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Lessons from my PhD

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Re: Lessons from my PhD

#81

Post by anonymousDan »

rabbits77 wrote: post #75
tasogare wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience failing my PhD it's not so simple. The head of my lab have a bunch of topics he want to (make other people under him) investigate, sometimes really precise. One of the PhD student literally got his thesis question handed down after an experimented researcher worked on it for 6 months. Other like me had to found one themselves. It's obvious that the first student got a head start of about a year. Th…

I recall the same things. I remember being bitterly envious of students that seemingly were given topics to examine while I had to spin my wheels for a good year or two coming up with my own ideas to explore. Looking back my perspective is very different. First of all, my ideas generated a minor spike in publications for the lab all centered around my work. After I graduated I continued to advise new students to cont…

Wow, not being allowed to present your own first author paper is pretty bad - unless someone else contributed a lot of the work and was made second author + presented?

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#82

Post by wanderingmind »

The author became a professor unlike the 90% of the other PhD graduates, so you need to take all the lessons with a heavy dose of selective bias. Most of the things the article talks about is the effective processes the author has learned during PhD. This is definitely useful in any work where agency is involved. However, these effective routines can be learned from a decent job in a good organization and does not need a PhD. There is nothing in the article that suggests a unique learning that can be achieved only through pouring years into an endless pursuit like PhD.

In my opinion, there is nothing unique that can be learned only through a PhD for a successful career (except maybe for a tiny slice of outlier of CS researchers). Most people will be well better served to take a job that provides some agency, or better try to start a company and fail. They can learn a lot more this way without jeopardizing their financial future.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#83

Post by mcguire »

xab31 wrote: post #57
zebraflask wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to ring true, but - it also seems a bit defeatist, don't you think? "Never question a scientific superior?" Not parsing that concept, please elaborate.

Very early on, I noticed that graduate students tend to be idealistic, postdocs extremely cynical, and faculty ruthlessly pragmatic perhaps to the point of occasional shortsightedness. Clearly, something about this progression is expected and normal. I'm a postdoc now, so I'm right on schedule. I think the way it ultimately works is that you have to be disillusioned from the grade-school fairy tales told to the publi…

"People above you in that chain will accept limited feedback on methods to attain their chosen goals and will greatly resent questions about whether their selected goals are worthwhile/realistic/rational, or whether their gestalt vision of the field's conventional wisdom is correct."

Corporate management has the exact same situation.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#84

Post by mcguire »

zebraflask wrote: post #41
xab31 wrote: post #38

My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity: - Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains/does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in…

That seems to ring true, but - it also seems a bit defeatist, don't you think? "Never question a scientific superior?" Not parsing that concept, please elaborate.

It is what it is, and it is mostly pretty successful. More or less.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#85

Post by mcguire »

wanderingmind wrote: post #82

The author became a professor unlike the 90% of the other PhD graduates, so you need to take all the lessons with a heavy dose of selective bias. Most of the things the article talks about is the effective processes the author has learned during PhD. This is definitely useful in any work where agency is involved. However, these effective routines can be learned from a decent job in a good organization and does not ne…

"Most of what I learned during my PhD had nothing to do with my dissertation topic, grad school, or even computer science.

"These lessons are so ingrained into me now that I'm shocked when I find out that not everyone knows them! I think they can be applied to virtually any office job."

Taking a job that provides some agency is harder than it sounds. As is starting a company and failing without jeopardizing one's financial future. (And not everyone is really enthusiastic about learning those lessons that can only be learned that way.)

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#86

Post by jrumbut »

xab31 wrote: post #38

My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity: - Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains/does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in…

> The incentive structure of scientific publication is such that there are big rewards for being right on an important question, bigger the earlier you are to the party, and little to no penalties for being wrong, so long as the error cannot be provably and directly linked to fraud.

This is fantastic insight and I'd like to thank you for sharing it with our group.

Would you agree that the model of rewards for correctness and penalization only in the case of fraud is the core feature of science? And what separates it from business or politics where being an honest failure is worse than being dishonest but successful?

Again, this is a great post, and I think you have a fantastic future in the sociology of science!

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#87

Post by jjdredd »

Ostrogodsky wrote: post #77
ta988 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reflects my experience as well.

Young people need to realize that the things we love about science: the uncompromising search for the truth, its international and no-boundaries character, the ability to bow down to evidence, the ambition of the ideas, are just a very distilled fraction (basically the highlights) of a what it is a very mundane, fragile, political human activity, full of petty and lame characters, absurd situations and pathetic devel…

> full of petty and lame characters, absurd situations and pathetic developments.

Yeh, I wish I could understand this a few years ago. Pursuit of truth is not the primary goal of many tenure profs it seems.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#88

Post by mcguire »

pezzana wrote: post #16

Missing from this actionable survey is the skill of answering questions that haven't yet been answered in the secondary literature (books, reviews) or even primary literature (journals). This is, of course, what research and a PhD is all about in the end. In my experience, this fact was the #1 reason why some peers dropped out of PhD programs. They joined expecting a continuation of undergraduate education, which con…

This is all completely true.

"Then, just when you've gotten the hang of this finding answers game you discover that the real expectation is to be the one who formulates good questions."

And that is where I personally failed.

On the other hand, there's that funny moment...

One of the things I've heard repeatedly from pilots is that first solo flight changes everything. Before that, you're just some human. Afterwards, you are some human who can fly. Everything is somehow different, although I've never seen anyone really successfully describe how. I suspect it's different for everyone. But then I'm not a pilot.

In your dissertation defense, someone whose knowledge and intelligence you respect immensely will ask a difficult question. When you answer that question confidently and to their satisfaction, the world is a different place. For one thing, you're no longer student and teacher; you are peers. But that's not all it is.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#89

Post by mrjangles »

vkk8 wrote: post #78

I did a PhD in physics and feel like I missed all the great "meta lessons" some people seem to learn in their PhD. Mostly I just spent my time alone doing calculations either with pen and paper or computer. Most of the stuff I did was either suggested by my supervisor or was obvious continuation of some previous work. Even after I got my PhD I didn't feel like I was really a member of the research community or that I…

As the joke goes, once you realize it's all bullshit is the day they go "Congratulations, you finally understand the field, so here is your PhD". Then you just have to decide if you want to continue on and get paid to do bullshit.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#90

Post by jjdredd »

tasogare wrote: post #27
tchalla wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience, this fact was the #1 reason why some peers dropped out of PhD programs. They joined expecting a continuation of undergraduate education, which consists largely of recapitulating what appears in the secondary literature. Instead, what they got in graduate school was the expectation that they would be producing the primary literature. That's a very different game. Hit the nail on the head. I would l…

From my experience failing my PhD it's not so simple. The head of my lab have a bunch of topics he want to (make other people under him) investigate, sometimes really precise. One of the PhD student literally got his thesis question handed down after an experimented researcher worked on it for 6 months. Other like me had to found one themselves. It's obvious that the first student got a head start of about a year. Th…

Wow, those who could find their own research topic were lucky. I've never seen anyone in my environment get that much freedom. The supervisor sets the problem and the student must solve it.

Edit: I was under the impression that even the postdocs are hired for a specific task.

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