Product Description
Despite your graduate education, brainpower, and technical prowess, your career in scientific research is far from assured. Permanent positions are scarce, science survival is rarely part of formal graduate training, and a good mentor is hard to find. This exceptional volume explains what stands between you and fulfilling long-term research career. Bringing the key survival skills into focus, A Ph.D. Is Not Enough! proposes a rational approach to establishing yourself as a scientist. It offers sound advice of selecting a thesis or postdoctoral adviser, choosing among research jobs in academia, government laboratories, and industry, preparing for an employment interview, and defining a research program. This book will help you make your oral presentations effective, your journal articles compelling, and your grant proposals successful. A Ph.D. Is Not Enough should be required reading for anyone on the threshold of a career in science.
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A PhD Is Not Enough: A Guide To Survival In Science
- Paperback: 128 pages
- Publisher: Basic Books; 1993-12-20
- Label: Basic Books
- Studio: Basic Books
- ISBN: 0201626632
- Average Customer Review:
 based on 40 reviews
- Sales Rank in Books: #28447
Avg. Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: should be obvious to experienced people, a must-read for new graduate students 2008-12-13
Comment: The book is a quick and easy read, outlining some facts of life as a scientist. I'm taken aback by some of the other reviewers though. For people that are in the process of getting, or already have, a Ph.D., they seem rather enthralled/amazed by the content of the book. Maybe it's just because I have been at an upper-echelon school for a few years now, and I get to see first-hand what it takes to do or die in academia, but I found nothing new in the book; all of the author's points were extremely obvious. The book is a little old, but if you can't step back and realize the big picture of what the author says, you need to get out of your lab. Just use your imagination; when he says "overhead foils", just pretend it says "powerpoint slides" or whatever.
Also, the content is just one opinion of one man. I agree with some of his points, and outright reject the rest. Or maybe I'm just doing what we, as Ph.D.-level scientists, as supposed to do (though the question is not a Ph.D.-level question)- gather information from multiple sources to form our own opinion of the state of the art, and then do some field research to refine said opinion. Multiple sources include your advisor, other professors in the department, postdocs in your lab/department, and friends in industry...go talk to people. In my experience, building and maintaining a network of friends in the scientific community will pay more dividends than anything else.
And for the love of god, don't publish five or six papers a year about the same project as the author advocates. As if there aren't already enough crappy papers floating out there in the literature...don't make my literature searches any more difficult and time-consuming. Be like Gauss, "few but ripe," when it comes to publishing.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Worth Reading, Not Buying 2008-12-04
Comment: I found this book to be a great introductory text to prepare you for more reading on books related to scientific mentoring. The matter-of-fact and casual tone used in the book sound more like a mentor speaking to you than a published text.
Pros:
--Very short (109 pages)
--Easy reading (casual tone)
--Straight talk. A lot of the book is obvious, but it's nice to hear it from someone in the field of science.
Cons:
--Very short (109 pages)
--Outdated (published in 1993) Needs a new version with updated information. No mention of the internet. Mentions using overhead slides in a talk (really, who does that at a professional meeting in current times?)
Unless they update this book, I would hold off on buying it. See if you can get it at your school library. It's worth reading, but not buying.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Concise Advice for Science Students 2008-10-21
Comment: [4 stars, due to possible personal bias.]
This short volume of 109 pages contains the kind of practical advice that I would get if I chanced upon knocking the right professor's door. Its tone is familiar to any bright student. One might seriously believe that, if Feibelman's advice were followed, the world would be a better place.
Let's see.
His advice on career path is quite persuasive. Who hasn't been enamored by the state-of-the-art hardware at national laboratories? Who doesn't wish for the financial security and the prestige that comes with a full professorship? Feibelman in Chapter 5 combines the two sequentially as the ideal career, gives sundry reasons, and concludes, with force:
"Financial priorities thus dictate the same career path as the scientific ones" (68).
In particular, Feibelman strongly discourages the too-common practice of working up the academic ladder, starting as an Assistant Professor. Instead, he suggests that the budding scientist:
1. start at a commercial or government lab;
2. establish reputation and become a senior scientist; and
3.(a) rise to management, or
(b) return to academia as a Full Professor (which is also management, in a sense).
But is it realistic?
Feibelman himself took a different, less ideal path. He was the dreaded Assistant Professor for five years, before going to Sandia National Lab in 1974. As of 2008, Feibelman is still at Sandia. Perhaps scientific priorities dictate that some must remain in government labs.
Feibelman lumps together industry and government when comparing them to academia. His CV (online) lacks any reference to industry, so his remarks concerning government labs may not necessarily apply to industry.
Some other points.
Chapter 3, "Giving Talks", is a matter of taste. Feibelman frowns upon photographs of experimental apparatus, long equations, DNA sequences, and other barrage of information that inundates many slides. We've all seen this. The theoretical physicist is inclined toward elegance; while the engineer may choose, to quote Semiconductor Device Fundamentals by Pierret, to "optimize the transmission of factual information" (v). It is a matter of taste.
Chapter 7-8: The scientific research enterprise is competitive yet paradoxically wasteful. One must seek all possible sources of funding for one's research, because it is scarce: "you are unwise to question the motives of the agency that grants you the funds to do it." Once the funds are obtained, one must not be thrifty with it: "he who spends the most money has the most influence" (80). Also, "No one ever got ahead in science by saving money" (105).
In Chapter 8, Feibelman warns the postdoc: "Working on more than one project is the only way a young (or any!) scientist should undertake an inherently long-term project" (102). Implicit Corollary: Where does that leave the PhD candidates, whose dissertations are inherently long-term projects? They should take frequent breaks and work on other projects in between!
_A PhD Is Not Enough_, by Feibelman.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Honest looks at academia are hard to find. This is one. 2007-12-26
Comment: For those like myself, interested in science policy, Fiebelman provides an unusually candid view of research life with the "Queen of the Sciences", physics. As an earth scientist I used to tell physicists I met that I figured that physicists could do anything that any other scientist could do - only better. Fortunately, they didn't want to do all those other things - leaving room for us.This is a joke - if other scientific types are taking me seriously and getting mad (hm, well there's some truth here, anyway).
Beyond the specifics regarding university science departments, such as the publish or perish syndrome, grantsmanship, and requirements for promotion and tenure, the book inadvertently, perhaps, touches on a larger issue: where does the research university's activities fit in with society and its needs? Some academic research departments place inordinate emphasis on specialized subdisciplines through peer-reviewed publications. They may operate in invisible colleges in which participants communicate with each other but are isolated from the larger society both with respect to science as well as the nation's needs.
In such departments publication may come to serve competitive or self-preservation goals more than meaningful larger objectives. This kind of condition is one of the reasons for the enormous proliferation of literature a good deal of which may be duplicative in character. E.g. the keywords, "intensity interferometry" in Google Scholar yields 77,000 scholarly articles or books. How does one extract meaningful synthesis or the best insights out of such accumulations?
This is where Fiebelman's suggestion that work in industry may yield value in the early stages of academic careers is interesting. Almost by definition, work in industry must serve realistic needs. The research literature and methodologies to which individuals are exposed tend to reflect this. I got this kind of benefit with respect to geology in my first job, working for an oil company. I "sat on wells", analyzing cuttings from rocks and cores in drillholes, experiencing "backward trips in geological time". I became familiar with geophysical logs and other technologies that added valuable perspectives to my later research career.
To sum up, Fiebelman's suggestion to new graduates or others entering the job market that jobs in industry can yield benefits down the road are well worth paying attention to. From the larger U.S. policy perspective Fiebelman's book also offers useful insights.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Customer Rating:
Summary: Could have more 2007-12-15
Comment: I think this book could be really helpful to first year Master or PhD students, especially those who want a career dedicated to research in academia or also a government lab. I thought the subject matter was good and written in an interesting way, but my big problem was the lack of detail and excess of anecdotes. Mostly, the chapters seem more like half-chapters; introductions to good ideas that aren't elaborated upon. As someone who is at the end of a first post-doc looking for "what's next" outside of academia, there was not any revelatory information in this book - just good reminders on how to be savvy about your scientific career and make a good reputation for yourself.
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A PhD Is Not Enough: A Guide To Survival In Science
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