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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

Philip Guo's "The Ph.D Grind: A Ph.D Student Memoir" is an amazingly well-written and sage chronicle of getting a Ph.D at Stanford from 2006-2012.

http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4179982

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thanks! AMA.

(no guarantees that i'll be able to answer via text, though; maybe i'll make a video later. been trying to minimize my computering time off-hours due to increasing wrist pains ... PSA: take care of your wrists, everyone!)

Would you do it again?

no way! (i'm glad i did it the first time, though)

What made you go back into academia? Based on this snapshot of your life, it felt like academia at its best gave you an outlet to explore the things you were really interested in, but at its worst, had a ton of obvious drawbacks. Even in this book, it seems a lot of the best experiences stemmed from or started outside of the program (MSR) and the Ph.D, while providing support and enabling these things to happen in the first place, was no longer an active contributor in.

I know you had mentioned you could write a whole book on this, so I'm sure there's a lot to the story.

you've inadvertently answered the question for me, to a first approximation :) i think that academia is a great launching point for a wide array of scholarly activities that the free market (i.e., industry) doesn't directly pay for: research, public policy, outreach, teaching, mentoring, industry collaborations, etc. i can work with whatever companies i want (even ones that are actively competing with each other at the moment!) and be seen as a "neutral" party; i can share knowledge via teaching and research again with a "neutral" voice without being seen as a spokesperson for a particular company or other special interest group. you're right, though -- there's a whole lot to the story. maybe someday i'll write something up!

Thanks so much for writing this memoir! It is absolutely brilliant. Considering you had a somewhat unconventional PhD with your independent projects, what was the main role of your advisor? How do you make the most of such a situation to extract knowledge out of professors who may not have an incentive to be directly involved in your project to the usual degree?

thanks! that's a hard problem! i frame it in terms of critical path: http://pgbovine.net/critical-path.htm

if you can't get on someone's critical path, then you have to make it very easy for them to help you with very little time commitment. e.g.,: http://pgbovine.net/how-to-ask-for-help.htm

That makes a lot of sense, thanks!

It's a good read but it is also worth knowing that Dawson's group was going through changes at the time and PhD experiences are often very unique depending on the circumstances of your advisor, research, and field trends.

totally agreed! things can change even from one year to another with the same advisor. for instance, i'm not the same advisor to my students that i was last year, or the year before that, or the year before that. (i've only been at this for 4 years, and each year is incredibly different from the prior one.) circumstances change, resources change, and constraints change.

I have read this before too, it is great.

25 pages in, this is a great find, thanks for sharing.

The link is dead ?

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