Farewell to MIT
evanjones.ca
evanjones.ca
This is a very interesting point.
These days many people argue that it's useless to go to college. But one of the points of going to college is not having regrets for not having tried.
Maybe the right approach is to go, and then drop out. You know you were able to go, you know how it is inside, and then if you get out after the first year you save at least 75% of the cost.
I wonder what it means in terms of getting US visas, too, but I guess I'll just have to adapt. I'm glad to be in a position where my main interest at the moment is so location- and language-agnostic, so I don't have to stay in any specific country, as long as I can communicate with people in their preferred language.
Don't forget that PhD student in most departments get paid a stipend; they aren't accruing debt during their graduate career.
(For what it's worth, I received my PhD and soon thereafter left academia as well, for many of the reasons outlined in the article above.)
I don't like the direction the world is heading. Knowledge is not a commodity. Nor are we livestock that is being bred to be sold on The Market.
I still hold the illusion that some people go to academia with non-material motives. How could research in some obscure part of some obscure field ever increase your price tag. Yet how can we hope of any academic progress if we base our research on what the economy needs.
I studied Computer Science because I was interested in it, not because I thought I would make a lot of money.
Frankly I deplore the attitude that the only point in education is to get a job. Many (most?) advancements in science occur because of curiosity, not from perceived practical value.
I couldn't agree with you more, but unfortunately I didn't feel this way as an undergrad. While I did enjoy the field of engineering, I was ready to be a "big boy" and start chipping away at my student loans with a real income. Soon after starting my job I was blown away by the level of knowledge of my co-workers and it motivated me to push myself to learn more...about anything! I didn't come from a CS background so I didn't know much about programming or hacking, but I was always fascinated with electronics and technology so I decided to learn how to program. I didn't want to feel like a one trick pony. If I could do undergrad all over again I would have taken more classes that were far out of my realm, possibly even a dual major. I feel like I'm playing catch up, but I'm glad I realized it while I'm only a year out of college and not half-way through my career.
Further, for a large fraction of STEM PhD students the stipend only slightly dulls the loss from opportunity cost. A PhD-worthy CS undergraduate in particular is looking at 60-100k/year starting income plus raises in industry vs 20-25k/year PhD stipend. Over five years that's easily around 150k foregone post-tax (assuming for accounting purposes that the increased income would not translate to increased consumption).
Just to elaborate on my limited view of the funding landscape, in STEM disciplines I can name 5-10 major public funding organizations easily (NSF, DARPA, DOE, ONR, AFOSR, NASA, ARL, DHS off the top of my head). My uninformed guess is that there are not nearly as many organizations for humanities, and that they are not nearly as well funded, but that's just based on my hypothesized motivations for the funding (military industrial complex, communists/terrorists/whateverists etc.).
If you have any light to shed on the subject, I'd be interested :-)
To the first part of your question: You're absolutely correct, good humanities PhD programs typically admit only 10-15 students per year, all of them fully funded. My question about your friend would be what program was he in (schools in themselves aren't indicative of much)? It sounds like it might be a niche program. I'd be stunned if an Ivy had unfunded PhDs in English, History, Philosophy, etc.
The thing about humanities programs is that they're funded de facto because graduate students do most of the teaching. If you look at the class schedule for a given term, for example, you're likely to see more basic writing classes than all other English classes combined (or math classes, or...). This is because writing is the only class in the US system that virtually every college student will have to take. The result is ample funding for humanities PhDs and, in many cases, MAs.
Don't get me wrong, though. Humanities PhDs face a whole host of other problems later on, like poor job prospects, mediocre pay, and politicking like you thought only existed in the Dune novels!
Not for me. I could have probably made just as much money by now had I left with a Master's in CS back in 2005. I got a PhD because I thought research was more fun than straight development, and a PhD is the research merit badge.
Does everybody go to private universities or something? Because in-state is still under $10,000/year in most places.
I don't regret it a lot, it was only a year wasted and some good still came of it, but I regret going to grad school for my Master's. If I hadn't gone, I might have regretted that instead, but is that worse?
I heartily endorse the author's advice to collaborate. I didn't do it much as I should have as a grad student. But, in some ways, doing so is not encouraged. My last two years, I had one goal: to graduate. I knew what I had to do to get that done, so I plowed through and did it. Because you need to come up with a dissertation that is yours, you have many students who will rationally work on their own projects without much collaboration.
At least for me, working with others makes me way more productive, so I think that my collaborations helped me graduate sooner. I were to start again, I would be more proactive about working with others. Its true that to graduate, you have to write your own thesis, but that doesn't mean you can't collaborate. I've found that parts of work naturally fall to people according to their interests, so it wasn't really a problem for the projects I worked on.
This great advice is hard to underestimate.
Your collaborators/peers will be your most important source of learning. They will also form the basis of your professional technical network.
It's a very good recommendation. I remember some PhD students reluctant to work on concrete implementations of their theorized approaches. But in the long-term, the most successful ones were doing a lot of concrete works and gained experiences for an academic career and while keeping a strong feet/competence into the private sector.
- giving you empirical evidences on the practical limitations of a positive theoretical results that might have been otherwise overlooked.
- giving you new insights on which approaches (e.g. class of algorithm) are the most promising for a given class of problems.
- make explicit some assumptions you might have implicitly made in your theoretical work and check whether they can actually be satisfied in practice.
"Farewell to MIT" just seemed like such great advice, I was surprised when I found it hadn't already been posted here.