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tl;dr: Getting a Ph.D. is lore like a job than you might think. Also, try to live life a little.
That's close to no information at all. So if someone could make a better summary, or at least a teaser, please do so.
My random musings from three years in CS grad school at UNC: Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes. The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or…
Agree. I almost went for it as well, though for a challenge and as a competition - publish the best paper in the best conference. Seemed like not too many people viewed it as that.
My random musings from three years in CS grad school at UNC: Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes. The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or…
I agree with your subdivision, but I'd add another class: people who want to understand/solve/think-about some hard problem they find genuinly interesting and who don't particularly care about career as an academic, or the good of the world or anything much else, they just want to think about this topic because they enjoy it and grad school gives them a relatively stable environment where they can do it.
My random musings from three years in CS grad school at UNC: Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes. The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or…
> Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes Agree. I almost went for it as well, though for a challenge and as a competition - publish the best paper in the best conference. Seemed like not too many people viewed it as that.
Usually, this is very hard to achieve. Not only is it hard to find the best conference in your field, getting the best paper award (nb. that there are conferences that don't have a one!) has (at times) something to do with sense of fashion and/or the valuation of your achievements by the programme committe. (I recently stumbled upon an article [unfortunately I cannot remember when and where, 20min of Googling did not help either] that detailed how Albert Einstein did not believe in one of his own equations, which was in the larger context that is difficult for scientists to properly judge their own contributions -- assuming this is correct, having the intention of writing "best paper award" papers seems very difficult...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The last 10% is heavily on the writing up and justifying independent research part, with some academic politics thrown in....places like Palantir explicitly recruit for "all-but-dissertation" PhD students. They need the kind of knowledge that someone will get from being in the research world for 3-5 years" That's called a Master's degree. You take some coursework, learn how to read papers and implement the ideas the…
Well, I'm writing up currently, and I guess I don't consider it the most important part, really. I'm finishing it more because I want the Ph.D., not because I'm learning anything at this point. Perhaps you could get the deep research engagement via an unusually research-focused master's, but there usually isn't scope for that. An M.S. is normally only two years, while 3-5 years is imo the amount of engagement you nee…
With luck, you've got enough momentum to push through to the end smoothly. Otherwise, you might find yourself within 'just a short distance to the summit' and being someone that climbed 90% of the way up Everest.
tl;dr: Getting a Ph.D. is lore like a job than you might think. Also, try to live life a little.
OK, I guess from the massive down-voting that this summary is inaccurate, or misleading, or inflammatory, or something . That's close to no information at all. So if someone could make a better summary, or at least a teaser, please do so.
I got a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. It was a really interesting four years (and three months) - I loved it. I actually brought my thesis topic with me to grad school from a summer job as an undergrad. I wrote three good papers, spent six weeks turning those papers into a thesis (mostly a matter of doing a nice literature review in the introduction), and I was done. I had a excellent advisor, and we had a great relationship. I was part of a solid research group, and we helped each other. The process seemed very straightforward and linear. Everyone in my department seemed to be roughly the same. We all worked hard, did research and got our degree in 4-5 years. Very few of use would have felt on our own.
I get the feeling that this happy experience is less common in CS. The relationship between grad student and advisor seems more distant, and less helpful. The happy hours we had with the SCS at CMU reinforced that. They had "black fridays" where projects were terminated and grad students left. That "how will I get my committee to sign off" thing was there, unlike in our department.
Is it something about the nature of "research" in CS that leads to this, or is it a cultural thing?
Another really helpful read was "Getting What You Came For" by Robert Peters. He walks through the entire Ph.D. process and describes a pipeline that can knock a 7 year program to 4 or 5 and a 5 year program to 3 or 4. That time saved would be incredibly valuable.
I'm always on the hunt for good material like this. What other Ph.D./grad school/research guides have people found helpful?