Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
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Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
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Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#2I will just offer some unsolicited advice about PhDs, as it came up a few weeks ago also. And the author touches on this. Of course this mostly applies to empirical sciences, but maybe some theoretical ones too.
An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students.
An advisor (and the PhD research he/she guides you on) should be targeting a very conscious choice of incremental versus breakthrough research results. And for most students, you're not going to have a whole lot of mindblowingly field-changing results -- as much as you may think you're a rockstar. So it's just sensible or an insurance policy to make sure you've got solid steady work that you're progressing on.
Learn to enable your research to have visible incremental gains on a known path every day, rather than hoping for some breakthrough at the end. Amazing breakthroughs have high risk, and make it highly likely you'll have a crisis when it doesn't happen.
Concretely, even if you don't know what the answer is going to be at the end of your research, you must think about, or have an idea about, the format of what that amazing answer is going to be. Write the outline of your thesis and "ghost out" what the major charts will be. Write the intro sentences of each chapter -- what are they? (and I don't just mean the boring review of the field part, but your findings part)
You should know what major type of finding, plot, or table your research is going to output. What are the columns and rows of that table, or axes of that plot? How many data points are required? How many of them can already be guessed? Where is the surprise going to be? What is the conclusion going to be?
Draw out the answer you're aiming for, now. If you can't even articuate what the answer will look like, you may be in for a bad time, so work on fixing that. It will also push you and your advisor to be specific about what the output of your thesis will be -- and set you up for a much better PhD experience.
Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#3For those who don't know like myself, I'm pretty confident "Eric" is Dr. Eric Gilbert, current associate professor at the University of Michigan and former lead of the comp.social lab at Georgia Tech. His personal website is here: http://eegilbert.org
Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#4I will just offer some unsolicited advice about PhDs, as it came up a few weeks ago also. And the author touches on this. Of course this mostly applies to empirical sciences, but maybe some theoretical ones too. An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of t…
> Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students.
My take is that having a good graduate advisor is largely about having a good undergraduate advisor who can offer an insider take and advocate on your behalf.
Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#5I will just offer some unsolicited advice about PhDs, as it came up a few weeks ago also. And the author touches on this. Of course this mostly applies to empirical sciences, but maybe some theoretical ones too. An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of t…
> Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students. How do you "test" for this? Asking potential advisors "do you know this?" is blunt and rude. Asking potential advisors in a mannered way prompts anodyne answers. Current students in the potential advisor's lab are unlikely to offer an intimate assessment of their personal satisfaction and research prog…
This is my syllabus. :-)
I tell all my prospective students to talk to my former students.
Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students. How do you "test" for this? Asking potential advisors "do you know this?" is blunt and rude. Asking potential advisors in a mannered way prompts anodyne answers. Current students in the potential advisor's lab are unlikely to offer an intimate assessment of their personal satisfaction and research prog…
This is my syllabus. :-) I tell all my prospective students to talk to my former students.
Yes, and it is an enormously appreciated breath of fresh air. But you're not every PhD advisor!
Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#7I take it something that Google Docs is doing makes those inline screenshots (like the year long todo) unreadable? Would love to be able to read those.
And love the paper algorithm btw.
I haven’t been through this journey myself but (to the author, who is here, not the poster) reading through how you have laid things out so clearly, your students are lucky to have you.
Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#8For those who don't know like myself, I'm pretty confident "Eric" is Dr. Eric Gilbert, current associate professor at the University of Michigan and former lead of the comp.social lab at Georgia Tech. His personal website is here: http://eegilbert.org
You are correct - he responded in the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24275188
Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my syllabus. :-) I tell all my prospective students to talk to my former students.
Yes, and it is an enormously appreciated breath of fresh air. But you're not every PhD advisor!
I would say that as a student, you would be asking a potential advisor what mix of projects would be an example course of the research. What is "their approach" to the sequence of your grad projects over several years? Examples? What combination of risk/certainty does it have? I think you can tell pretty quickly whether the advisor has this concept even in mind.
Former students should have this idea in their mind too, after finishing the program. If they don't, they haven't learned one of the important things about a PhD...
And if you feel that it's too rude to ask, or the professor can't handle such a question (or you're hesitant to ask) -- either you probably want to find someone who is comfortable with such questions, or better find out why you are uncomfortable. Better to be awkward up front and get the answers you want, than be polite and suffer for 5 years to discover the wrong answer.
I mean, that's a whole nother topic -- this is a huge investment of years of your life. You should ask difficult questions before you make the leap. And the professor should owe you such answers before committing to taking you on.
In fact, it's not that different from an awkward pre-nup contract conversation. Only this time you don't have to be swayed by emotion.
Re: Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students
#10my PhD advisor forgot I exists