LOL, wrote the thesis in one month. Very funny.
PhD Simulator
91–100 of 285 posts
Re: PhD Simulator
#92This 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…
> Teaching obligations
any advice for people aiming for teaching instead of all the publishing stuff?
Re: PhD Simulator
#93Didn't reach the roadblock I ran into: >Professors demand you do exactly what they want for your thesis. Also, what qualifying exam? It seems like as long as I was worker for my professors, they couldn't give a crap. (Although I was quite credentialed, so maybe they didn't care) If I do get a PhD, it will be on a topic I want. So far, I have done that better independently and have gotten a bunch of press on the topic…
I think some unis require students to start as an MPhil student and then transfer from MPhil to PhD via some kind of publication/presentation?
That's what I did (~17 years ago). I was registered as MPhil then transferred to PhD after submitting a mini-thesis after about 2 years. In the end the mini-thesis actually contained all the most significant results that formed the PhD thesis and the latter just explored some applications.
Re: PhD Simulator
#94This sounds less stressful than an average half a decade working at my current position. It is actually motivating. Whether or not that was the desired outcome, I don't know. At least I get to travel to half decent academic conferences and not large vendor marketing conferences.
The stress comes from constant and abject failure, not really the life style. Travelling is also like 2% of the total time.
I haven't done any productive work for about 5 years so doing something and failing would be an improvement.
Re: PhD Simulator
#95I 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?
A PhD is one of those rare periods of life where you are completely on your own, navigating unknown territories without anybody telling you what you should or should not do, where your professional success depends entirely on your own ideas and decisions. The reason to try a PhD is that you are truly free to test your limits. It can be liberating, but also daunting. And definitely humbling. In some ways, it is not so…
I wrote about that overlap with entrepreneurship here: https://twitter.com/mizzao/status/1505529213612609536
Re: PhD Simulator
#96I 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
after graduation you become lvl 1 wizard
that explains low hp stats
Re: PhD Simulator
#97I like declining the offer and going on with my life. Relaxing.
Re: PhD Simulator
#98I 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?
If you have a cool idea which is novel in your field, a PhD might allow you to work on it without selling out to VCs. There are still people to convince, but the time horizon for results is longer than with an average seed funding.
Re: PhD Simulator
#99Too real.
Re: PhD Simulator
#100That 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…
I followed this strategy + parallelized developing preliminary ideas and wrapped up in 3 years, 11 months with 100/100 Hope. If it only it was that easy! Haha