Things not to say to a graduate student | Hacker News Reader

Things not to say to a graduate student

jbdeaton.com

47 pointslquist49 comments

There are much tougher things than to be a grad student. Everyone who is working hard at whatever they are doing deserves the proper respect, and so does someone working on a thesis. But, I dislike the tone of this article. It makes it sound like grad students are somehow special and deserve special treatment. This is simply not true. If a person is corteous when asking a question, that should be enough. If the receiver of the question can't be bothered, that is an entirely different matter. If you are a grad student, people who have gone through the same may ask questions that you might be more comfortable with, but you should not expect that from everyone or anyone in particular. As long as you think that you "deserve " to be asked appropriate questions about what you do, you are still nothing but a kid inside. And if this comment stings you, it should be food for thought.

Seems a little harsh. I don't think he ever advocates being rude in response to such questions, merely explains some things for people to understand. As someone who just got accepted into grad school this is actually helpful for me to send around in a light hearted way to people who don't have any idea what it's like so they can understand better.

That's the same thing that I thought as I read the article. In fact, to me the article comes across as having a slightly whiny tone. Sure, there are questions that may not be the most pleasant to hear or answer or may even seem ignorant, but I doubt very much that that is exclusive to grad students. The author seems to have lost sight of the idea that these questions, even if they are not perfect, are often just intended to be a polite way of displaying interest. If somebody asks "When will you finish your thesis?", why take that as an annoying question? It allows you to say whether your research is going as expected, whether you've encountered strange hurdles along the way, in the research, in writing the thesis etc. Or perhaps things are moving swimmingly and you can proudly say you're going to finish much sooner than anticipated.

Those questions could be construed as annoying, but I don't think they're worth any special consideration over "when will you find a girlfriend?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

I think this is a very useful principle to ponder. In this situation we should strive to ask appropriate question, but not expect others to succeed in this.

As some of the other commenters have said, some of the language here is a little strong, but it does do a good job covering the nature of grad school - people do seem to think that it's like undergrad (likely because many of them know what that's like). It's not, it's really more like an entry-level professional position (where you have to pay a huge chunk of your salary back to your employer for professional training); it's highly entrepreneurial and self-directed, so yes, you can take off holidays, and you can have a life, but you're still responsible for finishing your research before your funding runs out, and that may well involve a fair number of nights and weekends. You do need some smarts to pull it off, but mostly you just have to love it enough to forgo higher income in industry while you do it (at least in CS). Here's to grad school!

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

It makes me seriously sad when people say that their occupation takes all their time, they have no time off and no time for what we call "life".

This is a sad state of affairs. We all should be working 40 hours weeks and take the honest time off for the remaining 128 hours in that week.

(The most bizzare thing is when it happens in education. Come on, children are supposed to play and read books and play computer games and just slack off. They are not supposed to work long hours. Who set this up?)

I know plenty of people who refuse to work more than 40 hour weeks. They'll never be renowned for their research, and they're not likely to get rich.

If someone wants to become "great", it almost always comes at some expense to their personal lives; if this is a trade-off they're willing to make, all the power to them.

As far as children go, I'm not concerned with the typical number of hours they go through (in the U.S.) in their education. You really think it's too much? Look at the typical 17-18 year old out of High School and see if you're satisfied with their knowledge/understanding of things.

I don't think so. We should find a way for people to become great without sacrificing their lives. Why? Because we want everyone to be great. And we can't have everyone sacrifice their life. It makes no sense if you look at it from this standpoint.

"Look at the typical 17-18 year old out of High School and see if you're satisfied with their knowledge/understanding of things."

That's because education doesn't work. You can make them "study" 80 hours weeks and they will not know or understand anything. They don't have time for that! They have to study.

The only way to understand something is to relax and see the big picture. You can't see the larger picture from inside the treadmill.

Do you think hyper-specialization could enable this?

I believe making everything simple, accessible and easy to understand can enable this. As opposed to knowledge enclosed in arcane tomes in the library only accessible to those in the inner circle.

> We should find a way for people to become great without sacrificing their lives. Why? Because we want everyone to be great.

I don't think you are actually expressing a coherent desire. To paraphrase the villain in The Incredibles: "If everyone's great, no one is."

I disagree. Suppose you increase the baseline “greatness” of humanity on the whole, so that the average person compares to the greats of the past, and the greats of the present are greater still.

This is horseshit.

You really think it's too much? Look at the typical 17-18 year old out of High School and see if you're satisfied with their knowledge/understanding of things.

You know, I don't think that's an issue with how much time they are or aren't spending studying, at least from a nationwide perspective.

some people would honestly rather be thinking about advancing the sum of human knowledge. for those people, an academic career is an outlet.

> (The most bizzare thing is when it happens in education. Come on, children are supposed to play and read books and play computer games and just slack off. They are not supposed to work long hours. Who set this up?)

I'm sure you want to hire the people who spent all their time slacking off?

Some things just take a lot of work. Almost no one is born into the world with an intuitive understanding of everything. If you want someone to have this understanding, those people are going to work their asses off. If they enjoy it, why are you judging?

I don't hire children. Neither should you. Children should be playing and reading and slacking off. That's what they are supposed to do.

You'll never get the intuitive understanding by working your ass off. It doesn't work that way. Working your ass off is like writing code by copy-paste. You save some time, and then boom!

> You'll never get the intuitive understanding by working your ass off

Maybe this is true if you're a savant. I'm not a savant. Everything that I really understand has thousands to tens of thousands of hours of practice and study behind it.

I'm not sure if I'm a savant/genius or if I just disagree. I've never managed to really grasp anything except by getting an intuitive grip on it, and all my research comes from that level. Yes, there's a lot of hard work involved, but there's also a diminishing returns curve where you slope off to the pub and try to just casually think about what X really is underneath all the math and abstractions.

you might be a genius! usually with me, there is an afternoon of "oh, okay, that's the idea I get it" followed by a day of happy implementation. then, a sad day of "wait, what's going on, what's wrong with my intuition" followed by perhaps a month of slog.

sort of like when I'm learning from a textbook. you read a section, say "oh huh cool okay", do one or two of the sample problems at the end of the section and say "neat". then, you flip to the chapter exercises and spend the next few days asking "oh god why".

I still have to put in all the hard work, but I actually manage to get an intuition from it.

>If they enjoy it

That's a big "if."

I take issue with the position that leisure time should not be part of people's lives. Especially the notion that school should be set up such that students cannot have leisure time and be successful. If someone wants to make that sacrifice, more power to them. But it shouldn't be required or expected just to achieve/maintain a comfortable life.

I'm not saying that leisure time should not be part of people's lives. Do you want leisure time? Take it! Do whatever you want.

Many people don't want it though. They would rather be working. Don't be angry when they have more success than you! They work more than you do.

I consider the "run the treadmill by choice", "want leisure time - take it, loser" attitude is actively poisonous to quality of your life in the long run.

The median result - you'll end up alone and not very much successful.

A friend was telling me that his kids' school (his kids are 5 and 7) has decided to give out extra homework for all students, a minimum of 4 hours per night, to help them get used to the workload as the progress through their education. I fail to see how this sort of practice helps create productive citizens. A lot of people I know were burnt out on anything that required reading, science or math before they even graduated/left high school. Education as we know it is no longer pushing society forward, it is holding us back in a very serious way.

The problem with we all have slightly different or even evolving meaning behind words like "occupation", "life" and "time off".

I have had time off when I wished I was working on something awesome.

I have been working when I wished I had a life.

I have been in a place when I thought I had a life but I remained perpetually unsatisfied and even unhappy.

I have had an occupation when I saw it as my life and enjoyed it more than the traditional meaning of "time off".

All this is okay because by nature, we seem to be chasing different things at different times of time. I just think your post takes a bit too simplistic view of life.

It makes me seriously sad when people say that their occupation takes all their time, they have no time off and no time for what we call "life".

It's not necessarily mutually exclusive. All the grad students I've known tend to find plenty of time to socialize, if they want to. They just think about schedules in different terms than most people with jobs. A grad student will have some sort of deadline (a paper to submit, a conference to prepare for, etc) and won't hesitate to spend an entire holiday working on it. But then when it's done, they'll throw a party or go camping or whatever, and they'll still take out time here or there for dinner/movie/exercise/etc. along the way.

As a grad student in chemical engineering, I'm not sure I entirely get the joke. I can answer both "How is your research going?" and "How long until you finish your thesis?" At least at my school, there's a general plan that most students are expected to follow to get their degree.

Progress must be reported to receive additional funding, so I can certainly explain the same to anyone that asks.

So, don't talk to you about your PhD at all? I understand someone would expect his close friends not to ask those questions, but you can't seriously hope the average people will know what to tell you. You could just ignore the "wrong" question and answer it properly:

a) When are you going to graduate? - I can't know for sure, but I hope it will be in two years or so. b) Do you have such and such holiday "off"? - No.

And no matter what you tell me, I can not accept you saying that "you must be so much smarter than me" is offensive. Even if I don't like hearing that myself.

It seems that to satisfy this person, all I have to do is compliment their work ethic, ask when they're hoping to finish, ask if they are tired of pursuing degrees, and confirm that they have no free time.

You should read more closely.

Don't ask when we're hoping to finish. Research is not a course, it's a job. It's like asking, "when is your start-up's IPO?"; it makes a lot of assumptions and implies your career is a paint-by-numbers affair.

Don't even talk to us if we seem like the kind of kvetchy grad-student who bitches about having no free time. Maybe it's just that I'm at Technion instead of some American university where everyone's a careerist workaholic, but over here many grad-students do have lives, at least until we actually get into doing our thesis. We know there are no new professorships, without illusions, so we're a little less hasty to finish.

I think he read it just right.

Part of being an adult in the real world is handling questions and issues that may make you uneasy or just make you say "what the hell?!?" inside your head. Your mission is to suffer the fools gladly or gently educate them, not publish missives about how special of a snowflake you are and how you should be treated.

It's a big world out there and we're all unique snowflakes.

"Landmines"? Seriously?

Personally, I like learning about what other professions are like, and how to avoid asking questions that make me seem ignorant. I would love to read more articles like this from people in other oft-misunderstood occupations.

I don't see the problem with educating a general audience through a blog post in addition to doing so in one-and-one conversation.

A PhD is a three year programme of study. I would certainly assume that every PhD student at least has the intention to complete it in three years. Some will take longer, but this isn't desirable because the grant money won't continue to pay you after the three years are up. Some unis even have hard deadlines of four years - you can't submit after that. The finish date is therefore likely to be important to the student and therefore is a natural and logical topic of conversation. The only assumption and implication here is that you do intend to complete. If you don't then you probably shouldn't be doing a PhD. Even as a post doc, when your research really is your job, people will still ask you when is the funding completion date for each project you work on, when will you submit papers, etc.

Where are you that a PhD is a three year programme of study? It's absolutely not the case in the United States that a PhD is expected to be completed in three years, and a hard deadline of four years would be exceptionally tight.

In Europe and Australia, a PhD is commonly a "three" year program. I put "three" in quotes because the truth is closer to 3.5 or 4. This is still very short and oddly specific to North Americans where a PhD is nominally a 4 year program, but in practice is more typically 6 (depending on whether or not you do a masters first). It is not unusual for it to take 7 or 8 years. North Americans are not being slow or lazy, they come out of it with far more research and teaching experience and are generally far more capable than the equivalent overseas. It is sort of like already having one postdoc under your belt.

Wow! Not remotely close to my experience. I don't know anyone who's finished a PhD in 3 years, and know a few who have gone on 7 or 8 years (fully funded). My perspective is US-based, mostly with MIT/Harvard PhDs.

You should probably qualify your statement, because I don't know what country/context you're speaking from.

This may be true for some fields in some countries at some universities, but it is certainly not the norm for, for example, Computer Science in the United States at any school I know of.

"A PhD is a three year programme of study. "

That might be the case in the UK but not the U.S. 4 years is closer to a minimum here than a maximum, and some fields (e.g., history) it may be ten years or more.

For people downvoting this: This is correct in the UK and judging from the spelling, that's a good guess for where billyjobob is, despite the Texas sounding handle.

To avoid downvotes, billyjobob should avoid making dismissive generalizations that are trivially shown to be untrue. This detracts from the conversation. What billyjobob should have said was, "In the UK, a PhD is..."

A PhD is a three year programme of study.

And now a lesson in international academic culture.

In European-style universities, you do a Masters of Science first, followed by a PhD. The MSc might take 2 years, then the PhD another 3. This leaves you with 5 years of postgraduate studies before you're "done" (or rather, before you have to "up or out" into a new position).

In American-style universities, you do a 5-year PhD (median is more like 6 years for certain fields where actual experiments take a long time). This will involve roughly two years of coursework equivalent to an MSc, followed by a "qualifying exam" called "quals". This exam could be either a research/engineering project or a series of actual paper exams.

Quals, or passing your MSc, is a very important time in the life of a graduate student. It marks the full transition from "student" to "worker". PhD students past quals are only nominally students, and in fact will only take courses at very advanced levels of knowledge and only to help them with research. MSc/pre-quals students still have a coursework requirement, but it's already getting more research-focused and less heavy than an undergraduate course-load.

As a founder, I would be so depressed if everyone around me was too doubtful and embarrassed to ask if I would ever be successful. However, I can satisfy this additional restriction by asking in what manner you hope your doctoral research to terminate or if you intend to pursue it perpetually.

Additionally, the odds of degree completion are much better than that of an IPO. I might put successful IPO (as opposed to the desperate fund-raising kind) and a feature article in the New York Times, possibly a Nobel, on about the same level. Most doctoral candidates finish their degrees in a timely manner; most of my friends with them have had theirs since about age 29-32.

If you have lives, then I can ask when you take time off. The original article suggested there was not such time. I don't think the restriction of not talking is realistic given that the original article assumed two people would find themselves in a conversational setting with time to talk.

As a former graduate student who M.A.'ed out of a Ph.D. program, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for people at the C. Phil stage of their graduate career. By the time a grad student qualifies, they should be well-aware of the current exploitive state of academia. Grad students at this stage of their career are treated as cheap knowledge labor by professors who are either motivated themselves to achieve tenure, or simply to do as little of their own work as possible. They are severely overworked and underpaid, and in STEM disciplines generally have all the knowledge and training they need to live a very comfortable life for themselves in private industry, instead of propping up the comfortable lives of their advisors. More and more, as publication platforms democratize, the knowledge academics provide has as much of a chance of being recognied or adopted by industry and even academia if it were blogged as if it were submitted to a scholarly journal. And let's not even get started on journals, which have their own litany of unresolved issues that endanger the true furthering of knowledge (in a word, Springer).

So grad students make peanuts, professors do less and less work as they age; fewer and fewer professors retire, and more and more unnecessary administrators demand a cut of the budget. Academia is broken in a way that would be very entertaining to someone like Karl Marx (who was, ironically enough, an awful scientist). The means of production is being exploited by those who have the power of prestige, budget, and the rather arbitrary ability to tell you whether or not you can graduate. This system is a lot like indentured servitude, except there is no set period of indenturement -- a committee arbitrarily decides whether they feel they have gotten enough cheap work out of you, whether they have gotten their names on enough papers they did minimal work on, etc. I've seen this take a lot of good people's lives. You can actually see what fatigue, hopelessness, and sunken costs looks like on an person's face when someone asks them what "year" grad student they are, and it's revealed that it's been eight or more years working 80 hours a week and living off of ramen, going from department to department in search of free pizza.

So being a doctoral candidate is in many ways like being upside down on your house. But it's been this way since I was in grad school from '05 to '08. So for people who are just starting out, make a plan for a master's and run. The real world is scary, but what's even scarier is finding out you went to grad school for 8 years just to end up a post-doc, which is -- surprise! -- exactly like grad school, but with a relatively meaningless title after your name. And that's what will happen, because baby boomer professors simply refuse to retire. They like the prestige and the money, along with the platform to pontificate, which they are so used to having by now. Then you realize why associate professors are so desperate for tenure, and by that time, it's really too late to change careers. You will be mired in a bad deal, generally unrecognized outside of your discipline, and continuously exploited by university administrators. Your only choice will be to take part in the exploitation and continue the cycle.

Sorry for the rant. Get out while you can.

Great post. Could you please email that to myself 5 years ago?

This spoke the hearts of many souls, myself included. Thank you for writing this.

Timid. Questions you really shouldn't ask a grad student:

1. So how come you don't just get a job?

2. When you graduate how long will it take for you to pay off your student loans?

1. For a PhD student, doing graduate research and teaching usually is their job.

2. PhD students in science or engineering are paid to do their work, should not require additional student loans to complete their PhD, and almost always do not.

Well yes, which is why those are stupid questions that make us facepalm.

It's all invoking the #1 way to offend a grad-student so much we sputter: imply that we're children who refuse to ever leave college.

In Australia, PhDs are bounded by government funding.

You have 4 years.

5, if you count the qualifying Honours year you'll need to complete as an undergraduate.

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