Comment by freyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freyr | Hacker News Reader

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Wrong, it's extremely important.

You're devoting the next 5+ years of your life to a single task. You're forgoing your programmer salary for the next 5+ years, which could easily add up to $300k - $500k in opportunity cost. Your forcing your wife and kids to come along for the ride. You're going to end up a world expert in a tiny niche that, quite possibly, nobody outside of academia cares about. You should have a pretty good idea where you want this all to lead.

There are practical reasons for having a goal in mind:

* If you want to land an academic job, you should be planning for that from day one. Academic positions are extremely competitive, and you need to make yourself an extremely competitive candidate. That means you must present and publish your work aggressively often, networking extensively, and choose a popular topic of research that will garner you many citations, etc.

* You have to make many important decisions right from the start of grad school (who to choose as an advisor, what topic to research, etc.). Choosing poorly will have ramifications for many years to come. Having relevant criteria (such as some long-term goal) can help you with these decisions.

* It's not entirely unusual for candidates to languish for 7+ years in their program, often due to lack of direction or because they expected their advisor to motivate them and keep them on track. You need to motivate yourself. Having some direction from the start can help with this motivation, and also help you from getting swallowed up by all the time-sinks that will eat away at your productivity.

This sounds a lot like you are telling us what you value in life. There are no rules in life and it's not a requirement to have your whole life planned out at every moment in time. Most people don't, including highly successful people. That's ok. What's important is taking advantage of opportunity when it is presented.

If a goal of yours is to learn, then a PhD is a great opportunity for this. The value of the PhD is not even gaining expert knowledge in a small area. It's learning how to learn. It's learning how to focus so hard on one thing so as to surpass or build on what the best of those who've come before you have done. It teaches you do deal with the fear of not knowing and having nobody to tell you the answer.

On the other hand, even if you end up coming to be concerned about money, it's still not a big deal. Sure, you don't go into a PhD for money. But wether you go into industry or succeed in academia afterwards, you won't be wanting for money. Hell, you can even leave part way through and get a well paying job!

Besides, your counterparts who ran the corporate treadmill will only be incrementally richer than you anyways. If you really want to be rich, you need to take on big risks such as starting a company or the like. Talking about putting your wife and kids in a tough spot! That said, I hope you put something in life above money.

Edit:

Regarding your edits, those are concerns that you do need to consider. Though it's really not the end of the world if you don't. Simply always trying hard goes a long way to doing alright in most scenarios and there are always great fallback options.

[bill lumbergh] I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that. [/office space] (My PhD is in behavioral neuroscience, so YMMV)

I've found that if people want to learn, then they will learn. You don't need a PhD for that, and the process of going through a PhD doesn't really teach you anything more than you couldn’t have gotten yourself. Passion drives someone to learn, not getting accepted into a PhD program.

It's about access to resources that you won't have not being part of a university. This is especially true for physical sciences that require expensive laboratory equipment. However, even for something like CS, having access to good lecturers and courses is very helpful.

Of course, the open courses being put out for CS and Math is certainly is changing the picture for these fields. I think they are great.

The point is, learning in a bubble is not nearly as useful as learning from peers and those more experienced as yourself. It's also the case that few people have the discipline to go through the important but sometimes dreary exercises required to learn these topics. Having structured learning programs helps with this too.

In theory I agree, but I very rarely run into people who actually do so on their own. Even fewer who do something recognizable as contributions to a research field, in the sense of writing up something of peer-reviewed paper quality, which indicates the author is familiar with existing research, appropriately explains how the new contribution relates to concepts and techniques that already exist, and presents the results in a convincing format (whether that's statistical analysis or a good case study or whatever). It doesn't even have to actually be published; I'm fine browsing papers on arXiv too, or things circulated as whitepapers or tech reports.

They exist, but they're uncommon, and many of the people doing that kind of work are in sort of para-academic jobs, like long-time librarian at a big research library, or senior staff member at a (government or corporate) research lab. Even in an environment like Google, the majority of the papers and paper-like writeups seem to come from either people with PhDs, or people with long track records in a quasi-academic environment, like Google's sizable stable of ex-Bell-Labs researchers.

I don't really say that out of any particular love for institutionally tied research, but more out of the opposite, a frustration that it's so rare to find DIY research that really contributes to a research field. Some of that, I assume, is just incentives: if what you earn money on involves getting something to work, all that really matters is that you come up with a technique that works. Understanding how your technique relates to existing techniques, explaining whether it's completely novel or a variant of an established one, and doing the detailed analysis to figure out why precisely it outperforms existing techniques (e.g. is there one particular tweak that's critical, and if so, why is it critical?), is not always something incentivized in that context, but is important to advancing the state of knowledge in a field.

Hey Delirium, very well put. I’m curious about your experience (phd program, country etc) as I have a different perspective and I frequently wonder if it’s just my experience in the biology side of academics.

“In theory I agree, but I very rarely run into people who actually do so on their own” This board is full of people who actually learn on their own:) People learned to code, people learned how to run businesses and people have learned how to build purely based on their passion to learn/build and contribute to the world. The reason why this is less so in science is that the resources are behind a paywall. I recently left my academic life to start a business and as such, I don’t have access to scientific papers anymore….this limits my ability. This is also the major motivation for my startup which will bring raw academic scientific data to the public…but I digress. The fact is that you are surrounded by those people, but they aren’t bringing their ideas to science because the process by which science is done doesn’t allow for it…and that is a problem.

Re: peer-review papers/quality: ahha, I’m not sure I agree. Peer review in theory is great, in practice it’s BS/politics/$$$$. Also, in my experience (YMMV), a lot of references in intros/discussions are “oh shit, you have to reference Joe Schmoe’s 2008 paper here because he is on the editorial board.” Not to discredit your point, I agree that peer review papers, citations and the like are important, but they are being abused now (at least in bio).

This is long winded, but my point is that we don’t see a lot of people contributing to science because they don’t have the resources to do so. I think that needs to change soon and I’m working to make that happen.

> This sounds a lot like you are telling us what you value in life.

That's true, just as you're telling us what you value in life (e.g., the opportunity to learn to learn).

However, I'm suggesting that it's be beneficial to enter into a PhD program with a long-term perspective. You seem to be actually discouraging that, or at the very least, claiming it's irrelevant.

I can't really see a scenario where that's good advice.

In fact, that's exactly how I entered a PhD program fresh out of college: without much direction or a long-term goal in mind, except to learn as much as I could and enjoy the experience. I enjoyed the experience, but I would have benefitted (during the program and after graduation) by aligning the program with my long term goals.

Besides, your counterparts who ran the corporate treadmill will only be incrementally richer than you anyways.

Of course, money isn't everything. But to be honest, that's definitely not the case. I have several friends who hustled after college or enrolled in professional degree programs. They now make multiples of what I can ever hope to earn as a "research engineer." Other friends saved up during those years and now own a house. Realistically, I'm still several years from owning a condo.

If you really want to be rich, you need to take on big risks such as starting a company or the like. Talking about putting your wife and kids in a tough spot!

And we've circled around to yet another example of the opportunity cost of spending 5+ years (perhaps before the wife and kids) in graduate school.

(As an aside, I've heard that grad school is about "learning to learn" before, and I'm not convinced. Yes, I worked on problems to which nobody knew the answer. From my perspective, that's not significantly different from working on a problem whose answer is at the back of the textbook. The internal process is the same. Most successful graduate students I knew were reasonably smart, and worked very hard, and eventually made progress. Did I need to spend an additional five years after college to tell me that "intelligence + effort = progress"?)

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