
So long, and thanks for the Ph.D. - fogus
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html
======
andjones
My random musings from three years in CS grad school at UNC:

Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into
two classes. The first class wanted the PhD as a means to an end, such as
doing research, or getting a professorship. The second class had more abstract
and less well-defined goals. Sometimes that meant generally "doing good for
the world", or "seemed like the right thing to do", or "the working world
sucks, this is the lesser of two evils".

I fell into the second class.

I spent three years doing computer science grad school at UNC. I passed my
dissertation proposal and then decided to leave.

I don't resent those three years and did learn a few things along the way.

Getting a PhD is ultimately about getting 5 other PhD's to sign off on your
dissertation. At least that's the requirement in computer science at UNC. I
wish that had been more clear to me at the beginning.

Graduate school as a means of stalling to find something you love to work on
is not a horrible way to go. In the meantime you might solve a few problems. I
also consider it noble that we (graduate students) as a whole are willing to
do the nation's research for such little pay.

Had I thought long and hard about why I was doing the PhD to being with, I may
not have started. But life always charges its own tuition.

From the article "As long as you have an answer that you believe in
passionately, then that's enough." My three years in graduate school taught me
that the most. Find something you love, or least have passion and do that. It
may be a silly belief, but it's worth believing in.

~~~
moonwalker
> Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into
> two classes

Agree. I almost went for it as well, though for a challenge and as a
competition - publish the best paper in the best conference. Seemed like not
too many people viewed it as that.

~~~
sb
RE: _publish the best paper in the best conference_

Usually, this is very hard to achieve. Not only is it hard to find _the_ best
conference in _your_ field, getting the best paper award (nb. that there are
conferences that don't have a one!) has (at times) something to do with sense
of fashion and/or the valuation of your achievements by the programme
committe. (I recently stumbled upon an article [unfortunately I cannot
remember when and where, 20min of Googling did not help either] that detailed
how Albert Einstein did not believe in one of his own equations, which was in
the larger context that is difficult for scientists to properly judge their
own contributions -- assuming this is correct, having the intention of writing
"best paper award" papers seems _very_ difficult...)

------
mdda
I've interviewed a fair number of people that claim that they completed 90% of
their PhD, but didn't quite get to the finishing line. While I sympathize,
they haven't really grasped that the last 10% of the distance takes at least
50% of the effort.

From the outside, a PhD sounds like it's all about 'smarts'. Having been
through the process I'd estimate the requirements of smarts:tenacity = 50:50.
(YMMV)

~~~
_delirium
It depends what you're looking for, though. The last 10% is heavily on the
writing up and justifying independent research part, with some academic
politics thrown in (convincing five professors to sign off on your thesis is
not as objective a process as one might think). If what you want is someone
really good at _applying_ research, perhaps with clever tweaks, that part
might not be as important. That's one reason places like Palantir explicitly
recruit for "all-but-dissertation" PhD students. They need the kind of
knowledge that someone will get from being in the research world for 3-5
years, but their needs aren't quite the same as someone hiring for a
professorship.

~~~
timr
_"The last 10% is heavily on the writing up and justifying independent
research part, with some academic politics thrown in....places like Palantir
explicitly recruit for "all-but-dissertation" PhD students. They need the kind
of knowledge that someone will get from being in the research world for 3-5
years"_

That's called a Master's degree. You take some coursework, learn how to read
papers and implement the ideas therein. It's a fine degree, but it's not even
remotely the important part of a PhD.

People who actually go through the "writing up and justifying independent
research part" of a PhD tend to find that the writing and justifying are the
hardest part of the technical process. It's easy to brush it off as minor, but
only once you've begun writing and organizing do you realize the places where
your work falls short. The writing takes a long time not because it's
especially hard to write a dissertation, but because you usually have to go
back and deal with a lot of unanticipated technical problems before you can
say the work is done.

~~~
_delirium
Well, I'm writing up currently, and I guess I don't consider it the most
important part, really. I'm finishing it more because I want the Ph.D., not
because I'm learning anything at this point.

Perhaps you could get the deep research engagement via an unusually research-
focused master's, but there usually isn't scope for that. An M.S. is normally
only two years, while 3-5 years is imo the amount of engagement you need with
a field to really understand what's going on in research. You need to attend
the major conferences in a field more than once, ideally present papers at
several of them, present a few more papers after the initial time you do (your
first presentation is never the greatest engagement with a research
community), and so on. You can get to that as an ABD PhD student, but rarely
as a master's student. An M.S. student publishes between 0 and 1 papers
typically, and maybe attends 1 or 2 conferences, while a 5th-year PhD student,
in CS at least, will more typically have published at least 3 papers in major
venues (often 5+) and attended 5+ conferences.

That's all still writing-and-justifying independent research (getting a few
conference publications and journal articles), but not quite the same as
writing the equivalent of a _book_ , which is a fairly different skill, and
one you're not actually likely to use again after getting a Ph.D., since most
research is done in conference and journal papers. I wouldn't say it's a
complete waste of my time to be writing a thesis, but I wouldn't say it's the
most important thing I've done in grad school either, by a long shot--- I
value my peer-reviewed publications in the scientific literature much more
than I value my institution's thesis/defense process.

~~~
mdda
I don't want to appear too critical, but you've just outlined the reasons not
to persevere with the write-up. The point is that you are right in every
respect : except for the part that doing the last 10% is only a modest amount
of work.

With luck, you've got enough momentum to push through to the end smoothly.
Otherwise, you might find yourself within 'just a short distance to the
summit' and being someone that climbed 90% of the way up Everest.

------
rb2k_
I personally was on my way to start a Ph.D.

Got a job at the university, talked to professors about possible topics but
ultimately decided to get a job in the industry.

While teaching classes was fun and the job gave me plenty of free time to read
things.

What was really annoying me is the fact that for every little thing you want
to do (e.g. buy another smartphone for the study, go to a conference, ...) you
have to run through a horribly inefficient process of filling out a dozen
forms and getting signatures from all sorts of people.

I also felt bad about not really "creating" something. In my master's thesis,
I created an asynchronous web-crawler, evaluated lots of NoSQL backends,
hacked for about 8 hours a day and had a nice project in the end.

At the university, I created slides, did lectures but never really did
something "cool". There are already dozens of lectures on all sorts of topics
and I pretty much only transformed text into pretty slides.

Starting next month, I'll be working at a small company (9 people) and really
look forward to hack on something with likeminded people :)

Hope it was the right choice

------
wheaties
Holy shit, this article could read like all the characteristics that are
needed to be a good leader and co-worker. Thanks for this. It made the morning
cup of tea taste that much better.

------
cschmidt
I always find an interesting contrast with articles like this on getting a CS
Ph.D., and my experience in engineering.

I got a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. It was a really
interesting four years (and three months) - I loved it. I actually brought my
thesis topic with me to grad school from a summer job as an undergrad. I wrote
three good papers, spent six weeks turning those papers into a thesis (mostly
a matter of doing a nice literature review in the introduction), and I was
done. I had a excellent advisor, and we had a great relationship. I was part
of a solid research group, and we helped each other. The _process_ seemed very
straightforward and linear. Everyone in my department seemed to be roughly the
same. We all worked hard, did research and got our degree in 4-5 years. Very
few of use would have felt on our own.

I get the feeling that this happy experience is less common in CS. The
relationship between grad student and advisor seems more distant, and less
helpful. The happy hours we had with the SCS at CMU reinforced that. They had
"black fridays" where projects were terminated and grad students left. That
"how will I get my committee to sign off" thing was there, unlike in our
department.

Is it something about the nature of "research" in CS that leads to this, or is
it a cultural thing?

------
joshrule
I really appreciate guides like these, particularly because I'm preparing for
graduate school myself.

Another really helpful read was "Getting What You Came For" by Robert Peters.
He walks through the entire Ph.D. process and describes a pipeline that can
knock a 7 year program to 4 or 5 and a 5 year program to 3 or 4. That time
saved would be incredibly valuable.

I'm always on the hunt for good material like this. What other Ph.D./grad
school/research guides have people found helpful?

------
nourishingvoid
I found this to be a good overview of the Ph.D. system from a CS perspective.
I'm doing grad school in a slightly different field, but a lot of the advice
was applicable.

<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~harchol/gradschooltalk.pdf>

------
chasingsparks
Coincidentally, I started writing a "What I learned from my first semester of
grad school essay on Friday." HackerNews is psychic paper.

------
ebaysucks
tl;dr: Getting a Ph.D. is lore like a job than you might think. Also, try to
live life a little.

~~~
loup-vaillant
OK, I guess from the massive down-voting that this summary is inaccurate, or
misleading, or inflammatory, or _something_.

That's close to no information at all. So if someone could make a better
summary, or at least a teaser, please do so.

~~~
hugh3
I think "tl;dr"s always get downmodded to oblivion.

~~~
loup-vaillant
Yet summaries without that term often sky-rocket:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2002255> And more than one HNer publicly
stated that they read comments first, to see if the article is worth their
time.

This only make sense if "tl;dr" is considered as a swear word here at HN. Is
it?

~~~
hugh3
It's a meme. A meme associated with a different style of commenting. In
particular, a "tl;dr" summary is usually a sarcastic over-summary.

~~~
ebaysucks
I had no idea that "tl;dr" is sarcastic.

My initial comments was meant to be an honest summary.

