

What you should know before starting a doctorate... - bootload
http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2004/07/what_you_should_know_before_starting_a_doctorate/

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ChaitanyaSai
The author of the article isn't on a tenure-track, it is the author of the
article excerpted in the above article. This author (Tom Coates) does make an
excellent observation: "The aim of doctoral work is not - no matter what
anyone tells you - to think up good stuff and write great works and reveal
your genius to the world. The aim is to make professional people who can teach
undergraduates, deliver papers and - yes - also (subsequently) push the
discipline further in one direction or another. You have to approach your
post-graduate work in this way. The most successful doctoral students in my
experience are the ones that are thorough and careful and take on relatively
unambitious projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the
discipline too much. They're the ones that finish their doctoral work and go
on to useful teaching positions (and then may or may not start exploring more
widely). It's definitely not the best and the brightest, the most imaginative
thinkers or the people with the great ideas that get through. If they get
through it's because they're thorough and they're careful and they're
professional and treat it as it should be treated - as a job of work rather
than a calling or an exploration."

This resonates really well with my personal experience. Conscientiousness is
the word to keep in mind.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the 22-year old kid just starting
graduate school is very different from the 27-year old standing at the other
end with a burnt wick. You cannot predict how your interests evolve, but you
should at least try and gauge if your current interests run deep enough to
allow for the sacrifice of four, five, or six years.

~~~
13ren
success factors: _[be] thorough and careful and take on relatively unambitious
projects which don't stretch the assumptions or structures of the discipline
too much._

irrelevant factors: _[being] the best and the brightest, the most imaginative
thinkers or the people with the great ideas_

You can do great work outside a university, be an artist or industrialist, in
poverty or in wealth. I love the idea of working in splendid isolation, but (I
feel) you _need_ something to push against, to measure yourself against, peers
to celebrate or hate you. Each discipline in academia is all that (as are
industries and arts). How can you rebel without a cause?

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cousin_it
Make an independent university. That's what Moscow mathematicians did in the
1990s, when it became clear that the new democratic Russia no longer cared
about fundamental science. <http://www.mccme.ru/ium/english/index.html> . I
studied there for a couple years, fantastic place.

~~~
13ren
How did they fund it? (I guess grants)

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mynameishere
_Why does any Ph.D. student at any but the top graduate schools believe that
he will get tenure at any university? The odds are so far against him, and
have been for a generation, than he ought to realize that he is about to waste
his most precious resource – time – on a long-shot. Investing five or more
years beyond the B.A. degree, except in a field where industry hires people
with advanced degrees, is economic stupidity that boggles the imagination._

<http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north427.html>

~~~
gaius
As a society we massively overproduce people with "high" (e.g. theoretical or
abstract) skills. Whether it's astrophysics PhDs or even just Bachelors of
Engineering, there simply isn't the work that needs doing to justify the
investment in educating them (us!).

Meanwhile, try getting a plumber or a plasterer. The UK govt. has the
objective of getting 50% of school leavers into university. Formal education
beyond a certain point is suboptimal both for the individual and for society
as a whole in probably most cases. The great irony is that this is a Labour
government, you'd think if anyone realized the value of traditional trademen,
it would be them...

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jleyank
From my experience, the "PhD or not" depends entirely on the field being
studied. In chemistry, the PhD is the union card that allows you to enter
industry at a higher level and allows advancement if one's lucky/good to quite
high levels. The BS/MS folks enters with lower ranks and face a ceiling about
the point where PhD's enter. Similarly, the MD has all sorts of advantages to
those who have studied medical-type fields at lower levels.

Conversely, nobody hired CS PhD's outside of think tanks or academia as far as
I can tell. Similarly, engineering PhD's seem tracked to academia.

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utnick
There are some companies that hire CS PhDs , or at least have divisions that
do.

Google, of course. Xerox. A bunch of big DoD contractors have R&D departments.
Video game companies have been known to pick up graphics focused Phds. Pixar.

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waldrews
To put this in a historical perspective, Adam Smith's bitter comments on the
fate of the academic still make sense today:

"But the usual reward of the eminent teacher bears no proportion to that of
the lawyer or physician; because the trade of the one is crowded with indigent
people who have been brought up to it at the public expence; whereas those of
the other two are incumbered with very few who have not been educated at their
own."

There's more at <http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Smith/smWN4.html>

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gamble
Great article. A friend of mine finally secured her first faculty position in
English this summer; you need balls to slog through that many years knowing
there's no guarantee you'll be able to find a job at the end.

On the other hand, if a person has an interest in grad school, I'd encourage
them to give it a shot. At worst you waste a couple of years. Once you get out
into the real world and start piling on a car, house, girlfriend, and then the
2.5 kids plus golden retriever, it becomes that much harder to go back and get
that degree if you realize it was a path you wanted to follow.

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pmorici
This author is primarily talking about a phd in the humanities... ...does the
same thing apply to science and engineering fields that aren't as ummm useless
in the real world?

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gaius
Yes, I'm afraid it does. Take two people, equally as smart, both in their late
20s, one did a PhD and one's a CEng (or PEng). They will have very different
skillsets at that point and the CEng will be very much more employable. The
PhD will have _slightly_ more options however if they decided to move into
another field.

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hugh
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only good reason for doing a
PhD in any subject P is that you're so fascinated by P that you find youself
saying:

"Holy shit, you mean somebody will actually let me sit around and just do
research on P for a few years? And they'll even pay me a little bit of money
while I do it? What a sweet deal!"

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ojbyrne
Nice piece, but I would go even further. I've heard of dropout rates of 80%.
The person writing it is a tenure-track professor, and doesn't even get to the
possibility of being denied tenure.

Anyway I'm one of those dropouts. If a Ph.D. counts for little outside
academia, an ABD counts for even less.

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gaius
No, he's quoting a tenure-track professor - the author of the article never
completed his PhD.

~~~
ojbyrne
Thanks for the correction. It was late, I skimmed the first part of the
article, then found myself being more interested further down.

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known
Free PhD at <http://thunderwoodcollege.com/>

