Reimagining the PhD
nadiaeghbal.com
nadiaeghbal.com
Spending time doing independent learning, even if you have given yourself some structure, misses some of the important things you get in a PhD program. Your advisor guides you, but they also challenge you. They hold you accountable. Some people may be able to challenge themselves, but most people don't have the necessary experience to know the difference between a "cool hack" and novel research. Your advisor has more experience and can tell you what is worth pursuing. Plus, to complete a PhD you have to do all the requirements- even the stuff you don't like. A self-structured independent study program is probably going to be light on the stuff that you don't find fun.
There are a lot of downsides to doing a PhD, and I'm not saying that it's for everyone. Independent study is fine. But I'm going to look skeptically at anyone who thinks their own independent study program is the equivalent of a PhD. I would probably be less skeptical if their independent study resulted in publishing a few peer-reviewed journal articles. The title of PhD doesn't just signal that you are capable of learning, it's also a signal that you can work within the current research environment, have your work accepted by other experts in the field, and in general just do a bunch of "intangibles" that aren't signaled by you working on your own.
That being said, I'm not sure that your experiences are typical. HN regularly has commenters and posters that have been disappointed by their forays in academia. One recent example was posted only two days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740833
I imagine that a good PhD program is, by definition, likely to be beneficial. Probably above "independent learning" by leagues. However, it's worth considering what an average-case or worst-case PhD program looks like. Those may not compare as favorably to "independent learning".
My theory is because of all the opportunities. At least in CS, there is no problem in finding the job with "incomplete phd", and such jobs usually have a much higher salary than PhD stipend. This means that if you don't like PhD, you just leave -- and income increase associated with such action makes it really simple.
From what I understand, this is not the case for non-CS PhD specialties.
Most PhD programs are small, and most advisors aren't famous academics. They are generally good people, but there are a few wackos (that's why it's important to have a few conversations before picking an advisor). The "typical" PhD is probably glad to be done, but isn't chomping at the bit for a second one. Nearly all will admit to stress during the program- with qualifying exams, comprehensive exams, and proposing/writing/defending a dissertation, you're bound to feel stress.
The jokes about being a "grad slave" are pretty common, but an advisor delaying a student's graduation because of the cheap labor is much less common. People claiming to be a grad slave to cover up their slow pace are probably more common. If a student actually has a strong case that a professor won't let them defend, then the word usually gets out and that professor will have a hard time finding more students (more reasons to have lots of conversations before choosing and advisor and committee).
And I definitely don't think that the peer review process is perfect, but it is more rigorous than publishing a blog post about something you learned. Not publishing isn't a deal breaker, but it's evidence of doing something. I trust the research skills of an M.S. that has a couple peer reviewed articles published more than an M.S. that has claimed to have done a self study program but has nothing to show for it.
Different pros, different cons, different approach, different result. Still get to learn interesting things, still wind up wandering through nifty spaces.
In my corner of physics, a PhD just doesn't work as a credential: it cannot be used to impress anybody in industry because my field has no near-term applications. What matters is the PhD process, a period of relatively stable funding where you can focus on learning and research without interruption. Some people even fight their advisors to get their PhD degree later, because it marks the end of that stable period and the start of the rat race for postdoc and faculty positions.
In other words, the value of the PhD is entirely in the space it gives you to think about something you love. Bickering over who deserves the title of PhD seems to miss the point.
Both Cambridge and Oxford will consider works of their former undergraduates for PhD's, and arrange formal defences.
This seems like an entirely fair system. Some people end up doing real research without having participated in a PhD program, and it seems natural to then let them defend that as a thesis.
I suspect that most people commenting are assuming that the system they are most familiar with is universal, including the author of the article.
At Yale, an embarrassing situation occurred: he had been hired as a postdoctoral fellow, but it was discovered that he had never received a Ph.D. While he had submitted an outline of his work in reciprocal relations to the Norwegian Institute of Technology, they had decided it was too incomplete to qualify as a doctoral dissertation. He was told that he could submit one of his published papers to the Yale faculty as a dissertation, but insisted on doing a new research project instead. His dissertation, entitled, "Solutions of the Mathieu equation of period 4 pi and certain related functions", was beyond the comprehension of the chemistry and physics faculty, and only when some members of the mathematics department, including the chairman, insisted that the work was good enough that they would grant the doctorate if the chemistry department would not, was he granted a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1935.
More generally a common statement of work being worthy of publication is that it be "new, correct, and significant".
Good research universities insist that their new assistant professors be actively publishing. Since not all of those professors have much success publishing, there do tend to be openings.
In some fields, people with good publication records can find jobs.
Some of what helps for a career as a professor: (i) Have teaching well enough organized that can do well teaching large, popular sections -- this teaching productivity helps the finances of the university. (ii) Be able to get research grants -- this also helps the finances of the university. (iii) Get a reputation as a leader in a popular field and, thus, contribute to the reputation of the university, which helps the university get gifts and, thus, also helps the finances of the university. (iv) Be successful at producing Ph.D. students that get good jobs. (v) Do well serving on committees. (vi) Don't be mean to students. (vii) Avoid politics and hanky panky.
For the OP, she (a) is finishing a book and (b) has been successful getting research grants. If the book can be judged to have content that is "new, correct, and significant", then she will have met the requirement "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". In that case she may be well on her way to a Ph.D. in some good research universities.
There is an example: In the field of computational complexity in computer science, an algorithm that has polynomial time complexity is regarded as a good algorithm. This definition was from J. Edmonds. IIRC he had been a graduate student at the University of Maryland, left for a job, and published his research on network flows. The story is that, then, some of his former professors at the University of Maryland approached him and suggested, essentially, that if he took his papers, put them in a stack, and put a staple in the upper left corner, then they would accept that stack as his dissertation and grant him a Ph.D.
So, the story in the OP is not a fully new or strange as a way to get a Ph.D.
Colleges and universities like their professors to have Ph.D. degrees if only because that helps with accreditation.
When I was finishing my PhD, my advisor pulled out his dissertation to show me what it looked like. It was literally his papers sandwiched between the covers.
(Edit: formatting)
If you're lucky you publish 2 - 3 papers in your PhD career along a similar topic. Stick those in and coheretize them with an introduction and a conclusion.
Those whose fields are less productive or who are in groups which don't publish very much will have a harder time getting their final bit written...but it isn't exactly supposed to be easy.
Albert Einstein was not even working for a university when he developed his general theory of relativity. That only happened after he published some ground breaking papers while working as a patent examiner (1905). The university where he studied a few years earlier wasted no time awarding him a Ph. D. for that.
The point is that a Ph. D. does not have to be a prep school for wannabe researchers where after a few years some committee decides that you've done at least the bare minimum but an acknowledgement that somebody is a researcher by their peers for work they've done. Many universities have honory doctorates for this but focus too much on nurturing their own students to a PhD. instead of reaching out to their former students and looking at what they have done.
E.g John Carmack dropped out of college but his work in 3D algorithms and moving that field forward technically is undeniable and I can't really think of many people more capable of speaking on that topic authoritatively. I could imagine that being worthy of a PhD. Likewise there are many others that busy themselves with OSS work, standardization, ground breaking algorithms, etc. that are producing lots of written work, patents, standards, etc. that are recognized authorities in their fields that don't have PhDs.
I happen to have done a PhD. the more conventional way (i.e. straight after my Msc.). Since getting my PhD. 16 years ago, I've gradually moved away from doing research. At this point, I've not published anything in ten years and would definitely not call myself a researcher. I can't deny a certain level of impostors syndrome. I'm certainly no Albert Einstein.
Suppose, I have a solid dedication, can allocate time for studying at home (20-30 hrs / week), have passion and brains for research.
1. Are there any universities that support distance PhD in Pure Maths? Also, I can visit a university regularly (a few times a year).
2. Or is there a way to do research somehow independently from a university (for my maths I do not need Hadron Collider), but have a mentor, reviewer (I can pay for their service)? Or work collaboratively within a group? Can such research, if it is on the level of PhD, allow some institution (Cambridge?) give me a PhD degree, as a rule not an exceptional case?
As you point out, sometimes enrolling in a PhD gives you access to a well-equipped lab that is necessary to do the work. Most research in the physical sciences requires that kind of set up. I am in the social sciences so it's not a lab science. I could have written the papers I am writing in my garage but I don't think that the experience would have been the same as being a PhD student.
By the way, at least in the US, there are a lot of research staff that works on research projects and publishes without having completed a PhD program. They probably have more knowledge than some PhD in the same field.
Finding a good mentor will be tough if you cannot commit full time. Advisors basically have to decide which students Will have their limited time for mentoring.
So you’re competing with full time students who often have no family and willing to work every waking hour of their life.
I think going part time route will depend on how much more productive you think you can be compared to other PhD students.
If you want to learn mathematics, you don't need to have PhD. If you want to go through the academic career line, you need to dedicate much more than part-time-job equivalent.
2. I want to explore some topics in depth, contribute, and get regular feedback, mentorship - basically, have an advisor.
I do not want to stay in university, fight for places there, I do not need grants - I want accredited expertise that can open some doors.
It seems like there are quite a lot of people in similar situations, and despite all the progress in online education, increasing academic requirements from many employees, requirements for life long learning our advanced education system cannot support different paths to accredited degrees and research.
A handwavy version of the scope would be
1) core coursework, which makes sure everyone has the same basic competence across a range of topics deemed important
2) comprehensive exams (but vary wildly by program) - the intent here is to set a bar everyone must pass to demonstrate the competence in (1)
3) seminars/journal review groups, etc.: group activities typically which are far less formally structure than (1), but allow students to be pushed technically by a prof and each other, and expand their understanding of current work
4) semi-formal presentations (usually within your group) and more formal presentations (e.g. conferences) - you have to learn how to communicate effectively with your peers and demonstrate it
5) Advisor: one person to guide and mentor you over the course of your study, and help tailor focus and remedial study as needed. Should help you refine your thesis topics etc.
6) Committee members: A group with broader experience than just your advisor, who will periodically review your research plan and progress. May be involved in setting your comprehensives. Will definitely review your thesis and will manage your defense.
7) external examiner : this is a check-and-balance thing, so a department doesn't drink their own cool aid too much. Should be an arms length expert in your field, who will review your thesis and can spike the whole defense if it isn't up to snuff.
So things that list are difficult to reproduce in your requested scenario: a) ongoing collaborative work with peers through baseline courses and paper reviews, editing each others stuff, etc. b) non-formal interactions with committee members although if you can commit to regular campus visits you can probably do that.
If I were in a position to consider supervising a "remote Ph.D." student like you suggest, I'd be concerned mostly on how to get them really ready for comps, and how to get them the kind of interaction and face time in a group to achieve demonstrate competence outside of a formal exam. The actual thesis part would be more manageable.
I'm not saying it couldn't be done. In fact it's not uncommon for someone to go "remote" once they have finished their comprehensives; in some fields this is known as ABD (all but dissertation). At this point you've put about 2 years in and mostly focusing on your own research.
It's worth nothing that leaving at this point is also a very common way that people just never finish.
It sounds a bit like you envision doing this ABD part, really, but as noted above that's only half of a PhD program, or less than half.
Basically the thesis part is a way to hand hold you through the process of writing up independent research and demonstration you can do it properly and on your own. In recent years their has been a move in some disciplines towards paper-based thesis, actually, which I think is weaker but is a response to the demand for publication numbers.
[1] https://www.daad.de/en/study-and-research-in-germany/phd-stu...
In the USA you may be given a masters as a sort of consolation prize if you leave a PhD early, but rarely are required to have one to enter a PhD. In Canada you often have to do both, at full length. Cambridge is more like your system, but instead of a masters there is a sort of in-between course year. Etc, etc.
As it turns out, I don't have an undergrad degree either, so it is tough for me to find jobs, but I find plenty of interaction!
Also, as a person with PhD - spending 4-7 years in an irrelevant field is going to seriously hurt your industry career. (I speak as someone with PhD.) Yes, PhD is worth something - but it won't come in the place of experience.
2. For the second, you need time. On their side, even if they don't need to provide funding, they invest their time. Talk to people at a local department. You may impress them enough that they are going to work with you unofficially - but the bar may be high.
For later - what is the exact area you are most interested in?
In pure mathematics - I found most interesting topics around algebraic topology. Next year, I plan to look into homology. These fields also have computational aspect and some applicability outside of pure maths: computational homology and Topological Data Analysis.
This autumn, I finally looked a bit into category theory (applied) using this good book: https://www.amazon.com/Invitation-Applied-Category-Theory-Co..., and, unsurprisingly, found it exciting.
Regarding PhD in an applied area: I tend to agree with you, and also keep thinking about focusing more on computational / applied mathematics so that my studies could be somehow related to my work. My tech focus at work is around data processing: with interest in distributed databases and computations.
Heh, I see that distributed systems, algebra, topology, and categories are similar in mental representation in my head, they cause same kind of excitement when I study them: visualising, analysing, and playing with the systems of structures, connections, defined rules and operations :)
As with all certifications from dog-training to fighter jet pilot, PhD certifications have both false positives and false negatives. Meaning, it is entirely possible to get expert levels on a topic without getting the PhD certificate. But the reason people insist that you get a PhD is because they don't want to get into the whole argument of whether you really are an expert. Otherwise, there is no reason to get a PhD. If you can convince people that you are indeed an expert without the PhD certificate, good for you. If not, sucks to be you.
Dude, chill, you can just be an expert on a subject without giving a damn about what other people think. It’s an option. Give it a try
It does really suck to be an expert but then be ignored or shunned by the people you consider your peers.
> ... Meaning, it is entirely possible to get expert levels on a topic without getting the PhD certificate.
If I'm not mistaken, for the part that you quoted, the OP is pointing out that there are many people who assess whether or not you are an expert they are looking for base on just a piece of paper, regardless of whether or not your skills in that area is that expected of an expert.
When you are looking for a job, whether you give a damn or not doesn't matter, it's whether or not the interviewer gives a damn that matters—and I feel that most of them don't.
Sure, you are then also the world's leading expert on <extremely narrow topic of your thesis>, but most of all a PhD shows that you are able to do research.
I have a PhD (in pure mathematics), and I disagree with this statement. It does not explicitly include the words "knowledge" or "learning" but I they're implied by "depth and breadth". But a masters is sufficient to show that you are capable of learning a lot of existing knowledge (and have actually done so).
The key distinction about a PhD, in my mind at least, is that it is a certification that you are capable of inventing new knowledge.
Generally, yes, you need to have learnt a lot of existing knowledge to do that but it is not strictly required and in any case certainly not the point.
In effect, once someone has a PhD certificate, they can throw away their Masters certificate, since the PhD certificate guarantees that they also have sufficient breadth of knowledge + new-knowledge-invention skills.
In Germany they will ask for your high school diploma before hiring you as a post doc, so keep hold of that masters, you might nedd it to get a job.
The General Regulations for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy [1] at the University of Oxford require the examiner's report to confirm that:
"1. the student possesses a good general knowledge of the particular field of learning within which the subject of the thesis falls;
2. the student has made a significant and substantial contribution in the particular field of learning within which the subject of the thesis falls;
3. the thesis is presented in a lucid and scholarly manner;
4. in their opinion the thesis merits the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy;
5. the student has presented a satisfactory abstract of the thesis."
Similarly, the regulations from the University of Cambridge [2] require both that "a candidate wishing to proceed to the Ph.D. Degree under these regulations shall be required to give proof of a significant contribution to scholarship" and that their oral examination will cover "the general field of knowledge within which it falls" (not just the thesis itself).
[1]: https://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/examregs/2014-15/grftdodoctofphil...
[2]: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/so/2019/chapter07-section13....
In case you can’t tell, I’m currently trying to finish my dissertation.
> "As an independent researcher, you don’t have those constraints, so you can focus on creating whatever artifacts you think will best reach your target audience (which might also mean academic papers, by the way!). I was mildly afraid of GitHub when I started, but I learned that open source developers use GitHub repositories for discussions, so I published some of my work that way. (A few other examples I like: Nicky Case publishes her ideas as games, and Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak are writing about quantum computing in an interactive readable format designed to improve retention.)"
We can redefine progress. Current academia is conservative, at least when it comes to what counts as work and progress, what as a distraction (sadly, almost all didactics and outreach counts as "distraction" for researchers).
Personally, after (kind of) leaving academia, I can focus much more on various media that wouldn't be recognized.
There is one part of the article that is a bit confusing:
> I was also told by one professor that it’d be “expected” for me to join faculty full-time after getting a PhD, which made me uncomfortable, because I knew I didn’t want to work in academia long-term.
Maybe some context is missing, but I'm a bit incredulous that anyone would believe this statement. A professor may train dozens of PhDs over his career, and if all were expected to join faculty, then the resulting exponential growth would cause the working population to be pretty much entirely university faculty.
I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers about about how to build things that people will almost certainly never use.
So, in this end what did you do? Are you able to build product you care about now?
I've never regretted leaving academia for a single moment - that's not to say I don't have fond memories and I learned a lot there but ultimately I have always liked building stuff and ultimately that's only worth it if people get value from what you build. I knew a lot of great people in academia - but I was conscious that there was very much a game to be played (as is the case everywhere) and the game from what I could see wasn't one that interested me.
Are you sure you are not harsh on yourself? :) Maybe it was a good paper. If you are so worried, you can always ask the conference reviewers for comments; maybe they thought it was excellent.
> useless crap
You get enough "useless crap" down as knowledge and, who knows, one day you get to flying cars or the proof of Goldbach's conjecture.
NB It probably didn't help that I spent 6 years working on symbolic AI at the start of the 90's at it was becoming increasingly apparent to me (correctly as it turned out) that this fundamental approach didn't really work no matter how fascinating it was.
It probably depends on the field, also on the supervisor, and how much clout or willpower the student employs to force through their own vision. I made it very clear during my PhD that I was in principle paying a significant sum to be a PhD student (comparing my PhD salary to what I could go and earn in industry), so my tolerance for constraints was low.
Suffice to say, I dropped out of college and chased a quick buck on IT. At least on my university, it as expected that you'll get to academia, and of my friends, those who didn't went to other career path, are still waiting for a place in academia.
The problems are:
* People who do become professors have spent years training to become good researchers, and very little (if any) time training to become good teachers. They're kind of expected to be pick it up along the way, which may or may not work well.
* Some people in academia still insist on the traditional idea that university should teach academic research and nothing else, and resist including anything that aims to better prepare students (and especially PhD students) for working in industry jobs, even though the vast majority of them will.
* There are some fields where there really are few job prospects outside academia, and logically those fields should have very few PhD students, or at least make it very clear to students that they need to have a Plan B that is really more Plan A. But Professors need PhD and postdoc students as cheap, qualified labor. Some unscrupulous professors try to attract students by giving them an unrealistic view of their prospects in academia. They probably don't even think they're lying: see the previous point. This kind of thing is probably most common in fields like literature which combine bad job prospects with being very popular.
The supply of Ph.D. graduates is much larger than the number of faculty job openings, which can attract hundreds of applicants for a single position. Winning the faculty lottery is extremely unlikely.
At least that's the case in mathematics. People who leave academia are spoken of as if they are dead, which might as well be the case: most stop doing mathematics, attending conferences, keep connections with peers, etc.
This attitude has only began to change in the last decade.
We should make efforts to overcome the friction of opening up and reaching out no matter where we work. That keeps organizations healthy and sane.
That's why I registered as a member of the Ronin Institute[1], and would encourage you to do the same if you are not employed by a university!
I had a student request to work with me because he thought that gave him the best chance of getting a nonacademic job, and I didn't see that as unusual. I have a student at this very moment going through the interview process with one of the big SV companies. For that matter, I would be happy to talk if a nonacademic employer were interested in me.
Edit: Take a look at Paul Romer's bio. He worked his way up to full professor at Stanford, quit to start a business, and last year won the Nobel for his early academic work.
The paradox with mathematics is that the vast majority of math PhDs end up in the industry, but they are taught as if getting a tenured position is their only way to succeed in life and attain fulfillment.
There's no such stigma in Computer Science, for example (in my observations).
Being in academia is the main way how people can be paid to work on research. If you're not in academia and not independently wealthy, chances are you're not doing research any more - some industries have big R&D labs doing fundamental research, but usually people going to industry would be just applying the research there and providing no research output that drives the field forward.
Consider that Fermat was a lawyer by occupation, and more recently, Fourier did a lot of things other than math.
An academic job is not all research: the amount of time and effort spent on teaching and duties is huge. So why can't people employed in the industry continue contributing to science?
The problem is mostly social, I think, and it's twofold:
1)It should become the norm to not work 5 days a week in technical fields (with a pay cut, if needs be). Not "work from home"; the mental space is scarce, and switching is hard.
2)There should be no friction in being involved with academia if you are not a part of it. People not officially affiliated with an academic institution do face friction.
Ronin Institute[1] is a virtual organization that aims to address (2). As for (1), people should be prepared to enter industry from the very start, so that if they do, they would be able to confidently demand the conditions that would allow them to continue with research.
> Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own.
I think this statement is lacking some truth. We can rewrite it as:
> Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own, but it can take significantly more time and there's no guarantee of consistency (compared to someone learning with a teacher).
>some instituting is staking part of its reputation on giving the world a promise that you have some minimum competence in some field.
Yes, and part of this process is having your work peer-reviewed as novel by active researchers in the field of interest (and getting advice/corrections from them along the way to the finish). I see this as an integral part of the process.
It can also take significantly less time. I'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays.
>> there's no guarantee of consistency
There's no guarantee of that in any case.
I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field. I'm not sure, however, if college is strictly speaking necessary for that in the third decade of the 21st century.
Strong opinion, but I think that if you want to learn facts, you can learn them faster on your own. If you want to learn a new skill, you need somebody to check your ideas until you can get to a level where you can self-correct yourself.
> II'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays.
Sure, and I agree, most of the time I would prefer to study on my own instead of going to the lecture. However, it was incredibly useful to have an expert that could align my understanding whenever I was off to the wrong path; I think those were the opportunities for learning, not reading facts of off the board.
> There's no guarantee of that in any case.
Let's say that it's significantly more likely that you have practised on a variety of easy to hard problems in your field of interest if you have taken good courses from a university versus doing your own work. I believe that when you pick your own homework, it's natural to cherry-pick problems that seem simple.
> I think the main value of the PhD is being in general proximity to, and collaborating with people interested in the same field.
That would (and does) describe research divisions in industry too.
It's actually one of the worst ways of learning.
It may be anecdotal, but I've found that I learn faster and retain more while actively working on something new that compares to a lecture.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t...
So, honest question, did you guys really learn anything directly from a teacher? I've gone through high school (obviously) and university but everything I've learned has been at home by reading about it (or simply practicing to become fast enough). The lectures tended to only touch the absolute basic concepts, and the actual learning you had to do at home. Maybe it had to do with the lectures being in giant halls with little to no interaction with the prof in most cases, and that probably changes if you're doing a PhD (or just go to a different university), but even during high school I pretty much never learned anything of note directly from a teacher. So if anything, it would have been significantly faster and more efficient for me to just get a list of topics to learn instead of sitting in class.
As for consistency, my friends from a different university learned in some cases completely different things. If we compare strictly what was discussed in class or required to pass tests, there would be surprisingly little overlap. (And neither overlapped very much with actual programming.) Even courses with essentially the same topic would often differ greatly in content, as the professor usually decided which particular things to focus on. Which is completely fine I mean you can't go in-depth into everything, but this notion of consistency is kind of funny to me when the same degree from different universities (sometimes even the same university just a few years apart with different professors) can mean completely different skill sets. And then of course if your have a CS degree and want to work as a developer, from my experience you have to learn the actual programming pretty much 95% on your own anyway, as most courses focus on purely theoretical topics, and programming simply requires a lot of practice.
I've learned things after being corrected by a teacher, and then I practised on my own until the next mistake, at which point I was corrected again, and so on. It's this interaction that I find valuable, not just stating facts on a blackboard. As I have taught mathematics myself at the university level, I find that students don't really need me to read them the facts, I was more there to align their understanding.
As for consistency, I meant that you won't get to cherry-pick the topics that you like when learning on your own (or solve the problem sets that you find simple), which is a natural thing to do by the way. If you have your own curriculum and you stick to it, that's great, but I have found that when I allowed students to pick their own problems for homework, they grew weaker in some areas and stronger in others. This also didn't give me enough signal on their understanding in general, which meant that it deprived them of useful feedback.
> but this notion of consistency is kind of funny to me when the same degree from different universities (sometimes even the same university just a few years apart with different professors) can mean completely different skill sets.
Absolutely! I didn't mean consistency in terms of pushing out duplicates of the same, but consistency in terms of attacking a variety of problems in some course, allowing you to become well-rounded in your understanding. Once you reach that level, you can fill in the gaps and be comparable to a colleague that maybe had a slightly different curriculum.
Yeah, that actually makes sense. I suppose with programming (or anything CS related) I had this feedback loop much more readily available in forums, IRC or Stackoverflow etc. so I never really appreciated having this from a teacher. But outside of CS topics it might not be that easy.
That's a lot harder to get in many fields.
Reading papers and talking about them with professors has been one of the most invaluable parts of graduate school for me
No, this neglects perhaps the most important aspect of a PhD: it is an apprenticeship with a professional researcher. Learning through apprenticeship is the most ancient and still often most effective methods of learning complicated skills. It is reasonable to dispute the value of accreditation from a university -- that's a practical question, and indeed strict university accreditation is relatively modern -- but it's not reasonable to think that anything you can learn in "school" can be learned on your own.
A PhD is not required to do research, but research is (or should be) required to get a PhD, and research done outside an university program would generally be sufficient to get a PhD - there are paths to get a PhD degree mostly based on existing publications or based on a 'monograph' such as the research-based book that the OP has written. Learning and schooling alone, on the other hand, is not sufficient for a proper PhD; if you've learned everything that's known and published on some topic, that's not enough, you need to make at least some novel contribution.
not everybody has an opportunity to
A PhD program is a training process on how to become and independent researcher. * Just like the word "theory", the word "research" has different meanings in academic and non-academic settings. A research work in academia is an original contribution to a specific field that meets certain criteria of: writing and technical rigor, objectivity and completeness. It is the community of that field who judges your work on these criteria. * What constitutes a research question is a hard problem (you need to compute your cost of opportunity: time, complexity, resources and impact) that only comes with experience. Choose badly and you might end up empty-handed after many years of work. At the beginning you rely on your advisor for guidance on this but with time you begin to smell the low hanging fruits and proceed with certain "independence".
Regarding the article, it is not clear whether the OP made a comprehensive review on the relevant and related literature. Without that, no research question can even begin to be formulated. No research is completely isolated from what has been already done and it is the job of the student to identify where it "fits". If it is really a completely novel subject then I would strongly discourage the OP from working on it if she were to do it in the context of a PhD program, for her own good and sanity.
Of course, this is not to say that her work has no value (it might have even more value that what she could have done in academia) but that is not the point. It does not mean either that academics are the only people who can do research. It means that you cannot obtain a PhD without the guidance of someone who has gone through the process of obtaining a PhD and has many years of independent research experience.
I had the impression, in Germany it's "research some stuff" and you are basically left on your own. Other countries had a real program, that was like a master program just more research related.
There's no "program" to speak of, no bureaucratic application procedure, no handholding.
But the differences start even earlier: in Germany even bachelor and master students are supposed to be rather responsible individual adults, than in Anglo countries. For example it's largely up to students to attend lectures or not, there's little homework, little to do during the semester. You can decide to take or drop courses deep into the semester, then take exams. If you prefer to work during most of the semester and cram everything into the exam period, it's up to you. The opposite is called "verschult" ("schoolized") and has pejorative connotations.
Unfortunately, in some fields, the PhD has sadly become a form of lazy gatekeeping, and reimagining the PhD in those cases may just be a matter of waiting for the old guard to step down.
In some other fields, the PhD is probably ripe for reimagining, but "independence" might not be the right lens through which to think about it. For example, it would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be physicist to independently build a large hadron collider to do their research with. The institutions that make those sorts of resources even possible are inherently large/complex, and in those cases the PhD is a less sad and lazy form of gatekeeping (i.e., you need to do a set of progressively more complex stuff under the tutelage of someone more experienced before we let you touch all of our big expensive things).
In yet some other fields, which may be younger, have less of an established orthodoxy, and lower overhead to participate in (e.g., the economic/anthropological open source software type work the author does), it seems totally reasonable that a person could develop and demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities on their own and without a formal course of study. In such fields, the concept of the PhD doesn't seem as ready for reimagining as it does retirement.
Getting a PhD was a waste for me, but I loved it anyways. It's been a liability for my career and it cost me ~5 years of income. I am older than my managers, and just a misfit overall.
Why did I leave academia? Well, there was this recession you see...but that was just the first part of the problem. A huge issue was how long it takes to get hired anywhere unless you're some top notch Harvard guy, it sucks, especially when you're broke. Then there was the realization that I could immediately see 2X the income just being a software engineer with evenings and weekends to myself pretty much.
Once I did the math, my academic career was immediately over. Broke, mentally exhausted, five years behind in income, not politically aligned with typical far left policies, sick of the campus lifestyle (beer, no parking, broken glass, property crime).
For me, it was called "growing up" to leave academia. I loved writing papers and articles and was getting into books, but it just didn't pencil out as a career goes. I think only independently wealthy or perhaps the really elite Ivy League types should even bother.