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Respectfully, I call bullshit. You can't quantify success in a PhD with a single variable. There are a billion ways research can go right or wrong -- irrespecti

by muds 4y ago

Respectfully, I call bullshit. You can't quantify success in a PhD with a single variable. There are a billion ways research can go right or wrong -- irrespective of your personal pedigree. Your ideas might be too early or late for your community to grasp, maybe you appeal to the wrong audience, maybe you're unaware of an application of your research, maybe you don't have the right set of collaborators or need a perspective that, often times, emerges out of a lucky encounters with someone. I respect your experience but I don't want it to give people the wrong idea about research success... > Paper authorship had NO correlation with research success I think paper authorship demonstrates that you're willing to put in a non-trivial amount of work to persue a problem. That seems to be atleast one attractive skill in a PhD, wouldn't you agree?

wink 4y ago
I dunno, my snarky answer would probably be: Just as if they'd test for A, but you actually need to be good at B. I've not been to any school in the US and I don't have a PhD, so all these acronyms like GPA only have a vague meaning to me. But as someone who kinda disliked school and didn't put much effort in it, I can see how school grades can be a bad proxy for university. I didn't even do that well in math in school, but I managed to go above and beyond with all my math classes for my CS degree. I'm not completely sure how the admission for PhDs work and if they look at your BSc/MSc tests... but again, I guess doing ANY work related to finishing a paper is probably closer to what you'll be doing later than e.g. your grades in database stuff when you'll be researching programming languages...
ramraj07 4y ago
Uhm, what exactly are you trying to get at? I said subject GRE is a very good measure of eventual success in academia, do you have a solid response to that or just a rambling tirade? Paper authorship if the student is the first author shows grit and “gumption” I suppose? As if that’s what’s needed in academia at this moment (it’s important but not the main requirement). But almost no undergrad gets a first author paper. They get mentioned in the middle because they ran a bunch of sds gels. I wasn’t even interested in trying to become a professor and I got 10 papers before I finished my PhD, do you know how many I (or any of the folks I actually know who are now professors) had during our undergrad? Zero. And not for lack of trying. You know who actually got papers? The son of the department head.
- muds 4y ago
  The original comment, to me, reads more like "subject GRE is a definitive measure of eventual success in academia." I was arguing against the definitive part. Thanks for the clarification. Maybe it might be a good measure for your cohort, you, and people in similar situations. > Almost no undergrad gets a first author paper Maybe this is different in different fields but we have a lot of undergraduate first author papers in programming languages and machine learning. I mean -- through and through -- undergraduate students bringing up a topic, getting guidance from professors and senior PhD students, getting results by the end of the semester, and publishing results by next year. Even the people who end up "running the sds slides" either fall out by next year or end up working towards their own first author publications. I've always chalked this up to the experimental setup cost being very cheap in CS compared to in the "hard sciences" so most undergraduate students are already comfortable with all the tools they need to do research. > I wasn't interested in trying to become a professor I think this is precisely the variable that a standardized test cannot account for! I feel an "authentic" undergraduate research experience is successful if it helps students realize if research is right for them or not. > ... papers ... the son of the department head... I see where your frustration is stemming from. Sorry this was your first experience with undergraduate research.
trentnix 4y ago
You can't quantify success in a PhD with a single variable. Of course, but I'd bet the farm there's a very strong correlation!
- a123b456c 4y ago
  I have 20+ years experience in academic research. Connections and hustle are very strong predictors of success. Test scores do indicate ability, and ability is helpful but far from sufficient.
  - sinuhe69 4y ago
    Can you clarify for me, a non-native speaker, what you mean with hustle here? Energetic activities or fraud? (I guess the first, but I also heard of a lot of academic frauds)
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    Connections and hustle are stuff you can learn. At least enough to become a professor. Most of my nerd friends who became professors learned these during their PhDs. I didn’t say they became famous professors just folks doing decent research in different corners of academia. I’ll still get my house in the subject GRE as the single most important metric if I were to choose a grad student. Not that I’m in that game anymore of course.

by muds 4y ago

wink 4y ago

I dunno, my snarky answer would probably be: Just as if they'd test for A, but you actually need to be good at B. I've not been to any school in the US and I don't have a PhD, so all these acronyms like GPA only have a vague meaning to me. But as someone who kinda disliked school and didn't put much effort in it, I can see how school grades can be a bad proxy for university. I didn't even do that well in math in school, but I managed to go above and beyond with all my math classes for my CS degree. I'm not completely sure how the admission for PhDs work and if they look at your BSc/MSc tests... but again, I guess doing ANY work related to finishing a paper is probably closer to what you'll be doing later than e.g. your grades in database stuff when you'll be researching programming languages...

ramraj07 4y ago

Uhm, what exactly are you trying to get at? I said subject GRE is a very good measure of eventual success in academia, do you have a solid response to that or just a rambling tirade? Paper authorship if the student is the first author shows grit and “gumption” I suppose? As if that’s what’s needed in academia at this moment (it’s important but not the main requirement). But almost no undergrad gets a first author paper. They get mentioned in the middle because they ran a bunch of sds gels. I wasn’t even interested in trying to become a professor and I got 10 papers before I finished my PhD, do you know how many I (or any of the folks I actually know who are now professors) had during our undergrad? Zero. And not for lack of trying. You know who actually got papers? The son of the department head.

muds 4y ago
The original comment, to me, reads more like "subject GRE is a definitive measure of eventual success in academia." I was arguing against the definitive part. Thanks for the clarification. Maybe it might be a good measure for your cohort, you, and people in similar situations. > Almost no undergrad gets a first author paper Maybe this is different in different fields but we have a lot of undergraduate first author papers in programming languages and machine learning. I mean -- through and through -- undergraduate students bringing up a topic, getting guidance from professors and senior PhD students, getting results by the end of the semester, and publishing results by next year. Even the people who end up "running the sds slides" either fall out by next year or end up working towards their own first author publications. I've always chalked this up to the experimental setup cost being very cheap in CS compared to in the "hard sciences" so most undergraduate students are already comfortable with all the tools they need to do research. > I wasn't interested in trying to become a professor I think this is precisely the variable that a standardized test cannot account for! I feel an "authentic" undergraduate research experience is successful if it helps students realize if research is right for them or not. > ... papers ... the son of the department head... I see where your frustration is stemming from. Sorry this was your first experience with undergraduate research.

trentnix 4y ago

You can't quantify success in a PhD with a single variable. Of course, but I'd bet the farm there's a very strong correlation!

a123b456c 4y ago
I have 20+ years experience in academic research. Connections and hustle are very strong predictors of success. Test scores do indicate ability, and ability is helpful but far from sufficient.
- sinuhe69 4y ago
  Can you clarify for me, a non-native speaker, what you mean with hustle here? Energetic activities or fraud? (I guess the first, but I also heard of a lot of academic frauds)
- ramraj07 4y ago
  Connections and hustle are stuff you can learn. At least enough to become a professor. Most of my nerd friends who became professors learned these during their PhDs. I didn’t say they became famous professors just folks doing decent research in different corners of academia. I’ll still get my house in the subject GRE as the single most important metric if I were to choose a grad student. Not that I’m in that game anymore of course.