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A Survival Guide to a PhD

karpathy.github.io

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Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#91

Post by [deleted] »

laxatives wrote: post #26
sndean wrote: post #9

With my own disclaimer [0], a few comments: > Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure. This is largely true, but only if you're on good terms with your advisor and they're happy with your progress. God, I miss being able to sleep in until 2pm. > Personal growth. ... you’ll become a master of managing your own psychology Yes, it's definitely a roller coaster. I know what h…

> > 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…

[deleted]

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#92

Post by Ar-Curunir »

sndean wrote: post #9

With my own disclaimer [0], a few comments: > Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure. This is largely true, but only if you're on good terms with your advisor and they're happy with your progress. God, I miss being able to sleep in until 2pm. > Personal growth. ... you’ll become a master of managing your own psychology Yes, it's definitely a roller coaster. I know what h…

How do you quantify being top 1% of your graduating class in a PhD?

I can potentially see how your advice could work for undergrad, but doing good research is difficult if your peers aren't as good. Your discussions are less interesting, your ambitions are scaled down, and so on.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#93

Post by glangdale »

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…

"5 year program" (laughter).

At CMU people were occasionally referred to as 'being on the 4-year plan', which meant you were like a superior alien intelligence (and, more importantly, focused on some good problem rather than, say, beer and girls or whatever you're into). But I think 7 years was typical, especially in "systems" or anything where you'd have to build something. Places that provision for 3 years total for a PhD are doing something fundamentally different, as people doing good quality PhDs at CMU were already casting around for topics quite early in those 6-7 years. I'm sure that in the long run it evens out for good people coming from good places in either system, as of course, the euro-PhD person can do 3 more years of post-doc under similar conditions.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#94

Post by Ar-Curunir »

morgante wrote: post #75
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 was wonderi…

> 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.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#95

Post by Ar-Curunir »

ppod wrote: post #64

>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”…

The reception to your work cannot be judged just on its technical merit. Writing good papers is part of your job in academia; that involves explaining your work in a descriptive, easy-to-follow (for experts in the field) manner.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#96

Post by hueving »

robotresearcher wrote: post #82
throwawaymsft wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Properties you find appealing..." * Freedom * Ownership * Personal freedom ... * Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references * Student adviser relationship * Pre-vs-post tenure * Impressing an adviser * (Topic) Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Reading this, I'm so thankful I didn…

> Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics That's crazy. The way to get a great reference is to do outstanding work. If by 'playing politics' you mean not pissing people off by being an asshole or being unreliable, then, yeah, take care to be a good colleague. But almost entirely: do really good work.

Bash other people's novel work while peer reviewing it anonymously, then steal it and submit for publication at another conference before the rejection notification goes to the original author.

Once someone makes it into the review pools for top conferences, they receive a constant feed of good ideas to harvest in the form of submissions.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#97

Post by nl »

laxatives wrote: post #71
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…

Karpathy has the benefit of being one of the best known bloggers/teachers in the most popular graduate-level course in possibly the most financially successful subfields ever while graduating at the peak of industry spending (so far). He's almost certainly the student described in http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/technology/the-race-is-on-... His experiences and successes are not generalizable. But he's probably my…

I'd assumed Karpathy was the the $1M student too, but apparently it was someone else (source: inter-university gossip). The same source did say the big4 were marking $300K offers on the NIPS floor last year, which I find even more extreme.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#98

Post by karpathy »

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 "survival guide" because (as I mention in the disclaimer paragraph) the experience is by no means a walk in the park.

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#99

Post by avmich »

> I can’t find the quote anymore but I heard Sam Altman of YC say that there are no shortcuts or cheats when it comes to building a startup.

Yeah, I've heard someone - Euclid may be? - said something similar about the road to science... :)

Re: A Survival Guide to a PhD

#100

Post by Chinjut »

tgarma1234 wrote: post #83
Chinjut wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm... are there any options other than hoping against all odds to successfully navigate the tenure-track rat-race, working for The Man as an anonymous cog at BigCorp, or starting a business and pouring myself into businessy businessperson busywork? I'm afraid... I'm afraid I may be a defective individual in that none of these sound terribly appealing as a way to spend the bulk of my life.

Please, don't do a PhD. The tenure track treadmill is brutal and on the wane. You would be much happier just getting a job. A normal job. With ordinary people. And I say that after a masters degree, many years in a PhD program and the having a normal job. A PhD is sort of useless at this point in history.

Good advice, but bad news: Too late. (Well, I quit ABD (with a consolation Master's) and got a BigCorp job, but wasn't too thrilled with that, and since now I've got this monkey on my back, I keep trying to finish writing my dissertation again, pointless though I know it to be... Actually, sounds like our experiences are quite similar except for the last bit!)

[No one's ever going to put in the effort to de-anonymize me off Hacker News, right? Just in case: Dear future potential employers reading this, A) Please don't, and B) Hey, I was totally kidding about not being thrilled with the BigCorp job. I love working for The Man! Go you! You The Man!]

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