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> But my experience has been that even when students are starting their doctorates there's very clear tiers -- even out of the pool of doctoral students in Oxfo

by nl 4y ago

> But my experience has been that even when students are starting their doctorates there's very clear tiers -- even out of the pool of doctoral students in Oxford. This might be true, but it's really really hard for someone who doesn't work with them day-to-day to distinguish. Your article pointed out the same problem in getting novel worked reviewed - it was extremely hard to find people for that. I know in my case it was even worse - funding proposals generally come from research group leaders, and there at least you have a body of work to look at and can judge their likelihood to succeed. But if you are trying to look at an individual's work how can you judge it when all you have to go on is peer reviews and maybe interviews with supervisors or peers? Supervisors' motivations are already complicated - most of the time they would want an individual in their group funded because their work is generally aligned with that research group's field. It's a pretty tricky problem.

spekcular 4y ago
> This might be true, but it's really really hard for someone who doesn't work with them day-to-day to distinguish. It's really not (in mathematics, the field under discussion). It's not hard to look at the CV of a graduating PhD student in math and tell whether they're a semi-reasonable candidate for the Clay Fellowship, or the other fellowships listed above. Among the small group who makes that cut, of course you need to rely on letters of recommendation, expert assessments, and so on. But the initial cut is fairly straightforward.
- nl 4y ago
  It's interesting. We were mostly funding at the PhD level, and in computer science. By contrast, I read the links for all the current Clay Fellows[1] and noticed that maybe 60-70% of them had one thing in common: They had proved some long standing (30 year+) conjecture. I agree that's a pretty good sign. Of course the program they did their PhD through is a pretty good initial screen too: Princeton 4 Harvard 4 Standford 1 Imperial College London 1 MIT 1 UT Austin: 1 [1] https://www.claymath.org/fas https://www.claymath.org/fas

by nl 4y ago

spekcular 4y ago

> This might be true, but it's really really hard for someone who doesn't work with them day-to-day to distinguish. It's really not (in mathematics, the field under discussion). It's not hard to look at the CV of a graduating PhD student in math and tell whether they're a semi-reasonable candidate for the Clay Fellowship, or the other fellowships listed above. Among the small group who makes that cut, of course you need to rely on letters of recommendation, expert assessments, and so on. But the initial cut is fairly straightforward.

nl 4y ago
It's interesting. We were mostly funding at the PhD level, and in computer science. By contrast, I read the links for all the current Clay Fellows[1] and noticed that maybe 60-70% of them had one thing in common: They had proved some long standing (30 year+) conjecture. I agree that's a pretty good sign. Of course the program they did their PhD through is a pretty good initial screen too: Princeton 4 Harvard 4 Standford 1 Imperial College London 1 MIT 1 UT Austin: 1 [1] https://www.claymath.org/fas https://www.claymath.org/fas