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Comment by nicebumblebee | Hacker News Reader

I discounted the remainder of the piece after reading this:

  Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure. Want to skip a day and go on a vacation? Sure. All that matters is your final output and no one will force you to clock in from 9am to 5pm. Of course, some advisers might be more or less flexible about it. . .

For some programs, this is untrue. Your advisor, your experiments, or your conference deadlines govern your schedule.

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I'd go further and say it's dangerously untrue. What I advise people is that your results are constantly decaying. Only a rate of progress that exceeds the rate of decay will get you out the door. Decay happens for a number of reasons:

* Your records are never good enough to completely replace your memory of what you did. The longer it takes, the more studies, readings, etc., that you will have to repeat.

* In physical and biological sciences, equipment breaks down, gets taken away, facilities get moved, etc. This stuff happens at a constant rate, and is a pure time cost.

* Technological progress gradually raises the bar for the minimum quality of some results, e.g., in computation. Even "theory" is highly computational these days.

There are also risks of career-ending accidents that can be treated as a constant risk per unit time:

* Your advisor dies, retires, gets promoted to administration, loses funding, changes jobs, gets embroiled in ethical / legal issues, etc.

* Some unexpected new result from another team or industry erases the relevance or novelty of your work.

* You get sick, have family crisis, etc.

* Burnout

Results are the wrong unit of measure. A better KPI is results per unit time. The people who look like they fucked around for 4 years then submitted a brilliant thesis were either working hard all along, or were just brilliant, which I certainly wasn't.

My then-fiancee and I were both grad students. We made a pact to meet at 7:00 every morning in the cafe across from the research building for coffee, to force both of us to stay on a work schedule.

This is the kind of advice I give incoming graduate students. The sooner you start to treat grad school like a full-time job, the better. I was in a similar boat: my wife and I were both in grad school at the same time. We worked 9-5 every day, even if we weren't going in to the office. We both finished on time, and generally didn't have a difficult time with our degrees.

He is obviously talking about computer science. Yes, I know in biology or medicine you can often only access the experimental devices during set hours and the lab may not be accessible 24/7 etc. But in computer science the schedule is mostly free, except for meetings and teaching duties but those are specific time slots not a regular clock-in clock-out job like a cashier or bus driver.

In my part of the world (central Europe), the vast majority of PhD-students is actually employed by the university they aim to obtain the PhD from. So in addition to working on your thesis you most likely have to support other research projects as well as do a lot of teaching. The model of a free PhD student certainly exists, but it is rare.

It's pretty common in ivy-leave US universities (which is what the article is biased towards). There, you only have to TA a bit and you certainly don't work for the uni or the dept.

The flip side of the coin is that if you don't have a determined rest time, you are always working. During my PhD, I couldn't feel the difference between weekdays and weekends; thus, I felt guilty on weekends when I was not making progress.

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