23 ms·

Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science (2014) [pdf]

179 points by bigfoot675 6y ago

zerr 6y ago
Any remote PhD opportunities nowadays?
- rgbimbochamp 6y ago
  I don't think so. PhD in CS and other related fields is a pretty intense affair nowadays (or has always been, idk) due to the crazy publication throughput one is required to have. Remote or part-time PhD options benefit no one.
- anonymousDan 6y ago
  You mean temporarily during the Covid period or for the whole program? As with the sibling poster, I don't think it's a great idea for the whole PhD. But maybe I'm just old fashioned :)
- najarvg 6y ago
  If you're looking for a terminal degree that is more application oriented, you may want to consider other options like a Doctorate of Engineering, EdD etc. Otherwise a PhD assumes close proximity to your advisor and lots of projects, publications etc
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
glitchc 6y ago
Most Comp Sci PhDs work from home anyways once they’re in.
- foobarian 6y ago
  If by work from home you mean live from the office then yeah, sure :)
  - glitchc 6y ago
    Other than experiments that require custom ICs or embedded boards, most CS/CE research can be done from home. Can remote shell into your machine at work, or log into the supervisor's private VM cloud. It's become much easier than it used to be. Even a decade ago, this was the norm and most of my colleagues were chippies. Even reams of data could be carried via a couple of spinning rust HDs in a backpack.
plushprocessor 6y ago
What isn't often discussed is how hard it is to go from a no name school that isn't ranked highly to an elite school. At a non-elite school your recommenders may be unknown to the admissions committee, the 'level' of education these applicants receive can be questionable ("What does an A mean from this program and how does it compare to our class?"), their research experience could be weak, student visibility could be weak (i.e. their recommender isn't known in the field, and their student didn't do any sort of research that made professors at our school aware of them in advance), the courses they take may be weak compared to other applicants (i.e. their program doesn't offer as many advanced courses, compared to other programs) and so on. There can be tremendous risk in taking students from unknown schools or non-elite schools. It's much easier to accept graduate students from a similar elite school, with well-known recommenders, and a history of successful applicants from that came from that school that did well in said program. It isn't impossible, but it is an extra step these applicants have to overcome.
- downerending 6y ago
  I was in this situation, decades ago, and indeed was turned down by CMU. At least back then, CMU like some other elite schools had no MSCS, making it even harder to make the grade coming from Podunk U. My strategy, which worked out okay, was to "bracket" the field by choosing a couple of schools that looked solid and had very large MS class sizes and to just view my "elite" apps as lottery tickets unlikely to pay off (which they didn't). Beyond that, and especially today, I'd look seriously at targeting specific future advisors at the schools in question, and worrying far less about the school's reputation. An excellent advisor at Mississippi State will do you far more good than a crappy one at Stanford. And will probably cost a lot less.
  - glangdale 6y ago
    I think this is bad advice for most people. "An excellent advisor at Mississippi State will do you far more good than a crappy one at Stanford. And will probably cost a lot less." I applied to 6 schools - doing the "bracketing" thing (CMU+UCB as "reach" schools, Wisconsin-Madison & Washington as "mid" schools and Columbia and U Colorado Boulder as safety schools). I got into everywhere but UCB and Washington, but CMU was my first choice so I was super-happy. The thing was - there were specific people at Boulder and Columbia that I thought I wanted to work with, but I checked a couple years later out of curiosity, and they'd moved on (around the time I would have been doing a thesis proposal). My first adviser at CMU also went to industry after a couple years and I had to switch advisors and fields, but had a number of excellent choices - as top-tier schools are packed with really good people. So if your interests shift, or you are forced to have an advisor change, or you wind up working in an area with some adjacencies to your original area (say you start as a networks person but wind up doing a half-networks, half-operating system PhD) you will find good advisors and coadvisors aplenty at a good school. At an "OK" school there are usually some really good people but they may have zero good people in whole subfields, and you might find that that good academic has left before you start your PhD proper...
scott_s 6y ago
This is solid advice. If you want to get a PhD in computer science, read and understand this advice. It's similar to the advice I would give someone, which is kinda funny, since I only know what you're supposed to do after having done just about all of it wrong.
bachmeier 6y ago
I don't work in CS. I was surprised when I watched this talk[1] by Michael Stonebraker to learn of the "Diarrhea of Papers" > A PhD applicant who wants to get a good academic job should have ~10 papers > A tenure case should have ~40 papers That alone would push me away from a PhD in CS. In economics, it's closer to what he said was the case when he was new: > I got tenure from Berkeley in 1976 — With about 5 papers [1] http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Stonebraker.pdf http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Stonebraker.pdf
- bhl 6y ago
  For additional context, Stonebraker helped make Postgres and was the Turing laurate back in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker
- papeda 6y ago
  There's a bit of a counterpoint to this: with papers, it's easier to point to your body of work (peer-reviewed and, if you're good/lucky, peer-understood-and-approved) as clear evidence that you can do research. Without papers, or with very few papers, that evidence has to come from somewhere else. My understanding is that somewhere else is usually recommendations, from your advisor and other people in the field. Some reasons to dislike that system include: 1) it gives advisors a lot of influence over the student's career (obviously, if you have an actively hostile advisor things will be hard in any system, but I have known successful faculty who had indifferent fund-and-forget-style advisors who wouldn't know enough about the student's field to write a good recommendation) 2) informal "I like this person, hire them" networks tend to select for people who are like current participants in the network I agree that a coarse "do they have at least x papers?" way of evaluating researchers is silly. But it's not crazy to have 10 papers when you graduate. That's about one paper every 6 months in a 5-year program. Six months is a long time, almost a thousand hours of work. If three people are focused on a project, it's pretty plausible to get a cool result in six months.
  - btrettel 6y ago
    I appreciate your perspective. The people on the hiring and tenure committees as far as I can tell usually don't/can't evaluate quality directly so they instead focus on proxies like the total number of papers and what journals someone published in. I'm fairly against total publications as a proxy but I hadn't considered how it fared against these alternatives. Personally, if I saw someone published a ton of papers during their PhD, I'd question the quality and importance of their research. Quality tends to decrease with quantity in my experience. And it appears too easy to fake importance. In my field I watch out for vague words like "novel" and "fundamental" in paper titles as evidence that the work is probably overhyped. I'm fairly well read in my field and I can sense the disappointment in people when I tell them that their "great" idea was done before, particularly when it was done better and/or a long time ago. (I take no pleasure in doing this. I just wish people spent less time reinventing the wheel.) I think I could have had 10 papers during my PhD if I focused on easily-published things and "salami-sliced" my papers. But I focused on what I thought was more important and made the scope of each paper larger than normal because it saves readers time. Proxies that are characteristics of the researcher might be better (or at least should be considered), like the willingness of the researcher to put "skin in the game" so-to-speak. I'd have a lot more confidence in research conducted part-time by someone on their own money than someone using another person's money (which has much less risk). Taleb has written about this as I recall.
gaze 6y ago
My feelings are a little different. If you feel like doing a PhD and enjoy doing research, you should do it. A PhD above all should be fun, and is thus not a waste. It's only a waste if it's not fun. There will be extended periods of intense struggle, and those parts are not that fun. One has to accept those. But, doing cutting edge research with experts is an incredible opportunity and I'd encourage those interested to take the plunge. If it doesn't work out, why not take the MA and run?
- Cyph0n 6y ago
  Agreed. As you noted, you don’t have much to lose by giving it a try, and you can always drop out and get the MS (like I did).
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Not much to lose... except four to six years of your life. If you think of your working life, which has maybe 45 years, four to six years is a fairly major cost. That's a fairly high cost even if it's fun. It still may be worth doing, and the fun may tip the scales, but... "don't have much to lose" is I think inaccurate.
    - Cyph0n 6y ago
      You misunderstood: I was referring to trying out a PhD for those curious about it. Worst case, you spend ~2 years and get out with a MS degree.
      - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
        That's not so bad, especially when you're 22. But I'm 58 now, and even two years still seems like a long time to me, perhaps because I don't have that many two-year intervals left...
        Cyph0n 6y ago
        True, that makes the decision a bit more difficult. But if you’re truly interested in getting into the world of academic research, I still think it’s worth a shot.
pnathan 6y ago
Very interested in working through the PhD as a mid-career SW engineer with a MS. Curious how someone in that state would be seen by the acceptance committee, or, alternatively, by hiring committees post-graduation. Perspectives?
- mistrial9 6y ago
  coventional wisdom is -- why get a PhD unles you want to publish ? .. shorthand for, publications with trackable impact (citations) or, fundemental contributions to the field; otherwise, long road, much time .. "piled higher and deeper" PhD
  - pnathan 6y ago
    thank you. this is common advice. And to answer: I have run the financials on a PhD program. I have done highly independent research as part of my Master's. I am aware the TT job market is dicey on a good year. I am aware that it's a Very Institutional game, unlike startups, and h-indexes tend to matter more than one might hope. I have known a number of PhDs and watched their planned graduation dates slip, and their advisors put them through wringers. So: thank you; I'm very aware of the PhD road. I would really like to go deep on a research problem and, later, be paid an acceptable sum to research & teach.
- bo1024 6y ago
  Not positive about hiring committees but I think most would be very open and judge you fairly. It won't be easy to get into a good PhD program, even with prior master's research experience. Did you get and keep old recommendation letters from your master's? That would be helpful. You could throw your application out there, but if not successful, a way forward is to identify a research area or problem, start reading papers, and get in touch with some current researchers (if they are slow to respond, their PhD students or postdocs). Demonstrate your knowledge and enthusiasm and see if you can join on a research problem. That project and recommendations from it will get you in somewhere (maybe the same lab), if successful.
  - 6y ago
scottishcow 6y ago
> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time. Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential. > The Ph.D. is a tremendous opportunity. You get to pick an advisor in any research area you like and then you get to do research in that area, receive mentoring, think deeply on problems, publish papers, become famous, while paying zero tuition for 6 years and receiving a salary. Yes it is a great opportunity, but considering how universities benefit massively from the work generated by their PhD students they're grossly underpaid (at least in STEM). Overall this seems like good practical advice, but it's firmly written from the perspective of a true believer in the PhD system (and academia in general). My take is a bit different, I really think academia is broken in some fundamental ways.
- blamestross 6y ago
  I don't do any academic research, but I do a LOT of science for my job. My PhD definitely provided me with skills and knowledge I could not have easily aquired in the workplace. I'm working on an almost-FAANG doing distributed systems maintenance and design.
- mayank 6y ago
  > Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time I'm in this camp (haven't published since I graduated and joined industry), and I also strongly disagree with this statement. The value of the PhD is how it changes the way you think, how you break down big fuzzy problems, and how it helps you navigate the literature when you need help, and how it helps you know where to look and who to ask. I've worked on much harder problems than my PhD, but none have felt as hard as the PhD, because of the PhD.
  - dan-robertson 6y ago
    Surely this is a question where many opinions will be biased. If you did a phd and stayed in academia then you are likely to feel that having people do phds and leave academia is a waste of resources (maybe this is wrong and phd students are so cheap that they are net contributors). If you did a phd and left academia then you are perhaps likely to feel that your phd bestowed benefits to you outside of academia and that those benefits ought to be afforded to people in later generations. I suppose if one doesn’t have a phd then one might have either opinion, or some other opinion eg that phds are entirely a waste of public money.
jcdavis 6y ago
Only slighly related to the topic at hand, but the author (Mor Harchol-Balter) is an amazing teacher, she was undoubtedly my favorite professor I had the opportunity to take a class with at CMU
supernova87a 6y ago
> "...You need to know why you want a Ph.D. You need to have vision and ideas and you need to be able to express yourself..." I've got to stress that this advice is really important. Especially for people who are considering going into grad school because they're on autopilot or think that it's just a natural continuation of your schooling. That's an easy way to think, but it's not the right way. You can easily lose 6 years of your life in grad school aimlessly this way. Go into grad school and pursue a PHD because you've got a burning desire to turn one of your good ideas into a breakthrough. If you don't have such an idea based on your undergrad experience, that's already a warning sign that you shouldn't just go to grad school. Another warning sign is if you don't know who (which professor) you want to work for. Grad school is advisor-based in the extreme. And definitely don't go just because "it's always good to be educated more". That approach will probably leave you disappointed and surprised by what grad school is. As the author mentions, success in grad school is not just more classes. And if you do a random walk because you don't know what you want, you'll waste a lot of time. Aside from what the author describes in other good points, if you fall into this category of why you "think you want" to go to grad school, do yourself a favor, and get outside your comfort zone and go into the real world of business or a company for a stint. Don't just let yourself go autopilot into grad school because it seems to look like more college. At least have a look outside and try something before you default back to the university. A few years in a real company taught me much more (and faster), life skills-per-time, than in grad school. Yes, admittedly I came out of grad school with some good technical skills and a whole lot of accumulated knowledge that I put to use today still. But I look back wishing I had learned about real world problem solving and ability to cut the bullshit and get to the bottom line sooner. Be sure you go in with open eyes. And open them by looking outside first.
- asciident 6y ago
  That's a really surprising opinion to be, because I feel the exact same way but replacing "grad school" with "working at a corporation". I feel that most people go get a job on autopilot, as applying to a PhD requires substantial preparation whereas applying for a job is sort of a default. Then a job is even more so trading time for money, and easy to lose 6 years, or even 40 years in a blink. And what do you have to show for it? Half the projects get cancelled, 95% of projects at a corporation don't last past 5 years. Your name does not even appear on any work you have done. Most of the the skills you gain are about how to navigate that specific corporation. This feel to me like the biggest waste of time when I was refreshing Reddit to death at my desk. At least with a Ph.D., you're at least learning a skill, and gaining a globally recognized credential. Having 10 years at AT&T or Oracle is a decaying credential in comparison. Like you, I'd suggest for people to "get outside your comfort zone" of a business/company and "try something before you default" to a corporate desk job.
papeda 6y ago
For anybody interested in the computer science PhD process, a good complement to the featured article is Philip Guo's "The PhD Grind" [1]. It's a long (115p, but with big text) blow-by-blow account of the author's PhD at Stanford in the late 00s. It's neither sensationalized nor sanitized, and it's weirdly engrossing for an account of PhD research. I read it before starting grad school and I think it helped my "meta" PhD skills a lot. [1] http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf
- _hardwaregeek 6y ago
  Man, I just read through the memoir (it's a pretty engrossing read) and it's a ride. I really want a sequel though. Why/how did he end up back in academia? What do the other parties, e.g. Dawson, Margo, etc. think of these recollections? How far has he shifted his research? How different is it now that data science is such a pronounced field? I definitely feel like his tools anticipated stuff like Docker and data science tooling. Maybe he would have had better success in industry with these ideas.
  - papeda 6y ago
    Not quite a sequel, but he recently gave more details on the post-phd transition here: http://pgbovine.net/one-weird-year.htm http://pgbovine.net/one-weird-year.htm.
    - saeranv 6y ago
      Interesting that he doesn't seem to debate or reconcile how painful he found working on his PhD, with his decision to rejoin academia. He makes the persuasive point that he doesn't have the freedom to pursue long-term research in the industry, but he documented all the trade-offs inherent in that freedom in 'The PhD Grind'. Is it just that he's on the other side of the advisor-student power-balance? Or that he has the experience and skills to negotiate them better?
      - papeda 6y ago
elwell 6y ago
> You will know about your research than anyone at your school. ᴛⷮyрⷬoͦ iͥn ᴛⷮнⷩEͤ 1ˢᵗ ¶ 𝕒𝕗𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕣𝕠𝕕𝕦𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟.
vzuvz 6y ago
In case there are any CS PhD students at top colleges in the US reading this, I'd appreciate some advice: I am currently applying for a PhD in Germany (RWTH), and although I am excited about that place, I think I'd rather do a PhD in a top US School (for a couple of reasons that I won't detail here). The thing is that admissions for US schools do not seem to start before September, and in case I get accepted in Germany I'd have to decide whether to accept or not without having the opportunity to even apply for American schools. My question is about whether I'd have a decent shot of getting into such programs or not. Because if I don't then it makes sense to take an opportunity somewhere else before even applying there. My relevant credentials are: I'm currently doing my Ms. Sc. at University of Chile, and have published the following papers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10000 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10000 (accepted at FUN2020) https://ioinformatics.org/journal/v10_2016_19_37.pdf https://ioinformatics.org/journal/v10_2016_19_37.pdf (IOI2016) https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11693 https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11693 (ICDT2020) https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3329486.3329498 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3329486.3329498 (Workshops DEEM2019 and AMW2019), and I'm currently preparing what will be my master thesis to be submitted to a conference as well. Does this look like a solid enough profile to get a decent shot at a top US PhD program?
- gautamcgoel 6y ago
  I'm a PhD student in CS at Caltech. The single biggest factor that determines whether you will get in is whether a well-known researcher writes a strong recommendation for you. I expect that it will be difficult to make the case to accept someone from a virtually unknown program like the University of Chile when there are so many qualified applicants from top American schools. Just to be clear, I'm not saying you are unqualified, only that you will have to compete with "safer bets" who look stronger on paper.
- ridv 6y ago
  Really nice to see a fellow Chilean (I was born in Santiago but raised in NY) going for a PhD in CS. I got a PhD from a public university that's probably considered tier-2 in 2018. I got rejected from every other university I applied to for the PhD program for but I learned a lot about how academia works in the process. There's another post in this thread about making the jump across tiers into the elite university tier. They are right on the money when they say how hard it is and how much of it depends on who you know in the department you're applying to or who your references know in that department. Being from a different country puts you at a severe disadvantage in the networking aspect of the application. If you really want to attend a top tier institution for your PhD, the most sensible path would be to get into a Master's program at a school where you have a few advisors you'd like to work under. Once you're in the Master's program, you can do your best to impress them and convince them to take you on as a PhD candidate. Otherwise it's really really difficult to convince them to take a chance on you without knowing you personally. Anecdotally, even at my tier-2 university it was an anomaly for a "stranger" to be accepted straight into the PhD track. The professors would almost never take a chance on anyone they didn't personally know or didn't have good personal references about. I can't imagine how it would be a tier-1. Tl;Dr: Unless you make a big name for yourself in a specific area, it's nearly impossible to get into the elite universities without connections. If you're hell bent on doing your PhD at a tier-1, go into the same university's Master's program and build a personal relationship with whomever you want your advisor to be.
leemailll 6y ago
For any one want to apply for grad school, I suggest visit phdcomics.com, and try to read at least top 100 there. It will bring some laugh, but I want to emphasize one thing: those jokes are real for many in grad school.
- knzhou 6y ago
  I laughed at PhD comics back in undergrad, but now as a PhD student it feels wrong to read. A lot like Lego Grad Student.
awelkie 6y ago
I have the impression that CS PhD programs are more competitive than they have ever been, by a large margin, at least in the US. My pet theory on this is that US CS PhD students are exposed to globalization in a big way. If you look at figure D2 in the 2018 Taulbee Survey by the Computing Research Association [0], you can see that nonresident aliens as a fraction of enrollments in US and Canadian CS PhD programs rose from around 40% in the mid ninties to 64% in 2015, 2016, and 2017. On the one hand I think it's great that the US and Canada continue to attract research talent from around the world. But on the other hand I suspect that the increased competitiveness has changed the nature of the PhD program in computer science. I think that professors these days have so many options for grad students that they can choose students with specialized experience in their research field, which means that any "exploratory" phase of the PhD process has shrunk significantly. In the article, the author says that CMU expects students to choose an advisor within a month or two of starting the program, and I guess that in reality most students have applied to work with a specific advisor before stepping foot on campus. I wonder has it always been the case? Can anyone - maybe someone who did a PhD at CMU or elsewhere more than a decade ago - shed any light here? Of course the increased competitiveness of US CS PhD programs is just conjecture on my part. It could be that the increase in nonresident alien enrollment just means that many US and Canadian citizens are not interested in a CS PhD these days, and that the PhD programs haven't really changed, which also sounds plausible. From my experience during my short PhD attempt, the amount of time spent studying (classes, reading papers, etc) versus simply working for an advisor was smaller than I expected, and I don't know if that's because of a real change in the PhD process or simply my own naïveté. [0]: https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2018_Taulbee_Survey.pdf https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2018_Taulbee_Surv...
- Mehdi2277 6y ago
  My experience applying for a phd and talking to professors is it has gotten a lot more competitive. When I applied a year ago to 8 schools my recommenders thought I'd picked enough schools and had a strong enough background for top schools (2 first author papers, one at a workshop in a top conference). That led to 2 interviews, but at the end still 8 rejections. The acceptance rate for cs overall in stanford/similar schools is getting to around 3 percent. I was applying in ML which is extra popular and remember hearing that Montreal had 1000 cs graduate applicants this past year, with 500 for ML and 900 some ML overlap. Given they only want 15-20ish students a year, that's a fairly poor acceptance rate. My own undergrad was a STEM school and the number of CS majors has somewhere around tripled in the past 5ish years even though it started already high around 20 percent (yeah a majority is CS at this point). I know my school talked about how there's plenty of universities across the country that have had CS enrollment grow a ton and are having problems supporting all of them.
grifball 6y ago
> As in all of life, you will be most successful if you simply figure out what skills your advisor has that you don’t and work hard at picking up all of those skills without complaining Which probably means you will pick up programming, as the field moves so fast that professors usually have out-of-date skills. With a younger professor, this may be different.
orthros 6y ago
I wish I had read this paper before entering CMU back in the mid-90s. My advisor would enthusiastically agree, I bet.

179 points by bigfoot675 6y ago

zerr 6y ago

Any remote PhD opportunities nowadays?

rgbimbochamp 6y ago
I don't think so. PhD in CS and other related fields is a pretty intense affair nowadays (or has always been, idk) due to the crazy publication throughput one is required to have. Remote or part-time PhD options benefit no one.
anonymousDan 6y ago
You mean temporarily during the Covid period or for the whole program? As with the sibling poster, I don't think it's a great idea for the whole PhD. But maybe I'm just old fashioned :)
najarvg 6y ago
If you're looking for a terminal degree that is more application oriented, you may want to consider other options like a Doctorate of Engineering, EdD etc. Otherwise a PhD assumes close proximity to your advisor and lots of projects, publications etc
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

glitchc 6y ago

Most Comp Sci PhDs work from home anyways once they’re in.

foobarian 6y ago
If by work from home you mean live from the office then yeah, sure :)
- glitchc 6y ago
  Other than experiments that require custom ICs or embedded boards, most CS/CE research can be done from home. Can remote shell into your machine at work, or log into the supervisor's private VM cloud. It's become much easier than it used to be. Even a decade ago, this was the norm and most of my colleagues were chippies. Even reams of data could be carried via a couple of spinning rust HDs in a backpack.

plushprocessor 6y ago

What isn't often discussed is how hard it is to go from a no name school that isn't ranked highly to an elite school. At a non-elite school your recommenders may be unknown to the admissions committee, the 'level' of education these applicants receive can be questionable ("What does an A mean from this program and how does it compare to our class?"), their research experience could be weak, student visibility could be weak (i.e. their recommender isn't known in the field, and their student didn't do any sort of research that made professors at our school aware of them in advance), the courses they take may be weak compared to other applicants (i.e. their program doesn't offer as many advanced courses, compared to other programs) and so on. There can be tremendous risk in taking students from unknown schools or non-elite schools. It's much easier to accept graduate students from a similar elite school, with well-known recommenders, and a history of successful applicants from that came from that school that did well in said program. It isn't impossible, but it is an extra step these applicants have to overcome.

downerending 6y ago
I was in this situation, decades ago, and indeed was turned down by CMU. At least back then, CMU like some other elite schools had no MSCS, making it even harder to make the grade coming from Podunk U. My strategy, which worked out okay, was to "bracket" the field by choosing a couple of schools that looked solid and had very large MS class sizes and to just view my "elite" apps as lottery tickets unlikely to pay off (which they didn't). Beyond that, and especially today, I'd look seriously at targeting specific future advisors at the schools in question, and worrying far less about the school's reputation. An excellent advisor at Mississippi State will do you far more good than a crappy one at Stanford. And will probably cost a lot less.
- glangdale 6y ago
  I think this is bad advice for most people. "An excellent advisor at Mississippi State will do you far more good than a crappy one at Stanford. And will probably cost a lot less." I applied to 6 schools - doing the "bracketing" thing (CMU+UCB as "reach" schools, Wisconsin-Madison & Washington as "mid" schools and Columbia and U Colorado Boulder as safety schools). I got into everywhere but UCB and Washington, but CMU was my first choice so I was super-happy. The thing was - there were specific people at Boulder and Columbia that I thought I wanted to work with, but I checked a couple years later out of curiosity, and they'd moved on (around the time I would have been doing a thesis proposal). My first adviser at CMU also went to industry after a couple years and I had to switch advisors and fields, but had a number of excellent choices - as top-tier schools are packed with really good people. So if your interests shift, or you are forced to have an advisor change, or you wind up working in an area with some adjacencies to your original area (say you start as a networks person but wind up doing a half-networks, half-operating system PhD) you will find good advisors and coadvisors aplenty at a good school. At an "OK" school there are usually some really good people but they may have zero good people in whole subfields, and you might find that that good academic has left before you start your PhD proper...

scott_s 6y ago

This is solid advice. If you want to get a PhD in computer science, read and understand this advice. It's similar to the advice I would give someone, which is kinda funny, since I only know what you're supposed to do after having done just about all of it wrong.

bachmeier 6y ago

I don't work in CS. I was surprised when I watched this talk[1] by Michael Stonebraker to learn of the "Diarrhea of Papers" > A PhD applicant who wants to get a good academic job should have ~10 papers > A tenure case should have ~40 papers That alone would push me away from a PhD in CS. In economics, it's closer to what he said was the case when he was new: > I got tenure from Berkeley in 1976 — With about 5 papers [1] http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Stonebraker.pdf http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/Stonebraker.pdf

bhl 6y ago
For additional context, Stonebraker helped make Postgres and was the Turing laurate back in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker
papeda 6y ago
There's a bit of a counterpoint to this: with papers, it's easier to point to your body of work (peer-reviewed and, if you're good/lucky, peer-understood-and-approved) as clear evidence that you can do research. Without papers, or with very few papers, that evidence has to come from somewhere else. My understanding is that somewhere else is usually recommendations, from your advisor and other people in the field. Some reasons to dislike that system include: 1) it gives advisors a lot of influence over the student's career (obviously, if you have an actively hostile advisor things will be hard in any system, but I have known successful faculty who had indifferent fund-and-forget-style advisors who wouldn't know enough about the student's field to write a good recommendation) 2) informal "I like this person, hire them" networks tend to select for people who are like current participants in the network I agree that a coarse "do they have at least x papers?" way of evaluating researchers is silly. But it's not crazy to have 10 papers when you graduate. That's about one paper every 6 months in a 5-year program. Six months is a long time, almost a thousand hours of work. If three people are focused on a project, it's pretty plausible to get a cool result in six months.
- btrettel 6y ago
  I appreciate your perspective. The people on the hiring and tenure committees as far as I can tell usually don't/can't evaluate quality directly so they instead focus on proxies like the total number of papers and what journals someone published in. I'm fairly against total publications as a proxy but I hadn't considered how it fared against these alternatives. Personally, if I saw someone published a ton of papers during their PhD, I'd question the quality and importance of their research. Quality tends to decrease with quantity in my experience. And it appears too easy to fake importance. In my field I watch out for vague words like "novel" and "fundamental" in paper titles as evidence that the work is probably overhyped. I'm fairly well read in my field and I can sense the disappointment in people when I tell them that their "great" idea was done before, particularly when it was done better and/or a long time ago. (I take no pleasure in doing this. I just wish people spent less time reinventing the wheel.) I think I could have had 10 papers during my PhD if I focused on easily-published things and "salami-sliced" my papers. But I focused on what I thought was more important and made the scope of each paper larger than normal because it saves readers time. Proxies that are characteristics of the researcher might be better (or at least should be considered), like the willingness of the researcher to put "skin in the game" so-to-speak. I'd have a lot more confidence in research conducted part-time by someone on their own money than someone using another person's money (which has much less risk). Taleb has written about this as I recall.

gaze 6y ago

My feelings are a little different. If you feel like doing a PhD and enjoy doing research, you should do it. A PhD above all should be fun, and is thus not a waste. It's only a waste if it's not fun. There will be extended periods of intense struggle, and those parts are not that fun. One has to accept those. But, doing cutting edge research with experts is an incredible opportunity and I'd encourage those interested to take the plunge. If it doesn't work out, why not take the MA and run?

Cyph0n 6y ago
Agreed. As you noted, you don’t have much to lose by giving it a try, and you can always drop out and get the MS (like I did).
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Not much to lose... except four to six years of your life. If you think of your working life, which has maybe 45 years, four to six years is a fairly major cost. That's a fairly high cost even if it's fun. It still may be worth doing, and the fun may tip the scales, but... "don't have much to lose" is I think inaccurate.
  - Cyph0n 6y ago
    You misunderstood: I was referring to trying out a PhD for those curious about it. Worst case, you spend ~2 years and get out with a MS degree.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      That's not so bad, especially when you're 22. But I'm 58 now, and even two years still seems like a long time to me, perhaps because I don't have that many two-year intervals left...
      - Cyph0n 6y ago
        True, that makes the decision a bit more difficult. But if you’re truly interested in getting into the world of academic research, I still think it’s worth a shot.

pnathan 6y ago

Very interested in working through the PhD as a mid-career SW engineer with a MS. Curious how someone in that state would be seen by the acceptance committee, or, alternatively, by hiring committees post-graduation. Perspectives?

mistrial9 6y ago
coventional wisdom is -- why get a PhD unles you want to publish ? .. shorthand for, publications with trackable impact (citations) or, fundemental contributions to the field; otherwise, long road, much time .. "piled higher and deeper" PhD
- pnathan 6y ago
  thank you. this is common advice. And to answer: I have run the financials on a PhD program. I have done highly independent research as part of my Master's. I am aware the TT job market is dicey on a good year. I am aware that it's a Very Institutional game, unlike startups, and h-indexes tend to matter more than one might hope. I have known a number of PhDs and watched their planned graduation dates slip, and their advisors put them through wringers. So: thank you; I'm very aware of the PhD road. I would really like to go deep on a research problem and, later, be paid an acceptable sum to research & teach.
bo1024 6y ago
Not positive about hiring committees but I think most would be very open and judge you fairly. It won't be easy to get into a good PhD program, even with prior master's research experience. Did you get and keep old recommendation letters from your master's? That would be helpful. You could throw your application out there, but if not successful, a way forward is to identify a research area or problem, start reading papers, and get in touch with some current researchers (if they are slow to respond, their PhD students or postdocs). Demonstrate your knowledge and enthusiasm and see if you can join on a research problem. That project and recommendations from it will get you in somewhere (maybe the same lab), if successful.
- 6y ago

scottishcow 6y ago

> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time. Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential. > The Ph.D. is a tremendous opportunity. You get to pick an advisor in any research area you like and then you get to do research in that area, receive mentoring, think deeply on problems, publish papers, become famous, while paying zero tuition for 6 years and receiving a salary. Yes it is a great opportunity, but considering how universities benefit massively from the work generated by their PhD students they're grossly underpaid (at least in STEM). Overall this seems like good practical advice, but it's firmly written from the perspective of a true believer in the PhD system (and academia in general). My take is a bit different, I really think academia is broken in some fundamental ways.

blamestross 6y ago
I don't do any academic research, but I do a LOT of science for my job. My PhD definitely provided me with skills and knowledge I could not have easily aquired in the workplace. I'm working on an almost-FAANG doing distributed systems maintenance and design.
mayank 6y ago
> Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time I'm in this camp (haven't published since I graduated and joined industry), and I also strongly disagree with this statement. The value of the PhD is how it changes the way you think, how you break down big fuzzy problems, and how it helps you navigate the literature when you need help, and how it helps you know where to look and who to ask. I've worked on much harder problems than my PhD, but none have felt as hard as the PhD, because of the PhD.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  Surely this is a question where many opinions will be biased. If you did a phd and stayed in academia then you are likely to feel that having people do phds and leave academia is a waste of resources (maybe this is wrong and phd students are so cheap that they are net contributors). If you did a phd and left academia then you are perhaps likely to feel that your phd bestowed benefits to you outside of academia and that those benefits ought to be afforded to people in later generations. I suppose if one doesn’t have a phd then one might have either opinion, or some other opinion eg that phds are entirely a waste of public money.

jcdavis 6y ago

Only slighly related to the topic at hand, but the author (Mor Harchol-Balter) is an amazing teacher, she was undoubtedly my favorite professor I had the opportunity to take a class with at CMU

supernova87a 6y ago

> "...You need to know why you want a Ph.D. You need to have vision and ideas and you need to be able to express yourself..." I've got to stress that this advice is really important. Especially for people who are considering going into grad school because they're on autopilot or think that it's just a natural continuation of your schooling. That's an easy way to think, but it's not the right way. You can easily lose 6 years of your life in grad school aimlessly this way. Go into grad school and pursue a PHD because you've got a burning desire to turn one of your good ideas into a breakthrough. If you don't have such an idea based on your undergrad experience, that's already a warning sign that you shouldn't just go to grad school. Another warning sign is if you don't know who (which professor) you want to work for. Grad school is advisor-based in the extreme. And definitely don't go just because "it's always good to be educated more". That approach will probably leave you disappointed and surprised by what grad school is. As the author mentions, success in grad school is not just more classes. And if you do a random walk because you don't know what you want, you'll waste a lot of time. Aside from what the author describes in other good points, if you fall into this category of why you "think you want" to go to grad school, do yourself a favor, and get outside your comfort zone and go into the real world of business or a company for a stint. Don't just let yourself go autopilot into grad school because it seems to look like more college. At least have a look outside and try something before you default back to the university. A few years in a real company taught me much more (and faster), life skills-per-time, than in grad school. Yes, admittedly I came out of grad school with some good technical skills and a whole lot of accumulated knowledge that I put to use today still. But I look back wishing I had learned about real world problem solving and ability to cut the bullshit and get to the bottom line sooner. Be sure you go in with open eyes. And open them by looking outside first.

asciident 6y ago
That's a really surprising opinion to be, because I feel the exact same way but replacing "grad school" with "working at a corporation". I feel that most people go get a job on autopilot, as applying to a PhD requires substantial preparation whereas applying for a job is sort of a default. Then a job is even more so trading time for money, and easy to lose 6 years, or even 40 years in a blink. And what do you have to show for it? Half the projects get cancelled, 95% of projects at a corporation don't last past 5 years. Your name does not even appear on any work you have done. Most of the the skills you gain are about how to navigate that specific corporation. This feel to me like the biggest waste of time when I was refreshing Reddit to death at my desk. At least with a Ph.D., you're at least learning a skill, and gaining a globally recognized credential. Having 10 years at AT&T or Oracle is a decaying credential in comparison. Like you, I'd suggest for people to "get outside your comfort zone" of a business/company and "try something before you default" to a corporate desk job.

papeda 6y ago

For anybody interested in the computer science PhD process, a good complement to the featured article is Philip Guo's "The PhD Grind" [1]. It's a long (115p, but with big text) blow-by-blow account of the author's PhD at Stanford in the late 00s. It's neither sensationalized nor sanitized, and it's weirdly engrossing for an account of PhD research. I read it before starting grad school and I think it helped my "meta" PhD skills a lot. [1] http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf

_hardwaregeek 6y ago
Man, I just read through the memoir (it's a pretty engrossing read) and it's a ride. I really want a sequel though. Why/how did he end up back in academia? What do the other parties, e.g. Dawson, Margo, etc. think of these recollections? How far has he shifted his research? How different is it now that data science is such a pronounced field? I definitely feel like his tools anticipated stuff like Docker and data science tooling. Maybe he would have had better success in industry with these ideas.
- papeda 6y ago
  Not quite a sequel, but he recently gave more details on the post-phd transition here: http://pgbovine.net/one-weird-year.htm http://pgbovine.net/one-weird-year.htm.
  - saeranv 6y ago
    Interesting that he doesn't seem to debate or reconcile how painful he found working on his PhD, with his decision to rejoin academia. He makes the persuasive point that he doesn't have the freedom to pursue long-term research in the industry, but he documented all the trade-offs inherent in that freedom in 'The PhD Grind'. Is it just that he's on the other side of the advisor-student power-balance? Or that he has the experience and skills to negotiate them better?
    - papeda 6y ago

elwell 6y ago

> You will know about your research than anyone at your school. ᴛⷮyрⷬoͦ iͥn ᴛⷮнⷩEͤ 1ˢᵗ ¶ 𝕒𝕗𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕣𝕠𝕕𝕦𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟.

vzuvz 6y ago

In case there are any CS PhD students at top colleges in the US reading this, I'd appreciate some advice: I am currently applying for a PhD in Germany (RWTH), and although I am excited about that place, I think I'd rather do a PhD in a top US School (for a couple of reasons that I won't detail here). The thing is that admissions for US schools do not seem to start before September, and in case I get accepted in Germany I'd have to decide whether to accept or not without having the opportunity to even apply for American schools. My question is about whether I'd have a decent shot of getting into such programs or not. Because if I don't then it makes sense to take an opportunity somewhere else before even applying there. My relevant credentials are: I'm currently doing my Ms. Sc. at University of Chile, and have published the following papers: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10000 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10000 (accepted at FUN2020) https://ioinformatics.org/journal/v10_2016_19_37.pdf https://ioinformatics.org/journal/v10_2016_19_37.pdf (IOI2016) https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11693 https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.11693 (ICDT2020) https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3329486.3329498 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3329486.3329498 (Workshops DEEM2019 and AMW2019), and I'm currently preparing what will be my master thesis to be submitted to a conference as well. Does this look like a solid enough profile to get a decent shot at a top US PhD program?

gautamcgoel 6y ago
I'm a PhD student in CS at Caltech. The single biggest factor that determines whether you will get in is whether a well-known researcher writes a strong recommendation for you. I expect that it will be difficult to make the case to accept someone from a virtually unknown program like the University of Chile when there are so many qualified applicants from top American schools. Just to be clear, I'm not saying you are unqualified, only that you will have to compete with "safer bets" who look stronger on paper.
ridv 6y ago
Really nice to see a fellow Chilean (I was born in Santiago but raised in NY) going for a PhD in CS. I got a PhD from a public university that's probably considered tier-2 in 2018. I got rejected from every other university I applied to for the PhD program for but I learned a lot about how academia works in the process. There's another post in this thread about making the jump across tiers into the elite university tier. They are right on the money when they say how hard it is and how much of it depends on who you know in the department you're applying to or who your references know in that department. Being from a different country puts you at a severe disadvantage in the networking aspect of the application. If you really want to attend a top tier institution for your PhD, the most sensible path would be to get into a Master's program at a school where you have a few advisors you'd like to work under. Once you're in the Master's program, you can do your best to impress them and convince them to take you on as a PhD candidate. Otherwise it's really really difficult to convince them to take a chance on you without knowing you personally. Anecdotally, even at my tier-2 university it was an anomaly for a "stranger" to be accepted straight into the PhD track. The professors would almost never take a chance on anyone they didn't personally know or didn't have good personal references about. I can't imagine how it would be a tier-1. Tl;Dr: Unless you make a big name for yourself in a specific area, it's nearly impossible to get into the elite universities without connections. If you're hell bent on doing your PhD at a tier-1, go into the same university's Master's program and build a personal relationship with whomever you want your advisor to be.

leemailll 6y ago

For any one want to apply for grad school, I suggest visit phdcomics.com, and try to read at least top 100 there. It will bring some laugh, but I want to emphasize one thing: those jokes are real for many in grad school.

knzhou 6y ago
I laughed at PhD comics back in undergrad, but now as a PhD student it feels wrong to read. A lot like Lego Grad Student.

awelkie 6y ago

I have the impression that CS PhD programs are more competitive than they have ever been, by a large margin, at least in the US. My pet theory on this is that US CS PhD students are exposed to globalization in a big way. If you look at figure D2 in the 2018 Taulbee Survey by the Computing Research Association [0], you can see that nonresident aliens as a fraction of enrollments in US and Canadian CS PhD programs rose from around 40% in the mid ninties to 64% in 2015, 2016, and 2017. On the one hand I think it's great that the US and Canada continue to attract research talent from around the world. But on the other hand I suspect that the increased competitiveness has changed the nature of the PhD program in computer science. I think that professors these days have so many options for grad students that they can choose students with specialized experience in their research field, which means that any "exploratory" phase of the PhD process has shrunk significantly. In the article, the author says that CMU expects students to choose an advisor within a month or two of starting the program, and I guess that in reality most students have applied to work with a specific advisor before stepping foot on campus. I wonder has it always been the case? Can anyone - maybe someone who did a PhD at CMU or elsewhere more than a decade ago - shed any light here? Of course the increased competitiveness of US CS PhD programs is just conjecture on my part. It could be that the increase in nonresident alien enrollment just means that many US and Canadian citizens are not interested in a CS PhD these days, and that the PhD programs haven't really changed, which also sounds plausible. From my experience during my short PhD attempt, the amount of time spent studying (classes, reading papers, etc) versus simply working for an advisor was smaller than I expected, and I don't know if that's because of a real change in the PhD process or simply my own naïveté. [0]: https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2018_Taulbee_Survey.pdf https://cra.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2018_Taulbee_Surv...

Mehdi2277 6y ago
My experience applying for a phd and talking to professors is it has gotten a lot more competitive. When I applied a year ago to 8 schools my recommenders thought I'd picked enough schools and had a strong enough background for top schools (2 first author papers, one at a workshop in a top conference). That led to 2 interviews, but at the end still 8 rejections. The acceptance rate for cs overall in stanford/similar schools is getting to around 3 percent. I was applying in ML which is extra popular and remember hearing that Montreal had 1000 cs graduate applicants this past year, with 500 for ML and 900 some ML overlap. Given they only want 15-20ish students a year, that's a fairly poor acceptance rate. My own undergrad was a STEM school and the number of CS majors has somewhere around tripled in the past 5ish years even though it started already high around 20 percent (yeah a majority is CS at this point). I know my school talked about how there's plenty of universities across the country that have had CS enrollment grow a ton and are having problems supporting all of them.

grifball 6y ago

> As in all of life, you will be most successful if you simply figure out what skills your advisor has that you don’t and work hard at picking up all of those skills without complaining Which probably means you will pick up programming, as the field moves so fast that professors usually have out-of-date skills. With a younger professor, this may be different.

orthros 6y ago

I wish I had read this paper before entering CMU back in the mid-90s. My advisor would enthusiastically agree, I bet.