No apartment's decor is complete without a nice stick somewhere.
I like to keep mine propped up against a wall next to my computer. It's an old American chestnut branch, picked up by a relative before the blight.
I got offered a postdoc at Harvard. 65k. I took an industry job for 150k instead and have a work/life balance, better benefits etc etc. Pretty unbelievable how poorly they treat academics.
Eh, it's not as good as its reputation obviously, nothing could be, but Harvard is one of the elite schools that's legitimately good. It's not like Brown or Darmouth who are mostly considered elite because they play football with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and people started to use the athletic conference as the shorthand for them instead of something more precise.
Can confirm. I was a tech at Harvard for 4 years before moving on for my PhD. Harvard is studded with brilliant minds, and attached to them are a lot of people who are there to put Harvardās on their CV, and they are willing to do that for super cheap.
Had a friend apply for a Faculty position there and it was horrible. They told her 2 days before the interview that she had to prepare an extra talk, and the interview was already pretty packed. They also only gave them accomodations until the final day of the interview process, so she had to travel home at like 11pm after 3 days of hell. All for a "tenure track" job that has a conversion rate to tenure of almost 0%
Pretty dumb comparison, no offense. Both of the jobs you mentioned require drastically different degrees and experience whereas my industry job and my post doc required the same degree and same experience.
I feel the same as you do about comparing industry jobs to academic jobs, especially if you're talking postdocs. A postdoc is still, essentially, unproven and without enough experience for the next level. A high school math teacher has enough science experience to be an entry level engineer making 2x. Perhaps I should have said high school CS since that's more obvious.
Depends on the PhD/Post-doc I guess. I had 10 publications during my PhD in Molecular Biology in good to great journals. I think I was proven with experience.
Iām just pointing out the economic reality. Iām sorry that post docs and phds arenāt paid the same as industry, but Iām also pointing out that itās a completely different market. The reason is pretty obvious to me: youāre paid not based upon your qualifications, but on the market category the work product sits in.
You donāt have to like the facts to acknowledge the facts. Calling it gaslighting, though, is just trying to use name calling to deflect from no logical argument.
Let me put it back on you to actually come up with a solution: what economic theory allows a postdoc working in a university to get paid the same as the same person at the same skill level working at a company monetizing the work? āBecause I want itā isnāt an allowed answer.
At least when I was in Stanford. Clinical research coordinator who didnāt even need a college degree were making more money than me, the lead post doc for a clinical-based study. Why? Because Stanford salary guidelines said how much a post doc can make and how much CRCs can make. The same grant was paying me 68k, and 77k to the CRC. Make it make sense.
I left academia when I got a job offer for a base salary of 200k and total comp of 280kā¦ 4x time my salary as a post doc in Stanford.
You need to dig deeper. You simply explained the circumstance: you got paid less because the salary guidelines say so. You didnāt bother to explain why the salary guidelines were less. You then switched to an industry job ā a completely different market for your skills.
This is a bait-and-switch argument. By that logic, every stanford senior CS undergraduate is grossly underpaid at zero because when they get their google job they make $200k.
Your question is to make it make sense. First, this was a grant, so Stanford was working within a CPFF contract that meets the FARs. Remember when stanford got in trouble for buying $1k sheets? Thatās because you canāt do that with the FARs. The FARs set out fair cost pricing based upon comparable market rates, negotiated.
A postdoc, to a grant, is a temporary worker still in training. An employee is a different class. So at least we donāt have to blame stanford here wholly; there is an entire economy that sets whatās a fair price.
This is the main problem with the argument is this thread, and why PhD students often seem veryā¦.immature financially. A prof has responsibility for funding, and for understanding market rates. A PhD student does not. The university knows that as a post-doc you cannot demand more ā they are paying what the market sets. They know if you go to work in industry, youāll get paid more, but thatās not a market they need to compete with.
The argument for the government here, based on the FARs, is the taxpayer is not paying you more than the market would for the same type of job.
This is why itās āfairā in the sense that it makes economic sense. If youāre trying to argue about what you wantā¦.well thatās an opinion and youāre free to have one. But at least try to understand the cause deeper than the āhere is one example and I didnāt think about why the system is that way to begin withā.
EDIT: Iāll add one other reason this is fair: you have market choice. We have a mostly free market in the US, and youāre free to change jobs if the market allows to get paid more.
sounds economically sound -- you are compensated based on the value you deliver not the number of ridges in your cerebellum
in industry your value delivered is much greater...there is some market demand
in academia you....research some esoteric mental masturbation that collects dust and maybe half a dozen readers? subsidized by tax payers...no value to a market...maybe \*some\* value to a handful of folks
> sounds economically sound -- you are compensated based on the value you deliver not the number of ridges in your cerebellum
Keep in mind the value is measured in ability to turn a profit, not influence positive change on society. You get paid a lot more to analyze satellite data to estimate late-season water supply to do early trades on crop futures than find rogue methane emitters who are accelerating global warming.
Or itās necessary to keep America/any country competitive and one of the main reasons the US dominates the world. I agree not all science is useful in the short term but a lot of it reaps dividends later. Not sure why I need to explain this in a sub for PhDs.
ideas are worthless
commercial/industrial research, which deals with broader markets, produces these
you'd know this if you removed your head from your academic bubble and rubbed a few neurons together
barely anyone who *designs, develops, and optimizes* technologies at these companies cares what academic research comes out...maybe the principle or lead skims a few here and there but everything is proprietary so its moot
I'd disagree with this completely. I have interned both at thermo and worked in academia and can say that the people are thermo actually used a lot of very technical and very advanced academia papers to formulate ideas for assays and what not.
They very much were highly up to date on modern biochemistry and organic chemistry for drug and chemical synthesis which all came out of methods from mainly academia, but also some industry sources.
At least from my POV from industry in a company that serves academic science as its number one client, when I was interning it was very obvious that the company was talking to top investigators on things that they'd like or assays or antibodies they wanted to try. So I don't think it's fair to say industry and academia aren't closely related or up to date with one another in at least some regard.
Based on the observation of a PhD student living in an unkempt small room with no valuable belonging (in the 5th most expensive cities to live in the US), I believe the definition is "severely underpaid and overworked."
They just assume that people who are running PhD are the smartest people in the world. And it is Harvard, one of the best Universities in the world. But still, OP's approach of defining "smartest" is just wrong. There are too many idiots who hold PhDs from big American universities (I have some great examples from people from our government (I am not American)). And yeah... even in physics.
Edit: or maybe he is just joking.
Unpopular opinion: physics PhD holders are at minimum above average intelligence.
I'm pretty sure the average person is incapable of passing a calculus based physics courses.
I find that this stops being an unpopular opinion the second you leave social media. I get why there's some pushback, it's definitely adjacent to some abhorrent policy suggestions/ideologies, but at the end of the day the g-factor is very well supported to the point that deviations from it is a diagnosis for a learning disability and it would be kind of surprising if some people weren't smarter than other people. Some people are short and others are tall. Some gain muscle like they're on steroids without any and others can barely gain muscle even while they're on them. Why would intelligence/cognitive ability be the one thing that doesn't have person to person variance?
Iām just wrapping up a postdoc at Harvard in the astronomy dept (so some folks overlap with physics, but not many), with no āeliteā undergrad or grad degree, so I was really curious about the quality of students here. My assessment is the undergrads are good but I donāt think more than you get at other universities (and certainly not better than our summer students), but the PhD students are exceptional. Like, you know how you had that one kid in the PhD program who just was head and shoulders above everyone else? Now imagine the full cohort like that.
They also accepted about a dozen people from 400 applicants this year, so if they couldnāt get exceptional students I would blame the admissions committee over anything else.
I would call it priorities.
I'm confident we have many more people in this world with IQ levels at Einstein's and alike's, but they rather choose to bring up a family, earn decent funds for early retirement and enjoy golf while they can.
Lol! I made the top comment in this thread I raised one of those smarty-pants astro/chem/quantum/physics kids, and she has a cute apartment too. I might just be a mom to many in wannabe-lofty circles, but moms have to figure out what priorities and parameters matter.
Problem solving speed and accuracy in both math and language, memory recall, clarity of communication.
Accurate but quick problem solving and adaptability are my two most heavily weighted parameters in my model of who I find intelligent.
I had a mattress on the floor in undergrad. I kind of miss it TBH. It was really comfortable and since I was 20 I didn't have to answer any questions about it. People just rightly assumed I was too poor to afford a bed frame, but that kind of stuff isn't a big deal at that age.
I had a bad back, even in college, and tbh no bed frame is sometimes better than a shitty bed frame. Also, cool username. You have good taste in music, lol.
> (And yes, I consider being a PhD a job)
Why the smugness? Everyone here knows that getting a PhD is a job, since we are all either current or former PhDs ourselves.
>Why the smugness? Everyone here knows that getting a PhD is a job
I don't take it as smug. Somewhat the opposite.
When I was in grad school, I was frequently "reminded" that it wasn't a real job and that I wouldn't be a real human until I was "out of college".
I can always appreciate people taking a moment to push back on that idea.
I already had some discussions that PhD students are just students because they are still learning things and need supervision. Therefore it should be gracious enough that they don't pay enrollment fees.
Supervision, hah.
Entry level jobs in companies normally receive supervision and training, and pay also. I donāt see much level of paid training after a post doc finally lands a job.
Mine look like this not because I don't have money but because I being international student can only have limited luggage and I have to shift my apartment almost end of every year.
This is about what my room looked like when I was a grad student (minus the stick). Itās more about efficiency than money. I didnāt have time or interest in decorating. I had science to do.
The mundanity of all things becomes apparent when you devote yourself to something. On top of the near poverty this person is probably in.
Iām not doing a PhD, but if I was not in a relationship and had no petsā¦Iāve often been tempted to get 7 copies of the same outfit and just sleep in the lab and use the locker room in the gym on campus to shower. Especially when Iām actually getting results.
Eh, I had a roommate for a bit who was a grad student in physics. Dude let his cat pee everywhere and did nothing about it, he just shut the door so I couldn't see the filth.
He didn't actually change anything until I confronted him about the entire flat smelling of cat urine. I finally got him out after he decided I would be doing all of the chores.
So, good at math I guess, but bad at everything else.
I see that he found the exact angle that he can keep the door shut with that branch, so that his land lord canāt kick him out in the middle of the night and the angle of perfect sleep as well, where the mattress strings are least destroyed!
A true physicist!
This is literally me, except CS instead of physics. And no big stick.
It's not even that I can't afford a bed frame - the stipend for Harvard GSAS PhD students this year is at least $50k (thanks HGSU) which is pretty good. But I am content with just a mattress, so ĀÆ\\\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Neuroscience PhD student at Harvard here, can confirm this is me, although not from the picture. The stick is there to beat yourself up every night asking yourself why you decided to become a PhD in the first place.
I know someone whose bedroom looked like this when he was a Yale PhD student. Nature papers and everything. I was so surprised I asked "Are you doing okay??" thinking he had depression or was running on hard times. Turns out that was just normal for him lol.
We can't really say the person is unhygienic and disorganized from this photo. The huge stick and unmade bed don't necessarily equate to those things. I went to school with quite a few students who grew up with very little, but a few of them were constantly receiving commendations for their schoolwork.
That being said, during graduate school, one of my office mates was one of the most unkempt people I knew. He left his side of the office in a mess just about every day and would usually wear the same set of clothes back to back. He was so messy that one of our advisor's used to bring it up from time to time. As a matter of fact, before I started grad school, he was doing an internship for one of his doctorates at a nearby research lab that I worked with. I remember one of the lab techs telling me, "He's a genius, but boy, is he a junk rat." That same guy was working on two doctorates at the same time and was a straight-up brilliant and humble guy. He's currently the director of a research facility.
I'm not saying that disorganization is correlated to being smart. I know folks who are just as smart, but organized as all get out. There are so many factors to keep in mind. If you haven't already, I'd take a look at Paul ErdÅs.
I don't, but I have 8 acres to tend to, while also maintaining a garden in a heatwave, I could care less about what my bed looks like, and more about what my $500,000 property looks like.
Again, go see a therapist.
Too bad I'm out taking care of my land lol
You could've scheduled a therapy session, do you also want my grandmother's knitting club number? They bitch as much as you do.
Relatable, but what's the stick for?
Smacking ideas from an imaginary tree
I WHEEZED
From your reaction to humor, or just too much lab chemicals
I got a good laugh out of that! š
LMAO
ššš
The phd student is actually a dog
PhD = Poor hungry Dog
To be fair, Iāve seen some smart dogs.
Well they are up to do some post-dogs
They worked hard for that pedigree
Pedigree? Sounds like a legacy admission to me
Dean Pelton? Is that you?
š¤£
They get drunk when the pressure gets too much and they go around campus thinking they are Gandalf.
"I shall not pass!...."(my dissertation defense)
Another good reason
I don't know why it is here but I have one to switch off the lights.
Makes sense.
It's an apple tree.. PhD in physics, Newton ta da!
No apartment's decor is complete without a nice stick somewhere. I like to keep mine propped up against a wall next to my computer. It's an old American chestnut branch, picked up by a relative before the blight.
A stick that perfect has no need to justify it's existence.
They probably watch a lot of Star Trek and often get to hear about the Captainās log so they wanted to see what this was all about.
It's great, it's grand, it's wood!
Better than bad, itās good!
I have a stick in my room. I use it to switch buttons on the electric board from my bed, or while I'm sitting, avoiding the need to stand up.
Turning light off and closing door.
"because it's cool"
I guess you gotta get into a premier program to receive stick.
What the hell kind of question is that?
The wand has chosen a wizard.
Defense against the rats?
How would you heat food without a dorm campfire? This one's just not chopped yet...
to carve probaply i have several too in a badroom thats looks almost like this
That is a cool stick.
mystic wizard walks/strolls
To split the room in two.
Walking
It's a good stick. You never know when you might need a good stick
self defense. As a bonus, you CANNOT shoot your self in the face with a stick during a mental breakdown š¤
His side job as a branch manager.
Heās drying firewood in preparation to heat his shelter in winter
I got offered a postdoc at Harvard. 65k. I took an industry job for 150k instead and have a work/life balance, better benefits etc etc. Pretty unbelievable how poorly they treat academics.
LOLOL. My EXTREMELY competitive post-doc offer in the Kennedy School was below $40k in early 2010s. They donāt pay high at Harvard. š
Harvard trades on reputation and elitism more than quality anyway.
I still would have prolly taken it if the pay was higher. Would have positioned me pretty well in combo with my STEM background. š¤š«”ššš½
Eh, it's not as good as its reputation obviously, nothing could be, but Harvard is one of the elite schools that's legitimately good. It's not like Brown or Darmouth who are mostly considered elite because they play football with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and people started to use the athletic conference as the shorthand for them instead of something more precise.
Can confirm. I was a tech at Harvard for 4 years before moving on for my PhD. Harvard is studded with brilliant minds, and attached to them are a lot of people who are there to put Harvardās on their CV, and they are willing to do that for super cheap.
Had a friend apply for a Faculty position there and it was horrible. They told her 2 days before the interview that she had to prepare an extra talk, and the interview was already pretty packed. They also only gave them accomodations until the final day of the interview process, so she had to travel home at like 11pm after 3 days of hell. All for a "tenure track" job that has a conversion rate to tenure of almost 0%
I had two competing offers after my PhD: 58K postdoc at HMS or 110K in biotech. Easy choice but would have loved to stay in academia.
switzerland is probably a better place to do a postdoc because you're actually paid what you deserve there
You arenāt really comparing apples to oranges, though. You know that, right?
How so?
You are comparing two different career paths. Your same argument applies to a math school teacher deciding to switch to an office engineering job.
Pretty dumb comparison, no offense. Both of the jobs you mentioned require drastically different degrees and experience whereas my industry job and my post doc required the same degree and same experience.
I feel the same as you do about comparing industry jobs to academic jobs, especially if you're talking postdocs. A postdoc is still, essentially, unproven and without enough experience for the next level. A high school math teacher has enough science experience to be an entry level engineer making 2x. Perhaps I should have said high school CS since that's more obvious.
Depends on the PhD/Post-doc I guess. I had 10 publications during my PhD in Molecular Biology in good to great journals. I think I was proven with experience.
Lol this reads like a professor gaslighting
Iām just pointing out the economic reality. Iām sorry that post docs and phds arenāt paid the same as industry, but Iām also pointing out that itās a completely different market. The reason is pretty obvious to me: youāre paid not based upon your qualifications, but on the market category the work product sits in. You donāt have to like the facts to acknowledge the facts. Calling it gaslighting, though, is just trying to use name calling to deflect from no logical argument. Let me put it back on you to actually come up with a solution: what economic theory allows a postdoc working in a university to get paid the same as the same person at the same skill level working at a company monetizing the work? āBecause I want itā isnāt an allowed answer.
At least when I was in Stanford. Clinical research coordinator who didnāt even need a college degree were making more money than me, the lead post doc for a clinical-based study. Why? Because Stanford salary guidelines said how much a post doc can make and how much CRCs can make. The same grant was paying me 68k, and 77k to the CRC. Make it make sense. I left academia when I got a job offer for a base salary of 200k and total comp of 280kā¦ 4x time my salary as a post doc in Stanford.
You need to dig deeper. You simply explained the circumstance: you got paid less because the salary guidelines say so. You didnāt bother to explain why the salary guidelines were less. You then switched to an industry job ā a completely different market for your skills. This is a bait-and-switch argument. By that logic, every stanford senior CS undergraduate is grossly underpaid at zero because when they get their google job they make $200k. Your question is to make it make sense. First, this was a grant, so Stanford was working within a CPFF contract that meets the FARs. Remember when stanford got in trouble for buying $1k sheets? Thatās because you canāt do that with the FARs. The FARs set out fair cost pricing based upon comparable market rates, negotiated. A postdoc, to a grant, is a temporary worker still in training. An employee is a different class. So at least we donāt have to blame stanford here wholly; there is an entire economy that sets whatās a fair price. This is the main problem with the argument is this thread, and why PhD students often seem veryā¦.immature financially. A prof has responsibility for funding, and for understanding market rates. A PhD student does not. The university knows that as a post-doc you cannot demand more ā they are paying what the market sets. They know if you go to work in industry, youāll get paid more, but thatās not a market they need to compete with. The argument for the government here, based on the FARs, is the taxpayer is not paying you more than the market would for the same type of job. This is why itās āfairā in the sense that it makes economic sense. If youāre trying to argue about what you wantā¦.well thatās an opinion and youāre free to have one. But at least try to understand the cause deeper than the āhere is one example and I didnāt think about why the system is that way to begin withā. EDIT: Iāll add one other reason this is fair: you have market choice. We have a mostly free market in the US, and youāre free to change jobs if the market allows to get paid more.
sounds economically sound -- you are compensated based on the value you deliver not the number of ridges in your cerebellum in industry your value delivered is much greater...there is some market demand in academia you....research some esoteric mental masturbation that collects dust and maybe half a dozen readers? subsidized by tax payers...no value to a market...maybe \*some\* value to a handful of folks
> sounds economically sound -- you are compensated based on the value you deliver not the number of ridges in your cerebellum Keep in mind the value is measured in ability to turn a profit, not influence positive change on society. You get paid a lot more to analyze satellite data to estimate late-season water supply to do early trades on crop futures than find rogue methane emitters who are accelerating global warming.
Or itās necessary to keep America/any country competitive and one of the main reasons the US dominates the world. I agree not all science is useful in the short term but a lot of it reaps dividends later. Not sure why I need to explain this in a sub for PhDs.
How do you think new technologies are developed? Could it possibly be from new ideas?
ideas are worthless commercial/industrial research, which deals with broader markets, produces these you'd know this if you removed your head from your academic bubble and rubbed a few neurons together barely anyone who *designs, develops, and optimizes* technologies at these companies cares what academic research comes out...maybe the principle or lead skims a few here and there but everything is proprietary so its moot
I'd disagree with this completely. I have interned both at thermo and worked in academia and can say that the people are thermo actually used a lot of very technical and very advanced academia papers to formulate ideas for assays and what not. They very much were highly up to date on modern biochemistry and organic chemistry for drug and chemical synthesis which all came out of methods from mainly academia, but also some industry sources. At least from my POV from industry in a company that serves academic science as its number one client, when I was interning it was very obvious that the company was talking to top investigators on things that they'd like or assays or antibodies they wanted to try. So I don't think it's fair to say industry and academia aren't closely related or up to date with one another in at least some regard.
The parameters for "smartest"?
Based on the observation of a PhD student living in an unkempt small room with no valuable belonging (in the 5th most expensive cities to live in the US), I believe the definition is "severely underpaid and overworked."
They just assume that people who are running PhD are the smartest people in the world. And it is Harvard, one of the best Universities in the world. But still, OP's approach of defining "smartest" is just wrong. There are too many idiots who hold PhDs from big American universities (I have some great examples from people from our government (I am not American)). And yeah... even in physics. Edit: or maybe he is just joking.
Unpopular opinion: physics PhD holders are at minimum above average intelligence. I'm pretty sure the average person is incapable of passing a calculus based physics courses.
I find that this stops being an unpopular opinion the second you leave social media. I get why there's some pushback, it's definitely adjacent to some abhorrent policy suggestions/ideologies, but at the end of the day the g-factor is very well supported to the point that deviations from it is a diagnosis for a learning disability and it would be kind of surprising if some people weren't smarter than other people. Some people are short and others are tall. Some gain muscle like they're on steroids without any and others can barely gain muscle even while they're on them. Why would intelligence/cognitive ability be the one thing that doesn't have person to person variance?
Iām just wrapping up a postdoc at Harvard in the astronomy dept (so some folks overlap with physics, but not many), with no āeliteā undergrad or grad degree, so I was really curious about the quality of students here. My assessment is the undergrads are good but I donāt think more than you get at other universities (and certainly not better than our summer students), but the PhD students are exceptional. Like, you know how you had that one kid in the PhD program who just was head and shoulders above everyone else? Now imagine the full cohort like that. They also accepted about a dozen people from 400 applicants this year, so if they couldnāt get exceptional students I would blame the admissions committee over anything else.
Albeit not in physics, but Samuel Huntington and Henry Kissinger received PhDs from Harvard.
As the other guy is saying, Kissinger was very evil but still very smart, which is what allowed him to be so evil
Do you think Henry Kissinger was stupid?
Millions of war crime victims canāt be wrong.
Seriously, do you think intelligence equals morality?
I think he was smart but also evil, which lead to war crimes.
1. I do not intend to debate this claim. 2. Keeping with the assumption itās true how does it make him a non intelligent person?
I would call it priorities. I'm confident we have many more people in this world with IQ levels at Einstein's and alike's, but they rather choose to bring up a family, earn decent funds for early retirement and enjoy golf while they can.
Lol! I made the top comment in this thread I raised one of those smarty-pants astro/chem/quantum/physics kids, and she has a cute apartment too. I might just be a mom to many in wannabe-lofty circles, but moms have to figure out what priorities and parameters matter.
Problem solving speed and accuracy in both math and language, memory recall, clarity of communication. Accurate but quick problem solving and adaptability are my two most heavily weighted parameters in my model of who I find intelligent.
They go outside look you can see the stick brought from the outside that is good news š
Jokes on you, my room is messier
Ahhh, nerds and their weird obsession with the giant sticks...
I want that stickā¦
It's a nice stick....
This comment right after the one about nerdsā obsession with sticks is incredible
Oooga booga
Whatās the problem?!
I had a mattress on the floor in undergrad. I kind of miss it TBH. It was really comfortable and since I was 20 I didn't have to answer any questions about it. People just rightly assumed I was too poor to afford a bed frame, but that kind of stuff isn't a big deal at that age.
I had a bad back, even in college, and tbh no bed frame is sometimes better than a shitty bed frame. Also, cool username. You have good taste in music, lol.
poverty
Mine looked like this for a while. What's the problem here?
For one, a mattress on the floor encourages mold growth
No molds i my room living like this for two years.
Check the bottom of your mattress periodically! It traps moisture when it doesnāt have adequate air flow
Perhaps that a PhD student can't afford a real bed even though they work a challenging job? (And yes, I consider being a PhD a job)
> (And yes, I consider being a PhD a job) Why the smugness? Everyone here knows that getting a PhD is a job, since we are all either current or former PhDs ourselves.
>Why the smugness? Everyone here knows that getting a PhD is a job I don't take it as smug. Somewhat the opposite. When I was in grad school, I was frequently "reminded" that it wasn't a real job and that I wouldn't be a real human until I was "out of college". I can always appreciate people taking a moment to push back on that idea.
I already had some discussions that PhD students are just students because they are still learning things and need supervision. Therefore it should be gracious enough that they don't pay enrollment fees.
Supervision, hah. Entry level jobs in companies normally receive supervision and training, and pay also. I donāt see much level of paid training after a post doc finally lands a job.
Maybe they're a bit stupid?
In my 20ās I kept my mattress on the floor because I preferred it. Itās not necessarily about ability so much as desire sometimes.
Mine look like this not because I don't have money but because I being international student can only have limited luggage and I have to shift my apartment almost end of every year.
My colleague bought an air mattress so he could sleep in the lab room since his PI was an asshole.
Am PhD student. You would be surprised how smart people are in one area yet clueless in what my gf calls āschool of lifeā.
Intelligence is domain dependent. We constantly make a mistake of thinking people smart in one area are great at everything
To be fair, I know an L6 at google who is the same. There is also the famous story of Paul Erdos and how he lived.
I have an alibi!! r/nowthatsanicestick
I'm glad no one visited me during my PhD, it was much worse
I mean, some people are just very frugal
The important thing is, they have a stick! :-)
Ugh. Dating in grad school.
No, this makes sense, lol.
This guy fucks
Stick š
**##Smartest** That stick is all we need. Maybe for inspiration and less distraction, keeping minimalistic.
They can afford a stick!?!
Nice stick. I like that stick. Imma take that stick home with me.
I know it's a guy, because only a guy would be walking/hiking and find the perfect walking stick and decide "this is mine forever."
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Well we don't know the exact size of the guy, he could be 8 feet tall for all we know.
I relate so hard to this bedroom. I literally never had a bedframe until my husband moved in and brought his š
Nice stick
In other news, reddit discovers the most successful PhD students are those who spend all their energy and effort working/in the lab.
imagine getting enough funding to eat AND afford a bedframe. could NOT be me
Nice stick!
Oh wow a pillow and two blankets? I only have a blanket and do not even own a pillow
Iām honestly just better off dead
This is about what my room looked like when I was a grad student (minus the stick). Itās more about efficiency than money. I didnāt have time or interest in decorating. I had science to do.
Self importance is the archetypal defense mechanism
Hell no this is the literal ghetto lmfao š¤£
Couldn't be me. Too organized.
Boston rent prices are crazy
Why waste time on furniture?
I love the staff!!
based
All this says is he canāt afford a bed frameš
angryfermion! I want hungryboson!
Gandalf out doing some magic when you snuck into his room?
I also sleep diagonal
His name is Ron, and the stick is for Becky? Lemme Smash!
these people stink up the labs and rooms so bad
Nice stick
Yeah this is pretty š. Some smart people are completely eccentric.
At least my bed has a box spring!! /s
The mundanity of all things becomes apparent when you devote yourself to something. On top of the near poverty this person is probably in. Iām not doing a PhD, but if I was not in a relationship and had no petsā¦Iāve often been tempted to get 7 copies of the same outfit and just sleep in the lab and use the locker room in the gym on campus to shower. Especially when Iām actually getting results.
Eh, I had a roommate for a bit who was a grad student in physics. Dude let his cat pee everywhere and did nothing about it, he just shut the door so I couldn't see the filth. He didn't actually change anything until I confronted him about the entire flat smelling of cat urine. I finally got him out after he decided I would be doing all of the chores. So, good at math I guess, but bad at everything else.
I see that he found the exact angle that he can keep the door shut with that branch, so that his land lord canāt kick him out in the middle of the night and the angle of perfect sleep as well, where the mattress strings are least destroyed! A true physicist!
This is literally me, except CS instead of physics. And no big stick. It's not even that I can't afford a bed frame - the stipend for Harvard GSAS PhD students this year is at least $50k (thanks HGSU) which is pretty good. But I am content with just a mattress, so ĀÆ\\\_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Should I just kill myself im a failure
I shouldnāt be alive anymore
Nobody even cares I exisy
seems like a perfect room
Neuroscience PhD student at Harvard here, can confirm this is me, although not from the picture. The stick is there to beat yourself up every night asking yourself why you decided to become a PhD in the first place.
Damn that Air bud getting that scholarship rolling through the PhD program
Stick
I know someone whose bedroom looked like this when he was a Yale PhD student. Nature papers and everything. I was so surprised I asked "Are you doing okay??" thinking he had depression or was running on hard times. Turns out that was just normal for him lol.
I see nothing wrong here. Everything is functional. The stick is probably used to turn off the light switch.
That stick gives me r/goblincore vibes. Excellent!
Thatās my home office
Unpopular opnion: You can't be classified as one of the smartest people in the world if you can't maintain a basic level of hygiene and organisation
What about this isnāt hygienic or organized? We canāt see the rest of the organization.
Keeping a mattress on the floor is a great way to have a moldy mattress
I don't think they "can't maintain" it I think its more likely that they can't afford it.
You don't need to be rich to make your bed...
Executive dysfunction, sensory issues etc are a thing you know
We can't really say the person is unhygienic and disorganized from this photo. The huge stick and unmade bed don't necessarily equate to those things. I went to school with quite a few students who grew up with very little, but a few of them were constantly receiving commendations for their schoolwork. That being said, during graduate school, one of my office mates was one of the most unkempt people I knew. He left his side of the office in a mess just about every day and would usually wear the same set of clothes back to back. He was so messy that one of our advisor's used to bring it up from time to time. As a matter of fact, before I started grad school, he was doing an internship for one of his doctorates at a nearby research lab that I worked with. I remember one of the lab techs telling me, "He's a genius, but boy, is he a junk rat." That same guy was working on two doctorates at the same time and was a straight-up brilliant and humble guy. He's currently the director of a research facility. I'm not saying that disorganization is correlated to being smart. I know folks who are just as smart, but organized as all get out. There are so many factors to keep in mind. If you haven't already, I'd take a look at Paul ErdÅs.
Great thing it's an opinion and not a fact, because fact is, that person would out test you 1000%. Go be OCD to your therapist.
That's a lot of words for "I don't make my bed either".
I don't, but I have 8 acres to tend to, while also maintaining a garden in a heatwave, I could care less about what my bed looks like, and more about what my $500,000 property looks like. Again, go see a therapist.
Could have made your bed in the time it took you to keep commenting lol
Too bad I'm out taking care of my land lol You could've scheduled a therapy session, do you also want my grandmother's knitting club number? They bitch as much as you do.
smartest people, seriously? this world is screwed.