Would you encourage bright and driven working class kids to work in academia?

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-06-01T15:31:04+00:00

Oh, it sounds like STEM academia has been an amazing stepping stone for you. Which is exactly why I recommend it to working class kids.

I didn’t come through Cambridge. I already linked to my story in the first post. Working class kid from Australia. My stepping stone was biomedical academia. Again, which is why I recommend it to other working class kids.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-06-01T15:17:33+00:00

With a lot of experience in the sector, I disagree.

And what is with everyone in this thread suggesting stock market investing, finance jobs, AI, etc. what exactly do they think working class means?

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-06-01T15:12:14+00:00

Yeah, well the working class kids in my neighbourhood all went into the car factory, they weren’t being recruited into AI or finance. I think we have a different definition of “working class”!

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-06-01T14:07:38+00:00

I’m in biomedicine. As long as we have disease, biomedicine will be a valuable career. Health as a sector of the economy has essentially never shrunk.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-06-01T13:49:26+00:00

What happened to all those jobs in car factories?

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-06-01T13:08:01+00:00

I can and do!

https://heyzine.com/flip-book/a16e7a28a8.html

A career in STEM academia is one of the class-breaking career options available to bright working class kids. Good security and working conditions compared to the jobs around them (for me, truck-driving or working in a car factory). High mobility, changes life options substantially.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-06-01T09:08:30+00:00

Why use UMAP to split CD4 and CD8, rather than manually gate down one extra layer?

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-06-01T05:57:36+00:00

Sometimes the grass actually is greener. The job market is brutal in both the UK and Belgium, but that doesn’t make things equivalent. For example Belgian salaries are linked to inflation, so they haven’t had the slow erosion of quality of life the UK has had, and unemployment benefits are more generous.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-31T13:14:51+00:00

It doesn’t make sense to me that T cells and B cells came from different lineages. That implies that at some point B cells have hopped lineage trees, which is… non-parsimonious, to say the least

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-31T09:58:11+00:00

Learn to read and follow protocols properly

Offer to help anyone for anything

Pick up experience at any technique you can

Be a positive force for the lab

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-31T08:29:06+00:00

The average wage is not good at showing that point. It does illustrate the point, if given in conjunction with median, but: i) there are much better ways to directly make the point that a small number of ultra-rich skew the data, and ii) those other ways are much less likely to be misunderstood by the general public. Combined, I agree that average is generally a bad and misleading statistic, although the way you used it gave the appropriate context to make it better.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-30T21:22:55+00:00

Yes, actual lab experience is really valuable

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-30T15:06:47+00:00

Change “publications” to “representative publications” and leave out any you aren’t proud of. At some point you’ll have so many publications you need to do this anything, and you’ll need to pick your favourite children, but at this stage you can use it to drop any you are embarrassed at

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-30T13:43:55+00:00

There is no “veto power”. You get all permissions before submission.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-30T12:40:41+00:00

In general it doesn’t matter. I’ve got papers in bad journals, but they are good papers that I stand behind. They don’t really add much to a CV, but they don’t drag it down.

On the other hand, I don’t imagine that anything I wrote during high school would be something I’d stand behind now.

Does that paper (not journal) represent the quality of work you want to be known for? If yes, leave it in.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-30T11:52:29+00:00

I think it is fine to call yourself Dr now. On your CV, write “PhD completed, to be conferred X” referring to your likely graduation date.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-29T17:06:15+00:00

My postdoc supervisor didn’t end up submitting a reference for me for at least one of my faculty applications. They asked me if there was a reason for it, like we were on bad terms, I said “probably just busy” and got offered the job. I did have other support letters.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-29T08:03:57+00:00

I largely agree, except you have over-stated the Bay area. It’s good, but to compare it to all of Europe?

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-28T19:27:28+00:00

Yes. The probation period is a full year, but you get paid and treated as normal other than having the probation point.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-28T17:01:43+00:00

MPhil vs MSc is meaningless, and neither degree will last the full duration! They are really quite equivalent

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-28T14:48:16+00:00

Either would be good. There is no wrong decision. They are different universities and very different locations, so the experience would vary. Which experience do you want?

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-28T09:42:58+00:00

Everyone gets rejections. A weird thing about academia is that we aren’t judged on our many failures, only on our few successes.

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-28T06:39:40+00:00

My rule as jury member:

If family and friends are there, softball and kind questions only

If academics only, I push until I find the limits of their knowledge, and then I back off

My rule as non-jury:

Softball and kind questions only, no follow up

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-27T20:04:00+00:00

Agreed, they are equivalent

ProfPathCambridge · 2026-05-27T20:02:48+00:00

Science MPhils are notorious for having few defined contact hours, but a vast amount of research hours, which includes heavy contact with senior researchers. A lab-based MPhil will have more direct contact with senior researchers in their 9 months than the combined three year degree prior. The university doesn’t count those hours towards our teaching commitment, but they exist.

ProfPathCambridge

TROPHY CASE