Is anyone else doing their PhD (or did their PhD) just because they thought it was a lot of fun and a great way to learn a lot in a short time period? Not that it's the only way to do any of those things, but I've found the lifestyle of a graduate student in CS to be extremely appealing.
My mentor once suggested that a PhD is only worthwhile if you plan on doing research after you graduate. But as he got to know me better, he noticed that I was actually enjoying the act of obtaining a PhD. Isn't that enough?
Well, yes, it can be. During my PhD studies I met a couple people who could be considered "lifers" who were clearly very happy doing graduate-level research work. Maybe you are one of them. Their optimal career path would be a cushy postdoc job so they continue to keep doing what they are doing but without paying tuition fees.
I'm sure you know, but for others reading, there are reasons why most people don't do this.
1. There is a strong psychological toll on doing original research. It's liberating and exciting, but also intensely frustrating and isolating. Writing papers, and their inevitable rejection, is a very disheartening venture that can't be accurately described without doing it.
2. If you're in the sciences, which I assume most people reading here are, you stand to make significantly more in industry research than post-doc research.
3. Research takes over your mind, you can't turn it off. When I was doing my PhD, I was essentially "on" all the time, it can never be a 9 to 5 job. Despite your best efforts, research will always have a toll on your family.
So if these things aren't a problem for you, then it certainly is enough. Research is a uniquely rewarding career path. But your mentor uses that line as a way of helping/warning others. You aren't the stereotypical PhD student, and PhD students are already skewed all the way down the spectrum of "normal". The majority of the population, and most PhD researchers, struggle with these problems. If you're not committed to it for the long-haul, which is what your mentor is alluding to, it's not worth doing it.
EDIT: Now I've done my PhD, people often ask me "Do you think I should do one?" and the unsatisfyingly true answer is "I don't know, I'm not you" (and, perhaps even worse, is that you aren't you when you finish the PhD from when you started, you change and grow a lot, which affects your viewpoint dramatically). That's another reason why your mentor has that saying, it's more easily digestible by those who are unsure.
I think this is a really insightful reply, and I tend to agree with you. But it still doesn't help me be any less taken aback when people assert that PhD's should only be obtained when you want to do original research for your career. If you want to warn people, that's fine, but just do it instead of phrasing it as if you know the One True Reason for doing a PhD. I grant that some people might just be trying to be pithy, but I've seen too many people take it too seriously to just give the benefit of the doubt to everyone.
> Now I've done my PhD, people often ask me "Do you think I should do one?" and the unsatisfyingly true answer is "I don't know, I'm not you"
Of course I can't claim that my personal experience is representative of all people. But you're the first person I hear say that did not feel any psychological effects of doing a PhD.
Every single person I know that did a PhD (including myself) has mentioned feeling frustrated/isolated/depressed/etc at different stages in their PhDs. It is interesting to see that some people are actually not affected that much.
I guess I'll just chime in and say that, going into my fourth year, I've never felt frustrated/isolated/depressed more than I thought was normal. (I mean, does getting frustrated with GHC count? :P)
I'd actually say it's the opposite: the process of getting my PhD has been one of the more wonderful experiences of my life thus far. Although, I tend to believe that at least part of this is due in large part to one particularly awesome professor that I've worked closely with (and isn't my advisor).
MS student here (maybe PhD in the future). This is exactly why I go to school. I enjoy the learning process. It's not about acquiring skills to make money, it's about learning interesting things in an interesting and creative environment where I'm free to explore to a certain extent. I think a reasonable way to describe it is that Google has 20% time, in school I have roughly 80% time to explore my interests.
Sure, I'm not making much money (people always bring this up). But who cares? HN is full of posts about how to live minimally, it's kind of a classic hacker challenge, right? I may need money someday, but right now I don't, so I might as well take advantage of the situation.
In Germany you get around 2000-2500 netto per month for doing a PhD. Its like an entry level engineering salary, but instead of working for someone else, you are working for your self (on your own PhD, which is a lot of fun). Furthermore, you are still a student, so you get all the student benefits available (really cheap transportation, cheaper food, cheaper sports, travels...).
That applies to some of the hard sciences (more precisely: engineering, as well as some branches of physics and chemistry), but not in general. PhD students in biology earn around 1400 after taxes; a philosopher or what have you is lucky to make any money at all.
This depends heavily on the country. In Denmark a PhD student in any discipline will earn a salary of about €2000/month after taxes. However the positions are somewhat more competitive as a result: professors have fewer PhD students at a time than American professors do, usually only one or two, sometimes three. The downside of that is that it's harder to get into grad school. But the upside is that the situation of lower ratios of PhD students to existing professors makes getting academic jobs after graduation easier, because the number of new PhDs graduating is not hugely out of proportion to the number of academic positions opening up.
A short time ago I started with my PhD in mathematics (in Germany, too). IMHO it's rather difficult to get a "Doktorandenstelle" (salary for doing PhD). The reason is that many universities are (in my opinion) underfunded. If you get one - lucky you.
The only other possibility for getting money for doing your PhD is trying to get a scholarship. If you aren't near to either a big religion or a political party (I'm not to any of both), there's virtually only "Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes" (German National Academic Foundation) which has really strict (and many people say: really strange) conditions of admission.
You do not get paid a lot in a PhD program. Where I am the pay is barely enough for one person to live on. There is also the time commitment -- a lot of programs demand 60 or more hours per week from their students. The combination basically means that starting a family is impossible while you are a PhD student, unless you have a spouse who has a comfortable income / family money.
If you do not mind a small adventure, consider moving to another country or continent. PhD positions in some countries (e.g. The Netherlands) are paid quite ok, with few distractions (usually fully focused on research), and a 40-hour work week.
Of course, there is good competition, so it might be harder to get such a position.
In Australia, with a scholarship and a few hours a week TAing during term time, I made enough to buy a half a million dollar apartment with my wife who was on a new-graduate nursing salary. She then got pregnant just as I finished up (good motivation to write fast, that was!)
YMMV but if you're thinking you're being used for cheap slave labour, you're in the wrong university.
I was a PhD student (I stopped to move to SF and work on startups- although now after 2 years I'm thinking of going back), and fwiw I enjoyed TA'ing. Grading papers was the worst part (but with a glass of beer and some motivating music it's not that bad), but I found everything else to be fairly rewarding.
You're right. I would just guess that most people are there there to learn and do research. And TA'ing takes away from that. But plenty of people do from PhD to teaching positions - in which case a TA'ship is perfect and gets your feet in the water.
I wouldn't necessarily agree that TA'ing takes away from teaching and learning. Many of the top researchers are also, in my experience, fantastic teachers.
>>MS student here (maybe PhD in the future). This is exactly why I go to school. I enjoy the learning process. It's not about acquiring skills to make money, it's about learning interesting things in an interesting and creative environment where I'm free to explore to a certain extent.
To me, this process started only after I left the safe and controlled environment that is college. Graduation was like someone lifting the veil: I suddenly started seeing with great clarity and had true freedom in terms of what I wanted to pursue learning (as opposed to only the illusion of freedom given in an academic setting).
I'd say the only advantage academia has is being surrounded by other smart people. Especially now that I live in Southern California, where big biceps are seen as more important than a capable mind, I miss the college environment a lot. But that's the only reason.
I'd say the only advantage academia has is being surrounded by other smart people.
I think you are missing one important advantage: in (good) universities, the environment is set up in such a manner that you can think and experiment all day without being bothered.
This is something I noticed profoundly when I started to work for a company after my PhD: in university there are relatively few distractions - the environment is set up so that you can think and experiment. A company is far more hectic, always has pressing deadlines, etc.
Both have their advantages: in a company there is more frequent gratification and you can leave your work at the door. In academia on the other hand, there is much more time to puzzle until things are really 'right'.
I've been enjoying it: work with smart folks, occasionally speak at conferences, learn whatever you're curious about.. However, the money situation can become tricky (especially in New York). I double my income from summer internships but have still managed to accumulate a lot of credit card debt. I would recommend the lifestyle only if, in addition to having a good advisor/lab and liking open-ended exploration, you (1) are habitually frugal (2) go to school somewhere cheap or (3) have a big pile of savings.
With regard to (2), I think it's more like, "Don't go to school in one of the most expensive places to live on Earth." :P
(I go to school in Boston, and while I live closer to central Massachusetts, plenty of my cohorts who live around Boston don't seem to have any financial issues without doing an internship.)
I started my PhD as a fun learning experience. I didn't (and still don't) care about credentials.
As I've gotten further into the degree, I've realized that academic research is as plagued by corporate-style politics as any other venture. The fun started to die.
As it is, I'm looking for the door (dissertation to be completed while working).
My experience of 6 years in academia is that I thought the politics there was far worse than anything I've found in the years since then. As Wallace Stanley Sayre famously said: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low".
> As I've gotten further into the degree, I've realized that academic research is as plagued by corporate-style politics as any other venture. The fun started to die.
I've actually gone through precisely the same realization, but it hasn't ruined the fun for me. Namely, I seem to be an observer while the messy politics are played by the faculty members.
I entered graduate school with the intention to become a professor, but am now leaning more toward taking my chances in industry. But I'm happy with my destination being unknown for the moment. :-)
I decided not to continue with academia after my PhD not because of the internal politics[1], but the external. I failed completely to find external funding, and with NSF only funding 11% of applications, that's typical. And when you going for external funding, you're having to do what they want you to do, not the blue sky research I naively thought I'd get to do when I started my PhD.
If I'm going to have to justify what I'm doing all the time, I'd rather do that in industry, where people have deeper pockets and you're closer to the source of the money.
[1] The internal politics is actually easy to understand. It moves very slowly, and it's based entirely on getting a critical mass of influential people in the department to be on your side. It requires a lot of closed door chats to get things done. But no-one is ever actively looking to bury you as I have heard can happen in law/accounting.
> The internal politics is actually easy to understand. It moves very slowly, and it's based entirely on getting a critical mass of influential people in the department to be on your side. It requires a lot of closed door chats to get things done.
Definitely. I'm entering my fourth year now, and in retrospect, it's completely unsurprising. But when I entered graduate school, I almost immediately realized that I had idealized the notion of academia. Probably because I was a newborn pup as far as academia was concerned and really wanted to believe bullshit didn't get in the way of quality publications. (And I don't even have any sour anonymous review experiences myself.)
But academia is just like everything else: most people seem motivated to publish to advance their career. Only a few good ones are out to publish something to help others. I really thought it'd be the other way around when I entered. Naive, I know.
I did a PhD exactly for that reason. I had an offer from a company, I was sort of bootstrapping a company with a friend, and I had an offer for a PhD position[1].
I decided to do a PhD, since it's much easier to roll in to a PhD right after finishing a Masters than ten or twenty years later, and I thought it would offer the opportunity to deepen my knowledge in a particular field. When I started my PhD I didn't have the ambition to start an academic career.
[1] In the Netherlands being a PhD candidate is a normal employment. You get a decent salary and benefits and you have four years to focus on actual research, with very few teaching responsibilities, or having to follow courses. It's just a researcher position where you also write a thesis.
I didn't cover this at all, but I am very excited about the education and the process.
For most people though some stronger reasoning is necessary and my understanding is that the research is really the point of PhD, the education is there to support that.
Congratulations, I have also been thinking about going back for a PhD sometime when "I'm older and more financially secure", even though I could never do it with a family to support at the same time, both things are already incredibly hard work on their own.
The problem is that you might find yourself at a point where it is just not all that enjoyable anymore. Your adviser stops caring about your research, or you are told that you need to get N papers published by the end of the year to stay in the program, etc. Maybe you find that you are unable to work with your adviser, and there is nobody else who will take you on as a student. I have seen a number of people leave grad school over such things.
That's pretty much why I started mine, I didn't intend to be a tenure-track researcher but was really interested in a couple of areas of NLP and a PhD seemed the logical way to dig in more deeply.
I did a PhD for the fun of it. And the challenges were so special and different and the whole crazy un-inuitiveness of academia (as opposed to the corporate world I was used to) was a complete breath of fresh air. I completed my PhD and went on to become an academic and never looked back. Its not for everyone, but if you like uncertainty, left-field and often unpredictable ways of thinking combined with talking with smart people all the time then it is a great place.
I don't have a PhD, but I hear it depends a lot on the school, the field of study, and most importantly, the mentor they assign you. Your mentor specifically has the ability to make your life hell and completely obstruct your learning.
1. My mentor is not the same person as my advisor. (I use the word "mentor" to describe a professor who is both my friend and someone whose advice I value deeply.)
2. My advisor is not the same person as the advisor I was assigned to when I entered graduate school.
But I agree with your main point: your advisor (and the way you receive your advisor) can play a big role in the level of misery of your graduate student years.
Oh GOD yes. I was assigned my current MSc-thesis advisor from the small selection of experts remotely close to topics I was interested in, by an admissions committee reading my personal statement.
Now that I'm looking at actually doing my MSc thesis (writing the proposal these days) and inshallah going on to a PhD, I'm having to think hard about where to get an advisor and what sort of topics to do.
I see a lot of people saying getting a PhD limits your options for employment afterwards and you should only do it if you want an academic career.
I'm currently completing a PhD, and that was one of my primary concerns prior to starting. However I've eventually become more at ease with it. For one, I see a new appreciation for PhD level knowledge thanks to Google et. al, who have repopularised the value of having a PhD with their hiring practises. The advent of machine learning has made higher level CS knowledge more valuable again where for a while it was even actively spurned by much of the software industry. At the same time the basic bachelor CS degree is becoming commoditized and its value is decreasing. Partly because of outsourcing, partly because of MOOCs, and partly because it is becoming evident to employers that people without college / university training can be as effective as people with that training.
All up, I'm a lot less worried about this point than I was before I started.
Good for you. I'm usually apart of the libertarian crowd of qualifications: You prove you're capable with example, not credential.
This is due to my view of the cost of college, and my success in IT without higher learning credentials. That said, I would definitely give advice to young adults now that if they are going to college, they should either go for their masters/doctorate, or an advanced bachelors like nursing, law, or engineering. Anything else is just a waste of money. Everything you said about bachelor degrees is spot on.
I had a similar decision to go through, and I'm in a PhD program in machine learning now myself! PhD's might not be the trendiest thing in the startup world, but they're not a detriment at all from what I've heard and seen. Interned at a well-funded startup with 40 employees at the time, and we interns were literally the only tech people there without advanced degrees; many were ex-Googlers and the like. Similarly, at Microsoft I heard from many that as long as you can demonstrate that you haven't lost your touch for coding (do implementation + theory!), you're at no disadvantage relative to where you were before the PhD, and quite possibly at an advantage if you want to do more research-oriented things. Me, I may end up catching the academia bug while I'm here, but I'm not worried about losing my "in" in industry.
I'm almost done with my PhD, and for people that don't want to stay at academia, I find extremely important what btown says about not doing only theory.
Very rarely you will find a job where you'll only have to do theory, and even if you think you still remember everything you learned in your Bsc, you probably don't. Also, some of the things you might still remember, may not be of any use in the job market anymore.
From my experince, I recently started being contacted and going to job interviews at major companies and I had to spend some time going through some course material and MOOCs, even if I been doing some code during my PhD.
Regarding the PhD experience, choose your advisor and group very carefully. You'll spend a lot of time with them. Also, during almost 2 years I was working with a really bad crazy advisor, that was pushing me to the limit for his interest. I was almost quitting but decided to change advisor and I'm really enjoying this now.
- When getting into the PhD. track, one should be aware of what he/she is getting into, and be prepared for the resulting lifestyle.
- One should have an extraordinary drive (even to the point of personal obsession) to search for answers towards the unsolved problems in his/her field of study despite knowing the consequences that will be imposed onto his/her life by this intellectual journey.
- One should find a PI whose personality clicks with his/hers, and whose research he/she is motivated to work on. It is pretty rare to match these two parameters perfectly, but one can weigh trade-offs, and work with the best available while still maintaining his/her aspirations.
- One should realize that, regardless of popular belief, academia is business with its own business model: understanding the intricate business logic behind the model will facilitate one greatly in his/her quest.
- One should realize that like every human society, academia has its own fair share of personalities and egos, and intrapersonal skills matter, a lot.
wow that's a great summary of key points :) and thanks for mentioning that my memoir has a more objective tone than the other student's rant. i tried hard to present both the good and bad sides of academia, as viewed through the lens of a naive Ph.D. student. ah good times.
For whatever it's worth, as someone who just finished, you're doing a PhD for all of the right reasons.
You do it because you want to. Because you like getting to delve into a wide array of things. Because you want to focus more on interesting problems than interesting solutions. (Obviously, those two aren't mutually exclusive.)
If you're doing it with a career focus, it's not worth it. A PhD can be a hindrance in the corporate world, and jobs in academia are difficult to get.
Do it because you want a chance to do what you find most interesting for 5-8 years. (CS is probably shorter... In the geosciences, a M.S. is 2-3 years, and a PhD is an additional 4-6. Typically, you switch institutions between an MS and PhD, as well.)
Also, from what I've seen, people who come back to graduate work after working for awhile are generally more successful than folks straight out of undergrad.
On the other hand, a PhD can close more doors than it opens in the corporate world, at least in my limited experience. For reasons I don't understand, most people view a PhD as meaning specialization. You'll be seen as "too specialized", regardless of your actual experience and skillset. At least for me, the opposite is true. My graduate work required me to be a generalist. Everyone I know of came out of undergrad much more specialized and became more of a generalist over time.
For whatever it's worth, as someone who just finished, you're doing a PhD for all of the right reasons.
That's true. I think it's telling, however, that the writer doesn't mention getting an academic job, or tenure. I hope his PhD works out for him and his family, who are implicitly along for the ride.
I also hope that, in three to four years, the OP writes an essay about what he thinks after he's gone through the academic grinder.
I truly wish you the best of luck, and for an excellent outcome.
One thing - you just can't say "why I'm getting a PhD", even from an elite school, the way you'd say "why I'm getting a law, medical, or business degree". Even if you've been admitted to an elite program, you can really only say "why I'm rolling the dice on the possibility of getting a PhD".
At elite programs, there is essentially no involuntary attrition in JD, MD, or MBA degrees. Yale law school has no 1L attrition. Columbia's JD 1L attrition is 0.3%. Attrition rates at elite med school is typically well below 1%.
I suppose I am part of your Ph.D. 'attrition' statistic. It's less atrocious than you'd think.
I enrolled in Brown's Ph.D. CS computer program immediately after undergrad. In retrospect, I was too green to do proper due diligence to find the right fit with advisor and research area. The advisor relationship is extremely important. Within the first year I realized two things: 1) there was no way I'd be happy going deep with this particular research area and advisor for another 5-6 years, 2) I would complete my masters in the first year, fully paid for (with a research assistant "salary" on top) by being on the PhD track. I returned full-time to the company I co-founded while in undergrad after that first year.
No two PhD paths are the same, unlike with JD/MBA. Some folks come in and earn a master's along the way. Some come in with a master's. Some don't pass the (widely different depending on school) bars to advance to the Ph.D. candidate stage (I imagine there's a good bit of attrition here). Some don't find an advisor who can fund them. The requirement of contributing something novel to the body of research, no matter how long it takes, is a higher bar than completing coursework and projects. 6,7,8 years is a lot longer than 2-3.
I suspect Berkeley is on the high end of the spectrum as far as attrition goes. I went there for undergrad, and the pressure and difficulty was extreme in areas like EECS. For perspective, after graduating I moved to the East Coast and worked in a research lab at MIT and took courses at Harvard, both of which felt quite laid back after Berkeley. It was the only school experience I had where I saw smart people work crazy hard and still receive C's and D's in some classes. The PhD candidate I lived with decided to take a year long internship with Intel (as a vacation) for mental health reasons.
> Attrition rates for engineering PhD students appear to be about 33%. This (to me, atrocious number) is way better than science or humanities.
Perhaps this is because an engineering Ph.D. student is far better positioned to get a high-paying job than their 1L or med school counterparts. The engineering candidate doesn't need to be there to get a job.
When my advisor quit, I left my PhD without thinking twice, because I got a job at a much higher pay than my PhD stipend, and leaving my PhD didn't present the kind of financial burden that it would have were I in a humanities field.
Now I'd like to complete it again, but I'd want to do it part-time, and I have a much better idea of what I'd like to do. As engineers, we are pretty lucky to be in that position, even when things don't quite work out as planned, we still end up pretty well off. So there's not quite the same determination to make a particular course of action work.
Yes, and the med school student will earn substantially more than the PhD student (or the PhD degree holder) after completing med school. So there is significant financial incentive to finish the degree (which has likely put the med school student deep into loan debt already).
Unfortunately, the problems I gravitate towards are not normally assigned to engineers and attempts to marry my interests with my domain of expertise [1,2] have met with understandably tepid responses. ,,, All of that makes perfect sense but it means I can't focus on the problems that I'm interested in.
---
What Interests Me
The things that keep me up past midnight working and learning are technical. Problems both large and small that remain unsolved or problems where the solution seems unsatisfactory to me. A short and incomplete list in no particular order:
...
A few of these might align with a job posting somewhere but most don't. More importantly, I'm not as interested in the implementation as I am in conceiving a solution and understanding its value.
...
===
I guess you could say I'm taking The Fourth Path™.
While I may be new to the academic environment, I have taken efforts to ensure that my impressions are not naive.
===
I think what is Naive here is that even with a phd you will be working for someone. to do something. So, not having a functional goal for your work is Naive. Even if its research it has a "market". There are people who value it or they don't. The trade may be "in kind", be it social favours or prestige/ego polishing, if not in discrete financial incentives (grants, etc).
Its illusory to think your "career" is independent. At best, you are captive to customer if nor directly to your employer.
This all might be formalistic oversights for a blog post, but still...your a mid-career executive...this stuff shouldn't be off the radar entirely.
This is essential. Research needs funding, and professors are working for grants in a manner deceptively similar to contract work. The grant work might not align well with what the community views as novel research so satisfying grant and research goals can be very challenging.
In the end I believe the most important focus of a PhD is to publish three papers at great venues in something that amount to a thesis topic. And don't distract yourself with something "fun" until this is done, because it is extremely common that the research topic will stop being fun at some point during your 5-7 year journey. People, including your advisor, will ask you to work on problems unrelated to your thesis when it fits their interests so it is up to you to manage your time. Since a PhD labour is cheap skilled labor you can not expect anyone else to take the high-road and manage your time.
A big point in academia is that you can research whatever direction and niche you want, but you'll get paid only to research directions and niches chosen by others..
If those directions happen to overlap at the right time and place, you can have a great time getting a PhD; if they stop overlapping (possibly suddenly), then the choices aren't that nice.
Successful research strategies typically involve working on what is funded, and simultaneously bootstrapping what isn't until the early results are sufficient to get funding or at least collaborators on board. It's maybe tougher overall, but it's the only way to have interesting work longer term. It's also nice when you're mind is blown-out and you're stuck and sick of your current project to do something shiny and new for a little while.
I would assume that this is exactly how most businesses operate; you have to not only serve your current customers but line up new ones as well.
Yep, the funding requirements typically meant a process somewhat like - if you've got result A done or nearly done; then you apply for funding to do "A", but in fact do B for all that time. Then you apply for funding "to do B" while working on C for that funding... repeat ad nauseam for decades. Amazingly, it results in a process where each individual step is technically fraudulent but the total result is the intended one.
But this is not how most businesses operate, academic funding is a very different mindset. Well, perhaps defense contractor companies need to plan about their funding in similar terms.
I agree with your thoughts on this being Naive. As an undergrad I wrote off the idea of pursuing a Phd (my initial intent) because I saw how the senior professor I assisted spent his time. A lot more mental energy went to grant writing than teaching or research.
The other thing is it will be very hard to do this at 30 with kids. Best of luck with this!
> A lot more mental energy went to grant writing than teaching or research.
As a PhD student, I can tell you firsthand that that is not true for all professors.
I was naturally very skeptical of the academic-governmental complex, but it turns out that academia can come fairly close to the idealized image people have of it. The professor I work for spend around 10% of his time on grant funding, and gets plenty.
I was very poor at applying my stats knowledge at the time, a sample size of one is hard to draw conclusions from. One thing that is very true is there is not a lot of control over research. As a Phd you are bound to your advisor (which you can choose) and as a non-tenured faculty you are bounded by what can get funded. As an undergrad I thought, "Being a faculty member is great, you get to create whatever you want in Computer Science." Once I realized that it was indeed a real job, my enthusiasm wrenched very (too?) hard in the other direction.
Shorter version of both posts: "Working at (university/big tech co.) frees me from all the distractions of working at (big tech co./university) so I can spend all my time hacking on the problems I find most interesting."
Where I get stuck: "we only accept PhDs at [GOOG/MS/FB] research." I want to be in these communities (preferably somewhere with funding + needs, likely to be a BigCo), but they don't make themselves very open.
FWIW, Peter Norvig was asked at an intern tech talk at Google "Do I need a PhD to work at Google?" and he replied "No, and most of the people here don't have one. What we are looking to hire is people who have the original thinking mindset that makes them able to do PhDs, even if they haven't done one."
When you're working at Google/Facebook/Microsoft you're working on problems that are new to you, even if they aren't new to the rest of the company. You're learning, which is the fun bit of research. Many of the products you will work on may never have been attempted at the size/scale you are going for, and so that's research.
Industry has a lot of the R of R&D, you just need to recognize it when it's happening.
I went into my PhD with totally the wrong reasoning and eventually left after 3 years. All I can say is: the PhD is about the process not the end results; and it's a qualification to conduct research and nothing more
Your experience mirrors mine in many ways (especially Hunt the Supervisor.. oh, the fun we had). Sounds like you were/are also in the UK -- 3-4 years for a PhD is considered fast over here in the US!
I think the most unexpected part of my PhD experience was the sheer mind-numbing slog that research can become, either your own project or assisting your supervisor. Writing a pretty easy script and then running it 1000 times with different variables on different datasets. Reviewing a metric ton of papers for a forced lit review. etc.
I loved the freedom of thought, and learned a lot about what I was interested in and motivated by. I loved the structure of academia, the familiar support networks, and I found I really enjoyed teaching. I particularly liked thinking up bizarre ideas and having the skills and tools at my disposal to see if anyone had done it before and quickly knock up a messy but functional way to test it out.
For me, it boiled down to wanting to do work on messy, imperfect data that came from the real world, which was at odds with the highly curated and neat datasets that can get you nice, repeatable results suitable for a PhD. Would I have stuck it out if I could have done the research I really wanted? Having seen friends go through the writing up stage and break under the pressure, I'm not sure. I'm not intending to go back and finish it, that's for sure.
Side note: the font size for your Joel on Software quote is insanely large (Chrome/Windows).
Your interests align with mine. I have considered academia, but for now it suffices to work on language research projects in spare time. I did get a job in compilers and build tools last year because of my language interests, so it’s certainly not impossible. Compilers experts are not in high demand, but when they are needed they can go for a pretty penny due to short supply.
> I’m not as interested in the implementation as I am in conceiving a solution and understanding its value. I'm sure that will sound like laziness to some…
Not at all. People like you are the reason that people like me have so many great papers to work from. The world needs people on both sides of that divide.
Good luck. I'm just finishing mine. It's been a hard path, but also incredibly stimulating and awesome in a lot of ways.
I'm an applied math-type, but your list of topics looks like a great start. My most successful peers knew exactly the things they wanted to work on and have nailed it.
"Because it's my life and I believe it's worthwhile to me." I don't understand why people bother to defend personal choices, like education, as if they're in some sort of formal argument. This says more about culture and your own insecurity.
Maybe they value others opinions/encouragement/feedback. A degree of insecurity isn't necessarily a bad thing, it can stop you making mistakes. I wish I'd taken some of the questions of my friends at school Why do you want to get a degree anyway? more seriously years ago.
Disclaimer: I am in geoscience, not CS, so my situation isn't the same as the blogger's. But much of the important things should still apply.
There are a lot of sacrifices to be made, it's really not for everyone, and timing is pretty important, but...
Though I'm not sold on becoming a professor, getting my PhD was a great experience, and really has set me up for a lot that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. Especially in the US system, where most students are required to do some teaching and a good amount of coursework in addition to rigorous research projects, there is a lot of personal/intellectual/character development that comes from not only balancing these responsibilities but being able to intellectually parse, synthesize, improve, and communicate the content. Granted, there are other ways to get some of these experiences, and a lot is missing, but there is some serious Gestalt here. Qualifying exams, as fear-inducing and social-life-destroying as they may be during preparation, really do whip you into intellectual shape.
And if you are really interested in your research, and your methods of inquiry are sufficiently compatible with the 'establishment' to keep you out of too much trouble, the opportunity to immerse yourself in your interests is rare elsewhere, especially if there isn't a lot of immediate monetary incentive to study the subject.
I do industry consulting as well as academic research now, and the industry stuff is still considered 'research'. Neither position would be available to me without a PhD, and I like both jobs much more than the work I see people with BS/MS degrees doing (or what I see most faculty doing), even though I am currently a bit underpaid.
So I would say that it's not always bad practical choice, even for those who aren't interested in professorships. Again, not for everybody, but it seems like the OP knows what he's getting into.
As soon as I submitted it I went back to remove it. But thanks for calling me on it anyway.
But perhaps you can find a more diplomatic way to say the same thing. When someone says something that's clearly an opinion, and wrong in my experience, and follows it with "Trust me," it's a guarantee that I will regard everything they say with suspicion.
Should that not be the case? How else should I point out the consequences of their utterance? Or should I let it pass, and not try to help them see the consequences?
Ah, so that was a response to the commenter's "trust me" remark. Perhaps "why should I trust you over some thousands of grad students," but it's difficult to gauge the amount of thought or research the commenter puts into "trust me," which is thrown around pretty liberally in modern English. When a friend says, "trust me, don't drink the water," and clearly his experience with water was not representative, if you want to keep the friend you're probably better off addressing it as a water quality issue instead of a trust issue. I'd say let the trust subject pass, and probably also save vocabulary like "utterance" for your enemies, or people wearing sith lord halloween costumes, etc.
WRT "utterance", it's probably a hangover from my lojban days. Different cultures use language differently. In my context, "utterance" is a common term, whereas "Trust me" is taken more sriously than you imply. Awareness of such issues is valuable - I'll look out for my usages of "utterance" in the future.
It really depends on what you value to be "worth it".
If you value the end goal of becoming a professor, you'd agree the Phd is "worth it"; perhaps this provides a career-oriented perspective.
But consider the other values:
If you want to explore a novel, foundational (perhaps theoretical) area of the field, academia represents a good venue. The journey is what is "worth it" to the value of intellectual curiosity.
Similarly, if you value gaining extreme depth in a narrow topic area to the end of advancing that topic area, academia enables an appropriate level of focus for that.
Blanket statements of what academia is useful for are biased by individual values, and are thus generally unhelpful. Not everyone pursues a path for its ends or career utility.
If you were doing that, you'd likely either be a professor (of some kind), or on that track post-doc, etc... or the national laboratory equivalent. I don't know how many PhD-level "staff" positions there are on the big physics experiments.
It's probably more accurate to say "unless you want to be an academic" as opposed to "unless you want to be a professor", but since becoming a professor is usually the goal of an academic career, it's a fair statement to make.
Thank you for the reply. So the only, or at least best, way of doing science research is to be an academic, or work at a national laboratory (does that count as academia?)? Thus, the statement "only reason to do a PhD is to be an academic" is isomorphic to the statement "only reason to do a PhD is to do basic science research"?
You can definitely get a job as a staff researcher at a national lab or small applied-science company (there are a ton of companies doing DARPA research). Note that due to the way the world is, you may not be able to be the prime scientist on a contract, but that does not stop you from doing basic research via collaboration.
If your contributions become noteworthy in the field, then along with the relationships that you've generated with your DARPA/NSF/? partner, you will eventually be able to be a prime.
To reiterate some of the other comments here, you may not be able to pick the 'basic research' that you want to work on in the above scenarios... usually the grant sponsors decide that.
Thank you for the reply. Do you mind if I ask some more questions? Suppose that I am financially independent and do not care about being paid, then would that open up more paths for me?
>In recent times, science has become very professionalised. Many of the steps in the list above serve specifically to maintain high professional standards. For example, step 5 – complete a Ph.D. – is a way of measuring an individual's likelihood of making significant contributions to scientific knowledge.
You wouldn't be able to. But keep in mind ...
(1) It's extremely difficult to get a job doing basic research in physics, even with a PhD.
(2) The OP hasn't said he wants to do basic research.
I feel like he's leaving out something quite important, which is what he plans to do once he has his PhD. Professor (research or teaching?) or industry (big business or startups?)?
You're devoting the next 5+ years of your life to a single task. You're forgoing your programmer salary for the next 5+ years, which could easily add up to $300k - $500k in opportunity cost. Your forcing your wife and kids to come along for the ride. You're going to end up a world expert in a tiny niche that, quite possibly, nobody outside of academia cares about. You should have a pretty good idea where you want this all to lead.
There are practical reasons for having a goal in mind:
* If you want to land an academic job, you should be planning for that from day one. Academic positions are extremely competitive, and you need to make yourself an extremely competitive candidate. That means you must present and publish your work aggressively often, networking extensively, and choose a popular topic of research that will garner you many citations, etc.
* You have to make many important decisions right from the start of grad school (who to choose as an advisor, what topic to research, etc.). Choosing poorly will have ramifications for many years to come. Having relevant criteria (such as some long-term goal) can help you with these decisions.
* It's not entirely unusual for candidates to languish for 7+ years in their program, often due to lack of direction or because they expected their advisor to motivate them and keep them on track. You need to motivate yourself. Having some direction from the start can help with this motivation, and also help you from getting swallowed up by all the time-sinks that will eat away at your productivity.
This sounds a lot like you are telling us what you value in life. There are no rules in life and it's not a requirement to have your whole life planned out at every moment in time. Most people don't, including highly successful people. That's ok. What's important is taking advantage of opportunity when it is presented.
If a goal of yours is to learn, then a PhD is a great opportunity for this. The value of the PhD is not even gaining expert knowledge in a small area. It's learning how to learn. It's learning how to focus so hard on one thing so as to surpass or build on what the best of those who've come before you have done. It teaches you do deal with the fear of not knowing and having nobody to tell you the answer.
On the other hand, even if you end up coming to be concerned about money, it's still not a big deal. Sure, you don't go into a PhD for money. But wether you go into industry or succeed in academia afterwards, you won't be wanting for money. Hell, you can even leave part way through and get a well paying job!
Besides, your counterparts who ran the corporate treadmill will only be incrementally richer than you anyways. If you really want to be rich, you need to take on big risks such as starting a company or the like. Talking about putting your wife and kids in a tough spot! That said, I hope you put something in life above money.
Edit:
Regarding your edits, those are concerns that you do need to consider. Though it's really not the end of the world if you don't. Simply always trying hard goes a long way to doing alright in most scenarios and there are always great fallback options.
[bill lumbergh] I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that. [/office space] (My PhD is in behavioral neuroscience, so YMMV)
I've found that if people want to learn, then they will learn. You don't need a PhD for that, and the process of going through a PhD doesn't really teach you anything more than you couldn’t have gotten yourself. Passion drives someone to learn, not getting accepted into a PhD program.
In theory I agree, but I very rarely run into people who actually do so on their own. Even fewer who do something recognizable as contributions to a research field, in the sense of writing up something of peer-reviewed paper quality, which indicates the author is familiar with existing research, appropriately explains how the new contribution relates to concepts and techniques that already exist, and presents the results in a convincing format (whether that's statistical analysis or a good case study or whatever). It doesn't even have to actually be published; I'm fine browsing papers on arXiv too, or things circulated as whitepapers or tech reports.
They exist, but they're uncommon, and many of the people doing that kind of work are in sort of para-academic jobs, like long-time librarian at a big research library, or senior staff member at a (government or corporate) research lab. Even in an environment like Google, the majority of the papers and paper-like writeups seem to come from either people with PhDs, or people with long track records in a quasi-academic environment, like Google's sizable stable of ex-Bell-Labs researchers.
I don't really say that out of any particular love for institutionally tied research, but more out of the opposite, a frustration that it's so rare to find DIY research that really contributes to a research field. Some of that, I assume, is just incentives: if what you earn money on involves getting something to work, all that really matters is that you come up with a technique that works. Understanding how your technique relates to existing techniques, explaining whether it's completely novel or a variant of an established one, and doing the detailed analysis to figure out why precisely it outperforms existing techniques (e.g. is there one particular tweak that's critical, and if so, why is it critical?), is not always something incentivized in that context, but is important to advancing the state of knowledge in a field.
Hey Delirium, very well put. I’m curious about your experience (phd program, country etc) as I have a different perspective and I frequently wonder if it’s just my experience in the biology side of academics.
“In theory I agree, but I very rarely run into people who actually do so on their own”
This board is full of people who actually learn on their own:) People learned to code, people learned how to run businesses and people have learned how to build purely based on their passion to learn/build and contribute to the world. The reason why this is less so in science is that the resources are behind a paywall. I recently left my academic life to start a business and as such, I don’t have access to scientific papers anymore….this limits my ability. This is also the major motivation for my startup which will bring raw academic scientific data to the public…but I digress. The fact is that you are surrounded by those people, but they aren’t bringing their ideas to science because the process by which science is done doesn’t allow for it…and that is a problem.
Re: peer-review papers/quality: ahha, I’m not sure I agree. Peer review in theory is great, in practice it’s BS/politics/$$$$. Also, in my experience (YMMV), a lot of references in intros/discussions are “oh shit, you have to reference Joe Schmoe’s 2008 paper here because he is on the editorial board.” Not to discredit your point, I agree that peer review papers, citations and the like are important, but they are being abused now (at least in bio).
This is long winded, but my point is that we don’t see a lot of people contributing to science because they don’t have the resources to do so. I think that needs to change soon and I’m working to make that happen.
It's about access to resources that you won't have not being part of a university. This is especially true for physical sciences that require expensive laboratory equipment. However, even for something like CS, having access to good lecturers and courses is very helpful.
Of course, the open courses being put out for CS and Math is certainly is changing the picture for these fields. I think they are great.
The point is, learning in a bubble is not nearly as useful as learning from peers and those more experienced as yourself. It's also the case that few people have the discipline to go through the important but sometimes dreary exercises required to learn these topics. Having structured learning programs helps with this too.
> This sounds a lot like you are telling us what you value in life.
That's true, just as you're telling us what you value in life (e.g., the opportunity to learn to learn).
However, I'm suggesting that it's be beneficial to enter into a PhD program with a long-term perspective. You seem to be actually discouraging that, or at the very least, claiming it's irrelevant.
I can't really see a scenario where that's good advice.
In fact, that's exactly how I entered a PhD program fresh out of college: without much direction or a long-term goal in mind, except to learn as much as I could and enjoy the experience. I enjoyed the experience, but I would have benefitted (during the program and after graduation) by aligning the program with my long term goals.
Besides, your counterparts who ran the corporate treadmill will only be incrementally richer than you anyways.
Of course, money isn't everything. But to be honest, that's definitely not the case. I have several friends who hustled after college or enrolled in professional degree programs. They now make multiples of what I can ever hope to earn as a "research engineer." Other friends saved up during those years and now own a house. Realistically, I'm still several years from owning a condo.
If you really want to be rich, you need to take on big risks such as starting a company or the like. Talking about putting your wife and kids in a tough spot!
And we've circled around to yet another example of the opportunity cost of spending 5+ years (perhaps before the wife and kids) in graduate school.
(As an aside, I've heard that grad school is about "learning to learn" before, and I'm not convinced. Yes, I worked on problems to which nobody knew the answer. From my perspective, that's not significantly different from working on a problem whose answer is at the back of the textbook. The internal process is the same. Most successful graduate students I knew were reasonably smart, and worked very hard, and eventually made progress. Did I need to spend an additional five years after college to tell me that "intelligence + effort = progress"?)
As someone currently in a PhD program, I strongly disagree with you. It looks like other people are carrying the torch for me pretty well. But I will say a couple of things.
You seem to really value "learning for the sake of learning." If so, you already have it figured out that you want to spend 5+ years learning and that you don't care about planning ahead for your life after that. You already have a tentative life plan (though part of it is the default "null plan").
People who think they have a life plan figured out without going through a long, careful process of figuring it out, should still do so, just to make sure their assumptions are valid.
I'm biting the bullet this fall too. Having worked in a lab for the past year, I can see what the good ways to do it are, and the bad ways too. I hope to do it in the good ways.
either good or bad ways, I'm just afraid of being stuck in academia. writing some papers and starting to every sentence with " according xx (1910)" are boring sometimes, you know well, I gyess :)
John, it's great that you want to learn more about those topics. But, don't misunderstand. Earning a PhD is like 10% learning about the topic, and 90% learning the process of research and the business of research. Based on your blog post, it's going to take a while until that other 90% really hits you. Reading papers is easy compared to writing them.
Also, PhD studies and the academic life at a research institution are emotionally stressful and extremely time consuming. You have to consider the negative impact of that on your family, regardless of how supportive they are.
As someone who was recently persuing a PhD, I would say anyone getting one is making a huge bet on the future of traditonal higher education institutes. In general, I am scared for the future of pure science
I think the right time to be scared for the future of pure science was in the 1970s. Pure R&D institutions started dropping like flies after that, and we almost lost our innovation edge.
I think the Internet brought us back from the brink -- except now it's not large institutions sponsoring R&D, but rather small companies and individuals. Pure science suffers in comparison to small tech (like apps and web stuff) because it's expensive, but I think that could change as we perfect crowd-funding mechanisms and as enough people accumulate enough resources to start privately funding pure science research.
I don't think traditional higher ed institutes are safe by any means -- but a PhD itself is still a worthwhile use of time, whether used for its intended purpose or as a pivot.
The problem with a PhD is that it requires a laser focus on a narrowly defined topic. I'm much more interested in the connections between different areas. Thus, no PhD so far. I also wouldn't want to put myself entirely under one advisor's control to the degree that PhD programs typically require.
I do think it would be an interesting way to re-structure my time, though.
I've always been passionate about education and hope to one day be in a place where I can get my PHD. Unfortunately I've opted to relocate and travel for a couple years which has showed me that online PHDs virtually don't exist. Has anyone done an online PHD in CS or something similar?
You're lucky to have a wife that supportive. I'm about to do something considered equally as risky, and the support of my SO helps in extinguishing a lot of the fear and anxiety. I have friends who are not as lucky with SO's demanding they continue down one career path or another.
I'm going to be applying for engineering PhD programmes by this coming January and I'm in a similar position to you: 28, wife, 2 year old kid, trying for another, etc.
I never wanted to leave college. Why leave--it's fun and
the social benefits were unbelievable.
Although, I think a college degree is overrated. I truly
believe a determined individual can use the Internet
as a substitute for a college degree, especially Programmers. When I went to school I thought General
Education requirements were a waste of time, but as I
aged, I'm glad I was exposed to philophy, and psychology
courses. I'm amazed how many people go through life
not knowing what the Placebo Effect is.(yes--Strunk would
be mad, but tired.).
Looking back, I regret not having pursued a degree in Physics or Mathematics. I took the "easy way out" and pursued a liberal arts degree just to be done with college and move on.
In retrospect, it would have been great to have majored in something that, perhaps, may have been more difficult but more rewarding in the long run.
Therefore I suggest that, if you have the opportunity to do so, pursue your PhD. You never know when older age will sneak up on you and you will no longer have enough time to do so :)
My mentor once suggested that a PhD is only worthwhile if you plan on doing research after you graduate. But as he got to know me better, he noticed that I was actually enjoying the act of obtaining a PhD. Isn't that enough?