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Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

brown.edu

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Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#81

Post by IneficientPgons »

eric4smith wrote: post #79

Very inspiring story indeed. But the first question resonating in my mind is... Why?? While what the student did is good. It serves as bad inspiration for too many people going to college these days just because they want to. And not because of a reason. If the cost of education was low, then I would not be opposed to it. But we all know stories of people who say they are "going back to school" for very minimal benef…

STEM PhDs in the US pay no tuition and receive a stipend of typically $30K+ as well as health insurance and sometimes housing benefits.

Honestly, "fuck it, do another Ph.D. in an adjacent field like math" is definitely in my "shit ran out of funds for ski trips because I retired too early and need some health insurance ASAP" quiver.

> So... at that age, we can see it as just an aspirational thing. But for younger people, it mostly (not all the time) sends the wrong message.

Like 20-somethings doing startup shit, PhDs can be terrible life choices or wonderful life choices. Outcomes are anything but uniform. If I had gone industry out of undergrad I might be making $150K by now. Instead I'm making close to 10x that doing exactly what I would be doing if I were an unemployed bum following my passion, all thanks to my phd. Lucky, sure. So are startup folks.

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#82

Post by throw63738 »

wanderingmind wrote: post #78

For all the fantasy here, let me remind you doing a PhD at an early age is one of the worst things you can do to your financial security (CS Ph.D being a major exception). It does not teach any employable skills, leads to a very high level of depression/anxiety compared to regular jobs and creates a huge opportunity cost where you miss out saving money early that has true compounding capability. The 2019 Nature surve…

PhD in information science or mathematics can be good investment. But it is bad idea to star career in academia.

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#83

Post by skeeter2020 »

soheil wrote: post #29
kortilla wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. A phd has very little overlap with learning broad topics about a field (unlike masters and bachelors/associates). Unless your job is literally to do research on the subject of your dissertation, it will not help.

What about working harder than your peers? If you're 2x harder working than the avg phd student shouldn't you be able to dedicate half or a third of that time to work and still finish the phd in 5 years?

I'm not sure what your ideal of a good PhD student is; there's no measurable level of "good enough" that once met allows you to do a bunch of other things. It's supposed to be an all-consuming, single-focus period of intense research and knowledge generation.

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#84

Post by skeeter2020 »

soheil wrote: post #63
School-Cotton wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything those denote even more time to their academic work than the average.

That's my point, can someone in that group instead of devoting more time than the average to their academic work take that extra time and devote it to their job?

So if you had the capability to be one of the greatest PhD students in the world your strategy would be "do a bunch of stuff average instead"? How would you achieve such a high level of performance in the first place? Being a good grad student is as much learned and practiced as any other skill.

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#85

Post by laichzeit0 »

grayclhn wrote: post #50
soheil wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about working harder than your peers? If you're 2x harder working than the avg phd student shouldn't you be able to dedicate half or a third of that time to work and still finish the phd in 5 years?

IME (US) the typical successful phd student works 60-80 hours a week, so… good luck working twice that hard for 5 years.

Let’s assume this is a CS PhD (so no “lab” work). Is this person doing 60 hours of actual research a week? If I did a PhD while working full time, I would expect to do purely research. I’m not interested in teaching or grading papers or anything non-dissertation related.

Btw, this is how most people do their PhDs here. It’s a quick in and out 3 year seal-team like operation. Caveat: We see Ph.D as a degree you do after a 2 year Masters degree. So in total 5 years after undergrad.

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#86

Post by skeeter2020 »

baby wrote: post #57
tombert wrote: post #3

This is really cool. I'm 30 right now, and only just recently finished my bachelors and have been looking to get a PhD, but it's really hard to find a program that will let you work full time while doing it. It doesn't help that a part of me does sort of feel "too old" to do this sometimes. The PhD system in the US is really tailored around the assumption that you haven't entered the corporate world yet. Anyway, it's…

Try France, it’s very common to do a PhD inside of a company.

As stated above European PhD are not typically the same as North American PhDs. I've never seen a respected program here that allows for part-time let alone while holding down a full-time job.

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#87

Post by soheil »

tomrod wrote: post #69
soheil wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point, can someone in that group instead of devoting more time than the average to their academic work take that extra time and devote it to their job?

No. If you plan to be successful, there is little to no time outside of being a PhD student. If you want to be in the top 1%, and especially the top 0.01%, you should plan to spend your free time researching to become an expert in your field. But such numerical distinctions are typically meaningless since, by virtue of working towards a dissertation, you should be pushing the boundaries of your field of knowledge and…

Take olympic athletes. There are differences not only in the level of work but also physiologically between those who win gold medals and those who can't be olympic athletes. If you're a would-be gold medalist why isn't it possible to settle for getting into the olympics and have a job on the side?

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#88

Post by BeetleB »

wanderingmind wrote: post #78

For all the fantasy here, let me remind you doing a PhD at an early age is one of the worst things you can do to your financial security (CS Ph.D being a major exception). It does not teach any employable skills, leads to a very high level of depression/anxiety compared to regular jobs and creates a huge opportunity cost where you miss out saving money early that has true compounding capability. The 2019 Nature surve…

Previous discussion regarding your comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679234

(I'd repeat what I said before, but dang wasn't happy the last time I copy/pasted).

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#89

Post by silisili »

perilunar wrote: post #70
silisili wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All adjectives precede nouns in English. Brown the university is still an adjective in this sense. There's really nothing to A/B test here. We, especially the media, don't refer to people as Brown the color.

'Attorneys General' and 'Majors General' would indicate otherwise. Also: president elect, poet laureate, devil incarnate, court martial, etc.

Fair examples. Every rule does have exceptions. But none that would make Brown in the title make one think it was a skin color because of English rules.

Re: Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89

#90

Post by bg4 »

tombert wrote: post #65
throaway1990 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European PhDs have better structure and rigid filters to weed out the unworthy dweebs. And the students take far less courses and generally work harder. US PhD system is slow and often leads to counter-intuitive, interesting or just weird results, which may or mayn't pan out in the long run. US PhD system has to be longer because i) US undergraduate system is absolute trash (like worse than 3rd world 12th grader at t…

I’m reasonably certain that American PhD students work very hard. Do you have any evidence for the claim that they don’t?

There is no evidence, only bitterness.
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