11 ms·

Syllabus for Eric's PhD Students

299 points by EvgeniyZh 6y ago

supernova87a 6y ago
I will just offer some unsolicited advice about PhDs, as it came up a few weeks ago also. And the author touches on this. Of course this mostly applies to empirical sciences, but maybe some theoretical ones too. An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students. An advisor (and the PhD research he/she guides you on) should be targeting a very conscious choice of incremental versus breakthrough research results. And for most students, you're not going to have a whole lot of mindblowingly field-changing results -- as much as you may think you're a rockstar. So it's just sensible or an insurance policy to make sure you've got solid steady work that you're progressing on. Learn to enable your research to have visible incremental gains on a known path every day, rather than hoping for some breakthrough at the end. Amazing breakthroughs have high risk, and make it highly likely you'll have a crisis when it doesn't happen. Concretely, even if you don't know what the answer is going to be at the end of your research, you must think about, or have an idea about, the format of what that amazing answer is going to be. Write the outline of your thesis and "ghost out" what the major charts will be. Write the intro sentences of each chapter -- what are they? (and I don't just mean the boring review of the field part, but your findings part) You should know what major type of finding, plot, or table your research is going to output. What are the columns and rows of that table, or axes of that plot? How many data points are required? How many of them can already be guessed? Where is the surprise going to be? What is the conclusion going to be? Draw out the answer you're aiming for, now. If you can't even articuate what the answer will look like, you may be in for a bad time, so work on fixing that. It will also push you and your advisor to be specific about what the output of your thesis will be -- and set you up for a much better PhD experience.
- legerdemain 6y ago
  > Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students. How do you "test" for this? Asking potential advisors "do you know this?" is blunt and rude. Asking potential advisors in a mannered way prompts anodyne answers. Current students in the potential advisor's lab are unlikely to offer an intimate assessment of their personal satisfaction and research progress to a stranger, assuming they can even be honest with themselves. My take is that having a good graduate advisor is largely about having a good undergraduate advisor who can offer an insider take and advocate on your behalf.
  - eegilbert 6y ago
    This is my syllabus. :-) I tell all my prospective students to talk to my former students.
    - legerdemain 6y ago
      Yes, and it is an enormously appreciated breath of fresh air. But you're not every PhD advisor!
      - supernova87a 6y ago
        I would say that as a student, you would be asking a potential advisor what mix of projects would be an example course of the research. What is "their approach" to the sequence of your grad projects over several years? Examples? What combination of risk/certainty does it have? I think you can tell pretty quickly whether the advisor has this concept even in mind. Former students should have this idea in their mind too, after finishing the program. If they don't, they haven't learned one of the important things about a PhD... And if you feel that it's too rude to ask, or the professor can't handle such a question (or you're hesitant to ask) -- either you probably want to find someone who is comfortable with such questions, or better find out why you are uncomfortable. Better to be awkward up front and get the answers you want, than be polite and suffer for 5 years to discover the wrong answer. I mean, that's a whole nother topic -- this is a huge investment of years of your life. You should ask difficult questions before you make the leap. And the professor should owe you such answers before committing to taking you on. In fact, it's not that different from an awkward pre-nup contract conversation. Only this time you don't have to be swayed by emotion.
- n3ur0n 6y ago
  As a rising 5th year PhD in ML -- I could not agree with this advice more! I have very hands-off advisors. I spent the first 3 years "wandering the woods to find something". Last year, I really had to sit down and think about how I can finish up my PhD on time. I pretty much did what you outline here. A lot of tools I used were organization tools I learned from my business school/product manager friends. I honestly think the PhD system needs to be overhauled. even at a "top-tier" program like mine, it is amazing to me that at no point do we receive any training regarding practical components of research. 100 years ago, the way you became a physician was to follow around a physician and one day you were ready to be a physician yourself. In the year 2020, this is how PhDs are trained. I do realize that a PhD is not a "professional" degree like MD or JD, however, given that most PhD grads will 1) go to industry 2) go into academia, we need to teach students about project management, planning etc.
  - ta1234567890 6y ago
    > we need to teach students about project management, planning etc. This is a problem with education in general. Those things should be taught in middle/high school as essential tools for modern life. Same as personal finances, effective strategies for team/group work, overcoming social anxiety, managing stress and building/maintaining relationships (personal and professional).
    - quineoa 6y ago
      Couldn’t agree more. Instead of learning those things in school. I got lucky and had privilege and learned some of them outside of school, and still need to learn others. But instead, they made sure I knew the name of the boats Columbus sailed in, in 1492. The Niña the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. I was forced to submit to whatever story they told me about the relationship between Columbus and the natives, no matter how untrue it was. But maybe that was the real lesson....
      - hinkley 6y ago
        One of the reasons I recommend volunteer work to people who graduated or are about to graduate with nothing like a plan for getting a job is that this is how I learned a lot of organizational skills (and got my first references). It also makes that, “what have you been doing for the last five months?” question a lot less uncomfortable to answer.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  > Concretely, even if you don't know what the answer is going to be at the end of your research, you must think about, or have an idea about, the format of what that amazing answer is going to be. Write the outline of your thesis and "ghost out" what the major charts will be. Write the intro sentences of each chapter -- what are they? (and I don't just mean the boring review of the field part, but your findings part) > You should know what major type of finding, plot, or table your research is going to output. What are the columns and rows of that table, or axes of that plot? How many data points are required? How many of them can already be guessed? Where is the surprise going to be? What is the conclusion going to be? You are absolutely right and it's depressing. The only practical, predictable and steady way to a PhD is to come up with the storyline in advance, do the experiments, bend the interpretation and analysis to support the story you already wanted in advance, then pretend the finding is surprising and novel (when actually you knew you could safely make it work in advance). There is a tension here, on the one hand PhDs have to pretend play that they discovered major novel stuff and innovated a lot (which is only possible through immense risk), on the other hand in reality they must finish in a given number of years and must be very risk averse. Only a major cultural shift towards handing out PhD titles for meticulous, systematic, risky but unfruitful research may help. Forcing people to find flashy new stuff will lead to tons of overinflated findings that are more about storytelling than actual surprising novel things that bring a field forwards. It's all a huge pretend play. ---- Ideally in an alternate universe of different incentive structures that support real science, a person would work in research, use existing approaches in different scenarios, push and prod them in different use cases then perhaps once every year you'd stumble upon some interesting effect you don't understand. Then you'd dive in and prod this specific effect with well designed experiments. Once it's clearer what is going on, you come up with the best way to convey this newly earned knowledge. It is at this point (once you actually know what you want to alert the research community to) that you decide how to best present the knowledge, what tables, sections and paragraphs will succinctly and ergonomically convey the information. If you knew all the story and layout beforehand and you know you will be able to just plug in the numbers and make the paper stand, then you are not doing real science, you are playing the academic game, a cargo cult of science, a game stealing and consuming the prestige of science. Yes, as I said this only works in the alternate universe. Here in this universe we must churn out papers and must overinflate our findings. Of course, we need to eat, we need jobs, we need titles etc. It has driven so many PhD students I know to bitterness and cynicism. Several have given up and went to industry. Others, after the disillusionment, have cynically pushed through with whatever minimal things they knew would be required (plus the right story and presentation) then bailed to consulting. You also need to bullshit in consulting but are at least compensated for it well enough. In the rarest cases do people come out of it as a positive passionate person. Even the successful ones become a hedging, scheming, lukewarm, slimy academic personality. Everything encourages this. The way you get professor positions, the way you get grant money etc. It optimizes and chisels people into becoming the antithesis of curious, open scientific inquiry.
- xab31 6y ago
  > An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. There is a tradeoff here. One of Eric's selling points for his lab is obviously that students get a lot of intellectual freedom to develop their own ideas. This is the "wandering the woods" approach, which was my advisor's as well. The advantage is the freedom, as well as the responsibility and intellectual independence that comes from exercising it. The disadvantage is that it can lead to a lot of wasted time and dead ends. The "guided coaching exercise", when taken to the opposite extreme, results in an advisor that hands a project with clearly defined goals and outcomes to the student. That kind of approach usually, in my experience, leads to more and higher-impact papers. It does not develop the student very well, but it does develop their CV, which is quite important, and once that student becomes a postdoc, it is do-or-die time, and every CV item helps. But if we just view this advice as "how should someone doing a project conceptualize their project", this is good advice. Although you would be astonished how many PIs don't follow it. I've had PIs want to write papers before seeing a single figure. I've had countless collaborators send me data to analyze without any clear idea what sort of results/analysis they want, without a hypothesis even.
  - Beldin 6y ago
    The job of a PhD advisor is to guide the student to become an independent researcher. That is: someone able to conceive of research-worthy ideas, separate the good from the bad, execute the research and write it all up in a paper. I have seen very hands-off approaches and very structured approaches. Both have their merits and pitfalls: the first may leave a student stranded in the proverbial forest, while the second may turn into nothing more than a 4 year long series of related tasks to be executed, set at day one, with no input from the student. On the other hand, I've also seen both approaches work well. Basically, you want a daily supervisor that cares, and with whom you have a click.
- shrimpx 6y ago
  My impression is that things are drastically different if you’re going for a top professorship vs something else, like a job at google. If you’re going for a professorship then basically nothing matters until you strike on an idea that hits it out of the park in some way. And it’s a tricky combination of technical and political fitness. Depending on your work, some schools will like you more than others. If you’re just looking for a job in some research lab then a basic “get it done” process on an incremental result works fine.
dwrodri 6y ago
For those who don't know like myself, I'm pretty confident "Eric" is Dr. Eric Gilbert, current associate professor at the University of Michigan and former lead of the comp.social lab at Georgia Tech. His personal website is here: http://eegilbert.org http://eegilbert.org
- obmelvin 6y ago
  You are correct - he responded in the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24275188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24275188
- raverbashing 6y ago
  There is a link on the doc to that website ;)
- swyx 6y ago
  @dang - maybe worth considering adding the last name to the title, so it doesnt look like we are supposed to know who this Eric is
natch 6y ago
I take it something that Google Docs is doing makes those inline screenshots (like the year long todo) unreadable? Would love to be able to read those. And love the paper algorithm btw. I haven’t been through this journey myself but (to the author, who is here, not the poster) reading through how you have laid things out so clearly, your students are lucky to have you.
- eegilbert 6y ago
  I need to fix that. Apologies. Somebody already caught it an earlier round of feedback, and I just haven't gotten to it yet with the pandemic. But will soon.
kome 6y ago
my PhD advisor forgot I exists
- riyakhanna1983 6y ago
  Just like mine :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mellosouls 6y ago
This is a very interesting and thorough document but seems more of a philosophical guide to studying with Professor Gilbert - plus general research study advice - than an actual syllabus; although perhaps due to the more open-ended nature of PhDs that is usual (I don't have an academic background)? I ask because I clicked on it expecting some technical list of topic areas, though I did find it instructive and useful despite that.
BeetleB 6y ago
While I agree with his perspective on classes, some departments are hostile to this. When I was in grad school, I was required to take a ridiculous number of course credits to satisfy the requirements. Moreover, if you wanted to pass the qualifying exam, you had to know the material in some of those courses really well. The professors always complained that the requirements were too high and many of their students would lose 2-3 years just satisfying them. But ... professors are the ones who made those requirements to begin with!
- eegilbert 6y ago
  Some of my immediate colleagues are hostile to this! Agree with the substance of your point: often the importance of classes varies with the structure of the program (e.g., quals).
logifail 6y ago
My relationship with my (PhD) advisor was beyond dysfunctional. I complained at the time that it was just wrong for one human to have so much power over another, not that anyone was listening. However, the three and a half years I spent in his group were some of the best years of my life, I got to do so much "cool stuff" with some pretty unique/expensive kit, was privileged to teach dozens of talented - and some not quite so talented - undergraduates. Every single one of them passed "my" course, and with the benefit of hindsight, I cared more about that than about the research in our lab...
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Maybe that's one reason why it's all the more important that you go into grad school with some strength of opinion and position on what you want to achieve. As opposed to "just more of the same" -- because random walking your way into/through grad school, you're much more likely to be jerked around and find yourself on the wrong end of a relationship.
  - logifail 6y ago
    > it's all the more important that you go into grad school with some strength of opinion and position on what you want to achieve Indeed. I stayed on to do a PhD at the same institution where I did my undergraduate degree, with hindsight I think this might be a poor choice. There was very much a feeling of prospective grad students competing (indeed begging) for PhD places, with not much in the way of due diligence...
dude_bro 6y ago
I think a point of tension for grad students is that many don't realize a PhD program is more so a job than it is another part of your education. Your advisor is generally paying for you with their hard earned grant money and relies on your results for their own success. In typical 9-5 job terms, the advisor is the manager and the PhD students are the individual contributors. It's a harsh realization that many grad students come to, but unless your grad student is getting some level of results then the advisor will feel his/her grant money isn't going to good use. It's essentially the same thought process a manager goes through when they feel they are paying somebody a salary but that person is not contributing. This is why independence is so critical and one of the most important traits of a grad student. Time spent telling a student exactly what to do, again, is not always a resource well spent. Anyways, this is just my perspective on things based on conversations with a couple of my immediate family members who are professors. I went into the normal job market after getting my bachelor's, and I see a lot of parallels between the world of academia and the rest of us. There are different titles and the work is different, but much of the structure and politics are the same.
- feral 6y ago
  Nooo :-) If you find yourself in a PhD program with an advisor who thinks like the above, it's really important to not internalize their viewpoint. It's not a job. A job would pay much better! It's not your advisors money, and they aren't paying you to advance their career. Independence is critical, but so that you can avoid becoming someone else's cheap labor, and can instead focus on doing work that educates you and moves you forward. (Thankfully I had a great advisor, but many try and just take advantage of the power imbalance to exploit students).
  - xab31 6y ago
    Hard disagree. I made every possible mistake that can be made related to being too idealistic about grad school; for example, I believed: - My advisor and collaborators have my best interests at heart - My primary role in graduate school is to develop novel, useful, reproducible ideas - Grants, fellowships, and stipends are generous donations freely given in order to enable the above - Quality is more important than quantity These kinds of sentiments caused more damage to my career than any other mistakes I have made (fortunately, I survived...so far). When someone gives you money, they definitely expect something in return, even if that something is not always clearly stated, and that something is almost always related to the donor's own career advancement. There are PIs who absolutely prey on this kind of idealism. They can find certain kinds of idealistic students, use them up, and discard them. Graduate students should be told from day one that they need to look out for their own interests, because no one else will. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are just that. The best that can be reasonably hoped for from an advisor-advisee relationship is a clear understanding that it is a mutually beneficial transaction with bidirectional expectations. It makes me uncomfortable that the OP document obscures this fact. > they aren't paying you to advance their career What are they paying you for, then?
supernova87a 6y ago
By the way, for people's entertainment -- a couple weeks ago we also shared a bunch of comments about what happens to grad students' productivity when they get married and have a kid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049428
shahinrostami 6y ago
I quite like this comic, it offers some perspective http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
pmohun 6y ago
This is a fascinating look inside the academic system. Eric, a question if I may: Is there room for a modern PhD that values breadth over depth? The goal of completing a Ph.D. program is to become the most knowledgable person in the world about a specific topic. While this is a valuable goal for disciplines that reward specialization, it does not provide enough flexibility for autodidacts with a range of interests. A P.h.D. typically takes between 3 and 6 years of self-directed study. If candidates spend between 35 to 70 hours per week, this amounts to 5,250 hours on the low-end and 21,000 hours at the extreme end. Of course, not all of this time is spent on research. In fact, modern P.h.D. students spend more time than necessary dealing with administrative functions like teaching, grading, and paperwork for the university. What would you recommend to someone planning their own "personal PhD"? That is, four to six years of self-directed research on a specific topic. This is something I think about often. Many citizen scientists like Franklin, Edison, and Darwin were not the result of PhD programs but instead curious professionals who conducted independent research. Other specific questions: - What is a suitable replacement for the role of advisor? Is there a representative person outside of academia who would provide the same type of advice? - What type of fields are best suited to personal PhDs? Low capital investment (ie, no expensive lab equipment) seems like a constraint? Like I said, I think about this often and have written more on the topic here: https://sundayscaries.substack.com/p/the-lifetime-curriculum-revisited https://sundayscaries.substack.com/p/the-lifetime-curriculum...
- angrais 6y ago
  FYI: neither of those three well known individuals were regarded as what we now call citizen scientists. They were a politician, inventor, and an academic. This is very very different to citizen science.
  - fuzzfactor 6y ago
    I would regard them as prominent gentlemen scientists of their time, to say the least. For every prominent man or woman of science, there have always been countless others having equal or better technology, whose recognition falls below an arbitrary media-determined threshold for eminence, whether or not eminence was on the agenda. That much of it is a popularity contest. There's rock stars and there's all the rest of the loud guitar players. I accept a citizen scientist as toward the lesser end of academic credentials and lacking widespread recognition of their leadership or capability, but no shortage of talent or potential. And perhaps leveraging lesser resources or overcoming the same common limitations that otherwise encumber their equally ambitious peers, who do not become scientists at all even if they wanted to. By good fortune or not. The citizen-scientist is an everyman of some kind. Well, you gotta draw the line somewhere. At the interface between citizen-scientists and citizen-not-quite-scientists, its a pretty fuzzy line and there's equal talent on both sides. Similar talent but the more rarefied community has the actual accomplishments. OTOH at the other end of the spectrum are the most prominent scientists and the fuzzy interface between the few of them and the next tier of equal talents having top credentials but insignificant recognition by comparison. Similar accomplishments but the more rarefied community has the actual recognition. It's much less common for the most prominent in the 21st century to be a gentleman scientist of our time anyway. In between the top credentials and the lesser ones there's got to be an even more fuzzy line where the gentleman scientist and the citizen scientist can't tell which side of the line they're on their dang self.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
superhuzza 6y ago
Eric Gilbert is a fairly well known person, but I still think the title should mention the full name as opposed to just "Eric". There are probably hundreds (more?) of professors called "Eric" in Computer Science alone.
zanecraw 6y ago
Interesting!
hank_z 6y ago
I really admire students who have Eric during their academic journey.
fergie 6y ago
Quite liked this -> "I believe the world needs far more thoughtful, critical, evidence-based technologists—and far fewer VC-backed tech founders."

299 points by EvgeniyZh 6y ago

I will just offer some unsolicited advice about PhDs, as it came up a few weeks ago also. And the author touches on this. Of course this mostly applies to empirical sciences, but maybe some theoretical ones too. An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students. An advisor (and the PhD research he/she guides you on) should be targeting a very conscious choice of incremental versus breakthrough research results. And for most students, you're not going to have a whole lot of mindblowingly field-changing results -- as much as you may think you're a rockstar. So it's just sensible or an insurance policy to make sure you've got solid steady work that you're progressing on. Learn to enable your research to have visible incremental gains on a known path every day, rather than hoping for some breakthrough at the end. Amazing breakthroughs have high risk, and make it highly likely you'll have a crisis when it doesn't happen. Concretely, even if you don't know what the answer is going to be at the end of your research, you must think about, or have an idea about, the format of what that amazing answer is going to be. Write the outline of your thesis and "ghost out" what the major charts will be. Write the intro sentences of each chapter -- what are they? (and I don't just mean the boring review of the field part, but your findings part) You should know what major type of finding, plot, or table your research is going to output. What are the columns and rows of that table, or axes of that plot? How many data points are required? How many of them can already be guessed? Where is the surprise going to be? What is the conclusion going to be? Draw out the answer you're aiming for, now. If you can't even articuate what the answer will look like, you may be in for a bad time, so work on fixing that. It will also push you and your advisor to be specific about what the output of your thesis will be -- and set you up for a much better PhD experience.

legerdemain 6y ago
> Test whether the PhD advisor you select knows this and has a history of taking this approach with former students. How do you "test" for this? Asking potential advisors "do you know this?" is blunt and rude. Asking potential advisors in a mannered way prompts anodyne answers. Current students in the potential advisor's lab are unlikely to offer an intimate assessment of their personal satisfaction and research progress to a stranger, assuming they can even be honest with themselves. My take is that having a good graduate advisor is largely about having a good undergraduate advisor who can offer an insider take and advocate on your behalf.
- eegilbert 6y ago
  This is my syllabus. :-) I tell all my prospective students to talk to my former students.
  - legerdemain 6y ago
    Yes, and it is an enormously appreciated breath of fresh air. But you're not every PhD advisor!
    - supernova87a 6y ago
      I would say that as a student, you would be asking a potential advisor what mix of projects would be an example course of the research. What is "their approach" to the sequence of your grad projects over several years? Examples? What combination of risk/certainty does it have? I think you can tell pretty quickly whether the advisor has this concept even in mind. Former students should have this idea in their mind too, after finishing the program. If they don't, they haven't learned one of the important things about a PhD... And if you feel that it's too rude to ask, or the professor can't handle such a question (or you're hesitant to ask) -- either you probably want to find someone who is comfortable with such questions, or better find out why you are uncomfortable. Better to be awkward up front and get the answers you want, than be polite and suffer for 5 years to discover the wrong answer. I mean, that's a whole nother topic -- this is a huge investment of years of your life. You should ask difficult questions before you make the leap. And the professor should owe you such answers before committing to taking you on. In fact, it's not that different from an awkward pre-nup contract conversation. Only this time you don't have to be swayed by emotion.
n3ur0n 6y ago
As a rising 5th year PhD in ML -- I could not agree with this advice more! I have very hands-off advisors. I spent the first 3 years "wandering the woods to find something". Last year, I really had to sit down and think about how I can finish up my PhD on time. I pretty much did what you outline here. A lot of tools I used were organization tools I learned from my business school/product manager friends. I honestly think the PhD system needs to be overhauled. even at a "top-tier" program like mine, it is amazing to me that at no point do we receive any training regarding practical components of research. 100 years ago, the way you became a physician was to follow around a physician and one day you were ready to be a physician yourself. In the year 2020, this is how PhDs are trained. I do realize that a PhD is not a "professional" degree like MD or JD, however, given that most PhD grads will 1) go to industry 2) go into academia, we need to teach students about project management, planning etc.
- ta1234567890 6y ago
  > we need to teach students about project management, planning etc. This is a problem with education in general. Those things should be taught in middle/high school as essential tools for modern life. Same as personal finances, effective strategies for team/group work, overcoming social anxiety, managing stress and building/maintaining relationships (personal and professional).
  - quineoa 6y ago
    Couldn’t agree more. Instead of learning those things in school. I got lucky and had privilege and learned some of them outside of school, and still need to learn others. But instead, they made sure I knew the name of the boats Columbus sailed in, in 1492. The Niña the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. I was forced to submit to whatever story they told me about the relationship between Columbus and the natives, no matter how untrue it was. But maybe that was the real lesson....
    - hinkley 6y ago
      One of the reasons I recommend volunteer work to people who graduated or are about to graduate with nothing like a plan for getting a job is that this is how I learned a lot of organizational skills (and got my first references). It also makes that, “what have you been doing for the last five months?” question a lot less uncomfortable to answer.
bonoboTP 6y ago
> Concretely, even if you don't know what the answer is going to be at the end of your research, you must think about, or have an idea about, the format of what that amazing answer is going to be. Write the outline of your thesis and "ghost out" what the major charts will be. Write the intro sentences of each chapter -- what are they? (and I don't just mean the boring review of the field part, but your findings part) > You should know what major type of finding, plot, or table your research is going to output. What are the columns and rows of that table, or axes of that plot? How many data points are required? How many of them can already be guessed? Where is the surprise going to be? What is the conclusion going to be? You are absolutely right and it's depressing. The only practical, predictable and steady way to a PhD is to come up with the storyline in advance, do the experiments, bend the interpretation and analysis to support the story you already wanted in advance, then pretend the finding is surprising and novel (when actually you knew you could safely make it work in advance). There is a tension here, on the one hand PhDs have to pretend play that they discovered major novel stuff and innovated a lot (which is only possible through immense risk), on the other hand in reality they must finish in a given number of years and must be very risk averse. Only a major cultural shift towards handing out PhD titles for meticulous, systematic, risky but unfruitful research may help. Forcing people to find flashy new stuff will lead to tons of overinflated findings that are more about storytelling than actual surprising novel things that bring a field forwards. It's all a huge pretend play. ---- Ideally in an alternate universe of different incentive structures that support real science, a person would work in research, use existing approaches in different scenarios, push and prod them in different use cases then perhaps once every year you'd stumble upon some interesting effect you don't understand. Then you'd dive in and prod this specific effect with well designed experiments. Once it's clearer what is going on, you come up with the best way to convey this newly earned knowledge. It is at this point (once you actually know what you want to alert the research community to) that you decide how to best present the knowledge, what tables, sections and paragraphs will succinctly and ergonomically convey the information. If you knew all the story and layout beforehand and you know you will be able to just plug in the numbers and make the paper stand, then you are not doing real science, you are playing the academic game, a cargo cult of science, a game stealing and consuming the prestige of science. Yes, as I said this only works in the alternate universe. Here in this universe we must churn out papers and must overinflate our findings. Of course, we need to eat, we need jobs, we need titles etc. It has driven so many PhD students I know to bitterness and cynicism. Several have given up and went to industry. Others, after the disillusionment, have cynically pushed through with whatever minimal things they knew would be required (plus the right story and presentation) then bailed to consulting. You also need to bullshit in consulting but are at least compensated for it well enough. In the rarest cases do people come out of it as a positive passionate person. Even the successful ones become a hedging, scheming, lukewarm, slimy academic personality. Everything encourages this. The way you get professor positions, the way you get grant money etc. It optimizes and chisels people into becoming the antithesis of curious, open scientific inquiry.
xab31 6y ago
> An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. There is a tradeoff here. One of Eric's selling points for his lab is obviously that students get a lot of intellectual freedom to develop their own ideas. This is the "wandering the woods" approach, which was my advisor's as well. The advantage is the freedom, as well as the responsibility and intellectual independence that comes from exercising it. The disadvantage is that it can lead to a lot of wasted time and dead ends. The "guided coaching exercise", when taken to the opposite extreme, results in an advisor that hands a project with clearly defined goals and outcomes to the student. That kind of approach usually, in my experience, leads to more and higher-impact papers. It does not develop the student very well, but it does develop their CV, which is quite important, and once that student becomes a postdoc, it is do-or-die time, and every CV item helps. But if we just view this advice as "how should someone doing a project conceptualize their project", this is good advice. Although you would be astonished how many PIs don't follow it. I've had PIs want to write papers before seeing a single figure. I've had countless collaborators send me data to analyze without any clear idea what sort of results/analysis they want, without a hypothesis even.
- Beldin 6y ago
  The job of a PhD advisor is to guide the student to become an independent researcher. That is: someone able to conceive of research-worthy ideas, separate the good from the bad, execute the research and write it all up in a paper. I have seen very hands-off approaches and very structured approaches. Both have their merits and pitfalls: the first may leave a student stranded in the proverbial forest, while the second may turn into nothing more than a 4 year long series of related tasks to be executed, set at day one, with no input from the student. On the other hand, I've also seen both approaches work well. Basically, you want a daily supervisor that cares, and with whom you have a click.
shrimpx 6y ago
My impression is that things are drastically different if you’re going for a top professorship vs something else, like a job at google. If you’re going for a professorship then basically nothing matters until you strike on an idea that hits it out of the park in some way. And it’s a tricky combination of technical and political fitness. Depending on your work, some schools will like you more than others. If you’re just looking for a job in some research lab then a basic “get it done” process on an incremental result works fine.

dwrodri 6y ago

For those who don't know like myself, I'm pretty confident "Eric" is Dr. Eric Gilbert, current associate professor at the University of Michigan and former lead of the comp.social lab at Georgia Tech. His personal website is here: http://eegilbert.org http://eegilbert.org

obmelvin 6y ago
You are correct - he responded in the thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24275188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24275188
raverbashing 6y ago
There is a link on the doc to that website ;)
swyx 6y ago
@dang - maybe worth considering adding the last name to the title, so it doesnt look like we are supposed to know who this Eric is

natch 6y ago

I take it something that Google Docs is doing makes those inline screenshots (like the year long todo) unreadable? Would love to be able to read those. And love the paper algorithm btw. I haven’t been through this journey myself but (to the author, who is here, not the poster) reading through how you have laid things out so clearly, your students are lucky to have you.

eegilbert 6y ago
I need to fix that. Apologies. Somebody already caught it an earlier round of feedback, and I just haven't gotten to it yet with the pandemic. But will soon.

kome 6y ago

my PhD advisor forgot I exists

riyakhanna1983 6y ago
Just like mine :)
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mellosouls 6y ago

This is a very interesting and thorough document but seems more of a philosophical guide to studying with Professor Gilbert - plus general research study advice - than an actual syllabus; although perhaps due to the more open-ended nature of PhDs that is usual (I don't have an academic background)? I ask because I clicked on it expecting some technical list of topic areas, though I did find it instructive and useful despite that.

BeetleB 6y ago

While I agree with his perspective on classes, some departments are hostile to this. When I was in grad school, I was required to take a ridiculous number of course credits to satisfy the requirements. Moreover, if you wanted to pass the qualifying exam, you had to know the material in some of those courses really well. The professors always complained that the requirements were too high and many of their students would lose 2-3 years just satisfying them. But ... professors are the ones who made those requirements to begin with!

eegilbert 6y ago
Some of my immediate colleagues are hostile to this! Agree with the substance of your point: often the importance of classes varies with the structure of the program (e.g., quals).

logifail 6y ago

My relationship with my (PhD) advisor was beyond dysfunctional. I complained at the time that it was just wrong for one human to have so much power over another, not that anyone was listening. However, the three and a half years I spent in his group were some of the best years of my life, I got to do so much "cool stuff" with some pretty unique/expensive kit, was privileged to teach dozens of talented - and some not quite so talented - undergraduates. Every single one of them passed "my" course, and with the benefit of hindsight, I cared more about that than about the research in our lab...

supernova87a 6y ago
Maybe that's one reason why it's all the more important that you go into grad school with some strength of opinion and position on what you want to achieve. As opposed to "just more of the same" -- because random walking your way into/through grad school, you're much more likely to be jerked around and find yourself on the wrong end of a relationship.
- logifail 6y ago
  > it's all the more important that you go into grad school with some strength of opinion and position on what you want to achieve Indeed. I stayed on to do a PhD at the same institution where I did my undergraduate degree, with hindsight I think this might be a poor choice. There was very much a feeling of prospective grad students competing (indeed begging) for PhD places, with not much in the way of due diligence...

dude_bro 6y ago

I think a point of tension for grad students is that many don't realize a PhD program is more so a job than it is another part of your education. Your advisor is generally paying for you with their hard earned grant money and relies on your results for their own success. In typical 9-5 job terms, the advisor is the manager and the PhD students are the individual contributors. It's a harsh realization that many grad students come to, but unless your grad student is getting some level of results then the advisor will feel his/her grant money isn't going to good use. It's essentially the same thought process a manager goes through when they feel they are paying somebody a salary but that person is not contributing. This is why independence is so critical and one of the most important traits of a grad student. Time spent telling a student exactly what to do, again, is not always a resource well spent. Anyways, this is just my perspective on things based on conversations with a couple of my immediate family members who are professors. I went into the normal job market after getting my bachelor's, and I see a lot of parallels between the world of academia and the rest of us. There are different titles and the work is different, but much of the structure and politics are the same.

feral 6y ago
Nooo :-) If you find yourself in a PhD program with an advisor who thinks like the above, it's really important to not internalize their viewpoint. It's not a job. A job would pay much better! It's not your advisors money, and they aren't paying you to advance their career. Independence is critical, but so that you can avoid becoming someone else's cheap labor, and can instead focus on doing work that educates you and moves you forward. (Thankfully I had a great advisor, but many try and just take advantage of the power imbalance to exploit students).
- xab31 6y ago
  Hard disagree. I made every possible mistake that can be made related to being too idealistic about grad school; for example, I believed: - My advisor and collaborators have my best interests at heart - My primary role in graduate school is to develop novel, useful, reproducible ideas - Grants, fellowships, and stipends are generous donations freely given in order to enable the above - Quality is more important than quantity These kinds of sentiments caused more damage to my career than any other mistakes I have made (fortunately, I survived...so far). When someone gives you money, they definitely expect something in return, even if that something is not always clearly stated, and that something is almost always related to the donor's own career advancement. There are PIs who absolutely prey on this kind of idealism. They can find certain kinds of idealistic students, use them up, and discard them. Graduate students should be told from day one that they need to look out for their own interests, because no one else will. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are just that. The best that can be reasonably hoped for from an advisor-advisee relationship is a clear understanding that it is a mutually beneficial transaction with bidirectional expectations. It makes me uncomfortable that the OP document obscures this fact. > they aren't paying you to advance their career What are they paying you for, then?

supernova87a 6y ago

By the way, for people's entertainment -- a couple weeks ago we also shared a bunch of comments about what happens to grad students' productivity when they get married and have a kid: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24049428

shahinrostami 6y ago

I quite like this comic, it offers some perspective http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

pmohun 6y ago

This is a fascinating look inside the academic system. Eric, a question if I may: Is there room for a modern PhD that values breadth over depth? The goal of completing a Ph.D. program is to become the most knowledgable person in the world about a specific topic. While this is a valuable goal for disciplines that reward specialization, it does not provide enough flexibility for autodidacts with a range of interests. A P.h.D. typically takes between 3 and 6 years of self-directed study. If candidates spend between 35 to 70 hours per week, this amounts to 5,250 hours on the low-end and 21,000 hours at the extreme end. Of course, not all of this time is spent on research. In fact, modern P.h.D. students spend more time than necessary dealing with administrative functions like teaching, grading, and paperwork for the university. What would you recommend to someone planning their own "personal PhD"? That is, four to six years of self-directed research on a specific topic. This is something I think about often. Many citizen scientists like Franklin, Edison, and Darwin were not the result of PhD programs but instead curious professionals who conducted independent research. Other specific questions: - What is a suitable replacement for the role of advisor? Is there a representative person outside of academia who would provide the same type of advice? - What type of fields are best suited to personal PhDs? Low capital investment (ie, no expensive lab equipment) seems like a constraint? Like I said, I think about this often and have written more on the topic here: https://sundayscaries.substack.com/p/the-lifetime-curriculum-revisited https://sundayscaries.substack.com/p/the-lifetime-curriculum...

angrais 6y ago
FYI: neither of those three well known individuals were regarded as what we now call citizen scientists. They were a politician, inventor, and an academic. This is very very different to citizen science.
- fuzzfactor 6y ago
  I would regard them as prominent gentlemen scientists of their time, to say the least. For every prominent man or woman of science, there have always been countless others having equal or better technology, whose recognition falls below an arbitrary media-determined threshold for eminence, whether or not eminence was on the agenda. That much of it is a popularity contest. There's rock stars and there's all the rest of the loud guitar players. I accept a citizen scientist as toward the lesser end of academic credentials and lacking widespread recognition of their leadership or capability, but no shortage of talent or potential. And perhaps leveraging lesser resources or overcoming the same common limitations that otherwise encumber their equally ambitious peers, who do not become scientists at all even if they wanted to. By good fortune or not. The citizen-scientist is an everyman of some kind. Well, you gotta draw the line somewhere. At the interface between citizen-scientists and citizen-not-quite-scientists, its a pretty fuzzy line and there's equal talent on both sides. Similar talent but the more rarefied community has the actual accomplishments. OTOH at the other end of the spectrum are the most prominent scientists and the fuzzy interface between the few of them and the next tier of equal talents having top credentials but insignificant recognition by comparison. Similar accomplishments but the more rarefied community has the actual recognition. It's much less common for the most prominent in the 21st century to be a gentleman scientist of our time anyway. In between the top credentials and the lesser ones there's got to be an even more fuzzy line where the gentleman scientist and the citizen scientist can't tell which side of the line they're on their dang self.

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superhuzza 6y ago

Eric Gilbert is a fairly well known person, but I still think the title should mention the full name as opposed to just "Eric". There are probably hundreds (more?) of professors called "Eric" in Computer Science alone.

zanecraw 6y ago

Interesting!

hank_z 6y ago

I really admire students who have Eric during their academic journey.

fergie 6y ago

Quite liked this -> "I believe the world needs far more thoughtful, critical, evidence-based technologists—and far fewer VC-backed tech founders."