It’s excellent you have such foresight and introspection. I have three family members (including myself) who were “dishonorably discharged” from a PhD with a masters.
This was me. I should've bailed in the first year, gone into tech as I was perfectly able to do then, and been richer. If the program doesn't feel like, bail and join the work force. You'll be happier and richer.
Basically I started a PhD, and told myself if I don't submit anything to publish anything in a year, I'm gonna quit. I found I just don't have the discipline and self-motivation for a PhD. I had already taken a year of classes so I qualified for the MS. I was only joking about the "dishonorably discharged" - that's just how I felt not being able to cut it.
As someone doing a PhD right now, I think not having something to publish within a year isn't all too unreasonable. After transferring from masters to PhD, it has still taken a little over a year for my collaboration with my advisors and other PhDs to mature enough to result in several publications happening roughly around the same time.
I did initially have someone scare me into thinking that if I didn't publish even something like a literature review within my first year, I wouldn't be taken seriously. But that turned out to not really apply.
No absolutely, it really was a challenge I gave myself and I failed. Several of my classmates didn't publish until their fourth year or so.
But I saw how much work they put in, how organized and passionate they were, and felt like i was just a moth in the lighting section of a hardware store just going towards the next brightest thing. I finally picked a lab and project under a postdoc (who took 6 years to finish his PhD, and was coming upon his tenth year of being a postdoc which should have been a huge red flag). I did about 6 months of reading, some microscope work (was a dev biology lab, another huge red flag given I was basically under the engineering dept). I would come in late night when the lab was free, and felt like I was working hard, but really I had no direction.
When I realized 6 months out that I basically knew nothing, had no goals/interesting ideas, I panicked a bit. I went home for a week to ruminate. My dad actually told me something (I thought at the time) prophetic: I should be giving my school/academic institution a good name, not the other way around. I realized there's no way I could live up to that standard, but I could see people in my class definitely do that (Impostor syndrome? probably, but I'd add laziness to it).
I basically then told myself: publish something in one year, or apply to medical school which I was slowly starting to get interested in.
PhDs (esp in biology/chem/physics) are a different breed in my eyes, and get lots of respect. I wish you the very best!
Probably for the best. Usually “I quit my PhD” stories are people who spent 6 years and got fed up, but if if the author can’t last 6 months it sounds like they had the wrong expectations going in.
That’s part of the problem here. 99% of a PhD is your choice of advisor. It fully determines your experience. Going to do quantum computing research in a lab that doesn’t understand quantum computing is really on the author; any questions about the core competency of the lab can be answered by their publication history.
Step 1 of doing a PhD is reaching out to people actually doing the research to see if it’s a match. Also having no one with whom to talk about QC tells me it’s a very small school or a specialized school. Or just the wrong school! Not all schools are created equally; they each have their own core competencies defined by the skills of the department faculty. If no one in the faculty had a history of QC research, why is the author attending that school to do QC research? Did they not think to ask before they applied?
And why don’t they just find a better school to fit their interests? Transferring is not unheard of at such an early stage of the degree. But the author is done completely, which tells me they weren’t that serious in the first place.
This doesn’t seem like an entirely fair take. Nobody has perfect expectations fresh out of undergrad. PIs chasing funding is real, and using those funds on grad students who are excited but don’t know what they’re getting into is extremely common. The one thing that is less common is providing zero resources & guidance to get the job done. This definitely sounds like at least as much advisory failure as student expectation.
Not going to disagree that it’s not an advising failure as well, but if you’re so interested in Quantum computing that you’d like to devote 6-8+ years studying the subject under a professor, you might want to check first that the professor knows something about quantum computing.
Step 1 of doing a PhD is to find a person who you want to work under for probably 10% of your entire life. If you’re serious about it, it’s something you should not quit at literally the first roadblock.
If I may read between the lines here, because I see this often enough: it seems like this student had a passing interest in QC; joined a department without talking to anyone there to find out if the research they do is compatible with their interests; proposed a deep theoretical research topic that neither anyone in the department nor the author knows much about; and then promptly quit when they told him it’s probably not the best idea.
PHDs are more about idealism for most than practical outcomes.
Would be cool if colleges were required to estimate number of job openings relevant to each PHD program vs current cohort sizes. Or some central body could
In Physics it's not unusual to start a PhD in a sub-discipline that you've got little experience in (I realize the author works more on the information theory side of things). When I started my PhD in experimental quantum computing I had experience with superconductivity and low-temperature physics but none with qubit design or high-frequency RF system design. It's the point of a PhD to learn about these things and get qualified to do your own research afterwards (e.g. as a PostDoc).
Advisors also have to start somewhere. There will always be a first PhD student who works on something everyone has only vague ideas about. I have worked with such students and they are genuinely a different kind of person from other PhDs. They require little to none guidance and have very strong opinions on how to do their work. I believe OP was a poor choice for this position.
The author is probably leaving out a lot of context. Seems to me they joined a program without really thinking about who they would work with, and then when they finally thought to look they were shocked to discover there was no one they’d like to work with.
Schools offer this kind of acceptance path for students who aren’t very strongly tied to a particular idea. The author, despite having no experience or knowledge in QC was very tied to the idea, which how would the faculty know that before admitting them? Usually when you are so devoted to a research idea you’ve worked on it to some degree before deciding to devote 10% of your life toward pursuing it. I’ve never seen a student quit in 6 months because they couldn’t make progress on an idea they had only just started to consider.
QM is not something you can pick up in a couple of sessions from your research supervisor. It's probably the hardest concept to grasp in Physics and some argue Physics is the hardest field to study.
It isn’t that strange in Europe, or even parts of America. When funding is buzzword driven, everyone adjacent or even not so adjacent try to spin themselves into the latest fad. I have seen physics professors turn into data scientists overnight. At least in their grant submission. If they are successful, they start looking for grad students to play the role. Fake it and have your students make it.
The funding situation around quantum computing is quite strange indeed. Governments want to get a foot in the door for a new high-tech industry, but it also has implications for national security. The few existing quantum computing nerds aren't enough to go around.
So everyone is falling over each other to train up some new nerds. They are opening huge pots of money any professor who can make a plausible case for quantum computing with X. Here X is generally some form of pure research that the professor made a contribution to in the past. You'll inevitably have some growing pains when you try to repurpose hundreds of physicists like this.
It seems sort of silly, but when a government decides it wants get a jump on a new industry, before it's commercially viable, I don't see a better option.
It can happen both ways. My PhD ended up being a computer vision project and while I could program better than most new grad students I didn't have any significant experience with image processing, visual geometry or CV (or ML for that matter). I did know that going in, but at the time I was more interested in working on instrumentation (which I got to do as well). As a PostDoc I flipped the other way, after a couple of years in industry I joined a group where I brought some specific expertise to the group that they didn't have. Good strategy for getting work in my experience.
This is fairly normal: you get some funding to do a project and you have to hire someone with experience, though in this case the PIs were experts in the domain of application. That's reasonably common for cross-discipline projects, but in this case you really have to trust that your hires know what they're doing and you need to be able to assess their work without deep knowledge of the techniques used.
PhDs can be absurdly specific and many are complex enough that you can't really study them until grad school. Many universities don't teach quantum computing, but as a physicist it's probably assumed you have enough of a background to understand the material.
Maybe a research group wants to investigate a connection to another discipline.
Maybe the research group comes across a talented student and sees the potential for a research grant (how this works depends on the country).
Maybe the student has the means to self-fund and so the university happily collects a pay-cheque.
I fell into the first category - I did my PhD in a quantum information group despite my background being in mathematical logic. I was accepted because I knew a lot about different formal logic systems, and they wanted to study connections between those and the formalism they were using for quantum information.
Good for you! A PhD is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition in most career paths these days. It certainly isn't a ticket to guaranteed prosperity. The opportunity cost can be very high.
Especially with a major research mismatch in available advisors and personal interests like the author describe in the article, it can be especially daunting.
I wish them luck in their next steps. I remember how difficult it was at that stage in my PhD to find the right mix -- especially with potential advisors who left the school.
This looks like a list of 100 motivated reasons to not go to graduate school.
For example, Reason 74: Academic conferences. Really?? Academic conferences are the best part about grad school! They're held in beautiful locations, you get to meet all kinds of smart and amazing people, spend all week steeped in your favorite research topic, and best of all it's all expenses paid by your project.
The author's main complaint seems to be that the audience
doesn't pay close enough attention at session presentations... okay? That doesn't seem like a reason not to go to grad school. A lot of these seem like they could be reframed as reasons to go to gradschool, actually.
A PhD arguably gives you the opportunity to run very fast into one particular direction. Much longer than you would be allowed to run in any commercial setting.
Whether or not that is a good idea is an open question. Societies, institutions and supervisors clearly benefit from individuals taking this huge risk (and often failing).
One of the main problems is that we communicate very badly what a PhD is about.
A PhD arguably gives you the opportunity to run very fast into one particular direction. Much longer than you would be allowed to run in any commercial setting.
It seems like most cutting edge research (and the ability to run fast) in machine learning is done in commercial settings these days, not academia.
Which is exactly why we made no progress in the theory of Machine Learning in the past decade. With massive industrial trial and error we identified things that work for specific cases, but we have no clue how to generalize.
Most of that research is being done by people with PhDs though. Their ability to run fast in a PhD gave them the opportunity to be able to run fast in a commercial setting.
FWIW, I’m surrounded by PhDs who love research, loved their time doing PhDs, and some of whom loved working at Microsoft Research. I work in computer graphics.
One good thing about a PhD is you get several years to explore a topic of interest to you in great depth. (As long has you have a decently good advisor.) Another good thing about a research PhD is that in addition to getting experience publishing papers, you go through the process of writing a book sized thesis, which is valuable experience in a lot of ways - skills transfer to publishing and reporting in any field.
On an intellectually superficial but economically important level, another good thing about a PhD is that people who have advanced degrees earn on average 50% more than (1.5x) people without advanced degrees. This is in the US at least, according to data published by the US Fed.
another good thing about a PhD is that people who have advanced degrees earn on average 50% more than (1.5x) people without advanced degrees
This is bad statistics 101.
The confounding variable in a lot of these cases is wealth (or social class). Someone who grew up upper class and got their PhD is of course going to earn more than someone who grew up in a trailer park never graduated high school.
The reality is that for a lot of people getting advanced degrees leads to nothing but wasted time and a lifetime of debt that they can't discharge.
Oh this has been well studied. There’s a whole swath of papers teasing out the confounding variables, and wealth is not the only one. These papers estimate the correction factor one would need to assign a portion of causation to the degree, and a portion of causation to the inherited wealth, and basically nobody is claiming that wealth is the complete reason, and nearly all papers assign a healthy portion to the degree after controlling for wealth, for two reasons: one, because unsurprisingly 5 years spent studying actually results in learning a few things and gaining some skills that are useful to industry, and two, because industry relies on credentials, and people without PhDs cannot get research jobs, regardless of how good they are.
There’s no doubt in my mind that things are biased for the wealthy, none whatsoever. But consider patents - they have no degree requirement, and the number of patents granted to people with a bachelor’s degree or less is in the low single digit percent, it’s a landslide for people with formal research experience.
> The reality is that for a lot of people getting advanced degrees leads to nothing
What does “a lot” mean? Do you have a source for this claim that passes statistics 101?
This does not seem quite right to me. You do not need student loans for a PhD, rather you are paid (relatively poorly) while being a PhD student. And, anecdotally, most people in my PhD program were lower middle class, not upper class.
They’re not. Not universally. I really enjoyed my PhD and so did most of my friends.
The issue with absolutist statements like “Why higher edu institutions are so disappointing and mediocre?” is that it is a generalization from a non-random sampling of narratives, one that appeals to our sense of outrage and negativity. If one were to collect a fuller set of narratives one will likely find a more nuanced picture — yes, there’s hardship in a Ph.D. but in many cases there’s also joy in learning and discovery. It’s all a function of your advisor, your topic, your funding, your peer group and yourself (not everyone is cut out for it).
Not for a PhD, but I had similar feelings about supervision for my internship. When I was starting off, it was hard for me to tell how much initiative I need to take versus how much my mentor should guide me. He was always busy and at times I felt like there was no need for the role I was hired for.
In hindsight, I feel like my mentor should have guided me a lot more than he did. But it's hard to know that when you're just starting off, and you tend to blame yourself for not taking enough initiative (even if you are).
Obligatory: I am a PhD. I understand the pyramid-ish scheme that academia is.
Your advisor is playing the 'grant-reward' game, and in most circumstances that enables you to play your 'ideal' PhD game. However your ideals are not the same as your advisors, your PhD-mates, or your school.
The sooner you recognize you are the standard-bearer for graduating, the sooner you realize it's time to take off the kid-gloves and start directly but professionally confronting your colleagues and advisors until you find what you are looking for.
If you don't find it in six months after you change, write what you did and you can collect a masters. It really is that simple, they need you to graduate.
PhD is a choose-your-own-adventure in real-life. No two PhDs are the same.
I would love PhDs to be thought of as something you dive into when you have something to pursue, perhaps many years later in life rather than a follow on immediately after study.
As a comparison imagine if VC funding only went to the highest scoring new grads and the business proposal was asked for after the invitation to take on VC funding. That's pretty much what's been happening with PhDs. You get the marks, you get invited to take on a PhD and then you look for projects. A totally inorganic process that leads to a gross misallocation of resources.
> There are way more PhD's then there are research positions
Nonsense. Look at how many job openings there are for PhDs - people can't hire them fast enough. I was in a call the other day saying how hard it is to even find PhDs to interview, let alone get them to accept your offer.
Job != research. Many people see a PhD as an indicator of "really smart person" (good for jobs!...maybe...until you have too many of them and they get bored or act like divas), but it's more an indicator of an ability to do independent research (good for a very specific type of job). We are producing vastly more PhDs than we need for jobs that require the latter.
Link to a graph of open tenure-track phd positions over time? I can't find one but from what I've been reading it would indicate there are not enough positions open to fill demand.
There are three types of jobs a PhD could go into: A) industry job (just job to us mortals), B) industrial research lab (a company, but does research. An example would be IBM or Microsoft Research in CS), or C) a professor. For context, I work in a research group in a building full of PhDs, postdocs and professors.
For A, PhDs ought never be short of work. They were likely good students, they also spent 3-5 years looking at the state of the art in their field. Something should've rubbed off along the way. So a PhD is usually a good signal (but many smart people decide not to do PhDs, as well).
For B - the supply of places which will pay you to do actual research rather than company-specific goal stuff is much reduced compared to the supply of PhDs. This is why you'll find plenty of PhDs at Google doing software engineering - sure they're PhDs and they're smart, but they're likely not still publishing much. Whereas MSR/IBM research groups do publish (and in many ways act like a university).
For C - the chances of getting to tenure-track professorship are low, and when people say there aren't enough jobs for PhDs this is generally what they mean: there aren't enough academic jobs. The usual process is to become a postdoc and then to become junior faculty - a professor, but not tenured. Then you must seek promotion into a tenured role. Sometimes people skip steps, but this is the path people I've talked to have taken. Each stage is competitive: you have to convince a professor to take you on as a postdoc, then you must convince hiring committees you should become faculty and that you have the potential to become tenured. All the while, you must deliver enough research output to back that up.
At each of those stages, there's a relatively high attrition rate, and this is amongst people who obtained PhDs.
As to C, the math is simple. If each tenured professor has tenure for 30 years and has a single phD student graduate every 5 years, statistically the number of tenured professors need to grow by 500% in 30 years (over 6% per year) for all those phD students to get a tenured job.
Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking.
Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year.
The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.
Yes exactly, and your numbers are a lower bound, because the professor must do a few things: supervision of the PhDs, teaching (prep, lecturing, admin), grant applications, peer review (if not delegated to PhDs/postdocs) etc. The actual time the professor has for pure research is... not as much as you'd think.
Which means that having more PhD students means you can explore more of your own ideas by assigning them to it. It also means more teaching assistants and so on for your course. So the chances you will take and graduate one at a time are very low. Also, you know some fraction won't make it, so you need to account for that too.
In my area of academia, we train about 4 mediocre PhDs for every good PhD that can do excellent, independent research. If we had more good researchers, we could create more positions for them. But right now most of our graduates don't want to do research or suck at it and go into industry. Not to mention the pay differential.
I also sit on a graduate admissions committee, and it's hard to find good students.
We have work enough for easily 10x as many STEM students in the US.
You make 5 people to go through long and demanding training, knowing that 4 out of 5 will have to change careers afterward, as the training wasn't a good fit for them. Just so that you can weed out that 1 out of 5 to hire. Doesn't this sound a bit exploitative to you?
> it's hard to find good students
Maybe because you provide such a bad deal for the majority of your students?
If you do a PhD at 21, you’ve got 40 years of productive research ahead of you. If you do one at 40 you’ve only got 21 years. Less time to research, so missed opportunity.
Thanks for replying. I think I would push back a bit on the idea that research generally only commences after a PhD. Maybe in academia, but in industry (engineering at least, I don't know on the CS side), an awful lot of research is done at masters or even bachelors levels.
The people I know who've gone for a PhD later in life were already doing research and generally took the path because the credential opened professional doors (e.g., to become a supervisor or director), not necessarily facilitated greater amounts of research.
To play devil's advocate, you could in theory increase the amount of research by opening avenues for non-traditional PhDs. There will still be those who start a program at 21, plus those starting at 40 who would normally not engage in a program.
PhD programs exist to create new faculty members at other institutions. Other people hiring PhDs is a side benefit that has nothing to do with the purpose of the programs.
I disagree. I'm curious what you base this conclusion on? I've heard professors say similar, but it always seemed that it was because they were in an academic bubble.
If this is true, then you almost have to concede the model is broken. There will be a glut of PhDs compared to faculty positions. One of the reasons so many PhDs are disgruntled is because of the false expectation that every PhD is on track for a professorship.
I picked a random public school to see if their program states the intent is to produce faculty[1]. It seems like research is the other half of the goal along with teaching. Lots of research is done outside of faculty positions.
"The doctoral degree, i.e. the Ph.D., is primarily intended for students desiring a career in research and/or collegiate teaching."
> If this is true, then you almost have to concede the model is broken.
PhD training prepares people for the academic career and faculty positions. Less than half of PhD graduates actually end up in the academic career. So yes, you could say the system is ...not perfect.
If that's the case, "predatory" is probably a more apt description.
Imagine if a trade school only had a 50% employment rate for their intended purpose and forced the students to work at a fraction of their market value for the privilege of attending, while profiting off that labor...I don't think imperfect would be the word used.
Many pre-modern apprentices never became journeymen and even fewer a master.
In 17th century Leiden, 40% of surgeons' apprentices dropped out. In Utrecht's Coopers' Guild, only about 10% of apprentices became Masters.
On the other hand, getting rid of the guilds in the 1820s and replacing it with less formalized vocational training during industrialization didn't change the system for better:
>A lengthy contribution in the journal of the Dutch Society to Advance Industry in 1891 criticised the condition of Dutch training in detail: ‘Nowadays boys leave one boss after the other for the greatest triviality . . .. The boss continuously fears that the boy will leave him to use his acquired skills with another boss. Bosses therefore slow down training by putting boys to work at specialised repetitive tasks, so that they bring in the highest profits.’
My time as a graduate student at a major research institution with the #2 program for my engineering field , and two years as the President of the Graduate and Professional Student Association. What institutions say and what faculty actually do may differ in reality.
CS programs may be different, but engineering and physics were definitely geared for academics
I'm still skeptical but willing to give the benefit of the doubt. What makes you think engineering and physics are definitely geared for academics?
I ask because all of the PhDs I've worked with outside of academia are from engineering and physics, save one from sociology and three from psychology. (The latter were geared to human factors of engineering problems).
Let's face it, PhD is a social signal as much as it is a vocational toolset. And it also signals a specific value system, like putting a high value on educational credentials. So if the selection board for a lab director is made of similar directors who have PhDs, you've already got a self-selecting pool of people who value PhDs, regardless if they provide much value in practice. Cognitive bias is strong and it would be tough for someone who's put in the work for a PhD to admit it's of little value, even if it were the case. Occasionally, people will get promoted who do not have a "proper" PhD, and they are (rightly or wrongly) derided for it behind closed doors, even if it has no bearing on their research competence. As a side note of irony, in many cases that I've worked with, getting a PhD makes someone do less research, not more. Because of the status signaling, they get more administrative leadership duties, not unlike a dean at a university.
And the PhDs that I know, who do it for a "simple" promotion, don't leave their job. (simple in quotes, because in my experience, they are rather large promotions).They complete their PhD as part of their job, in addition to their normal duties. It sounds like you are stuck in an academic mindset, where there is only one way to skin the PhD cat.
Why would you then assume people have to forsake their prime working years to pursue a PhD? Why propose that false dichotomy when you know firsthand that's not the case?
I still did it very early in my career. If I’d left it another ten years I’d have wasted a lot of time, and wouldn’t have been able to get the career I have.
And I recommend things because of my experience not despite it.
I'm assuming this recommendation comes because you were not doing research prior to your PhD and you wanted to? In other words, you think PhD is about building a skillset and not signaling?
That may be where we're talking from two different angles. Much of this discussion seems predicated on the idea that you need a PhD to do research (i.e., it's vocational in nature). My claim is that you do not, but that it's possible people will pursue a PhD for other reasons (because it's more about signaling than many realize).
Yes, some people are naturally talented enough to do research without training, or with training other than a PhD.
But if you aren't exceptional, then promoting this is not realistic and is setting people up for disappointment. Some people can learn to play an instrument without a teacher... most would be better served with some structure and guidance for an experienced tutor.
You seem to imply that a PhD program is the only way to have researchers get tutored/trained. I.e., that PhD programs have a monopoly on developing the skillset; I'm saying they have a monopoly on the credential but not the skillset. Maybe I've had good employers but there's always been an emphasis on training junior employees in research, regardless if they had a PhD or not. Maybe that's the seat of our difference in opinion.
I think the idea that a PhD program is the only adequate training for research is flawed. Most of the researchers (PhD and otherwise) have a fairly methodical approach to the endeavor. If there's a method/process, it can be taught. The non-PhDs that I know doing research did not have some innate talent for research, but were taught by other more senior researchers.
IMO, most research is borne from the combination of a solid grasp of a problem that needs to be solved, taking the time to build deep understanding of the topic, and then following a methodical approach to testing a hypothesis. None of that takes exceptional talent or half a decade in a PhD program to learn. (I say this as somebody who's been through a PhD program that I enjoyed. It's not from any bitterness). The biggest hurdle for many seems to be funding and resources, rather than some exceptional talent. And to that end, I'd concede that a PhD credential can open up doors for resources, but I hold that as distinct from the skills required from research.
If you're talking about the exceptional, once-in-a-generation breakthroughs, sure, I can see why a PhD program with an exceptional advisor may be necessary. The the vast, vast majority of research is small and incremental.
I'm interested enough that I could change my mind (although I thought it was curious that you said "I can't be convinced"). But your responses are somewhat vague and defensive in the tone of "I know what I'm talking about" without the specifics as to what I'm actually asking. To be specific, what do you think an PhD course offers that training through other means does not? For example, what do you define as "genuine research"? How does the training differ?
IMO, employment research offers many advantages. For one, it forces somebody to focus on the application and how it would genuinely be of value, so that one doesn't get bogged down into "neat" but ultimately impractical efforts that are little more than academic exercises. IMO, it opens the projects up to more interesting problems because they don't get cornered into the "publish or perish" paradigm. People easily get paid 3-4x (or more) what they would as a TA. They have daily access to experts in their field rather than relying on piecemeal meetings with their advisors. It also tends to open one up to larger resources for their investigation; for example, the people in PhD programs at my last job were given ample access to multi-million dollar rocket test stands and the anonymized data from them; if that were a university resource it would be hard to gain that same level of recurring access. Now I'll grant that there are certain PhD programs that are better suited to specific types of fundamental research that would otherwise be difficult to get funding while an employee. Nuclear physics would be one example. But I would venture that the majority of research is on the applied sciences/engineering side.
Sort of. From my experience a master's degree was like getting an accelerated undergrad degree without a lot of the hand holding or extra courses. While I did learn a lot I don't think I learned a whole lot in depth. I studied one thing somewhat in depth but that was really the tip of the iceberg for the whole sub-field/topic really. People would likely get a PhD in something way more specific that I probably never even learned about in said field.
You got it. I don’t know how things worked in the old days before people started to think that becoming Einstein or Witten was a plausible career path, and academia oriented itself to deal with the demand. But. To imagine that culture-fit might allocate resources better than test-driven meritocracy! quantamagazine needs to start featuring more representative career paths like OP’s.
It’d be pretty cool if we had a real path for later-in-life research time. I’m not sure that’s very realistic, but I’d love it too. Big problems are that kids and jobs lock you into needing to make enough money.
I actually tried to join a PhD program after 5 years of industry experience, and they offered the top fellowship they had, which was not enough to cover only the health insurance for my family, not to mention rent or food. It simply wasn’t feasible, and so we would need a systemic change to education funding to enable late-in-life study opportunities for everyone.
I dislike the comparison to VC funding. VC funding is essentially gambling and already a gross misallocation of resources. VC funding already goes to something analogous to the highest scoring grads who speculate wildly that they have a viable business model, and the real business model only shows up long after the funds, even in the small ~5-10% of successful startups. The ~90% of failures is proof enough.
Also, research requires taking risks with resources. If we don’t take risks, we won’t make progress. Thinking of research in narrow immediate economic terms is short sighted. We often don’t understand the ROI of research until long after the initial investment, meaning there will never be a time that allocation of resources can be predicted or approximated in advance.
It'd be interesting to see someone with industry experience bring industry problems to academia and explore them there. As a bonus, they might be accomplished enough professionally that they aren't interested in the publication rat race, so they're more likely to produce meaningful results (or nothing, but that's ok!) than a pointless paper.
In most faculties this is already happening, mainly because solving a problem that big corp is interested in will make it more likely to secure funding (by big corp), and in general you probably want to discuss (or even evaluate) the practical applications of your (maybe theoretical) research.
They will still be part of the rat race though. Actually it's been interesting to observe the opposite, I know some PhD students who quit because big corp offered them a nice position in their innovation branch with much more freedom (and financial security) to work on their favourite problem... A bit of luck involved to have your field of research align with big corps' goals though.
> big corp offered them a nice position in their innovation branch with much more freedom (and financial security) to work on their favourite problem
I'm going to pick on Timnit Gebru, or at least what became more obvious with that debacle. Both the directional freedom and financial security are there, but part of your job is PR, and you don't have the same freedom a professor with tenure gets. If you have a paper that is critical of your employer or they don't like it for any reason, they can kill it. That's the deal.
Thanks for the reference, I did not follow that particular debacle.
But I'm not convinced this couldn't happen at a faculty. "part of your job is PR" (i.e. fishing for grants) and "they can kill it" (i.e. funding dried up and focus changes) apply there as well...
>It’d be pretty cool if we had a real path for later-in-life research time.
I think some of these are out there. I've known a few people working in government, academia staff positions, and quasi-government organizations that pursued their PhDs (for free) while working full time. Occasionally, some got some push-back as to why they wouldn't be available to teach, for example, but often their advisors welcomed them because they came with real-world problems they were trying to solve and an organization willing to pay and support them in that effort as part of their "real" job.
> It’d be pretty cool if we had a real path for later-in-life research time.
We do. You can do a PhD in part-time, self-funded. Yes, your financial situation will definitely take a hit; you can control to what extent though.
Expect to need about 5-6 years of 1.5-2 days a week. If you'd like to know more, I'm happy to discuss my experiences as a supervisor of such PhD students and share what insights I have.
Blue Sky research is like that: you're venturing into new areas.
I remember the advertisement posted by Shackleton:
_"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."_
That's how I feel about this. Chances of success are not as high as one would like, however, case affirmative, honour and recognition. A lot!
You seem to dismiss publishing as performative when you don't rate the work. I can tell you that a lot of genius work dies on the vine because the researcher isn't capable in these "performative" aspects of the job. And many genius researchers' work never gets read/cited because they can't write.
Publishing and disseminating work is a skill that (imo) is almost entirely distinct from researching, but you must have this skillset to succeed in research. If your research group is succeeding by picking low hanging fruit (in your eyes) then this is a great sign. You should learn from them. Your talents will not go to waste through learning these new skills.
Lastly, if you like TA work then you should definitely continue because you can then look for lecturing positions after. To my knowledge TA roles generally require postgrad/PhD.
I'm someone who finished a PhD, here's my perspective.
You don't believe your supervisor or your research group and so you quit, great. It's great that you have the critical thinking abilities and confidence in yourself to make such a decision.
However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art. I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against. I think if there's enough substance to make your comment specific, you should. Maybe even write a paper explaining why what they're doing is nonsense. If you're right, this would genuinely be a contribution to the field.
If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.
You finished a PhD, you should know how much weight his accusations would be given seeing as he isn’t a professor. I kept my mouth shut when I heard my co-advisor was badmouthing my other co-advisor’s research and the result was the committee blowing up at the prospectus. Sometimes it pays to be proactive.
Exactly. Giving the OP the benefit of the doubt -- that he is completely correct in his assessment of the group -- he is certainly doing himself no favors publicly throwing them under the bus. I imagine other prospective advisors, in any field, might be reluctant to take him on if this is a pontential outcome.
This can go both ways. While he may be hurt by this, light needs to be shed on systemic failure.
I know a few people who have PhD's that had fantastic support, counselors and teachers, and they still had questions on the validity of their degrees and processes. Here, this person's experience seems to be a money grab by a school unqualified to provide him a PhD in his area.
Going public though, maybe a hard decision, and may hurt him, but who knows? Maybe there are people out there that want someone that is willing to stand up like this publicly?
This seems like the most important point. Is it normal for research groups to take on PhD candidates who they are unable to support in the field of interest?
{Takes on Quantum Computing grad student} + {has insufficient Quantum Computing expertise in group to even advise} seems... pretty bad.
PS: And being from a tenured family and having grown up exposed to academia, I'm inclined to take author at their judgement here, given that taking on students in hot topics meshes with how the incentives of grant funding, publishing, and prestige work.
Academia is full of mechanisms to negatively judge your research work. In fact judgement is pretty much the only constant in the field: every single piece of work you do will be under constant scrutiny, will be torn apart both before and after publication, and your entire (research) value will be harshly judged by outsiders on a more or less constant basis.
The one positive of this environment that when you see someone who has succeeded in publishing a substantial amount, it's safe to presume that their work is not entirely without merit. That's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a good heuristic. A post like this implies that the author's personal judgement is more insightful than a process that I know to be enormously thorough and harsh, and yet it provides only vague assertions and no details on methodology. At the same time it's hard to ignore that the post is written by someone who is (understandably) a bit bitter and probably isn't being entirely objective in their evaluation.
In general it's not my impression that this sort of post produces reliable feedback that outsiders should rely on, and (unless it's very carefully anonymized, which it isn't) it also leaves bitterness in its wake.
>Academia is full of mechanisms to negatively judge your research work.
Fascinating, as I did not find this at all to be the case in general. I imagine in some cases it could be true, but for the most part I found most research in academia to not be of much interest to many people, one way or another. Hardly anyone takes much time to either validate research or to critique it.
I'm glad to hear that you managed to find something to research that caught the attention of many people/mechanisms, even if only to judge it negatively. It must mean you were doing something important, which I think is the exception and not at all the norm.
I suspect from your comment that you're not familiar with the actual experience of R1 academic research. It is a Darwinian process that involves repeatedly submitting papers to highly competitive conferences for peer-review (a typical top-tier conference in computer security averages <20% acceptance rate.) You must do this many times just to get an Assistant Professorship. Then, assuming you publish N papers during grad school, you need to continue publishing maybe N/2 additional papers (or more) per year while also submitting successful grant proposals to organizations like NSF. These proposals are even more competitive (and worse: these organizations also consider your publication history and reputation, not just the merits of the proposal.) If you do this unabated for seven years or so then you might get tenure, which means you'll get to keep jumping those hurdles for another 25 years or so.
Of course you can argue that all this academic competition selects for the wrong thing (that's subjective) but the competition and testing is never-ending. There is a reason that a lot of people leave for industry, simply because it's so much less stressful.
> The one positive of this environment that when you see someone who has succeeded in publishing a substantial amount, it's safe to presume that their work is not entirely without merit. That's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a good heuristic. A post like this implies that the author's personal judgement is more insightful than a process that I know to be enormously thorough and harsh [...]
This has not been my experience. In my own field, I've found that quite a few well-cited peer-reviewed papers have severe flaws that are not difficult to find. I can't call the process "enormously thorough and harsh". I view current academic processes as more of a facade than anything else. Sure, the process probably filters out absolute garbage, but I don't think most people need peer review to recognize the worst quality research.
Complaining about flaws in a few papers is like saying “I found a piece of software with a bug” and then claiming software engineering is a broken field based on those examples. The argument about peer review is not that it’s perfect on any given paper, but that someone who has repeatedly survived a publication competition with a ~20% success rate and then got other serious researchers to cite and build their work is probably not a total piker. Everyone makes a few mistakes and papers, but in the aggregate it is a shockingly hard gauntlet to run, whatever your impressions may be from the sidelines.
> Complaining about flaws in a few papers is like saying “I found a piece of software with a bug” and then claiming software engineering is a broken field based on those examples.
My point wasn't a complaint about a few papers, rather, important papers that presumably have had a lot of eyeballs go over them in addition to being peer reviewed. If those papers have serious flaws, then I think that does say something about the standards in academia broadly.
One reason why I don't work in academia is that too many academics resist the idea that there is a quality problem.
Also: I didn't say that my field was broken or anything like that. It's not optimal, but for the most part it's okay. That has little to do with peer review.
> someone who has repeatedly survived a publication competition with a ~20% success rate and then got other serious researchers to cite and build their work is probably not a total piker
Sure, it's evidence that the work is good, but it's not particularly strong evidence in my view.
> whatever your impressions may be from the sidelines.
If you're implying that I haven't published in a peer-reviewed venue myself, you're mistaken. I've never had a problem publishing. I think that's because I agree more with Gauss: "few, but ripe". Unfortunately "publish or perish" reins supreme in academia, which probably explains why so many people have trouble as they seem to try to produce "least publishable units". Borderline papers like that of course will have trouble.
I think tarring the entire field of scientific research by saying "I claim I found serious flaws in a few unnamed papers" is pretty meaningless. Provide specifics!
Based on conversations I've had with tenured academics like yourself, providing specifics won't convince you. You could simply say that you aren't qualified in my field so you can't evaluate what I've said, or deny that I've identified enough problems. Those are reasonable counters, but they won't be convincing to me either.
The most effective thing I can do is encourage you to find problems in published papers yourself.
Another factor in my reluctance is that explaining each case would take a significant amount of time. (Brandolini's law, basically.) I can point you to places where I already explained problems I've found, for example: https://pubpeer.com/publications/95455FA4147A9CBD5EAA5185D21...
That paper has over 300 forward citations over about 25 years. It was published first in a conference, and later in the top specialized journal in my sub-field. I went through a large fraction of the forward citations and could not find anyone who noticed the major error I point out. And it's not difficult to spot if one does basic spot checks.
Let me understand this: you found an error in a paper published in 1998, over 24 years ago. Based on this finding you were able to publish a critique and partial solution in a more recent conference or journal, which seems like an absolutely first-class scientific outcome. (I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.) And yet despite this reasonably good outcome correcting an ancient and apparently little-studied result, you feel that this error indicts the entire field of scientific research… because people have cited the paper?? (Most likely, given the number of citations, without relying on the model and simply listing it in “previous work” sections.)
You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [initially I read their Google scholar as indicating they’d left the field, but they haven’t and that was my mistake reading Google Scholar in Korean.] Meanwhile you have not contacted the third (typically senior and advisory) author, who appears to have publications as of 2022?
Yet even if you do the basic legwork here and contact all the authors, I’m not sure quite what result you want from this? I presume you’d like an acknowledgement that an old paper has errors? You’ve already received that through the acceptance of your own paper. Would an admission by the third author help? Do you demand a retraction of that ancient paper and every single paper that cited it since? And how is this the devastating critique of all science that you seem to think it is?
I'm not sure we're having a productive conversation. Perhaps I've been unclear, but I didn't say this was a "devastating critique of all science". I said that I thought my field was "for the most part [...] okay" and I think that's true for science broadly. My main point is that peer review as currently practiced is not as good at quality control as you seem to believe.
My link was just one example. As I indicated, I don't have time to give more examples, and I didn't expect to convince you. I think few academics are actively looking for errors, so unless you are, you may not notice them as often as I have.
> I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.
There are quite a few papers that directly use the criticized model, from the 90s until recently. It does seem that many people blindly accepted a clearly wrong model. With that being said, the other model in the paper is responsible for most of the citations.
> You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [...] I’m not sure quite what result you want from this?
The first author is the senior author here. (The conference paper version does not have the other two authors.) I contacted them because if I'm wrong, I wanted them to tell me how so that I could avoid making a fool of myself in my paper. I don't want their paper to be retracted, though a notice that it has severe errors would be helpful to readers.
> If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.
It's a blog post, he definitely can say what he thinks, orthogonal to unprofessionality.
It's up to the reader to understand that's his view of reality and without any hard proof we should take his view as a data point, and potentially an erroneous one. Nothing more.
Last we need is people writing accusatory white papers to explain themselves over an opinion they had on a personal blog post.
This is terrible advice (also from a smurf account).
Yes unsubstantiated claims can be harmful, but that doesn’t mean that no such claims should ever be made. The author is not just bad mouthing their research group, but presenting their perspective of what took place.
> presenting their perspective of what took place.
I know this is the age of oversharing, but just because something is from a perspective doesn't mean that people should be interested in it, or that is wise or fair to share. Making it specific and detailed is a way to make it fairer and more productive.
edit: also, to appeal to self-interest, people respond to detailed argument with attacks on the supports of that argument. People respond to vague accusations with ad hominem (which may be very specific) because there's no argument to attack. Vague accusations are almost always eventually more damaging to the accuser than to the accused.
I don't like saying "in the old days" much, and I wasn't able to read the article, but this seemed like something you'd rant to a friend or two over a beer instead of to the general public.
That doesn't mean brushing it off though. More of a vent to cool yourself off before taking the next action. At least that's what I've always done.
At least you can somewhat "un-say" things now a days if you control the content hosting.
>I disagree. It is extremely unprofessional to act like doing research while pocketing mostly public funds like that.
This can be true while it's also true that making a vague, unsubstantiated assertion about how your love for the field is just too deep and pure for academia is still unprofessional.
Of the people who claim they dropped out of school because they were just too smart or creative to go through the motions, the vast majority are probably very wrong. If you want people to take you seriously, make a better argument.
I considered starting a PhD around ten years ago. One particular university was having an open day. When I got there everyone was locked out because someone hadn't bothered to tell someone else the open day was happening.
There were visits to the facilities, which were interesting enough but a lot of the tech had been there since the 90s (or 70s in some cases) and there wasn't anything fresh to see.
And there was a show-and-tell by various researchers and one lead professor, during which I realised the professor was a Grade A Bullshitter [1], and the researchers weren't even remotely familiar with other work in the field.
The main person I wanted to see didn't bother to turn up.
Bizarrely, there was a persistently religious undertone - very strange in a field that isn't even remotely religious. (The university is quite well known for its theology department.)
Now, this is a very niche field, so I have no way of knowing if it was typical.
But as experiences go it certainly didn't suggest that that particular department was simmering with eager high-voltage professionalism.
Since then I've read "We're looking for PhD students" notices on various email lists. It's striking how many [2] seem like transparently contrived attempts at getting funding from organisations who already know what exactly they want to fund, and how few have are truly research-driven.
It feels very much like a box ticking exercise. Org gets money, org hands it out to researchers, researchers get students, students write up dissertation, dissertation is forgotten, rinse and repeat.
[1] Subsequently confirmed independently by other people in various "Oh, him - yes, he's a loon" conversations.
[2] Not all. There are places who on the leading edge. But even there some of the research feels dissociated from real problems - almost as if the goal is the production of "Towards..." "Considering..." and "A critique/summary/review/taxonomy of..." of papers, and not so much developing techniques and solutions that that would really move the field forward.
It's also likely that, as a new student, the writer simply doesn't understand these "performative" aspects yet. The research group isn't succeeding by accident, put it that way.
This post isn't about the advisors. No one reading this knows who the advisors are, they won't show up in Google. "Saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art" is also hardly an accusation, it's an opinion. No names are named: how can there be an accusation without an accused?
I interact very heavily with academics (though am thankfully no longer one myself) and one thing I can't stand is that all of them will complain endlessly about the horribly abusive and broken system that academia has become, then without hesitation turn around and flog the next person in line when it's their turn to continue the process from the abusing side.
As someone who once held the title of assistant professor, I have little patience for people who recognize that the system is in many ways repulsive, and yet refuse to even consider to stop playing the game because it's all that they know.
The amount of bullshit being produced and regurgitated in academia needs to be called out. Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"
Academics who defend a broken system are a major factor in why that system continues to decline.
I'm glad the OP wrote this article and find it expectedly discouraging that someone creeps out from the woodwork to try to shush it.
> Academics who defend a broken system are a major factor in why that system continues to decline.
Much like military & law enforcement personnel who wear their medals defending a broken system.
The OP should count themselves lucky they have seen that having a few letters after their name on a piece of paper or business card doesnt cut it with many.
Estate agents (realtors) have devalued the letters after name's obedience to "authority".
I mostly agree, but I actually think the biggest pressure is people afraid of getting kicked out.
You pay your weight in gold, but if you become a pain to someone high enough on the totem pole, it's easy to get kicked out of a program, leaving you with not much.
You gotta play the game to have any chance of changing things. A lot like politics, actually.
> I interact very heavily with academics (though am thankfully no longer one myself) and one thing I can't stand is that all of them will complain endlessly about the horribly abusive and broken system that academia has become, then without hesitation turn around and flog the next person in line when it's their turn to continue the process from the abusing side.
Completely agree.
> The amount of bullshit being produced and regurgitated in academia needs to be called out. Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"
No, it isn't. First off, I'm not in the academia. I'm not part of the "us". It doesn't affect me if person A is attacking people B. For me I don't care at all. Also, I specifically said that the problem wasn't criticism. The problem is criticism so vague it's impossible to defend, because there's nothing to address. Person A says that person B is superficial. Person B responds "no I'm not". Very substantive!
"I'm someone who finished a PhD" doesn't help your claims.
But I digress. The real question is, why do personal opinions like "xxx is superficial" needs to be defendable? Is academia somehow a "protected class" of individuals where we need to keep our opinions to ourselves unless we have hard evidence?
Or is this a standard you hold against other PhDs? Because the OP stated they quit, so it doesn't really apply.
I can totally empathize with the GP's claim that 'Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"'. You might not be in academia per se, but it seems to me like you picked up that mode of thinking nonetheless.
And no, I didn't keep my opinions to myself despite I have no proof whatsoever. Sue me for unprofessionalism please.
> The amount of bullshit being produced and regurgitated in academia needs to be called out. Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"
This can be generalized, I think. Professional social standards, specifically, do seem to primarily be about protecting and saving face.
I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on what's broken, why, and what avenues are available to fix it. (Genuinely curious, I know the tone of that sentence may come across as dismissive. It wasn't intended to.)
Academia is no more motivated by a honest interest to understand things around us, raise questions and spend time deeply thinking and genuinely coming up with solutions that really make sense and bring change to the world.
A lot of researchers are very mediocre and they treat research as a simple career where they superficially advise a bunch of PhD students. A lot of those researchers neither think nor raise questions nor make meaningful contributions.
Exacerbated by research grants which favours researcher with lots of publications regardless of the quality of the research (usually real honest high quality research takes time and produces much fewer papers). Those researchers thus end up chasing low hanging fruit just to increase their paper count, making everything they do shallow and full of bullshit.
Okay that's your problem with the system, but how would you propose to fix it? That's the important part. And be careful in your proposal that you don't end up reinventing the current system (but worse), because lots of proposals I've seen tend to go that way (coming from a place that doesn't actually understand the system they purportedly want to fix).
To be honest, I have no idea how to fix this. This was just an insider observation. Luckily, I am doing a PhD on systems software and I have a large support network of very smart people on the Internet in the form of contributors to large open source projects such as the Linux kernel, GCC and LLVM. My supervisor is the shallow-type of researcher, but because of my special circumstances, it's easier for me to overcome the issue. However, it may not be that easy for other people working on exotic topics such as Quantum Computing.
The author's "About" page links to both their GitHub profile (full name, partial photo), and that in turn links to a more complete profile listing their location, current employer, previous employers + education, etc.
I think you're right that it could be a bit more tactful. It's also not surprising to me that the person who finished advocates a "go along to get along" and "don't rock the boat" attitude.
Spent a lot of time in academia, and I quite disagree. He's pointing out something that is very common in academia - common enough to be widely accepted. Saying he is unprofessional in criticizing his supervisors is like saying someone is unprofessional in criticizing his boss for demanding Leetcode style interviews.
If his supervisor were an outlier, I could see your point. But a big purpose behind his blog post is to highlight how common this is.
> Spent a lot of time in academia, and I quite disagree. He's pointing out something that is very common in academia - common enough to be widely accepted. Saying he is unprofessional in criticizing his supervisors is like saying someone is unprofessional in criticizing his boss for demanding Leetcode style interviews.
I specifically said the issue isn't criticizing. The issue is criticizing in a way which is so vague as to be impossible to defend.
It's exhausting commenting on HN. You have to append every minor observation of a laundry list of responses to likely misinterpretations.
I wanted to claim that you shouldn't make vague criticism. I immediately expected that people would respond as if my claim was that you shouldn't criticize. And sure enough, that's what the post I responded to did.
Me: "You shouldn't make vague criticism"
Response: "OMG you're saying university professors are above criticism."
You should re-read the response to your post. You are upset because you feel you are not being read, but the problem is that you are not reading others.
It's not exhausting, you're just refusing to understand the other side of the argument.
Criticizing in a vague way is precisely appropriate in a situation where you don't want to make the criticism specific to a single circumstance but are instead trying to make a broader point about a systemic issue.
The grandparent misunderstood why the author was being vague. This is a separate issue from whether the author of the blogpost is right or wrong, it gets very confusing if you try and conflate the two as you are doing right now.
I don't accept either side of the argument as true, my point is simply that telling someone to keep their story to themselves unless they can present an argument that satisfies a scientific standard is missing the point being made. People make arguments that are purposely vague to avoid causing undue harm both to themselves and, believe it or not, to the people they are accusing. Usually you do this because you're not interested in bringing to light the specifics of one particular instance as if this is an isolated case, but rather to let others who may find themselves in a similar circumstance know that they aren't alone.
I'm in favor of specific criticism rather than lumping everyone together or painting with a broad brush, so on that specific point, I agree with the OP. There is no mention about needing to satisfy any specific 'standard' as you claimed. What you quoted doesn't say that either. Anyway, there isn't much meat in this thread arguing over such minutia, so I will just let you have the last word if you'd like to.
You can be in favor of whatever you want, some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate. The issue is when someone who likes vanilla claims that people who like chocolate are acting unprofessionally and doing something wrong or doing something that is purposeless when all that's really happening is the person who likes vanilla fails to even make an attempt to understand why someone would like chocolate.
Feel free to have whatever preference you want, but understand that others may have different preferences from yours and they may have good reasons for those preferences that you simply are not aware of instead of assuming the worst of them.
>What you quoted doesn't say that either.
It absolutely does and the fact that you don't realize that is a good indication you are not discussing this matter in good faith so I thank you for choosing to cease discussing this any further.
Criticizing in a vague way is a great way to make a broader point if people already agree with you.
If they don't, then it's completely unconvincing because it doesn't actually provide any new information.
So if the goal is to gripe to other people who "get it", then sure, vague criticisms are great.
If the goal is to convince people that something is an issue, then all vague criticisms do is establish what your opinion is; they fail to actually provide information that could (justifiably) convince anyone.
At best, they can convince someone to be interested enough to look into it on their own.
Although its exhausting, one of the things I most appreciate about HN is the willingness of people to sort through those misinterpretations; thank you for doing that.
> I specifically said the issue isn't criticizing.
And my issue wasn't about whether it's OK or not to criticize, nor about the level of detail, but whether his manner of criticism was unprofessional. It was not. You can argue that it's not effective, but there's nothing unprofessional about it.
>He's pointing out something that is very common in academia
And what is that, exactly? That the author is smart and/or right and that everyone around him is wrong? Maybe, but it's not a particularly valuable observation.
In general, I tend to be of the school that, while I won't say you should never blow up bridges with great force, the default should almost always be that whatever satisfaction is gained by publishing a cathartic blog post or twitter thread is probably better written in a diary somewhere without pushing a publish button.
Some light sometimes needs to be shed (look at Susan Fowler's post on Uber. I think it triggered a fairly necessary reevaluation, or Edward Snowden's revelations), but it is seldom without cost to the person that's holding the flashlight (Snowden is unlikely to receive a warm welcome, if he comes back to the US, and I suspect that Russia won't be a particularly joyful place, in the near future. I have no idea how Susan Fowler has done).
In my own case, my history (quite checkered) has given me some fairly unique views into a lot of terrible behaviors, rotten attitudes, and outright hypocrisy by many folks that like to project a wholesome, professional, image. Now that I'm out of the rat race, I could probably be more specific.
But I won't.
In some, rare, cases, perpetrators went on to cause harm (Not much. I never worked with John Wayne Gacy), but most ended up in rather unenviable places.
In a number of other cases, however, people ended up changing their behavior/attitude, and going on to be happier, healthier people.
For reasons that I won't go into here, I believe in second chances. I was given first-, second-, and third chances.
It has less to do with "professionalism," and more to do with being human. It's not my job to clean up the world (just the bits around me), and I need to pick my battles carefully, so I can do the most good.
The original text says performative act, and not performative art. Not a big deal perhaps but this subtle difference carries a different connotation for me, I wonder if you might get a different impression if you read it again.
I flagged this but thought it is prudent to explain why.
The author deliberately took it down because the attention it garnered made them uncomfortable. While we all know what goes up on the internet is forever, it doesn't preclude us from having the decency to respect their wishes.
Can mods delete this please? I think web archive is misused in many cases when it's posted on HN. Web archive, in my opinion, shouldn't be used to circumvent author wishes or paywalls.
> If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.
This is some serious gatekeeping. A PhD student is an apprentice, on a path to get scientific training. They are not yet trained enough, so that you could reasonable expect them to "be scientific" to a level of rigorous standards.
Can't say I agree or disagree since article is gone but it does make me very curious how it was written to prompt your comment. Disparaging (the article I mean, not you) can take you down some bad paths with your career and academia.
Best for the blog post author. Picking fights with people stronger than you, in a system you don't intend to leave, doesn't usually work out well for you. Nor in general. STFUing is a near-optimal strategy in a lot of situations, really.
There's a major asymmetry in US academia that public accusations can address, if done tactfully, truthfully, and specifically enough to allow a defense.
In US academia, subordinates need positive references to get jobs. That leads many to be quite deferential to their supervisors, even allowing abuse. Nominally this is supposed to highlight strengths and weaknesses of a job candidate, but it also can serve to warn potential employers away from a particular job candidate.
However, in contrast, there is no formal mechanism to warn others about bad supervisors. Given that, I am okay with tactfully, truthfully, and specifically going public about negative experiences with academic supervisors.
To be clear: I don't advocate defamation. Keep good records, and if you choose the go public, be tactful and stick to what can be easily corroborated.
Also: My experience is that subordinates are rarely given the opportunity to reply to defamatory claims made by academic supervisors when providing references. So if your focus is on the ability of someone to defend against defamation, I don't think you can defend the status quo.
> However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art.
lol. You don't know the weight of crushed aspirations and a two year opportunity cost.
> I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against.
again lol. publication game is well know.
> I think if there's enough substance to make your comment specific, you should. Maybe even write a paper explaining why what they're doing is nonsense. If you're right, this would genuinely be a contribution to the field. If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.
again lol. this is a very academic answer. Actually, I'm not sure university administrations write a paper on policies and ask for peer comments before making changes. They just do it, in the most brutal, authoritarian/top-down/corporate way possible. But the top brass needs papers from the bottom. Show me how much academia has been optimized by writing papers about academia. Well, even if they did they are useless.
I also had the same issue as the author: absent supervisions. I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers (I tried everything to motivate them and I finally gave up). I did everything on my own. It was very hard. I learned the hard way (try and fail... do it again...). I finally finished my phd with great appreciations from the jury. However this ends with a considerable cost: I am completely broken. I now suffer of a severe depression and generalized anxiety disorders. I take several medications and this does not help so much. I lost a lot of friends. My life is basically a journey in hell since several years now.
> This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities?
Self-pressure? I cannot spend my work time in leisure time, otherwise I ashame. It is pretty even the opposite that I experienced: I felt ashame in my leisure time to not work to get more progress on my phd.
We were only two phd students supervised by the same pair of supervisors. In fact we saw our supervisors a lot. However this was more in a friend way. Every time we switch to work-related discussions they found excuses to leave or just say that they will take some time later to ask our questions / reveiw our drafts (and this never happen).
In the case of the other student, he was more lucky and find an unofficial supervisor that help him a lot. I find some support from another researcher at the end of my phd. And thanks to him I had some review of my manuscript. This gave me some confidence to finish the writing.
Yeah, I have seen many of my colleagues to feel ashamed to take all vacation time (around 28 workdays in a year) to go home or on vacation. It sometimes felt like unarticulated competition who takes less. Perhaps, it can explained by insecurity that your name is going to be taken off the paper you are coauthoring with others.
I guess in your situation the supervisors were present in taking care of your self motivation and checking your commitment to your PhD when having informal conversations. Also, it sounds you were in control of your PhD project and could set up goals and strategy achieving them yourself.
> How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities?
They are not there to babysit, and many want self motivated people. If you spend your time doing leisure activities, you will either spend too much time getting the PhD, or simply not get it.
Also, in large enough research groups, the advisor delegates almost everything to postdocs. I knew one guy who, every time he met his advisor, would have to answer the question "So what was your thesis topic again?"
This seems very much US and academic field specific. Here in Europe when I did my PhD in physics the supervisor is the boss designing the project and giving out orders on tasks to be accomplished. As somewhere in this thread one mentioned it is a true apprenticeship.
It is though very much opposite of what new PhDs expects judging that from my own experience, conversations and confronting my supervisor who eventually frankly said that “academic freedom is not for PhDs”. This created an environment which reinforced itself.
This made me look PhD as a job which I tried to treat as such looking through cost/benefit lense. Probably, if my supervisor would not keep up with regular meetings I would have done less (after being introduced with concept of “academic freedom” for PhDs).
I would not look in that as lack of self motivation. In contrary at the beginning many PhDs were quite curios on what they do and what happens around them. But by the end of it many my colleagues went away from academia to work it in finance because it pays and frankly many have said that PhD is just a job. Thus I would assert that self motivation does not make PhD thesis alone unless if someone cares about it.
> This seems very much US and academic field specific. Here in Europe when I did my PhD in physics the supervisor is the boss designing the project and giving out orders on tasks to be accomplished.
Many (most?) professors in the US are the same. The other kind, though, is not that rare.
While you’re not wrong, in the sense that this wouldn’t hold up as a piece of journalism, anyone who’s been in academia will read it differently: this is an emotional, honest account of a problem common enough that even if this one case were not true, we know it is all too plausible.
I feel for this student. Both for what they’ve gone through, and also how this moment of catharsis has probably also caused additional strife for them in all the attention it’s seen. Honestly, I feel for the professor and the rest of the research group too, and all the perverse incentives that have lead otherwise smart people down these unfortunate paths.
> I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against.
I have my doubts on this, because widespread use of sealed recommendation letters already make blackballing/indefensible accusations sort of the norm in academia, but in this case biased against students. When a student gets the courage to complain in the open, I tend to see it as making the playing field more even.
I think a Glassdoor-like site, but for academic advisors and research groups would be quite popular.
His accusations in the web archive snapshot that I pulled are ... quite mild, concrete and specific enough: Nobody to talk about in the university about your projects or topics. First PhD student. No postdoc working on the same topic. Advisors who suggest to do a thesis on something else, less difficult or familiar ... and the project seems to be less and less about the hot buzzword in the advertisement or grant proposal.
This is spots on description of what happens if you waltz into some university department or research group intending to "do a PhD" in something that isn't the core competency your group. This is very common in "provincial universities" but also happens to lesser in top schools if you just happen to come in with expectations that are misaligned with the reality. It is a side product of the sad aspect of academic reality that finding funding for a PhD student is often much easier than finding funding for a post-doc or more senior member, even though that is exactly the wrong way to build a good research group.
Philip Guo's the PhD Grind describes many of the same challenges.
I also share a memory of older member of the faculty suggesting that your PhD is supposed to a formality to endure. "A driving license", not real real research with your own ideas. It was very depressing thing to hear, because I too went in with an attitude of "I shall study a question I was interested in my undergrad, but seriously this time".
Good for him. Because of this: "My supervisors have a rather superficial understanding of Quantum Computing, and I feel like their idea to start a project in that domain was to a not inconsiderable extent motivated by the prospect of granted research funds, not primarily by their desire to achieve a deeper understanding of quantum stuff."
It's always about grant money. Especially with anything that starts with Quantum <insert buzzword here>
At least in most countries in Europe, where a PhD is expected to be a paid job, and unless you are from a really rich institution, you need grant money to take PhD students. There is no other way to do it, except for taking unpaid students, which is typically not considered an ethical thing to do.
And yes, sadly, being successful in asking for funding means pitching the hot topics du jour, which typically don't coincide with the most important or interesting things to do from a scientific point of view. Although asking for grants in quantum computer having zero experience in it does sound a bit too much.
We really need funding to go to people, not projects. Having to pitch specific projects when asking for funding does more harm than good IMO.
Why is no one considering that this PhD student is wrong and that his supervisor does in fact know what they are doing? Starting in a new field is hard, and it takes years to get a broad view of the field in order to understand what directions to take. As a PhD student you are not expected to be able to do this: this is why you have a supervisor who has enough experience. Maybe the supervisor does have a clear vision as to where to take the research, and the student does not yet see this?
Because what you are saying is the default situation in research. Students don't speak up, because they are taught to keep their heads down whether they are right or wrong. The default assumption is that the supervisors know what they are doing, but this student has shared his experience that this is not always the case. Maybe you should start considering that maybe supervisors are wrong sometimes too?
> However, just a couple of months into my project, I figured out, I wouldn’t find anyone to discuss my research with: My supervisors have a rather superficial understanding of Quantum Computing, and I feel like their idea to start a project in that domain was to a not inconsiderable extent motivated by the prospect of granted research funds, not primarily by their desire to achieve a deeper understanding of quantum stuff.
Sounds very familiar. I saw this a lot in grad school. My first advisor was also fed up with the nature in academia and left tenure path to work in private industry, leaving me to fend for money in this vein.
So then my graduate research topic came into this line. I stopped that after I realized that not only was it fishing far off the path of my social support, it was also weapons research disguised via a friendly sounding problem.
I switched programs, to an advisor who seemed to want me to work in something he actually does. Then I had zero relationship with him and became basically a highly underpaid developer to crank out the numbers that corroborated his research at 100+ hour weeks. In the marginal time I was tying to figure out if I could somehow make the small corner I thought might make a thesis fit into his unspoken program. I got the hint that my PhD was predicated on making his research stand up, and having a part in it is what my PhD would represent, not any actual original work.
I became a little more cynical but continued, now paying much more attention on the side to other's experience. I found this was nearly universal from 'top schools', and then with the overflow of candidates to academic jobs they take this style to the next tier of schools where they get tenure by making a lemming line of candidates do the same.
At this point it was the breaking point. I had a great internship the previous summer. I had a "come work for us now or maybe never" ultimatum. I took the plunge.
ABD Twice. And that I consider a great accomplishment that I am quite proud of.
I feel for the student writing this piece and I'm sad that they've developed some bitterness at their advisors and the entire field (which I read in the piece, even if it wasn't the intent.)
Everyone needs to understand something important: a PhD is first and foremost an apprenticeship. It is your opportunity to study under someone who has done a specific kind of research, and learn from that person. If that relationship isn't a good fit, the PhD itself won't be a good fit: it's like trying to learn neurosurgery from a cardiac surgeon. You cannot fix this with reading or online lectures, the apprenticeship is the whole point.
Occasionally I run into students who have these advisor mismatches and my instinct is to try to help them. However what I've learned is that good intentions (try to advise a student who is interested in a different area) don't actually translate to good outcomes. I am monomaniacal (only) about the research that interests me, and that doesn't translate into other areas I'm less familiar with. They will be frustrated with my lack of expertise in those other areas, and I will end up frustrated by my inability to properly advise them. In the worst case, that bad fit can turn to resentment against the entire scientific process (I see this process starting in the post above.)
If the author of the post wants to pursue a PhD, I would first urge them to stop for a while and not think about research: just do something else. When and if they've reached the point where they are bored to tears with whatever they're doing (I recommend taking a "real" job for a while) -- and can only think about the research they're missing out on -- then go figure out whose papers are actually exciting to them. Then go find out how to work with that person, whatever it takes. Sometimes there are ways to work with someone that don't require a formal PhD admission, and enough persistence can make the difference. I'm not saying this is easy. The point is: don't do it because it's easy, do it because you want to do it enough that it doesn't matter if it's hard.
I’m starting my PhD this fall and the prospect of an advisor mismatch terrifies me (having seen this first hand). Thankfully my program has 2 or 3 faculty who align well based off of my interviews but you never know…
Don’t be terrified, just keep pushing. That’s what separates those who finish from those who don’t.
I say this as someone who nearly did not finish a PhD and had terrible mismatch with my advisor. If you have a mismatch with your advisor, I have three pieces of unsolicited advice.
1. Find the community of your research topic early and get involved. Partially due to covid there are now many ~weekly seminars that meet online and post recordings on YouTube. They tend to be welcoming, and getting to know the people drives home the idea of “if they can do it so can I”
2. Pick a problem with extremely clear benchmarks. If you exceed the benchmarks, then congrats on your state of the art work! If not, write about the good parts and explain why the bad parts exist.
3. Write about your topic early and often. You don’t have to publish it necessarily, but writing has a clarifying effect acknowledged by every PhD student I know.
Stay positive and remember to take care of yourself! Good luck!
I'm actually very surprised by many of the posts here. I know that in the humanities advisors are often picked which are only partly related to the research question. But I would have expected to find many more natural science/engineering PhD here. In those areas picking an advisor is directly linked to picking a topic, i.e. you pick the advisor because you want to work in his area of expertise.
I don't know how they do it in the US, but something I like about the British way of doing PhDs (at least University of York) is that they require you to write a 5-6 page proposal for your project. The proposal needs to be at least a little well-researched, with citations and needs to show a minimal level of competence in the subject that you want to study.
I think this is a good idea because it really forces you to consider if you actually enjoy the subject. You work alongside the professors to tailor the proposal, and you'll find out pretty quickly if you hate the subject or not, and if you decide you do hate the subject, at least you didn't waste multiple years (and potentially thousands of pounds) trying to pursue it.
In the US we have a thesis proposal as well. However something I've learned is that no five-page document, no matter how well considered, can ever determine the optimal strategy for how to spend a 4-5 year slice of your research life. The whole point of research is to learn new things: new things sometimes imply changing direction.
Holding someone to a (US-style) thesis proposal is hard enough when they're already familiar with the area and have a couple of years of direct research experience under their belt. Doing it even earlier in the process sounds much harder.
I am biased but I think the US approach is much better. You start the MS and PhD at the same time. You get real research experience during the first two years, while also doing coursework: if things don't work out, you have an off-ramp in getting a terminal MS (usually for no financial cost.)
If you keep going, then ideally you have a good sense of what research you want to do. You may have one or more publications/near-publications under your belt. Now you write your proposal and finish out the dissertation over the course of 2-3 years, which is realistic. I may be missing something about the UK approach but this seems much more reasonable to me.
I disagree. It’s a final check to ensure that you will defend successfully. It is much easier to reject a proposal a year before the defense than to reject a defense.
In Spain we do the latter in theory. In practice, in almost all cases I know it's the supervisor who writes the proposal because there's no way a fresh PhD student has the experience or knowledge of the field to write one. And anyway, the proposal often gets overwritten a few years down the line after Plan A fails and the thesis is pivoted towards Plan B.
Thanks for this perspective. I am one of these mismatched PhD students. When I entered 6 years ago, no professors in my department had time to advise me. The professor for whom I was a GTA took pity on me after two years of rejection, and now serves as my committee chair despite having little to no expertise in my field. I am coadvised through a different department, but again, my coadvisor has little overlap with my interests. I am nearing completion, but stumbling over the lack of support, technical leadership, and community of practice. I am unconvinced that my proposed dissertation is meritorious or valuable in any way, but the only advise my advisors can give is “persist and finish quickly” because I am more expert than both of them. Defending feels like a gamble. The bitterness that comes from poor-fit advising is real, even when both advisors are earnestly doing their best. I wish I had learned this lesson sooner and quit with a master’s when I had the chance.
You can still quit. And, at least I would recommend you doing it. I have yet to do the jump to industry, but from what I'm hearing so far: There is little to no value assigned to the _paper_. And, at least in my view, this is exactly as it should be.
There are two and only two situations [0]:
1) The company requires your specific expertise and won't care about the title as you are the one with the knowledge
2) The company does not require your specific expertise at which point they care about the PhD as a marker of "can do stuff autonomously", which has nothing to do with the title.
On the other hand: (that is an assumption that may be wrong) You are miserable! That is time and joy that you won't get back. Academia will not be thankful for your sacrifice!
And besides: I highly doubt that you would have to work for less pay if you quit.
[0] well there is a third one: Someone wants someone with a title for title slides and reports. But I _really_ don't want to work for these people, so I'm discarding it.
There are some programs where you can earn a Doctorate without a Master's degree. Sometimes the program will combine both into one curriculum. In these cases, it's not possible to just quit and still have a Master's. You will have a Bachelor's and a bunch of debt. Perhaps they could work with an academic advisor to apply those credits taken to a Master's, maybe fill in the gaps and be done with it.
Okay yeah I should mention that I did my PhD in Germany, where a Master's is a prerequisite and there is nearly no course work (the little that is required is solved ... let's call it ... creatively, but the real work is done in the Master's)
"a bunch of debt"? PhD students in STEM fields, at least in the US, can usually get a PhD without taking on additional debt. Also, many programs that don't offer a master's degree program will still let you graduate with a master's if you're a few years into a PhD program and decide to bail.
This is bad advice. The sheepskin effect is real and a company that "cares about the PhD as a marker" is not being petty or superficial in using this as a screening mechanism. Unless you're truly looking to enter a field where having a PhD would be of no value on your resume, just finish your PhD if you're 6 years in and can do so without too much additional distraction.
> from what I'm hearing so far: There is little to no value assigned to the _paper_
I was given this advice when I was wavering on whether to finish my Ph.D. In fact, a guy who had finished his Ph.D. told me don't bother, nothing changed from before or after he got it.
Then I went to his wedding and he had the DJ refer to him as "Dr." the entire night in front of his entire family, and by God did they care. They were so proud of him for that title and that degree. After seeing that, I immediately went and applied to defend my dissertation.
And here's the other thing -- even if you work in an industry like CS that has more egalitarian views on credentials like a Ph.D., the whole world is not like that. The actual piece of paper opens up several opportunities not available otherwise:
- Some jobs require a Ph.D. All the experience in the world won't qualify you for that kind of role without the piece of paper.
- You can get jobs as an "expert" easily, where the piece of paper reifies your expertise to your clients (think expert witness or consultant). It's difficult to explain "Yes, I'm at the top of my field except I don't have the same credentials as those other people who also claim they are at the top". The credentials are more convincing to a lot of people.
- It's easier to emigrate to various places. Having a Ph.D. could help you qualify for a O1 visa in the US, and other countries have special carve outs in their immigration codes for Ph.D.s. You don't get any special treatment for being ABD, no matter how much you insist it wasn't worth your time.
etc.
So having completed the Ph.D., it was by far the right choice for me.
I find it generally bad advice to chase after something when the main driver is social prestige. For one, by definition, you hinging your esteem to the (possibly fickle) opinion of somebody else and two, the people who are in fields for status rather than because of intrinsic joy of the work itself are often not the most productive or ethical.
For example, the surgeons I know who are in the field mainly due to the status it confers seem to be quite miserable.
A phd is a one time expense, you can choose to discard it or use it as needed. Unlike a surgeon, who must spend their career actually doing surgery or face financial ruin.
Anecdotally, I have seen phds create expectation vs reality mismatches for some. The degree can easily become an anchor which holds someone to problems that they no longer care about, or provides false belief in one’s credentials.
>Unlike a surgeon, who must spend their career actually doing surgery or face financial ruin.
I literally know somebody who went through surgery residency and decided to walk away from the field. They are not in financial ruin.
Medical school is also a "one time expense", so I'm not convinced of the distinction. The opportunity cost of a PhD, especially in a field of engineering or CS is probably on similar par. The difference between a TA salary and someone in industry, over the course of 6-7 years to complete a PhD, can easily approach or exceed $500k. While the debt load between the two may be different, the actual opportunity cost is similar.
>The degree can easily become an anchor which holds someone to problems that they no longer care about, or provides false belief in one’s credentials.
> the people who are in fields for status rather than because of intrinsic joy of the work itself are often not the most productive or ethical.
On the other hand, I've found that people who convince themselves that they are pursing a path based on intrinsic joy of the work itself quickly lose interest when they hit a wall and the work becomes not fun at all but a slog.
I could concede the case for academia, but I think it probably has more to do with the broken academic system because it tends to punish those who follow a pursuit for intrinsic value, rather than some pragmatic goal of publishing, for example.
Really? It sounds to me like they are relying on "motivation" which will inevitably wane. That's different than what I'm speaking to.
Think about somebody who grinds out of a sense of duty (high on the "conscientiousness" scale of personality traits). They may not be motivated by the task itself, but are still able to continue the effort because of it's intrinsic rewards (for fueling their identity as a dutiful person, for example).
A parent may not feel motivated all the time regarding doing "silly" activities with their children. But they can push forward anyways, because the idea of "being a good parent" is intrinsically rewarding.
One approach that some supervisors take is to encourage their students to submit a paper (or poster, demo, etc.) each term (or a few times a year) to an appropriate conference or journal.
Even if the paper isn't accepted, you get the experience of conducting adequate background research and literature surveys, writing your own work up in a clear and coherent manner, and receiving feedback, some of which may be valuable. You also get used to rejection (and sometimes very harsh and dismissive criticism) as something that happens but isn't the end of the world. Eventually you get published, which in some sense proves the value of your work because it has been peer reviewed and identified as something worth publishing (and has arguably met the often nebulous "novelty" requirement as well.)
Sometimes innovative work just gets rejected for publication because it goes against the status quo, and that's perhaps another good lesson to learn (as well as how to get around such bias if you need to.)
Something I would highly recommend you to do is seek out an expert I your area of research (there would be someone) and contact them. Many academics are open to discuss ideas, work related to their research etc.. This might give you valuable feedback from someone who understands your work.
Now from your post it sounds like you don't work in the natural sciences (apologies if I assumed wrong) so you might not have publications (in many natural sciences it's very common to have multiple publications before the defence, in many humanities the thesis is the publication), if you don't be prepared to send that person some condensed work (they likely don't have time to read a whole thesis) or if you have a publication. However only do that after starting a dialogue and after they have agreed to look at some of your work.
Most good phd programs ensure that you won’t defend unless you will pass. That’s the purpose of the proposal. PhDs can be great— they mostly aren’t. But having a PhD is awesome. You can be an expert in anything the rest of your life. I say that sort of tongue in cheek. But really, your dissertation doesn’t matter.
Thanks for this response. This is exactly how I approached my PhD: I was in a group where I liked the _people_ and where I both enjoyed working with them, but also - crucially - was thinking that they could teach me something. The actual topic of my work a) shifted significantly [0], b) was barely relevant for my decision and c), while highly fascinating, very unlikely to be ever relevant, even if all stars align just the right way.
If you do not like your advisor [1] or even worse if you do not have confidence in at least scientific integrity: Then you should absolutely run and quit. You won't be happy. Ever. That doesn't mean you are not "fit for science" or either of you or your advisor is a "bad scientist". Just that the two particular persons don't (and won't) work out.
At least here in Germany it's also not a particularly hard decision [2]: You (quite easily) double your salary, while also (at least normally) significantly reducing your workload. But this assumes that you do the PhD because you "want it" and not because of the title.
But then again: I would very much discourage anyone doing a PhD for the title. So maybe I'm not the best person to ask
[0] up to the point where _after_ having written up my thesis I rediscovered the "outline" of the work that we send to the foundation and the faculty. Of which precisely _nothing_ was in my actual thesis.
[1] This is not necessarily your official supervisor, as in the person that is taking you on and giving you your title. Given a large enough group size (and I very much would put that number at anything beyond 3 students) but the person you interact with daily (or at least weekly).
[2] At least from the vantage of someone who _hasn't_ taken that one. FWIW
It seems like the PhD admission process is mismatched with the goal of admission. Phd students are recruited based on application rather than research interest. A candidate can easily go to an are which they have zero interest in.
Why not match students with professors pre admission? Phd from mit doesn’t mean much if you can’t work in your chosen field.
This is a fresh perspective, and a DUH moment for me.
I know quite a few PhD(s) and researchers, and a few PhD programs dropout. My takeaway up until now was "PhD = politics", but now I see that I was looking at it all wrong, I was looking under the wrong lens of pick_a_school->get_an_advisor. The reverse is true, when the student is read, the master will appear; the place comes with the advisor (not the other way around).
"It is your opportunity to study under someone who has done a specific kind of research, and learn from that person. "
That is what is it supposed to be, but I must interject that for many, myself included, the advisor is effectively absent. In a lab without postdocs or other students what I personally ended up with is an apprenticeship in learning from myself.
If you are seeing your advisor more than once or twice a year, and or if there are other people in your lab to discuss your work with then you are doing your PhD in easy mode.
The opening line about not having prior exposure before PhD is something that makes me wonder if author did have industry experience prior to this undertaking, there are application and network security hands-on problems that can be solved with quantum computing. I have zero practical experience with quantum computing myself but I can count at least 2-3 practical projects I could work on before starting PhD in that field. I wonder if the problem here is author going after PhD in the field without having an idea of what problem author can solve by using quantum computing experiments/projects. (instead of finding solution to problem, looking for problems and having time to experiment/research solutions.)
It is a generally accepted and being prove true countless times that all head on solutions to known problems have been already tried and published. What remains are solutions resembling "performative arts", like ones combining machine learning with quantum error correction. Sometimes works, but when they don't you can't explain why and are being instructed to try harder.
> studying the underlying Quantum Mechanics and understanding this new concept of how physical reality might look like under the hood (there are actually multiple interpretations of that, from Probabilism to the popular Many-World-Theory) has been eye-opening.
> I was asked to find something that does not require so much understanding of Quantum Computing
Sounds like QM was a new subject to you and you didn't know/understand QM enough to do research in an adjacent field. Not sure why you'd pick a field that you don't have much background in to do a PhD in. I'm not sure what advice you expected your supervisors to give.
I would suggest Aaronsons' "Quantum Computing since Democritus" for a different (mathematically rigorous) take. There is a lot of understanding we have found out since Feynman made that statement.
What I see here is mostly fear to failure. Fear about "not keeping the high standard level that should define myself". Fear about being perceived as a mediocre scientist saying incorrect things.
This is wrong. Let me tell you a thing. Nobody will cares. Not-one-single people will care about your mind image.
1-Feeling depressed or having doubts in some point of the process of writing your thesis is more common than you think
2-Run, reset and try in a different field will not be easier, it will be more difficult. It always is.
3-Closures provide a lot of peace of mind. Finish your thesis and then move your mind to greener pastures. A not perfect thesis about a poor known theme, is better than none.
So, just keep working and do your best effort. Most people never receive a Nobel in any case and what people could think about you, is not so relevant as you think. In the end, you will be the expert in quantum computing, not them.
Remember also that any error slipped in your these can be fixed later. Science is not written in stone. We fall and we learn. Scientists are expected to commit honest mistakes.
I think this is a bit narrow. I’d say it’s a credential that shows you know how to conduct research.
In my case it was less of an apprenticeship and more of a lot of stumbling around until I found a way to create research that matched my standards. My standards are modeled after the clearly explained and verifiable work in my field.
> "Aiming to produce PDF files that would be accepted at conferences (which seems to be easy-going if you sprinkle some fancy quantum vocabulary over something and hand it in to a non-quantum conference). I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day. After all, science is all about the pursuit of knowledge, even though the incentives of research funding might not be entirely aligned with that"
This is broadly similar to my experience. The priority of most academics is not to produce deep, novel, and creative work. It is to churn out sausages in the shapes favoured by journals, at a factory production rate. That's what they have to do for their career. After a while, though, they start to be unable to tell the difference between the two.
From what I can tell, the cause of this is that "number of papers published per unit of time" is the only metric institutions seem to care about when it comes to evaluating researchers' work.
This is true, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it. If you keep looking at your neighbor in order to determine your next step, you will be disappointed in every walk of life, not only in academia. If you don’t subscribe to the same ideas, do it differently, and get ready for some resistance. In academia you have to carve your path just like everywhere else. That said: I agree that academia is just a big circle jerk. :)
> I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day.
Why should you be uncomfortable with that? A discipline with lots of low-hanging fruit sounds like a pretty good place to be.
However, I concur regarding the quantity-over-quality problem. Personally I favor quality over quantity, both as a reader and as a writer. It wastes less of the reader's time and improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the field.
I disagree, generally it's important to get feedback often and early. Conferences and publications are an important part of the process. That is not to defend the salami strategies of some research labs, but science is moving to fast to wait for your deeply thought out 500 page opus dei, which likely has been obsoleted by some finding published at a conference 2 years ago that you didn't attend.
I have seen the false perception a few times that a PhD is mainly about sitting down and thinking deeply for a long time without talking to anyone and then getting an eureka moment and writing it all up. This is not how most modern science is done (maybe it's still possible if you're a genius in very few select areas of mathematics). So if this is what you think a PhD is about, you're likely not going to enjoy it.
there's too much science "up in the air" (to refer to the stuff that hasn't made it down to the text books)
it bothers me but I cannot do anything about it (other than be bothered by it)
> I have seen the false perception a few times that a PhD is mainly about sitting down and thinking deeply for a long time without talking to anyone and then getting an eureka moment and writing it all up.
also, a big part of the complaint from the linked and removed original blogpost is precisely the lack of being able to find people with whom to discuss. His advisors are not knowledgeable enough, (blog author claims) further, they advised them not to require so much in-depth knowledge in their thesis (!!).
I think the author was in a tough position to try and pursue this in the first place because, as they admit, they didn't have a direct background in the topic. That makes it difficult at the onset to look for programs and advisors with the the right type of experience to align with your desired research topic when you yourself do not have enough experience to make a fully informed judgement on how well their work in the field relates to what you want to explore.
My experience with post docs in a science lab was that science was surprisingly tribal, and not in a completely bad way. Certain programs and labs trusted people and papers from other labs they knew. They tended to accept PhD students who were recommended by particular professors. And this clustering seemed to exist along some theoretical or subject matter divides. The benefit is that there is some consistency and some short hand or "lab lore" in common.
This article seems to be about a PhD candidate at a program that didn't really have people experienced in the field. If you want to get a science PhD, look at the papers by the tenured people in that program and see where they went to school. Look at who cites their papers. The schools that read their papers may be the ones that you can apply to later.
I will hand in my notice tomorrow, after circa 1 year as a PhD student. In fact, I'm switching fields: from a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (energy systems) to a software developer role in a non-engineering sector. Very little of my 7 years (MSc) and subsequent circa 1 year as a PhD will carry over.
Certainly an exciting step, although the program here was pretty excellent. Good supervision, full funding for the entire duration, topic of my choosing (I wrote parts of the grant).
The main reason I'm leaving is that Mech.Eng. PhDs just seem like such a conservative bunch. Most end up either in tiny, provincial ventures (think utilities companies, for my field) or as middle managers at huge companies (where I live, car manufacturers). They then are, for all intents and purposes, managers and not engineers anymore. The title is the ticket to a cushy life. Academia was never an option; the kind of work professors and researchers do seems horrendous! You're chasing grants and need to manage such a wide range of the most frustrating but also mundane issues.
Here's to hoping a software development career is more fruitful and fulfilling. A life-long IC position seems attractive. You get the benefits, but little of the fuss.
It seems like PhDs are sought after (if they are) for their frustration tolerances and project management capabilities. Maybe I didn't have enough of either. Then again, I'm absolutely convinced many more would quit prematurely if they had attractive alternatives. A lot of mechanical engineer PhDs don't, but thanks to the software world and my passion for it, I do.
"It's difficult to take direction from someone who doesn't know (or can't explore) the problem space as well as I do. I find I'm managing up so much that there seems less and less benefit to the current reporting structure I find myself in."
How often do people complain themselves into a new post?
Absolutely possible. The difference might be that PhDs don't conventionally have the 'downward' path available. They have a lower bound to the career roles they can take up. You may well violate that bound and do more 'line worker' type roles, but that'll get funny looks, might actually be harder to get into with the title (some people might even conceal it for such reasons) and the PhD would have been largely wasted, career-advancement speaking.
For a software developer with a regular STEM MSc, there is more of an upper, less of a lower bound, but I'm not planning on testing out those upper boundaries (like, can you rise to C-level of a large corporation? Sure can, but a PhD makes it much easier where I'm from).
A PhD especially in a technical field gives broad insight to problem solving full stop, or at least someone without severe self-esteem issues should consider that is the bar they've cleared. I have a PhD and wormed myself into tons of low positions, doesn't anyone else want to know how the sausage actually gets made?
You’re going to become a middle manager if you follow the normal software engineering track.
Maybe it’s getting work “done” is what’s most attractive to you. I can see how it must feel to see your work right in front of you when you are writing code, but you need to be very aware of what you want. I’d not be happy if I switched fields to avoid management just to end up being a middle manager in a couple of years.
However, you will still be dealing with some project management and other similar workplace-related tasks that contribute nothing to the overall work product.
I made a similar decision as a former engineer in the physical realm. I would say normal engineering is about 90% 'fluff' work related to corporate traditions. In tech, it is more like 75%.
The only workers who truly focus only on their work are blue-collar workers. If that is what drives you, there are plenty of interesting trade jobs and fabrication jobs where people just solve problems day-in day-out and don't have to worry about dressing up or being diplomatic.
IMO good advising is critical. You must have someone you believe in and work with. Screening a prospective research group or advisor AHEAD OF TIME is the due diligence of the academic world. Don't work with someone you don't think will support you when you are stuck and advertise your accomplishments when you make them.
I totally agree with the comments who say "performance" is an essential part of research. Somebody (your advisor, then later you) needs to be telling people how important your work is, where it can lead, what it will be good for, etc.
If you're not at this stage yet, my advice is cast a wide net and interview several prospective advisors about their work, etc. A bad fit will waste years of your life.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] threadI’m not sure what you’re saying about the masters, you had that already or your experience + discharge was turned into a masters diploma?
I did initially have someone scare me into thinking that if I didn't publish even something like a literature review within my first year, I wouldn't be taken seriously. But that turned out to not really apply.
But I saw how much work they put in, how organized and passionate they were, and felt like i was just a moth in the lighting section of a hardware store just going towards the next brightest thing. I finally picked a lab and project under a postdoc (who took 6 years to finish his PhD, and was coming upon his tenth year of being a postdoc which should have been a huge red flag). I did about 6 months of reading, some microscope work (was a dev biology lab, another huge red flag given I was basically under the engineering dept). I would come in late night when the lab was free, and felt like I was working hard, but really I had no direction.
When I realized 6 months out that I basically knew nothing, had no goals/interesting ideas, I panicked a bit. I went home for a week to ruminate. My dad actually told me something (I thought at the time) prophetic: I should be giving my school/academic institution a good name, not the other way around. I realized there's no way I could live up to that standard, but I could see people in my class definitely do that (Impostor syndrome? probably, but I'd add laziness to it).
I basically then told myself: publish something in one year, or apply to medical school which I was slowly starting to get interested in.
PhDs (esp in biology/chem/physics) are a different breed in my eyes, and get lots of respect. I wish you the very best!
Anyway I've no horse in this race!
Step 1 of doing a PhD is reaching out to people actually doing the research to see if it’s a match. Also having no one with whom to talk about QC tells me it’s a very small school or a specialized school. Or just the wrong school! Not all schools are created equally; they each have their own core competencies defined by the skills of the department faculty. If no one in the faculty had a history of QC research, why is the author attending that school to do QC research? Did they not think to ask before they applied?
And why don’t they just find a better school to fit their interests? Transferring is not unheard of at such an early stage of the degree. But the author is done completely, which tells me they weren’t that serious in the first place.
https://yboris.com/quitting/
This doesn’t seem like an entirely fair take. Nobody has perfect expectations fresh out of undergrad. PIs chasing funding is real, and using those funds on grad students who are excited but don’t know what they’re getting into is extremely common. The one thing that is less common is providing zero resources & guidance to get the job done. This definitely sounds like at least as much advisory failure as student expectation.
Step 1 of doing a PhD is to find a person who you want to work under for probably 10% of your entire life. If you’re serious about it, it’s something you should not quit at literally the first roadblock.
If I may read between the lines here, because I see this often enough: it seems like this student had a passing interest in QC; joined a department without talking to anyone there to find out if the research they do is compatible with their interests; proposed a deep theoretical research topic that neither anyone in the department nor the author knows much about; and then promptly quit when they told him it’s probably not the best idea.
How does this happen?
Would be cool if colleges were required to estimate number of job openings relevant to each PHD program vs current cohort sizes. Or some central body could
Schools offer this kind of acceptance path for students who aren’t very strongly tied to a particular idea. The author, despite having no experience or knowledge in QC was very tied to the idea, which how would the faculty know that before admitting them? Usually when you are so devoted to a research idea you’ve worked on it to some degree before deciding to devote 10% of your life toward pursuing it. I’ve never seen a student quit in 6 months because they couldn’t make progress on an idea they had only just started to consider.
So everyone is falling over each other to train up some new nerds. They are opening huge pots of money any professor who can make a plausible case for quantum computing with X. Here X is generally some form of pure research that the professor made a contribution to in the past. You'll inevitably have some growing pains when you try to repurpose hundreds of physicists like this.
It seems sort of silly, but when a government decides it wants get a jump on a new industry, before it's commercially viable, I don't see a better option.
This is fairly normal: you get some funding to do a project and you have to hire someone with experience, though in this case the PIs were experts in the domain of application. That's reasonably common for cross-discipline projects, but in this case you really have to trust that your hires know what they're doing and you need to be able to assess their work without deep knowledge of the techniques used.
PhDs can be absurdly specific and many are complex enough that you can't really study them until grad school. Many universities don't teach quantum computing, but as a physicist it's probably assumed you have enough of a background to understand the material.
Maybe a research group wants to investigate a connection to another discipline.
Maybe the research group comes across a talented student and sees the potential for a research grant (how this works depends on the country).
Maybe the student has the means to self-fund and so the university happily collects a pay-cheque.
I fell into the first category - I did my PhD in a quantum information group despite my background being in mathematical logic. I was accepted because I knew a lot about different formal logic systems, and they wanted to study connections between those and the formalism they were using for quantum information.
Especially with a major research mismatch in available advisors and personal interests like the author describe in the article, it can be especially daunting.
I wish them luck in their next steps. I remember how difficult it was at that stage in my PhD to find the right mix -- especially with potential advisors who left the school.
I dont think ive ever heard good things about phd except the chance to work in cool places like e.g microsoft research
For example, Reason 74: Academic conferences. Really?? Academic conferences are the best part about grad school! They're held in beautiful locations, you get to meet all kinds of smart and amazing people, spend all week steeped in your favorite research topic, and best of all it's all expenses paid by your project.
The author's main complaint seems to be that the audience doesn't pay close enough attention at session presentations... okay? That doesn't seem like a reason not to go to grad school. A lot of these seem like they could be reframed as reasons to go to gradschool, actually.
Whether or not that is a good idea is an open question. Societies, institutions and supervisors clearly benefit from individuals taking this huge risk (and often failing).
One of the main problems is that we communicate very badly what a PhD is about.
It seems like most cutting edge research (and the ability to run fast) in machine learning is done in commercial settings these days, not academia.
One good thing about a PhD is you get several years to explore a topic of interest to you in great depth. (As long has you have a decently good advisor.) Another good thing about a research PhD is that in addition to getting experience publishing papers, you go through the process of writing a book sized thesis, which is valuable experience in a lot of ways - skills transfer to publishing and reporting in any field.
On an intellectually superficial but economically important level, another good thing about a PhD is that people who have advanced degrees earn on average 50% more than (1.5x) people without advanced degrees. This is in the US at least, according to data published by the US Fed.
This is bad statistics 101.
The confounding variable in a lot of these cases is wealth (or social class). Someone who grew up upper class and got their PhD is of course going to earn more than someone who grew up in a trailer park never graduated high school.
The reality is that for a lot of people getting advanced degrees leads to nothing but wasted time and a lifetime of debt that they can't discharge.
There’s no doubt in my mind that things are biased for the wealthy, none whatsoever. But consider patents - they have no degree requirement, and the number of patents granted to people with a bachelor’s degree or less is in the low single digit percent, it’s a landslide for people with formal research experience.
> The reality is that for a lot of people getting advanced degrees leads to nothing
What does “a lot” mean? Do you have a source for this claim that passes statistics 101?
The issue with absolutist statements like “Why higher edu institutions are so disappointing and mediocre?” is that it is a generalization from a non-random sampling of narratives, one that appeals to our sense of outrage and negativity. If one were to collect a fuller set of narratives one will likely find a more nuanced picture — yes, there’s hardship in a Ph.D. but in many cases there’s also joy in learning and discovery. It’s all a function of your advisor, your topic, your funding, your peer group and yourself (not everyone is cut out for it).
In hindsight, I feel like my mentor should have guided me a lot more than he did. But it's hard to know that when you're just starting off, and you tend to blame yourself for not taking enough initiative (even if you are).
Your advisor is playing the 'grant-reward' game, and in most circumstances that enables you to play your 'ideal' PhD game. However your ideals are not the same as your advisors, your PhD-mates, or your school.
The sooner you recognize you are the standard-bearer for graduating, the sooner you realize it's time to take off the kid-gloves and start directly but professionally confronting your colleagues and advisors until you find what you are looking for.
If you don't find it in six months after you change, write what you did and you can collect a masters. It really is that simple, they need you to graduate.
PhD is a choose-your-own-adventure in real-life. No two PhDs are the same.
As a comparison imagine if VC funding only went to the highest scoring new grads and the business proposal was asked for after the invitation to take on VC funding. That's pretty much what's been happening with PhDs. You get the marks, you get invited to take on a PhD and then you look for projects. A totally inorganic process that leads to a gross misallocation of resources.
Nonsense. Look at how many job openings there are for PhDs - people can't hire them fast enough. I was in a call the other day saying how hard it is to even find PhDs to interview, let alone get them to accept your offer.
It's not uncommon to see PhDs after five to seven years in industry in the C-suite. That is less common for MBAs, from my view.
For A, PhDs ought never be short of work. They were likely good students, they also spent 3-5 years looking at the state of the art in their field. Something should've rubbed off along the way. So a PhD is usually a good signal (but many smart people decide not to do PhDs, as well).
For B - the supply of places which will pay you to do actual research rather than company-specific goal stuff is much reduced compared to the supply of PhDs. This is why you'll find plenty of PhDs at Google doing software engineering - sure they're PhDs and they're smart, but they're likely not still publishing much. Whereas MSR/IBM research groups do publish (and in many ways act like a university).
For C - the chances of getting to tenure-track professorship are low, and when people say there aren't enough jobs for PhDs this is generally what they mean: there aren't enough academic jobs. The usual process is to become a postdoc and then to become junior faculty - a professor, but not tenured. Then you must seek promotion into a tenured role. Sometimes people skip steps, but this is the path people I've talked to have taken. Each stage is competitive: you have to convince a professor to take you on as a postdoc, then you must convince hiring committees you should become faculty and that you have the potential to become tenured. All the while, you must deliver enough research output to back that up.
At each of those stages, there's a relatively high attrition rate, and this is amongst people who obtained PhDs.
Now, there are hot topics that may see something around this amount of growth for a while, but many don’t. For example, in biology, genetics and biochemistry may somewhat have that growth rate, but if you’re in any other subfield such as ethology, forget it. If you’re a historian, did research on some ‘obscure’ language such as Middle English, or are working in some corner of mathematics that doesn’t have direct applications, you can forget it, too. If anything, the number of tenureships in those fields is shrinking.
Of course, many tenured professors have a lot more graduating students during their career. In medicine, one a year isn’t uncommon. That would require a field that grows by over 12% each year.
The deceptive thing about this is that, as a phD student, you don’t see those 30 competitors. You’ll only see maybe eight to ten. Some of them graduated a few years before you, others will start after you graduated.
Which means that having more PhD students means you can explore more of your own ideas by assigning them to it. It also means more teaching assistants and so on for your course. So the chances you will take and graduate one at a time are very low. Also, you know some fraction won't make it, so you need to account for that too.
I also sit on a graduate admissions committee, and it's hard to find good students.
We have work enough for easily 10x as many STEM students in the US.
> it's hard to find good students
Maybe because you provide such a bad deal for the majority of your students?
Can you explain this further? I don't follow how, for example, if I wait 10 years to begin a PhD there is somehow no research being conducted.
Even if everyone suddenly waited 10 years, there would only be a lag for the first generation.
The people I know who've gone for a PhD later in life were already doing research and generally took the path because the credential opened professional doors (e.g., to become a supervisor or director), not necessarily facilitated greater amounts of research.
To play devil's advocate, you could in theory increase the amount of research by opening avenues for non-traditional PhDs. There will still be those who start a program at 21, plus those starting at 40 who would normally not engage in a program.
If this is true, then you almost have to concede the model is broken. There will be a glut of PhDs compared to faculty positions. One of the reasons so many PhDs are disgruntled is because of the false expectation that every PhD is on track for a professorship.
I picked a random public school to see if their program states the intent is to produce faculty[1]. It seems like research is the other half of the goal along with teaching. Lots of research is done outside of faculty positions.
"The doctoral degree, i.e. the Ph.D., is primarily intended for students desiring a career in research and/or collegiate teaching."
[1]https://cse.engin.umich.edu/academics/graduate/phd-in-cse/
PhD training prepares people for the academic career and faculty positions. Less than half of PhD graduates actually end up in the academic career. So yes, you could say the system is ...not perfect.
Imagine if a trade school only had a 50% employment rate for their intended purpose and forced the students to work at a fraction of their market value for the privilege of attending, while profiting off that labor...I don't think imperfect would be the word used.
In 17th century Leiden, 40% of surgeons' apprentices dropped out. In Utrecht's Coopers' Guild, only about 10% of apprentices became Masters.
On the other hand, getting rid of the guilds in the 1820s and replacing it with less formalized vocational training during industrialization didn't change the system for better:
>A lengthy contribution in the journal of the Dutch Society to Advance Industry in 1891 criticised the condition of Dutch training in detail: ‘Nowadays boys leave one boss after the other for the greatest triviality . . .. The boss continuously fears that the boy will leave him to use his acquired skills with another boss. Bosses therefore slow down training by putting boys to work at specialised repetitive tasks, so that they bring in the highest profits.’
https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/391011
CS programs may be different, but engineering and physics were definitely geared for academics
I ask because all of the PhDs I've worked with outside of academia are from engineering and physics, save one from sociology and three from psychology. (The latter were geared to human factors of engineering problems).
You can’t convince me people are taking four years out of their professional lives at their prime to get a simple promotion?
Let's face it, PhD is a social signal as much as it is a vocational toolset. And it also signals a specific value system, like putting a high value on educational credentials. So if the selection board for a lab director is made of similar directors who have PhDs, you've already got a self-selecting pool of people who value PhDs, regardless if they provide much value in practice. Cognitive bias is strong and it would be tough for someone who's put in the work for a PhD to admit it's of little value, even if it were the case. Occasionally, people will get promoted who do not have a "proper" PhD, and they are (rightly or wrongly) derided for it behind closed doors, even if it has no bearing on their research competence. As a side note of irony, in many cases that I've worked with, getting a PhD makes someone do less research, not more. Because of the status signaling, they get more administrative leadership duties, not unlike a dean at a university.
And the PhDs that I know, who do it for a "simple" promotion, don't leave their job. (simple in quotes, because in my experience, they are rather large promotions).They complete their PhD as part of their job, in addition to their normal duties. It sounds like you are stuck in an academic mindset, where there is only one way to skin the PhD cat.
Well you’re mistaken because I also did my PhD after working for a few years, and while employed for an industrial lab.
And I recommend things because of my experience not despite it.
That may be where we're talking from two different angles. Much of this discussion seems predicated on the idea that you need a PhD to do research (i.e., it's vocational in nature). My claim is that you do not, but that it's possible people will pursue a PhD for other reasons (because it's more about signaling than many realize).
Yes, some people are naturally talented enough to do research without training, or with training other than a PhD.
But if you aren't exceptional, then promoting this is not realistic and is setting people up for disappointment. Some people can learn to play an instrument without a teacher... most would be better served with some structure and guidance for an experienced tutor.
I think the idea that a PhD program is the only adequate training for research is flawed. Most of the researchers (PhD and otherwise) have a fairly methodical approach to the endeavor. If there's a method/process, it can be taught. The non-PhDs that I know doing research did not have some innate talent for research, but were taught by other more senior researchers.
IMO, most research is borne from the combination of a solid grasp of a problem that needs to be solved, taking the time to build deep understanding of the topic, and then following a methodical approach to testing a hypothesis. None of that takes exceptional talent or half a decade in a PhD program to learn. (I say this as somebody who's been through a PhD program that I enjoyed. It's not from any bitterness). The biggest hurdle for many seems to be funding and resources, rather than some exceptional talent. And to that end, I'd concede that a PhD credential can open up doors for resources, but I hold that as distinct from the skills required from research.
If you're talking about the exceptional, once-in-a-generation breakthroughs, sure, I can see why a PhD program with an exceptional advisor may be necessary. The the vast, vast majority of research is small and incremental.
I had a high-school intern who worked with me and hit the top of Hacker News with a new compiler optimisation she invented.
I still think a PhD is the best for most people in most cases, if you want to be doing genuine research.
IMO, employment research offers many advantages. For one, it forces somebody to focus on the application and how it would genuinely be of value, so that one doesn't get bogged down into "neat" but ultimately impractical efforts that are little more than academic exercises. IMO, it opens the projects up to more interesting problems because they don't get cornered into the "publish or perish" paradigm. People easily get paid 3-4x (or more) what they would as a TA. They have daily access to experts in their field rather than relying on piecemeal meetings with their advisors. It also tends to open one up to larger resources for their investigation; for example, the people in PhD programs at my last job were given ample access to multi-million dollar rocket test stands and the anonymized data from them; if that were a university resource it would be hard to gain that same level of recurring access. Now I'll grant that there are certain PhD programs that are better suited to specific types of fundamental research that would otherwise be difficult to get funding while an employee. Nuclear physics would be one example. But I would venture that the majority of research is on the applied sciences/engineering side.
I actually tried to join a PhD program after 5 years of industry experience, and they offered the top fellowship they had, which was not enough to cover only the health insurance for my family, not to mention rent or food. It simply wasn’t feasible, and so we would need a systemic change to education funding to enable late-in-life study opportunities for everyone.
I dislike the comparison to VC funding. VC funding is essentially gambling and already a gross misallocation of resources. VC funding already goes to something analogous to the highest scoring grads who speculate wildly that they have a viable business model, and the real business model only shows up long after the funds, even in the small ~5-10% of successful startups. The ~90% of failures is proof enough.
Also, research requires taking risks with resources. If we don’t take risks, we won’t make progress. Thinking of research in narrow immediate economic terms is short sighted. We often don’t understand the ROI of research until long after the initial investment, meaning there will never be a time that allocation of resources can be predicted or approximated in advance.
They will still be part of the rat race though. Actually it's been interesting to observe the opposite, I know some PhD students who quit because big corp offered them a nice position in their innovation branch with much more freedom (and financial security) to work on their favourite problem... A bit of luck involved to have your field of research align with big corps' goals though.
I'm going to pick on Timnit Gebru, or at least what became more obvious with that debacle. Both the directional freedom and financial security are there, but part of your job is PR, and you don't have the same freedom a professor with tenure gets. If you have a paper that is critical of your employer or they don't like it for any reason, they can kill it. That's the deal.
But I'm not convinced this couldn't happen at a faculty. "part of your job is PR" (i.e. fishing for grants) and "they can kill it" (i.e. funding dried up and focus changes) apply there as well...
I think some of these are out there. I've known a few people working in government, academia staff positions, and quasi-government organizations that pursued their PhDs (for free) while working full time. Occasionally, some got some push-back as to why they wouldn't be available to teach, for example, but often their advisors welcomed them because they came with real-world problems they were trying to solve and an organization willing to pay and support them in that effort as part of their "real" job.
We do. You can do a PhD in part-time, self-funded. Yes, your financial situation will definitely take a hit; you can control to what extent though.
Expect to need about 5-6 years of 1.5-2 days a week. If you'd like to know more, I'm happy to discuss my experiences as a supervisor of such PhD students and share what insights I have.
It would be really cool if you can share that here.
That's how I feel about this. Chances of success are not as high as one would like, however, case affirmative, honour and recognition. A lot!
Publishing and disseminating work is a skill that (imo) is almost entirely distinct from researching, but you must have this skillset to succeed in research. If your research group is succeeding by picking low hanging fruit (in your eyes) then this is a great sign. You should learn from them. Your talents will not go to waste through learning these new skills.
Lastly, if you like TA work then you should definitely continue because you can then look for lecturing positions after. To my knowledge TA roles generally require postgrad/PhD.
You don't believe your supervisor or your research group and so you quit, great. It's great that you have the critical thinking abilities and confidence in yourself to make such a decision.
However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art. I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against. I think if there's enough substance to make your comment specific, you should. Maybe even write a paper explaining why what they're doing is nonsense. If you're right, this would genuinely be a contribution to the field.
If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.
I know a few people who have PhD's that had fantastic support, counselors and teachers, and they still had questions on the validity of their degrees and processes. Here, this person's experience seems to be a money grab by a school unqualified to provide him a PhD in his area.
Going public though, maybe a hard decision, and may hurt him, but who knows? Maybe there are people out there that want someone that is willing to stand up like this publicly?
{Takes on Quantum Computing grad student} + {has insufficient Quantum Computing expertise in group to even advise} seems... pretty bad.
PS: And being from a tenured family and having grown up exposed to academia, I'm inclined to take author at their judgement here, given that taking on students in hot topics meshes with how the incentives of grant funding, publishing, and prestige work.
The one positive of this environment that when you see someone who has succeeded in publishing a substantial amount, it's safe to presume that their work is not entirely without merit. That's not a 100% guarantee, but it's a good heuristic. A post like this implies that the author's personal judgement is more insightful than a process that I know to be enormously thorough and harsh, and yet it provides only vague assertions and no details on methodology. At the same time it's hard to ignore that the post is written by someone who is (understandably) a bit bitter and probably isn't being entirely objective in their evaluation.
In general it's not my impression that this sort of post produces reliable feedback that outsiders should rely on, and (unless it's very carefully anonymized, which it isn't) it also leaves bitterness in its wake.
Fascinating, as I did not find this at all to be the case in general. I imagine in some cases it could be true, but for the most part I found most research in academia to not be of much interest to many people, one way or another. Hardly anyone takes much time to either validate research or to critique it.
I'm glad to hear that you managed to find something to research that caught the attention of many people/mechanisms, even if only to judge it negatively. It must mean you were doing something important, which I think is the exception and not at all the norm.
Of course you can argue that all this academic competition selects for the wrong thing (that's subjective) but the competition and testing is never-ending. There is a reason that a lot of people leave for industry, simply because it's so much less stressful.
This has not been my experience. In my own field, I've found that quite a few well-cited peer-reviewed papers have severe flaws that are not difficult to find. I can't call the process "enormously thorough and harsh". I view current academic processes as more of a facade than anything else. Sure, the process probably filters out absolute garbage, but I don't think most people need peer review to recognize the worst quality research.
My point wasn't a complaint about a few papers, rather, important papers that presumably have had a lot of eyeballs go over them in addition to being peer reviewed. If those papers have serious flaws, then I think that does say something about the standards in academia broadly.
One reason why I don't work in academia is that too many academics resist the idea that there is a quality problem.
Also: I didn't say that my field was broken or anything like that. It's not optimal, but for the most part it's okay. That has little to do with peer review.
> someone who has repeatedly survived a publication competition with a ~20% success rate and then got other serious researchers to cite and build their work is probably not a total piker
Sure, it's evidence that the work is good, but it's not particularly strong evidence in my view.
> whatever your impressions may be from the sidelines.
If you're implying that I haven't published in a peer-reviewed venue myself, you're mistaken. I've never had a problem publishing. I think that's because I agree more with Gauss: "few, but ripe". Unfortunately "publish or perish" reins supreme in academia, which probably explains why so many people have trouble as they seem to try to produce "least publishable units". Borderline papers like that of course will have trouble.
The most effective thing I can do is encourage you to find problems in published papers yourself.
Another factor in my reluctance is that explaining each case would take a significant amount of time. (Brandolini's law, basically.) I can point you to places where I already explained problems I've found, for example: https://pubpeer.com/publications/95455FA4147A9CBD5EAA5185D21...
That paper has over 300 forward citations over about 25 years. It was published first in a conference, and later in the top specialized journal in my sub-field. I went through a large fraction of the forward citations and could not find anyone who noticed the major error I point out. And it's not difficult to spot if one does basic spot checks.
You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [initially I read their Google scholar as indicating they’d left the field, but they haven’t and that was my mistake reading Google Scholar in Korean.] Meanwhile you have not contacted the third (typically senior and advisory) author, who appears to have publications as of 2022?
Yet even if you do the basic legwork here and contact all the authors, I’m not sure quite what result you want from this? I presume you’d like an acknowledgement that an old paper has errors? You’ve already received that through the acceptance of your own paper. Would an admission by the third author help? Do you demand a retraction of that ancient paper and every single paper that cited it since? And how is this the devastating critique of all science that you seem to think it is?
My link was just one example. As I indicated, I don't have time to give more examples, and I didn't expect to convince you. I think few academics are actively looking for errors, so unless you are, you may not notice them as often as I have.
> I can only assume that very few people were relying on this stupid model, since the flaw wasn’t noticed for decades.
There are quite a few papers that directly use the criticized model, from the 90s until recently. It does seem that many people blindly accepted a clearly wrong model. With that being said, the other model in the paper is responsible for most of the citations.
> You are also unhappy that you can’t get a response from the first author [...] I’m not sure quite what result you want from this?
The first author is the senior author here. (The conference paper version does not have the other two authors.) I contacted them because if I'm wrong, I wanted them to tell me how so that I could avoid making a fool of myself in my paper. I don't want their paper to be retracted, though a notice that it has severe errors would be helpful to readers.
It's a blog post, he definitely can say what he thinks, orthogonal to unprofessionality.
It's up to the reader to understand that's his view of reality and without any hard proof we should take his view as a data point, and potentially an erroneous one. Nothing more.
Last we need is people writing accusatory white papers to explain themselves over an opinion they had on a personal blog post.
Yes unsubstantiated claims can be harmful, but that doesn’t mean that no such claims should ever be made. The author is not just bad mouthing their research group, but presenting their perspective of what took place.
I know this is the age of oversharing, but just because something is from a perspective doesn't mean that people should be interested in it, or that is wise or fair to share. Making it specific and detailed is a way to make it fairer and more productive.
edit: also, to appeal to self-interest, people respond to detailed argument with attacks on the supports of that argument. People respond to vague accusations with ad hominem (which may be very specific) because there's no argument to attack. Vague accusations are almost always eventually more damaging to the accuser than to the accused.
That doesn't mean brushing it off though. More of a vent to cool yourself off before taking the next action. At least that's what I've always done.
At least you can somewhat "un-say" things now a days if you control the content hosting.
I disagree. It is extremely unprofessional to act like doing research while pocketing mostly public funds like that.
I am 100% behind the author.
They have apparently tried to resolve the issue internally and this serves as good warning for people considering science career in today's world.
This can be true while it's also true that making a vague, unsubstantiated assertion about how your love for the field is just too deep and pure for academia is still unprofessional.
Of the people who claim they dropped out of school because they were just too smart or creative to go through the motions, the vast majority are probably very wrong. If you want people to take you seriously, make a better argument.
Alas I only have an anecdote.
I considered starting a PhD around ten years ago. One particular university was having an open day. When I got there everyone was locked out because someone hadn't bothered to tell someone else the open day was happening.
There were visits to the facilities, which were interesting enough but a lot of the tech had been there since the 90s (or 70s in some cases) and there wasn't anything fresh to see.
And there was a show-and-tell by various researchers and one lead professor, during which I realised the professor was a Grade A Bullshitter [1], and the researchers weren't even remotely familiar with other work in the field.
The main person I wanted to see didn't bother to turn up.
Bizarrely, there was a persistently religious undertone - very strange in a field that isn't even remotely religious. (The university is quite well known for its theology department.)
Now, this is a very niche field, so I have no way of knowing if it was typical.
But as experiences go it certainly didn't suggest that that particular department was simmering with eager high-voltage professionalism.
Since then I've read "We're looking for PhD students" notices on various email lists. It's striking how many [2] seem like transparently contrived attempts at getting funding from organisations who already know what exactly they want to fund, and how few have are truly research-driven.
It feels very much like a box ticking exercise. Org gets money, org hands it out to researchers, researchers get students, students write up dissertation, dissertation is forgotten, rinse and repeat.
[1] Subsequently confirmed independently by other people in various "Oh, him - yes, he's a loon" conversations.
[2] Not all. There are places who on the leading edge. But even there some of the research feels dissociated from real problems - almost as if the goal is the production of "Towards..." "Considering..." and "A critique/summary/review/taxonomy of..." of papers, and not so much developing techniques and solutions that that would really move the field forward.
As someone who once held the title of assistant professor, I have little patience for people who recognize that the system is in many ways repulsive, and yet refuse to even consider to stop playing the game because it's all that they know.
The amount of bullshit being produced and regurgitated in academia needs to be called out. Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"
Academics who defend a broken system are a major factor in why that system continues to decline.
I'm glad the OP wrote this article and find it expectedly discouraging that someone creeps out from the woodwork to try to shush it.
Much like military & law enforcement personnel who wear their medals defending a broken system.
The OP should count themselves lucky they have seen that having a few letters after their name on a piece of paper or business card doesnt cut it with many.
Estate agents (realtors) have devalued the letters after name's obedience to "authority".
You pay your weight in gold, but if you become a pain to someone high enough on the totem pole, it's easy to get kicked out of a program, leaving you with not much.
You gotta play the game to have any chance of changing things. A lot like politics, actually.
Completely agree.
> The amount of bullshit being produced and regurgitated in academia needs to be called out. Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"
No, it isn't. First off, I'm not in the academia. I'm not part of the "us". It doesn't affect me if person A is attacking people B. For me I don't care at all. Also, I specifically said that the problem wasn't criticism. The problem is criticism so vague it's impossible to defend, because there's nothing to address. Person A says that person B is superficial. Person B responds "no I'm not". Very substantive!
But I digress. The real question is, why do personal opinions like "xxx is superficial" needs to be defendable? Is academia somehow a "protected class" of individuals where we need to keep our opinions to ourselves unless we have hard evidence?
Or is this a standard you hold against other PhDs? Because the OP stated they quit, so it doesn't really apply.
I can totally empathize with the GP's claim that 'Your definition of "unprofessional" is just "this makes us look bad"'. You might not be in academia per se, but it seems to me like you picked up that mode of thinking nonetheless.
And no, I didn't keep my opinions to myself despite I have no proof whatsoever. Sue me for unprofessionalism please.
This can be generalized, I think. Professional social standards, specifically, do seem to primarily be about protecting and saving face.
A lot of researchers are very mediocre and they treat research as a simple career where they superficially advise a bunch of PhD students. A lot of those researchers neither think nor raise questions nor make meaningful contributions.
Exacerbated by research grants which favours researcher with lots of publications regardless of the quality of the research (usually real honest high quality research takes time and produces much fewer papers). Those researchers thus end up chasing low hanging fruit just to increase their paper count, making everything they do shallow and full of bullshit.
Not at all anonymous. :/
If his supervisor were an outlier, I could see your point. But a big purpose behind his blog post is to highlight how common this is.
I specifically said the issue isn't criticizing. The issue is criticizing in a way which is so vague as to be impossible to defend.
It's exhausting commenting on HN. You have to append every minor observation of a laundry list of responses to likely misinterpretations.
Interesting seeing this response after you just posted:
>If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself
Was this a tongue-in-cheek demonstration of your point? Or is vague criticism only unacceptable in academia?
I wanted to claim that you shouldn't make vague criticism. I immediately expected that people would respond as if my claim was that you shouldn't criticize. And sure enough, that's what the post I responded to did.
Me: "You shouldn't make vague criticism"
Response: "OMG you're saying university professors are above criticism."
Do you think I'm being vague here? :-)
Criticizing in a vague way is precisely appropriate in a situation where you don't want to make the criticism specific to a single circumstance but are instead trying to make a broader point about a systemic issue.
Do you also accept the "other side" of the argument that the author of the blog post could be wrong?
Perhaps, but only the author can confirm this.
I don't see where they made this claim, or a reference to a 'scientific standard'. Can you please point to it?
Feel free to have whatever preference you want, but understand that others may have different preferences from yours and they may have good reasons for those preferences that you simply are not aware of instead of assuming the worst of them.
>What you quoted doesn't say that either.
It absolutely does and the fact that you don't realize that is a good indication you are not discussing this matter in good faith so I thank you for choosing to cease discussing this any further.
If they don't, then it's completely unconvincing because it doesn't actually provide any new information.
So if the goal is to gripe to other people who "get it", then sure, vague criticisms are great.
If the goal is to convince people that something is an issue, then all vague criticisms do is establish what your opinion is; they fail to actually provide information that could (justifiably) convince anyone.
At best, they can convince someone to be interested enough to look into it on their own.
And my issue wasn't about whether it's OK or not to criticize, nor about the level of detail, but whether his manner of criticism was unprofessional. It was not. You can argue that it's not effective, but there's nothing unprofessional about it.
And what is that, exactly? That the author is smart and/or right and that everyone around him is wrong? Maybe, but it's not a particularly valuable observation.
Why?
What you're doing right now is telling other people how to live their lives. Is that ok, or should you be scientific about it, or keep it to yourself?
Some light sometimes needs to be shed (look at Susan Fowler's post on Uber. I think it triggered a fairly necessary reevaluation, or Edward Snowden's revelations), but it is seldom without cost to the person that's holding the flashlight (Snowden is unlikely to receive a warm welcome, if he comes back to the US, and I suspect that Russia won't be a particularly joyful place, in the near future. I have no idea how Susan Fowler has done).
In my own case, my history (quite checkered) has given me some fairly unique views into a lot of terrible behaviors, rotten attitudes, and outright hypocrisy by many folks that like to project a wholesome, professional, image. Now that I'm out of the rat race, I could probably be more specific.
But I won't.
In some, rare, cases, perpetrators went on to cause harm (Not much. I never worked with John Wayne Gacy), but most ended up in rather unenviable places.
In a number of other cases, however, people ended up changing their behavior/attitude, and going on to be happier, healthier people.
For reasons that I won't go into here, I believe in second chances. I was given first-, second-, and third chances.
It has less to do with "professionalism," and more to do with being human. It's not my job to clean up the world (just the bits around me), and I need to pick my battles carefully, so I can do the most good.
General accusations are easy to defend against, you just ask for specifics.
The author deliberately took it down because the attention it garnered made them uncomfortable. While we all know what goes up on the internet is forever, it doesn't preclude us from having the decency to respect their wishes.
This is some serious gatekeeping. A PhD student is an apprentice, on a path to get scientific training. They are not yet trained enough, so that you could reasonable expect them to "be scientific" to a level of rigorous standards.
1. Writes a vague blog post about his dissatisfaction with his PhD
or
2. Writes a paper attacking his supervisor explicitly
?
Obviously the 3rd option ("shut the fuck up if you don't want your overlords to hear") would be the best, but also perhaps the most boring.
Best for whom?
However it also leads to a tragedy of commons, in this case in the form of institutional corruption.
There's a major asymmetry in US academia that public accusations can address, if done tactfully, truthfully, and specifically enough to allow a defense.
In US academia, subordinates need positive references to get jobs. That leads many to be quite deferential to their supervisors, even allowing abuse. Nominally this is supposed to highlight strengths and weaknesses of a job candidate, but it also can serve to warn potential employers away from a particular job candidate.
However, in contrast, there is no formal mechanism to warn others about bad supervisors. Given that, I am okay with tactfully, truthfully, and specifically going public about negative experiences with academic supervisors.
To be clear: I don't advocate defamation. Keep good records, and if you choose the go public, be tactful and stick to what can be easily corroborated.
Also: My experience is that subordinates are rarely given the opportunity to reply to defamatory claims made by academic supervisors when providing references. So if your focus is on the ability of someone to defend against defamation, I don't think you can defend the status quo.
lol. You don't know the weight of crushed aspirations and a two year opportunity cost.
> I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against.
again lol. publication game is well know.
> I think if there's enough substance to make your comment specific, you should. Maybe even write a paper explaining why what they're doing is nonsense. If you're right, this would genuinely be a contribution to the field. If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.
again lol. this is a very academic answer. Actually, I'm not sure university administrations write a paper on policies and ask for peer comments before making changes. They just do it, in the most brutal, authoritarian/top-down/corporate way possible. But the top brass needs papers from the bottom. Show me how much academia has been optimized by writing papers about academia. Well, even if they did they are useless.
I also had the same issue as the author: absent supervisions. I had only two meetings during my phd and they never reviewed my papers (I tried everything to motivate them and I finally gave up). I did everything on my own. It was very hard. I learned the hard way (try and fail... do it again...). I finally finished my phd with great appreciations from the jury. However this ends with a considerable cost: I am completely broken. I now suffer of a severe depression and generalized anxiety disorders. I take several medications and this does not help so much. I lost a lot of friends. My life is basically a journey in hell since several years now.
This sounds unreal. How did your supervisor managed his subordinates so they wound not spend their time in leisure activities?
> However this ends with a considerable cost
I can relate to that. Broken aspirations, depleted ambition and energy and lack of interpersonal relationships sometimes make me feel sad.
Self-pressure? I cannot spend my work time in leisure time, otherwise I ashame. It is pretty even the opposite that I experienced: I felt ashame in my leisure time to not work to get more progress on my phd.
We were only two phd students supervised by the same pair of supervisors. In fact we saw our supervisors a lot. However this was more in a friend way. Every time we switch to work-related discussions they found excuses to leave or just say that they will take some time later to ask our questions / reveiw our drafts (and this never happen).
In the case of the other student, he was more lucky and find an unofficial supervisor that help him a lot. I find some support from another researcher at the end of my phd. And thanks to him I had some review of my manuscript. This gave me some confidence to finish the writing.
I guess in your situation the supervisors were present in taking care of your self motivation and checking your commitment to your PhD when having informal conversations. Also, it sounds you were in control of your PhD project and could set up goals and strategy achieving them yourself.
I am curios, in what field did you do your PhD?
They are not there to babysit, and many want self motivated people. If you spend your time doing leisure activities, you will either spend too much time getting the PhD, or simply not get it.
Also, in large enough research groups, the advisor delegates almost everything to postdocs. I knew one guy who, every time he met his advisor, would have to answer the question "So what was your thesis topic again?"
It is though very much opposite of what new PhDs expects judging that from my own experience, conversations and confronting my supervisor who eventually frankly said that “academic freedom is not for PhDs”. This created an environment which reinforced itself.
This made me look PhD as a job which I tried to treat as such looking through cost/benefit lense. Probably, if my supervisor would not keep up with regular meetings I would have done less (after being introduced with concept of “academic freedom” for PhDs).
I would not look in that as lack of self motivation. In contrary at the beginning many PhDs were quite curios on what they do and what happens around them. But by the end of it many my colleagues went away from academia to work it in finance because it pays and frankly many have said that PhD is just a job. Thus I would assert that self motivation does not make PhD thesis alone unless if someone cares about it.
Many (most?) professors in the US are the same. The other kind, though, is not that rare.
I feel for this student. Both for what they’ve gone through, and also how this moment of catharsis has probably also caused additional strife for them in all the attention it’s seen. Honestly, I feel for the professor and the rest of the research group too, and all the perverse incentives that have lead otherwise smart people down these unfortunate paths.
I have my doubts on this, because widespread use of sealed recommendation letters already make blackballing/indefensible accusations sort of the norm in academia, but in this case biased against students. When a student gets the courage to complain in the open, I tend to see it as making the playing field more even.
I think a Glassdoor-like site, but for academic advisors and research groups would be quite popular.
This is spots on description of what happens if you waltz into some university department or research group intending to "do a PhD" in something that isn't the core competency your group. This is very common in "provincial universities" but also happens to lesser in top schools if you just happen to come in with expectations that are misaligned with the reality. It is a side product of the sad aspect of academic reality that finding funding for a PhD student is often much easier than finding funding for a post-doc or more senior member, even though that is exactly the wrong way to build a good research group.
Philip Guo's the PhD Grind describes many of the same challenges.
I also share a memory of older member of the faculty suggesting that your PhD is supposed to a formality to endure. "A driving license", not real real research with your own ideas. It was very depressing thing to hear, because I too went in with an attitude of "I shall study a question I was interested in my undergrad, but seriously this time".
It's always about grant money. Especially with anything that starts with Quantum <insert buzzword here>
And yes, sadly, being successful in asking for funding means pitching the hot topics du jour, which typically don't coincide with the most important or interesting things to do from a scientific point of view. Although asking for grants in quantum computer having zero experience in it does sound a bit too much.
We really need funding to go to people, not projects. Having to pitch specific projects when asking for funding does more harm than good IMO.
I agree but this was the original idea behind tenure, and here we are. The question is how to return to this understanding of its meaning.
Sounds very familiar. I saw this a lot in grad school. My first advisor was also fed up with the nature in academia and left tenure path to work in private industry, leaving me to fend for money in this vein.
So then my graduate research topic came into this line. I stopped that after I realized that not only was it fishing far off the path of my social support, it was also weapons research disguised via a friendly sounding problem.
I switched programs, to an advisor who seemed to want me to work in something he actually does. Then I had zero relationship with him and became basically a highly underpaid developer to crank out the numbers that corroborated his research at 100+ hour weeks. In the marginal time I was tying to figure out if I could somehow make the small corner I thought might make a thesis fit into his unspoken program. I got the hint that my PhD was predicated on making his research stand up, and having a part in it is what my PhD would represent, not any actual original work.
I became a little more cynical but continued, now paying much more attention on the side to other's experience. I found this was nearly universal from 'top schools', and then with the overflow of candidates to academic jobs they take this style to the next tier of schools where they get tenure by making a lemming line of candidates do the same.
At this point it was the breaking point. I had a great internship the previous summer. I had a "come work for us now or maybe never" ultimatum. I took the plunge.
ABD Twice. And that I consider a great accomplishment that I am quite proud of.
many such cases
Everyone needs to understand something important: a PhD is first and foremost an apprenticeship. It is your opportunity to study under someone who has done a specific kind of research, and learn from that person. If that relationship isn't a good fit, the PhD itself won't be a good fit: it's like trying to learn neurosurgery from a cardiac surgeon. You cannot fix this with reading or online lectures, the apprenticeship is the whole point.
Occasionally I run into students who have these advisor mismatches and my instinct is to try to help them. However what I've learned is that good intentions (try to advise a student who is interested in a different area) don't actually translate to good outcomes. I am monomaniacal (only) about the research that interests me, and that doesn't translate into other areas I'm less familiar with. They will be frustrated with my lack of expertise in those other areas, and I will end up frustrated by my inability to properly advise them. In the worst case, that bad fit can turn to resentment against the entire scientific process (I see this process starting in the post above.)
If the author of the post wants to pursue a PhD, I would first urge them to stop for a while and not think about research: just do something else. When and if they've reached the point where they are bored to tears with whatever they're doing (I recommend taking a "real" job for a while) -- and can only think about the research they're missing out on -- then go figure out whose papers are actually exciting to them. Then go find out how to work with that person, whatever it takes. Sometimes there are ways to work with someone that don't require a formal PhD admission, and enough persistence can make the difference. I'm not saying this is easy. The point is: don't do it because it's easy, do it because you want to do it enough that it doesn't matter if it's hard.
I say this as someone who nearly did not finish a PhD and had terrible mismatch with my advisor. If you have a mismatch with your advisor, I have three pieces of unsolicited advice.
1. Find the community of your research topic early and get involved. Partially due to covid there are now many ~weekly seminars that meet online and post recordings on YouTube. They tend to be welcoming, and getting to know the people drives home the idea of “if they can do it so can I”
2. Pick a problem with extremely clear benchmarks. If you exceed the benchmarks, then congrats on your state of the art work! If not, write about the good parts and explain why the bad parts exist.
3. Write about your topic early and often. You don’t have to publish it necessarily, but writing has a clarifying effect acknowledged by every PhD student I know.
Stay positive and remember to take care of yourself! Good luck!
I think this is a good idea because it really forces you to consider if you actually enjoy the subject. You work alongside the professors to tailor the proposal, and you'll find out pretty quickly if you hate the subject or not, and if you decide you do hate the subject, at least you didn't waste multiple years (and potentially thousands of pounds) trying to pursue it.
Right - which is why it's a better check before they embark on a PhD.
If you keep going, then ideally you have a good sense of what research you want to do. You may have one or more publications/near-publications under your belt. Now you write your proposal and finish out the dissertation over the course of 2-3 years, which is realistic. I may be missing something about the UK approach but this seems much more reasonable to me.
There are two and only two situations [0]: 1) The company requires your specific expertise and won't care about the title as you are the one with the knowledge 2) The company does not require your specific expertise at which point they care about the PhD as a marker of "can do stuff autonomously", which has nothing to do with the title.
On the other hand: (that is an assumption that may be wrong) You are miserable! That is time and joy that you won't get back. Academia will not be thankful for your sacrifice! And besides: I highly doubt that you would have to work for less pay if you quit.
[0] well there is a third one: Someone wants someone with a title for title slides and reports. But I _really_ don't want to work for these people, so I'm discarding it.
This is bad advice. The sheepskin effect is real and a company that "cares about the PhD as a marker" is not being petty or superficial in using this as a screening mechanism. Unless you're truly looking to enter a field where having a PhD would be of no value on your resume, just finish your PhD if you're 6 years in and can do so without too much additional distraction.
I was given this advice when I was wavering on whether to finish my Ph.D. In fact, a guy who had finished his Ph.D. told me don't bother, nothing changed from before or after he got it.
Then I went to his wedding and he had the DJ refer to him as "Dr." the entire night in front of his entire family, and by God did they care. They were so proud of him for that title and that degree. After seeing that, I immediately went and applied to defend my dissertation.
And here's the other thing -- even if you work in an industry like CS that has more egalitarian views on credentials like a Ph.D., the whole world is not like that. The actual piece of paper opens up several opportunities not available otherwise:
- Some jobs require a Ph.D. All the experience in the world won't qualify you for that kind of role without the piece of paper.
- You can get jobs as an "expert" easily, where the piece of paper reifies your expertise to your clients (think expert witness or consultant). It's difficult to explain "Yes, I'm at the top of my field except I don't have the same credentials as those other people who also claim they are at the top". The credentials are more convincing to a lot of people.
- It's easier to emigrate to various places. Having a Ph.D. could help you qualify for a O1 visa in the US, and other countries have special carve outs in their immigration codes for Ph.D.s. You don't get any special treatment for being ABD, no matter how much you insist it wasn't worth your time.
etc.
So having completed the Ph.D., it was by far the right choice for me.
I find it generally bad advice to chase after something when the main driver is social prestige. For one, by definition, you hinging your esteem to the (possibly fickle) opinion of somebody else and two, the people who are in fields for status rather than because of intrinsic joy of the work itself are often not the most productive or ethical.
For example, the surgeons I know who are in the field mainly due to the status it confers seem to be quite miserable.
Anecdotally, I have seen phds create expectation vs reality mismatches for some. The degree can easily become an anchor which holds someone to problems that they no longer care about, or provides false belief in one’s credentials.
I literally know somebody who went through surgery residency and decided to walk away from the field. They are not in financial ruin.
Medical school is also a "one time expense", so I'm not convinced of the distinction. The opportunity cost of a PhD, especially in a field of engineering or CS is probably on similar par. The difference between a TA salary and someone in industry, over the course of 6-7 years to complete a PhD, can easily approach or exceed $500k. While the debt load between the two may be different, the actual opportunity cost is similar.
>The degree can easily become an anchor which holds someone to problems that they no longer care about, or provides false belief in one’s credentials.
Completely agree.
On the other hand, I've found that people who convince themselves that they are pursing a path based on intrinsic joy of the work itself quickly lose interest when they hit a wall and the work becomes not fun at all but a slog.
Think about somebody who grinds out of a sense of duty (high on the "conscientiousness" scale of personality traits). They may not be motivated by the task itself, but are still able to continue the effort because of it's intrinsic rewards (for fueling their identity as a dutiful person, for example).
A parent may not feel motivated all the time regarding doing "silly" activities with their children. But they can push forward anyways, because the idea of "being a good parent" is intrinsically rewarding.
Even if the paper isn't accepted, you get the experience of conducting adequate background research and literature surveys, writing your own work up in a clear and coherent manner, and receiving feedback, some of which may be valuable. You also get used to rejection (and sometimes very harsh and dismissive criticism) as something that happens but isn't the end of the world. Eventually you get published, which in some sense proves the value of your work because it has been peer reviewed and identified as something worth publishing (and has arguably met the often nebulous "novelty" requirement as well.)
Sometimes innovative work just gets rejected for publication because it goes against the status quo, and that's perhaps another good lesson to learn (as well as how to get around such bias if you need to.)
Now from your post it sounds like you don't work in the natural sciences (apologies if I assumed wrong) so you might not have publications (in many natural sciences it's very common to have multiple publications before the defence, in many humanities the thesis is the publication), if you don't be prepared to send that person some condensed work (they likely don't have time to read a whole thesis) or if you have a publication. However only do that after starting a dialogue and after they have agreed to look at some of your work.
If you do not like your advisor [1] or even worse if you do not have confidence in at least scientific integrity: Then you should absolutely run and quit. You won't be happy. Ever. That doesn't mean you are not "fit for science" or either of you or your advisor is a "bad scientist". Just that the two particular persons don't (and won't) work out.
At least here in Germany it's also not a particularly hard decision [2]: You (quite easily) double your salary, while also (at least normally) significantly reducing your workload. But this assumes that you do the PhD because you "want it" and not because of the title. But then again: I would very much discourage anyone doing a PhD for the title. So maybe I'm not the best person to ask
[0] up to the point where _after_ having written up my thesis I rediscovered the "outline" of the work that we send to the foundation and the faculty. Of which precisely _nothing_ was in my actual thesis.
[1] This is not necessarily your official supervisor, as in the person that is taking you on and giving you your title. Given a large enough group size (and I very much would put that number at anything beyond 3 students) but the person you interact with daily (or at least weekly).
[2] At least from the vantage of someone who _hasn't_ taken that one. FWIW
Why not match students with professors pre admission? Phd from mit doesn’t mean much if you can’t work in your chosen field.
I know quite a few PhD(s) and researchers, and a few PhD programs dropout. My takeaway up until now was "PhD = politics", but now I see that I was looking at it all wrong, I was looking under the wrong lens of pick_a_school->get_an_advisor. The reverse is true, when the student is read, the master will appear; the place comes with the advisor (not the other way around).
That is what is it supposed to be, but I must interject that for many, myself included, the advisor is effectively absent. In a lab without postdocs or other students what I personally ended up with is an apprenticeship in learning from myself.
If you are seeing your advisor more than once or twice a year, and or if there are other people in your lab to discuss your work with then you are doing your PhD in easy mode.
> I was asked to find something that does not require so much understanding of Quantum Computing
Sounds like QM was a new subject to you and you didn't know/understand QM enough to do research in an adjacent field. Not sure why you'd pick a field that you don't have much background in to do a PhD in. I'm not sure what advice you expected your supervisors to give.
I love cussing and discussing quantum theory / physics / computing. And Feynman is 100% right.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman
This is wrong. Let me tell you a thing. Nobody will cares. Not-one-single people will care about your mind image.
1-Feeling depressed or having doubts in some point of the process of writing your thesis is more common than you think
2-Run, reset and try in a different field will not be easier, it will be more difficult. It always is.
3-Closures provide a lot of peace of mind. Finish your thesis and then move your mind to greener pastures. A not perfect thesis about a poor known theme, is better than none.
So, just keep working and do your best effort. Most people never receive a Nobel in any case and what people could think about you, is not so relevant as you think. In the end, you will be the expert in quantum computing, not them.
Remember also that any error slipped in your these can be fixed later. Science is not written in stone. We fall and we learn. Scientists are expected to commit honest mistakes.
In my case it was less of an apprenticeship and more of a lot of stumbling around until I found a way to create research that matched my standards. My standards are modeled after the clearly explained and verifiable work in my field.
This is broadly similar to my experience. The priority of most academics is not to produce deep, novel, and creative work. It is to churn out sausages in the shapes favoured by journals, at a factory production rate. That's what they have to do for their career. After a while, though, they start to be unable to tell the difference between the two.
Why should you be uncomfortable with that? A discipline with lots of low-hanging fruit sounds like a pretty good place to be.
However, I concur regarding the quantity-over-quality problem. Personally I favor quality over quantity, both as a reader and as a writer. It wastes less of the reader's time and improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the field.
I have seen the false perception a few times that a PhD is mainly about sitting down and thinking deeply for a long time without talking to anyone and then getting an eureka moment and writing it all up. This is not how most modern science is done (maybe it's still possible if you're a genius in very few select areas of mathematics). So if this is what you think a PhD is about, you're likely not going to enjoy it.
it bothers me but I cannot do anything about it (other than be bothered by it)
> I have seen the false perception a few times that a PhD is mainly about sitting down and thinking deeply for a long time without talking to anyone and then getting an eureka moment and writing it all up.
also, a big part of the complaint from the linked and removed original blogpost is precisely the lack of being able to find people with whom to discuss. His advisors are not knowledgeable enough, (blog author claims) further, they advised them not to require so much in-depth knowledge in their thesis (!!).
This article seems to be about a PhD candidate at a program that didn't really have people experienced in the field. If you want to get a science PhD, look at the papers by the tenured people in that program and see where they went to school. Look at who cites their papers. The schools that read their papers may be the ones that you can apply to later.
Happily left with an ABD to join Microsoft in 1995.
Certainly an exciting step, although the program here was pretty excellent. Good supervision, full funding for the entire duration, topic of my choosing (I wrote parts of the grant).
The main reason I'm leaving is that Mech.Eng. PhDs just seem like such a conservative bunch. Most end up either in tiny, provincial ventures (think utilities companies, for my field) or as middle managers at huge companies (where I live, car manufacturers). They then are, for all intents and purposes, managers and not engineers anymore. The title is the ticket to a cushy life. Academia was never an option; the kind of work professors and researchers do seems horrendous! You're chasing grants and need to manage such a wide range of the most frustrating but also mundane issues.
Here's to hoping a software development career is more fruitful and fulfilling. A life-long IC position seems attractive. You get the benefits, but little of the fuss.
It seems like PhDs are sought after (if they are) for their frustration tolerances and project management capabilities. Maybe I didn't have enough of either. Then again, I'm absolutely convinced many more would quit prematurely if they had attractive alternatives. A lot of mechanical engineer PhDs don't, but thanks to the software world and my passion for it, I do.
How often do people complain themselves into a new post?
For a software developer with a regular STEM MSc, there is more of an upper, less of a lower bound, but I'm not planning on testing out those upper boundaries (like, can you rise to C-level of a large corporation? Sure can, but a PhD makes it much easier where I'm from).
Maybe it’s getting work “done” is what’s most attractive to you. I can see how it must feel to see your work right in front of you when you are writing code, but you need to be very aware of what you want. I’d not be happy if I switched fields to avoid management just to end up being a middle manager in a couple of years.
Then what?
However, you will still be dealing with some project management and other similar workplace-related tasks that contribute nothing to the overall work product.
I made a similar decision as a former engineer in the physical realm. I would say normal engineering is about 90% 'fluff' work related to corporate traditions. In tech, it is more like 75%.
The only workers who truly focus only on their work are blue-collar workers. If that is what drives you, there are plenty of interesting trade jobs and fabrication jobs where people just solve problems day-in day-out and don't have to worry about dressing up or being diplomatic.
I totally agree with the comments who say "performance" is an essential part of research. Somebody (your advisor, then later you) needs to be telling people how important your work is, where it can lead, what it will be good for, etc.
If you're not at this stage yet, my advice is cast a wide net and interview several prospective advisors about their work, etc. A bad fit will waste years of your life.