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I'm quitting my PhD

blog.derhagen.eu

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Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#231

Post by low_tech_love »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #38

> "Aiming to produce PDF files that would be accepted at conferences (which seems to be easy-going if you sprinkle some fancy quantum vocabulary over something and hand it in to a non-quantum conference). I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day. After all, science is all about the pursuit of knowledge, even though th…

This is true, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it. If you keep looking at your neighbor in order to determine your next step, you will be disappointed in every walk of life, not only in academia. If you don’t subscribe to the same ideas, do it differently, and get ready for some resistance. In academia you have to carve your path just like everywhere else. That said: I agree that academia is just a big circle jerk. :)

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#232

Post by gfaregan »

From my experience with graduate school I would add two points:

1. It helps to have a clear goal. Most of the people I knew viewed a PhD as a job qualification like an undergrad degree or a professional degree and they now work in tech. Others became professors, which had been their goal probably from before undergrad.

2. Social skills are really important for learning, working, getting help with problems, staying motivated, etc. This is still true for highly technical subjects, but isn't really taught explicitly.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#233

Post by yodsanklai »

What he's describing is extremely common (having an advisor who is loosely interested or competent). But this also what research is about. As he said, this is his PhD, not his advisor's. His advisor should be able help him navigate in the academic world, making the right contacts, funding his trips to conferences or summer schools and so on... But reading stuff for a couple of years before being able to even know what you want to really work on about is part of the deal. And also, pretty much all PhDs are about grabbing low hanging fruits at the frontier of the current knowledge, very few people make significant contributions.

Some students need more supervision that others, and similarly, different advisors have different style. It's important to be aware of that when starting a PhD and make sure there's a proper match.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#234

Post by shoyer »

david_l_lin wrote: post #83

I find that many of the PhD students who struggle are not prepared for the mostly self-driven nature of the pursuit, and have not had enough work experience to know how to choose a supervisor. The statistics support this: a majority of the PhD dropouts are students straight from undergrad who performed well academically, but have never had work experience. Finishing a PhD is as much about selecting a good PI as it is…

+1 one of most common mistakes for PhD students is picking a project based on research interests rather than the adviser. I believe it is relatively uncommon to speak with former students of an adviser, but this is something that everyone entering a PhD should do.

Finding a good mentor -- someone whose values you agree with and who sets you up for career success -- is far more important than working on any particular topic of interest. The world is full of interesting research topics, and very few PhDs work in the precise area of their PhD research for their entire career.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#235

Post by vorpalhex »

sdfhdhjdw3 wrote: post #175
Benjammer wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's exhausting commenting on HN. You have to append every minor observation of a laundry list of responses to likely misinterpretations. Interesting seeing this response after you just posted: >If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself Was this a tongue-in-cheek demonstration of your point? Or is vague criticism only unacceptable in academia?

The post I was responding to was the example. I wanted to claim that you shouldn't make vague criticism. I immediately expected that people would respond as if my claim was that you shouldn't criticize. And sure enough, that's what the post I responded to did. Me: "You shouldn't make vague criticism" Response: "OMG you're saying university professors are above criticism." Do you think I'm being vague here? :-)

You should re-read the response to your post. You are upset because you feel you are not being read, but the problem is that you are not reading others.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#236

Post by zahllos »

Someone wrote: post #186
zahllos wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As to C, the math is simple. If each tenured professor has tenure for 30 years and has a single phD student graduate every 5 years, statistically the number of tenured professors need to grow by 500% in 30 years (over 6% per year) for all those phD students to get a tenured job. 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…

Yes exactly, and your numbers are a lower bound, because the professor must do a few things: supervision of the PhDs, teaching (prep, lecturing, admin), grant applications, peer review (if not delegated to PhDs/postdocs) etc. The actual time the professor has for pure research is... not as much as you'd think.

Which means that having more PhD students means you can explore more of your own ideas by assigning them to it. It also means more teaching assistants and so on for your course. So the chances you will take and graduate one at a time are very low. Also, you know some fraction won't make it, so you need to account for that too.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#237

Post by holyra »

sdfhdhjdw3 wrote: post #20

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…

This is a harsh reply.

I also had the same issue as the author: absent supervisions. I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers (I tried everything to motivate them and I finally gave up). I did everything on my own. It was very hard. I learned the hard way (try and fail... do it again...). I finally finished my phd with great appreciations from the jury. However this ends with a considerable cost: I am completely broken. I now suffer of a severe depression and generalized anxiety disorders. I take several medications and this does not help so much. I lost a lot of friends. My life is basically a journey in hell since several years now.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#238

Post by rat9988 »

noptd wrote: post #158
sdfhdhjdw3 wrote: post #20

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…

Quoted post unavailable.

Can mods delete this please? I think web archive is misused in many cases when it's posted on HN. Web archive, in my opinion, shouldn't be used to circumvent author wishes or paywalls.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#239

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

yanderekko wrote: post #86
mordae wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extremely unprofessional I disagree. It is extremely unprofessional to act like doing research while pocketing mostly public funds like that. I am 100% behind the author. They have apparently tried to resolve the issue internally and this serves as good warning for people considering science career in today's world.

>I disagree. It is extremely unprofessional to act like doing research while pocketing mostly public funds like that. This can be true while it's also true that making a vague, unsubstantiated assertion about how your love for the field is just too deep and pure for academia is still unprofessional. Of the people who claim they dropped out of school because they were just too smart or creative to go through the motio…

Can you quote research to support your claim?

Alas I only have an anecdote.

I considered starting a PhD around ten years ago. One particular university was having an open day. When I got there everyone was locked out because someone hadn't bothered to tell someone else the open day was happening.

There were visits to the facilities, which were interesting enough but a lot of the tech had been there since the 90s (or 70s in some cases) and there wasn't anything fresh to see.

And there was a show-and-tell by various researchers and one lead professor, during which I realised the professor was a Grade A Bullshitter [1], and the researchers weren't even remotely familiar with other work in the field.

The main person I wanted to see didn't bother to turn up.

Bizarrely, there was a persistently religious undertone - very strange in a field that isn't even remotely religious. (The university is quite well known for its theology department.)

Now, this is a very niche field, so I have no way of knowing if it was typical.

But as experiences go it certainly didn't suggest that that particular department was simmering with eager high-voltage professionalism.

Since then I've read "We're looking for PhD students" notices on various email lists. It's striking how many [2] seem like transparently contrived attempts at getting funding from organisations who already know what exactly they want to fund, and how few have are truly research-driven.

It feels very much like a box ticking exercise. Org gets money, org hands it out to researchers, researchers get students, students write up dissertation, dissertation is forgotten, rinse and repeat.

[1] Subsequently confirmed independently by other people in various "Oh, him - yes, he's a loon" conversations.

[2] Not all. There are places who on the leading edge. But even there some of the research feels dissociated from real problems - almost as if the goal is the production of "Towards..." "Considering..." and "A critique/summary/review/taxonomy of..." of papers, and not so much developing techniques and solutions that that would really move the field forward.

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