
Farewell to MIT - richardk
http://www.evanjones.ca/farewell-mit.html
======
bambax
> _The most important thing I learned is that I don't want to be a professor.
> This is a valuable lesson, because now I won't have regrets about not
> pursuing that career path._

This is a very interesting point.

These days many people argue that it's useless to go to college. But one of
the points of going to college is _not having regrets for not having tried_.

Maybe the right approach is to go, and then drop out. You know you were able
to go, you know how it is inside, and then if you get out after the first year
you save at least 75% of the cost.

~~~
eykanal
The quoted line is a good point, but your take on it is completely wrong, I
believe. The main point in college is to get a degree. You don't spend
approximately $150,000 in order to "not have regrets later on". You spend it
to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work
within.

Don't forget that PhD student in most departments _get paid a stipend;_ they
aren't accruing debt during their graduate career.

(For what it's worth, I received my PhD and soon thereafter left academia as
well, for many of the reasons outlined in the article above.)

~~~
hepek
"You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field
you wish to work within."

I don't like the direction the world is heading. Knowledge is not a commodity.
Nor are we livestock that is being bred to be sold on The Market.

I still hold the illusion that some people go to academia with non-material
motives. How could research in some obscure part of some obscure field ever
increase your price tag. Yet how can we hope of any academic progress if we
base our research on what the economy needs.

~~~
amouat
Fully agree. Education should be primarily about furthering knowledge, not
finding a job. The same should be true about school as well as Uni.

I studied Computer Science because I was interested in it, not because I
thought I would make a lot of money.

Frankly I deplore the attitude that the only point in education is to get a
job. Many (most?) advancements in science occur because of curiosity, not from
perceived practical value.

~~~
tmh88j
>Fully agree. Education should be primarily about furthering knowledge, not
finding a job.

I couldn't agree with you more, but unfortunately I didn't feel this way as an
undergrad. While I did enjoy the field of engineering, I was ready to be a
"big boy" and start chipping away at my student loans with a real income. Soon
after starting my job I was blown away by the level of knowledge of my co-
workers and it motivated me to push myself to learn more...about anything! I
didn't come from a CS background so I didn't know much about programming or
hacking, but I was always fascinated with electronics and technology so I
decided to learn how to program. I didn't want to feel like a one trick pony.
If I could do undergrad all over again I would have taken more classes that
were far out of my realm, possibly even a dual major. I feel like I'm playing
catch up, but I'm glad I realized it while I'm only a year out of college and
not half-way through my career.

------
scott_s
I defended my dissertation in December 2010, and I started at IBM Research in
January of 2011. Within weeks of being at IBM Research, I found myself having
fantastically productive, ad-hoc research discussions with my colleagues that
lead to real work being done - code being written, experiments being run and
papers written. Things moved much, much faster than they could have when I was
working alone as a graduate student. Three highly motivated people working
together on the same problem are more than just three times more productive
than a single person working on the problem.

I heartily endorse the author's advice to collaborate. I didn't do it much as
I should have as a grad student. But, in some ways, doing so is not
encouraged. My last two years, I had one goal: to graduate. I knew what I had
to do to get that done, so I plowed through and did it. Because you need to
come up with a dissertation that is _yours_ , you have many students who will
rationally work on their own projects without much collaboration.

~~~
evanj
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way. I agree that working
alone seems like the easiest or best choice. However, I think it is a local
maximum, and not a true optimal solution.

At least for me, working with others makes me way more productive, so I think
that my collaborations helped me graduate sooner. I were to start again, I
would be more proactive about working with others. Its true that to graduate,
you have to write your own thesis, but that doesn't mean you can't
collaborate. I've found that parts of work naturally fall to people according
to their interests, so it wasn't really a problem for the projects I worked
on.

------
lars512
I think people tend to work alone because of the pressure they feel to come up
with something independent and original. I went through this process and
eventually realised how much more I enjoy working closely with others on hard
problems. It's far more productive as well.

------
roman_vorushin
> However, there is one important piece of advice I wish I could give to my
> past self, when I started my PhD: _Actively_ collaborate with others.

This great advice is hard to underestimate.

~~~
iqster
Yes. And understanding why is important.

Your collaborators/peers will be your most important source of learning. They
will also form the basis of your professional technical network.

------
adulau
"Take the next step with the ones that are really interesting: actually do
some concrete work, even if it has to be done as a side project. At the worst,
you will learn a lot and have fun by working on something new with other
researchers."

It's a very good recommendation. I remember some PhD students reluctant to
work on concrete implementations of their theorized approaches. But in the
long-term, the most successful ones were doing a lot of concrete works and
gained experiences for an academic career and while keeping a strong
feet/competence into the private sector.

~~~
ogrisel
Also, implementing ideas and testing them on real data can be a very good
heuristic to drive theoretical thinking by:

\- giving you empirical evidences on the practical limitations of a positive
theoretical results that might have been otherwise overlooked.

\- giving you new insights on which approaches (e.g. class of algorithm) are
the most promising for a given class of problems.

\- make explicit some assumptions you might have implicitly made in your
theoretical work and check whether they can actually be satisfied in practice.

------
evanj
I'm curious how you discovered my post, months after I originally wrote it.
Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments!

~~~
richardk
I'm was writing a user-space thread library and I found your article
"Implementing a Thread Library on Linux", a really nice article by the way,
and then found "Farewell to MIT" just through browsing the site.

"Farewell to MIT" just seemed like such great advice, I was surprised when I
found it hadn't already been posted here.

