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Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

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Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#31

Post by snowwrestler »

I've had several friends get Ph.D.s, and here's what I see: it takes very strong, maybe borderline obsessive self-motivation, to feel ok throughout the process and to succeed. In that respect it is probably like doing a high-stakes startup. It's not for everyone.

But I think a lot of this post is about the pain of transition for brilliant students. They go from a position of constant praise and success, to a position of being constantly frustrated and subject to the whims of more powerful people.

In my experience this transition happens to ALL brilliant students. It is structural, in that up to the completion of a bachelor's degree, the vast majority of the typical academic experience consists of professors creating structured, completable assignments, and the student completing them and being graded. In short, exercises.

But once you leave undergrad, that structure disappears pretty quickly. Whether it's your boss, your investors, or your advisor, the "adults" above you aren't just guiding you to pre-determined success points. They're just other people with their own goals and agendas. And the problems you're tackling with them are not necessarily structured, easy, or even achievable.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#33

Post by basseq »

As the husband of a PhD (in the U.S.), I agree with many of the OP's points. It was an arduous process with little in the way of internal controls or milestones and subject to the whims of her adviser. I was struck at how academia lacks the people and project management concepts that I've taken for granted; it really is a fiefdom ("deeply dysfunctional training system").

She made the choice to move into industry and not academia a year before graduation (because the concept of a post-doc, nontenured professorship, and continued toiling at below-market rates [and other reasons] was... unappetizing), and at that point was sort of sidelined.

She made it out in 4.5 years, where many of her peers are still in the program. Which brings me to my main point of contention with the article: "it's because you're brilliant that you're contemplating doing a PhD in the first place". Not all PhDs are brilliant any more so than every brilliant person considers doing one. As the OP points out, the key to PhD success is self-motivation and a dedication to the field ("appetite for pain") rather than any particular cognitive blessing.

As in all things, whether it's a PhD or the decision to go work in finance (for a great salary but no personal life for several years) or doing a start-up, you need to weigh your personal goals and limitations with the expectations of your environment.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#34

Post by eli_gottlieb »

cschmidt wrote: post #4

Boy, all the articles about Ph.D.'s on HN are so negative. I had a great time getting mine. I got a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. I guess it must depend a lot on the subject you're studying. We mostly did classes for the first two years. We got an adviser in the second year, and gradually ramped up the research. I finished in 4 years and 3 months. Pretty much everyone in the program would finish…

It was do 3 papers, write your thesis, and get out.

I'm a CS grad student at Technion, and that's basically how my advisor has described our grad-school process.

Paper 1: your MSc thesis.

Papers 2 and 3: If related to paper 1, combine into your PhD thesis.

3 related papers on one broad topic => thesis, you're done.

http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#35

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pnathan wrote: post #23

I just finished up a Master's in Computer Science. It took 5 years; my initial advisor died and I had to find another one to step in. I went deep into debt (no funding) and finally switched over to a part-time study while I worked full time. Unfortunately, it was just that point when the real research was ramping up. I remember nights where I would be falling asleep as I crammed my code in to see it work. Then more n…

Now, I want a PhD. Because I know of no other way forward to where I am tasked with advancing our field, publishing the result, and building a paying career on that.

This is the basic problem we have to solve. Yes, doing a PhD can suck, and the job market for academics sucks, but there's basically no other way to do original research and make original research-grade scientific advancements for a living.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#36

Post by kanzure »

polyfractal wrote: post #19
cschmidt wrote: post #4

Boy, all the articles about Ph.D.'s on HN are so negative. I had a great time getting mine. I got a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. I guess it must depend a lot on the subject you're studying. We mostly did classes for the first two years. We got an adviser in the second year, and gradually ramped up the research. I finished in 4 years and 3 months. Pretty much everyone in the program would finish…

I think it is highly dependent on field. My field, biology, is basically like flipping a coin. Do you graduate in five years or nine? Will you come out with a golden road to tenure or a life destined to work sad, lonely, post-docs? Flip that coin! No matter how smart you are, the Gods of Biology are fickle. You may end up with a shitty protein, an assay that only works when the moon is aligned with Venus or cells tha…

I wish there was some way to fix the situation with protocols in biology. Maybe we could attempt to identify the reasons that they suck, and then fix those reasons. There was a stackexchange site for protocols called methodmint, but nobody used that. Biologists either hate the internet or they hate computers because all of the attempts to get informal web communication happening have failed (even by email). It complicates things even more.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#37

Post by kd0amg »

10dpd wrote: post #20
cschmidt wrote: post #4

Boy, all the articles about Ph.D.'s on HN are so negative. I had a great time getting mine. I got a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon. I guess it must depend a lot on the subject you're studying. We mostly did classes for the first two years. We got an adviser in the second year, and gradually ramped up the research. I finished in 4 years and 3 months. Pretty much everyone in the program would finish…

Note that there is a huge difference between the UK PhD and the US PhD process. In the UK you are left to your own devices for 3 years, and only find out if the external examiner even approves of your research questions in the one and only final verbal exam. It is up to you alone to ensure the research is valid and makes a contribution. US PhD candidates have a lot more guidance and handholding that includes 4 years…

4 years of structured training, followed by the presentation of a research plan that is signed off by examiners before any research is begun so there are no surprises in the final examination.

And ideally, this plan has been discussed at length with the advisor before the formal proposal happens.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#38

Post by geebee »

The most telling thing about PhD programs is the attrition rate compared to elite professional programs. Attrition reates "for academic reasons" appear to be under 2% in elite JD and MD programs.

https://www.aamc.org/download/102346/data/aibvol7no2.pdf

The spread for law schools is much higher than for med schools, but for elite schools, it is also exceptionally low, well under 2%.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/04/law-school-r...

(note - just realized these are only 1L attrition rates. It isn't going to change much here).

Ph.D programs, even at elite schools and in science or engineering, are by comparison a horror show of failure and attrition.

It looks like completion rates for engineering - best of the bunch, are around 65%. For mathematics and physical sciences, it's about 55%.

www.phdcompletion.org/resources/CGSNSF2008_Sowell.pdf

I know this is a trick, dividing by such a low number, but I suspect that the PhD completion rate for the 3rd rated Engineering school (Berkeley) compared to the 3rd ranked law schools (Columbia) is about .3/.003. About 100 times higher. This is silly, because the attrition rate at Yale is zero, which means it's actually impossible to compute how much higher the top rated Engineering (MIT) PhD programs's attrition rate actually is. Or, as we said in grade school but not grad school, "infinity higher".

There are a couple reasons for this. Speaking as a PhD dropout myself, half of a PhD in engineering isn't as much of a loss as half of med school. I don't need the PhD to be licensed, so nobody's going to put me in jail for writing code. Completing 2 years of med school and dropping out is far worse than Mastering out of engineering. I just got to earning more quickly. At the same time, I think that many elite schools are able to suppress their true attrition rates by counting MS students as having achieved their degree goal (in short, I suspect the true attrition rate is higher than the already grim numbers).

But our wise elders in government (almost always lawyers) who wring their hands about the shortage of US students in PhD programs never seem to ask... why is Berkeley's Engineering PhD attrition rate 100 times higher than an elite law school. Are the magna cum laude applied math majors with 800/800 on the GRE and specialized subject tests just dumber than lawyers?

In reality, Americans have pretty much given up on PhDs in engineering and science. Sadly, this is rational for people who have the choice to go into the professions. However, if you'd like to come to the US, and you're looking for a way to sidestep our byzantine immigration system, a grad degree in a STEM field from a good US based university can be a wise move, especially since the professional schools are far less likely to admit large numbers of international students.

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#39

Post by kriro »

Too late (I wouldn't call myself brilliant though) :P

If anything the fact that so many people don't get there motivates me.

I've never belived in actually caring about the job market and such (or career planning). If you're sufficiently motivated that usually takes care of itself.

I mean I'm mostly in it because I need to change the world a bit. Kind of the whole "you just see the world in a different way" that gets brought up by entrepreneurs all the time. Some research isn't the slow and incremental type everyone keeps talking about in their "lol PhD/academics" rants :D

[Also getting a PhD here is vastly different. I get payed, teach classes and tutor students and work on my PhD on the side. Basically all self management/motivation and we don't take any classes and the like. Just thesis+defend]

Re: Dear brilliant students: Please consider not doing a PhD.

#40

Post by _dps »

michaelochurch wrote: post #29

21.3: the type of person she's writing for. I might not call myself "brilliant", but I was a good undergraduate student and a PhD seemed like the next and most respectable step. Anything else was selling out. 21.4-22.0: usual pre-PhD stuff like GREs and those ungodly applications where they make you list textbooks going back to freshman year calculus. Then there were the rejections, the acceptances, and the prospecti…

> To complete a PhD, you really have to have to want a research career.

(disclosure: loved my Ph.D., was a professor, now doing a startup)

This is almost true, and I don't mean to quibble, but the slight inaccuracy is an important one: to complete a PhD you have to want to complete a body of research-quality work that is recognized by experts in your field as a meaningful advance over the current state of the art.

Everyone I know who did the Ph.D. wanting to have completed something (improve file systems, discover a new alloy hardening process, etc.) had a great time and reports it as among the best years of their life. But there are lots of people who just see it as the next credential to get, and for them the lack of intrinsic motivation to complete specific independent work can make the process quite depressing and disorienting.

It's an interesting environment because you have a lot of the initiative/innovation challenges faced as an entrepreneur, but that part isn't evident to everyone. It is absolutely not like a job where you will be given responsibilities and expected to fulfill them.

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