
What My PhD Was Like - ingve
http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/02/my-phd-abridged.html
======
reuven
Look, a PhD is for one thing, and one thing only: Teaching you to be a
researcher. You're basically an apprentice researcher, learning from your
advisor and others in the field the current state of affairs, the language
they use, the questions that remain unanswered, and the methods you can use to
answer new questions.

A PhD is not proof that you're smart, or that you cannot get a job, or of
anything else (positive or negative). It just proves that you've demonstrated
an ability to do original research, and to survive a system that is often
unfair in numerous ways.

It also implicitly assumes that you're young -- and better yet, single and
without kids. In that sense, it's sort of like a startup, in that it consumes
as much of your time and energy as you're willing to give it.

I went into my PhD program knowing that I wasn't going to be a researcher. I
went in planning to learn new things, to meet new people, and to maybe try
some new directions in my career. In the end, it took a very long time (11
years), cost my family and me a lot of time and money, and didn't directly
affect my career. And yes, there were lots of tears along the way, as well as
many angry words.

I'm very happy that I finished it, rather than give up in the middle (which I
considered on many occasions). I have a huge sense of accomplishment. I
learned a ton, that's for sure. And we had an adventure living in Chicago,
where I met many new friends.

But I tell people, very seriously, that if they're thinking of doing a PhD,
they should think very hard before starting it. It's a huge commitment of time
and money, and especially in the computer industry, there are ways to do
research nowadays that don't require the effective vows of poverty and
servitude associated with graduate school.

~~~
mehrdada
> But I tell people, very seriously, that if they're thinking of doing a PhD

I simply tell them not to do it--in Computer Science--if they are genuinely
good at getting things done (for some mediocre people good at playing a
certain type of a game, grad school can be an okay career path), unless (1)
they need a student visa, or (2) they definitely want to go into academia
(which generally only makes sense in a top 5-10 ranked school).

To me the litmus test is now this: do you need a particle accelerator (or
equivalents) to conduct research in your field? If not, don't do a PhD.

~~~
turnip1979
I like the particle accelerator litmus test :p Also .. totally agree with the
top 5-10 school. Universities do not typically "hire down". I heard an
"unofficial list" during a faculty meeting my last year .. I was horrified!

Here is the big problem IMHO: by the time you graduate with your PhD in a 6-8
year program, you are either close to or in your 30s (best case). You just
spent a decade investing in a research career. Most scientists will tell you
that research is not being supported the same as in the old days. I can't say
about govt grants but industrial labs have definitely changed in the last 10
years (I'm thinking of IBM Research and Microsoft Research). There have been
several lab closures in the recent past: MSR's Silicon Valley, Nokia Research
in the Bay area, Intel Lab-lets (Berkeley, Pittsburgh, etc.). So basically,
supply is steady and demand is decreasing. This generally doesn't bode well
for the prospective PhD candidate trying to make a career in industrial
research. The bar simply keeps getting higher to get one of these "coveted"
positions.

While it is true that PhDs can (and do) get hired at places like Google,
Facebook or Wall Street, think about the almost decade spent on training that
not only are you not using, at least a chunk of the technical content will be
obsolete by the time you finish! Insane!!

To succeed with a PhD, you need to be a great seller. This is sort of the same
skill you need as an entrepreneur or a specific type of middle-manager
(dreamer? not sure this has a clear job title). I always thought it was about
the technical challenge of the work or the quality. I sadly have to come to
realize that the marketing (the intro to your paper) matters as much as the
rest.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
You can gain a lot of education working on a phd at a good school, even past
your masters, and that can help if you are doing more sophisticated stuff. I
found my phd helped a lot in my dev work at microsoft and google. Maybe
someone with a lot strong BS or MS could have done it, but I benefited from my
8 years at grad school! I'm kind of embarrassed to admit how long it took, but
I did finally finish :-)

------
timtadh
I think it is great that Jean (and Philip) both wrote these up. But, to be
honest it 100% depresses me to read them. Graduate school has not been easy
for me and I had no first author paper submissions for 5 years and ended up
having to being part time for 3 years to support myself and my family. (My
research is well in hand now. I finally submitted my first paper and have 2
more going out this calendar year. Sometimes it takes a while to find your
passion/research area.) Given my family situation I am not able to do
internships and in many ways I don't want to. I am going to go back to coding
now because this is too depressing to read.

~~~
a_bonobo
I feel that the US PhD system is extremely bad not for students, but for human
beings. Other countries like Australia or Germany have a much more stringent
timeplan - maybe 4 years, usually 3 years. I often talk to researchers from
the US and it's always 7, 8 years spent, with maybe one publication, or even 0
- the time is spent interning, or drifting between departments, taking various
university courses that really lead nowhere (like OP), or drifting along
without a real project, or you're the cheap work monkey of the supervisor (the
last one seems to be extremely common in the US).

I think that's the universities' fault - Australian unis force you to have a
project proposal after the 6 or 12 months mark, and then you have about a year
or two to do that project, then you have to write. There is very little time
to do courses, and if you take a course, you lose one out of 3 possible time
extensions. If you don't make it in time your student visa will expire (I
think maximum is 4 years?) and you have to leave the country. If you're a
citizen your scholarship will end at the same time. And these are good
scholarships, usually about $500-700 per week.

My PhD experience was nothing like OP's or yours, much more focused, much less
time wasted, much more publications too! I think our bioinformatics group's
record was 12 papers in one PhD (3 first author). I had 2 first author and a
few more middle author papers, one of them in Science.

~~~
lmeyerov
The primary output of a PhD is not a good project -- it's actually the
European system that's geared towards quick cheap labor for the PI's idea.
Instead, the output of the US system is researchers capable of forging their
own path. No surprise Jean landed a professorship at CMU after all this.
That's useful for anyone in a thought leadership role, e.g., PI/CEO/CTO.
(Though yes, for related reasons, US CS systems PhDs probably also have a
higher impact factor, e.g., they're actually implemented as is discussed in
her post.)

As for the bean counting: her first-author PLDI best paper is the field's
equivalent of a Nature paper, and she got one in her first year.

~~~
lmeyerov
Not sure how to edit, but I was overly harsh: my point about the European
programs is that _many_ combine their short duration with requiring a project
proposal going in, which _often_ is used by PIs to work on the next
~deterministic step of their existing research program. For students in that
situation, a postdoc (or darwinian trial by fire as a professor) is necessary
to learn how to lead research.

The above is not always true, but when it is, I view the US system as
fulfilling its mission better. Whether everyone is suited to the US system and
leading innovative projects is another story.

~~~
stdbrouw
At least here in Belgium, project proposals (which are indeed required) can
come from either the student or a principal investigator. Many of the most
talented students pick their own topic, and the topic is accepted or rejected
by an independent jury, not by the person who would advise you.

~~~
lmeyerov
In the US, there's generally a proposal process _two years in_ to determine
this, and even there' it's not surprising to see a pivot a year or so after
that once preliminary data is in. By pre-agreeing to a problem (and part of
the process), too much of the research definition process is skipped.

While half the PhD is about learning how to get to the solution, the other
half is in learning how to pick the right problem. In terms of HN, making a
startup solve a niche is great, but knowing how to grow it into a bigger space
is better.

------
aub3bhat
For those interested about income during PhD
[http://www.phdstipends.com/results](http://www.phdstipends.com/results) gives
a good overview of PhD stipends offered by most Universities. A grad student
at MIT CS doing a summer internship with Google etc. should typically gross at
least 54,000$.

Another point that is often overlooked is that if you want a good team at
Google / Apple such as working on autonomous car or deep learning etc. you
have better chance going if you have a PhD in similar area. I agree that a PhD
in Theory/PL is much more a life of mind rather than Machine
Learning/Vision/Systems which can be justified as a bet on possibility of a
future payout. I know several students at Cornell who joined Google/FB after
BS only to be placed in not very interesting teams and later decided to join
the PhD program. I think if played correctly a PhD from a good CS school to an
extent can help you avoid some of risks faced by middle-aged programmers.
Especially those who do not wish to transition into management roles.

Personally I am doing a PhD (Information Science / large scale data mining for
healthcare), since I had guaranteed funding along with access to a large
medical dataset that would have been impossible to get without being in
academia.

------
harveywi
> I will say that graduate school was one of the best periods of my life.

Results not typical
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8720640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8720640)).
It's surprising for me to read the author's account and not find even the
smallest tidbit of the adversity and nonsensical friction that plagued my
friends and I when we were in grad school.

At least the author is at least partially aware of why they had a good
experience:

> I am privileged to have had a relatively supportive environment and few
> additional pressures. My experience is most likely to generalize for other
> computer science PhD students at top schools, where the funding situation
> tends to be good and advisors tend to give students a fair amount of
> freedom.

~~~
dgacmu
I bet there's a lot of correlation. I also did my Ph.D. at MIT, and had a
similar experience. My first year was horrible and I was probably one
emotional breakdown away from therapy, but it was impostor-syndrome stress,
not any silliness of the program itself. The rest was fantastic, and changed
me and my life for the better.

I was lucky to attend the wedding of one of my former Ph.D. students a month
or so ago. At the (not all that large) wedding were about a dozen of his
friends from grad school. It was a fantastic reunion, and evidence to me about
the truth of what Jean wrote of finding some of the most intellectually
fulfilling friendships of her life.

None of this is intended to deny that others have bad experiences, at the same
or other schools -- two people having a great experience is just that: two
people's experience. I have a good friend whose horrible experience as a
biology Ph.D. at Berkeley led her to reject the entire <expletive deleted>
field.

There's a lot of material out there that's negative about the Ph.D. process,
and it's useful to hear the positive experiences side, which is (IMO) a bit
less represented.

------
namelezz
Keep in mind that this is what a PhD is like at elite universities. If you
take away interesting researches, great interns from big companies, and
awesome colleagues provided by those universities, then you may see a
different picture of what a PhD life is like.

~~~
dheera
Pretty much. I got my PhD from the same school and department as the author.
The only thing I would say though is it's more like "this is what a PhD is
like at a good research group/department". There are a few excellent
researchers at "non-elite" schools where I have friends doing very well,
publishing in top journals, and being extremely productive. There are also
people at "elite" schools doing not so well because their research direction
just isn't that school's forte or they didn't encounter the right group of
people for their own passions.

In any case, when I applied to grad school, my strategy wasn't really to apply
to safety schools after the competitive schools. Instead I applied
simultaneously to competitive schools as well as several companies, and
decided that if I didn't get into a PhD program at a place I liked, I was
going to go to industry or industry research instead.

------
smanzer
A few words of caution from a recent Ph.D. graduate: a big problem you will
face if you do this is the all-or-nothing nature of the degree. If you are
five years in, you will put up with a huge amount of abuse to avoid throwing
away that time. Departments and your advisor know this - they will abuse you
in lots of ways (stiffing you on reimbursements, making you teach constantly,
etc.) because you are stuck - if you leave, you will be perceived as having
failed and derive little career benefit from those years of your life. I would
also caution that the author's good outcome (assistant professorship at a top
tier school, straight out of grad school), would be considered impossibly
unlikely in my field, chemistry. I can't speak to CS though.

~~~
4426e6
I quit recently after 5 years. I don't think I regret it - the improvement in
my mental health has been dramatic. I found it difficult to trust any of the
advice I was getting from supervisors etc. because our interests weren't
aligned.

I can say that I'm significantly more highly skilled than when I started
though. Knowing that I didn't want to stay in academia, I spent a lot of time
working on my transferable skills (i.e. tech).

~~~
smanzer
Sounds like you played it smart developing industry-relevant skills. I lucked
out with that myself and got a thesis project that helped me get a software
engineering job afterward. This is really one of the things they should
emphasize to new students: the odds you will get a good academic gig, even if
grad school works out well for you, are very low, so make alternate plans.
Glad to hear things have gotten better for you after getting out - good luck!

------
fsloth
I have nothing but respect for people who have the grit and skill to go
through a PhD program. Another side of the coin - dropping out of PhD studies
after 6 months 10 years ago was retrospectively the best thing I ever did.
Quitting is fine if one sees better opportunities elsewhere - NOT quitting
when the only reason not to quit is an irrational fear of "being a failure" is
equal to a sunk cost fallacy. I was quite familiar with the research setting
at that point and moving to other things allowed me more space to grow
professionally and meet new people with different views of life. Yeah, I
choose OpenGL over density functional theory. This was a much better match for
my limited math skills (compared to other physicists) and enthusiasim towards
shiny things. I would have not quitted unless the new position had seemed like
a very unique position, though - which it was.

~~~
selimthegrim
DFT in particular is a trap - the field is simply not respected by other
physicists for a variety of reasons too complicated to get into here. I
dabbled in it at first but was able to switch to hard condensed matter because
I managed to pull off passing a QFT course in my first year of grad school
which combined with solving some experimentalist's problems got the requisite
professors to at least listen to me. A lot of DFT people end up as soft money
research assistant professors or switched to staff support scientist positions
(if they don't drop out and become programmers) because the perception is they
never came up with any ideas of their own - they just executed other people's
codes. Leave the field to the J-1s.

~~~
tfgg
Eh? This isn't my experience of condensed matter DFT at all. It's a pretty hot
area in the UK/Europe at least, and there are lots of postdocs being
advertised, as well as a reasonable number of new faculty being hired in the
area. Maybe if you're just hitting 'go' on someone else's code, sure, but
developing high throughput analysis or higher levels of theory... I mean,
until recently, the head of the Cambridge CMP theory group was a DFT guy.

~~~
selimthegrim
UK and Europe are different. Italy has very active electronic structure groups
and UK has people like the group at Cambridge and Rex Godby or Matthias
Scheffler at FHI. The funding structure here in the US simply does not reward
higher levels of theory, and high throughput analysis is being driven here in
the US by Scheffler's acolytes (and Gerbrand Ceder, etc). No less than Peter
Littlewood told people here at a DFT conference a few years back bitching
about funding "Go to chemistry and materials science departments instead, they
will love you"

~~~
tfgg
I agree with your analysis, I did notice that not many groups in the US were
doing what looked like interesting new methods/theory, more 'cashing in' on
existing code in a fairly short term way. There are people like Louie and
Vanderbilt, though. I did my DFT methods PhD in a materials department group,
full of Italian/German/English physicists, anyway :)

~~~
selimthegrim
Vanderbilt and Louie are the real deal, but what they do is much closer to
hard CMT. They have students who are real superstars.

As an aside, Vanderbilt was at the same conference. He told me how the same
trend chasing and flight to chemistry and materials science departments had
taken place among DFT people with high-Tc in the eighties that was taking
place with topological materials now, and that this was a symptom of "(long-
time sociological) problems I can't fix"

------
_lpa_
In contrast to sentiment of many replies here, I have really enjoyed my PhD
(admittedly I have not yet submitted - I plan to in the summer). I worked for
a year prior to starting, and while that was fun, it felt very limited by
comparison. Being around smart people who are interested in a variety of
topics, and have the freedom to pursue them, makes for an amazing environment.
I've learned a huge amount, and I think the tradeoff of low pay for a few
years was easily worth it.

------
danieltillett
The whole experience of doing a Ph.D in computer science is so different to
doing one in the experimental sciences. My Ph.D was a constant struggle
against nature and her desire to keep her secrets. As a general rule you could
expect 98% of all your experiments to fail and usually for totally boring
reasons like your reagents had died. Getting anywhere was a real struggle.

I loved writing up my papers as this was at least something I had some control
over. I do agree that doing a Ph.D is an experience like no other and one I
don't regret.

------
raverbashing
Looks like what a typical run through Graduate School looks like, but while it
seems in the US things are more dragged down it also seems like the
opportunities to connect to industry and work in immediate problems is greater

Also this is priceless
[http://haskellryangosling.tumblr.com/](http://haskellryangosling.tumblr.com/)
(done by the blog author)

------
compactmani
Do it to max out the education attribute on your char build. Plus, school is
cool.

In all seriousness, it's a great time to learn how to think and get
comfortable thinking. That said, there are likely many other ways to achieve
this.

------
uaaa
This is a nice write up. The only thing I found a bit distressing is the
"sense of academic achievement" or how one would call it. In my idealized
world (à la Hamming's You and Your Research), a great scholar would feel great
from doing great science and having a real impact:

* An applied scientist would feel great from solving someone's important problem -- i.e. saving lives, increasing revenue and/or decreasing costs at the end of the day.

* A theoretician would feel great from solving a recognized important problem.

On one hand, the author writes enthusiastically about her side-projects /
internships / hobbies. On the other hand, almost all academic remarks end
with:

"Our paper got rejected / accepted at [top venue]. We felt sad / relieved."

Without any further remarks about that work -- i.e. it's all "publish or
perish" no matter what.

In that way, it sounds as if one was doing research for the sake of producing
papers rather than solving important problems / contributing to our
civilization by increasing its stock of knowledge. Perhaps that is the sad
state of the current academia.

~~~
uaaa
TLDR: I found a difference between these two senses of academic achievement
when looking back at oneself's work:

1\. (Idealized) "I/we did a great job solving that important problem."

2\. (Current Academia?) "Phew! I/we finally scored another paper at [top
venue]." ("And I can now graduate / get a tenure / [something academic career
related].")

------
Rainymood
Are PhDs expensive, do you get paid? In Europe you are actually a full time
worker for the university and get paid a living wage (bit lower than industry
but it ramps up I guess).

~~~
emeryberger
In Computer Science, PhD students at any reasonable institution are invariably
funded (stipend + tuition & some fees). Most who are in non-theoretical fields
get research assistantships, which pay for them to do their PhD without any
teaching responsibilities. The pay is in no way comparable to industrial
salaries (OK, it's comparable; it's WAY less). The University of Massachusetts
Amherst, where I am a faculty member, pays our PhD students more than $2,500
per month, plus benefits. This is a pretty competitive figure. However, many
PhD students do summer research internships at places like Microsoft Research,
IBM Research, Facebook, and Google, and these pay pretty handsomely.

~~~
peter303
Furthermore the student stipend may go further because many needs at a big
university may subsidized. These include student residences, gyms, health
care, etc. To maintain the same lifestyle after leaving the ubiversity was
more expensive.

------
matthewaveryusa
I'm genuinely interested: jeeves weighs in at ~20k loc. at 50 lines of
code/day that's a 1 year endeavor. I know there's a lot of research upstream,
TAing, writing papers, and so on, but 50 loc/day is something very achievable
while doing lots of other things. My naive question is why/how does it seem
like the final result is way smaller than what I would expect for 7 years of
research?

~~~
riyadparvez
I am not sure what you are getting at. Are you counting productivity by LOC?

To sum-up: \- This is not her only project, just the main project \- She has
taken grad courses, doing a grad course in MIT will easily be more work than
average developer do in whole year. \- She had to study several research areas
before choosing her main project. It is unlike I read the tutorial of
currently trending distributed system Apache Spark and now I know everything
about state of the art research. It is going through dozens of research papers
in that domain, understanding all the concepts, identifying the gap in
existing research, figuring out how to fill that gap. \- You will fail several
times before finding a good approach. The author have mentioned she had tried
with Scala first, later switched to Python. \- Even the results are good, you
have to write the paper which is not trivial, and getting it accepted before
getting rejected several times. \- Worst case scenarios are also likely. Mid-
way in the project you have found out someone else has recently published a
paper. Now your work is worth-less because it is already published. Or you
have found it there is an obscure paper that also outlined the approach you
have taken, now you have lost the novelty factor of your paper.

TL;DR: 200 lines of some UI JS code is not same as 200 lines of new deep
learning algorithm in TensorFlow.

------
atemerev
Since having a PhD is not a prerequisite for most jobs, it only makes sense if
you are genuinely interested in science. The system is geared to support this.

Unfortunately, the system is also biased for the young and single and child-
free. When I tried entering the PhD program, I was ready for significant
income drop (I had been a successful software engineer for 10 years before).
But I also had a 10-months daughter (she is almost 2 now). And this proved to
be incompatible with the requirements of the job. I am not a father who
neglects his family needs and focuses on the job. So I moved back to
consulting, working from home most of the time.

I don't see an adequate solution for this. Of course, young and single will be
preferred to survive the grind, and forcing the employers to do otherwise is
unfair to them. Perhaps there is something else I can do to make a difference.

------
anniecarvl
Ouch. That sounds very mundane. I hope this person finds something fulfilling
in the future.

------
xyzzy4
PhDs seem like a journey to nowhere. What's the point? I guess I just don't
see what you get out of it that's valuable enough to devote 4 years.

~~~
profcalculus
Lots of people say they got something out of a PhD. Even if they are all
biased, doing a PhD is a culturally acceptable way of being unemployed and
goofing off.

[http://lemire.me/blog/2015/02/25/hopeless-
ones/](http://lemire.me/blog/2015/02/25/hopeless-ones/)

~~~
namelezz
I would say you are underemployed.

~~~
selectron
You are underpaid, but I would not say underemployed. The benefit society
gains from a PhD is high, mainly because of the training students get from
doing a PhD. But there is an over-supply of students who want to do PhDs as
opposed to the budget for science, so the pay is very low.

