So you want to do a PhD (2012)
youshottheinvisibleswordsman.co.uk
youshottheinvisibleswordsman.co.uk
This sentence resonates with me particularly. I was encouraged to choose my PhD based on love of topic rather than supervisor. I had multiple topics I enjoyed, but ended up going with a worse supervisor and a topic I thought more interesting than a better supervisor and a slightly less enthralling topic.
After a year, I quit my program.
What I learnt: even though a topic might be slightly less interesting, the people you work with (and in particular, your supervisor) can make you love something more.
(NB: Obviously I wouldn't recommend choosing a topic you have no interest in and/or hate just because you get along with the supervisor!)
Do you normally have time to chat with your potential supervisor, before deciding if you think it could work?
Had exactly that same grad school experience myself.
Lucked out after I left, and i'm doing even cooler stuff research wise in an industrial context! Building my own tech product that really require doing great Research and Dev both!
1) PhDs in the U.S. in CS take between 3-10 years to finish. Less if you are in theory and have a strong set of results off the bat that align around a single area. More if you need to build something with a long cycle time, such as create a new architecture and build a chip.
The first 2-3 years will have classes and feel a little like undergrad. After that it transitions into the free-form research as the post describes. Unlike in the U.K., typically you do not have a hard stop at 4 years, and you can find teaching assistantships or other sources of funding to keep going a year or two at a time.
The good news is that you have more time with relative freedom. The bad news is depending on your advisor, it is easy to drift for years without making much progress.
2) In all the U.S. universities I know, the standard state is for you to be employed by the university as a teaching assistant or a "graduate student researcher." This has impact on intellectual property. For example, the University of California used to ask and may still ask all employees to sign a "Loyalty Oath and Patent Assignment Agreement."
Especially in computer science, there are lots of opportunities to work on cool stuff without spending several years of your life to get a PhD.
I wonder how many people do Master's or PhD programs simply because they want to stay in school.
I imagine your parent was commenting on this statement:
a PhD is a poor metric of intelligence
Making the observation that, whether or not it is a metric of intelligence, PhDs certainly get to work on some pretty cool things.
I find your stance confusing (JD not floating your boat? I see you aren't an academic).
I'm actually in a PhD program at a top 3 engineering school and I'm frustrated as hell by what I encounter.
It's true that Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson had "only" masters degrees, but Skunk Works was started back at a time when that was a common terminal degree for research engineers.
There is of course nothing magical about the PhD. What's magical is working within a research institution that has real resources to do real research. You generally don't have access to those resources if you go off on your own.
Also, when I talk to PhDs, they seem like little kids who don't have an idea of anything in comparison to startup founders. --> Do a startup
Pushing the envelope of human knowledge, one pixel at a time.
I'm curious why you feel qualified to judge the quality of PhD theses, or whether they were worth the authors' time. There's obviously a gradient in quality, but your post is overly dismissive.
I'm guessing you aren't in the startup world, or haven't been for very long.
Here's your answer.
-Signs a bitter nerd.
Nothing beats the university environment for meeting girls though.