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PhD Simulator

research.wmz.ninja

71–80 of 285 posts

Re: PhD Simulator

#71

I notice a lot of negativity and "do not recommend" regarding pursuing a PhD on HN recently. That raises the question: Why would you go for it?

Because tenured faculty members at research universities often have lovely careers. The road there is long and challenging, but the result can be exceedingly rewarding.

Re: PhD Simulator

#72
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been mostly like this for a long time, but it is slowly changing. Open data repositories and scientific software libraries/products are beginning to count more and more (at least many of us are pushing for this). It also depends on the target career past graduation. Papers matter a lot for tenure-track positions, and much less for science support (scientific software developers, data engineers, lab managers etc.…

In what fields is 3 papers expected? In my field, Psychology, 3 first-author papers sounds like a reasonable lower bound, but that seems like it would be a lot to expect out of Biologists or hard scientists.

Current 4th year in Biology. Generally, 1 paper is expected, but it is not strictly necessary to graduate. Highly doubt that the PI will let you go without finishing your project though.

Re: PhD Simulator

#73
post #5

This is great and exactly captures the PhD experience. Both in the simulator and in real life, I mostly survived until the end by slacking off frequently, and needed around 5 years. Some highlights: > INBOX: Based on the reviewers' comments, we regret to inform you that your manuscript has been REJECTED for publication. One of the reviewers pointed out that there is no comparison with a state-of-art method. > You cam…

> You found one of your ideas appears in a recently published paper. You can no longer work on it.

This is one of the things I thought of right away when ChatGPT got released last year. "God, there's probably so many PhD candidates right now in NLP feeling despair like all their work was pointless ...as if million of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

It's hard in the moment to know whether what you're working on has any utility. So just do your best and keep chugging!

Re: PhD Simulator

#76

I find one month per turn quite coarse: much more fine-grained misery could be added with variable-length activities, waiting anxiously for something, real life commitments, or randomly wasting time. For example, 2d4 days to read some papers, 1d6+1 consecutive days to think about a new idea, a 50% chance per day of being busy teaching, resource contention with colleagues running their simulations, etc.

The idea of a D&D campaign centred around this is hilarious

Re: PhD Simulator

#78
post #73
post #5

This is great and exactly captures the PhD experience. Both in the simulator and in real life, I mostly survived until the end by slacking off frequently, and needed around 5 years. Some highlights: > INBOX: Based on the reviewers' comments, we regret to inform you that your manuscript has been REJECTED for publication. One of the reviewers pointed out that there is no comparison with a state-of-art method. > You cam…

> You found one of your ideas appears in a recently published paper. You can no longer work on it. This is one of the things I thought of right away when ChatGPT got released last year. "God, there's probably so many PhD candidates right now in NLP feeling despair like all their work was pointless ...as if million of voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced." It's hard in the moment to know whether what…

[deleted]

Re: PhD Simulator

#80

That was...a lot more straightforward than I thought. First try: Year 4 Month 5 Second try: a lot more things went wrong. Year 5 Month 11. Third try: Year 5 Month 11. I just followed these rules: - Study for the qualifying exam until I'm "very confident" - If I have no ideas, read papers - If I have an idea, work on developing it. If I have a preliminary result, work on developing it. If I have a major result, conduc…

A bit disappointing it doesn't go into other details like being a women. As most PhD candidates are in their mid 20s and often by the end of the beginning of their academic careers they immediately have to decide to either have a family or pursue academia.
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