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A Survival Guide to a PhD

karpathy.github.io

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Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#61

Post by glangdale »

I had a very different personal experience, but Karpathy did a wonderful PhD and I did a very marginal one (at a good school, which in many ways makes it worse). From the perspective of the "anchor" rather than the valedictorian, I'd say that he's right on almost all points as to what you should look to do if you decide to be a PhD. However, I do take exception at the rather false dichotomy between industry and academia that he creates.

A good PhD leads to many of the nice things he describes: freedom and ownership and personal growth and all that stuff. An average PhD (or worse) leads to pretty much the opposite. Most of the superstars I know went on to do pretty much whatever they are interested in at top schools. The non-superstars (and the real lumps, like me) can easily wind up in a death spiral - where your mediocre publishing record and mediocre PhD afford entry only into 3rd-tier institutions, where you will work with worse and worse people, more or less guaranteeing steadily declining quality of work. A mediocre result more or less guarantees that you will be a low-status drone in academia, trying to wedge world-class work in with a bunch of other activities (teaching, being a glorified research assistant, and other 'service').

No-one sets out to do a bad PhD, but people need to understand that the average outcome isn't nearly as glowing as Karpathy outlines. Similarly, the outcome of going to industry also has a huge range. I found myself immediately - I mean on Day 1 - doing more pure Computer Science going to work for a startup than I had any reasonable hope of doing as a semi-failed academic, and have had a steadily improving experience subsequently (some of this stems from a rather delayed growing-up on my part, so it's not entirely a judgement on industry vs academia).

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#62

Post by throwawaymsft »

baby wrote: post #56
throwawaymsft wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but (importantly) degrees vary. The politics of working for an adviser chasing tenure are different from, say, running a SaaS, writing an ebook, or selling a plugin.

You mean, politic is different if you're not working for anyone? I can't even agree with that. You will still have politic in place if you have people working for you, or if you have critics reviewing your ebook, or if you're trying to get your plugin accepted in a store, etc... cqfd

Correct. And are the politics of getting your plugin accepted in the Wordpress directory more or less than getting tenure?

See the edit above. You are saying two things must be equal because they are both non-zero. It's a very strange argument.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#63

Post by shas3 »

glangdale wrote: post #61

I had a very different personal experience, but Karpathy did a wonderful PhD and I did a very marginal one (at a good school, which in many ways makes it worse). From the perspective of the "anchor" rather than the valedictorian, I'd say that he's right on almost all points as to what you should look to do if you decide to be a PhD. However, I do take exception at the rather false dichotomy between industry and acade…

I think it's more of a continuum than you suppose in your comment. It's not a binary of "great" vs "average" PhD. There's plenty in between and many types of averages. Karpathy had it good, as did Might, Guo, and other purveyors of wisdom on PhD. But that doesn't invalidate their arguments and observations.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#64

Post by ppod »

>Over time you’ll develop a vocabulary of good words and bad words to use when writing papers. Speaking about machine learning or computer vision papers specifically as concrete examples, in your papers you never “study” or “investigate” (there are boring, passive, bad words); instead you “develop” or even better you “propose”. And you don’t present a “system” or, shudder, a “pipeline”; instead, you develop a “model”. You don’t learn “features”, you learn “representations”. And god forbid, you never “combine”, “modify” or “expand”. These are incremental, gross terms that will certainly get your paper rejected :).

This seems unfair. Many otherwise good students don't get taught this coded language. I understand that heuristic or incremental developments might not be accepted at top conferences, but the work should be judged on what it does rather than the inexact word choice of a student. It feels a bit cliquey.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#65

Post by nextos »

glangdale wrote: post #61

I had a very different personal experience, but Karpathy did a wonderful PhD and I did a very marginal one (at a good school, which in many ways makes it worse). From the perspective of the "anchor" rather than the valedictorian, I'd say that he's right on almost all points as to what you should look to do if you decide to be a PhD. However, I do take exception at the rather false dichotomy between industry and acade…

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.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#66

Post by chronic102 »

morgante wrote: post #51

These reasons for getting a PhD seem extremely one-sided and, frankly, inaccurate. > Exclusivity. There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs. Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate. > you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher start…

> Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate.

False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities.

> > you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher starting salary

> This is 100% false. Many many people have found a PhD to be a handicap when it comes to getting a job, particularly in software engineering. A large number of employers have anti-PhD biases which will work against you.

I agree.

> Meanwhile in companies you can have a tangible impact and see real results/credit from it (bonuses, promotions). Not to mention that many universities have draconian IP policies.

The results come from products you did not solely produce. There are plenty of other co-workers or teams which helped contribute large components to your product.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#67

Post by chronic102 »

sevensor wrote: post #59
shazam wrote: post #11

Does anyone have advice on applying to a PhD from industry & without significant research experience (but a BS + MS degree from Stanford)?

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.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#68

Post by morgante »

chronic102 wrote: post #66
morgante wrote: post #51

These reasons for getting a PhD seem extremely one-sided and, frankly, inaccurate. > Exclusivity. There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs. Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate. > you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher start…

> Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate. False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities. > > you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher startin…

> False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing. That's precisely my point: Google, for example, gets tens of thousands of applications. Their acceptance rate is incredibly low.

> The results come from products you did not solely produce.

Sure, but I don't see how that detracts from the fact that you can see meaningful rewards for your work in corporate life.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#69

Post by [deleted] »

sndean wrote: post #46
laxatives wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school > No, at least, in mine and other's experience, you should go to the best school where you're still capable of being in the top ~1% of your graduating class. You'll feel like you're the best and that's almost all that matters (Malcolm Gladwell's talk [1]). Isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens after you want to progress to the next environ…

> What happens after you want to progress to the next environment? It does sound odd, or just wrong. But from Gladwell's example [0], and others, top students in their class, regardless of the school, perform better than expected following graduation. From my experience, that's at least partially due to the increased attention (and better training) that top students receive. The lower ranked students are more-or-less…

[deleted]

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#70

Post by adityab »

nextos wrote: post #65
glangdale wrote: post #61

I had a very different personal experience, but Karpathy did a wonderful PhD and I did a very marginal one (at a good school, which in many ways makes it worse). From the perspective of the "anchor" rather than the valedictorian, I'd say that he's right on almost all points as to what you should look to do if you decide to be a PhD. However, I do take exception at the rather false dichotomy between industry and acade…

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 straight to a 5-year PhD program and within that, the coursework-research duration split is similar to what you find in Europe.

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