Grad student work hours

There is an important conversation going on on astrobetter here about how faculty communicate work expectations to their students.  I recommend John Johnson’s post and Julianne Dalcanton’s post on Cosmic Variance as follow-up reading. 

My comments are in the astrobetter comments section.  The bottom line is that I see what the faculty writing a letter to “buck up” their underachieving grad students were trying to do and why, but among their mistakes were misremembering their own lives as grad students and attempting to enforce a similar experience on all of their own students, without respecting those students’ career goals.

Update:OK, it’s still awaiting moderation.  I reproduce it below (I didn’t want to do this before because I don’t want to fragment the conversation.  To that end, please put any comments onto astrobetter or the comments section of another blog following this story).

I’m glad we’re having this discussion, because I think a lot of faculty read that letter and think, for the most part “geez, I wish we could say those truths to OUR students!” Let me share why I think that is, and what’s wrong with that approach. 

I think that the whole 80-100 hours per week number comes with a substantial dollop of “in my day we walked to school in 10 feet of snow uphill both ways.” I’m sure that I put in 80-100 hours occasionally, if you count mealtime; and if you count travel time and observing time then observing runs can certainly put you up to that number. But few students put in 100 hours of actual work in a week, and even then only rarely. I mentally shifted that number to “50-70 hours per week” of actual research work when reading the letter. 

 I look through the tone and details of this letter and see misguided faculty actually trying to help (is it a sign of assimilation by the tenure-track Borg that I sympathize at all?!) They ask the students to come to them with their problems, they explain that however tough the audiences are internally they’re tougher outside, they want the students to be realistic about what it takes to be like them. These are laudable goals, in principle. 

 But the last one is the problem: the underlying assumption of the letter is that students should be more like them, striving to maximize their chances at prize fellowships and tenure-line positions at Prestigious U at arbitrary personal cost. 

 Yes, it’s It’s incontrovertibly true that of otherwise identical students putting in 40 and 80 productive hours per week, respectively, the 80 hr/wk student will have a better cv and be more employable. Pointing out that the 60-80 hr/wk students are your primary competition for the “best” jobs is perfectly true. But that depends on what you think the “best” jobs are, and whether you actually want to do what’s necessary to get them. 

 If a student is productive at 40 hr/wk and happy with that, then they should be encouraged to maintain that pace with their eyes wide open regarding the likely jobs that will be available to them on the other side, according to their personal productivity. After all, 40 hours per week of actual, hard, no-goofing-off work can be a lot more productive than 80 hours of stressed-out, tired, procrastination-filled drudgery. 

 I think this is at the heart of Kelle’s excellent follow-up thread: what DO we want? I think we want professors to acknowledge and celebrate that some students are happy NOT to sacrifice their mental, social, and even physical health for the best shot at the most “prestigious” academic positions. We should be supporting them in helping them follow the path they DO want. 

 This goes hand-in-hand with the false problem of the “overproduction” of PhD astronomers. PhD astronomers have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country; there are not too many of us for the economy, there are just too many of us for the Academy. By refusing to denigrate, and in fact celebrating those who seek to apply their skills to job tracks unlike their PhD advisers, we solve this “problem” and improve the job prospects of astronomers everywhere.