6 ms·

Farewell to MIT

132 points by richardk 15y ago

APerry 15y ago
MIT is for retards. Go to Stanford, bitches.
bambax 15y ago
> The most important thing I learned is that I don't want to be a professor. This is a valuable lesson, because now I won't have regrets about not pursuing that career path. This is a very interesting point. These days many people argue that it's useless to go to college. But one of the points of going to college is not having regrets for not having tried. Maybe the right approach is to go, and then drop out. You know you were able to go, you know how it is inside, and then if you get out after the first year you save at least 75% of the cost.
- jgrahamc 15y ago
  Doing my doctorate also made me realize that I didn't want to be an academic. I am glad I did it although people sometimes (especially in the UK) ask why I bothered if I wasn't going to be an academic.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    That lesson is itself one of the benefits :)
  - mino 15y ago
    Same here :)
- nostrademons 15y ago
  Same often goes for founding a startup. Do it, push yourself as far as you can with it, but then get out before you run out of money and destroy your sanity. That way, you have no regrets, and also no permanent harm done to your finances or psyche.
- kmfrk 15y ago
  I think everyone ought to go to a great college and at least try it out. I live in a country where the universities are fairly awful, and I don't know if it's worth people's time to study at them (I dropped out), but I totally get why most companies require a bachelor in computer science, even though it means that I will never be able to get those jobs. I wonder what it means in terms of getting US visas, too, but I guess I'll just have to adapt. I'm glad to be in a position where my main interest at the moment is so location- and language-agnostic, so I don't have to stay in any specific country, as long as I can communicate with people in their preferred language.
- eykanal 15y ago
  The quoted line is a good point, but your take on it is completely wrong, I believe. The main point in college is to get a degree. You don't spend approximately $150,000 in order to "not have regrets later on". You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within. Don't forget that PhD student in most departments get paid a stipend; they aren't accruing debt during their graduate career. (For what it's worth, I received my PhD and soon thereafter left academia as well, for many of the reasons outlined in the article above.)
  - hepek 15y ago
    "You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within." I don't like the direction the world is heading. Knowledge is not a commodity. Nor are we livestock that is being bred to be sold on The Market. I still hold the illusion that some people go to academia with non-material motives. How could research in some obscure part of some obscure field ever increase your price tag. Yet how can we hope of any academic progress if we base our research on what the economy needs.
    - iqster 15y ago
      Yup ... money isn't everything (for everyone). I knew at least two people in grad school who had sold their startups for decent but not exorbitant paydays and then had come to grad school for personal satisfaction and other non-monetary reasons.
    - amouat 15y ago
      Fully agree. Education should be primarily about furthering knowledge, not finding a job. The same should be true about school as well as Uni. I studied Computer Science because I was interested in it, not because I thought I would make a lot of money. Frankly I deplore the attitude that the only point in education is to get a job. Many (most?) advancements in science occur because of curiosity, not from perceived practical value.
      - tmh88j 15y ago
- mikeash 15y ago
  What if you just exchange regrets for not having tried for regrets for having tried? I don't regret it a lot, it was only a year wasted and some good still came of it, but I regret going to grad school for my Master's. If I hadn't gone, I might have regretted that instead, but is that worse?
adulau 15y ago
"Take the next step with the ones that are really interesting: actually do some concrete work, even if it has to be done as a side project. At the worst, you will learn a lot and have fun by working on something new with other researchers." It's a very good recommendation. I remember some PhD students reluctant to work on concrete implementations of their theorized approaches. But in the long-term, the most successful ones were doing a lot of concrete works and gained experiences for an academic career and while keeping a strong feet/competence into the private sector.
- ogrisel 15y ago
  Also, implementing ideas and testing them on real data can be a very good heuristic to drive theoretical thinking by: - giving you empirical evidences on the practical limitations of a positive theoretical results that might have been otherwise overlooked. - giving you new insights on which approaches (e.g. class of algorithm) are the most promising for a given class of problems. - make explicit some assumptions you might have implicitly made in your theoretical work and check whether they can actually be satisfied in practice.
- evanj 15y ago
  When I said "concrete work" I didn't necessarily mean you can't do theoretical work, if that is your interest. I meant to say that you should actually be working together. It is very common for people to be part of a "single project" but the extent of their collaboration is that they have some meetings and talk about related issues. I don't think that is the same as working together.
roman_vorushin 15y ago
> However, there is one important piece of advice I wish I could give to my past self, when I started my PhD: _Actively_ collaborate with others. This great advice is hard to underestimate.
- iqster 15y ago
  Yes. And understanding why is important. Your collaborators/peers will be your most important source of learning. They will also form the basis of your professional technical network.
lars512 15y ago
I think people tend to work alone because of the pressure they feel to come up with something independent and original. I went through this process and eventually realised how much more I enjoy working closely with others on hard problems. It's far more productive as well.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
scott_s 15y ago
I defended my dissertation in December 2010, and I started at IBM Research in January of 2011. Within weeks of being at IBM Research, I found myself having fantastically productive, ad-hoc research discussions with my colleagues that lead to real work being done - code being written, experiments being run and papers written. Things moved much, much faster than they could have when I was working alone as a graduate student. Three highly motivated people working together on the same problem are more than just three times more productive than a single person working on the problem. I heartily endorse the author's advice to collaborate. I didn't do it much as I should have as a grad student. But, in some ways, doing so is not encouraged. My last two years, I had one goal: to graduate. I knew what I had to do to get that done, so I plowed through and did it. Because you need to come up with a dissertation that is yours, you have many students who will rationally work on their own projects without much collaboration.
- evanj 15y ago
  I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way. I agree that working alone seems like the easiest or best choice. However, I think it is a local maximum, and not a true optimal solution. At least for me, working with others makes me way more productive, so I think that my collaborations helped me graduate sooner. I were to start again, I would be more proactive about working with others. Its true that to graduate, you have to write your own thesis, but that doesn't mean you can't collaborate. I've found that parts of work naturally fall to people according to their interests, so it wasn't really a problem for the projects I worked on.
evanj 15y ago
I'm curious how you discovered my post, months after I originally wrote it. Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments!
- richardk 15y ago
  I'm was writing a user-space thread library and I found your article "Implementing a Thread Library on Linux", a really nice article by the way, and then found "Farewell to MIT" just through browsing the site. "Farewell to MIT" just seemed like such great advice, I was surprised when I found it hadn't already been posted here.
Encryptor 15y ago
not news.

132 points by richardk 15y ago

MIT is for retards. Go to Stanford, bitches.

> The most important thing I learned is that I don't want to be a professor. This is a valuable lesson, because now I won't have regrets about not pursuing that career path. This is a very interesting point. These days many people argue that it's useless to go to college. But one of the points of going to college is not having regrets for not having tried. Maybe the right approach is to go, and then drop out. You know you were able to go, you know how it is inside, and then if you get out after the first year you save at least 75% of the cost.

jgrahamc 15y ago
Doing my doctorate also made me realize that I didn't want to be an academic. I am glad I did it although people sometimes (especially in the UK) ask why I bothered if I wasn't going to be an academic.
- rhizome 15y ago
  That lesson is itself one of the benefits :)
- mino 15y ago
  Same here :)
nostrademons 15y ago
Same often goes for founding a startup. Do it, push yourself as far as you can with it, but then get out before you run out of money and destroy your sanity. That way, you have no regrets, and also no permanent harm done to your finances or psyche.
kmfrk 15y ago
I think everyone ought to go to a great college and at least try it out. I live in a country where the universities are fairly awful, and I don't know if it's worth people's time to study at them (I dropped out), but I totally get why most companies require a bachelor in computer science, even though it means that I will never be able to get those jobs. I wonder what it means in terms of getting US visas, too, but I guess I'll just have to adapt. I'm glad to be in a position where my main interest at the moment is so location- and language-agnostic, so I don't have to stay in any specific country, as long as I can communicate with people in their preferred language.
eykanal 15y ago
The quoted line is a good point, but your take on it is completely wrong, I believe. The main point in college is to get a degree. You don't spend approximately $150,000 in order to "not have regrets later on". You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within. Don't forget that PhD student in most departments get paid a stipend; they aren't accruing debt during their graduate career. (For what it's worth, I received my PhD and soon thereafter left academia as well, for many of the reasons outlined in the article above.)
- hepek 15y ago
  "You spend it to increase your net worth and hiring price in whatever field you wish to work within." I don't like the direction the world is heading. Knowledge is not a commodity. Nor are we livestock that is being bred to be sold on The Market. I still hold the illusion that some people go to academia with non-material motives. How could research in some obscure part of some obscure field ever increase your price tag. Yet how can we hope of any academic progress if we base our research on what the economy needs.
  - iqster 15y ago
    Yup ... money isn't everything (for everyone). I knew at least two people in grad school who had sold their startups for decent but not exorbitant paydays and then had come to grad school for personal satisfaction and other non-monetary reasons.
  - amouat 15y ago
    Fully agree. Education should be primarily about furthering knowledge, not finding a job. The same should be true about school as well as Uni. I studied Computer Science because I was interested in it, not because I thought I would make a lot of money. Frankly I deplore the attitude that the only point in education is to get a job. Many (most?) advancements in science occur because of curiosity, not from perceived practical value.
    - tmh88j 15y ago
mikeash 15y ago
What if you just exchange regrets for not having tried for regrets for having tried? I don't regret it a lot, it was only a year wasted and some good still came of it, but I regret going to grad school for my Master's. If I hadn't gone, I might have regretted that instead, but is that worse?

adulau 15y ago

"Take the next step with the ones that are really interesting: actually do some concrete work, even if it has to be done as a side project. At the worst, you will learn a lot and have fun by working on something new with other researchers." It's a very good recommendation. I remember some PhD students reluctant to work on concrete implementations of their theorized approaches. But in the long-term, the most successful ones were doing a lot of concrete works and gained experiences for an academic career and while keeping a strong feet/competence into the private sector.

ogrisel 15y ago
Also, implementing ideas and testing them on real data can be a very good heuristic to drive theoretical thinking by: - giving you empirical evidences on the practical limitations of a positive theoretical results that might have been otherwise overlooked. - giving you new insights on which approaches (e.g. class of algorithm) are the most promising for a given class of problems. - make explicit some assumptions you might have implicitly made in your theoretical work and check whether they can actually be satisfied in practice.
evanj 15y ago
When I said "concrete work" I didn't necessarily mean you can't do theoretical work, if that is your interest. I meant to say that you should actually be working together. It is very common for people to be part of a "single project" but the extent of their collaboration is that they have some meetings and talk about related issues. I don't think that is the same as working together.

roman_vorushin 15y ago

> However, there is one important piece of advice I wish I could give to my past self, when I started my PhD: _Actively_ collaborate with others. This great advice is hard to underestimate.

iqster 15y ago
Yes. And understanding why is important. Your collaborators/peers will be your most important source of learning. They will also form the basis of your professional technical network.

lars512 15y ago

I think people tend to work alone because of the pressure they feel to come up with something independent and original. I went through this process and eventually realised how much more I enjoy working closely with others on hard problems. It's far more productive as well.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

scott_s 15y ago

I defended my dissertation in December 2010, and I started at IBM Research in January of 2011. Within weeks of being at IBM Research, I found myself having fantastically productive, ad-hoc research discussions with my colleagues that lead to real work being done - code being written, experiments being run and papers written. Things moved much, much faster than they could have when I was working alone as a graduate student. Three highly motivated people working together on the same problem are more than just three times more productive than a single person working on the problem. I heartily endorse the author's advice to collaborate. I didn't do it much as I should have as a grad student. But, in some ways, doing so is not encouraged. My last two years, I had one goal: to graduate. I knew what I had to do to get that done, so I plowed through and did it. Because you need to come up with a dissertation that is yours, you have many students who will rationally work on their own projects without much collaboration.

evanj 15y ago
I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way. I agree that working alone seems like the easiest or best choice. However, I think it is a local maximum, and not a true optimal solution. At least for me, working with others makes me way more productive, so I think that my collaborations helped me graduate sooner. I were to start again, I would be more proactive about working with others. Its true that to graduate, you have to write your own thesis, but that doesn't mean you can't collaborate. I've found that parts of work naturally fall to people according to their interests, so it wasn't really a problem for the projects I worked on.

evanj 15y ago

I'm curious how you discovered my post, months after I originally wrote it. Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments!

richardk 15y ago
I'm was writing a user-space thread library and I found your article "Implementing a Thread Library on Linux", a really nice article by the way, and then found "Farewell to MIT" just through browsing the site. "Farewell to MIT" just seemed like such great advice, I was surprised when I found it hadn't already been posted here.

Encryptor 15y ago

not news.