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Comment by chias | Hacker News Reader

One dynamic I experienced that also isn't in the simulation: if you focus too much on classwork early on in order to pass your RPE, it can actually be hard to find an advisor. Classwork is basically dead-end work and the more you focus on it the less you have to show for yourself when trying to convince an advisor to work with you. Your goal should be to optimize for doing just well enough to pass your classwork.

Also, random catalysmic events, like in year 4 your advisor accepts a job at a different university in another state.

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I had picked my advisor at the start of my PhD. I also had 2 backups. My pick was on sabbatical my first year. He and I agreed I'd load up on the required classes that year.

He e-mailed me right before the year ended saying he had changed his mind and didn't want any more grad students, basically dumping me.

Right around the same time, my first backup decided to retire.

My second backup passed away.

I was left no longer making "sufficient progress" and no path to do so, losing my financial aid.

sorry this happened to you, wishing you success in spite of the setbacks

Thank you! I didn't have many options at the time, having a small family to provide for, so I went back to work as a software developer. The career has been good. I regret not being able to be a professor and devote more time to research, but I also try to make opportunities for those kinds activities in other ways.

This also depends on the field. I think this is good advice in fields where grad students are primarily there to help with grant-funded research. In those fields, the course and prelim requirements are reasonable because professors need warm bodies doing work. Eg, CS.

It's less good advice in fields where grad student research output doesn't matter as much, and where students do more teaching instead. Those fields tend to make much more aggressive use of weed-out exams to ensure that they have enough young grad students to meet teaching demand but not so many older (>=3yr) grad students that they saturate advising capacity. Mathematics in particular comes to mind.

Generally, the focus here should be on: 1) Not bombing any classes (i.e. A/A- in all, maybe a B+ in one; a B or below is failing) 2) Doing very good work and trying to write an original paper for professors that you want to work with while doing just enough to get by in other classes [this is in part how you figure out who you want to work with] 3) Being good enough with the literature to pass the comprehensive exams (or, as another comment points out, have some kind of protection from a sponsor; it is not uncommon to have profs use comps as a chance to take out students they don't like for various reasons, even as small as "they do X field, which I don't like" or "they work with Y, who really gets on my nerves).

Of course there's plenty of additional ways to derail this as well, including advisor moving, advisor getting into a fight with the rest of the department, advisor giving poor advice, advisor deciding that they don't like you, etc.

It really makes you wonder if the university should just have a mechanism to "fire" a grad student rather than pretending that these events aren't simply a mechanism to "fire" someone because they didn't pass X hurdle.

If the advisors can vouch for, or strike a student regardless of their qual performance - then why not simply have an end of year performance review?

For many schools that’s basically their qualifying exam. Normally multiple professors are involved so that your advisor can’t fire you unjustly, but if you don’t demonstrate you are up to standards on the exam and your advisor doesn’t go to bat for you in their deliberations, you will fail. Normally you have a chance to retake the exam, but two strikes and you’re out.

In my program we had annual committee reviews as well as a review submitted to the program chair and graduate school of the student by their advisor (with the student providing both a self-review and review of their advisor). Ultimately, unless you’re in a sub-field with many faculty, it is hard to get an accurate evaluation from three professors. My other committee members could understand the big picture of my work but they weren’t experts on the specifics, and they were the best equipped faculty in the department to be on my committee besides my advisor. The goal is to make sure that there is a paper trail and multiple professors aware of your progress (or lack thereof), so your advisor can’t just give you the boot for something tertiary like not watching his dog during a holiday weekend.

Professors are aware of their problematic peers in the department. Even if they can’t fire them outright (tenure has pros and cons), they can steer students away from them to more supportive professors (or give you a hint that maybe you should consider a different school during your visit day). Our program chair was very good at helping relocating students who initially started in the lab of one or two bad actors.

Most depts do have some kind of official review, but it's more of a formality. I think they're also concerned about how students would react if they suggest that academia isn't for them directly. So instead they resort to more passive-aggressive or arbitrary measures.

On the other hand, not all departments are good fits with students and there's a very wide asymmetry in information between many new students and programs, even if you "do your research" beforehand, given just how specialized these disciplines are at a high level. It would be nice if transferring programs was made easier and if more departments would just agree to help students "master out" and look for jobs rather than discard them like roadkill.

> Classwork is basically dead-end work and the more you focus on it the less you have to show for yourself when trying to convince an advisor to work with you.

nearly half of my year didn't get this and had to master out when we got to quals.

You mean they passed quals but couldn't get an advisor?

Or failed quals?

Are those different things? At departments where quals have high failure rates, it's really more of an annual layoff than anything else.

In many programs, the department aims to admit far more people than will pass the quals. They need the Calculus and Pre-calculus TAs but do not have the advising capacity.

Even if everyone gets a 95% on the quals, the majority will "fail" by necessity because the department simply does not have the advising capacity for the number of TAs they need. Of course, the department typically designs the quals to these needs either explicitly or implicitly.

This is usually at least implicitly understood by the faculty, who will navigate it when absolutely necessary. For example, I've seen it happen that if a professor really needs a student and vouches for/protects them (eg because the research is computational and the student came from 5 years at Google), then the student gets more goes at the plate on quals than is typical.

Depends on the school. My program requires you have an advisor before our version of quals. Our exam was also a research presentation followed by an oral exam where you had the pleasure of doing often a painful amount of algebra on a blackboard. It was also the culture that, while your advisor could ask you questions, they rarely would unless they were helpful (maybe a softball confidence booster or simple version of another question to get you started down the right track) or leading questions for you to talk about something not in your talk. People were largely concerned about being failed by the other examiners, not their advisor at that stage.

However, we were a small department and your acceptance was predicated on at least one faculty member wanting you to join their lab. Some people moved around within their first year, but the majority stayed with the first group they joined.

er, right, what other people call quals we called prelims. our quals were a presentation of early stage work, so when the deadlines rolled around, they didn't have an advisor, or hadn't been working with them long enough to have any results.

It's funny, my CS program in US you had to have an advisor by end of your first year and your quals were basically the thesis proposal you did with your advisor.

This would be incredibly bad advice in half of Physics and most of Math. An adviser would simply not trust a graduate student with middling grades to be competent enough to work with.

I think this depends on the field. For example in CS, my advisor straight up told me multiple times to stop worry about class work. His exact statement is that "There isn't anything more that you will learn in classes that you won't learn in greater detail doing research".

His logic is that when you are doing research, you are pushing the envelope into new territory that can't be taught in a classroom. When you are in a classroom you are learning old material that is already well-known and established.

This is very true in CS. But far from true in Math and Physics where there probably is a lot of advanced learning available in classes. The few classes I had that he actually endorsed being "worth your time" were Math classes focused around encryption (of which I took 3 different ones).

But my advisor was unique because he was 100% there for the research. He only taught because the university forced him to. He lived and breathed research and that was the only reason he was in academia. He was truly passionate and worked 10+ hours a day on research, but thats why he was there. He had a very low opinion of classroom teaching.

That's not very unique of your advisor. Most researchers are there for the research, not for the teaching and it shows.

I was thinking, this sounds very much like a person with a vested interest in getting you to do more research.

Which is literally all advisors. Once you have an advisor, grades don't really matter that much except that you need to pass the class.

This likely varies from department to department. If grades truly didn’t matter, it’s simpler for professors to adopt a lenient curve.

If they do not make the grading lenient - it’s for a reason.

As a counterpoint, I knew a physics prof that would drop any grad students who got above a B average, since it meant the student had bad time management. Bad time management being defined by spending more tine outside the lab than strictly necessary.

Then again, knowing that that @£&$€¥ would drop you might make it a good plan.

IME it's more that the advisor doesn't trust the student to make it through the annual layoffs (quals culling), and only wants to invest in people who they know will be around long-term.

At least in the poor (and honestly mostly useless) parts of Mathematics. Maybe Physics is less poor.

(Fortunately I was in CS, where the research output is actually needed by society and usually not pure masturbation, so the attitude toward coursework was "do well at what you need, enjoy what you want, and ignore what you don't need or want"

Most universities do not have "quals culling" and most universities that have "quals" (not that common anymore) do not use them for culling. There are a few notorious exceptions though.

Most departments at most universities do not have it. But a huge number of departments in certain fields do.

Agree, in my program there were a couple of faculty who used impossibly hard exams to figure out who they wanted to work with.

This emphasizes how much you need to know before you even get into a program. If you don't know that much, you NEED those classes to just catch up to your peers as to understanding what the world even says about various things at a foundational level. The weight is so much easier to carry if you go in with a certain level of knowledge so that you can slack in classes if you need to rest.

This. Most grad school classes are poorly taught and the professors indifferent or discouraging to actually helping you learn. PhD students are assumed to be capable of learning these things on their own or already knowing them. If you are encountering things for the first time, you'll likely be behind.

In contrast, if you come in mostly ready to go and these classes are just refreshers, you can spend time in that class working on actual research and impressing the prof as well as not panicking if/when you realize you don't understand what's going on.

Or your advisor retiring in year 2...

Every department I've worked in mandates 2 supervisors to mitigate against this, because it's reasonably common for people to move departments, go on sabbatical or just quit. Even with tenure, life happens and people need to leave their jobs. In theory, the department shouldn't allow advisors to take on more students if they're close to retirement though.

Buddy of mine, his advisor died in like year 4.

Turkish university system solved that problem by stipulating that thesis supervision and advice duties survive retirement unless the student explicitly requests otherwise, and end only if the student finishes or the supervisor/advisor is fired (not resigned!) or dead.

Or your advisor accepts a job at a company in another state in year 2...

oddly specific

That depends on your department and your field. Even though, on paper, I had a year to pick an advisor, I worked with mine from day 1 (or day -n since he first sent me research papers and discussed ways to get started on my project before my first semester even started). My department was fairly small, though, so you getting admitted meant at least professor specifically was interested in you joining. Professors at larger schools will put on their website not to even contact them unless you have been admitted, and their departments are large enough that only a portion of faculty members are involved in admission decisions. In that case, your advisor of choice may not know about you at all before you enroll and thus you need to fight for a spot in their group among your cohort.

Ironically universities have already found a way to defeat that behavior, too:

At some places, advisors now also consider a list of students ranked by grades. I have seen advisorship being offered only to the top student in the Professor's class.

If you lack ex-ante information how and where your grade rank matters in a year, this just adds a fun new challenge to the first year PhD!

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