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A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

theguardian.com

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Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#181

Post by veritas3241 »

shoguning wrote: post #177
veritas3241 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the _exact_ reason I went to grad school. I didn't believe I was a "good enough" chemical engineer so I went to grad school. About 2-3 years I was miserable but stuck with it to get the letters after my name. Thankfully my program pushes us to get out in under 5 years. I also struggled with mental health during my PhD, but there were a lot of compounding factors. The PhD was fuel on the fire, but not the spar…

This is scarily close to me.

Not sure if you're talking about the Chemical Engineer part, but I've met a lot of people trained as ChemE's that have nothing to do with that profession. But maybe that's true of a lot of professions and I'm just biased!

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#182

Post by wsy »

bradhoffman wrote: post #136
andreyk wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did the same route as you (Master's first, then starting on my PhD right now). It's a great route! In general, the best route is to try and join an ongoing project where you can be guided/mentored by a Post doc or senior PhD. This is easiest is larger labs, though in a smaller lab the professor might interact with you more (unlikely you will meet with prof much in larger lab). For your application two things matter…

What if the research options available are not something you're too interested in? I had a professor tell me I could work with him, but he said I had to work on what he has decided. That doesn't seem very attractive to me.

Think of your PhD not as as finding solutions for a specific problem you have in mind, think of it as working in a specific area of research. Like with a startup, you usually have to pivot your research because things don't work out as imagined, and other directions turn out to be more fruitful.

With that perspective, it doesn't matter much on what specific problem you start your research. Instead, find out which research groups are doing amazing work in the area you would like to work. And apply there.

To identify these groups, read a lot of papers in your favorite research area.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#183

Post by leereeves »

abnry wrote: post #128
leereeves wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptography is a trivial example. The entire field of computing was invented by pure mathematicians like Turing and Church working in the 1930s. At the time, no one had any idea what the applications, if any, would be. It's like any science. Some work has immediate applications. Other work is pure exploration of the unknown. And it is pure exploration of the unknown that leads to the truly revolutionary discoveries.…

Something like the Fast Fourier Transform has had a much significant impact on society than a proof of the incomputability of the Busy Beaver function. Saying that Turing and Church "invented computing" is too vague of a justification. I want numbers and details. Folks like Babbage were already thinking procedurally in practical enough terms that once the technological capability (not the theoretical capabilities) ca…

You're only thinking of the immediate practical applications of the mathematics, not the importance of that work for future work.

Turing's work was so important that he, not Babbage, is generally recognized as the founder of computer science.

One example of the importance of Church's work is Lisp. Church's lambda calculus is the foundation of Lisp, which pioneered nearly all the features of modern programming languages [1]. The designer of Smalltalk, Alan Kay, called it "the greatest single programming language ever designed" [2] and talked about its influence on Smalltalk quite a bit [3].

And your example, the Fourier transform, was itself a mathematical tool long before the first computer was built, and the first published FFT algorithm also dates from the 1930s. [4]

1: http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html

2: https://www.quora.com/What-did-Alan-Kay-mean-by-Lisp-is-the-...

3: http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform#History

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#184

Post by Miltnoid »

bradhoffman wrote: post #135
doctorsher wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of masters degree is it? Course-based or thesis-based? If you are interested in continuing on to a PhD, a thesis-based masters would give you a much better insight. Even better if you try to publish while you are getting your degree. If it is a course-based masters, it will take you a lot of extra work outside of classes to get a taste of research. Do you already know your area of interest? This would be tr…

I choose to take the thesis route, but I still have 27 hours of coursework to complete as well. My goal was to have 2-3 publications over the next year, but I am not sure how feasible it is. I am in the middle of determining a route for my research right now. Leaning towards AI, but also enjoy Operating Systems, Networking, and Security.

Yeah 2-3 publications in a year, unless you've been working on them for 2 years before that, is not going to happen. If you can get one good publication, you'll get into nearly any program in that field.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#185

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

fastaguy88 wrote: post #129
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You ... are mostly removed from the politics and stress of securing funding. This is definitely not normal in the humanities. Want to continue working next year? Win this annual contest for your subfield that 800 other people are also applying for. It will cover your costs for 5 months if you win, after you spend an entire month preparing your submission for it. Didn't win this time? I guess you'll have to spend 20…

If you are thinking about getting a PhD (in any field), you should be looking at an institution that guarantee's N (typically 4 or 5) years of funding. The best (and even the better) graduate schools do this, even in the humanities. It is much harder to get a job appropriate for a Ph.D. if you do not get into one of those schools that guarantees funding.

Define "best and better", though, because I can say with certainty that, for instance, Harvard's definition of "guarantee" doesn't align well with mine. See for instance the recent fight to unionize Harvard grad TAs because even (or perhaps especially) the "best" schools very regularly treat their students poorly, guarantees and all.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#186

Post by romwell »

chess19 wrote: post #70
ginnungagap wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe the norm is to do a Master after a Bachelor, some Master programmes are heavily research oriented and can give you a taste of what's to come if you choose to keep following that path. (I definitely agree with the point you're making, just pointing out that there are different possibilities)

Its pretty standard in the US (at least in the fields I am familiar with) that if you quit a PhD program you can still leave with a Master's if you've been in the program for long enough.

Not in Texas A&M math department, for example, at least a few years ago.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#187

Post by jrumbut »

tsumnia wrote: post #162
chrisseaton wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people do PhDs in things similar to reciting the alphabet? What do you think the examination for a PhD involves? It's a thesis and oral example. You can't produce a thesis by memorising someone else's work.

My current research is on retyping coding examples because I believe we don't give enough repetition (or rote memorization) in CS and that initial frustration is a primary reason for the high attrition/failure rates. To shift the view, I don't need to be a kinesiologist or nutritionist to work out. By all means, they help, but are not necessary. The "memorization" of repeatedly going to the gym creates the motivation…

I love the idea there. I know I and many others were taught coding by being plopped in front of an empty editor window.

If I had to design a curriculum that wouldn't happen until very late in the process. Start by copying, then modifying, then adding and subtracting elements, then get to wholly original creation.

I also imagine this would cut down on cheating. No more empty page terror, or panic to grab a solution.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#188

Post by shoguning »

veritas3241 wrote: post #181
shoguning wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is scarily close to me.

Not sure if you're talking about the Chemical Engineer part, but I've met a lot of people trained as ChemE's that have nothing to do with that profession. But maybe that's true of a lot of professions and I'm just biased!

Did chem eng undergrad, a PhD (not fun), and am now a data scientist! I also worked on a website using public data and found out that only 7% of chem eng majors work in the field...

link: https://careertrend.com/major-chemical-engineering.html

Other majors (e.g. accounting, nursing) work much more in their field. There just arent many chem e jobs.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#189

Post by yalph »

The reason I completely hated my phd program:

- it was incredibly political, much, much more than companies I worked at.

- most students were just trying to tweak some equations and get the hell out of that place.

Overall it was a very unhealthy environment and wasnt worth It.

Re: A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos

#190

Post by btrettel »

close04 wrote: post #179
btrettel wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The one upside of someone else giving the direction is that you can be sure that there will be some concrete benefit from it. Wiener argues that this often is not true, because the people with the money often have a poor understanding of what's actually important. To give an example, in my own area of research, my impression is that most industrial folks hate math. They consistently deny the benefit of it. As a the…

I won't claim to understand the topic better than this author but one thing I know: important is an incredible subjective concept. So I will quote the perspective of another writer. In Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind there's a chapter dedicated to research ( the Sugar Daddy of Science ). The short version is you have limited resources. You can't invest in every research project. You are more…

I agree that the problem of selecting which research to fund is difficult and (usually but not always) subjective. While a very interesting question, it's not actually relevant to what I was arguing. I'm getting the impression that you didn't understand one of my points, so I'll restate it in more detail.

> While this is an admirable academic exercise, is it better than any other study that produces in the end a more palpable result, like money?

You seem to believe that research results in the most revenue when managers and bureaucrats are in control, but I disagree. Wiener's argument is that managers and bureaucrats often don't even accomplish their stated goals (which should be fairly objective) due to their lack of subject knowledge, e.g., in your example, how to increase revenue. Required subject knowledge makes the right path forward invisible to most people. Many people are fond of efficient market type arguments suggesting these things are unlikely, but if the number of eyes who can spot the problem is small, efficient market ideas don't work.

Jacob Rabinow, a prolific inventor, had a list of "laws", and this is one of them, which basically summarizes the problem:

> When a purchaser, who doesn't know the difference between good technology and garbage, orders "good technology," he will always get garbage.

If someone can't tell the difference between good quality research and bad quality research, they'll likely optimize on cost or some other axis and make a poor decision.

I try hard to provide value to industry, but I find that industry folks avoid the sort of theoretical engineering work I do because they don't like math. Again, some of this is a marketing failure on my part, but this is only a fraction of the problem in my view. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.

Some of this seems to stem from managers and bureaucrats not trusting researchers. Yes, many researchers would waste the money, but this to me is similar to managers and bureaucrats wasting money because they don't know what they're doing. I see no reason to be "acutely aware" of researchers' faults but not the faults of managers and bureaucrats. Ultimately we need a hybrid approach, not the largely top-down manager and bureaucrat controlled approach we have right now.

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