The Apprentice (Not Affiliated with Donald Trump)

In a previous post I made the claim that grad school is rigged against internships. I standby that claim, but will now qualify it with a “…if you are getting a PhD.” If you’re a PhD student then you know exactly what I mean and can scroll down to the complaining part. But if you’re not, then that may be confusing. Internships are, after all, a normal part of undergraduate education and often an integral component professional graduate curriculum. Medical students do rotations, Law students do internships, Public Health students do practicums. Even my mom, who went to culinary school, had to stage at a restaurant before she officially graduated. Each of these “internships” takes students out of the campus bubble and places them into a real grown-up professional setting. Are internships often just BS grunt work? Yea sure, but they are also the ONLY way for students to figure out wtf they actually want to do with their lives. PhD students, in contrast, do nothing of the sort, because we aren’t real students.

A PhD is not a professional degree. It’s an apprenticeship.

Or at least that’s how it was originally developed. For centuries, science education was structured like other trade crafts (think blacksmiths back in the day. Ooh or knights and squires. Basically anything old-timey). A baby scientist worked under a master scientist (referred to as a Principle Investigator or PI) in an academic institution learning the trade of science. Eventually the baby scientist would blossom and mature into a mini me of their PI, thus entering academia as a grown up scientist. Under this sort of system, PhD students don’t need job training because the PhD itself is the job training. We are expertly prepared to become academic PIs… and for centuries, this system worked. Now, however, there are a number of alarming trends in academic science that undermine this system.

1. There are more PhD students than there are academic jobs so a lot of PhDs will be “forced” to do other things with their lives. See these reports by Nature, The New York Times, The Atlantic or if you’re a sucker here’s the primary data and some modeling to back my claim. Obviously this isn’t news to anyone. And yet no one is doing anything to deal with all the “unsuccessful” PhDs who don’t get academic tenure positions.
2. Academic jobs are becoming less and less appealing to PhD students. Everyone’s reasons for wanting to leave academia are different– rampant sexism and sexual harassment, no time to start a family, competitive hostile workplace, crappy pay, lack of fulfillment- but we all want out.

The problem is that we don’t know how to do literally anything else with our lives. Many students don’t even know what “out” looks like. What does it mean to be a science writer? A consultant? A patent lawyer? A political advisor? Literally no one knows!

We know we need to be trained better for the real world. The University knows we need to be trained better. The National Institute of Health knows we need to be trained better. The job market definitely knows we need to be trained better. But no one can agree on what that means because the apprenticeship model has made our path to degree so fundamentally at odds with taking time to do something like an internship.

First of all, we don’t really take classes. I was finished with my required coursework after my second year of grad school and that was considered *A LOT* of coursework. Unlike students in undergraduate or medical or law programs, I’m not being provided a formal classroom based education. This means there is no such thing as summer or Christmas or spring break in PhD school. The most annoying thing is when people not in PhD school ask me when my spring break is. THAT’S NOT A THING! And no I’m not “still in college” and I hate you for saying that. We are not on a school year schedule. We are on a regular work schedule, but without the benefit of weekends. There are also no weekends in PhD life. Every day is a Monday. Every day is also a Saturday. You do what you have to and hope you don’t get yelled at. I am lucky because I can work remotely so I get to go home for holidays, but that’s not because it’s Christmas break. It’s because I’m analyzing data between opening presents and Christmas Dinner. Some of my friends aren’t even allowed to take a long weekend without officially asking for time off from their advisor.

So what the fuck do we do with our time then? We *~*research*~* which for science PhD students really just means we do grunt work in labs to generate data. (I, for example, spend my days pipetting (think of a tiny scientific turkey baster) translucent liquids from one vessel to another and then play with a laser machine. Super exciting stuff.) We need this data to graduate so it does in fact benefit us, but mostly we get data on behalf of our advisor and ultimately The University. Anything we create, discover, imagine, patent, etc. during a PhD belongs to The University. Which means that The University often views us as employees.

And then there is the money situation… Unlike graduate students in masters or professional programs, we don’t pay our own tuition. TBH I don’t actually know who does pay for it, but I suspect it just get’s written off in a ledger somewhere. Hence the whole 2017 grad tax crisis. But it’s mostly not sketchy because, again, we don’t really take classes. And since we are pseudo employees, we also get paid a small stipend, unlike other graduate programs. This is super awesome because I could not have afforded 6 years of higher education on my own, but it also means that we have zero bargaining power with regards to our training. Students paying tuition can demand a service be rendered to them in return for their money. I pay nothing, therefore I can demand nothing. Not that I don’t try of course.

All of this makes us a weird group of students.

Are you really a student if you don’t take classes? Technically yes because every semester I have to enroll and pay student fees (even for the crappy campus gym swarming with undergrads… I’m salty about that).

Are you really an employee if you get a degree at the end of this whole thing? Maybe yes, because we get paid a sort of salary (though the bank would beg to differ when you go to get a loan). It’s a no man’s land of training which limits our options. How do you justify a long term “break” when your thesis work is one continuous process that requires you be in a particular location and especially when The University is footing the bill for the whole thing.

Honestly, universities are still trying to figure that out. Some are better than others. I will give Emory credit for at least trying. The logistics might be a complete mess but at least internships are allowed and enough people in the administration support them to make me feel okay. That’s better than most schools. Plus, there is a policy in place that allows students to take a leave of absence for up to a year at a time, no questions asked. That fact is SUPER important because there are an astonishing number of people in academia that fundamentally believe that PhD students should spend every waking hour in lab and anything- be it coursework, networking, exercise, even sleep- that keeps them out of lab is a grave sin. Breaks are not acceptable. Work life balance is not acceptable. Internships are certainly not acceptable.

Which means that regardless of your university policy, a lot of things have to fall in line to make returning from an internship possible. You have to have a PI that supports you, a program that allows you to leave, a project that can be paused or worked on remotely, and of course an actual internship opportunity. And in practice you need to make sure those first three are in place before you ever even APPLY to an internship or else you are going to burn bridges. So as righteous as it might feel running away middle fingers in the air yelling “It’s MY future goddammit!” keeping the peace is best for everyone involved.