The first two years of my PhD | Hacker News Reader

The first two years of my PhD

rachitnigam.com

85 pointsrachitnigam17 comments

Chatting with friends or their kids, I often got asked if I liked my PhD study. They tried to figure out if PhD is worthwhile for them or their kids to pursue.

I liked it a lot because: 1) I had a great relationship with my professor. 2) I published often. 3) I traveled a lot, to carry experiments in national labs, to present in conferences, to visit universities and other research groups. 4) My living cost was low, and I enjoyed my lifestyle.

As a matter of fact, in any career, these 4 things (working with great leaders; being productive; expanding a professional network; maintaining positive cash flow) can lead to a happy life.

I think it all depends on your supervisor and so it can be a real crapshoot. My supervisor was largely absent (saw him two times a year) and unhelpful. I didn't enjoy my PhD although I am glad I learned the material.

Thank you for the insight on the PhD life. I just finished my master's thesis and working on a paper submission for an automatic RCU framework.

I was recently hired by a FAANG company and wil be starting soon but I have a nagging feeling that the life path I would prefer lies in academia. I have seen a lot of posts detailing the horrors of PhDs and was surprised at the balance of your post. You lose some battles and you win others. In all cases, I bet the feeling of overcoming the hurdles with a stroke of inspiration makes the experience worth it.

So thank you for this post!

PhDs can be markedly different depending on your boss (advisor). They are also very different from America to, say, Europe.

In which regards do they differ in the US vs. Europe?

Many PhDs in America expect you to be self-supporting, so you have to take up a loan. I believe the practice is explicitly forbidden in most European countries, so you have to earn funding before starting your research (I could be wrong on this, especially regarding the social sciences). PhDs in America also last way longer, 6+ years vs. 5 years max, generally 3 or 4 in most of Europe.

Also, and this is veering into anecdotal stuff, PhD students in Europe tend to be fresh out of university, in their early to mid twenties, and their life is still a bit of a mess in many aspects, much of it due to their being in the middle of a PhD with a close and looming deadline. Their American counterparts tend to be more stable and 'adult', have a spouse and kids, maybe partly due to the fact that they start later and take longer.

There are other aspects such as many American labs being much larger so the PI can become some sort of distant god-like figure that you hardly ever meet. Of course all of it is a huge generalization from my lived experience and that of people I know, so other people should feel free to chime in and correct what I've said.

Some things don't change though - everyone is underpaid.

> Many PhDs in America expect you to be self-supporting, so you have to take up a loan.

This is not true in America, at least not in the sciences. I've never heard of a reputable computer science PhD program in the United States that didn't wave tuition and provide a stipend for its students. Additionally, all of the of the other PhD students I've met in the sciences have a stipend from their program. Sometimes those stipends have strings attached, like teaching requirements.

I am currently doing a PhD in Europe. The duration of 3 or 4 years is only really true for hard sciences/engineering, and can be much longer in other fields.

The self-support part is not true for the UK at least - I got admitted to the program but did not get funding, so I could have taken a loan. In Germany, I am employed as a 'research assistant' during my PhD, and while underpaid compared to FAANG (or other tech firms), my salary is around the median wage.

I don't think you have a great grasp on the PhD process in the US

A vanishingly small number of people are paying for their own PhD in the US. You are expected to be _funded_ though. Most programs give you 1-2 years of guaranteed funding (either through research or teaching assistantships) to give you time to find a PI if you didn't start the program with one and apply to grants. Having to secure grants is much different than paying your own way.

Most PhD students are either directly out of a bachelor's program or worked, maybe 2 years, in the field they want to do a PhD in. They're still most definitely in their early to mid-twenties. Are you thinking post-docs?

Length of stay is really dependent on your field of study and your specific work. I have friends who took 3 years to do computationally focused doctorates and some who took 6 years to do biology focused ones. You simply cannot make living things grow faster through sheer force of will.

I guess my last note would be that there's a reason US biology/biochem/bioME PhDs are paid a premium over their European colleagues internationally. And that's probably related to time spent getting their degrees and the depth and breadth of their experiences in the process

Like I said, this is my (limited) experience and that of people I know. It was also a number of years ago. But good on you for taking the time to correct me.

>there's a reason US biology/biochem/bioME PhDs are paid a premium over their European colleagues internationally

Are they though? In many academia institutions wages are fixed.

The vast majority of STEM PhDs are not staying in academia. The handful of recent grads I know who did stay in academia are, as I would put it, in academia-lite. They're in industry and privately sponsored positions or institutes, that pay quite well. Take a look at, say, the Broad Institute at MIT or the Allen Institutes in Seattle. Both are large, academic institutions that pay industry competitive wages.

Oh, then if you're counting industry PhDs I'm not sure how your argument about Americans getting a premium is that well-founded. The US (like many Western countries, but to an even greater extent) has a very strong NIH syndrome, and Europeans themselves are often taught endlessly to sell themselves because they're not assertive enough in their presentations, CVs, SOPs, what have you.

And of course there's the matter that most wages in Europe in the qualified labor force are way lower in general than their American counterparts. I've always thought it was more or less due to research being underprioritized in Europe but maybe that's about to change in the light of current events ;-)

What's your goal? Do you want to be a professor or just want to do research? A PhD depends highly on your advisor.

“ I kept feeling that the OCaml codebase was slowing me down so I rewrote Dahlia in Scala and implemented memory views.”

Wonder if that’s because he was more familiar with Java? OCaml appears to be a simpler language than Scala.

Author here.

- not really. I have a bunch of experience writing ocaml. I wouldn’t ascribe any good technical reason to this. A lot of research prototyping is finding something you enjoy writing rather than finding the optimal thing to use. Often you’re the only person working on it over the course of many years.

Seems pretty standard -- expect more of the same :-) Congrats on the PLDI paper!

Interesting to read about your experience, thanks for sharing!

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