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What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

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Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#71

Post by sytelus »

This is quite an unfortunate article. Author goes on to list several folks who don’t have PhD but have “made it” and asserts that many people can do fascinating and cutting-edge work without PhDs. There are always outliers in stuff like this but ask yourself: How many people you know who don’t have PhD and have freedom to explore at work full time what truely interests them? Author has rather twisted view of the selection bias.

People should do PhD if they are genuinely interested in doing scientific research. If you are doing PhD under pressure or in hope of getting better paying jobs you will be dissopointed. It is an arduous process and taking up your precious years but it gives you opportunity to have freedom to explore and work on your interests for rest of your life. You won’t be coming to office everyday doing assigned task on your backlog and reporting your status in scrum meeting. Instead you will be reading about new creative work that was literally published yesterday, mulling over that in lunch with colleagues and apply your original ideas to actually get published under your name. The downside could be lower pay and/or no stock bonuses for many outside of hot areas like AI. But in general, you have much better chance of doing cutting edge work that you are truely passionate about if you have PhD in that area.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#72

Post by btrettel »

tha12 wrote: post #32
nicodjimenez wrote: post #30

A PhD is a license to do deep research. Deep research careers are very rare, but for the right kind of person, they're great. However, deep research by definition means it probably won't work, and there's just a lot more money in doing things that will probably work vs things that probably won't. So it helps to be extremely talented at deep research if you want to pursue the PhD. Also, most engineering PhD's are bogu…

What do you consider to be deep research? I agree that engineering research is not actually deep, but once you eliminate that almost all of the current (applied, and maybe theoretical too) Machine Learning work for instance is also dismissed.

I'm not who you asked, but here's my current take:

Deep research maximizes uncertainty reduction (or information gain in other words). Uncertainty here could be model uncertainty if you are developing models, or a shift in the probability distribution for a particular question more generally. E.g., "Does P=NP?" would be an example of the latter.

It might be very general, applicable in many fields. Or it could be targeted at a particular field, but in a way which answers many questions.

Bayesian experimental design can do what I think is the easy part of the problem: maximizing information gained for a particular experimental problem statement. In my view, most of the time you can reasonably guess what Bayesian experimental design might tell you by looking at a state space of your exprimental data. So the math may not be strictly necessary. Unfortunately, not all research is experimental. And it won't tell you, for example, if you are missing a variable.

Framing the problem (which questions to ask, and how to answer them) seems like the most important part to me. Or at least it has been in my almost complete PhD.

These thoughts are in flux. I may have a different view in a year.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#74

Post by jinonoel »

somberi wrote: post #65

I am considering doing a Phd in a completely unrelated area when I turn 50 (45 now). Is there anyone in this thread done a phd that late? Obviously my motivation is different now to study - to really learn the subject. I am financially self sufficient and will continue to be, and hence making a living out of my phd is not a consideration. Edit: I would like to be able to study in a university setup (not distance educ…

A PhD is something I plan on doing much later in life too (35 now), a bucket list sort of thing once I've achieved financial independence and my kids are a bit older.

The hard part I imagine will be hanging out with mid-20-year olds everyday when I'll be in my late 40s already :)

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#75

Post by sytelus »

jedberg wrote: post #21

This is total anecdata, but out of my closest college friends, five of them went to get a PhD, while I went to industry. When they graduated, I was already making more than of all of them, with five years of industry experience. And I made more them them for the next thirteen years too. I never hit any magical ceiling where a PhD was necessary. In other words, don't do a PhD if you're in it for the money. It may open…

You obviously haven’t seen the other side :). If you are working as engineer/management/sales in software products, PhD rarely have advantage. However if you walk in to the places like FAIR, Google Brain, DeepMind, you will quickly find that your background as engineer/management/sales has little value compared to having a PhD in relevant area. These places are buzzing with innovations and creativity advancing the state of the art that rest of the world looks upon. Researchers are leading this front everyday and without PhD you won’t even get that job.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#76

Post by otoburb »

somberi wrote: post #65

I am considering doing a Phd in a completely unrelated area when I turn 50 (45 now). Is there anyone in this thread done a phd that late? Obviously my motivation is different now to study - to really learn the subject. I am financially self sufficient and will continue to be, and hence making a living out of my phd is not a consideration. Edit: I would like to be able to study in a university setup (not distance educ…

>>I am financially self sufficient and will continue to be, and hence making a living out of my phd is not a consideration.

I'm curious about this scenario from the advisor or departmental perspective: If a PhD candidate is financially self-sufficient, does this mean that a potential advisor has one less mouth to feed when competing for grants? How does the power dynamic change between advisor and financially independent PhD candidate? What if the PhD candidate is capable of funding a whole (or good portion) of a lab themselves - is there a conflict of interest somewhere there between donor vs. principal investigator vs. PhD-candidate roles? Do financially independent PhD candidates have more, less, or no competitive advantage during the selection and admissions process for an R1 institution?

So many questions...

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#77

Post by earenndil »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #28
sktrdie wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s so sad to be in it just for the money. If a phd will allow you to eventually do the things that you love, that should be the priority. Of course you can do what you love also without a PhD, but I’d argue that a PhD will eventually allow you to explore fields and things that are not economically viable. In fact I would say that it’s just plain sad that we have to choose something based on how economically via…

If you want to do something purely for its interesting properties, you don't need a PhD to do it.

I want to be a university professor purely because I find it interesting. Pray tell, in what land do I not need a Ph.D for this?

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#78

Post by jonas21 »

earenndil wrote: post #77
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to do something purely for its interesting properties, you don't need a PhD to do it.

I want to be a university professor purely because I find it interesting. Pray tell, in what land do I not need a Ph.D for this?

Certainly there must be a particular field of study that you find interesting -- not just the mechanics of being a university professor.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#79

Post by arunmp »

The Author is unfortunately right about the academic PhD program today, but mixes up two different things. A PhD is meant to teach you about what I call the "body of human knowledge" and to initiate you into it. Period. It does not matter if you can make a learning out of it, nor it helps you earn loads of money. All those hours of reviewing done by the DC members, journal reviewers etc. are done without the expectation of a single penny. It is done to place the PhD research in context among the world of human knowledge. Once you have done a PhD, you are supposed to get more confident dealing with unknown problems in general. Granted, other pressures like career, money and sometimes mere survival! take precedence after PhD but those are beyond the scope of your PhD.

Of course, you can work on cutting edge problems without a PhD but probably do it better with PhD. A PhD teaches a lot of intangible things like being comfortable with unknown problems , working patiently towards an end goal, get over the fear of failure etc. One thing it does not teach is how to earn money :).

In this context I would like to highlight unique cases where you do an "Industrial PhD" where you are working in a company and chose a relevant problem for a PhD. These have the "best of both worlds" and one is not bogged down with typical pressures in a regular PhD like those pointed by the author. That said, the final word is that a PhD is merely a conduit. Its more of what you chose to do with it than what it is , which matters at the end.

Re: What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

#80

Post by sytelus »

GuiA wrote: post #26
jedberg wrote: post #21

This is total anecdata, but out of my closest college friends, five of them went to get a PhD, while I went to industry. When they graduated, I was already making more than of all of them, with five years of industry experience. And I made more them them for the next thirteen years too. I never hit any magical ceiling where a PhD was necessary. In other words, don't do a PhD if you're in it for the money. It may open…

I was in a PhD program, I dropped out. I have been working in R&D at a large company for a while now; many of my best colleagues have PhDs, many others do not. As far as my personal experience is concerned, a PhD has no bearing whatsoever on your capacity to do solid research. That said, I am seriously considering going back on the PhD route, because I think I’d like to spend more time teaching down the line. Kind of…

> PhD has no bearing whatsoever on your capacity to do solid research

In my experience this is not true except unless you are super genius. Most folks without PhD often keeps making same naive mistakes, for example, not studying previous state of the art, not recording experiments properly, heuristics instead of rigorous analysis and so on. PhD trains to avoid all these. It allows you to build network, identity great researchers in the field as role models and understand what scientific scrutiny entails. It is not unusual to identify paper written by someone not experienced vs someone experienced. For example, a person without PhD would often neglect to mention scale in the graphs, compute variances in findings, describe figures properly and so on. These might look minor cosmetic things but it often goes long way in overall rigor.

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