My random musings from three years in CS grad school at UNC:
Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes. The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or "the working world sucks, this is the lesser of two evils".
I fell into the second class.
I spent three years doing computer science grad school at UNC. I passed my dissertation proposal and then decided to leave.
I don't resent those three years and did learn a few things along the way.
Getting a PhD is ultimately about getting 5 other PhD's to sign off on your dissertation. At least that's the requirement in computer science at UNC. I wish that had been more clear to me at the beginning.
Graduate school as a means of stalling to find something you love to work on is not a horrible way to go. In the meantime you might solve a few problems. I also consider it noble that we (graduate students) as a whole are willing to do the nation's research for such little pay.
Had I thought long and hard about why I was doing the PhD to being with, I may not have started. But life always charges its own tuition.
From the article "As long as you have an answer that you believe in passionately, then that's enough." My three years in graduate school taught me that the most. Find something you love, or least have passion and do that. It may be a silly belief, but it's worth believing in.
The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or "the working world sucks, this is the lesser of two evils".
I agree with your subdivision, but I'd add another class: people who want to understand/solve/think-about some hard problem they find genuinly interesting and who don't particularly care about career as an academic, or the good of the world or anything much else, they just want to think about this topic because they enjoy it and grad school gives them a relatively stable environment where they can do it.
> Graduate school as a means of stalling to find something you love to work on is not a horrible way to go.
I agree with this (despite being someone who is finishing soon, god willing), as long as you can have the mental toughness to not buy into the "man, failing out of grad school, what a shame" mentality that many people will direct your way. It's not that people are all jerks (though some are), but some people are just completionists (never start anything you won't finish), and other people are there because academia really is the best home for them, and they genuinely feel that it would be a waste for anyone smart and good at research not to finish and go into academia.
If you can get over that, though, a few years of grad school without finishing is not a bad deal. If you're in a PhD program (rather than masters) you generally get free tuition, plus a modest stipend that should cover at least rent+groceries, so you end up basically getting to study something for free for a few years. You could make a lot more doing something else, but if your goal is "learn some stuff about [subject]", it's just about the cheapest way you'll find to be able to do that full-time.
> Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes
Agree. I almost went for it as well, though for a challenge and as a competition - publish the best paper in the best conference. Seemed like not too many people viewed it as that.
Usually, this is very hard to achieve. Not only is it hard to find the best conference in your field, getting the best paper award (nb. that there are conferences that don't have a one!) has (at times) something to do with sense of fashion and/or the valuation of your achievements by the programme committe. (I recently stumbled upon an article [unfortunately I cannot remember when and where, 20min of Googling did not help either] that detailed how Albert Einstein did not believe in one of his own equations, which was in the larger context that is difficult for scientists to properly judge their own contributions -- assuming this is correct, having the intention of writing "best paper award" papers seems very difficult...)
Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes. The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or "the working world sucks, this is the lesser of two evils".
I fell into the second class.
I spent three years doing computer science grad school at UNC. I passed my dissertation proposal and then decided to leave.
I don't resent those three years and did learn a few things along the way.
Getting a PhD is ultimately about getting 5 other PhD's to sign off on your dissertation. At least that's the requirement in computer science at UNC. I wish that had been more clear to me at the beginning.
Graduate school as a means of stalling to find something you love to work on is not a horrible way to go. In the meantime you might solve a few problems. I also consider it noble that we (graduate students) as a whole are willing to do the nation's research for such little pay.
Had I thought long and hard about why I was doing the PhD to being with, I may not have started. But life always charges its own tuition.
From the article "As long as you have an answer that you believe in passionately, then that's enough." My three years in graduate school taught me that the most. Find something you love, or least have passion and do that. It may be a silly belief, but it's worth believing in.