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Lessons from my PhD

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Re: Lessons from my PhD

#111

Post by lambdatronics »

analog31 wrote: post #31
bluenose69 wrote: post #8

The topic sentence idea is particularly valuable, and it's something I try to pass on to students. I also use latex macros to turn this on and off (and to put in margin notes, also). All of this advice was so similar to that I give my students that I went to the author's homepage here on HN, to see if it was somebody I had taught. (Nope, wrong field.)

I did something similar that was quite useful. I wrote a complete outline of my thesis, down to the paragraph level. Then I sat down with my advisor and went over it, before I did any writing. This had a couple useful effects. First, I knew he was in general agreement with my plan. Second, it acknowledged that I was in fact in the writing phase and wasn't doing any more experiments. A useful side effect is that whene…

Wow, that's very detailed. I can see it being beneficial, especially in the case of an unreasonable advisor who might demand late-breaking additions to the research.

For me, I started from the slides I had presented in my immediate group meetings (~6 ppl, including my advisor, typically once per week, 2-3 slides each) plus the larger group meetings (~40 ppl, including the lab director, typically twice per year, 20-30 slides each). That gave me bullet points and figures. I wrote one chapter at a time, starting with the central chapters & ending with the introduction & conclusion. I had a 6-month time table for writing, and I was only delayed 2 weeks in the end. Remaking figures and messing with LaTeX took more time than I wish it had.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#112

Post by lambdatronics »

knolan wrote: post #9

Solid advice, not just for PhD students. This is also invaluable for helping final year/capstone students navigate their supervisor interactions. There’s nothing better than a student you wind up and they go off and solve a bunch of problems in interesting ways. They’re having fun, you’re workload is reduced and there’s even potential for a publication. Meetings are indeed about giving feedback and learning on both s…

>In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening.

What do you do in that situation? When I encountered it, I assumed it was a communication problem at first, so I asked the student to take notes on what I had requested. This didn't help. I then realized they didn't understand what I had asked for in the first place. I suppose I could have requested they repeat my instructions back in their own words. Ultimately, I figured it was a lack of motivation, b/c they would half-jokingly complain about whatever I requested, and I usually found them watching videos on their computer when I walked by.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#113

Post by DarylZero »

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…

Well there's science and then there are social institutions that undertake science. But science can exist outside the institutions.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#114

Post by lambdatronics »

evancoop wrote: post #26

The "lead or be led" trope is apt, and certainly became the paradigm of my doctoral years. I might, however, amend this slightly. There's another idea of going rogue too soon or too late ( https://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/ ). Students, new employees, and other inexperienced folks need to be led initially, and then rapidly, transition into a self-directed paradigm. Success emerges if and only if the…

Great point. I clashed a bit with my advisor early on - they were trying to shepherd me away from a rabbithole, but I was a bit pigheaded and determined to fix something that I felt was sloppy. I ended up with a publication on it, but it probably wasn't a great use of my time (aside from providing me with a chance to flex my wings).

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#115

Post by mirker »

yt-sdb wrote: post #65
BeetleB wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suddenly, in a Ph.D - not only do you not know the answer, you don't know the question too. Mirroring what tasogare said: There are a lot of research professors who will not give you the flexibility of finding the question. They often are paying you to be an RA, and will want you to work on their topics, not yours. This may vary per discipline. In the circles I was in, this was the norm, though. Some professors wer…

I'd frame it this way: a good senior researcher knows when to give a junior researcher the question or not. First-year grad student? Pair them off with a postdoc for fast iterating on an established project. Fourth-year grad student? Push them by letting them flounder a bit and learn to find their own questions. I agree that in practice, this simply varies a lot by discipline and advisor.

You missed the most fun option: pair them up with a problem that leads to nowhere!

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#116

Post by knolan »

lambdatronics wrote: post #112
knolan wrote: post #9

Solid advice, not just for PhD students. This is also invaluable for helping final year/capstone students navigate their supervisor interactions. There’s nothing better than a student you wind up and they go off and solve a bunch of problems in interesting ways. They’re having fun, you’re workload is reduced and there’s even potential for a publication. Meetings are indeed about giving feedback and learning on both s…

>In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening. What do you do in that situation? When I encountered it, I assumed it was a communication problem at first, so I asked the student to take notes on what I had requested. This didn't help. I then realized they didn…

It’s hard. In the case of final year students they just need to do enough to get by. This usually means finding something in the project description that they can actually do or are motivated to do.

Sometimes you need to have a talk about what is going on. This usually happens after Xmas when they screw up their interim report/presentation. They get to see their peers succeed so it’s a strong motivator.

With PhD students it’s even tougher. You have to work with them for years and build them up. Some lack confidence, some are over confident but can’t actually do anything. You need to avoid doing too much for them — that’s the hardest part for me.

Occasionally you get postdocs that are difficult. They really should know better at this stage and should not have been hired.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#117

Post by teekert »

lambdatronics wrote: post #106
teekert wrote: post #5

I also did a PhD and this is all true. I realized many of these things years later. I think many of these points come down to confidence. When you are in the trenches, you really, really do know a lot, and you know it in incredible detail. In fact, in your career, if you leave academia you will probably never know a unique small "thing" in such detail ever again simply because you will have to make something as oppos…

>It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. Amen to that! It's better to have the discussion than to silently disagree (well, assuming your thesis advisor isn't a raging narcissist, and ass…

I agree, I was fortunate to have a very nice prof, really dedicated to the development of his PhD students, who saw the importance of social events and tried to have some fun himself, eager to roll up his sleeves and help in the lab, he enjoyed it. He was a bit further in his career with no need to publish or perish anymore.

That's also an advice I give to aspiring PhD students, look for a warm place, talk to the other PhD students about the working atmosphere. You don't want to end up a "measurement slave", as one of the 4 PhDs that (and I quote a prof during a talk) "was burned on this subject".

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#118

Post by vkk8 »

lambdatronics wrote: post #109
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…

>People do research and write papers because they have to produce something measurable, not because the research they do is actually interesting or important. Yes, so much of this. I think it's a direct consequence of your next point: >I wanted to stay in academia so I couldn't take any risks. That's how boring research gets prioritized.

> That's how boring research gets prioritized.

Yes, I realized I was part of the problem, but couldn't help it (except by leaving). If it was only a bunch of PhD students and postdocs wasting their time, the boring research wouldn't be such a problem. It becomes a problem, however, when everyone is doing it and the actual good publications get drowned in noise.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#119

Post by vkk8 »

mrjangles wrote: post #89
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.

The thing is, I think there are people in academia who are not just bullshitting. Occasionally real scientific advances do happen. It's just that if I don't personally have a breakthrough in sight, I'm supposed to just produce garbage and pretend that I'm doing a good job while trying to do the actual good research on my free time or something.

Re: Lessons from my PhD

#120

Post by xab31 »

jrumbut wrote: post #86
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 correct…

It's a good question, and I don't like posting excessively long comments and didn't have time to make it concise, so here's an attempt at an answer:

https://pastebin.com/fsrTtiKY

I think science is too big a thing to have a small set of "core features", and the question of how to usefully define "honesty" in a scientific context is another big topic, but reading about "bullshit" (the term of art that has its own literature, not the colloquialism) is a good place to start thinking about it.

I would suggest that fraud is one of the rarest types of dishonesty, because people who are both smart and dishonest have less risky ways to proceed, and that such people are very glad fraud exists, because it misdirects attention away from their arguably more damaging and prevalent methods. Feynman has a passage about how honesty in science is more a state of mind, which I agree with. But really, the techniques to be dishonest with low risk are the same in science, journalism, politics, and business.

My field isn't sociology of science though; these are just views from the genomics trenches.

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