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PhD Simulator

research.wmz.ninja

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Re: PhD Simulator

#181

Post by sarosh »

Looking at https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/rulesets/default/eve... provides most of the key 'game loops', i.e.

# idea -> prelim -> major -> 2 figures -> submitted paper

interesting to see the hypothesis about reading more papers being borne out:

# increase the success rate as the player reads more papers probability: 0.60 + player.readPapers / 100 - itemCount('idea') / 20

Also interesting to see that passing the qualification exam provides the largest player.hope boost (+10)

Was fun to see the TooManyIdeas random event - now to actually get it to trigger.

Re: PhD Simulator

#182

Post by ketzo »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #150
jszymborski wrote: post #58

This is great but it's missing one thing: having to apply for funding each year (time consuming!) with the statistical expectation of not receiving it. Then having to TA to help towards making-up the difference (it does not). Then, spend egregious amounts of time each year filling out expense reports for conferences you attended. Also, take-up more part time work because it takes 4-6 months for the reports to get pro…

Do PhD students tend to apply for funding where you're at? In most CS PhD programs it's the advisors job to do that.

n=2 but my friends in humanities PhDs both have to do all their own funding work. sounds exhausting.

Re: PhD Simulator

#183

Post by fugue88 »

chias wrote: post #54
lqet wrote: 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…

One dynamic I experienced that also isn't in the simulation: if you focus too much on classwork early on in order to pass your RPE, it can actually be hard to find an advisor. Classwork is basically dead-end work and the more you focus on it the less you have to show for yourself when trying to convince an advisor to work with you. Your goal should be to optimize for doing just well enough to pass your classwork. Als…

I had picked my advisor at the start of my PhD. I also had 2 backups. My pick was on sabbatical my first year. He and I agreed I'd load up on the required classes that year.

He e-mailed me right before the year ended saying he had changed his mind and didn't want any more grad students, basically dumping me.

Right around the same time, my first backup decided to retire.

My second backup passed away.

I was left no longer making "sufficient progress" and no path to do so, losing my financial aid.

Re: PhD Simulator

#184

Post by nikvaes »

fractallyte wrote: post #148
womenintech333 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing a PhD program to 4 years can help but in many fields this is still a problem. For many fields and form of absence of leave can be the end of your academic career. If I recall correctly the average PhD graduate is still 26-27 years old. Which doesn't help much too much even though the average US grad is 31. For many field though this would help a lot. In tech and stem not so much. I remember some of the femal…

How should the system be changed to accommodate women? (And men/fathers?)

In my opinion, a first step is to equalize maternity and paternity leave. It should be equally disrupting for men to have children as for women (from the perspective of an employer). I like the Swedish implementation of this model, where partners get 480 days of leave per child which they are free to divide among themselves, with a minimum of 90 days for either.

Re: PhD Simulator

#185

Post by davidgay »

krastanov wrote: post #127
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teaching obligations any advice for people aiming for teaching instead of all the publishing stuff?

If you want to have a tenure track "professor" position focused on teaching in a top-tier university, you need to be a great researcher as teaching skills are not considered much -- you just get to decide to focus on teaching after you get tenure. Thankfully, many universities (even the prestigious ones) are now starting to hire more semi-permanent teaching-focused staff (and some even use the title professor for the…

> If you want to have a tenure track "professor" position focused on teaching in a top-tier university, you need to be a great researcher as teaching skills are not considered much

Not completely true. UC Berkeley at least has tenure-track lecturers, now apparently mostly referred to as "Teaching Professors" (https://apo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/teaching_profes...)

A random (old) job post for this: https://gsso.ce.gatech.edu/2022/01/12/tenure-track-teaching-...

Re: PhD Simulator

#186

Post by dragontamer »

CSMastermind wrote: post #142
TremendousJudge wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never heard of a "happy PhD"

It's interesting because I know maybe two dozen people with PhDs and every single one of them has a story about a moment of hitting rock bottom during the process and losing all hope. Obviously they all pulled through and make it out to the other side but it really doesn't sound like a pleasant experience.

My sister is the opposite.

She's got her bachelors back in 2010 and got a Masters while working full time. This part was brutal, but not technically PhD yet. She's in Health Policy, a lot of statistics and junk.

Anyway, she works for some special interest think-tank for a bit, works on insurance company some other bit, and finally settles down in the CDC where her skills in statistics / health policy were very much appreciated. She's getting to a point where it takes a Ph.D however before she can move forward with her career (she's already surrounded by Ph.Ds, and she sticks out in a bad way by not having one), so she's going for her Ph.D.

From her side of the aisle, she's seeing a whole bunch of silly 20-something year olds who don't even know what the field of Health Policy is about, trying to create Ph.D Thesis topics that have obviously no relevance to anybody in any of the fields she's ever worked in (politics, insurance, or CDC).

Meanwhile, her first idea was basically "Think of something CDC is blind at, which she can think of rather easily because she's worked there for 5+ years and everyone at the office is basically spitballing complaints about the CDC's statistics every damn day", and propose it as a Ph.D thesis.

Granted, her day-to-day work is filled with constantly interacting with Ph.Ds who are interested in improving the CDC's statistical collection techniques / improving accuracy / finding new ways to slice the data and innovation. That's literally her job. And those subjects just so happen to be very useful Ph.D thesis material for advancing the state of Health Policy.

--------------

How much blood, sweat, and tears are we setting up Ph.D candidates for because they're straight-out-of bachelors with no real world experience or knowledge of their damn field?

Some of these things _are_ easy to figure out after you've got 5 to 10 years of real world experience.

The treadmill of Bachelors -> Masters -> Ph.D is broken. It probably needs to be Bachelors -> Real world experience -> Masters -> Real World Experience -> Ph.D.

This "Read paper -> Think of idea -> Woops, someone already did it -> Read another paper" loop from the video game, is that how most Ph.Ds try to come up with their thesis? Isn't that obviously broken compared to other "life-loops"?

-----------

Ex: her office solved the question of "how to report statistics within one month to policy makers", because as late as 2018 or so, CDC was still on a yearly schedule of death statistics releases.

Imagine if we were still on the yearly-schedule when COVID19 happened, instead of the rapid schedule of monthly-statistics that we actually had! Monthly statistics, much like Inflation NowCasting, is actually a forecast / prediction because not all the data is in. But coming up with a forecast for this month (or last month) of data is still a problem that needed to be solved, especially in a way that policy makers would accept in a political environment where everyone's nitpicking at the details.

There's so many blind-spots and questions about how to improve statistics and statistical reporting at the Ph.D level in that field. But you are only aware of these blind-spots if you actually work in the field for a bit.

Re: PhD Simulator

#187

Post by SomewhatLikely »

gonzo41 wrote: post #13
trojan13 wrote: post #11

Now imagine this, but with a "LinkedIn feed" that shows updates from your peers, showing their professional accomplishments and current salary.

It should also have a picture of you, Like a current one that slowly degrades over the course as you start eating crap and stop exercising.

Reminds me of the early Duke Nukem games that showed your health as an increasingly beat up avatar.

Re: PhD Simulator

#188

Post by fallingknife »

whymauri wrote: post #100
armchairhacker wrote: post #10

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…

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

Nice, but judging from what I have heard about academia, I think I beat you and won in month 1 by rejecting the offer!

Re: PhD Simulator

#189

Post by sweetjuly »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #26

reading papers --> idea This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me. Ideas tend to come from working on real-world projects, which then shows the lack of understanding and need for research. The project forks to do the research and merge back to implement the findings. Thereafter, someone on the team will put it into a cohesive academic format, and use it for a PhD. Of course there is reading pap…

> This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me

You might want to take a different approach to reading papers then. No paper ever concludes by saying "yeah our method is perfect and no further work is needed" [1]. Instead, every solution has its quirks and questions which need to be explored further. Maybe their method has limitations which make it unusable for your applications, maybe they make somewhat faulty assumptions that don't always hold, maybe they wrongly ignore some technique. Seeing how other people approach a problem can often give you inspiration for how to take it another way.

[1] https://xkcd.com/2268/

Re: PhD Simulator

#190

Post by hattmall »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #92
lqet wrote: 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…

> Teaching obligations any advice for people aiming for teaching instead of all the publishing stuff?

A teaching university and not a research university. You can / will still do some research but your job is teaching students not doing research. The pay is generally better, but of course, you will have to actually teach a lot and have a lot of office hours. Maybe once every few years you can work out a research semester. The initial pay is better but less so the opportunities for advancement as you won't be publishing much. That makes it harder to differentiate on anything other than time.
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