Advice for Prospective PhD Students

> I am a huge supporter of two things not related to research and education: having a job while an undergraduate or showing a substantial dedication to an organization.

Sadly, this is a very ageist perspective, that I think is very common in academia. This advice is specifically geared towards undergrads who are applying to PhD programs without stating so. It's fine to tailor your advice to certain audiences (in fact the post says it's the author's perspective), but at least state who the intended audience is. I think the reason this ageist persepctive is common in academia is two-fold:

1) Many academics came straight from undergrad (or maybe had a one/two year gap), so they reflect their personal background as indicative of the path others will take to academia. 2) Older students typically have significantly higher self-esteem and understand their worth. They've potentially achieved success outside of academia where their talents were appreciated. It's much harder to steer such students to eschew their self-worth.

I speak from personal experience here. I started my PhD program at 35 after a successful industry career where I was unhappy with the type of work I was doing. I realized after a terrible interview experience at OpenAI that a PhD was the only way to pursue my interests in the burgeoning AI/ML/NLP field. Luckily, I made it into a pretty good PhD program that I'm happy with. I now conduct research melding LLMs with video games an interest I've held since the 90s playing CRPGs (back then I didn't have a specific technology in mind, just the idea of an "AI narrator").

If I had to give advice to PhD students, it's to know your worth. The fact that you made it into a PhD program is not a fluke. Imposter syndrome is rampant and many advisors take advantage of this, either explicitly or implicitly without realizing it.

I came from the video game industry, so I knew crunch times, but my first year as a PhD student was exceedingly brutal. To get my first paper out, I spent three weeks working 100 hours a week. I walked out of the lab the day before the paper deadline and nearly quite my PhD program. I just thought nothing is worth this stress.

If my wife didn't take care of everything else during that time, I couldn't have done it. During that exact same time, I was taking classes. I had a three week project that coincided with my paper deadline. I didn't start the class project until the day after it was due (you lost 10% of your grade per day late). Having industry experience helped tremendously here: I was already quite familiar with distributed systems having been the lead engineer on a (never released) MMORTS.

Don't do this to yourself. It's not worth it. At least in CS, deadlines for conferences are pretty arbitrary. Good research doesn't fit into fixed timelines.

As an aside, I don't blame my advisor for my stressful first year. He became a professor the same year I started my PhD. He didn't know any better and just assumed I was managing my time well while getting my work done. We had a good talk after the deadline and he's been absolutely great since. That's why I say, sometimes it might happen out of pure ignorance of the system. No one teaches you how to be a good advisor while you're getting a PhD. You're assumed to learn that once you become a professor.

Though there are those who DO take advantange knowingly. There's a professor in our department who is an absolute nightmare and for each candidate weekend when new prospective students are deciding on programs, all the current CS PhD students actively warn them away from working with this individual. They quite literally work people to the brink of death at times, where people have been hospitalized for exhaustion, and the professor even contacted them to do work while they were in the hospital! Though, considering the one suicide in their lab, it's debatable if "brink of death" goes far enough.

To be clear: if you're a woman who move here with your partner for a PhD, and you get pregnant during your PhD, you will be entitled to 9 months of fully paid maternity leave, plus your planned dissertation date will get postponed by 9 months, no questions asked. You can even do this twice if you're "efficient". Kindergarten is quite cheap at around $320 per month. As a man, I had one kid before starting my PhD and the second about halfway through, then I got 10 days leave just after the birth, and 3 months leave from our daughter was 9 to 12 months.

There are several bona fide unions you can join as a PhD student, you have a relatively well functioning HR system that will help quite a bit against toxic PIs. You will have annual "evaluation talks" with a professor other than your supervisor, where you can voice any concerns you might have. The PhD programme duration is 3 years, maybe some people do an additional few months, but I've never heard of someone doing more than 4.

It's still hard work though, there is supposed to be blood, sweat and tears. But it should be because sciencce is hard, not because you are living in poverty or because you have to postpone starting a family until you are in your fourties.

For some reason we get a lot of candidates applying from Europe and Asia, but almost nobody from North America, and I don't see why.