49 ms·

I'm quitting my PhD

• tasuki 4y ago
  > Because this article received somewhat more attention than I expected/feel comfortable with, I’ll take it down for a moment. I don't think that's fair, considering you submitted it to HN. If you don't want attention, why submit it?
• throwaway4220 4y ago
  It’s excellent you have such foresight and introspection. I have three family members (including myself) who were “dishonorably discharged” from a PhD with a masters.
  • XorNot 4y ago
    This was me. I should've bailed in the first year, gone into tech as I was perfectly able to do then, and been richer. If the program doesn't feel like, bail and join the work force. You'll be happier and richer.
  • samvher 4y ago
    This would be interesting to get some more context on - were you dishonorably discharged because you were critical of what was going on in your lab? I’m not sure what you’re saying about the masters, you had that already or your experience + discharge was turned into a masters diploma?
    • throwaway4220 4y ago
      Basically I started a PhD, and told myself if I don't submit anything to publish anything in a year, I'm gonna quit. I found I just don't have the discipline and self-motivation for a PhD. I had already taken a year of classes so I qualified for the MS. I was only joking about the "dishonorably discharged" - that's just how I felt not being able to cut it.
      • dotnet00 4y ago
        As someone doing a PhD right now, I think not having something to publish within a year isn't all too unreasonable. After transferring from masters to PhD, it has still taken a little over a year for my collaboration with my advisors and other PhDs to mature enough to result in several publications happening roughly around the same time. I did initially have someone scare me into thinking that if I didn't publish even something like a literature review within my first year, I wouldn't be taken seriously. But that turned out to not really apply.
        • throwaway4220 4y ago
          No absolutely, it really was a challenge I gave myself and I failed. Several of my classmates didn't publish until their fourth year or so. But I saw how much work they put in, how organized and passionate they were, and felt like i was just a moth in the lighting section of a hardware store just going towards the next brightest thing. I finally picked a lab and project under a postdoc (who took 6 years to finish his PhD, and was coming upon his tenth year of being a postdoc which should have been a huge red flag). I did about 6 months of reading, some microscope work (was a dev biology lab, another huge red flag given I was basically under the engineering dept). I would come in late night when the lab was free, and felt like I was working hard, but really I had no direction. When I realized 6 months out that I basically knew nothing, had no goals/interesting ideas, I panicked a bit. I went home for a week to ruminate. My dad actually told me something (I thought at the time) prophetic: I should be giving my school/academic institution a good name, not the other way around. I realized there's no way I could live up to that standard, but I could see people in my class definitely do that (Impostor syndrome? probably, but I'd add laziness to it). I basically then told myself: publish something in one year, or apply to medical school which I was slowly starting to get interested in. PhDs (esp in biology/chem/physics) are a different breed in my eyes, and get lots of respect. I wish you the very best!
• ModernMech 4y ago
  Probably for the best. Usually “I quit my PhD” stories are people who spent 6 years and got fed up, but if if the author can’t last 6 months it sounds like they had the wrong expectations going in.
  • OJFord 4y ago
    Having a supervisor roughly in the field seems like a reasonable expectation though? The complaint is not having anyone to discuss the topic with...
    • richardwhiuk 4y ago
      They chose their supervisior.
      • OJFord 4y ago
        Sure, but I seems like there was some miscommunication about the current research; what's active and what's a mere 'interest' in the department etc. Anyway I've no horse in this race!
    • ModernMech 4y ago
      That’s part of the problem here. 99% of a PhD is your choice of advisor. It fully determines your experience. Going to do quantum computing research in a lab that doesn’t understand quantum computing is really on the author; any questions about the core competency of the lab can be answered by their publication history. Step 1 of doing a PhD is reaching out to people actually doing the research to see if it’s a match. Also having no one with whom to talk about QC tells me it’s a very small school or a specialized school. Or just the wrong school! Not all schools are created equally; they each have their own core competencies defined by the skills of the department faculty. If no one in the faculty had a history of QC research, why is the author attending that school to do QC research? Did they not think to ask before they applied? And why don’t they just find a better school to fit their interests? Transferring is not unheard of at such an early stage of the degree. But the author is done completely, which tells me they weren’t that serious in the first place.
• chrisseaton 4y ago
  > I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it How does this happen?
  • adam_arthur 4y ago
    PHDs are more about idealism for most than practical outcomes. Would be cool if colleges were required to estimate number of job openings relevant to each PHD program vs current cohort sizes. Or some central body could
  • ThePhysicist 4y ago
    In Physics it's not unusual to start a PhD in a sub-discipline that you've got little experience in (I realize the author works more on the information theory side of things). When I started my PhD in experimental quantum computing I had experience with superconductivity and low-temperature physics but none with qubit design or high-frequency RF system design. It's the point of a PhD to learn about these things and get qualified to do your own research afterwards (e.g. as a PostDoc).
    • ProjectArcturis 4y ago
      Yeah, but at least your PI should know about your field. This is a really weird article and weird PhD experience.
      • newswasboring 4y ago
        Advisors also have to start somewhere. There will always be a first PhD student who works on something everyone has only vague ideas about. I have worked with such students and they are genuinely a different kind of person from other PhDs. They require little to none guidance and have very strong opinions on how to do their work. I believe OP was a poor choice for this position.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • 4y ago
• tomrod 4y ago
  Good for you! A PhD is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition in most career paths these days. It certainly isn't a ticket to guaranteed prosperity. The opportunity cost can be very high. Especially with a major research mismatch in available advisors and personal interests like the author describe in the article, it can be especially daunting. I wish them luck in their next steps. I remember how difficult it was at that stage in my PhD to find the right mix -- especially with potential advisors who left the school.
• hardware2win 4y ago
  Why higher edu institutions are so disappointing and mediocre? I dont think ive ever heard good things about phd except the chance to work in cool places like e.g microsoft research
  • Victerius 4y ago
    100 reasons not to go to graduate school: http://100rsns.blogspot.com/?m=1 http://100rsns.blogspot.com/?m=1
    • ModernMech 4y ago
      This looks like a list of 100 motivated reasons to not go to graduate school. For example, Reason 74: Academic conferences. Really?? Academic conferences are the best part about grad school! They're held in beautiful locations, you get to meet all kinds of smart and amazing people, spend all week steeped in your favorite research topic, and best of all it's all expenses paid by your project. The author's main complaint seems to be that the audience doesn't pay close enough attention at session presentations... okay? That doesn't seem like a reason not to go to grad school. A lot of these seem like they could be reframed as reasons to go to gradschool, actually.
  • uniqueuid 4y ago
    A PhD arguably gives you the opportunity to run very fast into one particular direction. Much longer than you would be allowed to run in any commercial setting. Whether or not that is a good idea is an open question. Societies, institutions and supervisors clearly benefit from individuals taking this huge risk (and often failing). One of the main problems is that we communicate very badly what a PhD is about.
    • andreilys 4y ago
      A PhD arguably gives you the opportunity to run very fast into one particular direction. Much longer than you would be allowed to run in any commercial setting. It seems like most cutting edge research (and the ability to run fast) in machine learning is done in commercial settings these days, not academia.
• abhaynayar 4y ago
  Not for a PhD, but I had similar feelings about supervision for my internship. When I was starting off, it was hard for me to tell how much initiative I need to take versus how much my mentor should guide me. He was always busy and at times I felt like there was no need for the role I was hired for. In hindsight, I feel like my mentor should have guided me a lot more than he did. But it's hard to know that when you're just starting off, and you tend to blame yourself for not taking enough initiative (even if you are).
• omgJustTest 4y ago
  Obligatory: I am a PhD. I understand the pyramid-ish scheme that academia is. Your advisor is playing the 'grant-reward' game, and in most circumstances that enables you to play your 'ideal' PhD game. However your ideals are not the same as your advisors, your PhD-mates, or your school. The sooner you recognize you are the standard-bearer for graduating, the sooner you realize it's time to take off the kid-gloves and start directly but professionally confronting your colleagues and advisors until you find what you are looking for. If you don't find it in six months after you change, write what you did and you can collect a masters. It really is that simple, they need you to graduate. PhD is a choose-your-own-adventure in real-life. No two PhDs are the same.
• AnotherGoodName 4y ago
  I would love PhDs to be thought of as something you dive into when you have something to pursue, perhaps many years later in life rather than a follow on immediately after study. As a comparison imagine if VC funding only went to the highest scoring new grads and the business proposal was asked for after the invitation to take on VC funding. That's pretty much what's been happening with PhDs. You get the marks, you get invited to take on a PhD and then you look for projects. A totally inorganic process that leads to a gross misallocation of resources.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    PhD is an apprenticeship to do research. If we left it until later in life, we wouldn't have anyone trained to do research.
    • im3w1l 4y ago
      There are way more PhD's then there are research positions, so we are very far from the deficit you fear.
      • chrisseaton 4y ago
        > There are way more PhD's then there are research positions Nonsense. Look at how many job openings there are for PhDs - people can't hire them fast enough. I was in a call the other day saying how hard it is to even find PhDs to interview, let alone get them to accept your offer.
        • selimthegrim 4y ago
          Pray tell, where is this Elysium?
          • chrisseaton 4y ago
            I have never heard of a PhD student in computing struggling to find a job.
• raister 4y ago
  Blue Sky research is like that: you're venturing into new areas. I remember the advertisement posted by Shackleton: _"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."_ That's how I feel about this. Chances of success are not as high as one would like, however, case affirmative, honour and recognition. A lot!
• anjc 4y ago
  You seem to dismiss publishing as performative when you don't rate the work. I can tell you that a lot of genius work dies on the vine because the researcher isn't capable in these "performative" aspects of the job. And many genius researchers' work never gets read/cited because they can't write. Publishing and disseminating work is a skill that (imo) is almost entirely distinct from researching, but you must have this skillset to succeed in research. If your research group is succeeding by picking low hanging fruit (in your eyes) then this is a great sign. You should learn from them. Your talents will not go to waste through learning these new skills. Lastly, if you like TA work then you should definitely continue because you can then look for lecturing positions after. To my knowledge TA roles generally require postgrad/PhD.
• sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
  I'm someone who finished a PhD, here's my perspective. You don't believe your supervisor or your research group and so you quit, great. It's great that you have the critical thinking abilities and confidence in yourself to make such a decision. However, I think it's extremely unprofessional to write a blog post saying that your supervisor is superficial or your research group is performative art. I don't say this because I think we should just take the venerable professor's word for it, but because accusations in general, if they're vague enough, are impossible to defend against. I think if there's enough substance to make your comment specific, you should. Maybe even write a paper explaining why what they're doing is nonsense. If you're right, this would genuinely be a contribution to the field. If you can't be specific enough to be scientific about it, just keep it to yourself.
  • omgJustTest 4y ago
    Edit: removed to follow rules
    • jacquesm 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    You finished a PhD, you should know how much weight his accusations would be given seeing as he isn’t a professor. I kept my mouth shut when I heard my co-advisor was badmouthing my other co-advisor’s research and the result was the committee blowing up at the prospectus. Sometimes it pays to be proactive.
  • JackFr 4y ago
    Exactly. Giving the OP the benefit of the doubt -- that he is completely correct in his assessment of the group -- he is certainly doing himself no favors publicly throwing them under the bus. I imagine other prospective advisors, in any field, might be reluctant to take him on if this is a pontential outcome.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dschuetz 4y ago
  Good for him. Because of this: "My supervisors have a rather superficial understanding of Quantum Computing, and I feel like their idea to start a project in that domain was to a not inconsiderable extent motivated by the prospect of granted research funds, not primarily by their desire to achieve a deeper understanding of quantum stuff." It's always about grant money. Especially with anything that starts with Quantum <insert buzzword here>
  • Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
    At least in most countries in Europe, where a PhD is expected to be a paid job, and unless you are from a really rich institution, you need grant money to take PhD students. There is no other way to do it, except for taking unpaid students, which is typically not considered an ethical thing to do. And yes, sadly, being successful in asking for funding means pitching the hot topics du jour, which typically don't coincide with the most important or interesting things to do from a scientific point of view. Although asking for grants in quantum computer having zero experience in it does sound a bit too much. We really need funding to go to people, not projects. Having to pitch specific projects when asking for funding does more harm than good IMO.
    • derbOac 4y ago
      > We really need funding to go to people, not projects. Having to pitch specific projects when asking for funding does more harm than good IMO. I agree but this was the original idea behind tenure, and here we are. The question is how to return to this understanding of its meaning.
  • akjssdk 4y ago
    Why is no one considering that this PhD student is wrong and that his supervisor does in fact know what they are doing? Starting in a new field is hard, and it takes years to get a broad view of the field in order to understand what directions to take. As a PhD student you are not expected to be able to do this: this is why you have a supervisor who has enough experience. Maybe the supervisor does have a clear vision as to where to take the research, and the student does not yet see this?
• boxfire 4y ago
  > However, just a couple of months into my project, I figured out, I wouldn’t find anyone to discuss my research with: My supervisors have a rather superficial understanding of Quantum Computing, and I feel like their idea to start a project in that domain was to a not inconsiderable extent motivated by the prospect of granted research funds, not primarily by their desire to achieve a deeper understanding of quantum stuff. Sounds very familiar. I saw this a lot in grad school. My first advisor was also fed up with the nature in academia and left tenure path to work in private industry, leaving me to fend for money in this vein. So then my graduate research topic came into this line. I stopped that after I realized that not only was it fishing far off the path of my social support, it was also weapons research disguised via a friendly sounding problem. I switched programs, to an advisor who seemed to want me to work in something he actually does. Then I had zero relationship with him and became basically a highly underpaid developer to crank out the numbers that corroborated his research at 100+ hour weeks. In the marginal time I was tying to figure out if I could somehow make the small corner I thought might make a thesis fit into his unspoken program. I got the hint that my PhD was predicated on making his research stand up, and having a part in it is what my PhD would represent, not any actual original work. I became a little more cynical but continued, now paying much more attention on the side to other's experience. I found this was nearly universal from 'top schools', and then with the overflow of candidates to academic jobs they take this style to the next tier of schools where they get tenure by making a lemming line of candidates do the same. At this point it was the breaking point. I had a great internship the previous summer. I had a "come work for us now or maybe never" ultimatum. I took the plunge. ABD Twice. And that I consider a great accomplishment that I am quite proud of.
  • walleeee 4y ago
    > weapons research disguised via a friendly sounding problem many such cases
• matthewdgreen 4y ago
  I feel for the student writing this piece and I'm sad that they've developed some bitterness at their advisors and the entire field (which I read in the piece, even if it wasn't the intent.) Everyone needs to understand something important: a PhD is first and foremost an apprenticeship. It is your opportunity to study under someone who has done a specific kind of research, and learn from that person. If that relationship isn't a good fit, the PhD itself won't be a good fit: it's like trying to learn neurosurgery from a cardiac surgeon. You cannot fix this with reading or online lectures, the apprenticeship is the whole point. Occasionally I run into students who have these advisor mismatches and my instinct is to try to help them. However what I've learned is that good intentions (try to advise a student who is interested in a different area) don't actually translate to good outcomes. I am monomaniacal (only) about the research that interests me, and that doesn't translate into other areas I'm less familiar with. They will be frustrated with my lack of expertise in those other areas, and I will end up frustrated by my inability to properly advise them. In the worst case, that bad fit can turn to resentment against the entire scientific process (I see this process starting in the post above.) If the author of the post wants to pursue a PhD, I would first urge them to stop for a while and not think about research: just do something else. When and if they've reached the point where they are bored to tears with whatever they're doing (I recommend taking a "real" job for a while) -- and can only think about the research they're missing out on -- then go figure out whose papers are actually exciting to them. Then go find out how to work with that person, whatever it takes. Sometimes there are ways to work with someone that don't require a formal PhD admission, and enough persistence can make the difference. I'm not saying this is easy. The point is: don't do it because it's easy, do it because you want to do it enough that it doesn't matter if it's hard.
  • stanford_labrat 4y ago
    I’m starting my PhD this fall and the prospect of an advisor mismatch terrifies me (having seen this first hand). Thankfully my program has 2 or 3 faculty who align well based off of my interviews but you never know…
    • enchiridion 4y ago
• koksik202 4y ago
  The opening line about not having prior exposure before PhD is something that makes me wonder if author did have industry experience prior to this undertaking, there are application and network security hands-on problems that can be solved with quantum computing. I have zero practical experience with quantum computing myself but I can count at least 2-3 practical projects I could work on before starting PhD in that field. I wonder if the problem here is author going after PhD in the field without having an idea of what problem author can solve by using quantum computing experiments/projects. (instead of finding solution to problem, looking for problems and having time to experiment/research solutions.)
  • JanisErdmanis 4y ago
    It is a generally accepted and being prove true countless times that all head on solutions to known problems have been already tried and published. What remains are solutions resembling "performative arts", like ones combining machine learning with quantum error correction. Sometimes works, but when they don't you can't explain why and are being instructed to try harder.
• soheil 4y ago
  > studying the underlying Quantum Mechanics and understanding this new concept of how physical reality might look like under the hood (there are actually multiple interpretations of that, from Probabilism to the popular Many-World-Theory) has been eye-opening. > I was asked to find something that does not require so much understanding of Quantum Computing Sounds like QM was a new subject to you and you didn't know/understand QM enough to do research in an adjacent field. Not sure why you'd pick a field that you don't have much background in to do a PhD in. I'm not sure what advice you expected your supervisors to give.
• alkaloid 4y ago
  Reading this, I couldn't help but recall Feynman's quote: "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics." I love cussing and discussing quantum theory / physics / computing. And Feynman is 100% right. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman
  • stazz1 4y ago
    Currently reading The Undivided Universe (Bohm, Hiley), recommend. More intuition, less "think"ing
  • krastanov 4y ago
    I would suggest Aaronsons' "Quantum Computing since Democritus" for a different (mathematically rigorous) take. There is a lot of understanding we have found out since Feynman made that statement.
• pvaldes 4y ago
  What I see here is mostly fear to failure. Fear about "not keeping the high standard level that should define myself". Fear about being perceived as a mediocre scientist saying incorrect things. This is wrong. Let me tell you a thing. Nobody will cares. Not-one-single people will care about your mind image. 1-Feeling depressed or having doubts in some point of the process of writing your thesis is more common than you think 2-Run, reset and try in a different field will not be easier, it will be more difficult. It always is. 3-Closures provide a lot of peace of mind. Finish your thesis and then move your mind to greener pastures. A not perfect thesis about a poor known theme, is better than none. So, just keep working and do your best effort. Most people never receive a Nobel in any case and what people could think about you, is not so relevant as you think. In the end, you will be the expert in quantum computing, not them. Remember also that any error slipped in your these can be fixed later. Science is not written in stone. We fall and we learn. Scientists are expected to commit honest mistakes.
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    If a PhD is mostly a research apprenticeship and there's no one who actually does that type of research you are in kind of a pointless situation
    • enchiridion 4y ago
      I think this is a bit narrow. I’d say it’s a credential that shows you know how to conduct research. In my case it was less of an apprenticeship and more of a lot of stumbling around until I found a way to create research that matched my standards. My standards are modeled after the clearly explained and verifiable work in my field.
• Emma_Goldman 4y ago
  > "Aiming to produce PDF files that would be accepted at conferences (which seems to be easy-going if you sprinkle some fancy quantum vocabulary over something and hand it in to a non-quantum conference). I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day. After all, science is all about the pursuit of knowledge, even though the incentives of research funding might not be entirely aligned with that" This is broadly similar to my experience. The priority of most academics is not to produce deep, novel, and creative work. It is to churn out sausages in the shapes favoured by journals, at a factory production rate. That's what they have to do for their career. After a while, though, they start to be unable to tell the difference between the two.
  • dixego 4y ago
    From what I can tell, the cause of this is that "number of papers published per unit of time" is the only metric institutions seem to care about when it comes to evaluating researchers' work.
    • avisser 4y ago
      Please. They care about $$$ in grants as well.
      • pfortuny 4y ago
        Which are gotten in proportion to the other metric…
  • low_tech_love 4y ago
    This is true, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it. If you keep looking at your neighbor in order to determine your next step, you will be disappointed in every walk of life, not only in academia. If you don’t subscribe to the same ideas, do it differently, and get ready for some resistance. In academia you have to carve your path just like everywhere else. That said: I agree that academia is just a big circle jerk. :)
  • 4y ago
• kongolongo 4y ago
  I think the author was in a tough position to try and pursue this in the first place because, as they admit, they didn't have a direct background in the topic. That makes it difficult at the onset to look for programs and advisors with the the right type of experience to align with your desired research topic when you yourself do not have enough experience to make a fully informed judgement on how well their work in the field relates to what you want to explore.
• georgeecollins 4y ago
  My experience with post docs in a science lab was that science was surprisingly tribal, and not in a completely bad way. Certain programs and labs trusted people and papers from other labs they knew. They tended to accept PhD students who were recommended by particular professors. And this clustering seemed to exist along some theoretical or subject matter divides. The benefit is that there is some consistency and some short hand or "lab lore" in common. This article seems to be about a PhD candidate at a program that didn't really have people experienced in the field. If you want to get a science PhD, look at the papers by the tenured people in that program and see where they went to school. Look at who cites their papers. The schools that read their papers may be the ones that you can apply to later.
• Aargau 4y ago
  PhDs really require hard justification to continue. Especially in STEM where you can do as much research via a corporate job. Happily left with an ABD to join Microsoft in 1995.
• diarrhea 4y ago
  I will hand in my notice tomorrow, after circa 1 year as a PhD student. In fact, I'm switching fields: from a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (energy systems) to a software developer role in a non-engineering sector. Very little of my 7 years (MSc) and subsequent circa 1 year as a PhD will carry over. Certainly an exciting step, although the program here was pretty excellent. Good supervision, full funding for the entire duration, topic of my choosing (I wrote parts of the grant). The main reason I'm leaving is that Mech.Eng. PhDs just seem like such a conservative bunch. Most end up either in tiny, provincial ventures (think utilities companies, for my field) or as middle managers at huge companies (where I live, car manufacturers). They then are, for all intents and purposes, managers and not engineers anymore. The title is the ticket to a cushy life. Academia was never an option; the kind of work professors and researchers do seems horrendous! You're chasing grants and need to manage such a wide range of the most frustrating but also mundane issues. Here's to hoping a software development career is more fruitful and fulfilling. A life-long IC position seems attractive. You get the benefits, but little of the fuss. It seems like PhDs are sought after (if they are) for their frustration tolerances and project management capabilities. Maybe I didn't have enough of either. Then again, I'm absolutely convinced many more would quit prematurely if they had attractive alternatives. A lot of mechanical engineer PhDs don't, but thanks to the software world and my passion for it, I do.
  • peteradio 4y ago
    Your face when in 5 years you find yourself in project management: >:0
    • itzworm 4y ago
      "We've found you to be so good at your job we want you to stop doing that job and do something with an almost mutually exclusive skill set."
      • peteradio 4y ago
        "It's difficult to take direction from someone who doesn't know (or can't explore) the problem space as well as I do. I find I'm managing up so much that there seems less and less benefit to the current reporting structure I find myself in." How often do people complain themselves into a new post?
• fn-mote 4y ago
  IMO good advising is critical. You must have someone you believe in and work with. Screening a prospective research group or advisor AHEAD OF TIME is the due diligence of the academic world. Don't work with someone you don't think will support you when you are stuck and advertise your accomplishments when you make them. I totally agree with the comments who say "performance" is an essential part of research. Somebody (your advisor, then later you) needs to be telling people how important your work is, where it can lead, what it will be good for, etc. If you're not at this stage yet, my advice is cast a wide net and interview several prospective advisors about their work, etc. A bad fit will waste years of your life.
• possiblydrunk 4y ago
  PhD --> Patience, humility, Drive
  • mikearagua 4y ago
    Patience, humility, Debt.
    • krastanov 4y ago
      Why debt? PhD student are paid (relatively poorly), they do not need (new) student loans during their PhD studies.
• austinl 4y ago
  > I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day. I think the author's reasons for quitting are valid. But I would also say that "low-hanging fruit" is exactly what many PhDs are going for by design. Science can move forward in giant leaps (like Newton, Einstein). But mostly, science progresses by the accumulation of thousands of narrowly focused projects. Perhaps the author's work could have eventually been used by another to make progress. The scope of what any single person can accomplish against the accumulated body of all scientific knowledge is often quite small.
• mcovalt 4y ago
  Congrats on making a decision sooner rather than later. I also dropped out of graduate school and remembered having some similar thoughts as you. I remembered feeling a bit lonely, too. There's no one to talk to about your work since no one understands it. It's a bit obvious in hindsight. Research topics are at the fuzzy fringe of human knowledge. They exist just outside of others' research topics. Your job is to find something that makes the field even more complex. Or, even better, connect the dots that show it may not be so complex after all. In either case, no one knows what the hell you're doing. If they're in your little tiny field, they may have some vague idea about how it may relate to their own little universe of research. But most likely, when you come home and a loved one asks what you did today, you won't be able to have an answer and that can be frustrating. To compound the issue, everyone is familiar with what a PhD is, but few know how academia works. And there's some not-great aspects of it. I've continued my research on my own time because it interests me. I no longer have looming deadlines and I don't have to check my bank account in the Wendy's drive-through line to see if my stipend will cover a chicken sandwich. I still value academia, though, and I know that my hobby-research will come nowhere close to matching the quality of research done with the resources provided by academic institutions.
  • Beldin 4y ago
    > But most likely, when you come home and a loved one asks what you did today, you won't be able to have an answer My PhD - and subsequent research - is in security. I will happily explain my research to anyone who will listen. In case I'm not sure, I just start explaining just in case. How privacy in voting is important. How most scraping studies have a fundamental flaw. How to catch scientific fraud. Current WiP is on reconstructing possible histories of NTFS files. Sounds boring? We're working to catch criminals that claim "never had that file". Maybe it's the subject, maybe it's just me, but this research stuff is friggin awesome and I'll happily shout that to the world!
    • afr0ck 4y ago
      It seems like you are very new to Academia.
• pacija 4y ago
  You did well. Quantum computing will never exist and you seem like a reasonable person who does not want to waste their life on horseshit.
  • fortuna86 4y ago
    Why do you say that?
    • pacija 4y ago
      Because "physics" it builds upon is wrong.
      • krastanov 4y ago
        Your vagueness makes it difficult to take your comment seriously. Are you saying quantum mechanics is wrong or are you making a more subtle argument?
        • pacija 4y ago
          I am saying quantum mechanics is wrong.
      • whatever1 4y ago
        That would be a great paper to write and publish.
        • pacija 4y ago
          Indeed. Here's one that has been translated to English: https://www.vasiona.rs/en/the-nature-of-the-mass https://www.vasiona.rs/en/the-nature-of-the-mass
          • whatever1 4y ago
            Make an effort to submit to a peer-reviewed venue to get some feedback from domain experts. From a quick look it does not seem to me that you have made a compelling case to bring down the entire domain of quantum mechanics.
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  It’s almost like he was saying that without some real world measurement he just couldn’t function, just felt like he was waving around at the fringes, and not producing a singular result.
• ryzvonusef 4y ago
  I am sorry but... if PhD are such a scam as the comments under such topics often devolve to... then how does one go about setting up a structure where research can be conducted on a PhD scale, for topics that are either not "profitable" at all, or not profitable on the short term enough for commercial organizations to fund them in house? Really curious to what the alternate should be.
  • hyperbovine 4y ago
    The comment pool on HN is massively over enriched for people who bombed out and have a chip on their shoulder about it. The overwhelming majority of the people I know who did a PhD regard it as one of the happiest and most intellectually stimulating periods of their life. Not everything is about money.
    • raister 4y ago
      Perhaps the research group and the culture plays a part on people taking out a good experience out of the PhD. The problem is to find the right place at the right time for you, matching your interests, and having people pursuing research with a reasonable amount of ego (note that I didn't say 'no ego').
• itronitron 4y ago
  I encourage derhagen to seek out and attend a short workshop on Quantum Computing and chat with the researchers as that may be a good way to find academic programs that have the talent and interest to share/spread the knowledge.
• hedora 4y ago
  There are basically three good outcomes from CS PhD's: - Learn you like teaching / mentoring - Become trained to read and write world class research, and become a world class engineer. - Learn that you are great at marketing and networking, and become a professor or nontechnical exec somewhere (perhaps your own startup). Obviously, the more of the above boxes you tick, the better (all three is the path to ACM Fellow / Turing Award), and they're not binary dimensions. The author of the post seems to have failed utterly on the third point, perhaps due to Covid isolation. The behavior of the professor in the story seems middling, but not terrible. They should have provided the student with more theoretically inclined contacts, while making it clear that quantum computers are almost real now, and a hands-on systems PhD is likely to be much more lucrative/impactful than closing some open, escoteric theoretical problems. (It sounds like this student joined a systems lab without understanding what systems research is.) If the student really wanted a theory PhD, they'd still get support from the theoreticians the advisor should have found, and the advisor should have had enough confidence in the student to delegate, and allow that (perhaps misguided) line of work, or helped the student find a more appropriate advisor.
  • walleeee 4y ago
    > quantum computers are almost real now in what sense is this true? practical quantum computers seem almost as far off as they were decades ago and NISQ appears to mean not large or reliable enough to do much with one consequence being people take option 3 and pad a career with speculative papers, too many of which are lacking in rigor QCs are "possible in principle" but remain a formidable engineering challenge in which we seem to be making rather slow headway
    • hedora 4y ago
      IBM claims they'll be at 4096 bits in a couple of years. I agree "option 3 only" types are particularly problematic. They soak up funding and burn out students. It's hard to weed out professors for only being good at getting tenure and grants though.
• david_l_lin 4y ago
  I find that many of the PhD students who struggle are not prepared for the mostly self-driven nature of the pursuit, and have not had enough work experience to know how to choose a supervisor. The statistics support this: a majority of the PhD dropouts are students straight from undergrad who performed well academically, but have never had work experience. Finishing a PhD is as much about selecting a good PI as it is love of the science. Anecdotally I've seen many great students struggle because of lack of support from their PI, and many "worse" students do extremely well because they chose a terrific PI who builds a support system around their students so they almost cannot fail.
  • xtracto 4y ago
    I second this. I found it extremely difficult to finish my PhD 12 years ago. It wasn't because the subject was difficult or complicated but because I came directly from a Bachelor's degree into a UK MPhil/PhD programme. I remember at the beginning being sited in front of my desk asking myself: What do I do now? And every time I had a meeting with my supervisors and I asks them whether what I was doing was right/wrong, their answer was "that is great, you are doing great". Nevertheless, I had great supervisors: After about a year of work, we decided that my work was more oriented towards what my secondary supervisor was doing, so my main supervisor took a step back and let us do our work; he still watched closely although more about "form" rather than substance. In retrospective it was an amazing experience. Now, with regards to the (now deleted) article. I blame the supervisors but from another point of view: They should have used their network to contact people that knew about Quantum Computing. They all (including the PhD student) already had the most difficult thing: The grant. They just needed to use it. If I were the PhD candidate, I would have looked for who were the main Quantum Computing researchers, and ask my supervisors to contact me with them. If they didn't want to, then I would contact them directly and start having an "informal" mentorship with them. Professors salivate at the prospect of having a "free" PhD student working on some of their projects, so I'm sure he would have been welcomed by some of them. I feel that the main problem with the student was his inexperience, and his supervisor's inability to support him.
  • yolo69420 4y ago
    There's a world of a difference between doing a PhD with an expert supervisor (in the field) and bootstrapping it completely on your own.
• Vaslo 4y ago
  I quit my PhD with a masters after I heard one really good saying that went against my ADD: PhDs learn a lot about almost nothing. Said differently, 20 years ago, if you got a PhD in chemistry it was typically very specialized (synthetic, analytical, etc) and that’s all you could really do in the field. I business I’ve moved pretty easily between functions and it’s just what I needed personally. I know some people love making new discoveries and becoming the preeminent expert in something, but I think some folks need to be able to jump around with their financial viability intact.
• rickstanley 4y ago
  I haven't finished the whole article, but I can resonate with this specific statement: > "However, just a couple of months into my project, I figured out, I wouldn’t find anyone to discuss my research with..." While studying physics and math, many, and I mean *many* of my friends had a difficult time trying to understand both, sometimes they would get bored and just try to get the "just right" grade to pass. I had that one friend that you like to discuss things and exchange ideas and concepts from this world, but this friend would halt his course and move on with other things and/or job. After some time, I would get bored because none of my fellows had the patience to understand or try to grasp the basics of what makes, at least for me, these fields so interesting, like "bootstrap concepts" (Newton's laws, Thermodynamics, Trigonometry, etc...). I don't blame them. The basic education in my country (Brazil) is somewhat crippled, not all of it mind you, but in my experience, it was depressing. And of course, no one is obliged to have fun with this, I'm not complaining about this, I'm sad because there's almost no one I can talk to about this, and not that "I was better" than them, by no means, it's just that had an acute interest in these topics; this is one of the reasons I quit my degree in Computer Science, half a year through. Nowadays I look for someone to interact with, about something new that I learned or that now I understand better. Right now, I'm looking for a friend that wants to study chemistry, physics or mathematics for fun, but with a deep interest.
  • chinchilla2020 4y ago
    There is also the matter of what stage of your journey you are in. People pass through many different interests on their journey and often become bored with areas they have already passed through. For you and me, we could help a child with their algebra homework but it would not be something we would be passionate about. The child, on the other hand, might find algebra fascinating and want to talk more about it. It is very rare for two people who are in the exact same spot in life to collide. It happens rarely in university, even where those people are concentrated heavily. The same story is true with personal hobbies and interests.
• zackmorris 4y ago
  For what it's worth, I burned out sometime in the late 90s just after video cards came out around 1997, because I could see how they would drive video game design towards a narrow branch of DSP/rasterization and building derivative games with cookie cutter libraries. At the time, I was more interested in getting away from all of that and exploring stuff like ray tracing and artificial life. My interest in video games never fully returned in the same way. And if I'm being truthful, I've been burned out ever since, approaching 25 years now. But after two lost decades, I've noticed a shift lately. I think that people are getting fed up with centralized control of the supply chain and are maybe looking towards things like FPGAs as a way to get to a level above the current imperative programming paradigm, rather than working at the level below it in the glorified DMA transfer and shader paradigm we have now (vertex buffers). For something as esoteric as quantum computing, I think it would help the world a great deal if someone would go back to first principles and explain it how it is. Not with complex notation, but with counting principles from probability and statistics. I had a great teacher in college who taught it just exactly that way, by imagining small groups of apples and bananas and how we could count them and detect larger patterns to get to stuff like Bayes' theorem. So for example, we can imagine cubits as coin flips that we haven't looked at yet. If there are relationships between multiple unseen coins, then we can map out that potential solution space like a big tree. Then look at the tree with random sampling of the superposition to infer where the answer probably lies. Which is a lot faster than iterating through all all of the permutations with a computer. But I suspect that convergence will end up taking roughly the same amount of time as brute force, due to noise or some fundamental aspect of the universe we don't understand yet. But I'm probably wrong about that, because I haven't gotten clarity on how any of this stuff actually works, because nobody bothers to write it this way from first principles. Even if the author isn't going to be doing quantum mechanics in academia, it would help the world a great deal to share what they've learned so far!
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    What you’re looking for exists with stuff like Gleason’s theorem and noncontextuality, but it’s not what you would train up in if you wanted to be “productive”.
• picture 4y ago
  It looks like the author has taken down the post, but it's archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...
  • lelandfe 4y ago
    You should consider respecting their desire to take it down, at least in the context of the heavily trafficked HN comments section
    • sva_ 4y ago
      If you don't want people to read your post, perhaps write a private diary instead.
      • lelandfe 4y ago
        Having it on the Archive is fine; choosing to disregard how scary landing on the top of HN can be seems callous.
        • NotOscarWilde 4y ago
          People in this thread should take into consideration that the author submitted the post to Hacker News themselves. This is a call for the general hacker public to read it, and ultimately it cannot be undone easily. I do understand the basic level of curiosity from fellow HN readers -- I did look up the research team and the supervisors mentioned. They do claim a really large area of research interests: * Verification and Validation * Search-Based Software Engineering * Autonomous Driving * Cyber-Physical Systems * Digital Twins * Quantum Software Engineering It all adds something to the picture. That being said, I would not form any conclusions from this besides "a PhD student faces a crisis" -- unfortunately, this happens often and diagnosing those is really, truly difficult. (I am an assistant professor for just a year now, and I have seen those crises second-hand.)
• tomatowurst 4y ago
  > Because this article received somewhat more attention than I expected/feel comfortable with, I’ll take it down for a moment. Sorry. I’ll leave the disclaimer: Here's the original: Just a bit over half a year ago, I started my PhD in Quantum Computing. Even though I basically didn’t have any previous knowledge about it, I thought Quantum Computing was an interesting challenge to get into. What should I say? Quantum Computing is really cool, indeed! Having a background in Theoretical Informatics, new complexity classes (BQP and friends) are exciting to work with. Also, studying the underlying Quantum Mechanics and understanding this new concept of how physical reality might look like under the hood (there are actually multiple interpretations of that, from Probabilism to the popular Many-World-Theory) has been eye-opening. However, just a couple of months into my project, I figured out, I wouldn’t find anyone to discuss my research with: My supervisors have a rather superficial understanding of Quantum Computing, and I feel like their idea to start a project in that domain was to a not inconsiderable extent motivated by the prospect of granted research funds, not primarily by their desire to achieve a deeper understanding of quantum stuff. So there it was me, an excited PhD student driven by scientific ideals, trying to find and discuss a meaningful research question in a new field vs. the harsh reality of being the first PhD student in the project, without a PostDoc or supervisor to reach out to discuss with and to get some basic orientation from. For quite a while, I didn’t know how to think about this situation. Of course, it is primarily my PhD thesis, so shouldn’t I try and make the best out of it? I should take some responsibility myself, right? I tried that. I read a bunch of books, watched more lectures, only to understand that the pure accumulation of knowledge does not help me finding orientation, quite the opposite. And the more I understood about Quantum Computing, the better I understood that the work that had been done in my research group before had been a rather performative act, aiming to produce PDF files that would be accepted at conferences (which seems to be easy-going if you sprinkle some fancy quantum vocabulary over something and hand it in to a non-quantum conference). I felt less and less comfortable in a setting that apparently expected me to pick some low-hanging – let’s call it fruits – and call it a day. After all, science is all about the pursuit of knowledge, even though the incentives of research funding might not be entirely aligned with that (I learned about The Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), after starting to write this post). I reached out for help. I expressed my doubts and difficulties to other PhDs as well as to more experienced researchers. Interestingly, most other PhDs could very well empathize with my situation and asserted me that my expectations in a certain amount of scientific supervision were justified and that I can’t be expected to create meaningful research entirely on my own. Conversely, the higher up or more experienced somebody was, the more often I got to hear that a PhD is generally seen as something you have to endure if you want to be a successful researcher afterwards. That I have to focus on my title if I want to be a researcher. It feels weird to me that experienced scientists tend to use anecdotal evidence of their own or other people’s underwhelming supervision situation to relativize my struggles. The difference between something being seemingly common, and something being acceptable or reasonable should be obvious, I thought. After all, I decided to quit. I might not have tried everything humanly possible to rescue my PhD, but I feel like I have already wasted much more of my personal energy than I should have. Understanding what’s going on (and daring to put words on it) took me a while and while I tried at first to create an environment that I thrive in by addressing the issues I struggle with, I felt like my supervisors became more and more defensive. Meanwhile, even though I came up with a couple of theoretical research ideas that I would have liked to seen discussed, I was asked to find something that does not require so much understanding of Quantum Computing, something “more hands-on”. Now I’m at a point where I’m burning out. I’m getting frustrated the moment I sit down at my desk, I waste too much time idling, I can barely manage to read books I’m interested in. I hate that. However, I don’t see my frustration as a reason to not like research, quite the opposite: Six months ago I was full of motivation and curiosity: I decided to take a TA position which I’ve been enjoying, I attended physics lectures, just for fun. I rather feel like it’s the people around me who don’t enjoy being researchers. It isn’t the first time such an environment has been burning me out (in particular when I was highly motivated in the start). For the future, it would probably be the easiest to cut down on my expectations and do what I was told: Focus on my title. But I feel like in that case, I would become one of them, forever chasing after the next title without ever finding fulfillment in the present. Paradoxically, the only way to maintain my scientific standards seems to be dropping my current PhD and trying again, some other time. It’s terrifying to hear how many PhD colleagues of mine seem to admire me for that decision, because they feel similar towards their studies. It shouldn’t be that way. Thank you all for your support, for your open ears, for your time, no matter of what you advised me to do. Don’t risk your own mental health for a title and be assured you will find my and others’ support, should you ever decide for a change.
• reedf1 4y ago
  I have noticed (anecdotally) an inverse relationship between PhD candidates and self-guided learning. I'm not entirely sure why, perhaps many coasters may get too comfortable at university and mindlessly follow the track. I think for these types there is a moment where the rubber hits the road, and if you can't be a self starter you will flounder and fail.
• taylodl 4y ago
  Author took it down for "getting too much attention." Based off the comments here I'm thinking perhaps the author is having 2nd thoughts about making their grievance public.
  • iqkznnft 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• vincentmarle 4y ago
  Article was taken offline, here's the archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  You know, when I'm feeling down, or bad, or am just generally in a terrible mood, I write. I get it all out. And then I delete it without saving it. Not only does it never see the internet, but it never even leaves notepad. Because the purpose of my writing is to sort out my own feelings and make myself feel better. Putting it all out there for everyone to see when there's no crime being committed is just personal indulgence without any perspective. I wouldn't want to work with someone who would put me on blast like that, and I don't know anyone else who would either. This isn't even an event where someone else did anything wrong. It's just the writer misunderstanding what being a PhD candidate is about.
• b215826 4y ago
  https://github.com/derhagen/derhagen.github.io/commit/71c9349366f1121a808bbec3223f7fbf7262dfcc https://github.com/derhagen/derhagen.github.io/commit/71c934... I don't understand what's so controversial about this post that the author had to take it down. Seems like a level-headed criticism of modern-day academia to me. Sturgeon's rule applies to everything, including academia.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
    the top rated comment is accusing him of being unprofessional. TBH, i would be mad too if someone did that to me.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • throwaway68642 4y ago
    Posting his commit history seems like a bit of a transgression though. If he's taken the post down I don't consider it any of our business.
• IncRnd 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/YfD7X https://archive.ph/YfD7X
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...
• jokoon 4y ago
  Sometimes I ask myself if a degree is really a legitimate proof of competence, skill or knowledge. Of course higher education matters, but I wish it would not exclude so many people. Higher education is usually the place where social classes start to branch. Academia has often been a tool used to maintain social inequality, and that's the words you often hear from people who are insiders. A lot of people want to be in academics for passion of their field, or for prestige, or for the status. But in reality, it's another place meant to maintain elitism. The weirdest thing is that jobs want you to have a degree, yet you often hear that degrees don't matter. So you quickly realize that education matters, but that degrees should not exist. Students should just want to learn and degrees should not be some sort of carrot on a stick.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Barrera 4y ago
  The article has been replaced with this disclaimer: > Because this article received somewhat more attention than I expected/feel comfortable with, I’ll take it down for a moment. Sorry. I’ll leave the disclaimer: > Disclaimer: This article has been primarily written to clear up my mind, and to potentially receive constructive, uplifting or critical comments from others. I feel like it helps me cope with a frustrating and difficult situation. I do not intend to attack anyone. It looks like the article was submitted to HN by the author. Then, taken aback by promotion to the front page and certain passages that could be construed negatively, the author took the article down. A lot of people dream about being well-known, or at least getting on the front page of HN. What they may not realize is the microscope that places you under and what it can do to you.
  • ModernMech 4y ago
    Something tells me an area of improvement for author would be thinking things through…
• sega_sai 4y ago
  I think it's perfectly fine to quit a PhD. It's not for everyone, and not every academic is a good supervisor, and not every phd project is a good one. Some people who even are not great academically and don't have a lot of scientific drive can still do a PhD with a good advisor and project (similarly for someone who has a lot of scientific drive, even a crappy advisor is not a problem). What however I didn't like in the original post are the sweeping comments about the supervisor's knowledge and research. It is possible that the author is right, but I would be somewhat sceptical, given they come from somebody who just spent 1 year as a PhD candidate.
• physicsguy 4y ago
  PhD projects are about going and finding out something that’s not known. Adequate supervision is important, but it dries up very quickly if you’re working on something novel. You cannot expect an academic to be on top of the fine details of everything in all of the sub areas of what their PhD students and post docs work on - they’re coordiators more than active researchers normally at that level.
• sklargh 4y ago
  And it's gone.
  • williamstein 4y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...
• TedShiller 4y ago
  Mirror?
  • williamstein 4y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...
• gfaregan 4y ago
  From my experience with graduate school I would add two points: 1. It helps to have a clear goal. Most of the people I knew viewed a PhD as a job qualification like an undergrad degree or a professional degree and they now work in tech. Others became professors, which had been their goal probably from before undergrad. 2. Social skills are really important for learning, working, getting help with problems, staying motivated, etc. This is still true for highly technical subjects, but isn't really taught explicitly.
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  What he's describing is extremely common (having an advisor who is loosely interested or competent). But this also what research is about. As he said, this is his PhD, not his advisor's. His advisor should be able help him navigate in the academic world, making the right contacts, funding his trips to conferences or summer schools and so on... But reading stuff for a couple of years before being able to even know what you want to really work on about is part of the deal. And also, pretty much all PhDs are about grabbing low hanging fruits at the frontier of the current knowledge, very few people make significant contributions. Some students need more supervision that others, and similarly, different advisors have different style. It's important to be aware of that when starting a PhD and make sure there's a proper match.
• sydthrowaway 4y ago
  To paraphrase a former HN user, isn't quantum computing obvious bullshit?
  • JanisErdmanis 4y ago
    A question what could one do with large `SU(N)` matrix accelerator is academically interesting. Also, interesting question is whether there are fundamental limits on the size of quantum computer which can be built for which you can't make an answer before have experienced struggle in building one. Generally, the idea that quantum computing would solve many issues of practical importance is overinflated hype. If it ever gets built with arbitrary scale it would add another attack vector for known cryptographic primitives.
• jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I got lucky with a great supervisor and I learned a lot when I did my PhD. Not everybody is that lucky and there are a lot of obstacles to completing a PhD. But most of those are on you. It's supposed to be hard. Not easy. Motivation for doing the work is a function of how inspiring the work is, how much you can accomplish with your own mind, and how well you are supported. The latter is a function of how coacheable you are and how good your supervisor is. Sometimes the best researchers are also the worst on that front. And of course not everybody is that good at mentoring others. If any of that does not add up, you are in going to have to do something. In a way, a PhD. degree is the reward for your ability to overcome such obstacles. It's a lonely job and with few exceptions, the only readership for your hard work is the handful of people who will actually read more than a few pages of your thesis and only because they have to. And yet you have to take it seriously and get it done. You might feel like you are wasting years of your life. But think of the person indulging you for all those years and trying to do their best to nudge you in the right direction. My advice would be to only do a PhD for the right reasons (i.e. the knowledge and the learning instead of the degree) and only if you can find the right mentor to coach you through it. Your first failing might be rooted in getting either of that wrong.
• vinni2 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...
• chinchilla2020 4y ago
  This is intended in a constructive way, so I apologize if it comes off harsh. Many of the complaints in this post betray an attitude of someone who has recently graduated from undergraduate, is very smart, but has little experience in the professional working world. In the future, you will encounter the exact same issues in the professional world - even amplified in some cases. Unless you want to quit every job you find, you will eventually learn the game, as most professionals do. Primary complaints: 1. No orientation, guidance Most jobs have minimal orientation and you can expect a fairly halfhearted orientation from peers. There will be nothing even close to an undergraduate course teaching you to do your job. For senior/managerial jobs there will be absolutely zero orientation, and there may be even be attempts by politically-minded peers/superiors to confuse you about your work responsibilities. 2. Work is 'performative' This is widespread at startups, corporations, and government. Much of the work we do as professionals is performative or geared towards meeting OKRs and having a whiz-bang presentation to senior leaders at the end of the year. This is not ill-intentioned. Every leader wants their org to get the resources that the company has, and must compete to impress the senior leadership. Perception is reality, and you want your work, and your people, to be perceived well. 3. Chasing low hanging fruit / Work is not important enough Nobody is working on the exact thing they dream of, unless they are a billionaire and bankroll their own spaceX. The reason someone pays you to work is because they don't want to be doing it. Your work will never feel important enough unless you are part of a very lucky and elite group of people who most likely have a massive financial stake in the work. 4. PhD as a gatekeeper This is no different from any job. You have to prove yourself before they let you fly the airplane. It is just how it works. It sucks when you feel 'ready' for higher aspirations and nobody will let you move forward. You are smart and motivated and want to do good work. The biggest challenge you will face in your career is this feeling you are feeling right now. There will always be a feeling of institutional inertia that holds you back. This will be ever-present for your entire life. The real test of your abilities as a professional is the ability to withstand it and keep finding ways to get traction under your tires when they are spinning in the mud.
• oversocialized 4y ago
• dcow 4y ago
  Article has been removed. Anyone have a summary?
  • iqkznnft 4y ago
• pacetherace 4y ago
  A lot of the discontent comes from the expectation that a professor in a well ranked university will be an expert in whatever research he/she is currently doing. So any student who prioritizes university/prof ranking over a professor/lab's expertise is going to be taken for a ride.
• sizzle 4y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derhagen.eu/2022/05/23/im-quitting-my-phd.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220523144108/https://blog.derh...
• walleeee 4y ago
  similar experience with an applied quantum computing course in my own program
• credit_guy 4y ago
  One thing people don't realize is that there's no training for advising Ph.D. students. Or, if there is, it's very rudimentary. Compare this with how much training there is for K-12 education, or for teaching undergraduate courses. So, people who start a Ph.D. face the brutal switch from getting very well polished education to getting to be advised "by the ear". Many advisors are just naturals. Guess what, students flock to them, so when it's your turn, it's likely that they already have 6 or maybe 8 or 10 Ph.D. students. Some advisors are just really bad, and people avoid them. But most advisors are in between. The experience of being their student will be so-so. But more generally, the experience of doing a PhD will be very different from undergrad. The pattern I noticed is plenty of introductory courses (i.e. upper undergrad level), and plenty of very advanced (or "Topics") courses. Very few intermediate courses. So, a lot of your education will be self-provided. In the end, that's good, you can't expect to be spoon-fed all your life. But many students find this experience quite difficult. Well, who said a PhD is a walk in the park? You need to work hard. Your advisor is not perfect? Or maybe is the opposite of perfect? Welcome to the party. Lots and lots of other PhD students have the same problem. Some quit, but most don't. You can switch your advisor. You can talk to other PhD students and postdocs, and see what they work on, maybe you can realign your research topic. You can even switch departments. Now, about quantum computation. It's the first course I took when I started my PhD more than 20 years ago. It was just as promising at the time as it is now. My conclusion: quantum computation will be just like nuclear fusion, 20 or 30 years in the future. But if you decided you want to pursue research in quantum computation, presumably you went beyond an introductory course, and you came to the conclusion that there's something worth pursuing. If only now you find out that the emperor has no clothes, then maybe it's your fault too for not paying attention during those introductory classes. So, sorry for what you've been through. You're not the only one who finds the PhD experience a tough one. Thrown in water and asked to swim is how many others find the experience. Most do not drown. As others have said it in this thread, outing your advisor is not that cool. I'm happy you decided to pull down the post. Good luck in your future endeavors.