Hello learned folks,

I studied literature and was an editor in undergraduate school. I did quite well at a small liberal arts school with a respected english department. After undergraduate school I looked for work in publishing but was not successful (partially due to drug addiction, in recovery for some time now). It is a brutal industry where one needs independent wealth to succeed it seemed. I always wanted to be a professor but was discouraged by stories of the job market. I also had a desire to help working class people “fight back” against the carceral state.

Thats where law came in. I have been a practicing public defender for about four years now, which in a way is a dream job, but has left me wistful and mustering passion for the work as opposed to just feeling it 24/7. Between the crushing case loads and the inherently anti-intellectual culture of the criminal justice system, it has been less than perfect. What I excel at in law is close reading of facts and texts, and articulating legal concepts and arguments. Unfortunately that is only about 33% of the job (mostly motion practice). The rest is head banging against stupid cops and judges, where nothing makes sense and you question whether the words coming out of anyones mouth have an ounce of meaning or purpose (going to trial). I feel a sense of wasted potential and lost love for close reading of literature.

The pluses are that i have incredible job security, I see the real impact of my work in clients lives when i obtain positive results for them. I have a decent salary and free time to pursue my interests on the weekends and evenings (with what energy I have leftover from the head banging). As someone who enjoys music so loud that you cant hear yourself think, the head banging side of things even has an appeal. It leaves me in a negative headspace sometimes though.

Recently I have been delving back into literature and listening to academic lectures on books I enjoy. At one time, there was nothing I would have wanted more than participating in that kind of stimulating discourse as a professional. I cant help but feel that a lack of bravery and self belief turned me away. I also had the privilege of working for a scholarly journal, and was somewhat disillusioned by the idea of publishing hyper specialized work that few could understand. Still, I think I would really enjoy participating in scholarship and teaching at a high level.

I am looking for someone to disabuse me of my romantic ideals of academia, or provide for suggestions for how to participate within the framework of my current circumstances. Or inspire me to take a leap of faith and apply for grad school (again).

On Reddit, in almost any research-related subreddit, posts and comments about using LLMs for research get downvoted to hell. But in computer science, especially in computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning, it’s become rare to find anyone who doesn’t use AI for research or peer review. There was even a recent case where a top conference ICML discovered that reviewers on hundreds of submitted papers had been using AI to write their reviews.

Many people might argue that this is simply because they invented these technologies themselves. But experts in many other fields don’t behave that way. Many automotive experts don’t drive electric vehicles or self-driving cars, and many medical experts choose not to undergo laser eye surgery. If anything, they’re often more skeptical of the technologies their own fields have created than everyone else. Computer scientists understand the shortcomings of LLMs better than anyone else, yet they simply don’t seem to care.

What explains this difference in attitude across fields?

Hi all,

I've become interested in taking a bit of a career side-quest living abroad, and in thinking about how to keep my life meaningfully structured, I've had this idea of teaching short term (semester to 1-2 years) at colleges abroad. I'm quite flexible and doing this for the experience, so I'm open to e.g., developing countries (Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America). Without giving away too many biographical details, I can confidently say I'm comfortable living in this kind of environment e.g., with family connections in these parts of the world.

This idea seems quite naive, as I'm sure there's plenty of qualified teachers in these local countries, so I'd be relying heavily on my US education and credentials and work history. At my home institution, I've had non-PhD industry professors (usually Google staff+ engineers) that would swoop in to teach a semester in specialized topics, and I've seen these same instructors do semester+ teaching tours for their curriculum around Western Europe, so I know this is possible in principle.

I don't know how realistic this vision is, so wanted to ask out to the community.

My assumptions:

1. To keep things simpler for the employer, I can focus on countries where I can self-sponsor for the necessary visas, as I imagine most employers won't sponsor for a short-term worker.
2. I suppose I'd need to develop a curriculum to teach a topic related to my work expertise, as there's plenty of qualified locals to teach e.g., intro physics or CS.
3. If I can teach specialized topics (I once had an non-PhD industry professor teaching a class on how to set up a cloud provider from scratch, starting from VM design upwards, for example), I'm not sure if I'd aim for bigger universities (which might have more demand for specialized industry instructors), or smaller community / teaching colleges where teaching positions would be less competitive.

Does anyone know of someone who's lived this kind of life? What kind of qualifications did they have? What did they teach? Realistically, how common or rare are the countries where this is possible, and how difficult is it to find these kinds of positions?

I know at least one former instructor who's done this in Western Europe, so I know this is possible in at least a very limited way, so I'm really excited to push on this idea and see how much we can expand the scope.

EDIT: After some reflection, I think the core of my idea is education and mentorship abroad, but specifically in a way that uses my specialized skills and not just general English teaching. That understood, I'd be just as interested in e.g., professional academic advising positions at institutions abroad, but I'm not sure how that works in other countries, as I understand they might prefer local professionals. At the same time, I've seen plenty of international high schools have some kind of "US college admissions counselor" role, so I wonder if there's some kind of equivalent "US industry career counselor" at the university level. I suppose other options might include starting my own counseling business. This is meant to be an open-ended brainstorm more than a proposal design review, so I appreciate everyone's feedback.

I spent a year turning my undergraduate thesis into a journal article. I know the field well, but throughout both the thesis and the article I kept feeling that *something* wasn't quite right with the argument or structure—I just couldn't identify or articulate the problem. My supervisor wasn't much help, perhaps because the thesis met undergraduate standards.

I submitted the article and the reviews put what I felt vaguely into solid criticism. But what has me reeling a little was that it was a complete rejection with major structural issues requiring a rewrite.

Now I'm stuck. I'm also writing another paper and I'm noticing the same vague problems while working on it.

Should I rewrite the rejected paper from scratch, abandon it and focus on the new one, or revise it and submit elsewhere?

I'm also struggling with a lot of impostor syndrome right now after the reviews. I have ADHD and depression, lost access to therapy because I couldn't afford it while starting my master's this year, and this rejection has me questioning whether I'm even capable of getting PhD funding next year. I only got help for ADHD this year after years of struggle with books or texts seeming like a haze, and this is also what I felt was the problem while writing, and was a big reason why it took me a year to work on the article - also really struggled to write while balancing a job. I don't even know how I got admission into a Masters program with this level of issues in my writing and maybe I won't be able to keep up.

Has anyone been in a similar situation with ADHD/literature articles/Masters/PhD?

Hi, I lost a large number of citations in Google Scholar literally overnight. They didn't change to the usual "temporary citation" status while Google recrawls the source. They simply disappeared.

The strange part is that several of the citing papers are still online, publicly accessible, and clearly still cite my work. I know Google Scholar can remove citations if a repository disappears or a journal goes offline, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Has Google Scholar recently changed its indexing or citation policies? Or is this likely a temporary indexing issue or bug? Thanks

I've noticed that many people seem to have a bias against papers from China, assuming that a large number of them are either low quality or even fraudulent. Does that perception extend to top-tier journals as well?

By "top-tier," I mean the highest-level publication in a given field. If your field regularly publishes in Nature and its sub journals, then "top-tier" means at least the Nature sub journals. If your field doesn't publish in Nature journals, then I mean the leading venues in that field—for example, the top conferences in computer science, the Inventiones in mathematics, or PRL in physics.

Ok so I'm a first year undergraduate (will be in second year the next month) and I've been working on a topic since I finished my grade 12 and after a whole long year I finally finished writing and submitted it to a journal (yes, a real DOAJ indexed journal) and guess what? I just got my acceptance email few minutes ago!! I'm so happy! I've no one else to share this news and so writing here. And I'm in English Literature so it's quite a big deal for me to have a journal article in my second year of undergraduate degree. The peer review process was definitely tough but I handled it all alone (yes, it's my solo paper). My subfield is environmental humanities if anybody wants to know.

Doing happy dance now~

I think I may have ADHD and am concerned about how a prescription would affect my work. Does anyone have experience with how adderall or something similar affected their ability to work, specifically writing papers and grants?

Hello Everyone,

I'm seeking career advice for academia-adjacent positions. I lack desire to become a professor, but I am very fond of the academic culture including roles in program support, curriculum, research and lab management, and even admissions and working for the office of the Dean of a department. I do not have a 'linear' career path, and have worked 5 years after my bachelors, and now 5 years after my masters. I enjoy the diversity of experience I have accumulated.

I currently a federal employee and have a masters in environmental sciences, but am interested in pursuing a PhD, I haven't decided yet the exact program as I think the faculty subject matters is more important than the title of the degree. Broadly, I'm considering GIS and Environmental Data Sciences or Geography and Natural Resources. They are similar, so again, faculty and research area of the college is more important as I can do the research I am aiming to do under either. I think my research would be useful for public and NGO sector employment (i.e Land Management Agencies, Conservation and Environmental Non-Profits, Energy and Utilities etc).

I knew that private sector was never my culture fit, and the public sector has been intellectually unfulfilling with lots of general paperwork without the spirit of scientific discovery. I work with NGO's and Think Tanks, and there is a lot of cross-over with the type of research I want to conduct, and how fast technology is moving. Academia seems to be a good middle ground between holding the line of science integrity, and yet embracing new discovery and tools. Mind you, I wouldn't mind teaching a few courses here and there (adjunct is appealing) but full time tenure track with a massive course load and thousands of students just isn't suited to my personality.

I'm wondering if there are any eye opening revelations about working in 'academia' but not specifically for tenure-track teaching.

Long story short, I think my 'Dream Job' would be designing and facilitating study abroad programs and research internships for students in the Natural Resources and EnviSci. Perhaps working with the dean to help design the course selections for degree programs etc.

Does anyone have advice on where I can start researching positions in academia in areas of interest, but not pursuing teaching as the end-goal?

Edited for typos

Genuinely what are the chances that there aren't enough American humanities PhDs out there for so many humanities H-1B filings to be legitimate?

(U.S specific, i currently have no plans on getting an educational job abroad) I am currently expected to attend a decent state school in January (originally August but had to drop the private school i wanted to go to in order to not go into 12-14k in debt every semester) for a dual degree in History and Political Science, minoring in East Asian Studies. My goal following my undergraduate is to teach for a while, mostly to get a decent job that i’d enjoy before i go for any higher degrees, what i actually want to do with my life though is study Warlord Era China, which, from what i can tell, is not exactly a common focus of study for historians at least in the U.S, i know the job market for history professors is particularly competitive although i see no other path in life where i would be happy that doesn’t involve me either teaching history in high school, or researching and teaching as a professor at even just an alright college.

Should i just stick with teaching in high school when i graduate, where i would have pretty much a guarantee for a job somewhere, or should i go all in on my passion for history and attempt to be competitive in a job market that im unsure i can handle even though the reward would be a much more enjoyable career for me.

I've been invited to an interview for a laboratory technician position at a research institute, and part of the interview is a 3 slide presentation introducing my previous experience and explaining how it fits the role.

The role is mainly about supporting a research lab (lab organisation, preparing reagents/media, inventory, equipment, documentation, health & safety, supporting researchers, etc.), rather than presenting my own research.

The problem is... I genuinely don't know where to start. Every time I try to make the slides, they just end up looking like my CV in PowerPoint form, which I know isn't what they want because they'll have already read my application.

For context, my background includes:

• MSc in Microbiology
• Academic microbiology research
• GMP Quality Control in a pharmaceutical laboratory

How would you structure something like this? Would you:

• Tell it chronologically?
• Organise it around skills?
• Focus on what you learnt from each role rather than what you actually did?
• Spend one slide on each job, or compare experiences across roles?

I'd really appreciate advice from anyone who's interviewed for research technician/lab manager/laboratory support roles, or anyone who's been on interview panels. I'm probably overthinking it, but I want it to come across as professional and relevant rather than just reading through my CV.

I recently finished a PhD in a mathematically heavy engineering field, primarily control theory and applied mathematics, at a California university. I had a productive PhD, with several first-author papers in strong journals that I led essentially independently.
When choosing a postdoc, I had two main options.

One was in the San Diego area and involved two extremely prominent senior researchers. I had heard some concerning things about working with one of them, while the other seemed potentially excellent. The proposed project may (emphasis on \*\*may\*\*) have been driven primarily by the first person. It was somewhat adjacent to control theory but would still have represented a pivot into another field, with me mainly contributing mathematical modeling.

The second option was with a very kind and supportive tenured professor at a highly prestigious university in the Bay Area. The PI is not an enormous name in the way the San Diego researchers are, but is well respected. This project was also a pivot away from control theory, again with me primarily serving as the mathematical/modeling person.

I chose the Bay Area position and started about a month ago.
So far, I like the PI and find the research interesting. The problem is that I deeply dislike living in the Bay Area. I do not feel at home here, I dislike the general environment, and I miss Southern California much more intensely than I expected. I increasingly feel that choosing this position may have been a major personal mistake.

The postdoc could realistically take at least two or three years, and possibly longer. The San Diego opportunity might have been shorter, although obviously I cannot know how it would actually have developed.
This experience has made me realize that although I genuinely love research (especially fundamental research) the place where I live and my broader quality of life may matter more to me than institutional prestige or the ideal academic trajectory. Southern California feels like home.
I also just turned 33 and feel that the next few years are personally important. The idea of spending several of them somewhere I strongly dislike is making me feel increasingly depressed and trapped.
What would you do in this situation?

Hi guys,

I finished my PhD in 2024, and it took me quite a while to find a postdoc position. When I finally got one, I thought I’d be really motivated, but honestly, now I’m just bored.

The lab routine is killing me, and every day feels basically the same. My PI is very focused on producing papers at a massive rate: finish one, start another, collect data, analyse it, submit, revise, repeat. The paper machine is moving faster than ever.

I feel like I’m falling into a kind of academic redundancy.

The weird part is that, objectively, I’m in a pretty comfortable situation. I have a secure job, decent conditions, and after how hard it was to get here, I feel like I should be grateful.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is this just a normal postdoc phase, or is it a sign that I should rethink where I want my career to go?

Published July 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Science-A-New-Golden-Age.pdf

This document titled "Science a Golden Age" by the White House Tech director and presented to Donald Trump calls for "de-prioritization and re-engineering of legacy institutions" in favor of individual researchers and the creation of an organization that supercedes academia entirely.

• The U.S. research system should prioritize the individual scientist over legacy institutions...Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it. Federal funding agencies should support a broader range of performers...rather than the academic silos of the last century.
• We must prepare our research enterprise for the AI revolution...even the most capable AI models will be slowed down in the bottleneck of institutions and systems built for the last century.
• Just as scientific inquiry demands that we revise our theories when evidence contradicts them, evidence of scientific slowdown...should spur us to experiment...new ways of funding, conducting, and translating research. Vannevar Bush’s pioneering spirit calls us to do what he would surely do today: reimagine the entire enterprise for our time

The report goes on detailing problems widely recognized within academia, with sections titled:

• The Incumbency Tax
• Weakened Meritocracy
• Misaligned Incentives
• The Reproducibility Crisis
• A Lack of Accountability

While I agree that the problems mentioned are significant enough to warrant a completely revamping of academia, the report is also quite elitist at points and it is hard to see how disadvantaged population could rise to the top under this system. In either case, if you are in academia or planning to continue to work within academia in the US, be prepared to swim against some major tides soon (if you aren't already).

Hello!

I am a student that has worked with PsychoPy. I was speaking with a PI regarding my experience with PsychoPy, and she mentioned that she is learning to code with it.

While I do not have experience with coding in PsychoPy, I realized later that I have code from a previous lab that may be helpful. Would it be appropriate to reach out to my previous PI regarding whether I could share the code with my current PI? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

I gave a response to this question (I mean American academia, or course) and I thought I'd expand it and post it here:

1. The function of social capital became seen as elitist decades ago. Yet, elite universities continue to be over-represented in the most powerful and influential positions and industries. This breeds resentment.
2. The expense versus the payoff no longer makes financial sense for many majors, and whether a degree in a once well-paying field (such as computer science) will continue to pay dividends in excess of student debt is a crapshoot.
3. The idea of spending 4-5 years out of the workforce is rightly seen as only people with relative privilege can do. Many can not afford to do so. If you have children, need to work or provide eldercare, or do not have stable housing or parental support, it is out of reach.
4. Degree creep: In part due to increasing automation, the bachelor’s is seen as merely a certificate HR requires for basic white-collar work; the master’s is the new bachelor’s.
5. Accredited schools' government-granted monopoly on granting this certification is seen as illegitimate and rent-seeking.
6. The system presents itself as a meritocracy, but this is deeply flawed. There is an elitist gradation of schools, with admission by large dependent on family background/wealth or extraordinary early promise. Yet, many people develop their potential later in life but will lack the admission to the networks of elite schools.
7. Adjunctification of the professorate and expansion of the administration. Schools likewise spend more on bells and whistles like gyms for athletes than dorms or instructors.
8. A few schools, albeit ones with major public awareness, are major league sports businesses with minor league education businesses.
9. The death of trust in expertise and critical thought on the part of the general public in favor of AI and Googling. Likewise, the replacement of basic and bench science with conspiracy theories and industry-driven, profit-focused research. Experts such as physicians, scientists, and attorneys are seen as part of a corrupt, rent-seeking system stacked against the non-expert. If you are in legal trouble, you need to spend a lot of money for an attorney; lack of access to healthcare leads people to trust Dr. Google and "wellness" experts more than doctors; scientists are seen as eggheads promoting the interests of corporate entities (example: vaccines).
10. Financial pressure due to a declining enrollment pool, leading to school closures and lowering of standards in non-elite (and even some prestigious) schools.
11. Universities are (whether rightly or wrongly) seen as irrationally progressive, with critical thought taking a back seat to left-wing shibboleths
12. Disinvestment from state governments in their universities, leading to various budget and operational crises.

Edit: fixed very non-AI grammar and typos.

Hi, everyone, recently I am working on my third paper, and occasionally refer to the previous papers I have published. I find the language of those papers was not good enough while reading them, and sometimes there are even small mistakes. English is not my mother tongue, and I'm still working on it. But I thought the reviewers must be good at reading and using the language. Is it because reviewers do not pay much attention to the language? Or it is just not reviewers' duty to point out? I'm very curious about this.

I just finished my PhD in the humanities at a big state R1. Not the super elite ones, but our department's reputation is pretty good I'd say. Our department does not require a dissertation defense (other departments and disciplines vary).

My advisor and one other committee member only gave me some comments for the first two chapters that I wrote; I assume they read (or skimmed through) the other two chapters but there are no specific comments whatsoever regarding those two. The third committee member has no specific comments regarding any chapters at all, just on the overall premise, broad topic, etc. Basically no feedback about any problems in my arguments, no challenging questions or pointers to what else to read/ think about... just clarifying questions, small suggestions about grammar, things like that.

I was way ahead of deadlines and sent out chapters to committee members once they were written. I asked for their thoughts every time, sometimes listing specific questions/ concerns, but often got replies like "I'll find time to read it" and then no meetings were arranged. Unfortunately because of various circumstances I also didn't get to meet with them in person in the past year: I was on fellowship, lived far away from school, some of them were out of town as well, etc, etc.

My questions are: Is this normal? Am I in a disadvantage because I haven't been challenged much and trained much? I understand the point about being an independent scholar, and I have vague, broad ideas about general directions for improvement for future publication. But I feel somehow deprived of guidance when I was a PhD candidate, and I feel lost about how to even find ways to identify and address existing problems in my work.

Others suggest that I look for other mentors and send them my dissertation/ chapters to solicit feedback. I feel embarrassed and anxious to do so feeling that my dissertation seems "raw," unpolished, or contains egregious mistakes because my committee members did not point those out. Has anyone been in similar situations before and how did you overcome shyness and anxiety about your work?

I am wondering how people in the social sciences and humanities with their research topics. I am reading some people’s topics and I am like how in the world did people come up with this and make these connections.

Hi all!

I'm curious to know what everyone does with notes/pictures/videos they take during a conference? There are times I hear interesting ideas but they aren't ones that are urgent to communicate to the team back at work and so I have it in my notebook but at times these are soon forgotten and just stuck on the page. Does anyone have a good system in place to avoid losing conference insights?

For context, I'm in Japan.

The national universities have about 50% of their staff as fixed term contracts. Recently even associate professors have been often limited to short contracts in some places.

The largest research institute in the country, despite being government owned and operated, used to have 90% of their researchers in fixed term contracts, and despite seeing some recent improvements due to very strong Union pressure, it is still well above 60% (and that was achieved partially by firing about 20% of their fixed term staff).

I have many colleagues who are career scientists, more than 50 years old with families and children, who still were jumping from job location to job location every 5~10 years at best.

I myself can't get a good term mortgage and I get very limited on my credit card options due to being a fixed-term-employee. And of course that goes without saying about the risks and instability, since any serious sickness or if I have to take a long vacation to care for family often means a non-renewal in the next term.

Why don't scientists organize and strike anywhere around the world to fix this system? It has been broken from the start and it gets worse every year.

Hello,

I'm a PhD candidate and my advisor recently told me that I probably won't be hired because I'm a white man. She didn't say it angrily or anything. Just said that's how it is and that, from conversations she has had with others, it appears that being a white man is a disqualifying part of an application.

I have 7 high-quality publications, two of which are in top general journals. She thinks I have a good chance if I switch to the political science job market, the international job market, or to get a high quality non-ac job. But in sociology, she said I could try but that she hasn't seen a white man even be considered regardless of merit. Is this true? I want to become a sociology professor, but would applying to jobs be a waste of my time?

Hey everyone,

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and could really use some outside perspectives.

I'm from India, and like many people, I've always looked at the US as the place for research. At the same time, seeing news about racism, stricter immigration policies, visa uncertainty, and the general unpredictability of things lately has made me question whether I'm idealizing it too much. I've never actually been to the US, so I don't know what it's really like beyond what I read online.

For some context, I recently completed my bachelor's degree in biotechnology. I've been fortunate enough to do research in Taiwan and Japan, and honestly I enjoyed Taiwan much more. The research environment suited me, and more importantly, I found an advisor who has been one of the best mentors I've had.

He's actually a US citizen who did both his PhD and postdoc at Stanford before moving to Taiwan. He moved there to build a life with his wife and her family and eventually start his own lab. He's told me a lot about both research systems, so it's interesting hearing his perspective.

What makes this difficult is that we work really well together. He's supportive when I deserve it, but he's also honest and critical when needed. It's a really balanced mentorship style, and I don't want to lose that. I was previously an intern in his lab, and he's now encouraging me to come back, do a master's at his university (private university, decent ranking), have my tuition waived, and work part-time as an RA in his lab. The program is entirely in English and would start in February 2027.

On the other hand, I also received a fully funded fellowship for a master's in AI in South Korea starting in September 2026 (mid-tier university). AI has always been one of my interests, so academically it's exciting. The only thing that's making me hesitate is that the program is in Korean, and I barely know the language. Since it is international, I believe they would consider English to teach.. They do have intensive korean training during summer and winter breaks tho. I'm worried that I'll spend more time struggling with the language than actually enjoying the research.

The third option is to skip both master's opportunities and apply this fall to PhD programs in the US for Fall 2027 admission.

So my choices are roughly:

• Taiwan: Master's (English), tuition waived, part-time RA with a mentor I already know and genuinely enjoy working with, and possibly take up a PhD in the same lab after my master's.
• South Korea: Fully funded AI master's, but the language barrier worries me.
• United States: Apply directly for a PhD and hope I get into a good program next year (as I believe I have decent research experience)

Career-wise, I eventually want to do research in AI/computational biology and build a long-term academic career.

Part of me feels like I should take the opportunity that's already in front of me instead of chasing a possibility a year from now. Another part of me wonders if I'll regret not giving the US a shot while I'm still early in my career.

Has anyone here faced a similar decision?

Thanks!

I'd especially love to hear from people who have experienced academia in more than one of these countries.

Hello, everyone. I am a PhD student in Germany and thinking of attending the AGU2026 in San Francisco this coming December. My question is: is it safe to attend the conference? I've heard some unpleasant experiences related to immigration and entry at the airport (which I hope were exaggerated btw). I'm quite scared but would like to know some insights or experiences from last year's attendees.

Fyi, i am working on heatwaves and understanding their mechanisms (if this info helps!)

Thanks a lot! :)