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I have nothing but respect for people who have the grit and skill to go through a PhD program. Another side of the coin - dropping out of PhD studies after 6 mo

by fsloth 11y ago

I have nothing but respect for people who have the grit and skill to go through a PhD program. Another side of the coin - dropping out of PhD studies after 6 months 10 years ago was retrospectively the best thing I ever did. Quitting is fine if one sees better opportunities elsewhere - NOT quitting when the only reason not to quit is an irrational fear of "being a failure" is equal to a sunk cost fallacy. I was quite familiar with the research setting at that point and moving to other things allowed me more space to grow professionally and meet new people with different views of life. Yeah, I choose OpenGL over density functional theory. This was a much better match for my limited math skills (compared to other physicists) and enthusiasim towards shiny things. I would have not quitted unless the new position had seemed like a very unique position, though - which it was.

selimthegrim 11y ago
DFT in particular is a trap - the field is simply not respected by other physicists for a variety of reasons too complicated to get into here. I dabbled in it at first but was able to switch to hard condensed matter because I managed to pull off passing a QFT course in my first year of grad school which combined with solving some experimentalist's problems got the requisite professors to at least listen to me. A lot of DFT people end up as soft money research assistant professors or switched to staff support scientist positions (if they don't drop out and become programmers) because the perception is they never came up with any ideas of their own - they just executed other people's codes. Leave the field to the J-1s.
- tfgg 11y ago
  Eh? This isn't my experience of condensed matter DFT at all. It's a pretty hot area in the UK/Europe at least, and there are lots of postdocs being advertised, as well as a reasonable number of new faculty being hired in the area. Maybe if you're just hitting 'go' on someone else's code, sure, but developing high throughput analysis or higher levels of theory... I mean, until recently, the head of the Cambridge CMP theory group was a DFT guy.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    UK and Europe are different. Italy has very active electronic structure groups and UK has people like the group at Cambridge and Rex Godby or Matthias Scheffler at FHI. The funding structure here in the US simply does not reward higher levels of theory, and high throughput analysis is being driven here in the US by Scheffler's acolytes (and Gerbrand Ceder, etc). No less than Peter Littlewood told people here at a DFT conference a few years back bitching about funding "Go to chemistry and materials science departments instead, they will love you"
    - tfgg 11y ago
      I agree with your analysis, I did notice that not many groups in the US were doing what looked like interesting new methods/theory, more 'cashing in' on existing code in a fairly short term way. There are people like Louie and Vanderbilt, though. I did my DFT methods PhD in a materials department group, full of Italian/German/English physicists, anyway :)
      - selimthegrim 11y ago
        Vanderbilt and Louie are the real deal, but what they do is much closer to hard CMT. They have students who are real superstars. As an aside, Vanderbilt was at the same conference. He told me how the same trend chasing and flight to chemistry and materials science departments had taken place among DFT people with high-Tc in the eighties that was taking place with topological materials now, and that this was a symptom of "(long-time sociological) problems I can't fix"

by fsloth 11y ago

selimthegrim 11y ago

DFT in particular is a trap - the field is simply not respected by other physicists for a variety of reasons too complicated to get into here. I dabbled in it at first but was able to switch to hard condensed matter because I managed to pull off passing a QFT course in my first year of grad school which combined with solving some experimentalist's problems got the requisite professors to at least listen to me. A lot of DFT people end up as soft money research assistant professors or switched to staff support scientist positions (if they don't drop out and become programmers) because the perception is they never came up with any ideas of their own - they just executed other people's codes. Leave the field to the J-1s.

tfgg 11y ago
Eh? This isn't my experience of condensed matter DFT at all. It's a pretty hot area in the UK/Europe at least, and there are lots of postdocs being advertised, as well as a reasonable number of new faculty being hired in the area. Maybe if you're just hitting 'go' on someone else's code, sure, but developing high throughput analysis or higher levels of theory... I mean, until recently, the head of the Cambridge CMP theory group was a DFT guy.
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  UK and Europe are different. Italy has very active electronic structure groups and UK has people like the group at Cambridge and Rex Godby or Matthias Scheffler at FHI. The funding structure here in the US simply does not reward higher levels of theory, and high throughput analysis is being driven here in the US by Scheffler's acolytes (and Gerbrand Ceder, etc). No less than Peter Littlewood told people here at a DFT conference a few years back bitching about funding "Go to chemistry and materials science departments instead, they will love you"
  - tfgg 11y ago
    I agree with your analysis, I did notice that not many groups in the US were doing what looked like interesting new methods/theory, more 'cashing in' on existing code in a fairly short term way. There are people like Louie and Vanderbilt, though. I did my DFT methods PhD in a materials department group, full of Italian/German/English physicists, anyway :)
    - selimthegrim 11y ago
      Vanderbilt and Louie are the real deal, but what they do is much closer to hard CMT. They have students who are real superstars. As an aside, Vanderbilt was at the same conference. He told me how the same trend chasing and flight to chemistry and materials science departments had taken place among DFT people with high-Tc in the eighties that was taking place with topological materials now, and that this was a symptom of "(long-time sociological) problems I can't fix"