Hacker News Reader

Comment by david_l_lin | Hacker News Reader

I find that many of the PhD students who struggle are not prepared for the mostly self-driven nature of the pursuit, and have not had enough work experience to know how to choose a supervisor.

The statistics support this: a majority of the PhD dropouts are students straight from undergrad who performed well academically, but have never had work experience.

Finishing a PhD is as much about selecting a good PI as it is love of the science. Anecdotally I've seen many great students struggle because of lack of support from their PI, and many "worse" students do extremely well because they chose a terrific PI who builds a support system around their students so they almost cannot fail.

View on HN

I second this. I found it extremely difficult to finish my PhD 12 years ago. It wasn't because the subject was difficult or complicated but because I came directly from a Bachelor's degree into a UK MPhil/PhD programme. I remember at the beginning being sited in front of my desk asking myself: What do I do now? And every time I had a meeting with my supervisors and I asks them whether what I was doing was right/wrong, their answer was "that is great, you are doing great".

Nevertheless, I had great supervisors: After about a year of work, we decided that my work was more oriented towards what my secondary supervisor was doing, so my main supervisor took a step back and let us do our work; he still watched closely although more about "form" rather than substance. In retrospective it was an amazing experience.

Now, with regards to the (now deleted) article. I blame the supervisors but from another point of view: They should have used their network to contact people that knew about Quantum Computing. They all (including the PhD student) already had the most difficult thing: The grant. They just needed to use it.

If I were the PhD candidate, I would have looked for who were the main Quantum Computing researchers, and ask my supervisors to contact me with them. If they didn't want to, then I would contact them directly and start having an "informal" mentorship with them. Professors salivate at the prospect of having a "free" PhD student working on some of their projects, so I'm sure he would have been welcomed by some of them.

I feel that the main problem with the student was his inexperience, and his supervisor's inability to support him.

+1 one of most common mistakes for PhD students is picking a project based on research interests rather than the adviser. I believe it is relatively uncommon to speak with former students of an adviser, but this is something that everyone entering a PhD should do.

Finding a good mentor -- someone whose values you agree with and who sets you up for career success -- is far more important than working on any particular topic of interest. The world is full of interesting research topics, and very few PhDs work in the precise area of their PhD research for their entire career.

There's a world of a difference between doing a PhD with an expert supervisor (in the field) and bootstrapping it completely on your own.

Do PhD students have much choice which supervisor they can choose? Supervisors do not come in all sizes, most of the time you have to deal with whoever is out there, whether you like them or not.

I have worked within academics, not as a researcher though, and from my experience academia is not about pursuing the knowledge and sciences. That's an intrinsic motivation some researchers still might have. Academia is rather pursuing prestige, which comes from successful researchers who are guaranteed to attract grant money for projects. And this is computer science alone. Most post-docs just don't care, they are doing everything as if it's their hobby, not work. Those who care do not last long in their field. Also, students are the hardest working bunch in academia, and are paid the least. Sure, when a student is failing, it's their own fault. No one has ever fired a PI, because their student failed, why or how doesn't really matter, right?

> academia is not about pursuing the knowledge and sciences

This criticism always gets me. Just how pure do you expect academics to be? They're already not working for the same money they could be getting in industry, now they also have to eschew prestige in their own communities, or else they're not driven by the pure intellectual pursuit of knowledge and science? When you're paid half of what you're worth, you find meaning in social constructs other than money and wealth.

> students are the hardest working bunch in academia

This is an opinion often held by students and graduates who haven't see what's behind the curtain. I've found students are always shocked to find out how much work professors actually do. This is prime material for the "what I think I do, what they think I do, what I actually do" meme.

>They're already not working for the same money they could be getting in industry, now they also have to eschew prestige in their own communities, or else they're not driven by the pure intellectual pursuit of knowledge and science?

I think the common form of the complaint is that the prestige-generating mechanism has is too decoupled from the scientific advances.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com