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Just keep working. Masters programs suck anyway --- the only things that really make a difference are a) time, b) conversations with peers, c) conversations wit

Just keep working. Masters programs suck anyway --- the only things that really make a difference are a) time, b) conversations with peers, c) conversations with an advisor. When you're 22 a PhD is a reasonable deal to spend 4 years to get this. When you're 32 it's a significantly crappier bargain. If you get good at designing the models, your results will speak for themselves, and it won't matter whether you have a certificate saying you can design models. Likewise if you're actually bad at something you're supposedly certified to do, I think that's actually worse than not having the qualification at all! The simplest thing to do is just pick a problem with a decent dataset and work on it. Either build the model from scratch, or if you prefer to use a library, make sure you're compiling the library from source. You want to make sure you can change arbitrary things --- don't just use an API. If you're interested in NLP, I can suggest a number of things you might work on for spaCy :). For instance, I'd like to have a sequence-to-sequence lemmatisation model. This will take some experimentation, but the basic idea should definitely work. If you need any more convincing not to do a masters...Really think about what that will involve. You'll go to lectures. You'll get homework. You can do better than that.

throwaway170820 9y ago
Thanks for your response. I tend to what you are saying by my actions (not getting a degree), but I wanted to make sure I wasn't just convincing myself it would be a drag to go back to school. I agree with most everything you said, but somewhat confused by "When you're 22 a PhD is a reasonable deal [...] When you're 32 it's a significantly crappier bargain," because I'm just rearranging years of my life, right? I mean, a 22 year old who had the possibly to enter the workforce also had an opportunity cost, albeit lower than mine now. Is that the intent?
- syllogism 9y ago
  Education is always more efficient when you're younger. Imagine the limit: if you have five years until retirement, spending them on training won't maximise your earnings! There are roughly 45 years in a career. If you do a PhD at 32 you only have about 30 years to exploit the degree.

throwaway170820 9y ago

Thanks for your response. I tend to what you are saying by my actions (not getting a degree), but I wanted to make sure I wasn't just convincing myself it would be a drag to go back to school. I agree with most everything you said, but somewhat confused by "When you're 22 a PhD is a reasonable deal [...] When you're 32 it's a significantly crappier bargain," because I'm just rearranging years of my life, right? I mean, a 22 year old who had the possibly to enter the workforce also had an opportunity cost, albeit lower than mine now. Is that the intent?

syllogism 9y ago
Education is always more efficient when you're younger. Imagine the limit: if you have five years until retirement, spending them on training won't maximise your earnings! There are roughly 45 years in a career. If you do a PhD at 32 you only have about 30 years to exploit the degree.