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I want some evidence that you're actually a PhD student at MIT before I start believing that the education system there is broken.
by zatkin 11y ago
I want some evidence that you're actually a PhD student at MIT before I start believing that the education system there is broken.
- selimthegrim 11y agoIt took me about 90 seconds to find him[1] given what he said about himself - why so suspicious? [1] http://www.rle.mit.edu/uqg/people.htm http://www.rle.mit.edu/uqg/people.htm
- zatkin 11y agoHis comment is near the top, so if everyone who reads it starts believing what he has said but he isn't actually an MIT student, people will suddenly believe that MIT's educational system is broken. But we now have evidence, thanks to your post, that it's true. At least from his perspective.
- arjunnarayan 11y agoI mean, I didn't go to MIT, but I just finished a PhD in CS from UPenn, and I'll attest that he's not wrong. Perhaps excessively pessimistic on it, but like, what he's expressed is not an uncommon sentiment. Like you'd hear the same thing from like a third of the grad students I personally know (across the entire spectrum of top-20 CS departments). I myself was fairly ambivalent on my own PhD, but ended up finishing it because 1) I had some strong publications early on in my grad career (first 2 years) so it made it much easier to get to the eventual finish line without much hassle. 2) I'm not a US citizen, and graduating means that the immigration pathway gets a lot easier (EB-1 green card application instead of EB-2, for instance, and since I'm from India that's a huge difference). 3) My advisor let me study/work on what the hell I wanted in my final 2 years (essentially some macroecon + finance research at the Wharton school, and spending a bunch of time reading up and working on large scale graph computation) so the opportunity cost was low to "finish up" the main line of thesis work, with the understanding that any future academic career was out of the question.
- puredemo 11y agoWhy was any future academic career out of the question?
- biswaroop 11y agoI want to clarify that I don't mean MIT is completely broken. Academia is inefficient, and I wanted to point that out.
- zatkin 11y agoThanks for the clarification. Sorry if my comment came off rude.
- dang 11y agoWe detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10348779 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10348779 and marked it off-topic.