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Comment by sega_sai | Hacker News Reader

As a professor many years after the PhD my advice is to do the PhD only if you are genuinely excited / cannot stop yourself from doing research. Only then it will outweigh the negatives of difficulties of getting the jobs, somewhat low pay etc. At least from my point of view I always tried to work on what was interesting to me and what I was good at/or it was interesting to learn vs optimising what is more high profile/sexy. I don't think it is a universal advice but at least I always enjoyed what I did

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I can only second this after having advised a few students from bachelor to PhD level. The ones who do well are (usually) the ones who are genuinely excited. Not only about the thing they're doing, but in general. It really helps getting over the lows.

Furthermore, do not underestimate the importance of sheer luck. Exaggerating a bit, deep learning was just another subfield of ML, until GPU-powered DL really took off and made the researches behind the most fundamental ideas superstars. This is not a given, and it might take years or decades until it's really clear whether you're making an impact or not.

I wish you the best of luck, InkCanon, and stay excited!

Thanks!

What do you mean by cannot stop doing research? I certainly haven't discovered anything new, but I love learning new things, reading about ideas, coming up with them.

You'll do great. This will eventually turn into new discoveries if you keep at it.

That is the hope!

Why not just study a bunch of different things to Master's level then? Learning something genuinely new seems like it has a much lower return to effort.

Good question. IMO

1) There's a kind of "hard" learning you're learning a fixed, structured way from a textbook.

2) There's a kind of "soft" learning which is transmission of knowledge, which happens a lot more face to face when you're working together.

3) Then there's a kind of research learning, where you're doing something new, usually with collaborators.

The second and third are really best done in certain environments like research or good companies

I meant that you tend to spend free time on that as opposed to treating it like 9 to 5 job. and again it is important that if you do that, it is because you just want to see what comes out of your experiment/learn a new thing etc rather than because you have to publish or is forced by your advisor.

I see. I think I definitely lean towards that.

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