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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.

#81

Post by snogglethorpe »

pmb wrote: post #53
jpallen wrote: post #24

As others are saying in this thread, I find myself disagreeing with almost every point the author makes about doing a PhD. I'm just about to hand in my thesis after 3 and half years of doing a PhD in theoretical physics in the UK. I've published 2 papers and have a third in preparation so I feel like my PhD has been 'good'. In contrast to the author, I've worked on my PhD no more than 40 hours a week, often less sinc…

The UK system is reputed to be far less abusive than the US system. The US system put me through the frigging wringer.

Take this with an enormous grain of salt, but some vague memories from conversations with UK grad students (I worked in a UK university for a few years a while back):

(1) UK undergrad programs are a lot more focused, so students tend to be a lot further along before they start a PhD program.

(2) UK PhD students are funded for a fixed time 3(?) years, and then you're supposed to be done. That doesn't always happen, of course—I knew students who went on the dole to continue once their funding ended—but the system is focused on getting them out in that period. In the U.S., on the other hand, there seems to be a lot more variability; we've all heard the stories about CS grad students that take 10 years to get their degree...

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

#82

Post by tryggvib »

dhimes wrote: post #55
tryggvib wrote: post #52

What a refreshing article when I'm about to defend my PhD this Friday :) My experience of the PhD was that it didn't break me but I come out of my studies having completely lost all respect for academia. I finished my dissertation in about two and a half years (the main contribution and content of it) and then I waited for about three years to be able to defend it. No matter how often I pressed things and asked wheth…

Hey, tryggvib. There are a lot of comments I can make in this thread (I'm 50 years old, Ph.D. in physics, despised classes but loved research), but I'm only going to make this one, to you: Good luck Friday!! Remember, YOU are the world's expert in this specialty. Remain calm, and don't let them rattle you.

Thank you dhimes!

On the bright side there is one thing my lack of respect for academia results in (I hope I'm not offending anybody and I'm mostly directing this at my university): I'm not at all stressed for the defense.

Thanks for the kind words.

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

#83

Post by tryggvib »

PhilWest wrote: post #62
tryggvib wrote: post #52

What a refreshing article when I'm about to defend my PhD this Friday :) My experience of the PhD was that it didn't break me but I come out of my studies having completely lost all respect for academia. I finished my dissertation in about two and a half years (the main contribution and content of it) and then I waited for about three years to be able to defend it. No matter how often I pressed things and asked wheth…

I'm defending my PhD on friday too! Good luck to us. The article strikes a chord with me and what I see around me. There are serious structural issues and being a PhD student is a surprisingly weak position. I am glad you are finally managing to finish.

Good luck to us (and to everybody else defending on Friday or any other given day)!

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

#84

Post by _delirium »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #50

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).…

I don't see that as much in computer science, though I could be oblivious. Conferences often have a mix of people with and without PhDs, and a lot of good work comes from people in the 2nd category (especially if your sub-area has many participants from industry), so I don't think many people are under the impression that those people are less intelligent.

I do find it jarring that in some fields they put the degree right at the top of papers, which segregates the two groups much more publicly: the author line will be "John Smith, PhD". I've never seen that on a CS paper (people put affiliations at the top, but not credentials), and I think it would be considered a bit gauche and uncollegial.

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

#85

Post by master_gopher »

kanzure wrote: post #36
polyfractal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compli…

I don't think it's either of those things - biologists and biochemists just seem to be ridiculously busy, in part because of spending to long in the lab trying to get your crap to work. Every lab I've been in has an inefficient process by which people share, modify and troubleshoot their protocols amongst themselves - but that's convenient because you can ask the guy on the bench next to you. How to get researchers to invest more time and effort, communicating with people they don't explicitly have to, is the problem.

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

#87

Post by raverbashing »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #34
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/

There's one important issue with this picture

You don't have the bigger picture. In fact sometimes you don't even know that a person in another country (or why not, maybe in another university in the same city) did what you were trying to do, or already knows something you don't.

Not to mention the Feuds, aah the feuds. Like something showing up in IEEE but in ACM it's gone and forgotten (or the other way round)

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

#88

Post by seanmcdirmid »

snogglethorpe wrote: post #81
pmb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK system is reputed to be far less abusive than the US system. The US system put me through the frigging wringer.

Take this with an enormous grain of salt, but some vague memories from conversations with UK grad students (I worked in a UK university for a few years a while back): (1) UK undergrad programs are a lot more focused, so students tend to be a lot further along before they start a PhD program. (2) UK PhD students are funded for a fixed time 3(?) years, and then you're supposed to be done. That doesn't always happen, of…

> UK undergrad programs are a lot more focused, so students tend to be a lot further along before they start a PhD program.

It depends. Definitely doing a theory-based PhD can benefit from a European (not just UK) undergrad education, but in systems or implementation, American undergrads actually have an edge (everything else being equal, which is never true).

> PhD students are funded for a fixed time 3(?) years, and then you're supposed to be done.

Truth. I didn't know anyone to get out in 5 or 6 years, let alone three (in the American system).

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

#89

Post by tripzilch »

guylhem wrote: post #54

I could not disagree more with the author - in fact at the moment I feel sorry for her. TLDR: PhD is not for whimps Yes it has the potential to break you, yes you will have very or little feedback loop and almost no money, and yes more people look forward being in academia for the freedom to pursue whatever research they fancy. But this whole interpretation is very very wrong. A PhD is a life changing experience - yo…

> I believe this is wrong, because anyone who wants to do that believes that its own interests are for some reason better than what the market values. It's good and all, do whatever you fancy, but not on my dime - not on public money. Get a real job.

If that's your chosen frame of reference, then that's not your dime. Or the public's dime. At that point it's the market's dime.

And the market doesn't particularly care if you believe it's wrong or not, or whether its goals are in fact better than this particular individual's interests.

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

#90

Post by Sulfolobus »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #88
snogglethorpe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take this with an enormous grain of salt, but some vague memories from conversations with UK grad students (I worked in a UK university for a few years a while back): (1) UK undergrad programs are a lot more focused, so students tend to be a lot further along before they start a PhD program. (2) UK PhD students are funded for a fixed time 3(?) years, and then you're supposed to be done. That doesn't always happen, of…

> UK undergrad programs are a lot more focused, so students tend to be a lot further along before they start a PhD program. It depends. Definitely doing a theory-based PhD can benefit from a European (not just UK) undergrad education, but in systems or implementation, American undergrads actually have an edge (everything else being equal, which is never true). > PhD students are funded for a fixed time 3(?) years, an…

My other observation with the same corollaries is that UK students tend to be better at getting on with things as GENERALLY they have been given more independence and have been treated more as adults during their undergrads. US university can feel a bit like high school++ at times (e.g. compulsory gen ed, I've even seen classes take attendance, constant exams with an average grade instead of a few big end of degree exams, homework, etc.).
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