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A Survival Guide to a PhD

karpathy.github.io

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Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#111

Post by roel_v »

adityab wrote: post #70
nextos wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't what you are saying a bit extreme? I mean, PhDs in Europe are very short and thus students don't have the opportunity to do that much. So in a way they are quite mediocre. Yet some recover afterwards. But I agree it's hard to revert the trend if you're in a down-spiral.

It's not as straightforward a distinction as you imply, and certainly not grounds for attributing a lower value. In Europe (Germany in particular), you have to do a 2-year Masters degree which tends to be ~1.3 years of coursework and ~0.7 years of research culminating in a thesis. Judged by the quality of your thesis, you then try to get accepted into a group for a PhD which takes 3 years on average. In the US you go…

Most phds I was involved with (Europe) were 4 years with the understanding there'd be a 2 year post doc if there was money (which usuallybcan be found if they want to keep you; even if it means 75% teaching), if you're not a complete cock up and if you want it.

Imho people make a bigger deal of EU/US phd differences than there actually is. The structure is different, but the end result not so much.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#112

Post by crististm »

"It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack." - That was the most non-obvious and profound thing I noticed when I saw and read Hamming about this.

It practically is a litmus test on answering what you should do, not necessarily in research, but in life.

For those interested, Hamming course on "You and your research" is on Youtube and has a _ton_ of _practical_ advice to future engineers.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#113

Post by stared »

karpathy wrote: post #98
stared wrote: post #32

Well, I went from academia (after finishing my PhD) to industry, to get more Freedom, Ownership, Personal growth, Status and Expertise. Here is a blog post on my transition from theoretical physics to data science (and how it made my life much better): http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html I understand that Andriej Karpathy (my favourite author/lecturer in Deep Learning, by a large margin) had a wonderfu…

It seems that a larger-than-I-expected fraction of the response to my post concentrates on a very small part of it, especially the part where I enumerate some considerations for thinking about whether a PhD might be a good fit for you. By far the largest fraction of the post is concerned with tips/tricks for effectively navigating the PhD experience once you commit to going through it. I jokingly refer to it as a "su…

Yes, it is a small part of text, but one that may persuade someone into doing PhD, or give a false impression (e.g. the typical one, in which I used to believe: "follow your dreams in academia or get money at a dull job").

(BTW: I guess you know http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm. Also from an uber-successful PhD student, but the full story, rather than a set of advice.)

It may be something about the field (growth, competition with industry). I think it was not a coincidence that out of many friends of mine who did their PhDs, only Wojciech Zaremba (now in OpenAI) had some non-trivial impact on the world.

I don't want to imply that even if everything works (topic, advisor, funding, the sense of meaning, the sense of progress, ...) it is any easy path. And I am really sure that even with your skills, work ethics (and luck) it was a challenge. Still, even if one field is rosy (DL or maybe CS in general), a typical PhD experience is hardly sth I would recommend blindly (vide links there: https://pinboard.in/search/u:pmigdal?query=academia+depressi...).

(On an unrelated note: thank you for "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks", ConvNetJS and CS231N - they brought me into the deep learning world. :))

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#114

Post by thr0waway1239 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #94
morgante wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was wondering if you could comment on this? Personal experience? I do not have a PhD. My experience is based on personal experience with hiring people, speaking to friends and other hiring managers, and anecdotes from HN. In general, the reasons are (for better or worse): 1. PhDs aren't very good programmers or don't follow software engineering best practices. 2. PhDs want to do "research" and will get bored with…

If you hire PhDs for software engineering jobs, then obviously there's a mismatch of skillsets.

I agree. If you are not having even a single problem in your company which makes you wish you had an expert (not that all PhDs are experts) in a specific domain (all the more if that domain is specialized in a way that you do not normally encounter in a typical software engineer job), it will be an unhappy marriage for both employer and employee.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#115

Post by user5994461 »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #89
throwawaymsft wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sucks, but politics in the workplace can be dialed from mega-corp to startup to consultancy to freelancer to anonymous author of a SaaS. How much politics did patio11 deal with when running Bingo Card Creator?

Pretty sure that the same applies for academia. It depends on your department culture and lab environment.

I found the academia to be way more vicious and politics than a company.

In academia, teachers/referees/directors were commonly there for 10-20 years, some will probably never have to live their positions and they have full unlimited authority for many things.

The worse that could happen in academia as a student is to have politics goes against your back. You will be blocked from graduating, you will loose X years of study unlikely to start over or graduate at another place, and be stuck with your debt and no diploma.

In a company, the worst that could happen is simply to be fired. You look for another job and keep your money, you keep your diploma, keep your experiences.

In fact, if you have a problem with your boss at work, you can always change job. If you have a problem with your PhD (or master's) teacher in academia, you can't leave without failing your studies and you're fucked.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#118

Post by lifebeyondfife »

As a PhD survivor, I liken it to a pyramid scheme these days. There aren't enough tenure track positions to have viable careers for all, so do not go into a doctorate program without considering your non-academia route to happiness and fulfillment.

My experience of getting the PhD was pretty positive (finished after three and half years, good university, good subject, great supervisor) but I still see so much truth in these essays: http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/

Or to be more succinct, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#119

Post by sevensor »

chronic102 wrote: post #67
sevensor wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I walked this path. Think about where you want to be when you're done. Are you married? Do you have kids? Do you want to do those things? If you want to be an academic, you have at least a decade of grueling work ahead. That's 4 years to do the Ph.D., and another 6 to get tenure, which is like doing three more dissertations worth of research while trying to manage a small group of young, inexperienced engineers. And…

Less than half of CS PhDs have aspirations to become a professor. Most are dead set on industry -- usually machine learning or cutting-edge technology projects at companies.

Fair point, that's not my field. Just be warned if you are interested in an academic career: you won't fix, or even make a dent in, the competence gap in industry by becoming a professor.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#120

Post by BenoitP »

stared wrote: post #32

Well, I went from academia (after finishing my PhD) to industry, to get more Freedom, Ownership, Personal growth, Status and Expertise. Here is a blog post on my transition from theoretical physics to data science (and how it made my life much better): http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html I understand that Andriej Karpathy (my favourite author/lecturer in Deep Learning, by a large margin) had a wonderfu…

In your blog post, you write:

> I do data science freelancing. That is, I take contracts related to machine learning (predicting things, e.g. user growth of a company), data visualization (custom charts in D3.js), preparing and conducting trainings in data analysis [...]

Would you mind sharing a bit on your approach to contracting in this space?

Here are a few questions: Do you do blind calls? Do you use a freelancing site? Do you work remotely? What is the typical contract, how much do you bill? Does one have to do public talks to get recognised? How much do clients value your having a PhD? How do you animate the networking? Do clients find you, or do you find them? Why are they buying, FOMO on a marketing dataset, or just plain curiosity on the subject? If you had to specialise in one niche market, what would be, what would be your approach? Basically: what would be the steps you would take should you start only with the data science technical knowledge?

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