
The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010) - mohitchawla
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
======
StreakyCobra
> 4\. Ability to work with poorly defined goals.

This is the most difficult part of a PhD for me.

Note: This quote is from the article on which this thread was pointing to
before it has been changed by mods.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382223](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382223)

~~~
kbart
_" Ability to work with poorly defined goals."_

Poorly defined goals should not be unfamiliar or scary to anyone who has done
at least one IT project for money. Actually, I haven't encountered many well
defined goals in my professional life after graduating high school many years
ago.

~~~
kelvin0
I think the difficulty the parent poster mentions is really meant to be read
as:

"Ability to work with poorly defined goals AND almost no one knows about this
subject you are discovering".

So of course you could start a new Web App for a customer and have poorly
defined goals (good luck with that!), but the problems you might encounter
have solutions already fleshed out by millions of other Web App devs (Stack
Overflow). Something tells me undergoing a PhD is not quite the same, as the
'resources' in this context are a few orders of magnitude scarcer, and the
subject matter a few orders of magnitude more complex ...

(I am not a PhD, please forgive me if this is wrong)

~~~
StreakyCobra
Yes it is a little bit of that.

In industry goals are maybe poorly defined, but at least you have directions,
and people that can answer the questions you may ask. If the contract is about
creating a website, at least you know what you are going to achieve, even if
you may have to fight with the customer to understand what he wants/needs on
this website and what problem he is trying to solve.

Using the image of pushing the boundary: Doing a PhD is like wandering within
some heavy fog. You want to push the boundary, but first you have to find the
boundary. You don't know in which direction is the closest boundary as you can
not see further than 10 meters from you. Maybe also the closest boundary is on
top of a 8000 meters high mountain that you don't have the capacities to
climb. So at the end you spend you time trying to figure out in which
direction to go. Some PhD students may have supervisors that are guiding them
through the fog, as they already explored the area and know it, but some other
are on their own, trying to figure out a boundary to push that is accessible
for them.

Situations of all PhD students are probably different, but this is my feeling
about it.

------
guaka
Not mentioned in the article is the strange workings of scientific publishing.
In my 20s I found writing open source software much more interesting than
writing scientific papers describing the software. Whereas to me at that time
it seemed everyone else was describing the buggy collection of Matlab code in
articles without publishing any of the code (or datasets used), making it
impossible to reproduce their results.

The topic of my unfinished PhD was finding structure in musical pieces with
AI.

------
wheaties
I'd just like to say that a master's degree makes you a better leader in the
same sense that reading a book does. Knowledge is great but knowledge alone
doesn't do diddly-squat for becoming an effective leader. That takes soft
skills. I know, I have a master's myself. It taught me nothing about what a
tech lead or manager needed to understand.

------
swingbridge
This is old and has been out there for ages. Regardless it's still one of my
favorite simple communications of a concept.

------
sidlls
Is the dichotomy at the end of the Might's article content accurate? It seems
too black-and-white to me, but I didn't go through a CS curriculum. Do MS/CS
students not have to do original research or read research papers?

~~~
pfooti
I have a MS in computer science that I got at UC Berkeley. I had to take a lot
of classes and write a thesis. Primarily, the thesis involved the design and
implementation of something interesting (at the time, at least), and then I
wrote about what it was, how it worked, and so on.

I _also_ got a PhD in science education at UCB, and that required writing a
research proposal, carrying out a six-month classroom intervention, and a lot
of other work on both sides of the research (design and framing the work,
analyzing the data). The amount of work was very different. The number of
classes was not too different - I had about the same number of credits.

All that said, my experience in academia (and out) has taught me that a degree
is only one indicator among many. I've had doors open to me because of my
degree, advisors' connections, and where my degree was granted, some doors I
did not particularly deserve, but the degree itself only shows that I can do a
certain kind of work when I want to. I've met plenty of other people who can
do the same kind of work who don't have the same kind of (or any) degree.

So, it feels like one of those 'neither necessary nor sufficient' sorts of
things.

------
norswap
Ah, the mighty diagram. It's been a while.

It reflects the mainstream and very unfortunate view of academia inside
academia. (Disclosure: I'm a PhD student)

~~~
tom_mellior
So what's your view?

------
activatedgeek
Somebody had explained this to me in words long ago. Interesting to finally
see the visual representation!

------
iplaw
I pointed out that this guy failed to properly attribute the work, and he
blocked me on Medium.

What a piece of work.

------
carc1n0gen
Really like how minimal but not ugly that blog is

------
agounaris
"A PhD degree equips you to do original research and potentially lead R&D
teams."

No you don't need a PhD to lead R&D teams...you don't even need a degree to do
that. And no you don't even need a PhD to push human knowledge. Too few of
those who did push it, did it through a PhD. In fact its just "possible" that
a PhD will push the boundary. Usually it does not.

~~~
nickflees
He didn't say that you can't lead an R&D team without a PhD. He said it equips
you to do so. There's no claim about it being the exclusive path to leading an
R&D team.

------
cauthon
The content of this article is lifted entirely from Matt Might's famous post;
I'm not sure what value the author intended to add by rehosting it.

[http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-
pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

~~~
bluesroo
It looks like someone changed the post's link to Matt Might's now.

~~~
dang
Yes, a mod changed it from [https://thebittheories.com/masters-versus-
ph-d-2b26ef33f883#...](https://thebittheories.com/masters-versus-
ph-d-2b26ef33f883#.qatl5reqn) a little while ago.

------
iplaw
It seems a little nefarious to blanket copy Matt Might's article, lead it with
some emphasized and bolded statements that give the impression that the
article is the work of the poster and distract from the plain text
attribution.

It looks like a bunch of hand-waving that results in a person skimming the
article believing that the poster is the author.

~~~
whorleater
Yeah, the author of this repost doesn't even bother to fully follow all the
license guidelines from Matt Might. Ironically this would be considered
plagiarism in any academic setting.

~~~
iplaw
Great ...

------
tmoot
so just Matt Might's article.

great. :|

~~~
tom_mellior
For completeness, here is the link to the original:
[http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-
pictures/](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/)

~~~
j-pb
Seriously? Did the mods also fuck with that link? I don't care if the other
post was a ripoff I still would like to read it.

~~~
StreakyCobra
I don't know if the link above has been changed by mods or was a mistake, but
here is the link to the original article:

[https://thebittheories.com/masters-versus-
ph-d-2b26ef33f883](https://thebittheories.com/masters-versus-
ph-d-2b26ef33f883)

The original content is licensed under a CC license [1], and _now_ (it
probably has been updated) the reposter is respecting the terms of it:

    
    
        1. Please attribute the original work to me (Matt Might) and link back to this page in your reproduction: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ as The Illustrated Guide to a Ph.D.
    
        2.When you attribute, please also link my name, Matt Might, to http://matt.might.net/
    
        3.And, don't forget the "Keep pushing," at the bottom!
    

So I don't see any reason why the original link can't be shared in thread's
comments, especially because people should be allowed to see by themselves the
original article in order to forge their own opinion on discussions happening
here.

[1] [http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-
pictures/#licen...](http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-
pictures/#license)

~~~
tom_mellior
> and _now_ (it probably has been updated) the reposter is respecting the
> terms of it

The reposter still doesn't link back to the actual article as requested,
though that's just a "please" clause. I guess naming (and even linking) the
author and giving the title suffices to satisfy the attribution clause of the
license.

~~~
StreakyCobra
> The reposter still doesn't link back to the actual article as requested,
> though that's just a "please" clause. I guess naming (and even linking) the
> author and giving the title suffices to satisfy the attribution clause of
> the license.

Indeed, I thought there was a link to the blog post, but there is not any. The
situation is different than before though, as the real author is now at least
credited.

