15 ms·

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010)

158 points by CaliforniaKarl 5y ago

david38 5y ago
I have a BS in Computer Science from a pretty good program. I thought it was quite difficult. I’ve met many people with a master’s who did less for their master’s than I did for my BS. I’ve met people with PhDs who didn’t have to write a dissertation. I’ve met PhDs who have who I wonder with true amazement how any institution granted them a PhD. It’s absolutely wild what the variation in quality is for the same piece of paper (if you ignore the name of the institution).
k__ 5y ago
In that image the master is longer than the bachelor, but I learned so much more in my bachelor than in my master.
- learc83 5y ago
  The bachelors is the whole pink part not just the bump. It looks like more volume overall than the masters. It’s meant to represent the additional breadth. But yeah masters programs do vary widely. When I was in undergrad there were students doing a CS masters coming from other disciplines. They mostly took classes with us and had to write maybe an extra paper to “make it a 6000 level class” (granted I did take more of the theory heavy CS classes than was required). In that case their masters was basically equivalent to just the bump from the bachelors.
ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago
I was hoping this would be a guide on how to make that dent because I'm four years in and so far I've got nothing to show for it beside personal growth ... which is nice but you can't put that in a thesis.
- orforforof 5y ago
  That can be really difficult. Having just read the fantastic addendum in the blog post, "HOW TO: Get tenure", I think there is good information in there for finishing a PhD too. My advice is to not be afraid to bring new ideas to the table at this stage; do what your advisor says to do, but also add in your own ideas. In my experience it is normal for a PhD to follow a course of minor progress for 4 years, followed by major success in year 5 once the student hits on a good direction and (more importantly) is able to recognize that for themselves and push forward, while taking on the risk and responsibility that goes with that. Then things start to click into place, your advisor learns to see you as "ready", you start executing as a team, and stuff gets done fast. Maybe this has no relation to what you're struggling with, but just my 2c.
gsich 5y ago
*Mains
- zohch 5y ago
  Like really, how hard is it to rename a degree, get with the times people, it's 2021.
btrettel 5y ago
I'm glad to see that several other commenters here are picking up on the fact that many PhDs don't actually make novel contributions, contrary to the suggestions of the article [0][1][2]. To add my own 2 cents, I think many people with PhDs believe they pushed the boundaries of knowledge, but many actually did not. As dahart indicated, the boundaries of knowledge look different to different people. Given that, one frequently "reinvents the wheel" because they think they're at the boundary, but they are not. There's this idea that science is incremental, but I don't think it is. It's more of a random walk. And given that much (if not most) research is conducted by relatively ignorant people (PhD students) who do not have much experience in their fields, we should expect people to be starting far from the boundary and "pushing" into areas already explored. The advisor is supposed to provide more knowledge, moving people closer to the boundary, but again, I don't see that happening as often as it should. Too frequently I see exploring previously seen territory while thinking it's unexplored or just accepting ideas about previously explored territory that are wrong. Reinventing the wheel is becoming increasingly likely in my view as the number of published documents increases dramatically, but search technologies, strategies, and habits (most PhDs don't do a comprehensive search or use good search strategies) aren't keeping up. While I do think I had some actually novel contributions during my PhD, I view myself as more of an "intellectual janitor", cleaning up the mess/technical debt that previous researchers left behind. Unfortunately this sort of work is perceived by many researchers as not research. My own PhD advisor was not a fan of this aspect of my work. I tried to be aware of the literature far more than most PhD students. Many people seem to be offended when I point out that their "novel" idea isn't actually novel. In my view, novelty should not be required to get a PhD or publish a paper. One should never be offended that their ideas aren't novel. Disappointed, sure, but offended, no. The only way to have high confidence that an idea is novel/pushes the boundaries is to do a comprehensive search, and even then you can't be 100% sure that you're not missing something. Most PhDs spend far too little time on this aspect. 0xB31B1B got it right: A PhD is training. Because PhD students are so inexperienced, they should not be expected to produce novel research or even recognize what novel research looks like. I think the US should greatly decrease the amount of funding available for PhD positions while increasing the amount of funding for permanent research positions. Total researcher headcount would decrease, sure, but a smaller number of more experienced researchers with stable positions would do a better job overall in my view. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139842 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139567 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139621
Twisol 5y ago
Original by Matt Might at https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/. I'm not sure what this version adds. It mostly seems to copy the original wholesale. And there's more than a little bit of humanity after the copied part that's been left off: > If you zoom in on the boundary of human knowledge in the direction of genetics, there's something just outside humanity's reach: > [image with isolated dot labeled "Knowledge to save my son's life"] > My wife and I chose to start funding these graduate students after we learned that our son has a rare, fatal genetic disorder.
- Ryoung27 5y ago
  I believe it adds a very bad website design and typos.
- hemmert 5y ago
  I totally agree.
- myself248 5y ago
  It would be good to change the URL, this is unquestionably a better source.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    Indeed. The Happy Schools source wholesale copied Matt's pictures and thought. On top of that, introducing people to Matt's work is a pleasure and a joy. Consider my input as voting for the Matt Might source to replace the HappySchools link.
  - docflabby 5y ago
    Looks like a good case for a DMCA (but we all know that's not what they are for) it's pretty much copy paste rip... You wouldn't steal a car......
    - jholman 5y ago
      This page is clearly consistent with the license granted at Matt's site. It's still an inferior site, but it's kinda wild to accuse someone of theft when they're not stealing.
andrewclunn 5y ago
Were all degrees teaching actual real knowledge, and only those in the academic system able to acquire new knowledge, this would be correct. These "charts" are arrogance posing as humility.
0xTJ 5y ago
This does depend on where you are. I think that in the US master's degrees are different that they are in other many places. It also depends a lot on the master's degree. Some degrees are just more school. Some are a little school with new and innovative research.
- spyremeown 5y ago
  Very true in my experience. In Brazil, for example, the common engineering curriculum is 5 years and requires an internship and a dissertation, which is gonna be basically a master's thesis - in a good university, which is not the norm around these parts, so I'm very biased -. Many colleagues of mine go to Germany for their master's and get surprised when they realise they already studied most of the material in their undergrad education here.
seahawks78 5y ago
This is mostly accurate and true. A PhD degree is basically "knowing absolutely everything about practically nothing".
- rosetremiere 5y ago
  In my experience (math, small european university), this is the romantic idea of a Ph.D. more than how it ends up being in practice. In my case (and quite a few others around me), a Ph.D. is some research of varying novelty and complexity, far from making you an expert in the subject(s) at hand, but hopefully enough for your committee to think you deserve the title. In the cases I'm talking about, you're far from becoming this idealized "expert in your specific subfield" with new insights and that further researchers will base their work on; it's mostly grabbing whatever small questions you can try to explore and if possible answering them. Still, I think the idealized version does hold for quite a few people, if not all of us.
  - Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    I think it depends on the field, and on factors like quality of advisor, quality of peers, how much teaching you have to do, etc. In CS, for example, people definitely come out as experts in some niche of their research. Of course, there's a difference between their expertise and that of an experienced professor, but both are quite far from a normal person's knowledge of the field.
    - rosetremiere 5y ago
      Good to know. I just wanted to express the (quite disappointing) fact that not all Ph.D.s match what's being proposed here.
- morelandjs 5y ago
  While learning the process that enables you to do that.
zohch 5y ago
Rather tone deaf to still refer to it as a masters degree.
- amcoastal 5y ago
  I think master is less offensive in this context since it's not also coupled with something called 'slave'.
  - zohch 5y ago
    It was not coupled with something called slave in git either.
    - amcoastal 5y ago
      Incorrect. Branches subservient to the master were called slave by many, a simple look around GitHub would show this was true. I challenge you to find the "slave" part of a master's degree (except TAing ;) )
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Eh?
  - Hendrikto 5y ago
    Stupid sjw bs. Just ignore that.
- tomrod 5y ago
  I assume you're "tone deaf" comment refers to recent societal relations in the US, and the response from organizations like Github to rename master branch to main branch. The master/slave duality is certainly an important notion to be worked through in the US. Respectfully, in the context presented here I disagree the "master" context always requires a slave to be a complete concept. This has a good discussion on it: https://www.etymonline.com/word/master https://www.etymonline.com/word/master It's simple to ban (antithesis) the status quo (thesis), but ultimately embracing the nuance leads to a more useful harmony (synthesis) that helps society grow and expand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic)
BenoitP 5y ago
An addition I'd like to make is that this circle is a high dimensional sphere (>300 dimensions IMHO in our current age). Another one is that an alternate representation of this circle can be made by having theta as the x axis, and r as -y. In this representation, a PhD would sort of look like a T: a horizontal bar for general knowledge, and a vertical one going deep down for the PhD. That's the T shape Valve refers to in their handbook [1]. Enough generic knowledge to communicate with your peers, and a deep enough specialty to make an impact. Other areas of specialty would make it look like paint-drip. I believe such a map can be build for an individual through a series of ML-chosen Questions and Answers (ML because this is the tool to explore that high dimensional space), but I don't have time to try to build it :/ I believe one could also assign economic value to some paint-drip patterns. The biology + deep learning paint drip seems to be very hot right now. [1] p.46 https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
- blueflow 5y ago
  Don't take the model itself too seriously - its a helper for our brain to conceptualize a few situations, but like all other models, it has its limits.
techcode 5y ago
This totally skipped the fact that some (or most of the world?!?) a while ago started to split applied from theoretical sciences/studies. So in that circle - they would go into slightly different directions.
cupofcoffee 5y ago
People that have spent their entire lives in academia consoling themselves for their wasted years with fancy graphics. :)
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Why post something so negative like this?
- tonytuttle 5y ago
  You should really look Matt Might up. He was an entrepreneur while working on his PhD. While he was a CS professor he had a child who had an extremely rare genetic disorder. He pivoted his entire life and focused all of his energy on learning about his son's condition. Since then he has become the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama. Hardly a career of "wasted years" of an "entire life in academia".
  - shagie 5y ago
    > While he was a CS professor he had a child who had an extremely rare genetic disorder. From January of this past year: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210126/Genetic-interactions-may-shed-light-on-NGLY1-deficiency.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210126/Genetic-interacti... > In 2012, four-year-old Bertrand Might became the first-ever patient diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called N-glycanase (NGLY1) deficiency. The discovery of this condition and Bertrand's diagnosis allowed doctors to look for other children with the same genetic defect. Since then, more than 60 additional patients have been found. > The disease affects every system of the body and is characterized by low muscle tone, seizures, developmental delays, and an inability to produce tears. > Sadly, Bertrand passed away in October at the age of 12. Although his life was cut short, his legacy will benefit children around the world. Through their website, NGLY1.org, Bertrand's parents collect and share a wealth of research and family stories to help educate and inform the community. As more patients have been identified, it's become apparent that even though the same gene is deactivated in all of them, their symptoms and severity of disease vary widely.
bob229 5y ago
Unless your phd is in critical race or gender studies and your endeavours actually reduce the totality of human knowledge
0xB31B1B 5y ago
IMO the PhD description here isn’t really useful for STEM fields and is too simple/idealized. What you learn in a PhD is how to do science. You learn about: experiment design, getting funding in your field, writing papers in your field, using the tools to understand data, learning who are the people in your field you want to work with/for to achieve your personal research goals etc. It’s not “you make a dent in the universe of knowledge”, its “you learn the stuff you need to know to make a dent in the universe of knowledge”. Actually making the dent is ancillary.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  Sure, but if you learn all that stuff without actually making a dent, you don't get granted your PhD. All the procedural stuff you learn along the way is necessary, but that's not what the PhD is.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  It's also learning to manage how to live on a criminally low salary. If I were to give advice to my kids, that would be a resounding - don't get a PhD. You can do research in industry while getting paid extremely well and most likely your work won't go waste. The only problem is that industry only hires PhDs for serious research - this needs to be reformed. There should be a possibility of allowing non-PhDs learn the process of research while they're working there.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    Salary/stipends vary significantly with country and research area. I can tell you that in Sweden for example a PhD student earns significantly above median wage and more than a teacher for example. In engineering you earn about on the same level as a masters graduate (slightly below typically).
- localhost 5y ago
  I certainly pushed the boundaries of knowledge by a tiny amount during my PhD - that's what publishing is all about. Sure, you're learning how to write the paper, how to conduct the research, how to think about science, etc. but you're also __researching__. Matt gets it exactly right in this description. I remember many years ago a friend's father commenting on my PhD by saying "isn't it wonderful to be the only person in the world to know about this thing that you're working on?" That's the moment when you have your unusual observation, something that nobody else has seen before (or at least nobody has published before) and it truly is a wonderful feeling. You rely on your advisor to tell you work to look initially, and eventually you get good at finding those places to look yourself. As Frank Westheimer once said (paraphrased) "Science starts with an unusual observation. When you have an unusual observation, one of two things has happened: you've made a discovery or you've made a mistake.". That's also an important lesson, and one that formed the core of my PhD.
soumyadeb 5y ago
Mirrors another popular quote. After bachelors, you feel, you know everything. After masters, you feel, you know nothing. After PhD, you feel, noone knows anything.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I must have skipped the "know everything phase". I've always felt like I know nothing. I have also discovered that no one knows anything (only have an MS, no PhD). Maybe it's just due to the nature tech - even if I know it know it in one tech right now, the tech changes and I dont know it in the other tech.
  - soumyadeb 5y ago
    Well, that's your humility. Most undergrads I have come across (me included) feel top of the world after the bachelors and landing a tech job. The better the job offer, more the feeling of you know everything
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I felt that in a different way after starting my first real job. I thought I was making good money and had a great career ahead. Now 10 years later and a MS, I realize I was underpaid, and likely still am, with a job and not a career.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  What on earth did they study that left them with the impression that they knew everything after a bachelor's degree? I and most people I know were left with the impression that we had merely scratched the surface. I studied applied physics in the 70s if that is relevant.
throwawaygh 5y ago
Blatant plagiarism by a website that's being used as a sales funnel for immigration attorneys. Kinda gross and exploitative. Maybe change the link to https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
nabla9 5y ago
Today PhD is just demonstration that you can do research and be understood by other researchers. Maybe 1 in 100 PhD's is meaningful contribution. Postdoc research is where people truly become experts and expand their knowledge.
dahart 5y ago
Geophysicist David Chapman once told me a story that has stuck with me for life… There’s a boundary of what you know, and a boundary of what you think you don’t know. Not the limits of all knowledge, but a belief about where that limit is. When you’re a kid, you already know you don’t know everything, but you see the radius for the rest of it as not that far off, maybe achievable some day. As you grow and learn and go to college and keep studying, the radius of what you know increases proportionally, accumulating little by little. And the radius of what you start to realize that you don’t know increases faster and faster, not just multiplied by the population of the earth, but also by the dawning realization that we collectively know very little. The take home message being that your relative size of knowledge, the more you learn, shrinks asymptotically to zero. In a strange way I find this more comforting than believing that graduate school research is at or even pushing the boundary of collective knowledge; the reality is that most advanced degrees aren’t broaching the boundary nor feeding into the collective.
- achillesheels 5y ago
  Hear hear! The “doctorate” is a blank paper compared to its former grandeur. It’s astonishing to me, for example, how unmotivated so many disciplines which rely upon human biological phenomena, eg the social sciences, do not actually mandate knowing cellular biology, let alone its electromagnetic phenomena (I’m looking at you medical schools!). It’s not like the knowledge is absent - it’s the will power to continue to learn, as opposed to secure a salary, that is absent. This is the largest divergence between aristocratic and proletarian science: the pursuit of knowledge for its very sake.
  - mrbukkake 5y ago
    This comment is pretentious gibberish. What are you actually trying to say? The only concrete critique you seem to be making is that people don't learn "cellular biology" or its "electromagnetic phenomena" at medical school which is just laughably wrong. The second sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense
    - pc86 5y ago
inetsee 5y ago
My first job after college was as a laboratory assistant at the university where I'd gotten my degree. My minor was in computer science, so my job was doing computer programming for the professor I'd done my senior thesis with. The plan was to work for a year or two, then start graduate school. The nice thing about this plan was that I got to see what graduate school was like without actually going to graduate school. After a couple of years I got a job as a programmer at another company (not at another university). I never did go to graduate school.
whatever1 5y ago
The Ph.D. is a piece of paper that shows that for 5+ years you were able to consistently push towards a (previously considered) unattainable goal. It is gruesome, the idea might not work, nobody else can help you because nobody else has tried, nobody cares about the myriad things that you tried and failed. You will literally become a different person after the phd experience. But trust me, these 2-3 nights over the span of 5+ years, when pieces somehow come together and the goddamn thing works, are really worth the effort.
- yodsanklai 5y ago
  My experience of PhD is more mundane. I didn't discover anything particularly meaningful, or hard, or even useful. Basically, I read papers until I understood the field well-enough so that I was able to make tiny contributions worth publishing and presenting in conferences. That led to a few papers that I eventually compiled in a thesis. I certainly got something out of the experience, but I can't say it made me a different person, or that it gives me an advantage of any sort at my current job (software engineer).
  - djenendik 5y ago
    All PhDs are not equal. As mentioned by others in this thread, generalizing probably means fitting to noise.
  - apohn 5y ago
    >My experience of PhD is more mundane. I didn't discover anything particularly meaningful, or hard, or even useful. Agreed. I feel the same about my PhD. I did write a book that I could use to put myself to sleep though :)
  - downrightmike 5y ago
    That's the positive sum game. To gain something, a lot of people have to put work in to move us all in inch further. That's progress.
  - fwilliams 5y ago
    I was a software engineer briefly before starting grad school. During that time, I found I didn't have the time to sit down and learn about topics that interested me. I also wanted to be in research-y roles where I could build things that were more experimental and less well understood. During my PhD, I got to spend time learning, and attending talks/seminars/conferences. Gaining deeper background knowledge in my field as well as learning how to quickly evaluate and explore new ideas gave me the tools to have the type of job I wanted. I'm a research scientist at an industrial lab now and quite enjoy it. That being said, I agree with the grandparent post that doing a PhD can be a grueling experience. I had to carry the bulk of the work for many of the papers I submitted. If I took a day off, nobody would pick up the slack. Tight deadlines meant the only way to succeed was putting in long hours. My advisors were also spread very thin so it was difficult to get a lot of time with them. There were times when I felt very alone. This was a really stark contrast to how collaborative engineering in industry was and I don't think I ever fully adjusted to it. My current job feels like a happy middle ground. I publish papers alongside other people and we split the work.
amelius 5y ago
Until some Ph.D. student invents the AI that will make dents everywhere and in rapid succession ...
analog31 5y ago
Because PhDs are still relatively few and far between, most people have never interacted more than superficially with a small handful of them. And if they happen to meet one who's an asshole or an idiot, that becomes memorable. What if generalizing about PhDs is impossible? What if that's partly the case because the point of the PhD is to let someone establish their own character as a researcher or scholar? Things that deliberately try to elude generalization, are hard to generalize about. If you took me and my lab-mates in grad school, and followed us through our careers, I doubt that any common theme would emerge. What if generalization is further complicated by confounding variables? For instance, PhDs are more common in some fields than others. At my workplace, all of the PhDs have degrees in math or the physical sciences, even if they are working as engineers or programmers. There are no engineering or CS PhDs. Disclosure: Physics PhD
billfruit 5y ago
What if one makes an small contribution through independent study? Will that be sufficient to be granted a Phd? I do hear that some universities offer a PhD by publishing, wherein they grant a degree for already published work. Perhaps a bit like the film making model whose name presently eludes me, where instead of trying to get a funding from a studio to make a film, the filmmakers make it out of their own resource arrangements, and later try to sell the finished film to studios (perhaps for a profit).
- xen0 5y ago
  In a previous job, I knew a scientist colleague who obtained their PhD in this manner. The number of Universities that allow this is quite small, I believe he said 'two' (in the UK), and he still had to undergo a viva/defense.
dang 5y ago
Some past threads: The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13381843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13381843 - Jan 2017 (46 comments) The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385881 - March 2013 (49 comments) The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727 - Aug 2010 (42 comments)
Chilicow 5y ago
What a cynical message. What a letdown to prospective entrants to the Distinguished Order of Idealistic Discoverers to be told by a gatekeeper, "Psst.. this Order sucks and nobody discovers or accomplishes much." I was stirred to write a post about the message here and what I believe the message should be. https://telegra.ph/On-Cynicism-11-08 https://telegra.ph/On-Cynicism-11-08
klobosi 5y ago
Ph.D is all about the certificate, which is a symbol of achievement. One can simply self-study a particular topic to gain more knowledge and become an expert.

I have a BS in Computer Science from a pretty good program. I thought it was quite difficult. I’ve met many people with a master’s who did less for their master’s than I did for my BS. I’ve met people with PhDs who didn’t have to write a dissertation. I’ve met PhDs who have who I wonder with true amazement how any institution granted them a PhD. It’s absolutely wild what the variation in quality is for the same piece of paper (if you ignore the name of the institution).

k__ 5y ago

In that image the master is longer than the bachelor, but I learned so much more in my bachelor than in my master.

learc83 5y ago
The bachelors is the whole pink part not just the bump. It looks like more volume overall than the masters. It’s meant to represent the additional breadth. But yeah masters programs do vary widely. When I was in undergrad there were students doing a CS masters coming from other disciplines. They mostly took classes with us and had to write maybe an extra paper to “make it a 6000 level class” (granted I did take more of the theory heavy CS classes than was required). In that case their masters was basically equivalent to just the bump from the bachelors.

ad404b8a372f2b9 5y ago

I was hoping this would be a guide on how to make that dent because I'm four years in and so far I've got nothing to show for it beside personal growth ... which is nice but you can't put that in a thesis.

orforforof 5y ago
That can be really difficult. Having just read the fantastic addendum in the blog post, "HOW TO: Get tenure", I think there is good information in there for finishing a PhD too. My advice is to not be afraid to bring new ideas to the table at this stage; do what your advisor says to do, but also add in your own ideas. In my experience it is normal for a PhD to follow a course of minor progress for 4 years, followed by major success in year 5 once the student hits on a good direction and (more importantly) is able to recognize that for themselves and push forward, while taking on the risk and responsibility that goes with that. Then things start to click into place, your advisor learns to see you as "ready", you start executing as a team, and stuff gets done fast. Maybe this has no relation to what you're struggling with, but just my 2c.

gsich 5y ago

*Mains

zohch 5y ago
Like really, how hard is it to rename a degree, get with the times people, it's 2021.

btrettel 5y ago

I'm glad to see that several other commenters here are picking up on the fact that many PhDs don't actually make novel contributions, contrary to the suggestions of the article [0][1][2]. To add my own 2 cents, I think many people with PhDs believe they pushed the boundaries of knowledge, but many actually did not. As dahart indicated, the boundaries of knowledge look different to different people. Given that, one frequently "reinvents the wheel" because they think they're at the boundary, but they are not. There's this idea that science is incremental, but I don't think it is. It's more of a random walk. And given that much (if not most) research is conducted by relatively ignorant people (PhD students) who do not have much experience in their fields, we should expect people to be starting far from the boundary and "pushing" into areas already explored. The advisor is supposed to provide more knowledge, moving people closer to the boundary, but again, I don't see that happening as often as it should. Too frequently I see exploring previously seen territory while thinking it's unexplored or just accepting ideas about previously explored territory that are wrong. Reinventing the wheel is becoming increasingly likely in my view as the number of published documents increases dramatically, but search technologies, strategies, and habits (most PhDs don't do a comprehensive search or use good search strategies) aren't keeping up. While I do think I had some actually novel contributions during my PhD, I view myself as more of an "intellectual janitor", cleaning up the mess/technical debt that previous researchers left behind. Unfortunately this sort of work is perceived by many researchers as not research. My own PhD advisor was not a fan of this aspect of my work. I tried to be aware of the literature far more than most PhD students. Many people seem to be offended when I point out that their "novel" idea isn't actually novel. In my view, novelty should not be required to get a PhD or publish a paper. One should never be offended that their ideas aren't novel. Disappointed, sure, but offended, no. The only way to have high confidence that an idea is novel/pushes the boundaries is to do a comprehensive search, and even then you can't be 100% sure that you're not missing something. Most PhDs spend far too little time on this aspect. 0xB31B1B got it right: A PhD is training. Because PhD students are so inexperienced, they should not be expected to produce novel research or even recognize what novel research looks like. I think the US should greatly decrease the amount of funding available for PhD positions while increasing the amount of funding for permanent research positions. Total researcher headcount would decrease, sure, but a smaller number of more experienced researchers with stable positions would do a better job overall in my view. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139842 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139567 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139621

Twisol 5y ago

Original by Matt Might at https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/. I'm not sure what this version adds. It mostly seems to copy the original wholesale. And there's more than a little bit of humanity after the copied part that's been left off: > If you zoom in on the boundary of human knowledge in the direction of genetics, there's something just outside humanity's reach: > [image with isolated dot labeled "Knowledge to save my son's life"] > My wife and I chose to start funding these graduate students after we learned that our son has a rare, fatal genetic disorder.

Ryoung27 5y ago
I believe it adds a very bad website design and typos.
hemmert 5y ago
I totally agree.
myself248 5y ago
It would be good to change the URL, this is unquestionably a better source.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Indeed. The Happy Schools source wholesale copied Matt's pictures and thought. On top of that, introducing people to Matt's work is a pleasure and a joy. Consider my input as voting for the Matt Might source to replace the HappySchools link.
- docflabby 5y ago
  Looks like a good case for a DMCA (but we all know that's not what they are for) it's pretty much copy paste rip... You wouldn't steal a car......
  - jholman 5y ago
    This page is clearly consistent with the license granted at Matt's site. It's still an inferior site, but it's kinda wild to accuse someone of theft when they're not stealing.

andrewclunn 5y ago

Were all degrees teaching actual real knowledge, and only those in the academic system able to acquire new knowledge, this would be correct. These "charts" are arrogance posing as humility.

0xTJ 5y ago

This does depend on where you are. I think that in the US master's degrees are different that they are in other many places. It also depends a lot on the master's degree. Some degrees are just more school. Some are a little school with new and innovative research.

spyremeown 5y ago
Very true in my experience. In Brazil, for example, the common engineering curriculum is 5 years and requires an internship and a dissertation, which is gonna be basically a master's thesis - in a good university, which is not the norm around these parts, so I'm very biased -. Many colleagues of mine go to Germany for their master's and get surprised when they realise they already studied most of the material in their undergrad education here.

seahawks78 5y ago

This is mostly accurate and true. A PhD degree is basically "knowing absolutely everything about practically nothing".

rosetremiere 5y ago
In my experience (math, small european university), this is the romantic idea of a Ph.D. more than how it ends up being in practice. In my case (and quite a few others around me), a Ph.D. is some research of varying novelty and complexity, far from making you an expert in the subject(s) at hand, but hopefully enough for your committee to think you deserve the title. In the cases I'm talking about, you're far from becoming this idealized "expert in your specific subfield" with new insights and that further researchers will base their work on; it's mostly grabbing whatever small questions you can try to explore and if possible answering them. Still, I think the idealized version does hold for quite a few people, if not all of us.
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  I think it depends on the field, and on factors like quality of advisor, quality of peers, how much teaching you have to do, etc. In CS, for example, people definitely come out as experts in some niche of their research. Of course, there's a difference between their expertise and that of an experienced professor, but both are quite far from a normal person's knowledge of the field.
  - rosetremiere 5y ago
    Good to know. I just wanted to express the (quite disappointing) fact that not all Ph.D.s match what's being proposed here.
morelandjs 5y ago
While learning the process that enables you to do that.

zohch 5y ago

Rather tone deaf to still refer to it as a masters degree.

amcoastal 5y ago
I think master is less offensive in this context since it's not also coupled with something called 'slave'.
- zohch 5y ago
  It was not coupled with something called slave in git either.
  - amcoastal 5y ago
    Incorrect. Branches subservient to the master were called slave by many, a simple look around GitHub would show this was true. I challenge you to find the "slave" part of a master's degree (except TAing ;) )
marcellus23 5y ago
Eh?
- Hendrikto 5y ago
  Stupid sjw bs. Just ignore that.
tomrod 5y ago
I assume you're "tone deaf" comment refers to recent societal relations in the US, and the response from organizations like Github to rename master branch to main branch. The master/slave duality is certainly an important notion to be worked through in the US. Respectfully, in the context presented here I disagree the "master" context always requires a slave to be a complete concept. This has a good discussion on it: https://www.etymonline.com/word/master https://www.etymonline.com/word/master It's simple to ban (antithesis) the status quo (thesis), but ultimately embracing the nuance leads to a more useful harmony (synthesis) that helps society grow and expand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic)

BenoitP 5y ago

An addition I'd like to make is that this circle is a high dimensional sphere (>300 dimensions IMHO in our current age). Another one is that an alternate representation of this circle can be made by having theta as the x axis, and r as -y. In this representation, a PhD would sort of look like a T: a horizontal bar for general knowledge, and a vertical one going deep down for the PhD. That's the T shape Valve refers to in their handbook [1]. Enough generic knowledge to communicate with your peers, and a deep enough specialty to make an impact. Other areas of specialty would make it look like paint-drip. I believe such a map can be build for an individual through a series of ML-chosen Questions and Answers (ML because this is the tool to explore that high dimensional space), but I don't have time to try to build it :/ I believe one could also assign economic value to some paint-drip patterns. The biology + deep learning paint drip seems to be very hot right now. [1] p.46 https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...

blueflow 5y ago
Don't take the model itself too seriously - its a helper for our brain to conceptualize a few situations, but like all other models, it has its limits.

techcode 5y ago

This totally skipped the fact that some (or most of the world?!?) a while ago started to split applied from theoretical sciences/studies. So in that circle - they would go into slightly different directions.

cupofcoffee 5y ago

People that have spent their entire lives in academia consoling themselves for their wasted years with fancy graphics. :)

chrisseaton 5y ago
Why post something so negative like this?
tonytuttle 5y ago
You should really look Matt Might up. He was an entrepreneur while working on his PhD. While he was a CS professor he had a child who had an extremely rare genetic disorder. He pivoted his entire life and focused all of his energy on learning about his son's condition. Since then he has become the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama. Hardly a career of "wasted years" of an "entire life in academia".
- shagie 5y ago
  > While he was a CS professor he had a child who had an extremely rare genetic disorder. From January of this past year: https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210126/Genetic-interactions-may-shed-light-on-NGLY1-deficiency.aspx https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210126/Genetic-interacti... > In 2012, four-year-old Bertrand Might became the first-ever patient diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called N-glycanase (NGLY1) deficiency. The discovery of this condition and Bertrand's diagnosis allowed doctors to look for other children with the same genetic defect. Since then, more than 60 additional patients have been found. > The disease affects every system of the body and is characterized by low muscle tone, seizures, developmental delays, and an inability to produce tears. > Sadly, Bertrand passed away in October at the age of 12. Although his life was cut short, his legacy will benefit children around the world. Through their website, NGLY1.org, Bertrand's parents collect and share a wealth of research and family stories to help educate and inform the community. As more patients have been identified, it's become apparent that even though the same gene is deactivated in all of them, their symptoms and severity of disease vary widely.

bob229 5y ago

Unless your phd is in critical race or gender studies and your endeavours actually reduce the totality of human knowledge

0xB31B1B 5y ago

IMO the PhD description here isn’t really useful for STEM fields and is too simple/idealized. What you learn in a PhD is how to do science. You learn about: experiment design, getting funding in your field, writing papers in your field, using the tools to understand data, learning who are the people in your field you want to work with/for to achieve your personal research goals etc. It’s not “you make a dent in the universe of knowledge”, its “you learn the stuff you need to know to make a dent in the universe of knowledge”. Actually making the dent is ancillary.

dahfizz 5y ago
Sure, but if you learn all that stuff without actually making a dent, you don't get granted your PhD. All the procedural stuff you learn along the way is necessary, but that's not what the PhD is.
systemvoltage 5y ago
It's also learning to manage how to live on a criminally low salary. If I were to give advice to my kids, that would be a resounding - don't get a PhD. You can do research in industry while getting paid extremely well and most likely your work won't go waste. The only problem is that industry only hires PhDs for serious research - this needs to be reformed. There should be a possibility of allowing non-PhDs learn the process of research while they're working there.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Salary/stipends vary significantly with country and research area. I can tell you that in Sweden for example a PhD student earns significantly above median wage and more than a teacher for example. In engineering you earn about on the same level as a masters graduate (slightly below typically).
localhost 5y ago
I certainly pushed the boundaries of knowledge by a tiny amount during my PhD - that's what publishing is all about. Sure, you're learning how to write the paper, how to conduct the research, how to think about science, etc. but you're also __researching__. Matt gets it exactly right in this description. I remember many years ago a friend's father commenting on my PhD by saying "isn't it wonderful to be the only person in the world to know about this thing that you're working on?" That's the moment when you have your unusual observation, something that nobody else has seen before (or at least nobody has published before) and it truly is a wonderful feeling. You rely on your advisor to tell you work to look initially, and eventually you get good at finding those places to look yourself. As Frank Westheimer once said (paraphrased) "Science starts with an unusual observation. When you have an unusual observation, one of two things has happened: you've made a discovery or you've made a mistake.". That's also an important lesson, and one that formed the core of my PhD.

soumyadeb 5y ago

Mirrors another popular quote. After bachelors, you feel, you know everything. After masters, you feel, you know nothing. After PhD, you feel, noone knows anything.

giantg2 5y ago
I must have skipped the "know everything phase". I've always felt like I know nothing. I have also discovered that no one knows anything (only have an MS, no PhD). Maybe it's just due to the nature tech - even if I know it know it in one tech right now, the tech changes and I dont know it in the other tech.
- soumyadeb 5y ago
  Well, that's your humility. Most undergrads I have come across (me included) feel top of the world after the bachelors and landing a tech job. The better the job offer, more the feeling of you know everything
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I felt that in a different way after starting my first real job. I thought I was making good money and had a great career ahead. Now 10 years later and a MS, I realize I was underpaid, and likely still am, with a job and not a career.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
What on earth did they study that left them with the impression that they knew everything after a bachelor's degree? I and most people I know were left with the impression that we had merely scratched the surface. I studied applied physics in the 70s if that is relevant.

throwawaygh 5y ago

Blatant plagiarism by a website that's being used as a sales funnel for immigration attorneys. Kinda gross and exploitative. Maybe change the link to https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

nabla9 5y ago

Today PhD is just demonstration that you can do research and be understood by other researchers. Maybe 1 in 100 PhD's is meaningful contribution. Postdoc research is where people truly become experts and expand their knowledge.

dahart 5y ago

Geophysicist David Chapman once told me a story that has stuck with me for life… There’s a boundary of what you know, and a boundary of what you think you don’t know. Not the limits of all knowledge, but a belief about where that limit is. When you’re a kid, you already know you don’t know everything, but you see the radius for the rest of it as not that far off, maybe achievable some day. As you grow and learn and go to college and keep studying, the radius of what you know increases proportionally, accumulating little by little. And the radius of what you start to realize that you don’t know increases faster and faster, not just multiplied by the population of the earth, but also by the dawning realization that we collectively know very little. The take home message being that your relative size of knowledge, the more you learn, shrinks asymptotically to zero. In a strange way I find this more comforting than believing that graduate school research is at or even pushing the boundary of collective knowledge; the reality is that most advanced degrees aren’t broaching the boundary nor feeding into the collective.

achillesheels 5y ago
Hear hear! The “doctorate” is a blank paper compared to its former grandeur. It’s astonishing to me, for example, how unmotivated so many disciplines which rely upon human biological phenomena, eg the social sciences, do not actually mandate knowing cellular biology, let alone its electromagnetic phenomena (I’m looking at you medical schools!). It’s not like the knowledge is absent - it’s the will power to continue to learn, as opposed to secure a salary, that is absent. This is the largest divergence between aristocratic and proletarian science: the pursuit of knowledge for its very sake.
- mrbukkake 5y ago
  This comment is pretentious gibberish. What are you actually trying to say? The only concrete critique you seem to be making is that people don't learn "cellular biology" or its "electromagnetic phenomena" at medical school which is just laughably wrong. The second sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense
  - pc86 5y ago

inetsee 5y ago

My first job after college was as a laboratory assistant at the university where I'd gotten my degree. My minor was in computer science, so my job was doing computer programming for the professor I'd done my senior thesis with. The plan was to work for a year or two, then start graduate school. The nice thing about this plan was that I got to see what graduate school was like without actually going to graduate school. After a couple of years I got a job as a programmer at another company (not at another university). I never did go to graduate school.

whatever1 5y ago

The Ph.D. is a piece of paper that shows that for 5+ years you were able to consistently push towards a (previously considered) unattainable goal. It is gruesome, the idea might not work, nobody else can help you because nobody else has tried, nobody cares about the myriad things that you tried and failed. You will literally become a different person after the phd experience. But trust me, these 2-3 nights over the span of 5+ years, when pieces somehow come together and the goddamn thing works, are really worth the effort.

yodsanklai 5y ago
My experience of PhD is more mundane. I didn't discover anything particularly meaningful, or hard, or even useful. Basically, I read papers until I understood the field well-enough so that I was able to make tiny contributions worth publishing and presenting in conferences. That led to a few papers that I eventually compiled in a thesis. I certainly got something out of the experience, but I can't say it made me a different person, or that it gives me an advantage of any sort at my current job (software engineer).
- djenendik 5y ago
  All PhDs are not equal. As mentioned by others in this thread, generalizing probably means fitting to noise.
- apohn 5y ago
  >My experience of PhD is more mundane. I didn't discover anything particularly meaningful, or hard, or even useful. Agreed. I feel the same about my PhD. I did write a book that I could use to put myself to sleep though :)
- downrightmike 5y ago
  That's the positive sum game. To gain something, a lot of people have to put work in to move us all in inch further. That's progress.
- fwilliams 5y ago
  I was a software engineer briefly before starting grad school. During that time, I found I didn't have the time to sit down and learn about topics that interested me. I also wanted to be in research-y roles where I could build things that were more experimental and less well understood. During my PhD, I got to spend time learning, and attending talks/seminars/conferences. Gaining deeper background knowledge in my field as well as learning how to quickly evaluate and explore new ideas gave me the tools to have the type of job I wanted. I'm a research scientist at an industrial lab now and quite enjoy it. That being said, I agree with the grandparent post that doing a PhD can be a grueling experience. I had to carry the bulk of the work for many of the papers I submitted. If I took a day off, nobody would pick up the slack. Tight deadlines meant the only way to succeed was putting in long hours. My advisors were also spread very thin so it was difficult to get a lot of time with them. There were times when I felt very alone. This was a really stark contrast to how collaborative engineering in industry was and I don't think I ever fully adjusted to it. My current job feels like a happy middle ground. I publish papers alongside other people and we split the work.

amelius 5y ago

Until some Ph.D. student invents the AI that will make dents everywhere and in rapid succession ...

analog31 5y ago

Because PhDs are still relatively few and far between, most people have never interacted more than superficially with a small handful of them. And if they happen to meet one who's an asshole or an idiot, that becomes memorable. What if generalizing about PhDs is impossible? What if that's partly the case because the point of the PhD is to let someone establish their own character as a researcher or scholar? Things that deliberately try to elude generalization, are hard to generalize about. If you took me and my lab-mates in grad school, and followed us through our careers, I doubt that any common theme would emerge. What if generalization is further complicated by confounding variables? For instance, PhDs are more common in some fields than others. At my workplace, all of the PhDs have degrees in math or the physical sciences, even if they are working as engineers or programmers. There are no engineering or CS PhDs. Disclosure: Physics PhD

billfruit 5y ago

What if one makes an small contribution through independent study? Will that be sufficient to be granted a Phd? I do hear that some universities offer a PhD by publishing, wherein they grant a degree for already published work. Perhaps a bit like the film making model whose name presently eludes me, where instead of trying to get a funding from a studio to make a film, the filmmakers make it out of their own resource arrangements, and later try to sell the finished film to studios (perhaps for a profit).

xen0 5y ago
In a previous job, I knew a scientist colleague who obtained their PhD in this manner. The number of Universities that allow this is quite small, I believe he said 'two' (in the UK), and he still had to undergo a viva/defense.

dang 5y ago

Some past threads: The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13381843 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13381843 - Jan 2017 (46 comments) The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385881 - March 2013 (49 comments) The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727 - Aug 2010 (42 comments)

Chilicow 5y ago

What a cynical message. What a letdown to prospective entrants to the Distinguished Order of Idealistic Discoverers to be told by a gatekeeper, "Psst.. this Order sucks and nobody discovers or accomplishes much." I was stirred to write a post about the message here and what I believe the message should be. https://telegra.ph/On-Cynicism-11-08 https://telegra.ph/On-Cynicism-11-08

klobosi 5y ago

Ph.D is all about the certificate, which is a symbol of achievement. One can simply self-study a particular topic to gain more knowledge and become an expert.