
Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science (2014) [pdf] - bigfoot675
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf
======
papeda
For anybody interested in the computer science PhD process, a good complement
to the featured article is Philip Guo's "The PhD Grind" [1]. It's a long
(115p, but with big text) blow-by-blow account of the author's PhD at Stanford
in the late 00s. It's neither sensationalized nor sanitized, and it's weirdly
engrossing for an account of PhD research. I read it before starting grad
school and I think it helped my "meta" PhD skills a lot.

[1] [http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-
grind.pdf](http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf)

~~~
ackbar03
Thanks for the recommendation. I'm currently doing a PhD and spent a few years
in the corporate world.

I've only read a fifth of it (the downfall) and I feel like some of his not so
good experiences could actually be easily avoided by anyone with some work
experience. Im already accustomed to knowing that half of the time the
leader/professor might not actually know what he's doing or get you to do
something that's obviously not gonna work because what the hell why not.
Usually I just do enough to keep him happy but not get too emotionally
invested, like I don't intentionally muck it but I don't get so committed that
I feel depressed.

I'm almost done with my first year and I was pretty much aware that I wouldn't
be able to do any decent research so I just tried to get as much of my
coursework out of the way as possible

~~~
johntiger1
+1, no one has any idea what they're really doing. This lets people suggest
random projects, if you keep prodding them. As your username suggests: "it's a
trap!"

------
scottishcow
> _Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such
> people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time._

Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting
their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as
my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential.

> _The Ph.D. is a tremendous opportunity. You get to pick an advisor in any
> research area you like and then you get to do research in that area, receive
> mentoring, think deeply on problems, publish papers, become famous, while
> paying zero tuition for 6 years and receiving a salary._

Yes it is a great opportunity, but considering how universities benefit
massively from the work generated by their PhD students they're grossly
underpaid (at least in STEM).

Overall this seems like good practical advice, but it's firmly written from
the perspective of a true believer in the PhD system (and academia in
general). My take is a bit different, I really think academia is broken in
some fundamental ways.

~~~
mayank
> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such
> people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time

I'm in this camp (haven't published since I graduated and joined industry),
and I also strongly disagree with this statement. The value of the PhD is how
it changes the way you think, how you break down big fuzzy problems, and how
it helps you navigate the literature when you need help, and how it helps you
know where to look and who to ask.

I've worked on much harder problems than my PhD, but none have felt as _hard_
as the PhD, because of the PhD.

~~~
jvanderbot
The problem is the definition of "research". If you call it "publication",
then yes, it seems like a waste.

If you call it "development of new widgets after principled approaches
consistent with or beyond the state of the art", it starts to feel like a Ph.D
can be training to do really great work in industry.

~~~
glangdale
Very much this. I have spent a considerable post-PhD period developing "new
widgets" as you put it, and I constantly feel the benefit of (a) the early
training of my PhD and (b) the benefit of commercial work done in the
framework of "(a)". That seems a bit obscure, but think of it as this analogy:

Person A never does any serious training in a sport, and then goes on to spend
10 years playing "hit and giggle" tennis (say). They probably get a bit
better.

Person B spends several years in their youth doing tennis lessons at a high
level. They then never take another tennis lesson, ever, but they spend the
same 10 years as person A playing recreational tennis, using the skills they
have built in their youth as a framework.

I feel that a lot of the stuff I've done recently builds more on the work I
did as a commercial researcher (2006-2017, particularly) than it does on my
PhD work, but I also think that the 2006-2017 work greatly benefited from my
PhD.

~~~
mettamage
I have one anecdata point, kind of. It's not PhD level but master versus the
non-academic route.

TL;DR: my friend is more practical (e.g. better at bandaid solutions). I am
more integrated with theory and practice (e.g. diagnosing issues from sillicon
to high level). When things are simple, he is faster. When things are harder,
I am the only one who can solve it.

===== THE WHOLE STORY ======

I simply did a bachelor + master in CS (security + web/mobile). My friend is a
semi self-taught web developer and (soon to be) pentester.

Friend in Web:

When he became serious about web development, he went to a coding bootcamp.
When I started teaching web, he had 1 year of company experience.

Me in Web:

I had some hobby experience with web, but because I had CS fundamentals and a
good teaching style, I was hired to start teaching his course.

Result:

My friend was more practical than me. He came with more bandaid-style
solutions which were sometimes warranted (time-constraints) and sometimes they
weren't. For me, it helped me to bridge theory and practice.

Alrighty, round 2: pentesting.

Friend in Pentesting:

It took him a year (!) to get his bearings and find a curriculum he wanted to
learn. In this year he learned a lot about pentesting which is how he could
verify that he found "the magic bullet" of curriculums. By the way the "magic
bullet" for entry level pentesters is: go to hackthebox.eu and if you want to
get certified (i.e. recruiters will notice you), do OSCP. He did a lot of
different stuff before he got to this conclusion (honorable mention: VHL -
Virtual Hacking Labs).

Me in Pentesting:

My friend invited me to join him on hackthebox.eu because he knew I did
courses in web + network security, binary & malware analysis and hardware
security. I go in and slay the boxes together with him. The key difference: he
is fast, I am slow but I am capable of hacking the most difficult levels
(which they call insane boxes).

Result:

We teach each other a bit of what we know. He helped me get faster with easy
boxes. I helped him to (almost) hack insane boxes. In doing so, I taught him
x64 assembly and some C.

------
plushprocessor
What isn't often discussed is how hard it is to go from a no name school that
isn't ranked highly to an elite school. At a non-elite school your
recommenders may be unknown to the admissions committee, the 'level' of
education these applicants receive can be questionable ("What does an A mean
from this program and how does it compare to our class?"), their research
experience could be weak, student visibility could be weak (i.e. their
recommender isn't known in the field, and their student didn't do any sort of
research that made professors at our school aware of them in advance), the
courses they take may be weak compared to other applicants (i.e. their program
doesn't offer as many advanced courses, compared to other programs) and so on.
There can be tremendous risk in taking students from unknown schools or non-
elite schools. It's much easier to accept graduate students from a similar
elite school, with well-known recommenders, and a history of successful
applicants from that came from that school that did well in said program. It
isn't impossible, but it is an extra step these applicants have to overcome.

~~~
throwlaplace
easiest way to jump tiers is networking i.e. person to person conversations
with PIs. if you're able to represent yourself well and describe your own
research articulately and authoritatively it'll make up for a great deal of
the gap between you and students from "elite" schools. unfortunately this
networking happens at conferences which less resource-rich schools can't
afford to send undergrads to.

my hack: when you're traveling to a city with a brand name school you might be
interested in attending, shoot some professors an email asking to drop by and
chat about their research. they will usually tell you to come by during their
office hours. this has worked for me no less than 3 times and led to 2
admissions.

if you're an undergrad and you've never sold/pitched yourself to someone i
strongly suggest you read some salesy stuff about how to approach a sales
meeting. you have to keep in mind that PIs are kind of like CEOs of small
startups - they do research, publish papers, and win grants. That's their
business cycle. when they're evaluating new students they're trying to
determine how effectively you'll fit into that cycle. that means if you've
done all 3 of those things you're in a good position to be hired (and it is
out and out hiring) but if you lack experience in one area (e.g. writing
grants) you can make up for it by being strong in another (or giving the
impression that you will be). ultimately you need to speak to their needs and
goals rather than your own.

~~~
usmannk
This comment is extremely helpful to me right now and I'm sure may be to many
others as well. Thanks for writing it. If I may, how did you prep for those
chats? What did you .. say when you got there? Read some of their papers and
bring followups to their conclusions?

For anyone else reading, I want to echo the sentiment here 100x. I'm currently
working closely on a research project with a CS prof who is one of the most
senior/accomplished at a top-4 (by the ranking in the original pdf, but this
is widely agreed upon) CS school due to networking my way in. Though this took
way more initial effort than a chat, they had a substantially involved form
they used for vetting inbound inquiries.

~~~
throwlaplace
>If I may, how did you prep for those chats? What did you .. say when you got
there? Read some of their papers and bring followups to their conclusions?

like I said the way to approach this is to try to identify with the person
you're pitching to and address their needs/goals.

The most obvious thing is to familiarize yourself with their research because
they have research goals. But honestly you don't need to go overboard on this
- no one that's not their student yet would be expected to know the research
in depth. Pick 3 of their most recent papers, read the abstracts and
conclusions and come up with vaguely interesting questions. Again they don't
need to be deep they just need to be better than "what learning rate did you
use" and more sophisticated than "why did you pick Adam over rmsprop".
Obviously extra points if have your own perspective on something (even if it's
not earth shatteringly novel). For example my new group works on distributed
ML and on my first call I said that I'd always wondered about distributed
inference (ie one test sample forward pass distributed across multiple nodes).
I didn't have an answer or solution to the problem but it was something they
hadn't considered.

The better thing though to discuss is new potential funding directions that
you would enable them to avail themselves of. Figuring this out is admittedly
tough if you're an undergrad because you don't know what you're good enough at
that you could get funding. Again for example in my case I have some computer
vision experience and so now my group can plausibly apply for grants at the
intersection of distributed systems and CV. I didn't quite discover this
intentionally but early conversations broached it organically and I recognized
the opportunity to include it in my "pitch".

But even if you don't have some kind of skills alignment like that, the most
important thing to stress is that you can independently start and complete
projects and you can write/present academic work. That means you can speak in
jargon, you know how to display results (plots, comparisons benchmarks, etc),
and most importantly you can concisely explain what you've done. I had an
unpublished lit review that I sent over as a writing sample.

This is getting a little long so I'll just say something everyone should
always keep in mind: you're trying to build a rapport with a person. No matter
how smart, successful, elite they are in their area they're not robots they're
fleshly people first. Being friendly and funny and getting to know them
outside of their research helps immensely (during the meeting not before -
that's creepy!)

edit: sorry also another thing you can do is prep by speaking with a grad
student and asking them good questions about the research, group, goals, PI,
etc. this'll get you comfortable speaking in terms that the PI is certain to
relate to.

~~~
usmannk
This is very helpful! Thanks for taking the time to reply. "The better thing
though to discuss is new potential funding directions that you would enable
them to avail themselves of." This is something I haven't considered before
and will be mindful of now.

"No matter how smart, successful, elite they are in their area they're not
robots they're fleshly people first." Hah, +1. I actually wasn't aware of my
current group's "status" until well after my initial contact. I just thought
our research interests matched perfectly and I was excited to learn about what
they were doing. Enthusiasm goes a long way.

------
gaze
My feelings are a little different. If you feel like doing a PhD and enjoy
doing research, you should do it. A PhD above all should be fun, and is thus
not a waste. It's only a waste if it's not fun.

There will be extended periods of intense struggle, and those parts are not
that fun. One has to accept those. But, doing cutting edge research with
experts is an incredible opportunity and I'd encourage those interested to
take the plunge. If it doesn't work out, why not take the MA and run?

~~~
Cyph0n
Agreed. As you noted, you don’t have much to lose by giving it a try, and you
can always drop out and get the MS (like I did).

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Not much to lose... except four to six years of your life. If you think of
your _working_ life, which has maybe 45 years, four to six years is a fairly
major cost.

That's a fairly high cost _even if it 's fun_. It still may be worth doing,
and the fun may tip the scales, but... "don't have much to lose" is I think
inaccurate.

~~~
Cyph0n
You misunderstood: I was referring to _trying out_ a PhD for those curious
about it. Worst case, you spend ~2 years and get out with a MS degree.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That's not so bad, especially when you're 22. But I'm 58 now, and even two
years still seems like a long time to me, perhaps because I don't have that
many two-year intervals left...

~~~
Cyph0n
True, that makes the decision a bit more difficult. But if you’re truly
interested in getting into the world of academic research, I still think it’s
worth a shot.

------
bachmeier
I don't work in CS. I was surprised when I watched this talk[1] by Michael
Stonebraker to learn of the "Diarrhea of Papers"

> A PhD applicant who wants to get a good academic job should have ~10 papers

> A tenure case should have ~40 papers

That alone would push me away from a PhD in CS. In economics, it's closer to
what he said was the case when he was new:

> I got tenure from Berkeley in 1976 — With about 5 papers

[1]
[http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Stonebraker.pdf](http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Stonebraker.pdf)

~~~
papeda
There's a bit of a counterpoint to this: with papers, it's easier to point to
your body of work (peer-reviewed and, if you're good/lucky, peer-understood-
and-approved) as clear evidence that you can do research. Without papers, or
with very few papers, that evidence has to come from somewhere else. My
understanding is that somewhere else is usually recommendations, from your
advisor and other people in the field. Some reasons to dislike that system
include:

1) it gives advisors a lot of influence over the student's career (obviously,
if you have an actively hostile advisor things will be hard in any system, but
I have known successful faculty who had indifferent fund-and-forget-style
advisors who wouldn't know enough about the student's field to write a good
recommendation)

2) informal "I like this person, hire them" networks tend to select for people
who are like current participants in the network

I agree that a coarse "do they have at least x papers?" way of evaluating
researchers is silly. But it's not _crazy_ to have 10 papers when you
graduate. That's about one paper every 6 months in a 5-year program. Six
months is a long time, almost a thousand hours of work. If three people are
focused on a project, it's pretty plausible to get a cool result in six
months.

~~~
btrettel
I appreciate your perspective. The people on the hiring and tenure committees
as far as I can tell usually don't/can't evaluate quality directly so they
instead focus on proxies like the total number of papers and what journals
someone published in. I'm fairly against total publications as a proxy but I
hadn't considered how it fared against these alternatives.

Personally, if I saw someone published a ton of papers during their PhD, I'd
question the quality and importance of their research. Quality tends to
decrease with quantity in my experience. And it appears too easy to fake
importance. In my field I watch out for vague words like "novel" and
"fundamental" in paper titles as evidence that the work is probably overhyped.
I'm fairly well read in my field and I can sense the disappointment in people
when I tell them that their "great" idea was done before, particularly when it
was done better and/or a long time ago. (I take no pleasure in doing this. I
just wish people spent less time reinventing the wheel.)

I think I could have had 10 papers during my PhD if I focused on easily-
published things and "salami-sliced" my papers. But I focused on what I
thought was more important and made the scope of each paper larger than normal
because it saves readers time.

Proxies that are characteristics of the researcher might be better (or at
least should be considered), like the willingness of the researcher to put
"skin in the game" so-to-speak. I'd have a lot more confidence in research
conducted part-time by someone on their own money than someone using another
person's money (which has much less risk). Taleb has written about this as I
recall.

~~~
new2628
I'm on many hiring committees and I try to evaluate quality of research as
well. While you cannot spend too much time reading all these papers in full,
just looking into them for a few minutes usually gives a sense of where the
results fit and how significant they are. A good recommendation letter is
useful here: especially for PhD research, the advisor can briefly explain what
motivated the problem, how the result was found, what is its significance
(from their own point of view of course), and what the candidate contributed
to it. The reco letter can also explain why the candidate has fewer/more
papers than usual, etc. At the end of the day, there are many objective-
looking criteria, but in my experience people still make gut decisions based
on their overall impression and then look for criteria to rationalize it. I
find this to mostly work OK though, and better than having purely objective
criteria and sticking to them no matter what.

------
supernova87a
> "...You need to know why you want a Ph.D. You need to have vision and ideas
> and you need to be able to express yourself..."

I've got to stress that this advice is really important.

Especially for people who are considering going into grad school because
they're on autopilot or think that it's just a natural continuation of your
schooling. That's an easy way to think, but it's not the right way. You can
easily lose 6 years of your life in grad school aimlessly this way.

Go into grad school and pursue a PHD because you've got _a burning desire to
turn one of your good ideas into a breakthrough_. If you don't have such an
idea based on your undergrad experience, that's already a warning sign that
you shouldn't just go to grad school. Another warning sign is if you don't
know who (which professor) you want to work for. Grad school is advisor-based
in the extreme.

And definitely don't go just because "it's always good to be educated more".
That approach will probably leave you disappointed and surprised by what grad
school is. As the author mentions, success in grad school is not just more
classes. And if you do a random walk because you don't know what you want,
you'll waste a lot of time.

Aside from what the author describes in other good points, if you fall into
this category of why you "think you want" to go to grad school, do yourself a
favor, and get outside your comfort zone and go into the real world of
business or a company for a stint. Don't just let yourself go autopilot into
grad school because it seems to look like more college. At least have a look
outside and try something before you default back to the university.

A few years in a real company taught me much more (and faster), life skills-
per-time, than in grad school. Yes, admittedly I came out of grad school with
some good technical skills and a whole lot of accumulated knowledge that I put
to use today still. But I look back wishing I had learned about real world
problem solving and ability to cut the bullshit and get to the bottom line
sooner.

Be sure you go in with open eyes. And open them by looking outside first.

~~~
asciident
That's a really surprising opinion to be, because I feel the exact same way
but replacing "grad school" with "working at a corporation". I feel that most
people go get a job on autopilot, as applying to a PhD requires substantial
preparation whereas applying for a job is sort of a default.

Then a job is even more so trading time for money, and easy to lose 6 years,
or even 40 years in a blink. And what do you have to show for it? Half the
projects get cancelled, 95% of projects at a corporation don't last past 5
years. Your name does not even appear on any work you have done.

Most of the the skills you gain are about how to navigate that specific
corporation. This feel to me like the biggest waste of time when I was
refreshing Reddit to death at my desk.

At least with a Ph.D., you're at least learning a skill, and gaining a
globally recognized credential. Having 10 years at AT&T or Oracle is a
decaying credential in comparison. Like you, I'd suggest for people to "get
outside your comfort zone" of a business/company and "try something before you
default" to a corporate desk job.

~~~
kyllo
Good point, but it's worth noting that "go get a job on autopilot" behavior is
entirely rational as it's driven by economic necessity--most people go get
jobs because that's the only way they can afford food, shelter, healthcare,
and other basic necessities. I wish it were optional!

------
awelkie
I have the impression that CS PhD programs are more competitive than they have
ever been, by a large margin, at least in the US. My pet theory on this is
that US CS PhD students are exposed to globalization in a big way. If you look
at figure D2 in the 2018 Taulbee Survey by the Computing Research Association
[0], you can see that nonresident aliens as a fraction of enrollments in US
and Canadian CS PhD programs rose from around 40% in the mid ninties to 64% in
2015, 2016, and 2017.

On the one hand I think it's great that the US and Canada continue to attract
research talent from around the world. But on the other hand I suspect that
the increased competitiveness has changed the nature of the PhD program in
computer science. I think that professors these days have so many options for
grad students that they can choose students with specialized experience in
their research field, which means that any "exploratory" phase of the PhD
process has shrunk significantly. In the article, the author says that CMU
expects students to choose an advisor within a month or two of starting the
program, and I guess that in reality most students have applied to work with a
specific advisor before stepping foot on campus. I wonder has it always been
the case? Can anyone - maybe someone who did a PhD at CMU or elsewhere more
than a decade ago - shed any light here?

Of course the increased competitiveness of US CS PhD programs is just
conjecture on my part. It could be that the increase in nonresident alien
enrollment just means that many US and Canadian citizens are not interested in
a CS PhD these days, and that the PhD programs haven't really changed, which
also sounds plausible. From my experience during my short PhD attempt, the
amount of time spent studying (classes, reading papers, etc) versus simply
working for an advisor was smaller than I expected, and I don't know if that's
because of a real change in the PhD process or simply my own naïveté.

[0]: [https://cra.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/05/2018_Taulbee_Surv...](https://cra.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/05/2018_Taulbee_Survey.pdf)

~~~
Mehdi2277
My experience applying for a phd and talking to professors is it has gotten a
lot more competitive. When I applied a year ago to 8 schools my recommenders
thought I'd picked enough schools and had a strong enough background for top
schools (2 first author papers, one at a workshop in a top conference). That
led to 2 interviews, but at the end still 8 rejections. The acceptance rate
for cs overall in stanford/similar schools is getting to around 3 percent. I
was applying in ML which is extra popular and remember hearing that Montreal
had 1000 cs graduate applicants this past year, with 500 for ML and 900 some
ML overlap. Given they only want 15-20ish students a year, that's a fairly
poor acceptance rate. My own undergrad was a STEM school and the number of CS
majors has somewhere around tripled in the past 5ish years even though it
started already high around 20 percent (yeah a majority is CS at this point).
I know my school talked about how there's plenty of universities across the
country that have had CS enrollment grow a ton and are having problems
supporting all of them.

------
pnathan
Very interested in working through the PhD as a mid-career SW engineer with a
MS. Curious how someone in that state would be seen by the acceptance
committee, or, alternatively, by hiring committees post-graduation.
Perspectives?

~~~
bo1024
Not positive about hiring committees but I think most would be very open and
judge you fairly. It won't be easy to get into a good PhD program, even with
prior master's research experience. Did you get and keep old recommendation
letters from your master's? That would be helpful. You could throw your
application out there, but if not successful, a way forward is to identify a
research area or problem, start reading papers, and get in touch with some
current researchers (if they are slow to respond, their PhD students or
postdocs). Demonstrate your knowledge and enthusiasm and see if you can join
on a research problem. That project and recommendations from it will get you
in somewhere (maybe the same lab), if successful.

~~~
pnathan
>. Did you get and keep old recommendation letters from your master's?

Let's go with _nah_: at this point they'd be almost a decade old. It would be
a measurement that is almost irrelevant to who I am today and my experience.
I'm sure I can swing managerial recommendations etc, and it's not out of the
equation that, at least at the local level, I could do some interesting
volunteer work at the local U.

~~~
bo1024
Remote collaboration is very common so I would email the best matches (once
you’ve one background research) wherever in the world they are!

~~~
pnathan
That's a _great_ idea. :) I am too used to the "Grab a coffee" worldview.

------
vzuvz
In case there are any CS PhD students at top colleges in the US reading this,
I'd appreciate some advice: I am currently applying for a PhD in Germany
(RWTH), and although I am excited about that place, I think I'd rather do a
PhD in a top US School (for a couple of reasons that I won't detail here). The
thing is that admissions for US schools do not seem to start before September,
and in case I get accepted in Germany I'd have to decide whether to accept or
not without having the opportunity to even apply for American schools. My
question is about whether I'd have a decent shot of getting into such programs
or not. Because if I don't then it makes sense to take an opportunity
somewhere else before even applying there.

My relevant credentials are: I'm currently doing my Ms. Sc. at University of
Chile, and have published the following papers:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10000](https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10000) (accepted
at FUN2020)
[https://ioinformatics.org/journal/v10_2016_19_37.pdf](https://ioinformatics.org/journal/v10_2016_19_37.pdf)
(IOI2016) [https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11693](https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11693)
(ICDT2020)
[https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3329486.3329498](https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3329486.3329498)
(Workshops DEEM2019 and AMW2019), and I'm currently preparing what will be my
master thesis to be submitted to a conference as well.

Does this look like a solid enough profile to get a decent shot at a top US
PhD program?

~~~
gautamcgoel
I'm a PhD student in CS at Caltech. The single biggest factor that determines
whether you will get in is whether a well-known researcher writes a strong
recommendation for you. I expect that it will be difficult to make the case to
accept someone from a virtually unknown program like the University of Chile
when there are so many qualified applicants from top American schools. Just to
be clear, I'm not saying you are unqualified, only that you will have to
compete with "safer bets" who look stronger on paper.

------
scott_s
This is solid advice. If you want to get a PhD in computer science, read and
understand this advice. It's similar to the advice I would give someone, which
is kinda funny, since I only know what you're supposed to do after having done
just about all of it wrong.

------
jcdavis
Only slighly related to the topic at hand, but the author (Mor Harchol-Balter)
is an amazing teacher, she was undoubtedly my favorite professor I had the
opportunity to take a class with at CMU

------
grifball
> As in all of life, you will be most successful if you simply figure out what
> skills your advisor has that you don’t and work hard at picking up all of
> those skills without complaining

Which probably means you will pick up programming, as the field moves so fast
that professors usually have out-of-date skills. With a younger professor,
this may be different.

------
elwell
> You will know about your research than anyone at your school.

ᴛⷮyрⷬoͦ iͥn ᴛⷮнⷩEͤ 1ˢᵗ ¶ 𝕒𝕗𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕣𝕠𝕕𝕦𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟.

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leemailll
For any one want to apply for grad school, I suggest visit phdcomics.com, and
try to read at least top 100 there. It will bring some laugh, but I want to
emphasize one thing: those jokes are real for many in grad school.

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knzhou
I laughed at PhD comics back in undergrad, but now as a PhD student it feels
wrong to read. A lot like Lego Grad Student.

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orthros
I wish I had read this paper before entering CMU back in the mid-90s. My
advisor would enthusiastically agree, I bet.

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zerr
Any remote PhD opportunities nowadays?

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najarvg
If you're looking for a terminal degree that is more application oriented, you
may want to consider other options like a Doctorate of Engineering, EdD etc.
Otherwise a PhD assumes close proximity to your advisor and lots of projects,
publications etc

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glitchc
Most Comp Sci PhDs work from home anyways once they’re in.

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foobarian
If by work from home you mean live from the office then yeah, sure :)

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glitchc
Other than experiments that require custom ICs or embedded boards, most CS/CE
research can be done from home. Can remote shell into your machine at work, or
log into the supervisor's private VM cloud.

It's become much easier than it used to be. Even a decade ago, this was the
norm and most of my colleagues were chippies. Even reams of data could be
carried via a couple of spinning rust HDs in a backpack.

