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I'm quitting my PhD

blog.derhagen.eu

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Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#351

Post by derhagen »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #169
lelandfe wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having it on the Archive is fine; choosing to disregard how scary landing on the top of HN can be seems callous.

People in this thread should take into consideration that the author submitted the post to Hacker News themselves. This is a call for the general hacker public to read it, and ultimately it cannot be undone easily. I do understand the basic level of curiosity from fellow HN readers -- I did look up the research team and the supervisors mentioned. They do claim a really large area of research interests: * Verification…

NotOscarWilde, I'd appreciate if you removed info regarding other people. The article was supposed about me, my feelings and the process of handling a personal crisis. My intention was that people read this post in a self-contained way, without relation to any other people (whose names I didn't mention on purpose), and I feel like most people here did. Maybe I could have expected folks spending time googling this type of unnecessary background information, it still got me by surprise. I'd really, really appreciate if you edited your comment insofar as a matter of respect to these other people.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#352

Post by chrisseaton »

bumby wrote: post #265
chrisseaton wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do a PhD at 21, you’ve got 40 years of productive research ahead of you. If you do one at 40 you’ve only got 21 years. Less time to research, so missed opportunity.

Thanks for replying. I think I would push back a bit on the idea that research generally only commences after a PhD. Maybe in academia, but in industry (engineering at least, I don't know on the CS side), an awful lot of research is done at masters or even bachelors levels. The people I know who've gone for a PhD later in life were already doing research and generally took the path because the credential opened profe…

If you didn’t need a PhD to do research then why do one at all?

You can’t convince me people are taking four years out of their professional lives at their prime to get a simple promotion?

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#353

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #296
chrisseaton wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US doesn’t the thesis proposal come after you’ve already sunk several years? In the UK you do it as part of your application.

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.

In Spain we do the latter in theory. In practice, in almost all cases I know it's the supervisor who writes the proposal because there's no way a fresh PhD student has the experience or knowledge of the field to write one. And anyway, the proposal often gets overwritten a few years down the line after Plan A fails and the thesis is pivoted towards Plan B.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#354

Post by wuschel »

dizzant wrote: post #149
matthewdgreen wrote: post #27

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…

Thanks for this perspective. I am one of these mismatched PhD students. When I entered 6 years ago, no professors in my department had time to advise me. The professor for whom I was a GTA took pity on me after two years of rejection, and now serves as my committee chair despite having little to no expertise in my field. I am coadvised through a different department, but again, my coadvisor has little overlap with my…

Keep pushing. You were not the only one. You can do it. You will make it.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#355

Post by sva_ »

derhagen wrote: post #351
NotOscarWilde wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in this thread should take into consideration that the author submitted the post to Hacker News themselves. This is a call for the general hacker public to read it, and ultimately it cannot be undone easily. I do understand the basic level of curiosity from fellow HN readers -- I did look up the research team and the supervisors mentioned. They do claim a really large area of research interests: * Verification…

NotOscarWilde, I'd appreciate if you removed info regarding other people. The article was supposed about me, my feelings and the process of handling a personal crisis. My intention was that people read this post in a self-contained way, without relation to any other people (whose names I didn't mention on purpose), and I feel like most people here did. Maybe I could have expected folks spending time googling this typ…

I doubt they can edit their comment at this point. If you really want it removed, reach out to hn@ycombinator.com for (accidental) doxxing.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#356

Post by matthewdgreen »

btrettel wrote: post #336
matthewdgreen wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining about flaws in a few papers is like saying “I found a piece of software with a bug” and then claiming software engineering is a broken field based on those examples. The argument about peer review is not that it’s perfect on any given paper, but that someone who has repeatedly survived a publication competition with a ~20% success rate and then got other serious researchers to cite and build their work is…

> Complaining about flaws in a few papers is like saying “I found a piece of software with a bug” and then claiming software engineering is a broken field based on those examples. My point wasn't a complaint about a few papers, rather, important papers that presumably have had a lot of eyeballs go over them in addition to being peer reviewed. If those papers have serious flaws, then I think that does say something ab…

I think tarring the entire field of scientific research by saying "I claim I found serious flaws in a few unnamed papers" is pretty meaningless. Provide specifics!

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#357

Post by selimthegrim »

zackmorris wrote: post #337
selimthegrim wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you’re looking for exists with stuff like Gleason’s theorem and noncontextuality, but it’s not what you would train up in if you wanted to be “productive”.

I'll use your comment to correct myself, I meant to write "qubit" heh. Thanks yes, after posting my comment, I was researching qubits and Hilbert spaces and stumbled onto ergodic processes, where the properties of a process can be inferred from random sampling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_process I believe that combining it with the Born rule (which gives the probability that a measurement of a quantum syst…

I hope this video by 3Blue1Brown sells you on complex numbers!

https://youtu.be/bOXCLR3Wric

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#358

Post by bumby »

lumost wrote: post #319
bumby wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

A phd is a one time expense, you can choose to discard it or use it as needed. Unlike a surgeon, who must spend their career actually doing surgery or face financial ruin. Anecdotally, I have seen phds create expectation vs reality mismatches for some. The degree can easily become an anchor which holds someone to problems that they no longer care about, or provides false belief in one’s credentials.

>Unlike a surgeon, who must spend their career actually doing surgery or face financial ruin.

I literally know somebody who went through surgery residency and decided to walk away from the field. They are not in financial ruin.

Medical school is also a "one time expense", so I'm not convinced of the distinction. The opportunity cost of a PhD, especially in a field of engineering or CS is probably on similar par. The difference between a TA salary and someone in industry, over the course of 6-7 years to complete a PhD, can easily approach or exceed $500k. While the debt load between the two may be different, the actual opportunity cost is similar.

>The degree can easily become an anchor which holds someone to problems that they no longer care about, or provides false belief in one’s credentials.

Completely agree.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#359

Post by bumby »

ModernMech wrote: post #331
bumby wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> 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. On the other hand, I've found that people who convince themselves that they are pursing a path based on intrinsic joy of the work itself quickly lose interest when they hit a wall and the work becomes not fun at all but a slog.

Really? It sounds to me like they are relying on "motivation" which will inevitably wane. That's different than what I'm speaking to.

Think about somebody who grinds out of a sense of duty (high on the "conscientiousness" scale of personality traits). They may not be motivated by the task itself, but are still able to continue the effort because of it's intrinsic rewards (for fueling their identity as a dutiful person, for example).

A parent may not feel motivated all the time regarding doing "silly" activities with their children. But they can push forward anyways, because the idea of "being a good parent" is intrinsically rewarding.

Re: I'm quitting my PhD

#360

Post by bumby »

wombatpm wrote: post #343
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…

My time as a graduate student at a major research institution with the #2 program for my engineering field , and two years as the President of the Graduate and Professional Student Association. What institutions say and what faculty actually do may differ in reality. CS programs may be different, but engineering and physics were definitely geared for academics

I'm still skeptical but willing to give the benefit of the doubt. What makes you think engineering and physics are definitely geared for academics?

I ask because all of the PhDs I've worked with outside of academia are from engineering and physics, save one from sociology and three from psychology. (The latter were geared to human factors of engineering problems).

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