4 ms·
I was in a PhD program, I dropped out. I have been working in R&D at a large company for a while now; many of my best colleagues have PhDs, many others do not.
by GuiA 8y ago
I was in a PhD program, I dropped out. I have been working in R&D at a large company for a while now; many of my best colleagues have PhDs, many others do not. As far as my personal experience is concerned, a PhD has no bearing whatsoever on your capacity to do solid research.
That said, I am seriously considering going back on the PhD route, because I think I’d like to spend more time teaching down the line. Kind of silly, but I have only a master’s and it seems like most higher ed institutions do not consider hiring you as a professor unless you have the magical piece of paper.
- electricslpnsld 8y ago> a PhD has no bearing whatsoever on your capacity to do solid research Having worked in research at a few major tech companies now, when hiring research staff I’ve found they typical want someone in a strong position in the research community, typically evidenced by a strong publication record in the field they are recruiting in. While this can certainly be done without a PhD, I find it to be a bit rare. Our current research group is around 10 people (in a ~2K person company), 9 have PhDs.
- azhenley 8y agoThat piece of paper is actually the easy part of the entire process.
- sytelus 8y ago> PhD has no bearing whatsoever on your capacity to do solid research In my experience this is not true except unless you are super genius. Most folks without PhD often keeps making same naive mistakes, for example, not studying previous state of the art, not recording experiments properly, heuristics instead of rigorous analysis and so on. PhD trains to avoid all these. It allows you to build network, identity great researchers in the field as role models and understand what scientific scrutiny entails. It is not unusual to identify paper written by someone not experienced vs someone experienced. For example, a person without PhD would often neglect to mention scale in the graphs, compute variances in findings, describe figures properly and so on. These might look minor cosmetic things but it often goes long way in overall rigor.
- gaius 8y agonot studying previous state of the art, not recording experiments properly, heuristics instead of rigorous analysis and so on ??? They taught all of us that in undergrad. a person without PhD would often neglect to mention scale in the graphs ... and they taught us about the scale of a graph in secondary school ...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y agoAs far as my personal experience is concerned, a PhD has no bearing whatsoever on your capacity to do solid research. That is all well and good, but I can't name a single person in my research field who has a decent publication record without a PhD (finished or in progress).
- PAClearner 8y agoyou must do theory right? tcs? based on the name edit: AI and ML are close enough :)
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y agoYep, mainly NLP (including the theoretical parts).
- PAClearner 8y agoElmo is bae