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I'm someone who finished a PhD, here's my perspective. You don't believe your supervisor or your research group and so you quit, great. It's great that you have the critical thinking abilities and confidence in yourself to make such a decision. However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art. I don't say this bec…
I'm someone who finished a PhD, here's my perspective. You don't believe your supervisor or your research group and so you quit, great. It's great that you have the critical thinking abilities and confidence in yourself to make such a decision. However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art. I don't say this bec…
> I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it How does this happen?
It sounds a bit like his supervisor(s) didn't know to much about Quantum Computing as well. Really seems like a strange situation...
I would love PhDs to be thought of as something you dive into when you have something to pursue, perhaps many years later in life rather than a follow on immediately after study. As a comparison imagine if VC funding only went to the highest scoring new grads and the business proposal was asked for after the invitation to take on VC funding. That's pretty much what's been happening with PhDs. You get the marks, you g…
I actually tried to join a PhD program after 5 years of industry experience, and they offered the top fellowship they had, which was not enough to cover only the health insurance for my family, not to mention rent or food. It simply wasn’t feasible, and so we would need a systemic change to education funding to enable late-in-life study opportunities for everyone.
I dislike the comparison to VC funding. VC funding is essentially gambling and already a gross misallocation of resources. VC funding already goes to something analogous to the highest scoring grads who speculate wildly that they have a viable business model, and the real business model only shows up long after the funds, even in the small ~5-10% of successful startups. The ~90% of failures is proof enough.
Also, research requires taking risks with resources. If we don’t take risks, we won’t make progress. Thinking of research in narrow immediate economic terms is short sighted. We often don’t understand the ROI of research until long after the initial investment, meaning there will never be a time that allocation of resources can be predicted or approximated in advance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are way more PhD's then there are research positions, so we are very far from the deficit you fear.
> There are way more PhD's then there are research positions Nonsense. Look at how many job openings there are for PhDs - people can't hire them fast enough. I was in a call the other day saying how hard it is to even find PhDs to interview, let alone get them to accept your offer.
- Learn you like teaching / mentoring
- Become trained to read and write world class research, and become a world class engineer.
- Learn that you are great at marketing and networking, and become a professor or nontechnical exec somewhere (perhaps your own startup).
Obviously, the more of the above boxes you tick, the better (all three is the path to ACM Fellow / Turing Award), and they're not binary dimensions.
The author of the post seems to have failed utterly on the third point, perhaps due to Covid isolation.
The behavior of the professor in the story seems middling, but not terrible. They should have provided the student with more theoretically inclined contacts, while making it clear that quantum computers are almost real now, and a hands-on systems PhD is likely to be much more lucrative/impactful than closing some open, escoteric theoretical problems. (It sounds like this student joined a systems lab without understanding what systems research is.)
If the student really wanted a theory PhD, they'd still get support from the theoreticians the advisor should have found, and the advisor should have had enough confidence in the student to delegate, and allow that (perhaps misguided) line of work, or helped the student find a more appropriate advisor.
I feel for the student writing this piece and I'm sad that they've developed some bitterness at their advisors and the entire field (which I read in the piece, even if it wasn't the intent.) Everyone needs to understand something important: a PhD is first and foremost an apprenticeship. It is your opportunity to study under someone who has done a specific kind of research, and learn from that person. If that relation…
I'm someone who finished a PhD, here's my perspective. You don't believe your supervisor or your research group and so you quit, great. It's great that you have the critical thinking abilities and confidence in yourself to make such a decision. However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art. I don't say this bec…
If his supervisor were an outlier, I could see your point. But a big purpose behind his blog post is to highlight how common this is.
I'm someone who finished a PhD, here's my perspective. You don't believe your supervisor or your research group and so you quit, great. It's great that you have the critical thinking abilities and confidence in yourself to make such a decision. However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art. I don't say this bec…
Exactly. Giving the OP the benefit of the doubt -- that he is completely correct in his assessment of the group -- he is certainly doing himself no favors publicly throwing them under the bus. I imagine other prospective advisors, in any field, might be reluctant to take him on if this is a pontential outcome.