
PhDs from the Faculty's Perspective - jnazario
http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/157012-phds-from-the-facultys-perspective/fulltext
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timr
_"How do I know when a student is doing really well? It’s when the best thing
I can do for them is to just get out of their way."_

I wish more "real world" managers believed in this principle.

Academics tend to want their students and post-docs to function independently.
They don't have the money to hire "managers" (a.k.a. "people who boss other
people around and don't contribute"), and therefore prize autonomy. It's not
universal, but it's common. Even on large projects, there tend to be very few
formal "managers" on a scientific team. The research organization tends to be
flat, and the leaders are the people who produce.

When I first left grad school, I assumed that this sort of autonomy would be a
prized commodity in the real world, but instead I've found that most
businesses have a natural revulsion to independence. Politics, money and
laziness conspire to produce a class of people who want mainly to exercise
authority without doing much work. These folks are easily threatened, resort
to micro-management to control situations that they don't understand, and
generally just try to get _in_ the way of any progress that occurs without
their consent. It's a weird pathology of the commercial world, but I don't
think I've ever encountered a professional manager who thought that his most
effective role was "getting out of the way".

~~~
guylhem
Maybe that's because management is required for 95% of the employees who don't
have a PhD and wouldn't know what to do next (no idea of the big picture) or
just play on their worktime (no internal drive)?

~~~
timr
I think that's a cynical way of looking at it (and I'm a pretty cynical guy).
Some people are just lazy, but they're in the minority. I think most smart
people will rise to the occasion, if they like their work and feel respected.

Most new grad students drift for a while until they find their internal ass-
kicker. The job of the "manager" is to help them find the thing that lets them
excel, then get out of the way.

~~~
barry-cotter
_I think most smart people will rise to the occasion, if they like their work
and feel respected._

Most smart people carries an awful lot of weight in that sentence. And respect
can be traded off against liking. Valve is an existence proof that this is a
feasible mode of organisation but I would be surprised if it worked with a
workforce that was not above average in intelligence, conscientiousness or
both.

------
denzil_correa

        Perhaps the best way to close this column is with something I once heard attributed to Stu Card, a pioneer the field of human-computer interaction: "Grad school will be the best years of your life. Having said that, get out as soon as you can." 
    

Yes, this is indeed the best way to close the column. Wonderful article,
thanks for sharing.

~~~
jamesrcole
Except that he doesn't give any explanation of _why_. Considering that it is
an introductory-type article handing out advice, he should have.

~~~
ronyeh
Why: grad school is a great time to be independent and work on a lot of things
that you want. But, after your 6th-7th year in the PhD program, it will
quickly flip from being the best time in your life to being one of the worst
times of your life, if you can't manage to graduate.

You will question yourself. You will envy your friends who've graduated from
the program and are now working as a professor, or for Google or for MSR.
You'll look around at all the new grad students and realize you don't know
their names.

So the quote is right on. Enjoy your time, but get out as fast as you can. :-)

------
mahesh_rm
I'm handing over my thesis in less than one month. In fact, most of my friends
and colleagues think of grad school as a sort of institutionalized
enslavement. On the contrary, I find my PhD years have been a good school of
entrepreneurship. Among other things, they taught me how to fail fast and come
back stronger, how big institutions work, and how people behave and trust
other people in productive relationships and partnerships. As an Italian
moving to SF in order to develop my MVP and incorporate my startup, I can
truthfully state I would have never been able to figure out this was my path,
let alone to find the right attitude, confidence, and determination to follow
it, without my PhD years.

~~~
beambot
(Based on "as an Italian") how are you dealing with visa issues? My good grad
school friends all had issues with that transition. Many of them are slaving
away at MegaCorps until they get green cards.

~~~
mahesh_rm
Nice question. Exploring the window of possibilities at the moment. There are
a bunch of them, some involving enslavement, some not necessarily...

------
omnisci
The truth is that there is a lot of variability between PIs and their
students. Some see them as lab techs/free labor, others see them as their
family. I"m currently sitting in my lab and experiencing both, one PI is
really interested in their students/post-docs lives, has parties for their
students, and has a close knit group, whereas the other has the polar
opposite. Care to guess which lab is more successful?

In regards to the article, yes. It hits all of the points that all grad
students should understand. Especially the social part, which tends to be
difficult when PhDs are known to be socially awkward. Hence Beer :D.

Re:Delirium, in my experience (Biology) Professors don't pay for their
students tuition. That should be covered by the department for 3-5 years.

~~~
jpdoctor
> _The truth is that there is a lot of variability between PIs and their
> students. Some see them as lab techs/free labor, others see them as their
> family._

Very true.

I'd add: There is also a wide range of management styles of the profs. Some
are hands-off (come back and see me in a month), others want hourly updates.
The best ones dial their style upon recognizing which way the student works
best.

~~~
denzil_correa
> _The best ones dial their style upon recognizing which way the student works
> best._

So true! Each one of us is different. Personally, I love my freedom and
ability to work at my own hours. My advisor always respects that and allows me
to do so. He however adopts a different strategy for other students.

------
nachteilig
Probably the hardest lesson from grad school was learning that my adviser
wasn't always right. Learning to push back against what he said made me a much
better scientist.

~~~
mcguire
Make sure you get your colleagues to do the pushing back, too. Once you get
out in public, it's far too late. No one is going to point out that you're
being an idiot.

"I came away from the presentation feeling quite embarrassed, pretty much the
same way you feel after watching Ricky Gervais doing another one of his
cringeworthy performances."

Oh, yeah.

------
polyfractal
PhD's from the Faculty's Perspective: cheap slave labor.

~~~
andrewcooke
offensive bullshit. my partner is a prof. she works her fucking heart out
trying to help her students.

downvote all you like, you ignorant fools (so ready with a cheap piece of
cynicism). everyone i know cares deeply about their students. they're like
surrogate kids.

~~~
EvilTerran
<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

_In Comments

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

...

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you._

~~~
andrewcooke
i wasn't inviting anyone. i was responding to downvotes.

and frankly, i don't see why i should be civil to people who mindlessly accuse
others of not caring about something that, in fact, is hugely important to
them, just to appear cynically cool.

more generally, the problem with hn these days is not a lack of politeness; it
is a lack of insight, depth and originality. read any thread here. this kind
of cheap, cynical throw-away remark is the bland norm.

maybe you should find some authority figure saying "be smart and care" and try
posting that? best of luck...

~~~
shrughes
Do you think you're too good for us to use capital letters?

------
jobu
From an outside (undergrad) perspective, I always thought that the focus of
any faculty or PhD was toward attracting government grants or alumni
donations.

~~~
omnisci
It is, and in order to get the gov grant, you need to have data. That data is
typically generated by PhD students and Post-docs.

------
rayiner
PhD programs are by and large an utter scam at all levels and in many
different ways.

Downvotes away.

~~~
fayden
Why don't you take some time to explain your opinion? Currently, your comment
is only noise and completely useless.

~~~
rayiner
Within universities, PhD's are sources of cheap labor. Depending on how big of
a research mill yours happens to be, you'll often get little or uneven support
on your research agenda.

In the real world, a PhD has very little utility. If you're smart enough to
get a PhD, you're smart enough to do something else that doesn't have 5 years
of opportunity cost and a negative expected ROI. You might make important
social contributions as a research engineer, but your employer owns them all
anyway and you'll never see a dime of the value you add to the economy.

My brother graduated top of his undergraduate class at an Ivy with a BS in
physics and two publications. He was leaning towards going into a PhD program,
but I told him to do business/consulting/finance recruiting for his last
summer in college instead of doing more research, just to see how he liked it.
He did that, then went back full time, and has abandoned any plans to do a
PhD. He is tremendously happy with the decision.

