Strong/Weak Reasons to Do a PhD in Computer Science
raymondcheng.net
raymondcheng.net
I mean I’m sure that’s all good and fine for the author who if I understand correctly already has academic accomplishments and connections to lean into with.
But what if I or John Nobody wanted to work in computational biology? Am I supposed to just start reading and than reach out to randos working in the field and beg them to let me work for/with them?
If you're a software engineer, I'd venture a claim and say that the rando route will be easier. You have a valuable skillset researchers need -- you can code at a professional level. Use that to get your foot in the door!
Another path is to join one of the many many NGS startups where you too can analyze Nextseq data.
That will give you sufficient credentials to get into a PhD program if you want to do that.
Also there's an ex-hedge fund guy D.E. Shaw who runs a comp bio group, also Wolfram and all the big tech companies have comp bio groups.
Work there, see if you like it, that may give you an opportunity to enroll in a PhD if you want.
It will probably pay less than you'd make in a regular software job but its enough to live on and likely interesting work.
No matter where you go find a lab that is generating data. Data is the key.
I particularly like the mention that a CS PhD isn't about "novelty" or "freedom", and I've found this to be a common misconception that new CS PhD students make. Another common one I will bundle in there is "making an impact on the world"; I cringe when a new PhD student tells me they chose to do a PhD because they wanted to change the world. There are so many better ways....
Edit: adding examples of ways that are less sexy, yet way more likely to be measurably impactful (in a positive way)
1. Teach high school,
2. Volunteer at your local soup kitchen (do it for 2 years -- less than half the time you'd spend in classes for quals),
3. Mentor an undergrad for a decade,
etc.
Thus, the value of wisdom is individual, and non-transferrable -- it can neither be carried "backwards over time", nor handed over to another human via a "brain dump".
The best one can hope for, is to distill personal lessons from our own experience (compute that integral), and invite others to sample it (no guarantees that it'll stick in any way, but their journey might be similar, allowing them to compute their own integrals faster, by seeing our own).