"Mentoring in the professional neoliberal workplace of is one of those classic words that can be used to invoke or simulate institutional benevolence when there is actually a waning of reciprocity in the employment relation. "

"Since an article consists of about forty 40 paragraphs and you should be able to write a paragraph about something you know in about 30 minutes, you should be able to draft a journal article in around 20 hours."

Pathways Through Graduate School and Into Careers examines the critical link between graduate education and preparation for careers. The findings and recommendations provide universities, employers and policymakers with concrete steps each sector can take, individually or in collaboration, to support the future success of the U.S. economy and society.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://chronicle.com/article/Graduate-School-Is-a-Means-to/131316

"That’s why I have a large poster of James Franco up next to my computer

Some Helpful Ideas about restructuring graduate education

"That cyclical component accounts for a lot of the short-run variation in hiring, but if you’re estimating the response to a demand shock, longer-term supply trends matter too and often they matter a great deal.  If Ph.d. programs were stricter about enforcing standards of quality and relevance, rather than stringing along students to maintain the flow of revenue to the graduate program, the short run negative demand shocks would lead to a much less severe queuing problem.  That’s simple microeconomics, and it should be macroeconomics too."

"…For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: department by department, institution to institution, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them."

Until any of this becomes commonplace, it is up to prospective graduate students to enter a science PhD with their eyes open to the opportunities — or lack of them — at the end. Not all mushrooms grow best in the dark.