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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.

#41

Post by denzil_correa »

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…

> I'm not particularly special; just tenacious.

It's a myth that you require to be "smart" to do a Ph.D. You just require few basic skills, a good supervisor and persistence. You are good to go! Here's a quote which is another version of what you said and you will realize it's exactly the same. If this person could do it(with wide spread fame) why not you?

    It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with 
    problems longer. - Albert Einstein

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

#42

Post by IheartApplesDix »

As an individual with an IT Startup, I have to agree with this article. I certainly don't have the money to pay for PhD-level talent, but I'm in dire need of skilled individuals to implement the technical side of my business plans and maintain them. I think it's critical that we stem the tide of over-educated people entering the workforce in America and the best way to do it is FUD-y articles like this that exaggerate every negative aspect of the academic environment to the extreme. Just because you have the opportunity and resources necessary to get a PhD, doesn't mean you should take advantage of that and improve your possibility in life dramatically. Chances are you'll end up moving to a European country where all the successful startups seem to be based anymore.

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

#43

Post by mcguire »

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…

Thanks for pointing this out.

Just a few paragraphs into the article, I was thinking the author had done a spectacularly bad job of picking an adviser (or supervisor). In my experience, "meaningful intermediate goals" and feedback are the reason for having an adviser.

Not to say that all advisers are very good at providing goals and feedback, though.

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

#45

Post by undershirt »

denzil_correa wrote: post #41
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…

> I'm not particularly special; just tenacious. It's a myth that you require to be "smart" to do a Ph.D. You just require few basic skills, a good supervisor and persistence. You are good to go! Here's a quote which is another version of what you said and you will realize it's exactly the same. If this person could do it(with wide spread fame) why not you? It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with proble…

I'm not smart, I'm just really hungry.

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

#46

Post by hardhead »

acuozzo wrote: post #44

Here's a related but off-topic question: How does one earn a PhD in the US while working a full-time job to support a family, including a wife, children, and a home?

Often, you don't. When I applied to graduate school I intended to keep my full time "real pay" job. My PhD program only accepted students who would take a graduate student stipend and commit full time to the "program." After going through it, I understand why they want that commitment and I would not recommend anyone try to get a PhD in the spare time.

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

#47

Post by geophile »

pnathan wrote: post #25
geophile wrote: post #17

My experience was quite different from that of OP, and I suspect most people who walk that path. I'm 56 in a few days, and got my PhD in computer science in 1983. I was lucky enough to go to a high school that had a real computer, a PDP-8M, and I was hooked five minutes after I sat down at the DecWriter. At college, I was theoretically pre-med. A month into my freshman year (1974), I went to a party at the house of a…

> My PhD adviser was a wonderful man, low-key, with some fun things he was investigating, but he wasn't building an empire, built on the backs of enslaved grad students. We were just looking at interesting problems together. That sounds like so much fun. Hey, what was your PhD on? Can you talk about the product you shipped?

My research was on spatial query processing -- z-order-based techniques. The idea is to map spatial objects to one dimension by noting how a space-filling curve (z-order) passes in and out of the object. Overlapping objects can then be found by simple operations on 1-d data structures supporting random and sequential access, (e.g. sorted array, btree). I believe that the same transformation is used in geohashes.

The product is Akiban Server, a database system. I implemented nearest neighbor and point containment queries, and integrated it with our query optimizer. (You can download it from akiban.com and try it out.)

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

#48

Post by cottonseed »

The author makes some good points, but what they don't realize is:

For an intellectually and professionally ambitious person, the the options carry many of the same challenges, although the details might vary.

I'm in a PhD program right now, but I did startups in my 20s. I worked crazy hours. I broke myself physically and mentally. Many relationships got destroyed along the way. The money was bad (ramen) and uncertain -- when do you give up when the salary stops but the idea still seems good? The ideas were ambitious and open-ended. The goals were vague. We made mistakes, wasted weeks and months, pivoted, failed. We were doing research.

The PhD has had its challenges (learning the literature has been hard for me), but when I started research I thought, "Oh, right, I recognize this. This I know how to do." The PhD isn't the problem.

What's the alternative?

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

#49

Post by acuozzo »

hardhead wrote: post #46
acuozzo wrote: post #44

Here's a related but off-topic question: How does one earn a PhD in the US while working a full-time job to support a family, including a wife, children, and a home?

Often, you don't. When I applied to graduate school I intended to keep my full time "real pay" job. My PhD program only accepted students who would take a graduate student stipend and commit full time to the "program." After going through it, I understand why they want that commitment and I would not recommend anyone try to get a PhD in the spare time.

That's a shame.

So, basically, choosing to start a family first keeps you out of academia forever by design.

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

#50

Post by ChuckMcM »

One of the interesting thing I find about PhDs (as in people who have one) is that a non-trivial number of them seem to equate not having a PhD with not being able to get one. I've always wondered if that was a cognitive dissonance issue (unable to relate to having a capability and not using it) or a self evaluation issue (unable to accept that having a PhD doesn't increase the specialness of your snowflake status). Generally only a problem when it got in the way of productive discussions.

I realize this is true for any class of certificate, whether it be a College Degree or a Certified Microsoft Programmer but my experience is that its a bigger issue with PhDs.

I would agree that passing on getting a PhD can be argued to be a good investment in your time (unless you really really want to teach). But if you are passionate about a subject enough to pursue it through the PhD level then by all means go for it.

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