iarwain1 comments on Academia as a career option, its social value, and alternatives - Less Wrong

9 Post author: VipulNaik 10 March 2014 06:32PM

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Comment author: iarwain1 10 March 2014 08:47:00PM 4 points [-]

I'm not as interested as others in effective altruism, although that's certainly a secondary goal of mine. My primary goal in a career was to optimize happiness by focusing on what I enjoy and am good at, namely research and deep thinking. I didn't want to go for academia for many of the reasons you mention. Instead I'm currently shooting for data science. My reasoning is as follows:

  • I enjoy programming, although not as much as theoretical research.
  • There are plenty of data science or related jobs available from the looks of it. And the pay is very good, so although that's not a primary goal of mine it's certainly a good bonus.
  • I'm making a somewhat educated guess that there are research-related jobs available for people with a data science background. A lot of research these days seems to use data analysis / big data as an input (especially in the social sciences, which is one of my favorite areas of study), so I'm hoping to use these skills to get my foot in the research door.
  • There are enough large data sets publicly available, and there seems to be enough meaningful research problems out there that use that data, that if all else fails I could probably use data science to do meaningful research as a hobby.
  • My secondary idea was to go for a career as a statistician. Good statistics are crucial for well-designed studies, and many scientists hire statisticians to help with their research. So again I could maybe hope to use statistics to get my foot in the research door, or at least to do research on the side. I'm still keeping statistics open as a possibility, but in any case data science and statistics have a very large amount of overlap, so a lot of the areas of study are the same.
  • If I change my mind and decide to go into academia after all, I can always do so in the areas of data science or statistics or some area related to those, and my previous learning will help me a great deal.

This is all pretty theoretical - I'm still in the very early stages of studying for any career. Also, I could probably have researched my options a bit better. I did talk to some people who do data analysis at least.

What do others think of my analysis?

Comment author: Gimpness 11 March 2014 12:53:14PM 0 points [-]

I work at a University as a research assistant in the Biology Department and I am currently studying part-time in a masters of Biostatistics. One of the main reasons (apart from enjoying it) why I began to take statistics seriously was due to a) most of the PhD students lack of knowledge of statistics and b) complete and utter ugh-fieldness in having to do statistics.

I think your reasoning is good (though that just maybe cause it aligns with mine) just don't forget how many companies/corporate jobs there are for data-science now especially when the money seems very good. I have come to the opinion that going into academia via the "traditional" route is flawed and most definitely not for everyone (see shminux's comment) i.e. PhD -> then madly applying for very competitive (depends on field but mostly true?)post-doc positions ->even more competitive faculty job -rinse repeat. Perhaps that's just my hesitance as it seems to be a path of continual narrow specialization with unequally increasing competitiveness.

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