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Thesis Hatement

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Re: Thesis Hatement

#71

Post by ktf »

rmk2 wrote: post #49

This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth . Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them. But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanitie…

After receiving my BS in computer science I went on to get my MA in film studies. I considered going for the PhD, but decided I didn't really care for the taste of academia I had gotten. (To me, it basically seemed like politics, but without the money.)

When interviewing for engineering positions afterward, my interviewers would often try to put some spin on my MA, like:

"Well, I'll bet an intensive two-year study of film made you a better developer."

To which I'd reply, "No. No it didn't. It was fun though, and I learned a lot. I'd do it again in a heartbeat."

Not everything is about software, and not everything has to be. I didn't spend those years studying film as some oblique exercise in... well, in anything. And the value I gained from the experience can't be measured in dollars. (As cheesy as that sounds...)

Re: Thesis Hatement

#72

Post by tellarin »

arethuza wrote: post #67
tellarin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Academic work year and no crazy hours? Sorry, but you clearly don't work with research. Working all days of the week is incredibly common. And, unfortunately, crunch time specially near major conference deadlines is almost becoming the norm. Of course, the focus on publication is another problem related to that.

Having worked in academic research and co-founded a startup I would admit that the working hours weren't that different. However, in a startup you have a much wider set of pressures - making payroll at the end of the month, keeping customers happy, investing your own money to keep the business going, hiring/firing/managing people etc. (it's a very long list).

Having had my own co-founded company gone bankrupt, I have to agree with you.

Re: Thesis Hatement

#73

Post by wyclif »

jpdoctor wrote: post #38
wyclif wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title was too long and exceeded the HN limit.

That's one possibility. The other is that the submitter chose to retain clauses which would increase hits at the expense of wasting a lot of people's time. How many people would bother with an article telling us that academic jobs for Literature PhDs are hard to find?

While that's possible, I thought HN was being a lot more strict about submission titles lately. I know I've had a few of mine changed immediately (and I'm talking about those I edited for clarity, not linkbaiting).

Re: Thesis Hatement

#74

Post by unimpressive »

rmk2 wrote: post #49

This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth . Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them. But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanitie…

The best part is people trying to justify their or somebody elses strange majors as being somehow useful to the goal of producing software.

Is it really that hard to admit that you did something expensive because it was kind of fun?

Re: Thesis Hatement

#75

Post by idm »

dhstylez wrote: post #62
wisty wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges have many of them. They typically won't tell a student "sure, you can go for a PhD, but it's a waste of time." Schools and colleges tend to be biased towards thinking more education is always better.

There was a time in high school where I came to the realization that I learned material better doing independent study than in actual lectures/classes. Reading/studying on my own allowed me to learn in a more focused atmosphere. Lectures seemed like a waste, time spent scribing what was being 'taught' (for review later) versus actually absorbing material. Also, I felt that a lot of my time was wasted on topics that I…

Once you get to PhD level, you need to be an independent student. The best students are. In order to get there, it's useful to be independent all along the way, typically by riffing on the constraints of the various assignments you complete.

If you're not into the structured part at all, then it will chafe from friction. However, the structure is definitely there for a reason because, if you're really pushing the limits, you'll be thankful for the times when you stumble and there is a structure to fall back on.

So you're left with two choices that maximize independent learning: 1) drop out or 2) make it past undergrad and become a master student.

I'm in a PhD program right now, but some of the best stuff I'm learning is happening through Coursera. ...and that's great, but the fact that I have a community of other full-time students and researchers to work with makes all the difference. If I were just sitting in a room learning for learning's sake, it would be totally different. I feel really lucky that I can put my ideas into practice, and I totally love the academic environment for facilitating that. To me, it's worth it.

Re: Thesis Hatement

#76

Post by droithomme »

michael_miller wrote: post #57
rmk2 wrote: post #49

This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth . Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them. But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanitie…

Very well said. At the risk of taking away from your original point, going into academia (especially a non-engineering field) can give you a very different perspective and release you from the tech mindset. As an example, the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has a PhD in German social philosophy. How the hell did he end up leading a billion-dollar tech company? Basically he was really smart, and his PhD gave him the frame…

"the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has a PhD in German social philosophy"

To be fair we should note that Palantir is a CIA operation whose job is to help the US military destroy indigenous peoples world wide in prep for western corporations to come in and exploit local resources.

Pretty much everybody at Palantir (such as Mr. Miller) reads HN regularly though since they post here all the time to promote and justify their company's fine work in suppressing people. The German social philosophy angle fits right in there.

Love the work you guys do attacking journalists and threatening their families. Real classy.

http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/palantir/

Re: Thesis Hatement

#77

Post by bgalbraith »

rmk2 wrote: post #49

This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth . Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them. But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanitie…

I agree with your sentiment about the lamentable, though typical HN response. However, it is totally in accordance with the mean audience of the site. Almost 50% of HN readers are under the age of 25 [1]. HN is a product of Y Combinator, an accelerator that predominantly focuses on software-based startups frequently run by kids in their 20s. The average perspective is highly skewed and very different from someone several years into a non-CS technical PhD let alone a humanities one.

[1] http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/08/21/report-social-network-de...

Re: Thesis Hatement

#78

Post by cafard »

rmk2 wrote: post #49

This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth . Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them. But credit where credit is due: Academia, especially in the humanitie…

"This is the perfect article to be submitted to HN. Because it brings out the worst in HN. The saturated, self-congratulatory, better-than-thou crowd that is smug about their income, prospects and worth. Many here already believe that everything that isn't programming or engineering is virtually worthless and should be killed. This reinforces them."

Wow. Not judging, are we?

I was a liberal arts major the first time through the mill. I agree that the charlatanism tends to fail quicker in the scientific and technical fields--you need a Stalin behind you to get as far as Lysenko did, but fad upon fad in the humanities has a long run in the academy. That said, I don't know of anything more worth doing well than the humanities.

A problem that I see is that US academia had a long run as a successful pyramid scheme. All those undergraduates showing up during the GI Bill years and then the baby boom kept the colleges expanding. Somewhere after 1980 the rate of expansion slowed down, and the graduate students were scrambling for positions. But everyone's expectations had been set by the boom. The days of genteel academic poverty in the 1940s and before were forgotten. But if you look back at books about that time--Jacques Barzun's essays in Teacher in America, Ulam's memoirs, parts of Wallace Stegner's novel Crossing to Safety--you'll see that it wasn't an especially secure life, and not always a contented one.

I work as a programmer. I am not obsessed with money--a very easy thing to say if you've been comfortably solvent most of your life. But I do need to make a living. Academia was never really an option. I've enjoyed schools as a student, but found them to induce a bit of claustrophobia even when I knew that I was just passing through.

Re: Thesis Hatement

#79

Post by 16s »

rollo_tommasi wrote: post #36
knieveltech wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad to hear job prospects for EE's have improved. I remember a time about 12 years ago when a graduate degree in EE and a buck would get you a newspaper and a shitty cup of coffee. Nothing like getting introduced to the new-hire at our shitty 2nd shift call center only to find out they've got a doctorate and 10 years of job experience and ended up having to take a gig in tech support just to feed their family.

This may only be the case for CMU EE PhD's. In today's winner-take-all economy, graduates of top programs have all the options; anyone who isn't a superstar generally has to eat shit.

Grads from big state universities with a technical focus do pretty well too.

Re: Thesis Hatement

#80

Post by crusso »

earlyresort wrote: post #60
crusso wrote: post #23

Don't most of us think, "Duh?" to an article proclaiming that getting/being a PhD in Literature is hard and mostly pointless? Upper level education costs a lot of money and involves years of time, don't these people think about what they want to do with their lives? Don't they do at least cursory research into what that degree will mean to their careers? Every high school has some sort of career counselor. Colleges h…

About a decade ago, I left a humanities Ph.D. program at Stanford after finishing the coursework, but before starting the dissertation. In my experience, my classmates thought very hard about what they wanted to do with their lives, and were very aware of the career risk involved - if not when they entered the Ph.D. program, certainly by a couple years in. (Hanging out in the graduate lounge with the eighth-year Ph.D…

Note how we lionize entrepreneurs who intensely pursue a low-probability dream, whether they succeed or fail, while grad students pursuing their own low-probability dream get nothing but scorn.

I disagree with your characterization that grad students are getting scorn. At least in my post, I don't intend to scorn. Maybe a "marked lack of sympathy for a self-made mess" would be what I'm trying to convey. I also disagree that there is a significant commonality between entrepreneurs and grad students because of their probability of success.

I'm just wondering why PhD students are surprised that higher degrees in the humanities aren't the easy gravy train they imagined. It seemed pretty obvious to me 20 years ago. Seems easily researchable 20 years ago. As time has gone by, it has just seemed more and more obvious.

What needs to be changed isn't necessarily grad school, but academic culture - particularly its attitudes towards and adaption to failure

I disagree again. Making it nicer to fail won't help those people. Opening their eyes to the real risk vs reward scenario earlier on would.

Conflating the entrepreneurial and academic communities as far as the understanding of failure doesn't help. Entrepreneurs who fail learn important lessons about what doesn't work and are encouraged to dust themselves off and apply what they've learned. They're still entrepreneurs when they try again.

Academics who fail while working on obscure/useless PhDs should most properly learn to stop being academics.

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