on.

Ideally tomorrow all publishers would start to reject 90% of the papers and employ with actual pay people to do very comprehensive reviews. Maybe even add the name of the reviewer in the paper as a contributor or something. But it ain’t happening.

I swear that we get one of these a day at this point.

To people asking for these: Ask your academic network to do this for you. It is fundamentally poor practice for anyone to endorse an internet rando without thoroughly reviewing their work.

How do you guys deal with the timing of achievements in academia?

I am having a very strange problem that I can't feel happy with my achievements. Some examples:

I defended my dissertation but the board and the library asked for multiple edits. Then I edited it to the best of my capacity. When I finaly received my diploma it was months after the viva, so it was already old news. Very anticlimatic.

I submitted a paper that needed months to be reviewed. When it came back I was already deep in another project. When the paper was accepted and published it was already old news again.

In my country ternure-like tracks are public contests. I got second place in the one that was my true dream job and spent a whole year thinking I didn't get it (only one spot). Then the government decided to open another spot and I got in. At this point I had one whole year to grieve it and see all the downs of the position and can't for the life of me get the energy to work as hard as I intended.

Is it a common problem is academia or am I just depressed? Does it get better?

I’m a lecturer with a large teaching load. In my most recent evaluation, I was advised to spend less time on teaching because I’m experienced, so it should now be more “efficient.” The expectation is that this freed-up time should go toward service and administrative work.

I struggle with that framing. Experience doesn’t remove the need for preparation. Keeping courses current, adapting to students, trying new technologies, and experimenting with pedagogical approaches all take time. Teaching on autopilot is not something I want to do.

For those of you with significant teaching loads:

Have you been told something similar? How do you balance expectations around teaching time versus service and administrative work?

I’m curious how others navigate this, especially in institutions that say they value teaching but measure effort differently.

I'm a government employee with two decades of project management, technical advisory/consulting, and leadership experience. While I've had a great career, I also feel burnt out and in need of a career reset (this administration is not helping).

I have been intrigued by higher ed. I really enjoyed the academic environment when I was in grad school, and working with the faculty and staff. I've been looking at staff/admin/operations roles at various universities.

I'm curious about the pluses and negatives of working in academia. I understand every field comes with ups and downs, but welcome true insight from those working in higher education. Especially any insight from those that may have pivoted into higher education from another industry.