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PhD Simulator

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Re: PhD Simulator

#201

Post by godelski »

laewirjtlawejtl wrote: post #176
godelski wrote: post #163

I think the most realistic thing here is the luck element. You have people around you passing and making it look easy and saying to do exactly what they did and those people make it all out to be a skill game. But you follow their exact method and still fail. And keep failing. Making you think there's some secret sauce that they aren't telling you about. But in reality the difference was just luck. That in one game y…

Reminds me of the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. Initially it seems like it's a poem about working hard and taking risks, but it's actually about old people lying to themselves, trying to forget that their success was actually just luck. About half the professors I worked with were responsible adults, and half were narcissistic children who would do exactly what you described, "just do what I did", and when…

There's a saying I really like "the harder I work, the luckier I get." It being about how the time you invest makes you able to take advantage of more opportunities. BUT it also recognizes that the luck element exists. I think Veritasium also had a video along the luck+work lines. Basically if you just are unlucky you just have no opportunities and you'll fail no matter what work you put in. But if you don't put in work, you're also passing up possible lucky opportunities. Either way, it is a combination of a stochastic process plus skill (think about the design of any good {video,board} game. They require both skill and luck, just like life.

You definitely need both, and I think this is what people forget. Work is incredibly important, but you can do a lot of good and hard work and just be unlucky. That honestly is probably one of the more distinguishing differences between students/faculty at top institutions vs mid. Especially since success is a compounding event, thus an early success can catapult someone forward. We shouldn't diminish their hard work by saying it is all luck, but neither should they diminish others hard work and frustration as a lack of working hard enough when luck plays a significant role in the system. Neither is failure strictly due to luck. It is messy and we need to accept that this is the reality of the world, especially if we want to make the system more efficient and more "meritocratic" (quotes because previous comments and their relationship to Goodhart, the difficulties in evaluation and necessity to embrace noise).

Though your last point about the top tier breezing through, I can completely relate. I see a lot of low quality papers from those institutions get high marks and it is very surprising and definitely not consistent with a blind evaluation system... but I think most of us already know that.

Re: PhD Simulator

#202

Post by bumby »

dragontamer wrote: post #186
CSMastermind wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

>It probably needs to be Bachelors -> Real world experience -> Masters -> Real World Experience -> Ph.D.

This was my path and my experience largely mirrored your sisters. I came to my program with a decade+ of industry work and I think that was invaluable to understanding the context of what problems are of interest. When I eventually matriculated to a position that valued PhDs, I now had a pretty concrete handle on what problems were enough of a stretch to be useful to a thesis, but not so far away as to be unrealistic. I also had a way to fund my studies without the burden of teaching and while making better pay. The younger cohort I worked with seemed to struggle because they often lacked a grounding in understanding real and feasible problems. So they were left bouncing between one half-baked idea to the next. That's what a lot of research is, of course, but it also left many to be either dropped or leave the program willingly.

I think you're right that we do a disservice to treat the bachelors >> masters >> PhD as a template to follow. There's lots of ways to skin the proverbial cat.

Re: PhD Simulator

#203

Post by rewmie »

LASR wrote: post #198

I wanted to go all the way to a PhD. So did my classmates. We were going to change the whole world. But after an internship at a FAANG during my 2nd year undergrad, the money was too good. Got some return offers and basically slacked off the rest of my undergrad, just waiting to graduate. I was not born into wealth. I am a 1/2-generation immigrant. My parents struggled to keep me afloat during my undergrad years. Eve…

> But I cannot help wonder how life might have been different, and if I really did have a chance to change to world.

You made the right choice. Life as a PhD student is ultimately a life of poverty and uncertain future. You might get lucky and be able to explore a meaningful research topic, but more often than not you would end up in a miserable path with no future, and with the best option at securing your material needs to be in an ungrateful and very hard to reach academic role.

Re: PhD Simulator

#204

Post by 78124781 »

PakG1 wrote: post #178
chias wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This emphasizes how much you need to know before you even get into a program. If you don't know that much, you NEED those classes to just catch up to your peers as to understanding what the world even says about various things at a foundational level. The weight is so much easier to carry if you go in with a certain level of knowledge so that you can slack in classes if you need to rest.

This. Most grad school classes are poorly taught and the professors indifferent or discouraging to actually helping you learn. PhD students are assumed to be capable of learning these things on their own or already knowing them. If you are encountering things for the first time, you'll likely be behind.

In contrast, if you come in mostly ready to go and these classes are just refreshers, you can spend time in that class working on actual research and impressing the prof as well as not panicking if/when you realize you don't understand what's going on.

Re: PhD Simulator

#205

Post by Ultimatt »

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…

There is also a hidden variable about being tired too, and if you don't slack off you waste months in forced situations with asking for breaks with the supervisor or burning out.

Re: PhD Simulator

#206

Post by rewmie »

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…

> What was missing:

n) Your old college friends have secured their material needs while you barely make rent.

n) a PhD student that joined the program after you just surpassed your number of publications.

n) your thesis supervisor just bumped you off primary author to contributor in your own paper.

Re: PhD Simulator

#207

Post by mebassett »

rewmie wrote: post #203
LASR wrote: post #198

I wanted to go all the way to a PhD. So did my classmates. We were going to change the whole world. But after an internship at a FAANG during my 2nd year undergrad, the money was too good. Got some return offers and basically slacked off the rest of my undergrad, just waiting to graduate. I was not born into wealth. I am a 1/2-generation immigrant. My parents struggled to keep me afloat during my undergrad years. Eve…

> But I cannot help wonder how life might have been different, and if I really did have a chance to change to world. You made the right choice. Life as a PhD student is ultimately a life of poverty and uncertain future. You might get lucky and be able to explore a meaningful research topic, but more often than not you would end up in a miserable path with no future, and with the best option at securing your material…

or after a few years of postdocs and job security that comes in 12-24 month bouts, you might have moved into industry anyway and just starting making 60% of what you're making now.

Re: PhD Simulator

#208

Post by Balgair »

rewmie wrote: post #206
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…

> What was missing: n) Your old college friends have secured their material needs while you barely make rent. n) a PhD student that joined the program after you just surpassed your number of publications. n) your thesis supervisor just bumped you off primary author to contributor in your own paper.

> your thesis supervisor just bumped you off primary author to contributor in your own paper.

I mean, woah. Even that's a little too far for phd-land

Re: PhD Simulator

#209

Post by ryandrake »

azangru wrote: post #14
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 lost all hope and quit. Something that happened to me in real life as well.

Every time I tried the game (using OP's described steps) I "lost all hope and quit". I thought that was the joke / funny commentary: that all paths through the game involve you ending up losing. Didn't know there was a path to actually win the game until reading the HN comments. So I kept trying it over and over doing the same steps and finally won once.

I guess that's an even funnier commentary on how it's pretty much entirely luck based.

Re: PhD Simulator

#210

Post by libealistand »

ke88y wrote: post #162
krastanov wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be incredibly bad advice in half of Physics and most of Math. An adviser would simply not trust a graduate student with middling grades to be competent enough to work with.

IME it's more that the advisor doesn't trust the student to make it through the annual layoffs (quals culling), and only wants to invest in people who they know will be around long-term. At least in the poor (and honestly mostly useless) parts of Mathematics. Maybe Physics is less poor. (Fortunately I was in CS, where the research output is actually needed by society and usually not pure masturbation, so the attitude…

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