Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application • Hacker News Board

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#31

Post by jrs99 » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 4:34 PM UTC

pnathan wrote: post #26

jrs99 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you do that you might as well forget the PhD. Schools don't want to teach you, they want to accept the best applicants. Applicants who work on open source projects and can get a job anywhere. Applicants that became great learning from somewhere that is not the school that he is applying to. Whereas as a post doc you'll be someone's bitch working for 40K per year. Screw the PhD and whatever it is supposed to mean--…

Sarcasm detector might be failing, but PhD work has very little to do with homework....

to get into a phd program, i mean. a phd from a "top school" means you did your homework in college and high school.

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#32

Post by segmondy » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 4:37 PM UTC

tjr wrote: post #2

An 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…

Of course. I have no intention of moving to Cali, but one thing I do plan to do when I go to vacation West next year is to apply to Google, possibly Facebook or/and Amazon. If I get the offer letter, I can frame it and use it as negotiating tactic here in the midwest. It's almost as good as saying "I worked at Google"

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#33

Post by zura » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 4:38 PM UTC

stephencanon wrote: post #25

clarebear wrote: post #19

Why would you be filling out a PhD application if you already had an offer letter from Google or YCombinator?

Because you always wanted to do academic research? Because you someday want to teach at the college level? Because you have no idea what you want to do and you want to keep your options open a while longer? I left grad school to work in industry, but I’m not so naive as to think that everyone shares my preferences. I have friends who turned down Google offers c. 2001 to go to grad school, and they’ve never regretted…

Personally, I'd want to get a PhD to be able to work in such places as Microsoft Research. I don't want to become a teacher/professor. Other than that, I really hate some perils of academic world - bureaucracy, nepotism/favoritism/elitism, ...

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#34

Post by mcguire » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 4:45 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #32

tjr wrote: post #2

An 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…

Of course. I have no intention of moving to Cali, but one thing I do plan to do when I go to vacation West next year is to apply to Google, possibly Facebook or/and Amazon. If I get the offer letter, I can frame it and use it as negotiating tactic here in the midwest. It's almost as good as saying "I worked at Google"

Possibly better: you don't have to actually work at Google. 80% of the benefit minus 1% of the opportunity cost.

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#35

Post by DrSpock » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 4:49 PM UTC

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #16

DrSpock wrote: post #6

Hmmm. 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 typ…

mattgreenrocks it's never too late! But, I agree without a PhD R&D jobs are difficult to come by.

It sounds like you know what you want to work on. My advise would be to do some more reading in the area and find research papers in your field. Soon you'll know how to extend or improve on prior work. At this point it's a good idea to identify schools and supervisors you want to work with, especially those whose papers you've read or reach you are interested in extending. You might even propose a research collaboration with them based on the papers you read. This is a good way to open channel of communication and get your foot in the door.

There's a great deal that can be said on how to get into a PhD programme. Let me know if you want to continue this discussion offline.

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#36

Post by chrisseaton » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 4:50 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #30

chrisseaton wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't Officer Selection where candidate for officer training are selected, not after the full training? According to this link it looks like a ~5 day process: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm [NB Not sure I approve of people using up forces resources just to pad their CVs]

I think the Army likes it because it reinforces the idea that Army officers are an elite, and it exposes more future leaders to a little bit of Army life, so they're more positive about the Army when they make decisions when they're running a business or a government department.

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#37

Post by mlyang » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 5:00 PM UTC

Cool idea-- people inventive enough to go down an entrepreneurial route would probably be interesting/compelling candidates for academic innovation.

I actually think that creating many interesting projects + one's corresponding Github would be a better metric than getting a Google (or even YC) acceptance letter. You want people who are constantly tinkering and thinking of new ideas/projects/approaches and inventing just for the sake of inventing.

If you go too entrepreneurial, you might also be selecting for students who might be more amenable to dropping out from the program and doing a start-up (which then wastes the resources/time that Jeff mentioned he had to give to every PhD candidate).

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#38

Post by bkamapantula » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 5:01 PM UTC

zura wrote: post #27

I'm still waiting for a REMOTE PhD position :)

I doubt if it would happen at all.

I'm a full time Ph.D. student. You might, of course, know that professors interact with the students very often (except if the professor is super busy always). I interact with mine almost every day. I do work with couple of collaborators in different countries. That is because my advisor knows them in-person before deciding to collaborate. I work with lab colleagues frequently. Remote makes all this extremely challenging.

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#39

Post by mcguire » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 5:02 PM UTC

brucehart wrote: post #4

I'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 am not surprised that it is competitive (PhD's in general are kind of oversupplied), but the form the competition takes:

"Maybe you didn't publish as an undergraduate.... Maybe you can't even write a very compelling research statement yet."

When I was applying, no undergraduates had published research. And the "research statement" could hardly be described as "compelling"; that was one of the points of the breadth requirements for the graduate program---my eventual research topic was completely unrelated to my interests or knowledge coming out of my undergraduate program.

Re: Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

#40

Post by mcguire » Thu, Nov 14, 2013, 5:05 PM UTC

DrSpock wrote: post #7

brucehart wrote: post #4

I'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.

Entry into elite PhD programmes is as competitive as ever. Others, not so.

...and of course Brown (where the author is) is top-twenty, in fact tied at #20 [according to US News & World Report[1]] with places like Rice. It's pretty elite.

[1] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...