
Easy Ways to Fail a Ph.D. - RBerenguel
http://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd
======
robg
I'd add a huge one to the top of the list:

1) Pick the wrong mentor.

Quite simply, if a mentor hasn't graduated a student in the last three years,
serious red flags should go up. Professors can get a ton of work done relying
on research assistants and post-docs. But students need to be nurtured and
many mentors just aren't up to the task. Their track record at graduating
students is the best evidence you can ask for. Look for potential role models
in that history.

If the mentor is a nontenured professor, ask for their advice but don't make
them your lead mentor to sign off on your work. Tenure has many stresses and
some are orthogonal to your interests as a student and future researcher. The
nontenured need to be focused on themselves until they get tenure. They can
have a lot of energy and novel thoughts, but since your results will be tied
to their future prospects, your work will get undue pressure.

The edge case is the newly crowned associate professor. Fully interview the
prospective mentor and get references. Your career will literally be in this
person's hands. Make sure you know that this is a person who will challenge
and inspire. Associate professors can be really, really great mentors, but you
just have to be careful if they haven't graduated any students. If they have,
and those students are already on tenure tracks, you likely have an excellent
candidate.

~~~
RK
I think this is one of the most important things, although as a student you
may have less control over it than you'd like. The big problems in picking an
advisor are lack of information and lack of opportunity. There may be the
"perfect" advisor with the project you want and good funding, but no
information available (e.g. new professor). On the other hand there may be the
professor, who everyone says is great and is working on exactly what you want,
but they don't have any money for a new student. You usually find yourself in
these types of situations when choosing an advisor.

Bad advisors probably set me back at least a year and my former labmates as
much as 3 years when they quit the lab shortly before our former advisor
"resigned". I eventually took matters into my own hands and helped two
professors I liked write an NSF grant on my topic and got funding for two
students for 3 years, and they basically let me do whatever I want.

~~~
robg
_You usually find yourself in these types of situations when choosing an
advisor._

No doubt, but as you note, your mentor will impact you for years and perhaps
your entire career. If the right one doesn't come along, better to wait. Many
schools also won't tell you that you've been admitted to the program and the
mentor they've assigned isn't set in stone. Ideally, use the time during
visits and interviews to identify the best mentors in the program. A good
mentor will get you through the program. A bad mentor will actively sabotage
your progress. To me, it's most the important decision you'll make, especially
if as you note, the funding is tied to the mentor.

 _I eventually took matters into my own hands and helped two professors I
liked write an NSF grant on my topic and got funding for two students for 3
years, and they basically let me do whatever I want._

Take note: If there's one way to punch your own ticket, it's this approach.
Acquire your own funding and you're pretty free to do what you want. In that
regard, grants may be more powerful than even publications.

------
hopeless
My personal experience* is that some of that failure rate can attributed to
students not understanding what a PhD is for. It is a qualification to conduct
research... it is not about creating something cool/interesting and/or useful
(particularly not the last one). It's about the journey not the product.

Unless you intend to stay in academia, the qualification probably won't pay
off in terms of a higher salary vs. the years you wasted. And if you do intend
to be in academia, be prepared for a long (possibly indefinite) wait before
you get a permanent lecturing/research position. Post-doc life is not easy.

* 3 years wasted working on a PhD, no thesis submitted in the end, walked away back to the real world.

~~~
stevenbedrick
> It is a qualification to conduct research... it is not about creating
> something cool/interesting and/or useful (particularly not the last one).
> It's about the journey not the product.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. New PhD students should have this tattooed on their arms
as part of the admissions process. I wasted an entire year trying to come up
with a dissertation project because I didn't understand this fact.

~~~
scott_s
I've described it as a research merit badge.

~~~
hopeless
I won't tell you what I call it!

Ok, I will: Intellectual masturbation - It feels good at the time but is
ultimately unproductive.

------
jessriedel
Man, as a grad student, I can't disagree with the first two points enough.

This is OK advice if all you want to do is finish a PhD as quickly as possible
(ignore course work and any studying not directly related to your
dissertation), but it's _terrible_ advice if you want to (a) become a broadly
smart individual or (b) do research later on _anything else_ besides the tiny
topic of your dissertation. Grad school is the _only_ time in your life where
you'll have the freedom to study all sorts of incredible stuff. If you leave
academics, you won't have access to the resources, and if you stay in
academics, you'll be constantly scrambling to crank out publications as a
post-doc or professors.

> In the interest of personal disclosure, I suffered from the "want to learn
> everything" bug when I got to Ph.D. school. I took classes all over campus
> for my first two years: Arabic, linguistics, economics, physics, math and
> even philosophy. In computer science, I took lots of classes in areas that
> had nothing to do with my research. The price of all this "enlightenment"
> was an extra year on my Ph.D.

Only a year? Sounds cheap to me! When else in your life are you going to have
the opportunity for this kind of enrichment?

Yes, taking linguistics classes is probably not going to help your future
physics research. (Though it can still be worthwhile). But taking chemistry,
math, and physics outside of your particular niche is incredibly helpful for
teaching you different ideas that you can apply later.

Also:

>Einstein's Ph.D. dissertation was a principled calculation meant to estimate
Avogadro's number. He got it wrong. By a factor of 3.

Yea, well, for their PhDs, Bekenstein's discovered black hole thermodynamics,
Feynman came up with the path integral, and Hawking proved the singularity
theorem. Yes, you can go on to be successful after a modest thesis. But you
can also kick ass young. (Also, finding a method to calculate a theretofore
empirically-measured universal constant based on elementary principles--and
_only_ being wrong by a factor of 3--is pretty incredible!)

Frankly, I just don't know very many grad students who come close to "shooting
too high". I'm sure this professor has met a few, but is his concern really
that they are shooting themselves in the foot, or is it that grad students who
take chances for big breakthroughs (and hence, usually fail) are not very
useful for advancing the career of professors?

~~~
mattmight
> Yea, well, for their PhDs, Bekenstein's discovered black hole
> thermodynamics, Feynman came up with the path integral, and Hawking proved
> the singularity theorem. Yes, you can go on to be successful after a modest
> thesis. But you can also kick ass young.

Sadly, most grad students (and most professors) can't hold a candle to
Feynman, Hawking or Bekenstein.

"Oh, just be like Feynman," is not a repeatable strategy for success for most
folks.

> Frankly, I just don't know very many grad students who come close to
> "shooting too high". I'm sure this professor has met a few, but is his
> concern really that they are shooting themselves in the foot, or is it that
> grad students who take chances for big breakthroughs (and hence, usually
> fail) are not very useful for advancing the career of professors?

My advisor used the term "doctoral Vietnam" for the really hard topics.

He talked about the severed heads and charred skeletons that line the paths to
the top of what look like "hills."

It takes a tremendous amount of arrogance or foolishness to charge up those
hills and think you're going to make it to the top.

For example, tangoing with P v NP is a classic way that brilliant students in
computer science leave grad school completely dejected.

They probably could have made a good contribution had they focused on
something achievable.

But, you raise an interesting question: if Ph.D. students aren't going to
challenge the hard problems, then who will?

I don't have a good answer to that question.

~~~
LargeWu
> But, you raise an interesting question: if Ph.D. students aren't going to
> challenge the hard problems, then who will?

Tenured professors. Because they certainly aren't wasting their time teaching.

~~~
nanairo
That's the concept behind a tenure: you don't need to _prove_ yourself
anymore, and hence are free to take risky path that may fail and leave you
with nothing.

But if every PhD student thought they were going to be the next Einstein and
tried to write a new revolutionary paper, we'll end up with a lot Universities
closing doors.

You give the risky stuff to those who have proved themselves, not to the ones
who have just started.

------
adw
People have touched on this, including the parent article, but this needs
stating in BIG SHOUTY CAPITALS:

PhDs are the last mediaeval guild apprenticeship standing, with all the
ceremony and all the anachronism that implies.

Seriously. You're apprenticed to a master, you have to produce a _meisterwerk_
, then they let you in. The entire thing is a historical accident. Remember
that and everything else is... well, it's still crazy, but you can get the
thread of it.

(yrs, PhD (Cantab) 2007 - <http://www.lexical.org.uk/science/thesis/>)

~~~
etal
With a few words switched, I find this a pretty accurate description of the
PhD and postdoc years:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journeyman_years#Historic_roots>

------
cdavidcash
Matt, I understand that you are writing primarily to your graduate students,
but I also have to object to your first two points in general. I am a
counterexample, as I took 12+ unnecessary math classes (getting A's in them)
on my way to a successful PhD in theoretical computer science/crypto. I've
found that my background in math has given me some tools and perspective that
improve my research (I recognize when we are constructing a finite field in a
round-about way, or when the abstraction we really want is a group action, or
when Borel-Cantelli is really needed to make an argument rigorous, etc etc). I
wouldn't have obtained these tools without a huge investment in time at some
point.

Actually, I still find myself reading and learning unnecessary math papers
most evenings as a hobby. I think it makes a huge difference.

Perhaps this is unique to mathematics, where theorem proving skills are
portable. I certainly wouldn't use my situation to argue that PL grad students
need to study French. But maybe the PL students should take an extra
distributed systems course - and TA while they do it!

~~~
mattmight
In theory, nothing is unnecessary, because everything in theory is
unnecessary.

(j/k, of course; I love theory.)

More seriously, folks like you are the reason I phrased it "almost always." If
you take the right "unnecessary" courses, it can help a lot. (So, are they
really unnecessary then?)

My quantum mechanics class got me to think about the PL problem I was working
on in terms of group theory. That turned out the be the key serendipitous
insight that solved the problem.

But, I'm watching two students at two universities go down in flames right now
because they're too distracted by taking lots of "fun" classes. They're like
kids that locked themselves inside the candy store.

------
SandB0x
An American PhD sounds tougher than here in the UK, or at the very least
significantly longer. Here, you get funding for three (or sometimes four)
years and I don't know of that many people who have left their programmes.

Why is there such a big difference, and is there any data about how this this
reflected in later careers?

I would guess that the advice of "only do a PhD if you want to be an academic"
doesn't hold as strongly over here. Does it?

(Disclaimer: I say this as someone currently debating whether or not to do a
PhD, but who doesn't want to be an academic.)

~~~
mattmight
The differences are more than US versus UK. It's more US versus Europe.

I spent a semester in Ph.D. school in Denmark, and I noticed what you
describe: 4 years guaranteed funding with a boot at the end.

What this means is that at the end of four years, a student has to staple all
the papers they wrote, back-solve for a unifying "thesis" and then defend. No
matter what.

In general, this is why Europeans Ph.D.s tend to need a postdoc, whereas
American Ph.D.s can (usually) transition directly to faculty jobs.

The US Ph.D. student is encouraged to hang on and continue publishing with
their advisor while they're on a hot streak and for as long as the grant
funding lasts.

This allows US profs to turn the last couple years of their Ph.D. students
into postdocs paid at grad student wages.

~~~
jessriedel
> whereas American Ph.D.s can (usually) transition directly to faculty jobs

In physics, going straight from grad student to professor is extremely rare
these days.

~~~
apu
I think the OPs comment was about computer science in particular, but even
there things are changing somewhat. Partially it's because of the weak economy
and scarcity of faculty jobs, but getting into the top-tier places almost
_requires_ a postdoc these days.

------
alec
Quote of the article: "I fantasize about buying an industrial-grade stapler
capable of punching through three journal papers and calling it The
Dissertator."

~~~
edanm
I liked this quote a lot too: "Perfection cannot be attained. It is approached
in the limit."

------
zck
>At best a handful of chemists remember what Einstein's Ph.D. was in.

>Einstein's Ph.D. dissertation was a principled calculation meant to estimate
Avogadro's number. He got it wrong. By a factor of 3.

This is interesting. A quick search can't show me the history of Avogadro's
number -- what was it thought to be before? Einstein could have been off by a
factor of three, or he could have been off by "only" a factor of three.
Context matters.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Google: "einstein avogadro" gives me
<http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Avogadro%27s_number> as the first result, it's
quite good, certainly more than sufficient as a starting point.

Note that sub- and super-scripts have not copy-pasted properly.

> _Einstein wrote in his 1905 Ph.D. thesis about the size of molecules and the
> closely related problem of the magnitude of NA. He derived equations for
> diffusion coefficients and viscosities in which Avogadro's number appears.
> From experimental values of the diffusion coefficients and viscosities of
> sugar solutions in water Einstein gave the estimate NA = 2.1×1023. In a
> later paper derived from his doctorate work[6] he gave a better estimate
> from improved experimental data: NA = 4.15×1023, close to Maxwell's value of
> 1873. Later (1911) it was discovered that Einstein made an algebraic error
> in his thesis[7] and in the paper based on it. When this was corrected the
> very same experimental data gave NA = 6.6×1023._

Prior to that Perrin's better estimate was 6.2E23

------
lionhearted
I thought about getting a PhD at one point. It seemed like a neat thing to do.
Talking to a friend of mine who is a professor disabused me of that idea
quickly. Too much obedience, maybe, but the real killer is the politics. Lots
of politics and politicking and stroking ego to get a PhD. No good. That's not
what it should be.

~~~
agconway
I doubt there is any professional endeavor free of "politics and politicking."
Universities are large bureaucracies, and come with all of the institutional
morass present in other organizations of such scale.

~~~
lionhearted
> I doubt there is any professional endeavor free of "politics and
> politicking."

There's lots of professions where decisions are primarily made on merit.
Entrepreneurship is one of them.

~~~
Lewisham
I wouldn't necessarily agree this is true as long as you never have a mentor,
never take money from anyone who wants voting shares and only work by
yourself.

All environments have politics. It's inherent in collaborative human
interaction. What changes is the extent and the style.

I much better understand university politics than I do office politics.
University politics is glacially slow and almost always run democratically; if
you want something to change, you need plenty of closed door discussions with
as much faculty as possible to get them on-side when the time comes to push.

My exposure to office politics was always power struggles between people with
titles, and who can get the right handful of ears to listen. Sometimes you
needed to step on the throats of other people internal or external to the
company. I could never find the right pace, people or aggression to get it
right.

------
tansey
The only thing I don't agree with is "Aim too high."

I can't imagine surviving at a top-ten school without having a focused
research vision from the start. I'm not saying you should walk in hoping to
prove P != NP, but who wants to dedicate 5+ years of their life to working on
someone else's research project? Not to mention that these are typically the
_best_ years of your life.

I think the real key is to aim for a the top of a hill, not a cliff. You need
to pick a goal that enables you to make gradual progress. If you start out by
saying "I plan to build the best race car in the world"-- that's fine. Your
first paper may be on improving the tires, then a follow-up with an even
better tire material, then you discover that square tires can be used instead
of round ones (thereby disrupting the entire field of tireology), and before
you know it you have a PhD. You never reached the top of the hill like you
expected, but you kept climbing.

Disclaimer: I don't have a PhD (yet). :)

~~~
billswift
If you think the twenties "are typically the _best_ years of your life", you
haven't grown up yet. Unless you let your brain dry out or rot, your life will
continue getting richer and deeper as you live it and continue to gain
experience and knowledge.

Life is an ongoing "learning experience". What you learned in the past allows
you to function at a higher level now; and it allows you to learn more so you
can function and learn at an even higher level tomorrow; and so on, "forever
and ever" (with a little bit of luck).

------
liedra
Man, this makes an Australian PhD seem like a piece of cake comparatively.

1\. No need to worry about funding: if you get an APA or an APA/I. If you
don't get one of those, you'll be screwed. But they're not impossible to get
either, if you're an Australian citizen. It's not $$$ but it's just enough to
live on, if you are good at budgeting. If nothing else, at least you won't
starve to death.

2\. No courses. Just research your thesis topic for 3 years.

3\. No teaching necessary. You can do it a bit on the side if you don't have
an APA or the APA isn't enough. But you're limited to 8hrs/week of paid
outside work if you're getting an APA anyway.

4\. No defence. I guess it's too expensive to fly specialists to Australia,
and those who set up the system did it in a time when video conferences didn't
exist.

5\. If you don't pass the first time you submit, you can just keep
resubmitting until you pass. Of course, if you submit when your supervisor
says it's not a good idea, that's probably going to be an unconditional fail.
But you'd not do something silly like that, well, we'd hope not. The only
other way to fail is to drop out. And there's a bunch of reasons to do that!
The biggest ones are not being able to get a good research topic, or to not
get a good supervisor.

------
ryanjmo
Maybe I am just bitter because I feel like my PhD was a waste of time (and I
did finish), but I feel like doing a PhD is a failure in itself.

On HN a lot of people seem interested in Doctoral study and seem to praise it
as a good thing, but I am wondering, are there many people out there who found
their years of a PhD helped them much on their start-up?

I feel my years of PhD study and the degree have not helped much.

~~~
pgbovine
_but I am wondering, are there many people out there who found their years of
a PhD helped them much on their start-up?_

sorry for the snarky comment, but i'm pretty sure 10000% of HNers will agree
that a Ph.D. is definitely an anti-prereq for doing a start-up; in fact, it's
probably the worst use of your time if your goal is to found a start-up
(UNLESS you want to develop your Ph.D. thesis into a start-up, which is hard,
since what is popular in research and what makes $$$ are largely
uncorrelated).

that's like spending 3 years earning a law degree and then complaining that it
didn't help you with your goal of becoming an Olympic swimmer

~~~
ryanjmo
I think what I find annoying/confusing is that on HN articles that have to do
with PhDs are voted up and people are generally pretty positive about PhDs,
rather than emphasizing that they are a waste of time to people interested in
start-ups.

HN doesn't seem like the appropriate place for PhD info.

~~~
apu
HN is no longer just Startup News, as it used to be. Topics which are of
intellectual merit appeal both to startup founders as well as to PhD students.
Hence the large number of PhD HNers and generally rosy picture of PhDs.

But I agree with the grandparent that getting a PhD is somewhat opposed to
doing a startup (although you need many of the same skills for both).

------
Maro
I feel left out:

#11. Start a startup while doing the PhD.

~~~
mattmight
I almost mentioned that. I did start-ups my last year in grad school (and for
the year after I graduated). It _almost_ killed my Ph.D.

Now that I'm a prof, I'm actually recruiting locals in start-ups to come get a
Ph.D. with me. I feel like folks that can excel at a start-up can also excel
at a Ph.D.

I also assert that someone with a start-up mentality should be able to get a
Ph.D. much faster than a "regular" Ph.D. student.

The razor-sharp focus that a start-up needs is perfect for blasting through a
Ph.D.

I'm looking for ways to make the two experiences synergistic and complementary
instead of antagonistic.

~~~
Lewisham
Some universities are better at this than others. My alma mater, University of
Bristol, actively encouraged their faculty and students to create startups
inside their incubator, giving them a bunch of money (usually alongside other
VC AFAIK). You had about a year to pop, if nothing happened you went back to
your day job, if it did, the company span out at UoB held onto their equity.
I'm sure this is a model you'll see at other top universities such as
Stanford.

I'm now at UC Santa Cruz, and despite being 40 minutes from Silicon Valley, I
see absolutely zero of this entrepreneurial spirit. The administration is
wasting their talent from top to bottom. They had a business plan competition.
Top prize: $500. Not an incubation offer. No VCs invited. Nothing.

Even my Computer Science Masters at UoB had a business plan class baked in,
and the final project pitch was to a board including the head of CS, the head
of the business incubator, another faculty member, and an invited VC. You had
to impress all of them to do well. Apparently the VC was the only person who
didn't like my pitch :) But UCSC is doing nothing like this anywhere. It's a
terrible waste.

------
whyenot
This may be good advice for getting a doctorate in ?computer science? -- the
author never states his discipline in the article.

It may _not_ be particularly good advice for other disciplines. For example,
as a doctoral student in Ecology you would be very lucky to have anything
submitted for publication before you take your orals. It takes too long to get
set up and start your research, especially if there is a seasonal component,
and there are too many dead ends along the way. If you work hard, and with a
little luck you may have one or two publishable papers by the time you
graduate. Aim for the stars, but the important thing is clearing the trees...

------
Vargas
Join a financial institution and get very well paid before finishing. This is
the easiest way to fail your Ph.D.

------
wisty
I like the article. A good comprimise between pragmatic cynicism, and good
advice.

~~~
mattmight
I really like the term "pragmatic cynicism."

------
wallflower
The converse:

"How to Succeed as a Graduate Student in the Sciences"

[http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/06/Gas...](http://www.chemistry-blog.com/wp-
content/uploads/2010/06/Gassman-and-Meyers.pdf)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504679>

------
meelash
huh. I wish my advisor had been told about this. Before I dropped out, I'm
pretty sure the problems I was having in my Ph.D. were mostly _because_ of not
doing 1, 2, 3, and 10. And my prof. pretty much pushed us towards 5 (the too
soon one) exclusively. Although, to be fair, I was also an expert at 4 and 8.
:)

------
jlees
My way:

#1, pick a supervisor who's going to be absent the entire first year and who
decides to change your research topic significantly from its proposal to fit
in with her own research (yes, I know this is common)

then

#2, decide the real world is more exciting and start working on a startup
idea. Whoops. Still, dropping out to do the startup makes me cool like Larry
and Sergey, so I'm down with that.

------
korch
I think Einstein's dissertation is a bad example of a dissertation that was
not an immediate superstar. It was. Einstein could have taken this author's
advice of stapling together his first three papers. Einstein's considerations
about more precise calculations of Avogadro's Number lead directly to his
novel technique(at the time!) of using Brownian motion to deduce that photons
exist as particles, and not just waves. Then it only took a couple of years
for that idea to morph into his famous _Annus Miribilis_ paper _On the
electrodynamics of moving bodies_ , from which Special Relativity sprung
forth. And the rest was history.

~~~
cynicalkane
Actually, the Brownian Motion paper concerned the increasingly popular atomic
theory, not photons. The photoelectric effect paper used the notion of
photons, but it wasn't new and Einstein didn't really believe that photons
existed. And special relativity is different from those two entirely. And all
those papers were published in the same year. The same year in which he
defended his thesis.

~~~
korch
Thanks for the clarification!

------
HilbertSpace
Professor Might's advice is on the whole good.

I would add:

Academic Jobs. Professor Might suggested that a Ph.D. is good only for an
academic career, and I would in part disagree: I got a Ph.D. in engineering
where it was solidly in my mind before, during, and since that never did I
want an academic career. Actually I did take an academic job for a while as a
way to have time better to care for my wife in a long illness, but I regarded
the job as a waste of time for all concerned.

The best of my Ph.D. coursework was terrific stuff. And the Ph.D. did confirm
to me that I knew how to do research. To me, both of these are the two main
pillars of my current attempts to start a successful business.

Long one of the best approaches to progress is to do _field crossing_ : For a
career in computer science, either in practice or in research, I would suggest
(1) avoiding taking any courses at all in computer science unless just want to
waste some time and (2) taking all the best courses could find in the
_mathematical sciences_.

In particular, my view is that now, for the future of computing, computer
science has a fatal disease and is nearly dead -- the field is missing any
powerful _intellectual methodology_. The problems in computing remain
important, but by a very wide margin the most powerful tools for progress in
those problems are just the mathematical sciences.

For how to get a Ph.D., I would recommend: Start with what is fairly clearly
an important, apparently not well solved, real problem from outside academics.
Then attack the problem with some new work in the form of theorems and proofs
with prerequisites in the mathematical sciences.

The usual criteria for publication are "new, correct, and significant": Okay,
given where you got the problem and that you did some original work just for
that problem, your work is likely "new". For "correct", it is fairly easy to
know that theorems and proofs are correct, and it is difficult to argue with
them. For "significant", since the real problem was, likely so is your
solution.

I brought my own research problem to graduate school. The best coursework in
my first year was a BIG help. I did all the actual research independently in
my first summer. All my advisors ever did was approve my final work. I
recommend this approach.

If a student has done some good research and still has a problem with his
advisors, then I'd recommend just publishing the work. Nearly no one in
academics wants to argue with the significance of published paper.

I do recommend doing some publishable research while a graduate student. Once
in a course I saw a problem that should have been solved but was not solved in
the literature. I took out a week, found a crude solution, got the problem
approved for a _reading course_ , in the next week found a better solution,
and wrote up the work. It was clear that the work was publishable, and, thus,
much better than needed for a _reading course_ , and later I did publish it.
That work gave me good _research credibility_ and helped me get the rest of my
way through graduate school.

For getting a paper published, it can also help if the paper has more
prerequisites in the mathematical sciences than any of the reviewers have;
this situation can be relatively easy for someone bringing to computer science
original work based on the mathematical sciences.

Can this approach to research work? Here's my evidence: I've published several
papers in computer science jointly with others, and I've published two papers
on my own. One of these two, and the best paper of the lot, really is in
computer science. I've never had a paper rejected, and I've never had to make
any significant revisions. The two papers where I was the sole author were in
relatively good journals.

I was encouraged to publish my dissertation but wanted to sell it and refused
to publish it! Again, I've never had any interest in an academic career.

I would take issue with the path suggested for research that a student should
start with advanced courses in computer science, read 50-150 papers, and then
do some research. That approach is too narrow -- it's nose to the grindstone,
shoulder to the wheel, and ear to the ground and then trying to do good work
in that position. Moreover, in a plowing analogy, will likely break a plow
just where the last 50 people did.

For big success in academics, need to do some broadly powerful work. For that,
I would suggest picking a direction with a much wider _field of view_ , also
starting with a field of computing important outside academics.

