12 ms·

Reimagining the PhD

211 points by imartin2k 7y ago

alt_f4 7y ago
In this article: yet another person who thinks they deserve the title of PhD, but didn't actually do a PhD program
- tutfbhuf 7y ago
  Fair enough.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > but didn't actually do a PhD program They did the work (i.e. education, hypothesis testing and publication). And it produced novel, helpful outputs. The author doesn’t lay claim to a PhD title. They’re reflecting on their experience, noting the problems with modern PhDs, and wondering if their path could inform the latter. It’s a good-natured, unentitled piece of writing.
  - rubidium 7y ago
    “delta’s solely in certification” I agree with all of your comment except this. Peer review and any formal standard of research is missing from this persons work. Their work stands alone in that regard. That’s not necessarily better or worse, but it is different. The PhD dissertation is about externally validated novelty and significance. I know people who spent 6-7 years doing masters level work and weren’t allowed to pass their PhD defense. So doing research != PhD.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      Fair. Removed.
  - moralestapia 7y ago
    >They did the work No, they didn't. If you think so, then any consultant writing whitepapers for McKinsey, PWC or whatever should have a PhD as well. I'm not diminishing their effort or implying their content is not as interesting but a (serious) PhD is about the experience of doing the PhD. I know it sounds weird, but that's the best way I could put it in words.
- dang 7y ago
  This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you please read them and not post like this to HN? Note this one: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Athas 7y ago
A PhD is not required to do research, nor does research necessarily lead to a PhD. A PhD is ultimately like any other degree: a school programme where, at the end, some instituting is staking part of its reputation on giving the world a promise that you have some minimum competence in some field. Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own. (I have a PhD myself and I encourage everyone who has the opportunity to undergo formal schooling, but I'm well aware that not everybody wants to.) There is one part of the article that is a bit confusing: > I was also told by one professor that it’d be “expected” for me to join faculty full-time after getting a PhD, which made me uncomfortable, because I knew I didn’t want to work in academia long-term. Maybe some context is missing, but I'm a bit incredulous that anyone would believe this statement. A professor may train dozens of PhDs over his career, and if all were expected to join faculty, then the resulting exponential growth would cause the working population to be pretty much entirely university faculty.
- keithwhor 7y ago
  Maybe some context on my end is missing — but isn’t the last paragraph basically describing the current problem with academia? That’s exactly what people are being trained for, there is just not enough demand for PIs / Professors so bright-eyed optimistic researchers end up getting left up sh*t creek without a paddle after four to six years.
  - Athas 7y ago
    Can't speak for everyone, but for my PhD I was trained for doing research. What else would it be? That kind of research is (presumably) also useful in R&D positions in industry, and I certainly see most of the PhD graduates here eagerly hired by companies with advanced products. Actually, what I was not directly trained for is exactly what you need only in academia: writing grants, managing small teams, supervising students, and so on.
    - arethuza 7y ago
      The thing that killed the appeal of academic research for me was that I found I was playing the "publish or perish" game too well an it was actually making me (as someone observed at the time) "hyper cynical". I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers about about how to build things that people will almost certainly never use.
abdullahkhalids 7y ago
I have a PhD. A PhD is just a certification that you have depth and breadth around a topic at an expert level. An expert of a topic is someone who has the skills and knowledge to evaluate someone else's work on the topic, and who can themselves do novel work on that topic or nearby. As with all certifications from dog-training to fighter jet pilot, PhD certifications have both false positives and false negatives. Meaning, it is entirely possible to get expert levels on a topic without getting the PhD certificate. But the reason people insist that you get a PhD is because they don't want to get into the whole argument of whether you really are an expert. Otherwise, there is no reason to get a PhD. If you can convince people that you are indeed an expert without the PhD certificate, good for you. If not, sucks to be you.
- ronilan 7y ago
  If you can convince people that you are indeed an expert without the PhD certificate, good for you. If not, sucks to be you. Dude, chill, you can just be an expert on a subject without giving a damn about what other people think. It’s an option. Give it a try
  - pm90 7y ago
    It really sucks to be an expert but then not be able to get others to take your expertise seriously. We can do a lot of things on our own, but we're all social beings who do need to interact with others around us. It does really suck to be an expert but then be ignored or shunned by the people you consider your peers.
  - 4k05 7y ago
    Exactly! But that was the point made, right? Regardless of your credentials you should be able to convince people that you are an expert in a field. If you can prove your expertise only through credentials and not actual expert knowledge that is the "false positive" mentioned in the comment.
  - hmwhy 7y ago
    I think the OP is pretty chill and doesn't mean that having a PhD is equivalent to being technically superior (see the following quote). > ... Meaning, it is entirely possible to get expert levels on a topic without getting the PhD certificate. If I'm not mistaken, for the part that you quoted, the OP is pointing out that there are many people who assess whether or not you are an expert they are looking for base on just a piece of paper, regardless of whether or not your skills in that area is that expected of an expert. When you are looking for a job, whether you give a damn or not doesn't matter, it's whether or not the interviewer gives a damn that matters—and I feel that most of them don't.
thomasahle 7y ago
Cambridge awarded Aubrey de Grey a PhD in biology based on his book on the mitochondrial theory of aging. Both Cambridge and Oxford will consider works of their former undergraduates for PhD's, and arrange formal defences. This seems like an entirely fair system. Some people end up doing real research without having participated in a PhD program, and it seems natural to then let them defend that as a thesis.
- ISL 7y ago
  That is very cool -- I've not seen that done before, but done right, it is a wonderful idea.
- dewy 7y ago
  And Martin Kleppman got his PhD based in part on Designing Data Intensive Applications.
- kwhitefoot 7y ago
  As far as I can tell a European, and more specifically UK, PhD is a rather different animal than a US PhD. Much shorter elapsed time for a start. I suspect that most people commenting are assuming that the system they are most familiar with is universal, including the author of the article.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
knzhou 7y ago
It's funny how experiences can differ so much -- academia really varies a lot. There's all this talk about what a PhD really means as a credential, while I've never thought about it that way. In my corner of physics, a PhD just doesn't work as a credential: it cannot be used to impress anybody in industry because my field has no near-term applications. What matters is the PhD process, a period of relatively stable funding where you can focus on learning and research without interruption. Some people even fight their advisors to get their PhD degree later, because it marks the end of that stable period and the start of the rat race for postdoc and faculty positions. In other words, the value of the PhD is entirely in the space it gives you to think about something you love. Bickering over who deserves the title of PhD seems to miss the point.
- mnky9800n 7y ago
  even this can lead to problems. i entered my phd after working in the field for several years as a research scientist. because of my experience i have been put in charge of internships, advising many masters students, organizing workshops, etc. all on top of the research im supposed to spend my time doing. this is all okay i suppose, because i've been able to be a very productive phd in addition to everything else ive done. but my phd compatriots have a lot more time in their days to pursue their interests in comparison to me. i hate it when people say a person is "too old" to do a phd, but I think there is a place where you may be too experienced and it would be better to do a phd in another field you find fascinating but have no experience in.
- aspaceman 7y ago
  This is extremely different. From what I've heard, physics and mathematics are much better at shielding their students from a lot of the bad stuff in academia till later. Which is good in some ways and bad in others I suppose.
stared 7y ago
I think this thing is the key: > "As an independent researcher, you don’t have those constraints, so you can focus on creating whatever artifacts you think will best reach your target audience (which might also mean academic papers, by the way!). I was mildly afraid of GitHub when I started, but I learned that open source developers use GitHub repositories for discussions, so I published some of my work that way. (A few other examples I like: Nicky Case publishes her ideas as games, and Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak are writing about quantum computing in an interactive readable format designed to improve retention.)" We can redefine progress. Current academia is conservative, at least when it comes to what counts as work and progress, what as a distraction (sadly, almost all didactics and outreach counts as "distraction" for researchers). Personally, after (kind of) leaving academia, I can focus much more on various media that wouldn't be recognized.
moralestapia 7y ago
I know the author is well intended and in the end it's her opinion after all. But many of the points she raises are naive when viewed from the point of view of someone who is inside academia. Someone going through a PhD could write a wildly different opinion. In the end it's opinions all the way down, but if you want to "re-imagine" this whole thing you need to start with a much broader vision.
graycat 7y ago
At least one famous research university states that (1) a Ph.D. requires the student to write a dissertation; (2) a dissertation is an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication; (3) the dissertation will be judged by a committee with the chair and the majority outside of the student's department; (4) there is no coursework requirement for a Ph.D. Individual departments may have additional requirements, e.g., qualifying exams. More generally a common statement of work being worthy of publication is that it be "new, correct, and significant". Good research universities insist that their new assistant professors be actively publishing. Since not all of those professors have much success publishing, there do tend to be openings. In some fields, people with good publication records can find jobs. Some of what helps for a career as a professor: (i) Have teaching well enough organized that can do well teaching large, popular sections -- this teaching productivity helps the finances of the university. (ii) Be able to get research grants -- this also helps the finances of the university. (iii) Get a reputation as a leader in a popular field and, thus, contribute to the reputation of the university, which helps the university get gifts and, thus, also helps the finances of the university. (iv) Be successful at producing Ph.D. students that get good jobs. (v) Do well serving on committees. (vi) Don't be mean to students. (vii) Avoid politics and hanky panky. For the OP, she (a) is finishing a book and (b) has been successful getting research grants. If the book can be judged to have content that is "new, correct, and significant", then she will have met the requirement "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". In that case she may be well on her way to a Ph.D. in some good research universities. There is an example: In the field of computational complexity in computer science, an algorithm that has polynomial time complexity is regarded as a good algorithm. This definition was from J. Edmonds. IIRC he had been a graduate student at the University of Maryland, left for a job, and published his research on network flows. The story is that, then, some of his former professors at the University of Maryland approached him and suggested, essentially, that if he took his papers, put them in a stack, and put a staple in the upper left corner, then they would accept that stack as his dissertation and grant him a Ph.D. So, the story in the OP is not a fully new or strange as a way to get a Ph.D. Colleges and universities like their professors to have Ph.D. degrees if only because that helps with accreditation.
- physicsyogi 7y ago
TheYellowKing 7y ago
I tried getting a PHD but it was just too much, the lecturers weren't friendly, there was little return value. Of course, I went for PhD of contemporary philosophy, but I expected way more. Philosophers just hate each other because they're close minded and believe only in themselves.
salty_biscuits 7y ago
My favorite story about researchers getting by without phds is about Lars Onsager, quoted from his Wikipedia article At Yale, an embarrassing situation occurred: he had been hired as a postdoctoral fellow, but it was discovered that he had never received a Ph.D. While he had submitted an outline of his work in reciprocal relations to the Norwegian Institute of Technology, they had decided it was too incomplete to qualify as a doctoral dissertation. He was told that he could submit one of his published papers to the Yale faculty as a dissertation, but insisted on doing a new research project instead. His dissertation, entitled, "Solutions of the Mathieu equation of period 4 pi and certain related functions", was beyond the comprehension of the chemistry and physics faculty, and only when some members of the mathematics department, including the chairman, insisted that the work was good enough that they would grant the doctorate if the chemistry department would not, was he granted a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1935.
hiruxxv 7y ago
https://www.helathlktip.club/2019/12/rinarytract.html?m=1 https://www.helathlktip.club/2019/12/rinarytract.html?m=1
jillesvangurp 7y ago
A PhD. simply is recognition from an accredited institution for research work you have done. It used to be quite common for people to get one towards the end of their careers: you'd work your entire life as e.g. a teacher and then write a dissertation on your learnings. Albert Einstein was not even working for a university when he developed his general theory of relativity. That only happened after he published some ground breaking papers while working as a patent examiner (1905). The university where he studied a few years earlier wasted no time awarding him a Ph. D. for that. The point is that a Ph. D. does not have to be a prep school for wannabe researchers where after a few years some committee decides that you've done at least the bare minimum but an acknowledgement that somebody is a researcher by their peers for work they've done. Many universities have honory doctorates for this but focus too much on nurturing their own students to a PhD. instead of reaching out to their former students and looking at what they have done. E.g John Carmack dropped out of college but his work in 3D algorithms and moving that field forward technically is undeniable and I can't really think of many people more capable of speaking on that topic authoritatively. I could imagine that being worthy of a PhD. Likewise there are many others that busy themselves with OSS work, standardization, ground breaking algorithms, etc. that are producing lots of written work, patents, standards, etc. that are recognized authorities in their fields that don't have PhDs. I happen to have done a PhD. the more conventional way (i.e. straight after my Msc.). Since getting my PhD. 16 years ago, I've gradually moved away from doing research. At this point, I've not published anything in ten years and would definitely not call myself a researcher. I can't deny a certain level of impostors syndrome. I'm certainly no Albert Einstein.
k__ 7y ago
Isn't it also a bit more strictly defined in angelo saxon countries? I had the impression, in Germany it's "research some stuff" and you are basically left on your own. Other countries had a real program, that was like a master program just more research related.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  Exactly. In Germany there is no "grad school" or "grad students". You get hired directly by a prof to work in their department as a researcher/research assistant ("scientific employee/colleague") and indeed "research some stuff", work on industry collaboration projects, supervise student theses and so on. If you can publish a few papers about that stuff at relevant places, you can write it up and defend your thesis. There's no "program" to speak of, no bureaucratic application procedure, no handholding. But the differences start even earlier: in Germany even bachelor and master students are supposed to be rather responsible individual adults, than in Anglo countries. For example it's largely up to students to attend lectures or not, there's little homework, little to do during the semester. You can decide to take or drop courses deep into the semester, then take exams. If you prefer to work during most of the semester and cram everything into the exam period, it's up to you. The opposite is called "verschult" ("schoolized") and has pejorative connotations.
Gatsky 7y ago
This isn’t reimaganing, this is about increasing the number of people with PhDs, which is surely a step in the wrong direction. PhDs are an incredibly wasteful endeavour, consuming huge amounts of time and human spirit for unclear benefits, under circumstances that invite exploitation. In case you can’t tell, I’m currently trying to finish my dissertation.
turk73 7y ago
Love the citations at the end of the blog article. Getting a PhD was a waste for me, but I loved it anyways. It's been a liability for my career and it cost me ~5 years of income. I am older than my managers, and just a misfit overall. Why did I leave academia? Well, there was this recession you see...but that was just the first part of the problem. A huge issue was how long it takes to get hired anywhere unless you're some top notch Harvard guy, it sucks, especially when you're broke. Then there was the realization that I could immediately see 2X the income just being a software engineer with evenings and weekends to myself pretty much. Once I did the math, my academic career was immediately over. Broke, mentally exhausted, five years behind in income, not politically aligned with typical far left policies, sick of the campus lifestyle (beer, no parking, broken glass, property crime). For me, it was called "growing up" to leave academia. I loved writing papers and articles and was getting into books, but it just didn't pencil out as a career goes. I think only independently wealthy or perhaps the really elite Ivy League types should even bother.
huherto 7y ago
It seems to me that there was a time that a lot of the Software Engineering work was contributed by Universities. Operating Systems, Databases, Compilers, Networks, etc. Examples that come to my mind are UCSD Pascal, Unix Berkley, Ingres at Berkley, Kermit Project at Columbia. I don't see that any more. You should be able to get a PHD by designing and implementing a state of the art piece of software. Even google was started as part of a research project I think.
playing_colours 7y ago
Is there a way to get PhD in Mathematics for a working individual, without leaving the job? Suppose, I have a solid dedication, can allocate time for studying at home (20-30 hrs / week), have passion and brains for research. 1. Are there any universities that support distance PhD in Pure Maths? Also, I can visit a university regularly (a few times a year). 2. Or is there a way to do research somehow independently from a university (for my maths I do not need Hadron Collider), but have a mentor, reviewer (I can pay for their service)? Or work collaboratively within a group? Can such research, if it is on the level of PhD, allow some institution (Cambridge?) give me a PhD degree, as a rule not an exceptional case?
- pacbard 7y ago
  There is much more to a PhD than research output. The unwritten curriculum of a PhD program is to introduce the student to the field of research through apprenticeship. For example, you hear people talk more about who your dissertation advisor was than what your dissertation was about. Writing a dissertation requires more than just "brains". It's about building relationships with professors that serve on the committee, learning how to manage feedback, and navigate the other aspects of academic life. If publications is all it matters, universities would just give out degrees based on published papers alone but few institutions do (at least in the US. I don't know how it works in the EU). As you point out, sometimes enrolling in a PhD gives you access to a well-equipped lab that is necessary to do the work. Most research in the physical sciences requires that kind of set up. I am in the social sciences so it's not a lab science. I could have written the papers I am writing in my garage but I don't think that the experience would have been the same as being a PhD student. By the way, at least in the US, there are a lot of research staff that works on research projects and publishes without having completed a PhD program. They probably have more knowledge than some PhD in the same field.
- j7ake 7y ago
  In general academia is competitive and productivity matters. You are evaluated relative to other academics at similar stages of their career. Finding a good mentor will be tough if you cannot commit full time. Advisors basically have to decide which students Will have their limited time for mentoring. So you’re competing with full time students who often have no family and willing to work every waking hour of their life. I think going part time route will depend on how much more productive you think you can be compared to other PhD students.
egyptiankarim 7y ago
A PhD is intended to demonstrate that a person is capable of pursuing a course of research within a field of study, and has a mastery of the existing knowledge and pertinent skills/methodologies. Unfortunately, in some fields, the PhD has sadly become a form of lazy gatekeeping, and reimagining the PhD in those cases may just be a matter of waiting for the old guard to step down. In some other fields, the PhD is probably ripe for reimagining, but "independence" might not be the right lens through which to think about it. For example, it would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be physicist to independently build a large hadron collider to do their research with. The institutions that make those sorts of resources even possible are inherently large/complex, and in those cases the PhD is a less sad and lazy form of gatekeeping (i.e., you need to do a set of progressively more complex stuff under the tutelage of someone more experienced before we let you touch all of our big expensive things). In yet some other fields, which may be younger, have less of an established orthodoxy, and lower overhead to participate in (e.g., the economic/anthropological open source software type work the author does), it seems totally reasonable that a person could develop and demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities on their own and without a formal course of study. In such fields, the concept of the PhD doesn't seem as ready for reimagining as it does retirement.
- anticensor 7y ago
  Yes, a Doctorate of Arts in Software Development would be more appropriate.
parsimo2010 7y ago
As a PhD candidate right now, after having spent seven years with an M.S. and doing "independent learning" and thinking that it was giving me the same growth- I can tell you right now that it isn't the same. This may vary for different fields of study, and it may vary for different people, but I think my experience will hold true for most people. Spending time doing independent learning, even if you have given yourself some structure, misses some of the important things you get in a PhD program. Your advisor guides you, but they also challenge you. They hold you accountable. Some people may be able to challenge themselves, but most people don't have the necessary experience to know the difference between a "cool hack" and novel research. Your advisor has more experience and can tell you what is worth pursuing. Plus, to complete a PhD you have to do all the requirements- even the stuff you don't like. A self-structured independent study program is probably going to be light on the stuff that you don't find fun. There are a lot of downsides to doing a PhD, and I'm not saying that it's for everyone. Independent study is fine. But I'm going to look skeptically at anyone who thinks their own independent study program is the equivalent of a PhD. I would probably be less skeptical if their independent study resulted in publishing a few peer-reviewed journal articles. The title of PhD doesn't just signal that you are capable of learning, it's also a signal that you can work within the current research environment, have your work accepted by other experts in the field, and in general just do a bunch of "intangibles" that aren't signaled by you working on your own.
- poplarstand 7y ago
  You seem to have had a very successful PhD experience. You write approvingly of your advisor, acknowledge the ways in which the program benefited you, and have respect for peer-reviewed literature. That being said, I'm not sure that your experiences are typical. HN regularly has commenters and posters that have been disappointed by their forays in academia. One recent example was posted only two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740833 I imagine that a good PhD program is, by definition, likely to be beneficial. Probably above "independent learning" by leagues. However, it's worth considering what an average-case or worst-case PhD program looks like. Those may not compare as favorably to "independent learning".
bohorqne 7y ago
This article reminds me of the book "How to get a PhD" by E. Phillips and D. Pugh. A PhD program is a training process on how to become and independent researcher. * Just like the word "theory", the word "research" has different meanings in academic and non-academic settings. A research work in academia is an original contribution to a specific field that meets certain criteria of: writing and technical rigor, objectivity and completeness. It is the community of that field who judges your work on these criteria. * What constitutes a research question is a hard problem (you need to compute your cost of opportunity: time, complexity, resources and impact) that only comes with experience. Choose badly and you might end up empty-handed after many years of work. At the beginning you rely on your advisor for guidance on this but with time you begin to smell the low hanging fruits and proceed with certain "independence". Regarding the article, it is not clear whether the OP made a comprehensive review on the relevant and related literature. Without that, no research question can even begin to be formulated. No research is completely isolated from what has been already done and it is the job of the student to identify where it "fits". If it is really a completely novel subject then I would strongly discourage the OP from working on it if she were to do it in the context of a PhD program, for her own good and sanity. Of course, this is not to say that her work has no value (it might have even more value that what she could have done in academia) but that is not the point. It does not mean either that academics are the only people who can do research. It means that you cannot obtain a PhD without the guidance of someone who has gone through the process of obtaining a PhD and has many years of independent research experience.

Reimagining the PhD

211 points by imartin2k 7y ago

alt_f4 7y ago

In this article: yet another person who thinks they deserve the title of PhD, but didn't actually do a PhD program

tutfbhuf 7y ago
Fair enough.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> but didn't actually do a PhD program They did the work (i.e. education, hypothesis testing and publication). And it produced novel, helpful outputs. The author doesn’t lay claim to a PhD title. They’re reflecting on their experience, noting the problems with modern PhDs, and wondering if their path could inform the latter. It’s a good-natured, unentitled piece of writing.
- rubidium 7y ago
  “delta’s solely in certification” I agree with all of your comment except this. Peer review and any formal standard of research is missing from this persons work. Their work stands alone in that regard. That’s not necessarily better or worse, but it is different. The PhD dissertation is about externally validated novelty and significance. I know people who spent 6-7 years doing masters level work and weren’t allowed to pass their PhD defense. So doing research != PhD.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    Fair. Removed.
- moralestapia 7y ago
  >They did the work No, they didn't. If you think so, then any consultant writing whitepapers for McKinsey, PWC or whatever should have a PhD as well. I'm not diminishing their effort or implying their content is not as interesting but a (serious) PhD is about the experience of doing the PhD. I know it sounds weird, but that's the best way I could put it in words.
dang 7y ago
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you please read them and not post like this to HN? Note this one: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Athas 7y ago

A PhD is not required to do research, nor does research necessarily lead to a PhD. A PhD is ultimately like any other degree: a school programme where, at the end, some instituting is staking part of its reputation on giving the world a promise that you have some minimum competence in some field. Anything you learn in school, you can in principle learn on your own. (I have a PhD myself and I encourage everyone who has the opportunity to undergo formal schooling, but I'm well aware that not everybody wants to.) There is one part of the article that is a bit confusing: > I was also told by one professor that it’d be “expected” for me to join faculty full-time after getting a PhD, which made me uncomfortable, because I knew I didn’t want to work in academia long-term. Maybe some context is missing, but I'm a bit incredulous that anyone would believe this statement. A professor may train dozens of PhDs over his career, and if all were expected to join faculty, then the resulting exponential growth would cause the working population to be pretty much entirely university faculty.

keithwhor 7y ago
Maybe some context on my end is missing — but isn’t the last paragraph basically describing the current problem with academia? That’s exactly what people are being trained for, there is just not enough demand for PIs / Professors so bright-eyed optimistic researchers end up getting left up sh*t creek without a paddle after four to six years.
- Athas 7y ago
  Can't speak for everyone, but for my PhD I was trained for doing research. What else would it be? That kind of research is (presumably) also useful in R&D positions in industry, and I certainly see most of the PhD graduates here eagerly hired by companies with advanced products. Actually, what I was not directly trained for is exactly what you need only in academia: writing grants, managing small teams, supervising students, and so on.
  - arethuza 7y ago
    The thing that killed the appeal of academic research for me was that I found I was playing the "publish or perish" game too well an it was actually making me (as someone observed at the time) "hyper cynical". I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers about about how to build things that people will almost certainly never use.

abdullahkhalids 7y ago

I have a PhD. A PhD is just a certification that you have depth and breadth around a topic at an expert level. An expert of a topic is someone who has the skills and knowledge to evaluate someone else's work on the topic, and who can themselves do novel work on that topic or nearby. As with all certifications from dog-training to fighter jet pilot, PhD certifications have both false positives and false negatives. Meaning, it is entirely possible to get expert levels on a topic without getting the PhD certificate. But the reason people insist that you get a PhD is because they don't want to get into the whole argument of whether you really are an expert. Otherwise, there is no reason to get a PhD. If you can convince people that you are indeed an expert without the PhD certificate, good for you. If not, sucks to be you.

ronilan 7y ago
If you can convince people that you are indeed an expert without the PhD certificate, good for you. If not, sucks to be you. Dude, chill, you can just be an expert on a subject without giving a damn about what other people think. It’s an option. Give it a try
- pm90 7y ago
  It really sucks to be an expert but then not be able to get others to take your expertise seriously. We can do a lot of things on our own, but we're all social beings who do need to interact with others around us. It does really suck to be an expert but then be ignored or shunned by the people you consider your peers.
- 4k05 7y ago
  Exactly! But that was the point made, right? Regardless of your credentials you should be able to convince people that you are an expert in a field. If you can prove your expertise only through credentials and not actual expert knowledge that is the "false positive" mentioned in the comment.
- hmwhy 7y ago
  I think the OP is pretty chill and doesn't mean that having a PhD is equivalent to being technically superior (see the following quote). > ... Meaning, it is entirely possible to get expert levels on a topic without getting the PhD certificate. If I'm not mistaken, for the part that you quoted, the OP is pointing out that there are many people who assess whether or not you are an expert they are looking for base on just a piece of paper, regardless of whether or not your skills in that area is that expected of an expert. When you are looking for a job, whether you give a damn or not doesn't matter, it's whether or not the interviewer gives a damn that matters—and I feel that most of them don't.

thomasahle 7y ago

Cambridge awarded Aubrey de Grey a PhD in biology based on his book on the mitochondrial theory of aging. Both Cambridge and Oxford will consider works of their former undergraduates for PhD's, and arrange formal defences. This seems like an entirely fair system. Some people end up doing real research without having participated in a PhD program, and it seems natural to then let them defend that as a thesis.

ISL 7y ago
That is very cool -- I've not seen that done before, but done right, it is a wonderful idea.
dewy 7y ago
And Martin Kleppman got his PhD based in part on Designing Data Intensive Applications.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
As far as I can tell a European, and more specifically UK, PhD is a rather different animal than a US PhD. Much shorter elapsed time for a start. I suspect that most people commenting are assuming that the system they are most familiar with is universal, including the author of the article.

deleted 7y ago

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knzhou 7y ago

It's funny how experiences can differ so much -- academia really varies a lot. There's all this talk about what a PhD really means as a credential, while I've never thought about it that way. In my corner of physics, a PhD just doesn't work as a credential: it cannot be used to impress anybody in industry because my field has no near-term applications. What matters is the PhD process, a period of relatively stable funding where you can focus on learning and research without interruption. Some people even fight their advisors to get their PhD degree later, because it marks the end of that stable period and the start of the rat race for postdoc and faculty positions. In other words, the value of the PhD is entirely in the space it gives you to think about something you love. Bickering over who deserves the title of PhD seems to miss the point.

mnky9800n 7y ago
even this can lead to problems. i entered my phd after working in the field for several years as a research scientist. because of my experience i have been put in charge of internships, advising many masters students, organizing workshops, etc. all on top of the research im supposed to spend my time doing. this is all okay i suppose, because i've been able to be a very productive phd in addition to everything else ive done. but my phd compatriots have a lot more time in their days to pursue their interests in comparison to me. i hate it when people say a person is "too old" to do a phd, but I think there is a place where you may be too experienced and it would be better to do a phd in another field you find fascinating but have no experience in.
aspaceman 7y ago
This is extremely different. From what I've heard, physics and mathematics are much better at shielding their students from a lot of the bad stuff in academia till later. Which is good in some ways and bad in others I suppose.

stared 7y ago

I think this thing is the key: > "As an independent researcher, you don’t have those constraints, so you can focus on creating whatever artifacts you think will best reach your target audience (which might also mean academic papers, by the way!). I was mildly afraid of GitHub when I started, but I learned that open source developers use GitHub repositories for discussions, so I published some of my work that way. (A few other examples I like: Nicky Case publishes her ideas as games, and Michael Nielsen and Andy Matuschak are writing about quantum computing in an interactive readable format designed to improve retention.)" We can redefine progress. Current academia is conservative, at least when it comes to what counts as work and progress, what as a distraction (sadly, almost all didactics and outreach counts as "distraction" for researchers). Personally, after (kind of) leaving academia, I can focus much more on various media that wouldn't be recognized.

moralestapia 7y ago

I know the author is well intended and in the end it's her opinion after all. But many of the points she raises are naive when viewed from the point of view of someone who is inside academia. Someone going through a PhD could write a wildly different opinion. In the end it's opinions all the way down, but if you want to "re-imagine" this whole thing you need to start with a much broader vision.

graycat 7y ago

At least one famous research university states that (1) a Ph.D. requires the student to write a dissertation; (2) a dissertation is an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication; (3) the dissertation will be judged by a committee with the chair and the majority outside of the student's department; (4) there is no coursework requirement for a Ph.D. Individual departments may have additional requirements, e.g., qualifying exams. More generally a common statement of work being worthy of publication is that it be "new, correct, and significant". Good research universities insist that their new assistant professors be actively publishing. Since not all of those professors have much success publishing, there do tend to be openings. In some fields, people with good publication records can find jobs. Some of what helps for a career as a professor: (i) Have teaching well enough organized that can do well teaching large, popular sections -- this teaching productivity helps the finances of the university. (ii) Be able to get research grants -- this also helps the finances of the university. (iii) Get a reputation as a leader in a popular field and, thus, contribute to the reputation of the university, which helps the university get gifts and, thus, also helps the finances of the university. (iv) Be successful at producing Ph.D. students that get good jobs. (v) Do well serving on committees. (vi) Don't be mean to students. (vii) Avoid politics and hanky panky. For the OP, she (a) is finishing a book and (b) has been successful getting research grants. If the book can be judged to have content that is "new, correct, and significant", then she will have met the requirement "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication". In that case she may be well on her way to a Ph.D. in some good research universities. There is an example: In the field of computational complexity in computer science, an algorithm that has polynomial time complexity is regarded as a good algorithm. This definition was from J. Edmonds. IIRC he had been a graduate student at the University of Maryland, left for a job, and published his research on network flows. The story is that, then, some of his former professors at the University of Maryland approached him and suggested, essentially, that if he took his papers, put them in a stack, and put a staple in the upper left corner, then they would accept that stack as his dissertation and grant him a Ph.D. So, the story in the OP is not a fully new or strange as a way to get a Ph.D. Colleges and universities like their professors to have Ph.D. degrees if only because that helps with accreditation.

physicsyogi 7y ago

TheYellowKing 7y ago

I tried getting a PHD but it was just too much, the lecturers weren't friendly, there was little return value. Of course, I went for PhD of contemporary philosophy, but I expected way more. Philosophers just hate each other because they're close minded and believe only in themselves.

salty_biscuits 7y ago

My favorite story about researchers getting by without phds is about Lars Onsager, quoted from his Wikipedia article At Yale, an embarrassing situation occurred: he had been hired as a postdoctoral fellow, but it was discovered that he had never received a Ph.D. While he had submitted an outline of his work in reciprocal relations to the Norwegian Institute of Technology, they had decided it was too incomplete to qualify as a doctoral dissertation. He was told that he could submit one of his published papers to the Yale faculty as a dissertation, but insisted on doing a new research project instead. His dissertation, entitled, "Solutions of the Mathieu equation of period 4 pi and certain related functions", was beyond the comprehension of the chemistry and physics faculty, and only when some members of the mathematics department, including the chairman, insisted that the work was good enough that they would grant the doctorate if the chemistry department would not, was he granted a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1935.

hiruxxv 7y ago

https://www.helathlktip.club/2019/12/rinarytract.html?m=1 https://www.helathlktip.club/2019/12/rinarytract.html?m=1

jillesvangurp 7y ago

A PhD. simply is recognition from an accredited institution for research work you have done. It used to be quite common for people to get one towards the end of their careers: you'd work your entire life as e.g. a teacher and then write a dissertation on your learnings. Albert Einstein was not even working for a university when he developed his general theory of relativity. That only happened after he published some ground breaking papers while working as a patent examiner (1905). The university where he studied a few years earlier wasted no time awarding him a Ph. D. for that. The point is that a Ph. D. does not have to be a prep school for wannabe researchers where after a few years some committee decides that you've done at least the bare minimum but an acknowledgement that somebody is a researcher by their peers for work they've done. Many universities have honory doctorates for this but focus too much on nurturing their own students to a PhD. instead of reaching out to their former students and looking at what they have done. E.g John Carmack dropped out of college but his work in 3D algorithms and moving that field forward technically is undeniable and I can't really think of many people more capable of speaking on that topic authoritatively. I could imagine that being worthy of a PhD. Likewise there are many others that busy themselves with OSS work, standardization, ground breaking algorithms, etc. that are producing lots of written work, patents, standards, etc. that are recognized authorities in their fields that don't have PhDs. I happen to have done a PhD. the more conventional way (i.e. straight after my Msc.). Since getting my PhD. 16 years ago, I've gradually moved away from doing research. At this point, I've not published anything in ten years and would definitely not call myself a researcher. I can't deny a certain level of impostors syndrome. I'm certainly no Albert Einstein.

k__ 7y ago

Isn't it also a bit more strictly defined in angelo saxon countries? I had the impression, in Germany it's "research some stuff" and you are basically left on your own. Other countries had a real program, that was like a master program just more research related.

bonoboTP 7y ago
Exactly. In Germany there is no "grad school" or "grad students". You get hired directly by a prof to work in their department as a researcher/research assistant ("scientific employee/colleague") and indeed "research some stuff", work on industry collaboration projects, supervise student theses and so on. If you can publish a few papers about that stuff at relevant places, you can write it up and defend your thesis. There's no "program" to speak of, no bureaucratic application procedure, no handholding. But the differences start even earlier: in Germany even bachelor and master students are supposed to be rather responsible individual adults, than in Anglo countries. For example it's largely up to students to attend lectures or not, there's little homework, little to do during the semester. You can decide to take or drop courses deep into the semester, then take exams. If you prefer to work during most of the semester and cram everything into the exam period, it's up to you. The opposite is called "verschult" ("schoolized") and has pejorative connotations.

Gatsky 7y ago

This isn’t reimaganing, this is about increasing the number of people with PhDs, which is surely a step in the wrong direction. PhDs are an incredibly wasteful endeavour, consuming huge amounts of time and human spirit for unclear benefits, under circumstances that invite exploitation. In case you can’t tell, I’m currently trying to finish my dissertation.

turk73 7y ago

Love the citations at the end of the blog article. Getting a PhD was a waste for me, but I loved it anyways. It's been a liability for my career and it cost me ~5 years of income. I am older than my managers, and just a misfit overall. Why did I leave academia? Well, there was this recession you see...but that was just the first part of the problem. A huge issue was how long it takes to get hired anywhere unless you're some top notch Harvard guy, it sucks, especially when you're broke. Then there was the realization that I could immediately see 2X the income just being a software engineer with evenings and weekends to myself pretty much. Once I did the math, my academic career was immediately over. Broke, mentally exhausted, five years behind in income, not politically aligned with typical far left policies, sick of the campus lifestyle (beer, no parking, broken glass, property crime). For me, it was called "growing up" to leave academia. I loved writing papers and articles and was getting into books, but it just didn't pencil out as a career goes. I think only independently wealthy or perhaps the really elite Ivy League types should even bother.

huherto 7y ago

It seems to me that there was a time that a lot of the Software Engineering work was contributed by Universities. Operating Systems, Databases, Compilers, Networks, etc. Examples that come to my mind are UCSD Pascal, Unix Berkley, Ingres at Berkley, Kermit Project at Columbia. I don't see that any more. You should be able to get a PHD by designing and implementing a state of the art piece of software. Even google was started as part of a research project I think.

playing_colours 7y ago

Is there a way to get PhD in Mathematics for a working individual, without leaving the job? Suppose, I have a solid dedication, can allocate time for studying at home (20-30 hrs / week), have passion and brains for research. 1. Are there any universities that support distance PhD in Pure Maths? Also, I can visit a university regularly (a few times a year). 2. Or is there a way to do research somehow independently from a university (for my maths I do not need Hadron Collider), but have a mentor, reviewer (I can pay for their service)? Or work collaboratively within a group? Can such research, if it is on the level of PhD, allow some institution (Cambridge?) give me a PhD degree, as a rule not an exceptional case?

pacbard 7y ago
There is much more to a PhD than research output. The unwritten curriculum of a PhD program is to introduce the student to the field of research through apprenticeship. For example, you hear people talk more about who your dissertation advisor was than what your dissertation was about. Writing a dissertation requires more than just "brains". It's about building relationships with professors that serve on the committee, learning how to manage feedback, and navigate the other aspects of academic life. If publications is all it matters, universities would just give out degrees based on published papers alone but few institutions do (at least in the US. I don't know how it works in the EU). As you point out, sometimes enrolling in a PhD gives you access to a well-equipped lab that is necessary to do the work. Most research in the physical sciences requires that kind of set up. I am in the social sciences so it's not a lab science. I could have written the papers I am writing in my garage but I don't think that the experience would have been the same as being a PhD student. By the way, at least in the US, there are a lot of research staff that works on research projects and publishes without having completed a PhD program. They probably have more knowledge than some PhD in the same field.
j7ake 7y ago
In general academia is competitive and productivity matters. You are evaluated relative to other academics at similar stages of their career. Finding a good mentor will be tough if you cannot commit full time. Advisors basically have to decide which students Will have their limited time for mentoring. So you’re competing with full time students who often have no family and willing to work every waking hour of their life. I think going part time route will depend on how much more productive you think you can be compared to other PhD students.

egyptiankarim 7y ago

A PhD is intended to demonstrate that a person is capable of pursuing a course of research within a field of study, and has a mastery of the existing knowledge and pertinent skills/methodologies. Unfortunately, in some fields, the PhD has sadly become a form of lazy gatekeeping, and reimagining the PhD in those cases may just be a matter of waiting for the old guard to step down. In some other fields, the PhD is probably ripe for reimagining, but "independence" might not be the right lens through which to think about it. For example, it would be exceedingly difficult for a would-be physicist to independently build a large hadron collider to do their research with. The institutions that make those sorts of resources even possible are inherently large/complex, and in those cases the PhD is a less sad and lazy form of gatekeeping (i.e., you need to do a set of progressively more complex stuff under the tutelage of someone more experienced before we let you touch all of our big expensive things). In yet some other fields, which may be younger, have less of an established orthodoxy, and lower overhead to participate in (e.g., the economic/anthropological open source software type work the author does), it seems totally reasonable that a person could develop and demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities on their own and without a formal course of study. In such fields, the concept of the PhD doesn't seem as ready for reimagining as it does retirement.

anticensor 7y ago
Yes, a Doctorate of Arts in Software Development would be more appropriate.

parsimo2010 7y ago

As a PhD candidate right now, after having spent seven years with an M.S. and doing "independent learning" and thinking that it was giving me the same growth- I can tell you right now that it isn't the same. This may vary for different fields of study, and it may vary for different people, but I think my experience will hold true for most people. Spending time doing independent learning, even if you have given yourself some structure, misses some of the important things you get in a PhD program. Your advisor guides you, but they also challenge you. They hold you accountable. Some people may be able to challenge themselves, but most people don't have the necessary experience to know the difference between a "cool hack" and novel research. Your advisor has more experience and can tell you what is worth pursuing. Plus, to complete a PhD you have to do all the requirements- even the stuff you don't like. A self-structured independent study program is probably going to be light on the stuff that you don't find fun. There are a lot of downsides to doing a PhD, and I'm not saying that it's for everyone. Independent study is fine. But I'm going to look skeptically at anyone who thinks their own independent study program is the equivalent of a PhD. I would probably be less skeptical if their independent study resulted in publishing a few peer-reviewed journal articles. The title of PhD doesn't just signal that you are capable of learning, it's also a signal that you can work within the current research environment, have your work accepted by other experts in the field, and in general just do a bunch of "intangibles" that aren't signaled by you working on your own.

poplarstand 7y ago
You seem to have had a very successful PhD experience. You write approvingly of your advisor, acknowledge the ways in which the program benefited you, and have respect for peer-reviewed literature. That being said, I'm not sure that your experiences are typical. HN regularly has commenters and posters that have been disappointed by their forays in academia. One recent example was posted only two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21740833 I imagine that a good PhD program is, by definition, likely to be beneficial. Probably above "independent learning" by leagues. However, it's worth considering what an average-case or worst-case PhD program looks like. Those may not compare as favorably to "independent learning".

bohorqne 7y ago

This article reminds me of the book "How to get a PhD" by E. Phillips and D. Pugh. A PhD program is a training process on how to become and independent researcher. * Just like the word "theory", the word "research" has different meanings in academic and non-academic settings. A research work in academia is an original contribution to a specific field that meets certain criteria of: writing and technical rigor, objectivity and completeness. It is the community of that field who judges your work on these criteria. * What constitutes a research question is a hard problem (you need to compute your cost of opportunity: time, complexity, resources and impact) that only comes with experience. Choose badly and you might end up empty-handed after many years of work. At the beginning you rely on your advisor for guidance on this but with time you begin to smell the low hanging fruits and proceed with certain "independence". Regarding the article, it is not clear whether the OP made a comprehensive review on the relevant and related literature. Without that, no research question can even begin to be formulated. No research is completely isolated from what has been already done and it is the job of the student to identify where it "fits". If it is really a completely novel subject then I would strongly discourage the OP from working on it if she were to do it in the context of a PhD program, for her own good and sanity. Of course, this is not to say that her work has no value (it might have even more value that what she could have done in academia) but that is not the point. It does not mean either that academics are the only people who can do research. It means that you cannot obtain a PhD without the guidance of someone who has gone through the process of obtaining a PhD and has many years of independent research experience.