33 ms·

Lessons from my PhD

403 points by andrewnc 5y ago

ColinWright 5y ago
Invaluable. I've put that on my list of things to distil, review, and put into action.
jenny91 5y ago
This is really good and I've saved it to revisit it later. Very concrete and insightful. Unlike a lot of meta-posts about PhDs that tend to be pretty watered down or abstract.
edu 5y ago
This is really good advice, with actionable tips for once. Bravo!
teekert 5y ago
I also did a PhD and this is all true. I realized many of these things years later. I think many of these points come down to confidence. When you are in the trenches, you really, really do know a lot, and you know it in incredible detail. In fact, in your career, if you leave academia you will probably never know a unique small "thing" in such detail ever again simply because you will have to make something as opposed to studying it. Not even your professor knows everything about what you do, and so she may give advice that seems to contradict what you think. It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It's hard to admit, I know. Also, you may really have wrong assumptions about the progress you're going to make in the project. You may feel very bad after a year of messing around while the prof thinks you're doing well. Talk about these feelings. The prof knows what's normal, you on the other hand may think you're the next Einstein (and assume Einstein wrote something great every other month) and constantly disappoint yourself.
- dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
  Similar to learning software engineering on the job. Once you're leaving the baby level you stop being able to take the more senior engineers' word as golden. You will know some things better temporarily due to recent intense exposure. The tricky part is figuring out when that's true and when others can see something you can't. This never leaves you I guess.
- patrick451 5y ago
  > It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It's hard to admit, I know. It's really not. It was obvious to me about 9 months in that my advisor really didn't know all that much. The professors who really seemed to have technical chops were either new faculty still trying to get tenure, or the rare iconoclast who didn't play the game and had a single grad student. The tenured professors with large research labs were frankly better politicians than they were scientists.
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  >It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. Amen to that! It's better to have the discussion than to silently disagree (well, assuming your thesis advisor isn't a raging narcissist, and assuming you are sufficiently tactful about speaking up) because there's a chance you are mistaken & the feedback would be helpful. >You may feel very bad after a year of messing around while the prof thinks you're doing well. Talk about these feelings. Another one that I wish I had known (again, needs caveats about unhealthy advisors, though). It's easy to underestimate the scale of a task as a grad student (the devil is in the details), and to therefore bite off more than you can chew & feel guilty for choking.
  - teekert 5y ago
    I agree, I was fortunate to have a very nice prof, really dedicated to the development of his PhD students, who saw the importance of social events and tried to have some fun himself, eager to roll up his sleeves and help in the lab, he enjoyed it. He was a bit further in his career with no need to publish or perish anymore. That's also an advice I give to aspiring PhD students, look for a warm place, talk to the other PhD students about the working atmosphere. You don't want to end up a "measurement slave", as one of the 4 PhDs that (and I quote a prof during a talk) "was burned on this subject".
simonbarker87 5y ago
Two things I would add to this that I learned early on in my PhD: 1. Presentations aren’t really about conveying information. I sat though so many dull presentations, they were very informative but I can read a paper quicker than they can badly present the same information. The best presentations were the ones that covered the whys of the work, the applications, the next steps, the specific problem areas - often these aren’t covered in the paper but, armed with that extra insight I am far more likely to read the paper and remember it. Presentations are (as the author says) about telling stories. 2. Show up. So many PhDs waft around not doing a whole lot, and so land up being on the program forever. This only benefits the uni and is detrimental to the student. I noticed in the first month of my PhD that most people did a lot more work at the end than the beginning - so I flipped it, worked consistently from day one and got done in just under 3 years. Carry this over to your daily life and it’s almost a super power for getting stuff done. Consistently showing up and plugging away in something reaps rewards.
- DrBazza 5y ago
  100% agree with number 2. A PhD is a job. 5 days a week, 9 to 5, or you’ll never finish in 3 years. Fastest I saw was 2 years, which was a guy that put in all the hours. Slowest was a guy that took 8 years, ‘full time’, though he was never there, but clearly didn’t have a job. Goodness knows how they supported themselves for all that time. In the uk you had a grant for 3 years when I did mine.
  - simonbarker87 5y ago
    Yep, this was my attitude - I was technically done in 2.5 years but my uni wouldn’t let you submit until 2yr 10 months - so I started my first company in those intervening months. To anyone reading this who is considering a PhD, start writing up your thesis as soon as you can, like 6 months in if you can and have enough to start. You can always go back and change when you’ve written but it makes life so much easier if you’re “always writing up” then you’re not terrified of starting. Oh and yeah: 9 to 5, full time, give yourself a standard holiday allowance and stick to it.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
Unmotivated details are also my pet peeve. I want to know why something is important or valuable before I decide to invest my time and energy into it. Other people generally don't care about your personal struggles with a problem, so leave them out. Or at the very least don't lead with them. Lead with something that piques the interest of your target audience.
bluenose69 5y ago
The topic sentence idea is particularly valuable, and it's something I try to pass on to students. I also use latex macros to turn this on and off (and to put in margin notes, also). All of this advice was so similar to that I give my students that I went to the author's homepage here on HN, to see if it was somebody I had taught. (Nope, wrong field.)
- teekert 5y ago
  I do that too, I tell students to first make a skeleton document, with titles that read like a story. I do the same when programming btw, my function names read like a story with their complexities hidden lower in the class/library. Yes I have function names that some may find ridiculously long but it helps me a lot.
- ivansavz 5y ago
  Would it be possible to share the macro for highlighting topic sentences? I'd love to try that out on a recent draft I'm working on.
  - bluenose69 5y ago
    Sure, I'm pasting it below. Since I might sometimes want bold-face, I am also colouring it red, which my journals will not permit. (I am not sure how this will format in hackernews, but the main thing is that you uncomment either of the two `newcommand` lines.) If you want to do other things, you might want to use the `\if` method, so that altering just one line will let you alter a bunch of properties at once. \documentclass{report} \usepackage{color} \begin{document} \newcommand{\topic}[1]{\color{red}\textbf{#1}\color{black}} %\newcommand{\topic}[1]{#1} \topic{Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.} Praesent vel consectetur est, sed accumsan dolor. \topic{In malesuada in nulla eget aliquam.} In facilisis erat neque, non sollicitudin felis finibus a. Sed pellentesque suscipit lorem, quis lacinia mi suscipit at. \end{document}
- analog31 5y ago
  I did something similar that was quite useful. I wrote a complete outline of my thesis, down to the paragraph level. Then I sat down with my advisor and went over it, before I did any writing. This had a couple useful effects. First, I knew he was in general agreement with my plan. Second, it acknowledged that I was in fact in the writing phase and wasn't doing any more experiments. A useful side effect is that whenever I wasn't feeling really inspired, I could pick a paragraph at random and just fill it in. I would not call any of my paragraphs "filler" but there was stuff that needed to be written down, that didn't require profound brain work to produce. Anyway, that's how we're supposed to write code, right? It was, 30 years ago. ;-)
knolan 5y ago
Solid advice, not just for PhD students. This is also invaluable for helping final year/capstone students navigate their supervisor interactions. There’s nothing better than a student you wind up and they go off and solve a bunch of problems in interesting ways. They’re having fun, you’re workload is reduced and there’s even potential for a publication. Meetings are indeed about giving feedback and learning on both sides. In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening.
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  >In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening. What do you do in that situation? When I encountered it, I assumed it was a communication problem at first, so I asked the student to take notes on what I had requested. This didn't help. I then realized they didn't understand what I had asked for in the first place. I suppose I could have requested they repeat my instructions back in their own words. Ultimately, I figured it was a lack of motivation, b/c they would half-jokingly complain about whatever I requested, and I usually found them watching videos on their computer when I walked by.
  - knolan 5y ago
    It’s hard. In the case of final year students they just need to do enough to get by. This usually means finding something in the project description that they can actually do or are motivated to do. Sometimes you need to have a talk about what is going on. This usually happens after Xmas when they screw up their interim report/presentation. They get to see their peers succeed so it’s a strong motivator. With PhD students it’s even tougher. You have to work with them for years and build them up. Some lack confidence, some are over confident but can’t actually do anything. You need to avoid doing too much for them — that’s the hardest part for me. Occasionally you get postdocs that are difficult. They really should know better at this stage and should not have been hired.
austinjp 5y ago
All true. I learned about topic sentences only recently, I wish I'd heard of them years ago! I'll add something else I have realised: Your Gantt chart is not for you. I hate Gantt charts - they're out of date the second they're created; they take too long to update; there's very little decent free software for them that everyone uses; etc etc. But your supervisor will probably want to see one. Or your funder, or examiners, and so on. That's the point: sometimes you just gotta transform information into the format that's expected. From your perspective it may be easier to say "I've completed task X but task Y will drag on for another two weeks" than it is to update a spreadsheet and render a Gantt chart, attach it to an email and stick it in a shared drive. But from the supervisor/funder/examiner perspective, they need a way to very rapidly assimilate complex detail and spot problems. A lot of academia is about clear communication of complex material. Your supervisor probably has several students, as well multiple projects of their own, teaching duties, management duties, and so on. Your Gantt chart is for them, not for you! Simple and obvious in hindsight, but it really helps me put aside the grinding resentment I feel whenever it comes to updating a Gantt chart :)
XorNot 5y ago
My lesson from my failed Ph.D (graduated with a Master's in Chemistry after far too long) is that after the first year take a long critical look at what you're planning to accomplish and whether you really made the progress you needed too. I didn't, and simply tried to power ahead on the assumption I'd pull it out of the fire: this was absolutely the wrong conclusion. You already have a university degree, and you'll get paid more in industry: the right answer is to abandon ship it you're not looking at a clear path ahead by then.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  A first year is a pretty harsh deadline to set yourself to know what you’re doing. Most people I know’s PhDs only came together in the last 18 months of their degree.
  - natechols 5y ago
    For most people in my program and others like it (molecular biology, US) the decision point tended to be at the end of the second year, after the qualifying exam(s). This is because the first year tends to be full of lab rotations and some classes, and you don't really start doing research until nine months in.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      My program was pure research, so I'd say that decision point lines up pretty well with the "1 year of research in, are you looking good?" Though it seems weird to me to be in classes and labs without it being associated with it's own academic achievement (did that qualify as a certificate of any sort?)
      - natechols 5y ago
        If you dropped out after passing the qualifying exam, you got an MS.
hkab 5y ago
Really helpful! I love the 'Managers as input/output machines' part.
cyberlurker 5y ago
All of these tips are good, but the “get excited” one has been my secret weapon through life. A professor in undergrad gave me the tip to get excited or even feign interest when reading dense written material in order to retain more. After trying it throughout a difficult class I was amazed at how well it worked. I applied it to every other academic thing I didn’t want to do and noticed immediately how much easier and enjoyable school was. I still use the “fake excitement” trick for my work all the time. Also, it’s kind of like a Trojan excitement because after I fake the intense interest I do genuinely become interested more often than not.
- schoolornot 5y ago
  It's hard to remain excited when so many professors don't prepare for lectures, teach outdated material, rely on question banks for exams, and play the part of ball-breakers. I went back to school for a different degree program in my 30s with a fresh perspective and a much bigger drive from 15 years ago when I did my first two degrees. Mind you that it was during COVID but what did I get? A bunch of "read these chapters, take these exams" kind of lectures. The current education model is shot, particularly the PhD degree where you practically grind out nonsense for years on end only for your advisor to collect the funds and stick their name on top of your papers.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    > stick their name on top of your papers. Maybe you have a more independent mindset having gone into a PhD program a little later than most, but the whole point of a PhD program (at least in the sciences) is that it’s an apprenticeship. You study under an established researcher using their grant, so it’s not “your” paper. You are supposed to work together using grant money from your advisor. If you have obtained grant funding on your own and are working independently on a novel research project you thought of yourself, then you can call it your paper. But that scenario usually doesn’t happen, because it’s hard to come by funding without a good proposal, and it’s hard to write or qualify for a grant without the training one gets in a PhD program. If you are working using grant money, lab equipment, lab space, data, models, software, or methods acquired and developed in your advisor’s lab, then even if you write an entire paper yourself it’s still both your names that go on the paper. I’ve had a few like that and was glad to share the credit, because it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.
pezzana 5y ago
Missing from this actionable survey is the skill of answering questions that haven't yet been answered in the secondary literature (books, reviews) or even primary literature (journals). This is, of course, what research and a PhD is all about in the end. In my experience, this fact was the #1 reason why some peers dropped out of PhD programs. They joined expecting a continuation of undergraduate education, which consists largely of recapitulating what appears in the secondary literature. Instead, what they got in graduate school was the expectation that they would be producing the primary literature. That's a very different game. It was a game these peers discovered they hated playing. Nothing in college can prepare you for the isolation of spending your time becoming the world's expert on a narrow technical topic. Your usual reinforcement mechanisms of approval from family and friends gives way to slight comprehension at best. Then there is all of the alone time doing research requires. But I suspect the hardest part of all is the seemingly endless lineup of dead ends and false hope. Not only is success not assured, you often have no idea whether the result will have any utility even if you succeed. Then, just when you've gotten the hang of this finding answers game you discover that the real expectation is to be the one who formulates good questions. The kinds of questions that, although they will certainly involve dead ends, will ultimately pay off in some meaningful way. Very little in a bachelor's prepares you for doing this. It's a hard-won skill that comes from a round or two (or three or four) of months (or years) spent answering questions that nobody cares about. A lot hinges on your relationship with your advisor on this one. The PhD isn't just a bachelors degree but harder. It's a completely different animal. The skills in this article are very useful toward that end. But there's a lot more to the story when it comes to skills for finding answers to those unanswered questions, and formulating worthwhile questions without answers. The benefit of all of this work and discomfort is that you come away with the ability to answer worthwhile questions that haven't yet been answered. And that's a highly transferrable and applicable skill.
- OccamsRazr 5y ago
  And this makes everything else in the survey easier. Topic sentences and presentation skills are useful but most important is having something original and substantial to say. The rest follows and is easy by comparison.
- 5y ago
nabla9 5y ago
The value in formal education is mostly reading, writing, and thinking skills. How to express and communicate increasingly complex ideas to others. PhD is not much different. There was just a Reddit post saying that 54% of US adults have a reading level equal to or below a sixth-grade level according to the US Department of Education. Many communication problems can be attributed to differences in prose, document, and numeracy literacy. "If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking." – H. G. Wells
evancoop 5y ago
The "lead or be led" trope is apt, and certainly became the paradigm of my doctoral years. I might, however, amend this slightly. There's another idea of going rogue too soon or too late (https://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/ https://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/). Students, new employees, and other inexperienced folks need to be led initially, and then rapidly, transition into a self-directed paradigm. Success emerges if and only if the advisor and student recognize the need for this transition at a similar moment. The alternative is either the student who runs down rabbit holes repeatedly despite being guided elsewhere (those students tend to at least get SOMETHING done and while they take forever to graduate, do find some interesting results along the way) or the student who after a couple years is still just reading papers and waiting to be told what to do (these students often fail outright as advisors get fed up with the hand-holding).
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  Great point. I clashed a bit with my advisor early on - they were trying to shepherd me away from a rabbithole, but I was a bit pigheaded and determined to fix something that I felt was sloppy. I ended up with a publication on it, but it probably wasn't a great use of my time (aside from providing me with a chance to flex my wings).
  - evancoop 5y ago
    It seems like, in your case, the publication is evidence that the rabbit hole was at least original and interesting. Students in that category tend to graduate, have a few compelling results to their name, and simply expend a couple extra semesters relative to the average. The real question is whether they learn to focus efforts on the relevant goal (in which case, these original thinkers with innate curiosity can be fantastic hires) or continue their rabbit-hole-exploring ways (in which case they generate publications as post-docs, but generally struggle in the private sector where folks want THEIR questions answers ASAP). Which are you? (Fascinating discussion!)
    - lambdatronics 5y ago
andreyk 5y ago
Nice list! A bit micro on a few points, but nice things to highlight. On a zoomed out View, a PhD will teach you a lot about the life cycle of creative projects in general - idea inception, prototyping, feedback, iteration, presentation. It will also teach you perseverance - oh boy, will it teach you perseverance. At the same time, it will not teach you some things you'd pick up in industry - team work in particular.
neom 5y ago
My wife is finishing up her PhD in American History and I can tell she's getting bored, at least demotivated reading a billion books a week. I've seen this motivation decline in a lot of founders as well 4/5 years into their startups, but I've not seen much reignite the fire. Can anyone recommend any specific tips for staying motivated through a PhD?
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Your wife is bored because she’s gotten what she can out of the program, and the dissertation is a slog. I had the same experience. This is why there is a term for people who do the whole program but drop out without finishing the dissertation: ABD (all but dissertation). It’s the one non-degree people feel justified to list on their resume, because it takes at least 4 years to get there, and it’s still quite an achievement. I was ABD for 3 years when I got bored, and I almost quit. I figured since I had all the skills, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have the degree. It’s just a meaningless credential. I asked a friend of mine who had gotten his degree whether it was worth it, and he said “Don’t do it, the plus side isn’t that great” Then I went to his wedding. He was the only PhD in his family, and his mother made the DJ introduce him as “Doctor”. What he considered a meaningless credential made his whole family so happy and proud. That moment made me change my mind, and I finished my PhD. And you know what, he was wrong about the credential being meaningless. Employers look at you differently when you are ABD versus PhD. He didn’t experience that because he was never ABD. Truly it was like night and day. Governments care when applying for visas. Grant agencies care. There is also a lucrative market for expert opinions, and ABD are not considered at all in this market. Credentials matter in our society, even if they don’t matter so much in the tech sector. Anyway, I hope something I said here will convince your wife to stick it out! If you want a specific tip, I would say take a leave of absence. For me I could take up to 2 years off no questions asked, and rejoin. If her school has a similar policy, she can use that time to recharge, and come back fresh and ready to bang out her dissertation.
  - neom 5y ago
    wow this is really great advice! And funnily parallels what I see in founders, founders who start their startups for the wrong reasons (Sam raised a $3MM seed and I'm smarter than Sam so I bet I can raise a $5MM seed. Shit, I raised a $5MM seed). Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I'll share your words with her.
graycat 5y ago
Lessons from my Ph.D.: (1) Role of Math. In most fields of research, the most respected research mathematizes the field, that is, makes progress with math techniques and results. So for Ph.D. research, try to have math play that role. (2) Ugrad Preparation. To be successful with that role of math, have a good ugrad math background. Then maybe get some more math from independent study, work in a career, a Master's program, or whatever. Likely the math topics that both come first and are the most important are calculus and linear algebra. (3) Find a Good Problem. In your career, independent study, whatever, find a good problem to solve. Pick a practical problem and intend to get an engineering Ph.D. where a solution to that problem is regarded as good research. Make some progress on solving the problem. (4) Pick a University and a Department. Want a department that respects applied research, maybe in a school of engineering. Hopefully the university will state their standards for a Ph.D. dissertation, e.g., "An original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication." Look at their description of their Ph.D. qualifying exams. Do enough study at the ugrad or Master's level and/or independent study to be well prepared for the exams. If the department offers courses for preparation for the exams, in addition plan to take those courses. (5) Enroll. Become a grad student in the chosen department. (6) Progress. In your first year, take some courses, especially in subjects you already know well. Continue your research. Pass the qualifying exams. If you see some opportunities for doing some fast publishable research, as co-author, better as sole author, do that. Show the department that you have done publishable research. Then, sure, technically will have done a Ph.D. dissertation (I did that). (7) Finish. In your second year, finish your research project, stand for an oral exam, and graduate. Of course, if there is any question about your research being publishable, then just PUBLISH it. Done.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  I think a 2 year PhD is very atypical in my field (CS). In my experience I learned a different lesson than you when it comes to 3 and 4. I found that more important than anything, picking an advisor is the way to choose your PhD. They have such an outsized role over your experience, much more than the University, Department, or even the problem IMO. To give some context as to my experience: - PhDs are funded. You get a stipend and tuition is paid for. This funding is either through a research assistantship (RA), or a teaching assistantship (TA). Either way you are expected to devote 20 hours a week to this task, and the rest would be devoted to your coursework. Typically you take 9 credits per semester for about 4 years, and then after you enter candidacy (you're not really considered a PhD candidate until you pass qualifiers, before then you're a mere PhD "student") you reduce that to a 1 credit "dissertation maintenance" per semester. - Grant money is the lifeblood of a PhD granting research-focused department. Here's how the economy of a typical CS department works: -- Newly hired faculty are given a "startup grant" that they use to bootstrap a lab. Their motivation is they want to get tenure in 6-8 years. To do that, they will need to justify to the Dean that they are capable of generating sufficient grant revenue. -- Grant agencies award grants largely based on published research papers. Therefore the primary directive of a new academic is to publish research, and use that to obtain grants. Hence the phrase "Publish or perish"; if a researcher fails to get enough grants when the tenure clock is up, they will usually be put out to pasture; failing to get tenure is the death knell for a young academic's career. -- So they hire a couple PhD students as RAs and they work on producing research papers for conferences. The new academic uses the published research in grant applications (the first target is usually the CAREER award). Soon enough grant this grant money is flowing to the researcher and they use it to pay for all sorts of things. Chiefly though, it is used to pay for the stipends and tuition of graduate RAs. - As an RA, you will be expected to spend 20 hours per week on grant funded research. This means you don't have room to explore your own research topics! All of the grant money is allocated for the funded grant research, not your own whims. The best you can do is carve out some interesting angle on the research that you can call your own. - By the time you get to maintaining your candidacy, you're already knee deep in publications on the funded research project. The path of least resistance at this point is to bundle them up into a dissertation and defend it. - If you have your own research agenda, now is the time to execute it as a faculty member at another University. One of their primary concerns during hiring will be: "How is your research agenda different from your advisors?" You will perhaps not be surprised to find that many candidates fresh out of a PhD program will not have their own original thoughts yet. This is why many departments prefer that a new PhD actually take some time doing a postdoc where they can gain some independence from their mentor. Anyway, what I would say is that instead of picking a problem or a university or a department, pick a person you want to work with for the next 5-8+ years. Like I said, 2 years is very atypical. In my department, we have built in buffers that would make the minimum I think 3 years with a Master's, and even then I think the typical time would be 4 years.
xab31 5y ago
My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity: - Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains/does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in person or in writing, they may well make a variety of unwanted psychological deductions about you. - Similarly, nobody actually enjoys being around critics or enduring criticism, and therefore you will observe many senior scientists partially avoiding the major downsides of being a critic by artfully concealing criticisms inside what sounds to the uninitiated like mutual affirmation sessions. You have to listen very closely and learn the lingo to pick this up. - Never question a scientific superior (other than maybe a direct mentor or very close colleague) with any other approach besides "I have a helpful suggestion about how you can maybe reach your intended destination better/faster/more precisely". Regardless of where that destination might be, such as off a cliff or into a wall. - The opinion/fact ratio you are allowed to have as a scientist is directly and very strongly correlated with seniority, H-index, and so on. - The incentive structure of scientific publication is such that there are big rewards for being right on an important question, bigger the earlier you are to the party, and little to no penalties for being wrong, so long as the error cannot be provably and directly linked to fraud. There are a variety of interesting consequences to this incentive structure.
- kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
  This is true here, as well. I once asked about something related to SSL/TLS (fairly politely) and was kind of mockingly escorted by some groupies to the corner since I apparently responded to an Apache developer. I was just trying to learn. Learning bad is what I learned.
- zebraflask 5y ago
  That seems to ring true, but - it also seems a bit defeatist, don't you think? "Never question a scientific superior?" Not parsing that concept, please elaborate.
  - 5y ago
th9283749238 5y ago
There is another, more fundamental lesson, that I learned during my (failed) PhD - make sure that the environment suits you. By this, I mean do some research beforehand about the supervisor and the alumni. If possible talk to one of the other PhD candidates in their department and find out if you are compatible with the working environment. This could be hard to do such early in your life, as one does not have much experience. Usually it falls in one of two categories - either you are someone that can do the work but needs support and guidance, or you prefer working on your own, in which case a more hands-off supervisor would be OK. If you are of the former type and find yourself working for a supervisor that doesn't offer much support, it will be very hard to finish anything, and most likely you will become demotivated and drop out. Likewise, if you want to try things on your own but your supervisor wants to dictate where to go next, there will be a lot of conflicts and even the possibility that they block the thesis until it is done their way. Having other PhD colleagues around and bouncing ideas off of them is worth its weight in gold, make sure that there is at least one that is working on something similar as you are.
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  Yeah, this is great advice for undergraduates considering graduate applications. I lucked out with my supervisor in terms of his advising style (rather hands-off, which suited me), but I could have easily gotten stuck with a bad match. I picked the school, rather than the advisor, which I now realize wasn't the best way to go. [Edit: I will say that picking a school where there were multiple faculty to choose from in the topical area was a good decision, because that provides options.]
engineer_22 5y ago
You could have learned all of this stuff at a good mid sized company.
mybrid 5y ago
YMMV. What I learned from experience that I already knew from education is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is a real tension when picking a graduate school. Do you go with the topic of interest and a tyrant? Or do you pick an amenable advisor that's in a different research field? I guess one can get lucky and find both but that wasn't an option the year I applied. The thing about graduate schools and research domains is that there a typically only a handful of choices if one is lucky. The other thing I learned is graduate schools never admit absolute power corrupts absolutely and when one points that out one is immediately ostracized. Go along to get along should be a sign over ever graduate schools doorway. Or dog eat dog.
anthomtb 5y ago
If I had written this article myself and titled it “Lessons from my First Year as a Full Time Software Dev” a lot of the bullets would have been the same. Especially the Daily Progress and Get Excited bullets. Those two tend to go hand-in-hand given how often you need to do a thing with the only tangible reward being the accomplishment of the thing.
l5870uoo9y 5y ago
> Lead or be led > If you show up to a meeting/internship/job expecting to be told what to do, then chances are someone will tell you something to do... Alternatively, if you show up to a meeting/internship/job with a convincing game plan, then chances are people will get out of your way so you can go do it. Wholeheartedly agree.
gww 5y ago
One point that I seem rarely mentioned especially in the life sciences is learning when to tell your mentor that you have enough to leave. In my experience a lot of labs will try to keep their senior PhD students around as long as they can because they don't have a suitable replacement and they are cheap labour. I know people who stick around for 6 to 10 years to chase after a high impact paper (that doesn't often manifest) or they can't let their work go and pass it off to someone else, or in the very malicious cases the PI won't let them go until they publish another paper etc. The department I was in was determined to get the average PhD down to less than six years but still hasn't reached that point. The trainees supervisory committee is usually there to push them out but in many cases they also have a close relationship with the PI and aren't going to force a productive student to graduate. Those extra years are rarely useful for their overall career prospects. I think students need to be aware of when they should draw the line and move on. Spending three more years in their PhD probably won't pay off nearly as much as three years of accumulated experience in industry job or in a post doctoral fellowship in a new lab.
- lambdatronics 5y ago
  Yeah, I have seen instances where it's the student's lack of drive/progress, the PI being unreasonable, the student's project was too ambitious, plain bad luck (lab equipment caught fire & destroyed), or time taken off for family considerations (child-birth, caring for ailing parents). I graduated in 6 years (including 2 years of coursework), which was the mode (not the median, though) for my department. The distribution skewed to the long side, and 5 years was the shortest I can recall.
vkk8 5y ago
I did a PhD in physics and feel like I missed all the great "meta lessons" some people seem to learn in their PhD. Mostly I just spent my time alone doing calculations either with pen and paper or computer. Most of the stuff I did was either suggested by my supervisor or was obvious continuation of some previous work. Even after I got my PhD I didn't feel like I was really a member of the research community or that I had a PhD level command of my field. I just did a bunch of calculations, wrote papers on what I did and got a PhD. It was almost like doing homework on a really long course, but just more difficult. I left academia after a failed postdoc because I realized I had no clue how to conduct research on my own; I didn't know how to pick good research topics, or how to manage my time, or how to find people to collaborate with, or how to collaborate productively with someone for that matter. I'm not sure if the fault was my supervisors or mine. I'm a bit "on the spectrum" and have lots of difficulties with social interaction, but I guess so do many other people drawn to technical fields and still they manage to navigate the system somehow. I certainly never sought for any kind of mentorship because I didn't realize it was needed and, also, because it felt extremely awkward. Also, the whole academic system seemed a bit fucked up. People do research and write papers because they have to produce something measurable, not because the research they do is actually interesting or important. I published five papers during my PhD and I would say that maybe only one of them was slightly interesting or important, and even that could have been much better. All of the papers were published in proper, highly regarded journals (mostly Physical Review). Towards the end of the PhD I started having some vague ideas of stuff that would be _actually_ interesting and more worth my time, but also more difficult and less certain results. When was I supposed to do those? I was still in the mindset that I wanted to stay in academia so I couldn't take any risks.
- anonymousDan 5y ago
  To be honest, that's kind of normal and 5 papers is pretty good going for a PhD (assuming at least some of them were at reputable venues). The truism is that you should view the PhD as training you how to do research, but not necessarily that the results you produce will be in anyway ground breaking. Of course there are exceptions. As you develop it would be expected you apply for funding/fellowships to pursue more difficult problems etc. and demonstrate more independence.
- 5y ago
wanderingmind 5y ago
The author became a professor unlike the 90% of the other PhD graduates, so you need to take all the lessons with a heavy dose of selective bias. Most of the things the article talks about is the effective processes the author has learned during PhD. This is definitely useful in any work where agency is involved. However, these effective routines can be learned from a decent job in a good organization and does not need a PhD. There is nothing in the article that suggests a unique learning that can be achieved only through pouring years into an endless pursuit like PhD. In my opinion, there is nothing unique that can be learned only through a PhD for a successful career (except maybe for a tiny slice of outlier of CS researchers). Most people will be well better served to take a job that provides some agency, or better try to start a company and fail. They can learn a lot more this way without jeopardizing their financial future.
- mcguire 5y ago
  "Most of what I learned during my PhD had nothing to do with my dissertation topic, grad school, or even computer science. "These lessons are so ingrained into me now that I'm shocked when I find out that not everyone knows them! I think they can be applied to virtually any office job." Taking a job that provides some agency is harder than it sounds. As is starting a company and failing without jeopardizing one's financial future. (And not everyone is really enthusiastic about learning those lessons that can only be learned that way.)
  - wanderingmind 5y ago
    You can LC for a few months closed door to get a decent SWE job in a good company that can provide you enough agency. PhD on the other hand requires spending 5+ years in a lab cutoff from reality and ending up with no skills to get a real world job. Yes you lose some money (mostly other people money) if a company fails, but the learnings are well worth the loss of money. Its definitely not the case with a PhD.
ixnus 5y ago
Great article. I especially loved the parts about presenting, greying out the boring stuff makes a ton of sense. What is the appeal of posting your daily progress on a public form? Do you not feel this to be a kind of invasion of your privacy? Is there some benefit that isn't immediately clear?
jl2718 5y ago
I do not have a PhD, but this is how I believe professional work should (and probably used to) operate. I’m extremely bored and annoyed by management practices that do nothing but track and assign work. When I started my career, it seemed a like a lot like a PhD described here. It was in space systems, and everybody was responsible for finding a problem to solve independently within the mission requirements. In that scenario, a PhD felt like a waste of time compared to professional work. Today it feels like I sorely need it (or an MBA) to climb the micromanagement hierarchy. Is there such a place today as a professional?

403 points by andrewnc 5y ago

Invaluable. I've put that on my list of things to distil, review, and put into action.

This is really good and I've saved it to revisit it later. Very concrete and insightful. Unlike a lot of meta-posts about PhDs that tend to be pretty watered down or abstract.

edu 5y ago

This is really good advice, with actionable tips for once. Bravo!

teekert 5y ago

I also did a PhD and this is all true. I realized many of these things years later. I think many of these points come down to confidence. When you are in the trenches, you really, really do know a lot, and you know it in incredible detail. In fact, in your career, if you leave academia you will probably never know a unique small "thing" in such detail ever again simply because you will have to make something as opposed to studying it. Not even your professor knows everything about what you do, and so she may give advice that seems to contradict what you think. It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It's hard to admit, I know. Also, you may really have wrong assumptions about the progress you're going to make in the project. You may feel very bad after a year of messing around while the prof thinks you're doing well. Talk about these feelings. The prof knows what's normal, you on the other hand may think you're the next Einstein (and assume Einstein wrote something great every other month) and constantly disappoint yourself.

dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
Similar to learning software engineering on the job. Once you're leaving the baby level you stop being able to take the more senior engineers' word as golden. You will know some things better temporarily due to recent intense exposure. The tricky part is figuring out when that's true and when others can see something you can't. This never leaves you I guess.
patrick451 5y ago
> It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. It's hard to admit, I know. It's really not. It was obvious to me about 9 months in that my advisor really didn't know all that much. The professors who really seemed to have technical chops were either new faculty still trying to get tenure, or the rare iconoclast who didn't play the game and had a single grad student. The tenured professors with large research labs were frankly better politicians than they were scientists.
lambdatronics 5y ago
>It is vital that you trust yourself enough to speak up. Yes, the professor is really smart, and knows more than you, but she didn't spend 3 weeks in the lab wrestling with some optical setup like you did and you know some things better then her, better than anyone in fact. Amen to that! It's better to have the discussion than to silently disagree (well, assuming your thesis advisor isn't a raging narcissist, and assuming you are sufficiently tactful about speaking up) because there's a chance you are mistaken & the feedback would be helpful. >You may feel very bad after a year of messing around while the prof thinks you're doing well. Talk about these feelings. Another one that I wish I had known (again, needs caveats about unhealthy advisors, though). It's easy to underestimate the scale of a task as a grad student (the devil is in the details), and to therefore bite off more than you can chew & feel guilty for choking.
- teekert 5y ago
  I agree, I was fortunate to have a very nice prof, really dedicated to the development of his PhD students, who saw the importance of social events and tried to have some fun himself, eager to roll up his sleeves and help in the lab, he enjoyed it. He was a bit further in his career with no need to publish or perish anymore. That's also an advice I give to aspiring PhD students, look for a warm place, talk to the other PhD students about the working atmosphere. You don't want to end up a "measurement slave", as one of the 4 PhDs that (and I quote a prof during a talk) "was burned on this subject".

simonbarker87 5y ago

Two things I would add to this that I learned early on in my PhD: 1. Presentations aren’t really about conveying information. I sat though so many dull presentations, they were very informative but I can read a paper quicker than they can badly present the same information. The best presentations were the ones that covered the whys of the work, the applications, the next steps, the specific problem areas - often these aren’t covered in the paper but, armed with that extra insight I am far more likely to read the paper and remember it. Presentations are (as the author says) about telling stories. 2. Show up. So many PhDs waft around not doing a whole lot, and so land up being on the program forever. This only benefits the uni and is detrimental to the student. I noticed in the first month of my PhD that most people did a lot more work at the end than the beginning - so I flipped it, worked consistently from day one and got done in just under 3 years. Carry this over to your daily life and it’s almost a super power for getting stuff done. Consistently showing up and plugging away in something reaps rewards.

DrBazza 5y ago
100% agree with number 2. A PhD is a job. 5 days a week, 9 to 5, or you’ll never finish in 3 years. Fastest I saw was 2 years, which was a guy that put in all the hours. Slowest was a guy that took 8 years, ‘full time’, though he was never there, but clearly didn’t have a job. Goodness knows how they supported themselves for all that time. In the uk you had a grant for 3 years when I did mine.
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  Yep, this was my attitude - I was technically done in 2.5 years but my uni wouldn’t let you submit until 2yr 10 months - so I started my first company in those intervening months. To anyone reading this who is considering a PhD, start writing up your thesis as soon as you can, like 6 months in if you can and have enough to start. You can always go back and change when you’ve written but it makes life so much easier if you’re “always writing up” then you’re not terrified of starting. Oh and yeah: 9 to 5, full time, give yourself a standard holiday allowance and stick to it.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

Unmotivated details are also my pet peeve. I want to know why something is important or valuable before I decide to invest my time and energy into it. Other people generally don't care about your personal struggles with a problem, so leave them out. Or at the very least don't lead with them. Lead with something that piques the interest of your target audience.

bluenose69 5y ago

The topic sentence idea is particularly valuable, and it's something I try to pass on to students. I also use latex macros to turn this on and off (and to put in margin notes, also). All of this advice was so similar to that I give my students that I went to the author's homepage here on HN, to see if it was somebody I had taught. (Nope, wrong field.)

teekert 5y ago
I do that too, I tell students to first make a skeleton document, with titles that read like a story. I do the same when programming btw, my function names read like a story with their complexities hidden lower in the class/library. Yes I have function names that some may find ridiculously long but it helps me a lot.
ivansavz 5y ago
Would it be possible to share the macro for highlighting topic sentences? I'd love to try that out on a recent draft I'm working on.
- bluenose69 5y ago
  Sure, I'm pasting it below. Since I might sometimes want bold-face, I am also colouring it red, which my journals will not permit. (I am not sure how this will format in hackernews, but the main thing is that you uncomment either of the two `newcommand` lines.) If you want to do other things, you might want to use the `\if` method, so that altering just one line will let you alter a bunch of properties at once. \documentclass{report} \usepackage{color} \begin{document} \newcommand{\topic}[1]{\color{red}\textbf{#1}\color{black}} %\newcommand{\topic}[1]{#1} \topic{Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.} Praesent vel consectetur est, sed accumsan dolor. \topic{In malesuada in nulla eget aliquam.} In facilisis erat neque, non sollicitudin felis finibus a. Sed pellentesque suscipit lorem, quis lacinia mi suscipit at. \end{document}
analog31 5y ago
I did something similar that was quite useful. I wrote a complete outline of my thesis, down to the paragraph level. Then I sat down with my advisor and went over it, before I did any writing. This had a couple useful effects. First, I knew he was in general agreement with my plan. Second, it acknowledged that I was in fact in the writing phase and wasn't doing any more experiments. A useful side effect is that whenever I wasn't feeling really inspired, I could pick a paragraph at random and just fill it in. I would not call any of my paragraphs "filler" but there was stuff that needed to be written down, that didn't require profound brain work to produce. Anyway, that's how we're supposed to write code, right? It was, 30 years ago. ;-)

knolan 5y ago

Solid advice, not just for PhD students. This is also invaluable for helping final year/capstone students navigate their supervisor interactions. There’s nothing better than a student you wind up and they go off and solve a bunch of problems in interesting ways. They’re having fun, you’re workload is reduced and there’s even potential for a publication. Meetings are indeed about giving feedback and learning on both sides. In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening.

lambdatronics 5y ago
>In contrast other students show up empty handed, unmotivated and expect a list of instructions some of which they might attempt. You feel like repeating yourself constantly and that they are not listening. What do you do in that situation? When I encountered it, I assumed it was a communication problem at first, so I asked the student to take notes on what I had requested. This didn't help. I then realized they didn't understand what I had asked for in the first place. I suppose I could have requested they repeat my instructions back in their own words. Ultimately, I figured it was a lack of motivation, b/c they would half-jokingly complain about whatever I requested, and I usually found them watching videos on their computer when I walked by.
- knolan 5y ago
  It’s hard. In the case of final year students they just need to do enough to get by. This usually means finding something in the project description that they can actually do or are motivated to do. Sometimes you need to have a talk about what is going on. This usually happens after Xmas when they screw up their interim report/presentation. They get to see their peers succeed so it’s a strong motivator. With PhD students it’s even tougher. You have to work with them for years and build them up. Some lack confidence, some are over confident but can’t actually do anything. You need to avoid doing too much for them — that’s the hardest part for me. Occasionally you get postdocs that are difficult. They really should know better at this stage and should not have been hired.

austinjp 5y ago

All true. I learned about topic sentences only recently, I wish I'd heard of them years ago! I'll add something else I have realised: Your Gantt chart is not for you. I hate Gantt charts - they're out of date the second they're created; they take too long to update; there's very little decent free software for them that everyone uses; etc etc. But your supervisor will probably want to see one. Or your funder, or examiners, and so on. That's the point: sometimes you just gotta transform information into the format that's expected. From your perspective it may be easier to say "I've completed task X but task Y will drag on for another two weeks" than it is to update a spreadsheet and render a Gantt chart, attach it to an email and stick it in a shared drive. But from the supervisor/funder/examiner perspective, they need a way to very rapidly assimilate complex detail and spot problems. A lot of academia is about clear communication of complex material. Your supervisor probably has several students, as well multiple projects of their own, teaching duties, management duties, and so on. Your Gantt chart is for them, not for you! Simple and obvious in hindsight, but it really helps me put aside the grinding resentment I feel whenever it comes to updating a Gantt chart :)

XorNot 5y ago

My lesson from my failed Ph.D (graduated with a Master's in Chemistry after far too long) is that after the first year take a long critical look at what you're planning to accomplish and whether you really made the progress you needed too. I didn't, and simply tried to power ahead on the assumption I'd pull it out of the fire: this was absolutely the wrong conclusion. You already have a university degree, and you'll get paid more in industry: the right answer is to abandon ship it you're not looking at a clear path ahead by then.

chrisseaton 5y ago
A first year is a pretty harsh deadline to set yourself to know what you’re doing. Most people I know’s PhDs only came together in the last 18 months of their degree.
- natechols 5y ago
  For most people in my program and others like it (molecular biology, US) the decision point tended to be at the end of the second year, after the qualifying exam(s). This is because the first year tends to be full of lab rotations and some classes, and you don't really start doing research until nine months in.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    My program was pure research, so I'd say that decision point lines up pretty well with the "1 year of research in, are you looking good?" Though it seems weird to me to be in classes and labs without it being associated with it's own academic achievement (did that qualify as a certificate of any sort?)
    - natechols 5y ago
      If you dropped out after passing the qualifying exam, you got an MS.

hkab 5y ago

Really helpful! I love the 'Managers as input/output machines' part.

cyberlurker 5y ago

All of these tips are good, but the “get excited” one has been my secret weapon through life. A professor in undergrad gave me the tip to get excited or even feign interest when reading dense written material in order to retain more. After trying it throughout a difficult class I was amazed at how well it worked. I applied it to every other academic thing I didn’t want to do and noticed immediately how much easier and enjoyable school was. I still use the “fake excitement” trick for my work all the time. Also, it’s kind of like a Trojan excitement because after I fake the intense interest I do genuinely become interested more often than not.

schoolornot 5y ago
It's hard to remain excited when so many professors don't prepare for lectures, teach outdated material, rely on question banks for exams, and play the part of ball-breakers. I went back to school for a different degree program in my 30s with a fresh perspective and a much bigger drive from 15 years ago when I did my first two degrees. Mind you that it was during COVID but what did I get? A bunch of "read these chapters, take these exams" kind of lectures. The current education model is shot, particularly the PhD degree where you practically grind out nonsense for years on end only for your advisor to collect the funds and stick their name on top of your papers.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > stick their name on top of your papers. Maybe you have a more independent mindset having gone into a PhD program a little later than most, but the whole point of a PhD program (at least in the sciences) is that it’s an apprenticeship. You study under an established researcher using their grant, so it’s not “your” paper. You are supposed to work together using grant money from your advisor. If you have obtained grant funding on your own and are working independently on a novel research project you thought of yourself, then you can call it your paper. But that scenario usually doesn’t happen, because it’s hard to come by funding without a good proposal, and it’s hard to write or qualify for a grant without the training one gets in a PhD program. If you are working using grant money, lab equipment, lab space, data, models, software, or methods acquired and developed in your advisor’s lab, then even if you write an entire paper yourself it’s still both your names that go on the paper. I’ve had a few like that and was glad to share the credit, because it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

pezzana 5y ago

Missing from this actionable survey is the skill of answering questions that haven't yet been answered in the secondary literature (books, reviews) or even primary literature (journals). This is, of course, what research and a PhD is all about in the end. In my experience, this fact was the #1 reason why some peers dropped out of PhD programs. They joined expecting a continuation of undergraduate education, which consists largely of recapitulating what appears in the secondary literature. Instead, what they got in graduate school was the expectation that they would be producing the primary literature. That's a very different game. It was a game these peers discovered they hated playing. Nothing in college can prepare you for the isolation of spending your time becoming the world's expert on a narrow technical topic. Your usual reinforcement mechanisms of approval from family and friends gives way to slight comprehension at best. Then there is all of the alone time doing research requires. But I suspect the hardest part of all is the seemingly endless lineup of dead ends and false hope. Not only is success not assured, you often have no idea whether the result will have any utility even if you succeed. Then, just when you've gotten the hang of this finding answers game you discover that the real expectation is to be the one who formulates good questions. The kinds of questions that, although they will certainly involve dead ends, will ultimately pay off in some meaningful way. Very little in a bachelor's prepares you for doing this. It's a hard-won skill that comes from a round or two (or three or four) of months (or years) spent answering questions that nobody cares about. A lot hinges on your relationship with your advisor on this one. The PhD isn't just a bachelors degree but harder. It's a completely different animal. The skills in this article are very useful toward that end. But there's a lot more to the story when it comes to skills for finding answers to those unanswered questions, and formulating worthwhile questions without answers. The benefit of all of this work and discomfort is that you come away with the ability to answer worthwhile questions that haven't yet been answered. And that's a highly transferrable and applicable skill.

OccamsRazr 5y ago
And this makes everything else in the survey easier. Topic sentences and presentation skills are useful but most important is having something original and substantial to say. The rest follows and is easy by comparison.
5y ago

nabla9 5y ago

The value in formal education is mostly reading, writing, and thinking skills. How to express and communicate increasingly complex ideas to others. PhD is not much different. There was just a Reddit post saying that 54% of US adults have a reading level equal to or below a sixth-grade level according to the US Department of Education. Many communication problems can be attributed to differences in prose, document, and numeracy literacy. "If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking." – H. G. Wells

evancoop 5y ago

The "lead or be led" trope is apt, and certainly became the paradigm of my doctoral years. I might, however, amend this slightly. There's another idea of going rogue too soon or too late (https://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/ https://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/). Students, new employees, and other inexperienced folks need to be led initially, and then rapidly, transition into a self-directed paradigm. Success emerges if and only if the advisor and student recognize the need for this transition at a similar moment. The alternative is either the student who runs down rabbit holes repeatedly despite being guided elsewhere (those students tend to at least get SOMETHING done and while they take forever to graduate, do find some interesting results along the way) or the student who after a couple years is still just reading papers and waiting to be told what to do (these students often fail outright as advisors get fed up with the hand-holding).

lambdatronics 5y ago
Great point. I clashed a bit with my advisor early on - they were trying to shepherd me away from a rabbithole, but I was a bit pigheaded and determined to fix something that I felt was sloppy. I ended up with a publication on it, but it probably wasn't a great use of my time (aside from providing me with a chance to flex my wings).
- evancoop 5y ago
  It seems like, in your case, the publication is evidence that the rabbit hole was at least original and interesting. Students in that category tend to graduate, have a few compelling results to their name, and simply expend a couple extra semesters relative to the average. The real question is whether they learn to focus efforts on the relevant goal (in which case, these original thinkers with innate curiosity can be fantastic hires) or continue their rabbit-hole-exploring ways (in which case they generate publications as post-docs, but generally struggle in the private sector where folks want THEIR questions answers ASAP). Which are you? (Fascinating discussion!)
  - lambdatronics 5y ago

andreyk 5y ago

Nice list! A bit micro on a few points, but nice things to highlight. On a zoomed out View, a PhD will teach you a lot about the life cycle of creative projects in general - idea inception, prototyping, feedback, iteration, presentation. It will also teach you perseverance - oh boy, will it teach you perseverance. At the same time, it will not teach you some things you'd pick up in industry - team work in particular.

neom 5y ago

My wife is finishing up her PhD in American History and I can tell she's getting bored, at least demotivated reading a billion books a week. I've seen this motivation decline in a lot of founders as well 4/5 years into their startups, but I've not seen much reignite the fire. Can anyone recommend any specific tips for staying motivated through a PhD?

ModernMech 5y ago
Your wife is bored because she’s gotten what she can out of the program, and the dissertation is a slog. I had the same experience. This is why there is a term for people who do the whole program but drop out without finishing the dissertation: ABD (all but dissertation). It’s the one non-degree people feel justified to list on their resume, because it takes at least 4 years to get there, and it’s still quite an achievement. I was ABD for 3 years when I got bored, and I almost quit. I figured since I had all the skills, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have the degree. It’s just a meaningless credential. I asked a friend of mine who had gotten his degree whether it was worth it, and he said “Don’t do it, the plus side isn’t that great” Then I went to his wedding. He was the only PhD in his family, and his mother made the DJ introduce him as “Doctor”. What he considered a meaningless credential made his whole family so happy and proud. That moment made me change my mind, and I finished my PhD. And you know what, he was wrong about the credential being meaningless. Employers look at you differently when you are ABD versus PhD. He didn’t experience that because he was never ABD. Truly it was like night and day. Governments care when applying for visas. Grant agencies care. There is also a lucrative market for expert opinions, and ABD are not considered at all in this market. Credentials matter in our society, even if they don’t matter so much in the tech sector. Anyway, I hope something I said here will convince your wife to stick it out! If you want a specific tip, I would say take a leave of absence. For me I could take up to 2 years off no questions asked, and rejoin. If her school has a similar policy, she can use that time to recharge, and come back fresh and ready to bang out her dissertation.
- neom 5y ago
  wow this is really great advice! And funnily parallels what I see in founders, founders who start their startups for the wrong reasons (Sam raised a $3MM seed and I'm smarter than Sam so I bet I can raise a $5MM seed. Shit, I raised a $5MM seed). Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I'll share your words with her.

graycat 5y ago

Lessons from my Ph.D.: (1) Role of Math. In most fields of research, the most respected research mathematizes the field, that is, makes progress with math techniques and results. So for Ph.D. research, try to have math play that role. (2) Ugrad Preparation. To be successful with that role of math, have a good ugrad math background. Then maybe get some more math from independent study, work in a career, a Master's program, or whatever. Likely the math topics that both come first and are the most important are calculus and linear algebra. (3) Find a Good Problem. In your career, independent study, whatever, find a good problem to solve. Pick a practical problem and intend to get an engineering Ph.D. where a solution to that problem is regarded as good research. Make some progress on solving the problem. (4) Pick a University and a Department. Want a department that respects applied research, maybe in a school of engineering. Hopefully the university will state their standards for a Ph.D. dissertation, e.g., "An original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication." Look at their description of their Ph.D. qualifying exams. Do enough study at the ugrad or Master's level and/or independent study to be well prepared for the exams. If the department offers courses for preparation for the exams, in addition plan to take those courses. (5) Enroll. Become a grad student in the chosen department. (6) Progress. In your first year, take some courses, especially in subjects you already know well. Continue your research. Pass the qualifying exams. If you see some opportunities for doing some fast publishable research, as co-author, better as sole author, do that. Show the department that you have done publishable research. Then, sure, technically will have done a Ph.D. dissertation (I did that). (7) Finish. In your second year, finish your research project, stand for an oral exam, and graduate. Of course, if there is any question about your research being publishable, then just PUBLISH it. Done.

ModernMech 5y ago
I think a 2 year PhD is very atypical in my field (CS). In my experience I learned a different lesson than you when it comes to 3 and 4. I found that more important than anything, picking an advisor is the way to choose your PhD. They have such an outsized role over your experience, much more than the University, Department, or even the problem IMO. To give some context as to my experience: - PhDs are funded. You get a stipend and tuition is paid for. This funding is either through a research assistantship (RA), or a teaching assistantship (TA). Either way you are expected to devote 20 hours a week to this task, and the rest would be devoted to your coursework. Typically you take 9 credits per semester for about 4 years, and then after you enter candidacy (you're not really considered a PhD candidate until you pass qualifiers, before then you're a mere PhD "student") you reduce that to a 1 credit "dissertation maintenance" per semester. - Grant money is the lifeblood of a PhD granting research-focused department. Here's how the economy of a typical CS department works: -- Newly hired faculty are given a "startup grant" that they use to bootstrap a lab. Their motivation is they want to get tenure in 6-8 years. To do that, they will need to justify to the Dean that they are capable of generating sufficient grant revenue. -- Grant agencies award grants largely based on published research papers. Therefore the primary directive of a new academic is to publish research, and use that to obtain grants. Hence the phrase "Publish or perish"; if a researcher fails to get enough grants when the tenure clock is up, they will usually be put out to pasture; failing to get tenure is the death knell for a young academic's career. -- So they hire a couple PhD students as RAs and they work on producing research papers for conferences. The new academic uses the published research in grant applications (the first target is usually the CAREER award). Soon enough grant this grant money is flowing to the researcher and they use it to pay for all sorts of things. Chiefly though, it is used to pay for the stipends and tuition of graduate RAs. - As an RA, you will be expected to spend 20 hours per week on grant funded research. This means you don't have room to explore your own research topics! All of the grant money is allocated for the funded grant research, not your own whims. The best you can do is carve out some interesting angle on the research that you can call your own. - By the time you get to maintaining your candidacy, you're already knee deep in publications on the funded research project. The path of least resistance at this point is to bundle them up into a dissertation and defend it. - If you have your own research agenda, now is the time to execute it as a faculty member at another University. One of their primary concerns during hiring will be: "How is your research agenda different from your advisors?" You will perhaps not be surprised to find that many candidates fresh out of a PhD program will not have their own original thoughts yet. This is why many departments prefer that a new PhD actually take some time doing a postdoc where they can gain some independence from their mentor. Anyway, what I would say is that instead of picking a problem or a university or a department, pick a person you want to work with for the next 5-8+ years. Like I said, 2 years is very atypical. In my department, we have built in buffers that would make the minimum I think 3 years with a Master's, and even then I think the typical time would be 4 years.

xab31 5y ago

My big eye-openers (some from postdoc) were more about the sociology of science than the day-to-day productivity: - Even the most blatantly wrong and illogical published work can only be displaced by another publication that explains/does the same phenomenon better; i.e., people are going to keep believing in phlogiston until someone shows them oxygen. If you simply point out inconsistencies in phlogiston theory, in person or in writing, they may well make a variety of unwanted psychological deductions about you. - Similarly, nobody actually enjoys being around critics or enduring criticism, and therefore you will observe many senior scientists partially avoiding the major downsides of being a critic by artfully concealing criticisms inside what sounds to the uninitiated like mutual affirmation sessions. You have to listen very closely and learn the lingo to pick this up. - Never question a scientific superior (other than maybe a direct mentor or very close colleague) with any other approach besides "I have a helpful suggestion about how you can maybe reach your intended destination better/faster/more precisely". Regardless of where that destination might be, such as off a cliff or into a wall. - The opinion/fact ratio you are allowed to have as a scientist is directly and very strongly correlated with seniority, H-index, and so on. - The incentive structure of scientific publication is such that there are big rewards for being right on an important question, bigger the earlier you are to the party, and little to no penalties for being wrong, so long as the error cannot be provably and directly linked to fraud. There are a variety of interesting consequences to this incentive structure.

kafkaIncarnate 5y ago
This is true here, as well. I once asked about something related to SSL/TLS (fairly politely) and was kind of mockingly escorted by some groupies to the corner since I apparently responded to an Apache developer. I was just trying to learn. Learning bad is what I learned.
zebraflask 5y ago
That seems to ring true, but - it also seems a bit defeatist, don't you think? "Never question a scientific superior?" Not parsing that concept, please elaborate.
- 5y ago

th9283749238 5y ago

There is another, more fundamental lesson, that I learned during my (failed) PhD - make sure that the environment suits you. By this, I mean do some research beforehand about the supervisor and the alumni. If possible talk to one of the other PhD candidates in their department and find out if you are compatible with the working environment. This could be hard to do such early in your life, as one does not have much experience. Usually it falls in one of two categories - either you are someone that can do the work but needs support and guidance, or you prefer working on your own, in which case a more hands-off supervisor would be OK. If you are of the former type and find yourself working for a supervisor that doesn't offer much support, it will be very hard to finish anything, and most likely you will become demotivated and drop out. Likewise, if you want to try things on your own but your supervisor wants to dictate where to go next, there will be a lot of conflicts and even the possibility that they block the thesis until it is done their way. Having other PhD colleagues around and bouncing ideas off of them is worth its weight in gold, make sure that there is at least one that is working on something similar as you are.

lambdatronics 5y ago
Yeah, this is great advice for undergraduates considering graduate applications. I lucked out with my supervisor in terms of his advising style (rather hands-off, which suited me), but I could have easily gotten stuck with a bad match. I picked the school, rather than the advisor, which I now realize wasn't the best way to go. [Edit: I will say that picking a school where there were multiple faculty to choose from in the topical area was a good decision, because that provides options.]

engineer_22 5y ago

You could have learned all of this stuff at a good mid sized company.

mybrid 5y ago

YMMV. What I learned from experience that I already knew from education is that absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is a real tension when picking a graduate school. Do you go with the topic of interest and a tyrant? Or do you pick an amenable advisor that's in a different research field? I guess one can get lucky and find both but that wasn't an option the year I applied. The thing about graduate schools and research domains is that there a typically only a handful of choices if one is lucky. The other thing I learned is graduate schools never admit absolute power corrupts absolutely and when one points that out one is immediately ostracized. Go along to get along should be a sign over ever graduate schools doorway. Or dog eat dog.

anthomtb 5y ago

If I had written this article myself and titled it “Lessons from my First Year as a Full Time Software Dev” a lot of the bullets would have been the same. Especially the Daily Progress and Get Excited bullets. Those two tend to go hand-in-hand given how often you need to do a thing with the only tangible reward being the accomplishment of the thing.

l5870uoo9y 5y ago

> Lead or be led > If you show up to a meeting/internship/job expecting to be told what to do, then chances are someone will tell you something to do... Alternatively, if you show up to a meeting/internship/job with a convincing game plan, then chances are people will get out of your way so you can go do it. Wholeheartedly agree.

gww 5y ago

One point that I seem rarely mentioned especially in the life sciences is learning when to tell your mentor that you have enough to leave. In my experience a lot of labs will try to keep their senior PhD students around as long as they can because they don't have a suitable replacement and they are cheap labour. I know people who stick around for 6 to 10 years to chase after a high impact paper (that doesn't often manifest) or they can't let their work go and pass it off to someone else, or in the very malicious cases the PI won't let them go until they publish another paper etc. The department I was in was determined to get the average PhD down to less than six years but still hasn't reached that point. The trainees supervisory committee is usually there to push them out but in many cases they also have a close relationship with the PI and aren't going to force a productive student to graduate. Those extra years are rarely useful for their overall career prospects. I think students need to be aware of when they should draw the line and move on. Spending three more years in their PhD probably won't pay off nearly as much as three years of accumulated experience in industry job or in a post doctoral fellowship in a new lab.

lambdatronics 5y ago
Yeah, I have seen instances where it's the student's lack of drive/progress, the PI being unreasonable, the student's project was too ambitious, plain bad luck (lab equipment caught fire & destroyed), or time taken off for family considerations (child-birth, caring for ailing parents). I graduated in 6 years (including 2 years of coursework), which was the mode (not the median, though) for my department. The distribution skewed to the long side, and 5 years was the shortest I can recall.

vkk8 5y ago

I did a PhD in physics and feel like I missed all the great "meta lessons" some people seem to learn in their PhD. Mostly I just spent my time alone doing calculations either with pen and paper or computer. Most of the stuff I did was either suggested by my supervisor or was obvious continuation of some previous work. Even after I got my PhD I didn't feel like I was really a member of the research community or that I had a PhD level command of my field. I just did a bunch of calculations, wrote papers on what I did and got a PhD. It was almost like doing homework on a really long course, but just more difficult. I left academia after a failed postdoc because I realized I had no clue how to conduct research on my own; I didn't know how to pick good research topics, or how to manage my time, or how to find people to collaborate with, or how to collaborate productively with someone for that matter. I'm not sure if the fault was my supervisors or mine. I'm a bit "on the spectrum" and have lots of difficulties with social interaction, but I guess so do many other people drawn to technical fields and still they manage to navigate the system somehow. I certainly never sought for any kind of mentorship because I didn't realize it was needed and, also, because it felt extremely awkward. Also, the whole academic system seemed a bit fucked up. People do research and write papers because they have to produce something measurable, not because the research they do is actually interesting or important. I published five papers during my PhD and I would say that maybe only one of them was slightly interesting or important, and even that could have been much better. All of the papers were published in proper, highly regarded journals (mostly Physical Review). Towards the end of the PhD I started having some vague ideas of stuff that would be _actually_ interesting and more worth my time, but also more difficult and less certain results. When was I supposed to do those? I was still in the mindset that I wanted to stay in academia so I couldn't take any risks.

anonymousDan 5y ago
To be honest, that's kind of normal and 5 papers is pretty good going for a PhD (assuming at least some of them were at reputable venues). The truism is that you should view the PhD as training you how to do research, but not necessarily that the results you produce will be in anyway ground breaking. Of course there are exceptions. As you develop it would be expected you apply for funding/fellowships to pursue more difficult problems etc. and demonstrate more independence.
5y ago

wanderingmind 5y ago

The author became a professor unlike the 90% of the other PhD graduates, so you need to take all the lessons with a heavy dose of selective bias. Most of the things the article talks about is the effective processes the author has learned during PhD. This is definitely useful in any work where agency is involved. However, these effective routines can be learned from a decent job in a good organization and does not need a PhD. There is nothing in the article that suggests a unique learning that can be achieved only through pouring years into an endless pursuit like PhD. In my opinion, there is nothing unique that can be learned only through a PhD for a successful career (except maybe for a tiny slice of outlier of CS researchers). Most people will be well better served to take a job that provides some agency, or better try to start a company and fail. They can learn a lot more this way without jeopardizing their financial future.

mcguire 5y ago
"Most of what I learned during my PhD had nothing to do with my dissertation topic, grad school, or even computer science. "These lessons are so ingrained into me now that I'm shocked when I find out that not everyone knows them! I think they can be applied to virtually any office job." Taking a job that provides some agency is harder than it sounds. As is starting a company and failing without jeopardizing one's financial future. (And not everyone is really enthusiastic about learning those lessons that can only be learned that way.)
- wanderingmind 5y ago
  You can LC for a few months closed door to get a decent SWE job in a good company that can provide you enough agency. PhD on the other hand requires spending 5+ years in a lab cutoff from reality and ending up with no skills to get a real world job. Yes you lose some money (mostly other people money) if a company fails, but the learnings are well worth the loss of money. Its definitely not the case with a PhD.

ixnus 5y ago

Great article. I especially loved the parts about presenting, greying out the boring stuff makes a ton of sense. What is the appeal of posting your daily progress on a public form? Do you not feel this to be a kind of invasion of your privacy? Is there some benefit that isn't immediately clear?

jl2718 5y ago

I do not have a PhD, but this is how I believe professional work should (and probably used to) operate. I’m extremely bored and annoyed by management practices that do nothing but track and assign work. When I started my career, it seemed a like a lot like a PhD described here. It was in space systems, and everybody was responsible for finding a problem to solve independently within the mission requirements. In that scenario, a PhD felt like a waste of time compared to professional work. Today it feels like I sorely need it (or an MBA) to climb the micromanagement hierarchy. Is there such a place today as a professional?