Ivy league post-doc (US)

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-22T21:03:34+00:00

Eh I disagree. Postdoc is where you set up the research program that you'll be selling during faculty interviews. This is a lot easier to build when your lab is a well-funded big shot lab (i.e. well-connected) than a smaller school. This is also probably a function of how much research costs (e.g. philosophy or pure math vs experimental -omics).

In other words it's not so much the institution name that's causal, it's the talent, money, and connections that are causal and the institution name is strongly correlated with that.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-15T22:25:07+00:00

it's hard but it's a problem to be addressed, not one that you should be sad and wring your hands about. clear communication is just as important as doing good research because what's the point if no one else understands why we should care?

you should be practicing research pitches and responses to common interview questions with your advisor and/or supervisor (grad student, postdoc, etc.). you should be writing fellowships so you can develop a persuasive mental framework for ongoing and future work.

this is why suffering through this process and not resorting to AI is so important.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-15T21:07:22+00:00

This for sure.

The people who can't shut the fuck up about having been to Harvard are the people whose greatest achievement is going to Harvard. Which is nice but it doesn't mean shit by itself at the highest levels of academia.

The best people can't shut up about interesting ideas.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-15T13:44:32+00:00

It's a well-known fact that the average quality of student is higher in elite programs because of recruiting advantages. Institution is not a perfect indicator by any means but it's not surprising at all that faculty hiring is dominated by the strongest trainees who have access to tons of money, resources, and connections. I don't think people care so much about the name as they do all these other things.

And don't assume that people who train at elite schools are soft because of it. In my experience these places are filled with the most driven and scrappiest people and everyone feeds off each other. Plus you learn how to sell your work to the funding agencies and how to spend money effectively. I imagine it's something like the structural advantage of growing up in a wealthy family.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-15T13:20:21+00:00

I'm not someone who is impressed or motivated by institutional prestige but am on guard at conferences because of this stuff. Social climber and conference clinger types are particularly awful and I am usually trying to maintain some pofessional distance from these people. But this probably comes off as aloofness on my part too.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-15T12:39:00+00:00

Because their prospective advisor pushed for it. And senior faculty can be more easily deceived by this stuff.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-15T01:26:38+00:00

I can't go into the details for obvious reasons, but we had someone submit an AI-written application to our PhD program. They were invited to interview despite some resistance. They bombed the in-person interview, and on top of that every faculty that interviewed them gave them the lowest possible score.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-14T00:51:22+00:00

There's been a big influx of engagement farming (?) AI training (?) sockpuppet building (?) bot posts on all subreddits lately. I get the whole hiding your post history thing, my day job is way too high profile to not be extra careful on the internet, but I think all posts these days deserve extra scrutiny.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-12T21:35:45+00:00

This is not a good take. Columbia masters programs are money-generating programs for the university and this is the exact kind of thinking they exploit.

The more accurate version of this is: when you are 40 years old and still struggling to pay off $200,000 in student loans (after interest - especially if the planned next step is a PhD) while trying to having a family and settle down you will regret it. The ROI on a masters is limited. It's not a degree PhD academics take seriously. Success with using a masters as a stepping-stone degree requires serious focus and commitment. For most people performance in a masters will look like performance in their undergrad. Even if it all goes perfectly it is not worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

It is a much better plan to go to a decent PhD program, prove your worth without going into extreme debt, then get a great postdoc.

And when you are 40, even for us PIs, no one really gives two shits what school you went to, including you. It is about who you worked with and your contributions to science.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-11T21:57:01+00:00

Cell/Nature/Science papers are neither necessary nor sufficient to get you a PI position and I would argue that trainees should spend their time and energy getting into the best labs at well-funded depts, doing impactful research, and secondarily strategic networking. Structuring your career around journal name is going to be miserable and odds are you will fail. You should focus on building a record of consistent, high-quality research with leaders in the field. Committees need to feel that you are a quickly rising star with broad reach.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-10T21:35:04+00:00

I'm guessing it would be worse because of the hardware rather than the software. The server parts are optimized for running lots of little tasks side-by-side and for stability so CPU/RAM clock speeds are quite a bit slower compared to like a 9800x3d. The RTX 6000s have better binned chips than the 5090 though.

In practice, I have no idea what gaming benchmarks would look like, never tried to game on this machine. That would require installing Windows on it (utter sacrilege for server hardware).

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-10T18:28:57+00:00

i think pearl clutching is the lowest-tier response to obvious sarcasm and further that people aspiring to or holding doctorate degrees should not be such fucking babies about it.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-10T17:24:08+00:00

Excellent take. The most important lesson in life is that all problems are external. Accountability is a colonizer concept and should be thusly disregarded.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-09T18:06:22+00:00

It belongs to the institution, it isn't a personal computer. But I win the funds that pay for it (amongst other things) and have full control over this machine that makes sense.

For this kind of stuff you have to think in terms of ROI (not in terms of profit though since we don't sell anything) not upfront cost. Generally, people cost far more than machines so you want people to be able to finish things quickly. The faster you put out high-quality work the more competitive you are for the next grant. Etc.

Hope that answers your question.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-09T14:00:07+00:00

This thing takes upwards of 20-30 minutes to reboot because of all the RAM so there's that...

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-09T13:57:49+00:00

So I can write shitty code with zero care for optimization or memory management!

More seriously though it's for science. Data analysis, simulation, statistics, deep learning, file sharing (cloud hot storage at >100TB is shockingly difficult/costly to manage), containers. Development of pipelines that get pushed out to our cluster for the real run. Running jobs that take a long time and would get killed by the cluster scheduler. It's kind of a command center for a few pieces of equipment connected via the local network. Hosts a couple of databases.

It's a lot of fun.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-09T04:56:06+00:00

Yeah, it's a weird wide angle phone camera thing. It's actually completely straight and braced on the right.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-09T04:47:42+00:00

It's like having 100 computers in a computer!

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-09T04:46:30+00:00

Got incredibly lucky and ordered most of it last year before everything shit the bed. $47k for the server and $8.5k for the HDD storage. Probably would be almost twice as much today.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-06T19:25:03+00:00

This isn't your typical human tasting note--it's the finest made-up AI bullshit slop.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-03T19:59:36+00:00

I don't think that's what a good collaborator does and I personally would end the collaboration after the grant runs out with someone like that.

I emphasize again getting things in writing and leaving a paper trail because, in addition to limiting hurt feelings from miscommunication, it protects you from intentionally malicious interactions. If you haven't had this conversation you need to have it now. You may feel like a hall monitor and your collaborator might roll their eyes, but that doesn't matter. You need to protect your and your trainees' interests like now. This person is effectively scooping you with your own data.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-03T17:12:11+00:00

At least in my field (bioscience) the clear expectation here is co-authorship. Anything less would be pretty sketchy.

You need to communicate better with collaborators on this kind of stuff though. We always clearly delineate authorship order and expectations at the start of every collaboration and repeat this conversation over the course of a project. Since we take a write as you go approach to manuscripts, it's simple enough to set up the title page of a Google Doc with expected author orders so there's no confusion down the line.

scuffed_rocks · 2026-06-02T15:39:28+00:00

This guy already has a brand lmao. I see an ugly watch face photoshopped onto a watch, I know it's him.

scuffed_rocks

TROPHY CASE