Comment by ___luigi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ___luigi | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry to bring the bad news, but the author the first comment is 100% right. Moreover, structure in academia is different than in Startups. In startups, people don't care about "names" and "prestige". In academia, it is different. In order to get your next job in academia, you need (1) recommendation letters (2) citations. Advisors usually have a larger network and experience to be able to publish papers and help you climb the ladder through their networks/recommendations.

In Industry, you can come from no-name university, and you can still make it to FAANG (or top tier companies). In academia, that's impossible. To start, it is impossible to make it to good PhD program without publishing papers in top-tier conference, MSc student in no-name universities can't afford finding advisor to easily do that. Good PhD programs will help you to join a good Lab, and usually it is through network + recommendations.

In Startup world, you can sit in your dorm room, without anyone believing in you and you can make it.

P.S. I am a research engineer, I worked in both places and that was my observations. There is no shortcuts, everything is hierarchical in academia.

Well, I think that's a bit pessimistic.

I think every Msc student at a "no-name" german university has the chance to publish a paper at a top-tier conference. Student research assistant jobs are plenty and the Msc Thesis can be real-science. Every Msc. CS program here I know has a research-option so that instead of lecture you can do research. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences and most research is more applied (and therefore more niche!) so its not easy to find an advisor for this. But in my experience even if the professor is working in a more applied setting you can push for a more basic-research, research is research. But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first, so I don't think most Msc Students see it as a priority.

As someone who went through German academia at a very high level, with a top PhD, early and lasting grant success, top-tier publications and a multidisciplinary network, but who still could not land a Professorship in Germany but had to leave the country for it, I can tell you, it is not too pessimistic what ___luigi writes.

Hierarchy is everything in academia, especially in Germany. The only way to tenure is to have someone up there already who is willing to pull many strings for you.

>> .. a "no-name" german university

We come from different places. German universities are good in average. + MSc student have the chance to work as "working students" (20hr/week) at any company in Germany. https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...

>> .. It's just hard to publish in those top-tier conferences

Hard is relative. You should also check the costs of publishing a paper or attending a conference for students from global south https://twitter.com/hadyelsahar/status/1374699909451030542

>> But you can do a phd here without publishing a paper first

I agree with that.

If academia is 100% about status hierarchies this definitely wouldn’t work. It probably won’t work anyway but if there’s anything real in the function used to judge academic worth of work then there’s potential for it to work. There are multiple ways to improve that likelihood, more money most obviously of all. But new successful research institutes are founded so it’s clearly possible. Very unlikely unless there’s a very big budget, excellent taste in selection of applicants or both, but hardly impossible.

> .. more money most obviously of all.

I would challenge this point. There are few research labs in Singapore and middle east (UAE, Saudi Arabia) where money is not a problem. I have seen many researchers fly there to build research groups, but many of them leave after some time. You can see papers coming from these groups in top-tier conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, etc) every years, but these papers come from individuals, not groups. Money is one ingredient, you need fresh blood and students to work on new ideas. You need an ecosystem for research and industry to adopt and develop some of these ideas (e.g. Standford/Google, UCLA/DeepMind, UoT/Uber, MIT/Boston startups, etc)

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