PhD Simulator • Hacker News Board

Re: PhD Simulator

#261

Post by krastanov » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

davidgay wrote: post #185

krastanov wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://…

Yes, I mentioned this type of examples in the second half of my post. Thankfully these are becoming more common.

Re: PhD Simulator

#262

Post by krastanov » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 1:42 PM UTC

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…

Most universities do not have "quals culling" and most universities that have "quals" (not that common anymore) do not use them for culling. There are a few notorious exceptions though.

Re: PhD Simulator

#263

Post by DrNosferatu » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 6:41 PM UTC

Aha - feels like that ZX Spectrum game "Dictator", by Don Priestley.

(less like Jones in the Fast Lane)

Re: PhD Simulator

#264

Post by tnecniv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 7:50 PM UTC

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…

That depends on your department and your field. Even though, on paper, I had a year to pick an advisor, I worked with mine from day 1 (or day -n since he first sent me research papers and discussed ways to get started on my project before my first semester even started). My department was fairly small, though, so you getting admitted meant at least professor specifically was interested in you joining. Professors at larger schools will put on their website not to even contact them unless you have been admitted, and their departments are large enough that only a portion of faculty members are involved in admission decisions. In that case, your advisor of choice may not know about you at all before you enroll and thus you need to fight for a spot in their group among your cohort.

Re: PhD Simulator

#265

Post by tnecniv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #219

78124781 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, the focus here should be on: 1) Not bombing any classes (i.e. A/A- in all, maybe a B+ in one; a B or below is failing) 2) Doing very good work and trying to write an original paper for professors that you want to work with while doing just enough to get by in other classes [this is in part how you figure out who you want to work with] 3) Being good enough with the literature to pass the comprehensive exams…

It really makes you wonder if the university should just have a mechanism to "fire" a grad student rather than pretending that these events aren't simply a mechanism to "fire" someone because they didn't pass X hurdle. If the advisors can vouch for, or strike a student regardless of their qual performance - then why not simply have an end of year performance review?

For many schools that’s basically their qualifying exam. Normally multiple professors are involved so that your advisor can’t fire you unjustly, but if you don’t demonstrate you are up to standards on the exam and your advisor doesn’t go to bat for you in their deliberations, you will fail. Normally you have a chance to retake the exam, but two strikes and you’re out.

In my program we had annual committee reviews as well as a review submitted to the program chair and graduate school of the student by their advisor (with the student providing both a self-review and review of their advisor). Ultimately, unless you’re in a sub-field with many faculty, it is hard to get an accurate evaluation from three professors. My other committee members could understand the big picture of my work but they weren’t experts on the specifics, and they were the best equipped faculty in the department to be on my committee besides my advisor. The goal is to make sure that there is a paper trail and multiple professors aware of your progress (or lack thereof), so your advisor can’t just give you the boot for something tertiary like not watching his dog during a holiday weekend.

Professors are aware of their problematic peers in the department. Even if they can’t fire them outright (tenure has pros and cons), they can steer students away from them to more supportive professors (or give you a hint that maybe you should consider a different school during your visit day). Our program chair was very good at helping relocating students who initially started in the lab of one or two bad actors.

Re: PhD Simulator

#266

Post by tnecniv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

ke88y wrote: post #161

hgsgm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean they passed quals but couldn't get an advisor? Or failed quals?

Are those different things? At departments where quals have high failure rates, it's really more of an annual layoff than anything else. In many programs, the department aims to admit far more people than will pass the quals. They need the Calculus and Pre-calculus TAs but do not have the advising capacity. Even if everyone gets a 95% on the quals, the majority will "fail" by necessity because the department simply d…

Depends on the school. My program requires you have an advisor before our version of quals. Our exam was also a research presentation followed by an oral exam where you had the pleasure of doing often a painful amount of algebra on a blackboard. It was also the culture that, while your advisor could ask you questions, they rarely would unless they were helpful (maybe a softball confidence booster or simple version of another question to get you started down the right track) or leading questions for you to talk about something not in your talk. People were largely concerned about being failed by the other examiners, not their advisor at that stage.

However, we were a small department and your acceptance was predicated on at least one faculty member wanting you to join their lab. Some people moved around within their first year, but the majority stayed with the first group they joined.

Re: PhD Simulator

#267

Post by tnecniv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:23 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #238

libealistand wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Math is pointless from start to finish And this attitude, my friends, is the reason why so much software out there is so bad. We need more of a math mindset when developing software. What can we be sure about, what are the invariants, what can we prove? There is so much crap out there that somebody lacking understanding just tried to wing, and I'm constantly ashamed of it. Computer science is applied math.

He said maths not CS. A lot of research mathematics has no application.

While there certainly exists math for the sake of math, there is a trickle down effect that is quite real (there’s also a trickle up effect that is real but that’s unrelated). Someone does some math for the sake of math. Later on, someone who is slightly more applied sees a link between that math and a more applied problem they’re working on. If the idea is truly useful, it propagates down all the way to application-focused practitioners. Researchers exist on a spectrum, generally, between pure theory and pure application.

Math has no application until you find an application for it. Differential equations are just equations until you pair them with physics. Formal logic is just an abstract discussion of human reasoning until you build a circuit, etc.

Re: PhD Simulator

#268

Post by tnecniv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:27 PM UTC

cycomanic wrote: post #180

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…

I would also add that the hope trajectory is quite right in the simulation. You really should start quite high and it starts dropping until your first conference, but then towards the middle of the PhD it gets very low. It only really goes up again when the end is in sight. In the game it pretty much continously went up.

Yeah that’s how it went for me. My confidence was very high until I finished my qualifying exam and just had to sit there trying to solve a novel problem for over a year. Eventually I learned enough through trial and error that I could work productively in that space, but doing well in classes often does not translate to immediate research success and there were dark days and many therapy appointments in the middle.

Re: PhD Simulator

#269

Post by tnecniv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

rewmie wrote: post #256

Balgair wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

This is somewhat common though.

I think the grandparent was just joking that “this is a game let’s not get that dark, bro.”

Re: PhD Simulator

#270

Post by tnecniv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:41 PM UTC

phist_mcgee wrote: post #239

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.

No obviously about it. I've seen people attempt suicide and had to drop out of their programs. Doctoral programs are a vicious and cruel system to exploit high-achieving young adults.

It’s not even necessarily the program, but the nature of research. I liked my advisor a lot and he was helpful but at some point you need to figure out how to fly out of the nest and they can’t do it for you. During my dark period I ended up in an outpatient therapy program because my anxiety was so bad some days I wasn’t leaving my bed. My failure to figure out my problem at the time (even with a good advisor) had eradicated my self-esteem. I came in feeling a vocational calling to do research and I was just not getting anywhere with it.

The two comparisons I always made were a priest, who felt called by god to be a man of the cloth his whole life, losing his faith and the part in Moneyball where Brad Pitts character reflects on skipping college to sign a contract has a hot baseball prospect out of high school, yet being unable to succeed in the bigs.

Eventually, in conjunction with therapy and medication, I reached a critical mass of knowledge where I became, what I’d like to think at least, a good researcher. The process was just painful and I’m not sure how anyone could have made it easier.