181–190 of 382 posts
Reading this, I couldn't help but recall Feynman's quote: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." I love cussing and discussing quantum theory / physics / computing. And Feynman is 100% right. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman
What however I didn't like in the original post are the sweeping comments about the supervisor's knowledge and research. It is possible that the author is right, but I would be somewhat sceptical, given they come from somebody who just spent 1 year as a PhD candidate.
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…
PhD is an apprenticeship to do research. If we left it until later in life, we wouldn't have anyone trained to do research.
Can you explain this further? I don't follow how, for example, if I wait 10 years to begin a PhD there is somehow no research being conducted.
Even if everyone suddenly waited 10 years, there would only be a lag for the first generation.
The article has been replaced with this disclaimer: > Because this article received somewhat more attention than I expected/feel comfortable with, I’ll take it down for a moment. Sorry. I’ll leave the disclaimer: > Disclaimer: This article has been primarily written to clear up my mind, and to potentially receive constructive, uplifting or critical comments from others. I feel like it helps me cope with a frustrating…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There are three types of jobs a PhD could go into: A) industry job (just job to us mortals), B) industrial research lab (a company, but does research. An example would be IBM or Microsoft Research in CS), or C) a professor. For context, I work in a research group in a building full of PhDs, postdocs and professors. For A, PhDs ought never be short of work. They were likely good students, they also spent 3-5 years loo…
Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking.
Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year.
The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.
I will hand in my notice tomorrow, after circa 1 year as a PhD student. In fact, I'm switching fields: from a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (energy systems) to a software developer role in a non-engineering sector. Very little of my 7 years (MSc) and subsequent circa 1 year as a PhD will carry over. Certainly an exciting step, although the program here was pretty excellent. Good supervision, full funding for the enti…
Your face when in 5 years you find yourself in project management: >:0
For a software developer with a regular STEM MSc, there is more of an upper, less of a lower bound, but I'm not planning on testing out those upper boundaries (like, can you rise to C-level of a large corporation? Sure can, but a PhD makes it much easier where I'm from).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Physics it's not unusual to start a PhD in a sub-discipline that you've got little experience in (I realize the author works more on the information theory side of things). When I started my PhD in experimental quantum computing I had experience with superconductivity and low-temperature physics but none with qubit design or high-frequency RF system design. It's the point of a PhD to learn about these things and g…
Yeah, but at least your PI should know about your field. This is a really weird article and weird PhD experience.
Schools offer this kind of acceptance path for students who aren’t very strongly tied to a particular idea. The author, despite having no experience or knowledge in QC was very tied to the idea, which how would the faculty know that before admitting them? Usually when you are so devoted to a research idea you’ve worked on it to some degree before deciding to devote 10% of your life toward pursuing it. I’ve never seen a student quit in 6 months because they couldn’t make progress on an idea they had only just started to consider.