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I'm quitting my PhD

blog.derhagen.eu

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Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#301

Post by bumby »

ModernMech wrote: post #290
hnaccount_rng wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still quit. And, at least I would recommend you doing it. I have yet to do the jump to industry, but from what I'm hearing so far: There is little to no value assigned to the _paper_. And, at least in my view, this is exactly as it should be. There are two and only two situations [0]: 1) The company requires your specific expertise and won't care about the title as you are the one with the knowledge 2) The co…

> from what I'm hearing so far: There is little to no value assigned to the _paper_ I was given this advice when I was wavering on whether to finish my Ph.D. In fact, a guy who had finished his Ph.D. told me don't bother, nothing changed from before or after he got it. Then I went to his wedding and he had the DJ refer to him as "Dr." the entire night in front of his entire family, and by God did they care. They were…

>and by God did they care.

I find it generally bad advice to chase after something when the main driver is social prestige. For one, by definition, you hinging your esteem to the (possibly fickle) opinion of somebody else and two, the people who are in fields for status rather than because of intrinsic joy of the work itself are often not the most productive or ethical.

For example, the surgeons I know who are in the field mainly due to the status it confers seem to be quite miserable.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#303

Post by cycomanic »

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…

I disagree, generally it's important to get feedback often and early. Conferences and publications are an important part of the process. That is not to defend the salami strategies of some research labs, but science is moving to fast to wait for your deeply thought out 500 page opus dei, which likely has been obsoleted by some finding published at a conference 2 years ago that you didn't attend.

I have seen the false perception a few times that a PhD is mainly about sitting down and thinking deeply for a long time without talking to anyone and then getting an eureka moment and writing it all up. This is not how most modern science is done (maybe it's still possible if you're a genius in very few select areas of mathematics). So if this is what you think a PhD is about, you're likely not going to enjoy it.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#304

Post by matthewdgreen »

Kranar wrote: post #294
matthewdgreen wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academia is full of mechanisms to negatively judge your research work. In fact judgement is pretty much the only constant in the field: every single piece of work you do will be under constant scrutiny, will be torn apart both before and after publication, and your entire (research) value will be harshly judged by outsiders on a more or less constant basis. The one positive of this environment that when you see someo…

>Academia is full of mechanisms to negatively judge your research work. Fascinating, as I did not find this at all to be the case in general. I imagine in some cases it could be true, but for the most part I found most research in academia to not be of much interest to many people, one way or another. Hardly anyone takes much time to either validate research or to critique it. I'm glad to hear that you managed to fin…

I suspect from your comment that you're not familiar with the actual experience of R1 academic research. It is a Darwinian process that involves repeatedly submitting papers to highly competitive conferences for peer-review (a typical top-tier conference in computer security averages N papers during grad school, you need to continue publishing maybe N/2 additional papers (or more) per year while also submitting successful grant proposals to organizations like NSF. These proposals are even more competitive (and worse: these organizations also consider your publication history and reputation, not just the merits of the proposal.) If you do this unabated for seven years or so then you might get tenure, which means you'll get to keep jumping those hurdles for another 25 years or so.

Of course you can argue that all this academic competition selects for the wrong thing (that's subjective) but the competition and testing is never-ending. There is a reason that a lot of people leave for industry, simply because it's so much less stressful.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#305

Post by zekrioca »

tomatowurst wrote: post #274
zekrioca wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't you simply respect the author's wish to leave the text private?

No implicit agreement to privacy can exist on the internet. Once you click publish, its archived. I wanted to read what the author wrote. https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...

It depends. The author should also have the Right to be forgotten, which applies to some jurisdictions, specially in this situation that the matter may have not been set.

But I still disagree with you not respecting the author's implicit wish. For instance, thanks to the various similar links like the one you just sent, I can pin-point exactly who the person in question is. How can you guarantee the information will not be used against the person? I'm not sure if this is on your ethical framework to consider, but that's where I see the fundamental disagreement.

You could have privately read the text (because you know how to access it), while not posting the text per-se here, and you could even comment something insightful about it. It is more about the anthropological aspect of it, the respect of privacy, not about the technical aspects of the public town-square that the Internet is.

Clearly the author did not know any of these either, nor about what a PhD actually entails. But still, these are mistakes that can be part of someone's life.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#307

Post by matthewdgreen »

chrisseaton wrote: post #297
matthewdgreen wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holding someone to a (US-style) thesis proposal is hard enough when they're already familiar with the area and have a couple of years of direct research experience under their belt. Doing it even earlier in the process sounds much harder.

> Doing it even earlier in the process sounds much harder. Right - which is why it's a better check before they embark on a PhD.

I am biased but I think the US approach is much better. You start the MS and PhD at the same time. You get real research experience during the first two years, while also doing coursework: if things don't work out, you have an off-ramp in getting a terminal MS (usually for no financial cost.)

If you keep going, then ideally you have a good sense of what research you want to do. You may have one or more publications/near-publications under your belt. Now you write your proposal and finish out the dissertation over the course of 2-3 years, which is realistic. I may be missing something about the UK approach but this seems much more reasonable to me.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#308

Post by ModernMech »

Victerius wrote: post #8
hardware2win wrote: post #6

Why higher edu institutions are so disappointing and mediocre? I dont think ive ever heard good things about phd except the chance to work in cool places like e.g microsoft research

100 reasons not to go to graduate school: http://100rsns.blogspot.com/?m=1

This looks like a list of 100 motivated reasons to not go to graduate school.

For example, Reason 74: Academic conferences. Really?? Academic conferences are the best part about grad school! They're held in beautiful locations, you get to meet all kinds of smart and amazing people, spend all week steeped in your favorite research topic, and best of all it's all expenses paid by your project.

The author's main complaint seems to be that the audience doesn't pay close enough attention at session presentations... okay? That doesn't seem like a reason not to go to grad school. A lot of these seem like they could be reframed as reasons to go to gradschool, actually.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#309

Post by aqsalose »

sampo wrote: post #281
bumby wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I'm curious what you base this conclusion on? I've heard professors say similar, but it always seemed that it was because they were in an academic bubble. If this is true, then you almost have to concede the model is broken. There will be a glut of PhDs compared to faculty positions. One of the reasons so many PhDs are disgruntled is because of the false expectation that every PhD is on track for a profes…

> If this is true, then you almost have to concede the model is broken. PhD training prepares people for the academic career and faculty positions. Less than half of PhD graduates actually end up in the academic career. So yes, you could say the system is ...not perfect.

Many pre-modern apprentices never became journeymen and even fewer a master.

In 17th century Leiden, 40% of surgeons' apprentices dropped out. In Utrecht's Coopers' Guild, only about 10% of apprentices became Masters.

On the other hand, getting rid of the guilds in the 1820s and replacing it with less formalized vocational training during industrialization didn't change the system for better:

>A lengthy contribution in the journal of the Dutch Society to Advance Industry in 1891 criticised the condition of Dutch training in detail: ‘Nowadays boys leave one boss after the other for the greatest triviality . . .. The boss continuously fears that the boy will leave him to use his acquired skills with another boss. Bosses therefore slow down training by putting boys to work at specialised repetitive tasks, so that they bring in the highest profits.’

https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/391011

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#310

Post by zekrioca »

mcbuilder wrote: post #259
zekrioca wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why couldn't you simply respect the author's wish to leave the text private?

I agree with you in principle, but the second you make a public blog post, especially a controversial one, these days assume it's public forever. Someone intelligent enough to do attempt a PhD should know this. Him making it private was a futile attempt based in naïveté. I've been in a similar position, saying something incendiary on a large corporation's public intranet comment section. What I said was more objectiv…

Yes, and I think the author also realized the same causal relationship of a given position and that's when the person removed the text. And that's also how one can see the person did not think about this when opting to join a PhD program.
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