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Comment by mcyc | Hacker News Reader

I am the author of this. Happy to discuss!

One thing to note is that, after I submitted the final draft of this article, the Japanese government ended the MEXT university track or is at least planning to. There was a memo, but the status is not clear.

Anyway, I had a great time doing my PhD this way, and generally I recommend that people work before a PhD and try to work during it (if you are in CS). It gives you a lot of freedom and, at least for me, it is very helpful to have more than one pipeline of work at a time so that when one slows down (as it inevitably does in research), you can draw on the other.

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Thank you for sharing.

"In essentially every other category, my quality of life has degraded significantly since returning home. "

This is the challenge. The market in the US, the salaries, etc. are significantly better/higher, but the quality of life is often worse.

And that’s quite notable since the suburbs of Silicon Valley is one of the best places to live in the entire country.

Though the author enumerated the some of the subjective things that rolled up into “QoL” and SV suburbs objectively don’t meet them (eg walkability).

Right, so if you then downgrade from the Silicon Valley suburbs with their excellent weather, strong economy, ample cultural and education infrastructure and head to some other less attractive suburb in the United States you’ve gone even further down the lower quality of life rabbit hole.

Not universally. The author wants to live in a city, so of course they're not going to enjoy living in a suburb. It sounds like they'd be better off in an East-cost metropolis like New York instead.

They could also live in San Francisco proper, too, without being far from family.

Congrats! I am surprised that you first chose Korea for PhD. As myself being Korean, I hear a lot of horrendous stories about PhD students in Korea. They tend to spend for more than +8 years. I know a few people who went through their PhDs and certainly it took +8 years for all of them. I did my PhD by the way in France and it took me 4 years.

Did you know that it could take so long when you first started your PhD in Korea? Could this be one of your reasons to move to Japan?

FWIW, the "extended" Korean PhD is an artifact of grant projects that need people to do the busy work (usually reports), and it seemed to be uncommon to have foreign students thrown into that pool. Scholarship max durations are also a limiting factor.

One aspect worth calling out as a huge plus of Japanese national institutions which the author didn't disclose is funding for compute is much better than what one would get from a Korean institution (e.g. the author's school runs one of the biggest GPU clusters in Japan).

Thanks!

My decision to start my PhD in Korea was under very different circumstances. I was studying a totally different field (automata theory, so closer to mathematics than ML) where longer PhDs were normal, I was used to the US system, I wasn't working or married, etc. I expected it to take ~6 years when I started.

I basically had to choose between living in the Canadian countryside, Helsinki, or Seoul in order to be in a lab studying what I wanted. I was already pretty into Korean culture (I minored in Korean in college, studied abroad there, and was a serious StarCraft player) so that choice was easy!

When I started looking again, I knew I wanted a shorter PhD (especially since I had a masters and industry + industry research experience), so Japan was pretty attractive.

I will admit that I think 3 years is a little short to make substantive progress outside of machine learning, so unless you come in with a lot of research experience and a good idea of what you want to work on, I think a longer PhD would be beneficial, but the opportunity cost is so high that it really doesn't seem like a great option on paper.

As a Starcraft fan, if you’ve not heard of yet, I highly recommend the Youtuber Kim Seong-Hyun (Alphago)

I had no idea they were ending this program. I had a MEXT scholarship for a PhD in aerospace engineering. In my case I tried the recommendation via school first and didn't get it even though I did have a letter from a Professor. By coincidence a year later I had an internship in Japan with another Professor and with his support I got into the program via the embassy route.

Your experience mostly tracks with mine, but in my case there was a lot of interaction between Japanese and foreign students, and international journal and conference submissions were preferred. Many courses were offered in English and those that weren't, I could do homework and tests in English. Thesis had to be in English, even for Japanese students. It was a goal of the program to also help Japanese students get comfortable with international collaboration and working in English.

In my case I stayed in Japan for a decade and it was overall a very good experience.

One note about working as a student in Japan. You can work up to 28 hours a week without limitations as you noted. You can even work remotely for a foreign company, which is unique because if you have a work visa and freelance in Japan either as your main job, or a side job, your main client is supposed to be Japanese. This is a slightly grey area, your taxes are to be paid in Japan, and the company will be "operating in Japan" so be very careful about doing this by the books.

I'll bite.

> at Google I work primarily on on-device language models for keyboards.

It's difficult to reconcile the amount of horsepower your typical keyboard, and a language mode, let alone how a language model might be useful in a keyboard (the mind boggles at the thought it starts correcting your typing).

What are the potential uses of a language model in a keyboard?

Predictive texting/typing was basically the use for language models before LLMs. Not all language models are LLMs. And yes, correcting/predicting your typing has been the main feature for at least the last decade.

swipe/glide typing?

Hi there for reference you said self funded PhDs are common in Japan. Would you hazard a guess what it would cost to fund your own PhD. I have lived in Japan before during a half year of language school, and still want to at one point in the not so far future do my PhD. And Japan would be one of the potential places on the list.

Hmm, the tuition is extremely low relative to the US. On the order or $4-5k USD/year. I am not sure how many additional fees (like facilities, etc.) there are, but I guess not many. Being self funded was common for Japanese students. AFAIK no international students that I knew were self funded, up to the tail of their graduate program when their MEXT ran out.

Now that I think about it, one thing I am not sure about is if self-funded students' travel/conference fees were covered. I would guess they are covered through a grant and it is just the tuition that is self funded, but I do not know for certain. Going to >1 international conference a year would be far more than the tuition.

So, I would guess it would cost ~10k/year to be fully self funded. You can recoup some of that cost working (on a student visa this is limited though), and your lab may also have an RA stipend (but this is both very low [<$20/hr] and counts towards your 28 hour/week limit).

My advice though is to never do a self-funded PhD. Being a PhD "student" is a misnomer. You are a research employee and should be compensated as such.

Do you see any path to doing this that doesn't go through working big tech? I'd love to finish a PhD and have at least a few ideas of what I'd do at this stage for it, but few companies are willing to sponsor this kind of thing, and many universities won't even allow you to work while in their program

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