What My PhD Was Like
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jxyzabc.blogspot.com
A PhD is not proof that you're smart, or that you cannot get a job, or of anything else (positive or negative). It just proves that you've demonstrated an ability to do original research, and to survive a system that is often unfair in numerous ways.
It also implicitly assumes that you're young -- and better yet, single and without kids. In that sense, it's sort of like a startup, in that it consumes as much of your time and energy as you're willing to give it.
I went into my PhD program knowing that I wasn't going to be a researcher. I went in planning to learn new things, to meet new people, and to maybe try some new directions in my career. In the end, it took a very long time (11 years), cost my family and me a lot of time and money, and didn't directly affect my career. And yes, there were lots of tears along the way, as well as many angry words.
I'm very happy that I finished it, rather than give up in the middle (which I considered on many occasions). I have a huge sense of accomplishment. I learned a ton, that's for sure. And we had an adventure living in Chicago, where I met many new friends.
But I tell people, very seriously, that if they're thinking of doing a PhD, they should think very hard before starting it. It's a huge commitment of time and money, and especially in the computer industry, there are ways to do research nowadays that don't require the effective vows of poverty and servitude associated with graduate school.
I did it in a program called "Learning Sciences," which is a mix of computer science, cognitive science, and design, all for educational purposes. I studied at Northwestern University, just outside of Chicago.
Also, curious if you have worked as a regular software engineering employee? It is kind of difficult to be in your mid to late 30s as a fresh software engineer when many people your age have more years writing production code and being a team lead/manager. Curious if/how you dealt with that?
My ability to get gigs was always pretty good -- but it really skyrocketed about 2 years ago. That's when I decided to explicitly pursue training in a few technologies (Python, Git, PostgreSQL, and Ruby) rather than "doing whatever they want, using whatever technology they want." That specialization, and my focus on training, has done wonders to my career; I'm earning more, having more fun, and doing more interesting work (I think) than when I was looking all over for development jobs.
I still get to do software development, but now I do it for things I want, or when researching new topics for myself. I have a few SaaS ideas that I've been thinking about, but haven't had time, between writing books and doing courses.
It's hard to say whether the PhD has helped me much. On the one hand, I put it on my ebook covers, since I figure it'll impress some people enough to buy the book. And to be honest, I have used (and continue to use) many of the techniques I learned in the LS program in my lectures, which I do think help to make me a more effective trainer. However, I think that people hire me not because of the PhD, but because I have built up a reputation -- and once you do a few successful courses for a company, they're very likely to hire you back.
I did work as a regular employee for a bunch of years: I worked at HP's medical products group (spun off as Agilent, and then sold to Philips, both after I was there), and then for Time Warner. When I moved to Israel in 1995, I figured that this was a good chance to try my hand at consulting -- and I haven't had any regrets since.
It's a sad, but true, state of affairs in the computer industry, in that people in their mid-30s who are qualified and bright have a hard time getting jobs. I'm fortunate in that I haven't had to deal with that. (And I'm now 45, so I'm definitely over the hill in terms of getting development jobs.) Consulting has provided me with something of a cushion there.
I get that you can't just move to seattle or some big city with tech or wherever for a job, you might have a family, a life (it's fairly expensive here), but if you can't find a job as a dev, you are probably living in the wrong place.
You have to practice before interviewing. If you don't know c++ or java or js, practice on your own until you proficient. Just get out there and try. I feel so sad when i read one of the endless stories about someone who got laid off by a stupid evil company (like the recent disney people) and training your replacement, that would be unbearable. I have been fortunate to find companies that honestly did have thousands of job openings, and did hire tons of us citizens but also we hired thousands of people outside of the us of a too.
What would be some of these ways in your opinion?
On this last point, I should mention that my dissertation research involved the creation of a collaborative Web application for people developing agent-based models. The IRB (ethics board) insisted that anyone who would want to use my Web site would need to fax a permission form to the university office. You can imagine how this would have killed any use of my site, and thus of my dissertation work. It took several months of pleading with them to get them agree that usage of the site wouldn't require a faxed form. Doing that same sort of work at Facebook et. al. would have been a non-issue.
And yes, there are ethical and privacy issues associated with Facebook, Google, etc. I'm not ignoring them, merely pointing to the abundance of data and opportunities they have at their disposal.
There are still advantages to a university laboratory, including the cushion that you have from real-world profitability. There's something nice about being able to spend months or years looking at a problem, without having shareholders looking over your shoulder. But universities have their own politics and problems, and they're far from the pristine labs we'd like to imagine.
There are several companies (and not just universities) in the top 20. Microsoft leading.
Microsoft Research has a lot of amazing people working there, doing very impressive stuff.
[0]: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/jobs/fulltime/default.as...
And having a PhD and a body of work does help a lot in the interview cycles.
Thanks,
It's far from perfect, and I really need to do some maintenance on it one of these days. But as things stand, I have the largest public collection of agent-based models. One of my committee members told me that another research group had done something similar, but with a multi-million dollar NSF grant. That certainly made my day!
Let me know if you have issues/bugs/whatever!
Absolutely true, but is it possible to work in those places without a PhD?
One path I can imagine would be to devote 2-3 years to independent study, attend appropriate conferences and get to know the researchers on a professional and personal level. Build some respect on your own dime before trying to move to professional work.
No idea if that would work, though - whether there are avenues for an amateur-but-devoted scientist to contribute to research, or whether that research would break down any barriers.
You can certainly do good independent work, and write and publish papers if you want. If you can prove your conpetence, why shouldn't you be hired? At least, not every employer is going to have a major bias against those without PhDs.
I simply tell them not to do it--in Computer Science--if they are genuinely good at getting things done (for some mediocre people good at playing a certain type of a game, grad school can be an okay career path), unless (1) they need a student visa, or (2) they definitely want to go into academia (which generally only makes sense in a top 5-10 ranked school).
To me the litmus test is now this: do you need a particle accelerator (or equivalents) to conduct research in your field? If not, don't do a PhD.
So yes, if you're not interested in doing academic research, then a PhD is a pretty hard sell.
Here is the big problem IMHO: by the time you graduate with your PhD in a 6-8 year program, you are either close to or in your 30s (best case). You just spent a decade investing in a research career. Most scientists will tell you that research is not being supported the same as in the old days. I can't say about govt grants but industrial labs have definitely changed in the last 10 years (I'm thinking of IBM Research and Microsoft Research). There have been several lab closures in the recent past: MSR's Silicon Valley, Nokia Research in the Bay area, Intel Lab-lets (Berkeley, Pittsburgh, etc.). So basically, supply is steady and demand is decreasing. This generally doesn't bode well for the prospective PhD candidate trying to make a career in industrial research. The bar simply keeps getting higher to get one of these "coveted" positions.
While it is true that PhDs can (and do) get hired at places like Google, Facebook or Wall Street, think about the almost decade spent on training that not only are you not using, at least a chunk of the technical content will be obsolete by the time you finish! Insane!!
To succeed with a PhD, you need to be a great seller. This is sort of the same skill you need as an entrepreneur or a specific type of middle-manager (dreamer? not sure this has a clear job title). I always thought it was about the technical challenge of the work or the quality. I sadly have to come to realize that the marketing (the intro to your paper) matters as much as the rest.
As someone that did research outside of academia my litmus test was:
Do I need a mentor to train me to be a great researcher? After doing research on my own for a while I discovered that yes I needed such a mentor. I optimized my search around finding the best mentor possible.
2. Understanding which problems to work on (Prior to grad school I spent over a year on a problem, when I published a solution I discovered that there was very little interest. I want to build things people use.).
3. Developing better research methods (How to approach and understand a problem. How to think about solutions and measure them.).
4. Honest, critical, and in-depth feedback on all of the above.
This advice would apply to all mathematics research.
I disagree - there's tons of skills you learn in the process which are useful in other contexts - the most important, in my opinion, is learning how to write well and communicate complicated ideas to others.
If you go into industry, then depending on what you studied and what kind of job you have, the knowledge of a given field (networking, graphics, compilers, computer vision etc) can be extremely helpful.
But some (many) use long words and convoluted sentences, seemingly for no reason other than to make their reader feel less intelligent. I know someone in the latter category; while he's a very bright guy, I haven't the foggiest idea what he's saying in any of his papers.
Which does indeed demonstrate that a PhD doesn't necessarily make you a great writer. I had been writing professionally for a decade before I started my PhD, and this had far more to do with my clarity of writing than any feedback I got in grad school.
And of course, don't forget the gibberish, automatically generated papers that were accepted: http://www.ibtimes.com/fake-research-papers-how-did-more-120...
you also learn this while working for a company, which has the added benefit of not treating you like an indentured servant.
I did some work helping Msc and PhD students many aeons ago and I felt that people hid in academia at that time because there was a recession and few initials after the name were better than a spell of unemployment for those with daddies that could afford it.
The above is based on experiences in STEM, probably things are different for liberal arts people.
There are!?
My own story follows:
I started the PhD in a UK university in the mid ‘1980s. I started it because it was the simplest course of action (staying at a comfortable uni) not because I wanted a career in academia, and I was fascinated by the subject (building a frame-based knowledge representation to support a first-order logic reasoner). Two other grads started at the same time, working on different aspects of the same project to get their PhDs. In retrospect it was a big mistake. The project devolved into uncontrolled software development (which I enjoyed) but we were in fact spending all our time building research tools (in C!) rather than using them to do research. Our mutual supervisor had no particular team leading experience and given that it had become a group project, we lacked the discipline of a proper software development lead. Our supervisor abruptly resigned in the third year to move to a new Uni and he didn’t offer to take us with him. I decided to cut my losses and took a research-programmer job in a different department of the same university. I used my spare time to write up my thesis to the extent that I could and submitted it as an M.Phil (so I did at least get a qualification from the whole experience). I then took a job at the advanced techniques department of a large UK engineering company, where I was introduced to Lisp-based tools that would have let me complete my PhD coding in months rather than years. And have worked in industry ever since.
My message to prospective PhD students is to do the PhD for the right reasons. Make sure that you understand the approach your supervisor will want you to follow and check with their other students before taking them on. Ask what their track record is, in terms of whether their students complete the PhDs. Make sure you understand what tools you will be using, and whether they are fit for purpose (i.e., for getting research outputs), and whether there is a supportive community of users in the facility.
The plus side is that I had a great time socialy, and learned software engineering the hard way, which led to a good job offer. But 25 years on, in industry, my actual qualifications are now irrelevant to my career development and progression.
I'm sorry to hear about your family situation. Internships provide much needed $$$ to supplement the crappy stipend if you are in North America. I lectured part-time and being a TA is also an option. The teaching was one of the better parts of my grad experience. One mistake I made was not work as a free-lance dev while in grad school. I know people who did and it pays well and also looks good on the resume (also a distraction so you maintain sanity).
Be proactive about getting a job after school. Sad to say .. the primary goal during the PhD is to get out of grad school (ideally with a PhD). The old style industrial labs are in bad shape IMHO. Try your very best to get a prof job ... I went for labs but friends who went the prof route got tenure around years 4-6. I am year 8 and still have to deal with work insecurities. The good news is that non-research jobs are plentiful and the PhD gives you a leg up. My overall suggestion ... lower your expectations and find happiness. A CS PhD doesn't mean success or status these days (not sure if it ever did). Good luck!
I think that's the universities' fault - Australian unis force you to have a project proposal after the 6 or 12 months mark, and then you have about a year or two to do that project, then you have to write. There is very little time to do courses, and if you take a course, you lose one out of 3 possible time extensions. If you don't make it in time your student visa will expire (I think maximum is 4 years?) and you have to leave the country. If you're a citizen your scholarship will end at the same time. And these are good scholarships, usually about $500-700 per week.
My PhD experience was nothing like OP's or yours, much more focused, much less time wasted, much more publications too! I think our bioinformatics group's record was 12 papers in one PhD (3 first author). I had 2 first author and a few more middle author papers, one of them in Science.
(there's an obvious Soviet joke here about 3 year plans)
I really enjoyed my PhD as a time to learn and think about deep and difficult questions. Regarding employment, I think it shows that you can commit to a problem. It shows perseverance and drive. And those are good skill to have at any technical job.
in graduate school, i learned a lot...in the first year. after the fire hose of the first year, i was rather tired of courses, but still had to take 3 full-time courses while teaching and tutoring. ignoring the fact that there were almost no advisors to choose from (that you'd want as an advisor), i had no time to pursue anything being bogged down with homework and exams, which became very tedious. any time i was trying to read on my own, i couldn't concentrate because i knew i had homework and exams to study for.
i went to graduate school based upon a very enjoyable NSF REU. that was fantastic because you picked a problem at the beginning and spent the whole summer working on that as your project. it ended with writing a paper and most of us presented at conferences later in the year. it was an absolutely fantastic experience that had no parallel when i was in my ph.d. program.
and my "failure" in graduate school was even from someone who had never failed on anything. it was like hitting quicksand. i had even read up a lot on how to be successful in graduate school, but it didn't matter. i left because i was miserable and earning $15,000 a year. a mere 6 months or so after leaving i had a job paying $70,000. it would have been sooner, but i was an idiot and thought i'd go back and finish a second bachelor's since i had taken so many courses as an undergrad.
As for the bean counting: her first-author PLDI best paper is the field's equivalent of a Nature paper, and she got one in her first year.
geared towards quick cheap labor for the PI's idea.
The real reason why most PhD students work on their supervisor's ideas is different. Most students would drown in the ocean of possible ideas, would simply fail without strong guidance from an experienced supervisor. It's probably best to see a PhD as a warm-up exercise for future research. The ocean of previous research one must master before being able to do original research in mature fields is simply so large that most students can't handle it on their own. Supervisors would love PhD-students who are intellectually mature enough to come up with their own ideas and execute them to a publishable standard. In my experience, at best 1 in 5 PhD students can do this.
I used to think my own PhD work was 100% self-invented. But now, having supervised a lot of my own students, I see clearly how my intellectual mentor gently nudged me in the right direction at all critical junctions where I would have gone astray otherwise. Without him, I too would have failed.
US PhD typically last a lot longer than UK PhDs, so comparing the two is difficult. I'd say UK PhD+postdoc is a probably comparable with an US PhD.
Hmm I thought it was the other way around. In the UK PhD students rarely do work for their supervisors like teaching undergraduate courses, which seems to happen a lot in the US. When I started my PhD in the UK I was told I needed to come up with my own project from the start. I only did one paper that was sort of related to my supervisor's project, and I only did a hundred hours teaching over my entire PhD, and that was voluntary.
The other big difference between the US and UK PhD approaches is that in the UK a PhD student doesn't do any courses. Day one on the PhD is day one working towards their research project and thesis.
The above is not always true, but when it is, I view the US system as fulfilling its mission better. Whether everyone is suited to the US system and leading innovative projects is another story.
While half the PhD is about learning how to get to the solution, the other half is in learning how to pick the right problem. In terms of HN, making a startup solve a niche is great, but knowing how to grow it into a bigger space is better.
What usually happens is that after the three years (+ extension if you're lucky) is up, you don't have a scholarship any more, and for most people this means they have to find a job to support themselves, which leaves little to no time to work on the thesis. I was fortunate enough to get a teaching position at the same university, but even that was very demanding and my progress slowed to a crawl, though I did eventually manage to finish.
Universities only get paid if the student completes, so they tend to be pretty flexible. If they kick you out at the three year mark they lose; if there's indications you're likely to complete at some point, they have a chance of getting paid, so there's some flexibility here.
I came to the conclusion that ultimately the timeframe doesn't matter - what counts is that you get it done; it takes as long as it takes. A friend of mine was at it for 20 years, but eventually finished. University administration were not exactly pleased with this timeframe and she went through a lot of difficulties because of this, but a remark she made once really stuck to me: "You succeed in spite of the system, not because of it".
Caveat: Both of us are Australian citizens; I can see how the limit would be extremely problematic for international students due to visa rules.
That seems like a bizarre bit of reasoning. When I go grocery shopping, the important part is that it gets done, but that doesn't mean I want to be stuck in the store for five years. At a certain point the cost/benefit ratio becomes insane, not just from a financial point of view but academically as well.
PhDs in e.g. Physics are harder though.
Another point that is often overlooked is that if you want a good team at Google / Apple such as working on autonomous car or deep learning etc. you have better chance going if you have a PhD in similar area. I agree that a PhD in Theory/PL is much more a life of mind rather than Machine Learning/Vision/Systems which can be justified as a bet on possibility of a future payout. I know several students at Cornell who joined Google/FB after BS only to be placed in not very interesting teams and later decided to join the PhD program. I think if played correctly a PhD from a good CS school to an extent can help you avoid some of risks faced by middle-aged programmers. Especially those who do not wish to transition into management roles.
Personally I am doing a PhD (Information Science / large scale data mining for healthcare), since I had guaranteed funding along with access to a large medical dataset that would have been impossible to get without being in academia.
Results not typical (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8720640). It's surprising for me to read the author's account and not find even the smallest tidbit of the adversity and nonsensical friction that plagued my friends and I when we were in grad school.
At least the author is at least partially aware of why they had a good experience:
> I am privileged to have had a relatively supportive environment and few additional pressures. My experience is most likely to generalize for other computer science PhD students at top schools, where the funding situation tends to be good and advisors tend to give students a fair amount of freedom.
I was lucky to attend the wedding of one of my former Ph.D. students a month or so ago. At the (not all that large) wedding were about a dozen of his friends from grad school. It was a fantastic reunion, and evidence to me about the truth of what Jean wrote of finding some of the most intellectually fulfilling friendships of her life.
None of this is intended to deny that others have bad experiences, at the same or other schools -- two people having a great experience is just that: two people's experience. I have a good friend whose horrible experience as a biology Ph.D. at Berkeley led her to reject the entire <expletive deleted> field.
There's a lot of material out there that's negative about the Ph.D. process, and it's useful to hear the positive experiences side, which is (IMO) a bit less represented.
In any case, when I applied to grad school, my strategy wasn't really to apply to safety schools after the competitive schools. Instead I applied simultaneously to competitive schools as well as several companies, and decided that if I didn't get into a PhD program at a place I liked, I was going to go to industry or industry research instead.
I can say that I'm significantly more highly skilled than when I started though. Knowing that I didn't want to stay in academia, I spent a lot of time working on my transferable skills (i.e. tech).
Playing the game without having benevolent overlords is a fool's errand, but many people do not learn this until it is too late.
One of the most important lessons that can be taken away from grad school [1]: "If you compete, never leave your fate in the hands of the judges. In regular life, never leave your fate in the hands of other people."
[1] https://www.t-nation.com/powerful-words/4-things-you-can-lea...
As an aside, Vanderbilt was at the same conference. He told me how the same trend chasing and flight to chemistry and materials science departments had taken place among DFT people with high-Tc in the eighties that was taking place with topological materials now, and that this was a symptom of "(long-time sociological) problems I can't fix"
I loved writing up my papers as this was at least something I had some control over. I do agree that doing a Ph.D is an experience like no other and one I don't regret.
Also this is priceless http://haskellryangosling.tumblr.com/ (done by the blog author)
In all seriousness, it's a great time to learn how to think and get comfortable thinking. That said, there are likely many other ways to achieve this.
* An applied scientist would feel great from solving someone's important problem -- i.e. saving lives, increasing revenue and/or decreasing costs at the end of the day.
* A theoretician would feel great from solving a recognized important problem.
On one hand, the author writes enthusiastically about her side-projects / internships / hobbies. On the other hand, almost all academic remarks end with:
"Our paper got rejected / accepted at [top venue]. We felt sad / relieved."
Without any further remarks about that work -- i.e. it's all "publish or perish" no matter what.
In that way, it sounds as if one was doing research for the sake of producing papers rather than solving important problems / contributing to our civilization by increasing its stock of knowledge. Perhaps that is the sad state of the current academia.
1. (Idealized) "I/we did a great job solving that important problem."
2. (Current Academia?) "Phew! I/we finally scored another paper at [top venue]." ("And I can now graduate / get a tenure / [something academic career related].")
There is no salary progression, bonus or pension and your funding cuts off at 3/3.5/4 years. After that, you aren't eligible for any govt. benefits as you are a full time student.
In some parts of the UK £14k can go a long way, but UK PhD students definitely aren't equal to full time staff as it stands.
The pay can be higher with industry partnerships (£30k tax free!!) but this is the more usual research council level.
Although I consider it to be one of the best times that I had, in professional terms I didn't got much from it unfortunately..
To sum-up: - This is not her only project, just the main project - She has taken grad courses, doing a grad course in MIT will easily be more work than average developer do in whole year. - She had to study several research areas before choosing her main project. It is unlike I read the tutorial of currently trending distributed system Apache Spark and now I know everything about state of the art research. It is going through dozens of research papers in that domain, understanding all the concepts, identifying the gap in existing research, figuring out how to fill that gap. - You will fail several times before finding a good approach. The author have mentioned she had tried with Scala first, later switched to Python. - Even the results are good, you have to write the paper which is not trivial, and getting it accepted before getting rejected several times. - Worst case scenarios are also likely. Mid-way in the project you have found out someone else has recently published a paper. Now your work is worth-less because it is already published. Or you have found it there is an obscure paper that also outlined the approach you have taken, now you have lost the novelty factor of your paper.
TL;DR: 200 lines of some UI JS code is not same as 200 lines of new deep learning algorithm in TensorFlow.
Unfortunately, the system is also biased for the young and single and child-free. When I tried entering the PhD program, I was ready for significant income drop (I had been a successful software engineer for 10 years before). But I also had a 10-months daughter (she is almost 2 now). And this proved to be incompatible with the requirements of the job. I am not a father who neglects his family needs and focuses on the job. So I moved back to consulting, working from home most of the time.
I don't see an adequate solution for this. Of course, young and single will be preferred to survive the grind, and forcing the employers to do otherwise is unfair to them. Perhaps there is something else I can do to make a difference.
A PhD is the most straightforward path towards involvement in science that needs big, expensive, sophisticated equipment.