Application looks too involved for Brown. When applying to 10 schools I wouldn't do this one because it has no overlap with my other application. I can reuse my letters of recommendation, I can't reuse this application.
Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
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Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#12I'm surprised that admission into Computer Science PhD programs is so competitive. I would think that with the strong job market for computer scientists, there would not be as many students who would want to make the commitment to a PhD program over other job and entrepreneurial opportunities.
I believe someone who is not a good software engineer or even can't code at all, can still be admitted into some CS PhD program.
i'm sure that's extremely rare though. maybe like 1 person per year may have no idea what coding is and get admitted to a program for CS.
Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#13An offer letter from Google or YCombinator (where you are the tech co-founder) which serves as evidence that you passed a challenging programming interview at Google, or that YCombinator believed you would be successful at developing your company product. Interesting. Because I have no intention of moving to a Google or YCombinator location, I never applied to either, but this makes me wonder if merely having been of…
In the UK in some areas such as finance and business there are many people who apply to be an Army officer, and go all the way through selection, but never intend to join up. They do it just so that they can put on their CV (resume) that they've passed Army officer selection.
Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#14Application looks too involved for Brown. When applying to 10 schools I wouldn't do this one because it has no overlap with my other application. I can reuse my letters of recommendation, I can't reuse this application.
I graduated quite some time ago. Getting letters of recommendation from professors would be impossible for me. I doubt I'd have one professor that knew me when I graduated let alone now years later. And yet, fulfilling these requirements would be very easy for me. I think it's very nice to have multiple routes in. Even if very few candidates avail themselves of this latter route, they might be interesting candidates worth strong consideration.
Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#15Hmmm. This is an interesting spin the Brown Professor has taken on the PhD application process. For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must. Getting on to a prestigious PhD programme is incredibly competitive, and as someone who has gone through the whole process and seen it from both sides, I can say that I've seen individuals who'd make great computer science researchers not…
For those interested in a career in development, a PhD is rarely helpful. For the PhD candidate, it can even be counterproductive, as any gains in initial salary will be more than offset by the lost salary during the 5-6 years of the PhD.
Only for a career in research is a PhD important.
Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#16Hmmm. This is an interesting spin the Brown Professor has taken on the PhD application process. For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must. Getting on to a prestigious PhD programme is incredibly competitive, and as someone who has gone through the whole process and seen it from both sides, I can say that I've seen individuals who'd make great computer science researchers not…
Do you have any thoughts on how to get started on this road? I feel like I missed the boat sometimes, though I'm using doing interesting-ish work professionally and in open source. I'm not interested in chasing the framework-of-the-week, I want to work on tools that advance how we think about software.
This may be something I do later in life, but I feel very wired for R&D + tooling, and a bit locked out of these types of jobs without a PhD.
Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#17Submit your GitHub portfolio and join the Ivy League university that also develops Racket? Awesome!
Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#18An offer letter from Google or YCombinator (where you are the tech co-founder) which serves as evidence that you passed a challenging programming interview at Google, or that YCombinator believed you would be successful at developing your company product. Interesting. Because I have no intention of moving to a Google or YCombinator location, I never applied to either, but this makes me wonder if merely having been of…
In which case you move to #2 which (to me) seems much easier to get: A Github or other online repository of your source code demonstrating contributions to open source projects or impressive projects of your own.
True - if the open source project you've contributed significantly to is, say, a well-acclaimed machine learning library, and you're applying to a machine learning Ph.D., then the sum of your accepted pull requests might be a reasonable proxy for a recommendation letter from the (presumably well-acclaimed) maintainers of said library.
Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#19Why would you be filling out a PhD application if you already had an offer letter from Google or YCombinator?
Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application
#20Hmmm. This is an interesting spin the Brown Professor has taken on the PhD application process. For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must. Getting on to a prestigious PhD programme is incredibly competitive, and as someone who has gone through the whole process and seen it from both sides, I can say that I've seen individuals who'd make great computer science researchers not…
For those interested in a career in development, a PhD is rarely helpful. For the PhD candidate, it can even be counterproductive, as any gains in initial salary will be more than offset by the lost salary during the 5-6 years of the PhD. Only for a career in research is a PhD important.
That is true to an extent. But, most people don't do PhDs to end up doing purely software development.