Comment by sndean | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sndean | Hacker News Reader

With my own disclaimer [0], a few comments:

> Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure.

This is largely true, but only if you're on good terms with your advisor and they're happy with your progress. God, I miss being able to sleep in until 2pm.

> Personal growth. ... you’ll become a master of managing your own psychology

Yes, it's definitely a roller coaster. I know what happens to your body after a month when your only calorie source is peanut butter and white bread. Depression, random trips to Canada, and more.

> Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school

No, at least, in mine and other's experience, you should go to the best school where you're still capable of being in the top ~1% of your graduating class. You'll feel like you're the best and that's almost all that matters (Malcolm Gladwell's talk [1]).

> So you’ve entered a PhD program and found an adviser. Now what do you work on?

You will not be interested in the same exact topic for ~5 years straight, so keep that mind. Try to keep it broad.

> Giving talks

Do this / practice this as often as possible. It's how you'll get hired (or not). I've had to sit through some embarrassingly bad ones, where the candidate then has to survive the next 7-hours of interviewing where everyone knows they're not getting hired. (In my experience the talk is first thing in the morning.)

[0] He gave the fields of "Computer Science / Machine Learning / Computer Vision research" as a disclaimer, my disclaimer is that I only know about experiences in molecular biology / chemistry / materials science / synthetic biology / microbiology. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc

> > Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school

> No, at least, in mine and other's experience, you should go to the best school where you're still capable of being in the top ~1% of your graduating class. You'll feel like you're the best and that's almost all that matters (Malcolm Gladwell's talk [1]).

Isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens after you want to progress to the next environment?

Is it realistic to be in the top 1% anywhere? Isn't that like being the best graduate ever from a small program, or the best in a decade at a larger one? You're not competing with a large population anymore, you're competing with someone who has passed dozens of filter steps in their lifetime and have gotten just as far as you have.

> What happens after you want to progress to the next environment?

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

> Is it realistic to be in the top 1% anywhere?

No. But you may have a higher chance of being a top student at a cheap in-school school than at Harvard.

[0] https://ideas.repec.org/p/van/wpaper/vuecon-sub-13-00009.htm...

What "graduating class"? In undergrad studies, your peers are your classmates, but in PhD studies, your peers are the global community of your sub-subfield. For feeling like you're the best, your competition will be someone across the ocean who happens to work on a topic very close to your thesis, and most of students in your department will be largely irrelevant since they'll work in a different field and interact with different topics, papers, ideas and people.

If anything, being in one of the few labs that work on "top" things in a specific domain pretty much guarantees that you'll be in that 1% of your subfield; and if your lab is weak in that (though possibly world class in other fields), then you won't.

> What "graduating class"?

Many universities have a "College of Science." Many of those universities give out some sort of "Top Doctoral Student" award, with a different name.

And I largely agree with what you say. That would be how any rational person would measure themselves, you would think. But in reality, you're comparing yourself to the people you're surrounded by, not with the smart guy in Iceland.

Nice comment. In my opinion, in reality you are not comparing to your peers. Instead, you are your peers. There is a quote, something like, you are the average of your best 6 friends. To some degree, I think it makes sense because they basically serve as your inspiration and collaborators.

Personally I would not want to attend a second-tier school/lab as a PhD student, spending half a decade with some mediocre people. I mean, if one truly wants to stand out among the peers/crowds, isn't it a better idea to do really excellent research rather than lower your peers' quality.

Currently I am in a top research group and I might not be the top 1% of my graduating class; yet, I am confident that I am having my best time to learn from my great peers.

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

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

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