22 ms·

PhD Simulator

828 points by Smith42 3y ago

morriswmz 3y ago
Hi everyone, I wrote this game 5 years ago when I was going to graduate from my PhD program. I did not expect to suddenly become popular in the middle of this week. Hope you enjoyed it (and thank you for stress testing my personal website)! I wrote it to look back my PhD experience in a humorous way. However, each person may have a different experience and the game cannot simply capture all the scenarios. The road toward the PhD degree is full of challenges, and can be very stressful. I feel sometimes you also need a bit of luck like the randomness in the game. Thank you all for playing the game! Congratulations to those who already got their PhD, and best of luck for those who are still pursuing it! You can find the source code of the game here: https://github.com/morriswmz/phd-game https://github.com/morriswmz/phd-game. I haven't touched it for years and probably already forgot how to build it. From my memory all events/items/status are customizable through YAML files so you can easily mod it if you want to. Cheers!
- sebmellen 3y ago
  Welcome to Hacker News! Forwarding this game to some people who probably need the humor… Thank you for making it!
cyrillite 3y ago
This, and subsequent comments, are all experiences I’ve seen happen to my partner and three very close friends. I decided to pivot academic path ways and pursue a masters, so they all wound up ahead of me by a year. Watching their experiences, I decided I’d rather pursue financial security and independence before pursuing a PhD. I think I’ve made the right call. It may be harder to get into a programme this way, I’m not sure, but I fundamentally do not want the worst case scenarios of a PhD combined with needing it as a next step in my career or a source of income.
jesalg 3y ago
Is it bad that I feel like a massive failure for taking 7 years to complete a sim PhD?
ketzu 3y ago
> Your submission to [...] was REJECTED. The reviewers were not convinced of the significance your [preliminary!] results. Thanks for the flashbacks. At least we didn't have any qualifying exams.
JBorrow 3y ago
This is great! The ending phase really gives you the same feeling of “screw everything else, I need to finish this paper” rushing to get the final stuff out.
- xp84 3y ago
  By that time I had already grinded so long and lost so much hope that I HAD to slack off but couldn’t because every time I tried, my advisor caught me and reminded me of my progress. Repeat until I lost all hope!
geigco 3y ago
Confirmation that I was right not to get my PhD!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lqet 3y ago
This is great and exactly captures the PhD experience. Both in the simulator and in real life, I mostly survived until the end by slacking off frequently, and needed around 5 years. Some highlights: > INBOX: Based on the reviewers' comments, we regret to inform you that your manuscript has been REJECTED for publication. One of the reviewers pointed out that there is no comparison with a state-of-art method. > You came up with a bunch of ideas. However, upon further searching, you found that they have already been done before. > You found the missing piece during a shower. You develop one of your preliminary results into a major result. > You found one of your ideas appears in a recently published paper. You can no longer work on it. > Three years passed. You have witnessed many graduations. You began to worry about whether your can graduate on time. > The simulation took a much longer time than you expected. The results are not available yet. What was missing: 1.) Growing feeling of getting too old 2.) Growing family obligations (marriage, kids, trying to write a thesis at 3am with a crying baby next room) 3.) Questions asked by friends and relatives regarding progress 4.) Teaching obligations
- peteradio 3y ago
  > 3.) Questions asked by friends and relatives regarding progress This one in particular had me temporarily cut off contact with people who could not be bothered to remember that I had no interest in answering this question!
- chias 3y ago
  One dynamic I experienced that also isn't in the simulation: if you focus too much on classwork early on in order to pass your RPE, it can actually be hard to find an advisor. Classwork is basically dead-end work and the more you focus on it the less you have to show for yourself when trying to convince an advisor to work with you. Your goal should be to optimize for doing just well enough to pass your classwork. Also, random catalysmic events, like in year 4 your advisor accepts a job at a different university in another state.
  - dazed_confused 3y ago
    Or your advisor retiring in year 2...
jmercan 3y ago
Sounds like this is how my life will be like for a couple years if I get accepted :p
- fwsgonzo 3y ago
  I'm doing it right now and I kind of envy my colleagues that are doing normal work. There are times when I enjoy the ability to focus on things that really interest me, but the paper writing and publishing processes really suck. Also, the random stuff from the university that I have to jump over sucks fun out of the process, for no gain to anyone.
lusus_naturae 3y ago
Unrealistic because it doesn't have enough inter-dept. politics and other phd/msc students in-fighting.
- drdunce 3y ago
  ...and the final step where having succeeded no one actually cares and you are now unemployable.
  - lusus_naturae 3y ago
    Ah yes, the coup de grâce. Or you do find employment and then find that your major result paper is being challenged and have to submit a retraction. The fun is endless.
spacemanspiff01 3y ago
Wait... There was only one month where I was working on "finish your thesis"
armchairhacker 3y ago
That was...a lot more straightforward than I thought. First try: Year 4 Month 5 Second try: a lot more things went wrong. Year 5 Month 11. Third try: Year 5 Month 11. I just followed these rules: - Study for the qualifying exam until I'm "very confident" - If I have no ideas, read papers - If I have an idea, work on developing it. If I have a preliminary result, work on developing it. If I have a major result, conduct experiments etc...if I have a rejected paper, revise and resubmit. Prioritizing whichever option gets me closer to an accepted paper (because presumably the ideas get outdated quickly) - Whenever I get the "ask my advisor for a break?" say yes. Whenever I get "I am tired" and no "ask my advisor", "Slack Off" for one month. Fortunately I got no abusive advisor, rejected papers usually end up getting accepted later, no extreme life circumstances or cut funding. But my computer crashed way more often than I'd expect, especially since backups are so common nowadays.
- azangru 3y ago
  I lost all hope and quit. Something that happened to me in real life as well.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Every time I tried the game (using OP's described steps) I "lost all hope and quit". I thought that was the joke / funny commentary: that all paths through the game involve you ending up losing. Didn't know there was a path to actually win the game until reading the HN comments. So I kept trying it over and over doing the same steps and finally won once. I guess that's an even funnier commentary on how it's pretty much entirely luck based.
    - 19h 3y ago
      I actually got the PhD so it’s not all ways leading to failure — just accept when your advisor offers you to take time off.
    - 93po 3y ago
      i won on my first try at just under 6 years and my hope never got below 65 i think, maybe i got lucky
trojan13 3y ago
Now imagine this, but with a "LinkedIn feed" that shows updates from your peers, showing their professional accomplishments and current salary.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  It should also have a picture of you, Like a current one that slowly degrades over the course as you start eating crap and stop exercising.
  - dhimes 3y ago
    haha that would be perfect. Receding hairline, expanding waistline...
    - drdunce 3y ago
      don't forget the back hump!
      - 1323portloo 3y ago
        I remember my advisor's most relevant advice, "Keep working toward your thesis, and one day, you, too, shall have a mighty hump!"
  - SomewhatLikely 3y ago
    Reminds me of the early Duke Nukem games that showed your health as an increasingly beat up avatar.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Also just pictures of them enjoying life in the city of their choice, the families they’ve started, the vacations they go on, the fun hobbies they have time for, etc.
liendolucas 3y ago
Some time ago I watched this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416675/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416675/ (Dark matter). I don't know how accurately captures the essence of getting a PhD, maybe someone who went through it can expand on that, but I've always wondered if it's actually how is depicted in the film.
- stolenmerch 3y ago
  This film is a fictionalized depiction of the real-life 1991 University of Iowa shooting. A PhD student murdered his advisors, VP of Academic Affairs, and a fellow student for being passed over for a prestigious prize. There were other geopolitical influences on this event that I'd say make it unique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Iowa_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Iowa_shooting
JaceLightning 3y ago
I declined. Best decision ever.
dktnj 3y ago
This sounds less stressful than an average half a decade working at my current position. It is actually motivating. Whether or not that was the desired outcome, I don't know. At least I get to travel to half decent academic conferences and not large vendor marketing conferences.
- dchftcs 3y ago
  The stress comes from constant and abject failure, not really the life style. Travelling is also like 2% of the total time.
  - dktnj 3y ago
    I haven't done any productive work for about 5 years so doing something and failing would be an improvement.
  - aiisjustanif 3y ago
    Depends on the subject matter.
jebarker 3y ago
I'm interested in how specific this PhD experience is to the US, certain subjects or recent times. My own experience doing a maths PhD in the UK in the mid-2000s was not like this at all (but had a different set of challenges for sure).
- mbustamanter 3y ago
  I'm a chilean maths grad student and save for the qualifying exam, it's quite accurate. So much so that I think I made a mistake clicking on this because as it progressed I started feeling dizzy. Other commenters here also have their relatable experiences, which doesn't make me feel so bad.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I'm about to wrap up my PhD in a few months here in the US, I find that while it's kind of close, it's a bit on the cynical side, as is most of the HN discussion about PhDs. Yes, my advisor emphasizes papers a lot, but there aren't any requirements for number of papers for graduation. While there are extremely busy periods of forgoing sleep to work (eg right before a major deadline), my advisor also constantly reminds us to take breaks and enjoy life. There was also the anxiety about graduating on time, but that too was sorted out by just having a meeting with my advisor and understanding how things work. On the other hand, the situation with the qualifying exam was the opposite, I had to constantly remind my advisor that I needed to get that done. It involved a 50 page report on the current status of my research and a thesis defense style presentation to my committee, so that was a bit of a challenge to make time for between normal research. Passing it didn't feel like much of a challenge, just meeting the 50 page requirement did. I had enough data, but it was still a lot of writing.
hospitalJail 3y ago
Didn't reach the roadblock I ran into: >Professors demand you do exactly what they want for your thesis. Also, what qualifying exam? It seems like as long as I was worker for my professors, they couldn't give a crap. (Although I was quite credentialed, so maybe they didn't care) If I do get a PhD, it will be on a topic I want. So far, I have done that better independently and have gotten a bunch of press on the topic without needing academia.
- zelos 3y ago
  I think some unis require students to start as an MPhil student and then transfer from MPhil to PhD via some kind of publication/presentation?
  - jebarker 3y ago
    That's what I did (~17 years ago). I was registered as MPhil then transferred to PhD after submitting a mini-thesis after about 2 years. In the end the mini-thesis actually contained all the most significant results that formed the PhD thesis and the latter just explored some applications.
WaitWaitWha 3y ago
reading papers --> idea This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me. Ideas tend to come from working on real-world projects, which then shows the lack of understanding and need for research. The project forks to do the research and merge back to implement the findings. Thereafter, someone on the team will put it into a cohesive academic format, and use it for a PhD. Of course there is reading papers and such, but it is not the source of the idea. edit: I am also curious, how many really stop research because a similar or tangential topic was explored? "There can be only one"?! that said, the game is fun! Thank you.
- Frost1x 3y ago
  I'd say this is where more engineering approachable ideas come from or ideas that might be considered translational (or near translational). If you work near the bridge of theory and application, this is probably more the case. A lot of funding agencies are pressuring even theoretical or basic research to look at translational application anymore though (capitalism is all about immediate ROI) so I'd say this is increasingly shifting towards many research domains but in the past, there were a lot of pure theoretical areas you could work on where there are plenty of unexplored ideas you could build out and get paid to do the work. Application is certainly a great driver though because you have a demand signal to look at vs throwing darts at the board in work that may never manifest to anything solid.
- sweetjuly 3y ago
  > This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me You might want to take a different approach to reading papers then. No paper ever concludes by saying "yeah our method is perfect and no further work is needed" [1]. Instead, every solution has its quirks and questions which need to be explored further. Maybe their method has limitations which make it unusable for your applications, maybe they make somewhat faulty assumptions that don't always hold, maybe they wrongly ignore some technique. Seeing how other people approach a problem can often give you inspiration for how to take it another way. [1] https://xkcd.com/2268/ https://xkcd.com/2268/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
foobarbecue 3y ago
Goat simulator is better
cosmic_quanta 3y ago
Very cool! I was surprised that writing the thesis was an immediate success. I've seen many PhD students struggle at this point, taking > 12mo to submit.
sgt101 3y ago
It shocks me so much that publication has become the only metric of a Ph.D.
- milancurcic 3y ago
  It's been mostly like this for a long time, but it is slowly changing. Open data repositories and scientific software libraries/products are beginning to count more and more (at least many of us are pushing for this). It also depends on the target career past graduation. Papers matter a lot for tenure-track positions, and much less for science support (scientific software developers, data engineers, lab managers etc.) in academia, or most jobs in the industry. The 3 paper requirement in the game is also not a formal requirement in most universities--it's more of an implied requirement by individual PhD advisors. FWIW, my first lead-author paper I published a year past my PhD. During my PhD, I produced two relatively large scientific software applications (one open and one closed source) and a few open datasets. I'm now 8 years past my PhD and relatively successful in my field, 90th or so percentile based on common metrics--papers, citations, and funds raised. Bottom line, papers are important but not the only thing that counts. Outside of tenure-track careers where they are crucial, it's possible to establish yourself as a scientist and be respected by your peers by publishing software and data.
  - bogtog 3y ago
    In what fields is 3 papers expected? In my field, Psychology, 3 first-author papers sounds like a reasonable lower bound, but that seems like it would be a lot to expect out of Biologists or hard scientists.
    - milancurcic 3y ago
      Ah, good point. I'm in Earth sciences. 3 papers before PhD is reasonable here, just not a formal university requirement.
    - fht 3y ago
      Current 4th year in Biology. Generally, 1 paper is expected, but it is not strictly necessary to graduate. Highly doubt that the PI will let you go without finishing your project though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gus_massa 3y ago
A very important part of the work of the advisor is to pick a subject that is not been researched by other group, so you can work on it without the fear of been sniped. It not foolproof, but if three or four ideas get sniped, it's probably better to kindly consider an advisor change.
bluish29 3y ago
As a current 4th year graduate student, I opened the link and found the choice to accept or decline the admission offer, I don't know why I clicked decline without thinking.
- computomatic 3y ago
  I did the same. The only way to win is not to play.
  - diracs_stache 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    Your prize is always wondering if you should have done it. I know people that say one of their biggest regrets was electing to pass on the PhD path. The grass, unfortunately, is always greener.
    - freilanzer 3y ago
      Add me to the list. It would have destroyed me but I still regret not doing it.
- ketzu 3y ago
  I was secretly hoping it will tell me "you win" when I clicked decline.
  - DirkH 3y ago
    "You decline the PhD offer and end up happy with an intellectually satisfying six-figure role in tech. You are surprised when you learn that your older colleague with a PhD earns just as much as you do."
- moffkalast 3y ago
  "That is unfortunate."
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
This is as engrossing as MUDs from the 90s! Maybe an endless generation of MUD + LLM are actually the future of gaming
jannw 3y ago
seems quite accurate to me - reflects well my own experience.
tibbon 3y ago
I find this highly unrealistic. Advisors do not notice nor care for your mental health. Breaks and rest are not offered nor advised. Back to the lab!
- gradstudent 3y ago
  Claim your free time. No sane advisor would ever say no.
  - blitzar 3y ago
    That explains a lot about my advisor then ...
    - wpietri 3y ago
      Yeah, that's one of the things I was looking for in this game. A friend of mine had an absolutely bonkers advisor who stopped answering my friend's emails. For a while they basically had to stalk their advisor, who would come in at erratic hours and quickly lock their office door, just ignoring any knocking. It was so wild to me, as my friend was just incredibly nice. My friend only graduated because other faculty sort of clubbed together as unofficial advisors. I get that if you select only for smarts, you're going to get some odd ducks. But I've heard so many stories from PhD-seeking friends about the level of dysfunction that gets visited upon grad students.
  - BeetleB 3y ago
    Many advisors are not sane. Many will definitely not tolerate multiple leaves of absences (i.e. vacations) due to stress. People lie and make up family emergencies to get the time off. Highly dependent on the advisor.
- moab 3y ago
  You had a terrible advisor. I'm sorry.
  - klysm 3y ago
joshcsimmons 3y ago
Pretty good but needs more Machiavellian power games
jack_riminton 3y ago
Now do an arts PhD!
- jack_riminton 3y ago
  lol at the downvotes, you know it's true. Most of the made up papers in the "Sokal squared" affair that made publication are considered PhD level within those fields and they're literal nonsense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
spidersenses 3y ago
For some reason I found the font really hard to read. My brain has the impression that the text is vertically compressed, squished even. Just that no amount of resizing the window changed the strange effect. Is that only me?
- spencerchubb 3y ago
  It is vertically squished. I had to modify the CSS myself in the dev tools because I couldn't bear it
whatever1 3y ago
This is so brutally accurate
ccppurcell 3y ago
The proportion of slackings off for which you are caught by your advisor is unrealistically high, but exactly as high as it feels. I definitely got my fair share of those emails...
geysersam 3y ago
Thanks for the ptsd relapse.
eagleseye 3y ago
I notice a lot of negativity and "do not recommend" regarding pursuing a PhD on HN recently. That raises the question: Why would you go for it?
- toast0 3y ago
  A PhD, preferably from your destination country, is helpful for immigration.
- whatever1 3y ago
  1. If you manage to get through it, you will be a world expert in a niche that can be valuable. $$$$$$$$ 2. You will develop the invaluable skill of not giving up even when all the odds are against you 3. You will be able to swim by yourself, parsing enormous amount of literature, identifying what is useful and useless and solve problems that no one else before you has solved. 4. Access to academic positions that offer stability 5. Access to academic network that provide infinite talent
  - bityard 3y ago
    > If you manage to get through it, you will be a world expert in a niche that can be valuable. $$$$$$$$ This depends highly upon your field, the current needs of industry, and your own work ethic. For example, if you want to write or architect software for a living, a PhD in computer science really doesn't get you much. Neither is it a good idea to go for a PhD just because you can't think of anything better to do to further your career. But if your goal is to make new discoveries in a field you are passionate about, then that would be a different story. Also I have met a lot of PhDs who are absolutely not experts on anything at all, except for knowing how to thrive in the socio-political academic system by being "book smart," and writing bullshitty articles/papers. > You will develop the invaluable skill of not giving up even when all the odds are against you Are you saying people don't wash out of PhD programs all the time? Even if this was somehow true, you don't need to throw money at a PhD program to learn this!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
maxmalkav 3y ago
"The only winning move is not to play."
jszymborski 3y ago
This is great but it's missing one thing: having to apply for funding each year (time consuming!) with the statistical expectation of not receiving it. Then having to TA to help towards making-up the difference (it does not). Then, spend egregious amounts of time each year filling out expense reports for conferences you attended. Also, take-up more part time work because it takes 4-6 months for the reports to get processed and you need to pay off your credit cards.
- Ar-Curunir 3y ago
  Do PhD students tend to apply for funding where you're at? In most CS PhD programs it's the advisors job to do that.
  - ketzo 3y ago
    n=2 but my friends in humanities PhDs both have to do all their own funding work. sounds exhausting.
    - jszymborski 3y ago
      it is.
  - jszymborski 3y ago
    Profs apply for research grants that, depending on the grant terms, can be used to pay your stipend. There is no guarantee that your prof can secure that funding or afford to allocate it to support you. As a result, it behooves you to apply to funding agencies to get studentships that fund you. Another note is that it is also a prestige thing. Getting grants as a graduate student makes you way more competitive when applying for PDF/PhD positions.
bradreaves2 3y ago
As a former PhD student who is now faculty, I have to say that the pace of the game is one of the most realistic aspects. Every small step forward takes about a month, it may or may not pan out, but it passes in the blink of an eye. It's a game, so it can't model everything. But I thought the biggest missing thing was "leveling up." As you accomplish more, you should have a higher likelihood of future success, and your hope should increase as you gain confidence and experience. That's how a PhD works -- those who can get early wins (or stick through a lot of bad bounces) can build on success will finish well. To rip off Tolstoy, "Happy PhDs are all alike; each unhappy PhD is unhappy in its own way."
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  I have never heard of a "happy PhD"
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    I heard of one but the guy went back to do his degree when he was in his late 30s. He came in with a game plan, executed, got out.
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    It's interesting because I know maybe two dozen people with PhDs and every single one of them has a story about a moment of hitting rock bottom during the process and losing all hope. Obviously they all pulled through and make it out to the other side but it really doesn't sound like a pleasant experience.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      My sister is the opposite. She's got her bachelors back in 2010 and got a Masters while working full time. This part was brutal, but not technically PhD yet. She's in Health Policy, a lot of statistics and junk. Anyway, she works for some special interest think-tank for a bit, works on insurance company some other bit, and finally settles down in the CDC where her skills in statistics / health policy were very much appreciated. She's getting to a point where it takes a Ph.D however before she can move forward with her career (she's already surrounded by Ph.Ds, and she sticks out in a bad way by not having one), so she's going for her Ph.D. From her side of the aisle, she's seeing a whole bunch of silly 20-something year olds who don't even know what the field of Health Policy is about, trying to create Ph.D Thesis topics that have obviously no relevance to anybody in any of the fields she's ever worked in (politics, insurance, or CDC). Meanwhile, her first idea was basically "Think of something CDC is blind at, which she can think of rather easily because she's worked there for 5+ years and everyone at the office is basically spitballing complaints about the CDC's statistics every damn day", and propose it as a Ph.D thesis. Granted, her day-to-day work is filled with constantly interacting with Ph.Ds who are interested in improving the CDC's statistical collection techniques / improving accuracy / finding new ways to slice the data and innovation. That's literally her job. And those subjects just so happen to be very useful Ph.D thesis material for advancing the state of Health Policy. -------------- How much blood, sweat, and tears are we setting up Ph.D candidates for because they're straight-out-of bachelors with no real world experience or knowledge of their damn field? Some of these things _are_ easy to figure out after you've got 5 to 10 years of real world experience. The treadmill of Bachelors -> Masters -> Ph.D is broken. It probably needs to be Bachelors -> Real world experience -> Masters -> Real World Experience -> Ph.D. This "Read paper -> Think of idea -> Woops, someone already did it -> Read another paper" loop from the video game, is that how most Ph.Ds try to come up with their thesis? Isn't that obviously broken compared to other "life-loops"? ----------- Ex: her office solved the question of "how to report statistics within one month to policy makers", because as late as 2018 or so, CDC was still on a yearly schedule of death statistics releases. Imagine if we were still on the yearly-schedule when COVID19 happened, instead of the rapid schedule of monthly-statistics that we actually had! Monthly statistics, much like Inflation NowCasting, is actually a forecast / prediction because not all the data is in. But coming up with a forecast for this month (or last month) of data is still a problem that needed to be solved, especially in a way that policy makers would accept in a political environment where everyone's nitpicking at the details. There's so many blind-spots and questions about how to improve statistics and statistical reporting at the Ph.D level in that field. But you are only aware of these blind-spots if you actually work in the field for a bit.
HelloNurse 3y ago
I find one month per turn quite coarse: much more fine-grained misery could be added with variable-length activities, waiting anxiously for something, real life commitments, or randomly wasting time. For example, 2d4 days to read some papers, 1d6+1 consecutive days to think about a new idea, a 50% chance per day of being busy teaching, resource contention with colleagues running their simulations, etc.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
  The idea of a D&D campaign centred around this is hilarious
  - NooneAtAll3 3y ago
    after graduation you become lvl 1 wizard that explains low hp stats
stusmall 3y ago
I slacked off until I failed the first year exam. I escaped a PhD program and was left full of hope. I consider that a win.
logifail 3y ago
In the sim, at "Year 3 Month 9" I apparently "lost all hope and quitted your PhD". In my real one (20+ years ago), I submitted my thesis after 3 years and 6 months, by which point I was no longer on speaking terms with my supervisor and was hanging on to my sanity by the skin of my teeth. My viva went surprisingly well, after which I did the minor corrections that were requested, handed in a copy of my thesis, packed up my stuff and left that hateful group behind me.
- b555 3y ago
  if given a chance to do it all again, would you?
  - logifail 3y ago
    > if given a chance to do it all again, would you? Yes, definitely, but maybe(?) in a different research group.
  - ikrenji 3y ago
    absolutely not lol
synergy20 3y ago
nobody is going to take on PhD after running the simulator I'm sure about that.
moffkalast 3y ago
> An item in your cart was on sale, you bought it immediately and felt much better. +5 hope Feeling personally attacked.
amir734jj 3y ago
I took qualifying exam on the last semester after I finished the thesis. They [university officials] thought in their system I have left the program. I had only 4 weeks to study for the exam because my advisor gave me a ultimatum after he thought I took the exam already. I was working full-time at this time and couldn't take 4 weeks off. After so much praying, I got the highest score, and I ended up becoming a Christian because of all the praying. It worked out at the end.
Lk7Of3vfJS2n 3y ago
Looking forward to a Job Search simulator.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  You could adapt the same game logic to a lot of things in life: Job Search, Career Success, Startup Founder, Stock Investor. In most life situations, it is possible--even likely--to "make no mistakes and still lose."
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
I got the most anxiety when I got cloud storage.
Derbasti 3y ago
LOL, wrote the thesis in one month. Very funny.
birdyrooster 3y ago
I like declining the offer and going on with my life. Relaxing.
rwxrwxrwx 3y ago
Too real.
footlose_3815 3y ago
TIL month-long breaks are required to pass a PHD
Lk7Of3vfJS2n 3y ago
[dead]
glomgril 3y ago
This is just brilliant. Brings back memories, some fond others less so. Only addition I'd suggest is a subplot involving teaching/TAing duties and/or money problems. Good to be occasionally reminded that slacking off is a legitimately important part of the scientific process. Wish this view was more popular in the industry.
warent 3y ago
I've never gone for a PhD, so I can't relate to the experience of this simulation, but found this game was actually really easy. I completed my PhD in 4 years and 11 months, which feels quite reasonable. My "hope" never dropped below 45, and by the end, hope was 76. If anything, this simulation just made me think getting a PhD would be a fun opportunity to do a lot of study, and didn't put me off at all. EDIT: Why downvote? haha I'm just sharing my experience.
- johndhi 3y ago
  My experience was: damn, I need to do tons of reading and research and writing. Like a full time job, not just chilling. Which is a bummer. I was hoping I could just chill.
  - recursive 3y ago
    If you just want to chill, you definitely don't need any of the phd stuff. Pretty much everyone chills occasionally.
- Derbasti 3y ago
  That's actually sort of accurate. Some PhDs are lucky early, and can build on that success. Good for you! Good for them. Most PhDs aren't so lucky, regrettably.
- smeej 3y ago
  It took multiple tries for me, and at first I was convinced the game wasn't even winnable. I finally beat it in 6 years, 2 months, with 71 hope, 3 conference papers, 3 papers, an idea, some cloud storage, and some late year anxiety lol.
PakG1 3y ago
As a current PhD student, the stress of this simulator felt way too real to be comfortable.
aiertlaijrilej 3y ago
I completed the game the same way I completed real life. I left early with a MS instead of a PhD. Based on my experience, there needs to be a chance that your advisor is a narcissistic child who pushes you repeatedly to spend your entire PhD either fixing the mistakes in their own PhD thesis (without changing anything they did) or doing unpaid unpublishable production work for their half-assed startup. And hobbles your attempts to establish connections outside of their control. And also does a lot of things that could be termed "fraud" and "embezzlement" if the university cared to investigate when you and others before and after you complained about it. And probably some more mess involving petty politics with post-docs and competing professors. I loved grad classes and research, but I hated academia.
- jacurtis 3y ago
  > I loved grad classes and research but I hated Academia Truer words have never been spoken. I went back to get a PhD after a solid career where I was in a prominent leadership position at a respectable tech company (in my mid-thirties). I was bored, not motivated with work anymore, and wanted to do something that really pushed me and motivated me in ways that I hadn't felt in years. I also wanted to truly learn some advanced concepts through Grad classes. I really loved the grad classes (although they were much much much easier than I expected). That is why I moved into research, to really stimulate myself and do something interesting to me in my specific area of expertise. I really enjoyed doing the research too. I was personally motivated and curious on the topics I was researching. It gave me a lot of new-found motivation in life and I really flourished. But academia: the drama and games you need to engage in to do such simple (arguably trivial or non-important) tasks is ridiculous. I succeeded in my business career because it was results driven. If you produce results, people don't care how you got there exactly. But in academia I felt like it was a board game of "chutes and ladders", mixed with Risk and Monopoly where you had to own parts of the board that other people deem important, you hit chutes that set you back for no apparent reason, you were constantly collecting personal referrals and clout from other professors so you could get their blessing or IOUs. There's a lot of favors and ceremony around trivial tasks and the actual produced value often gets overlooked or forgotten about because you didn't march to the same drum as someone else.
dekhn 3y ago
Holy cow, I just played the rules I used when I did my PhD (1/4 time slacking off, 1/3 on developing major ideas and collecting results to support it and resubmitting the rejected papers) and graduated in 7 years. Exactly like real life.
voxl 3y ago
I was able to easily graduate in 5 years, only one false start because the simulation seriously overvalues preparing for the qualifying exam. Also, it doesn't consider that you usually get two attempts at such an exam, not just one.
joewferrara 3y ago
This game is exactly like graduate school in a PhD program! Love it!
mrcaosr 3y ago
This is so sad and pretty much captures the PhD experience.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nrabulinski 3y ago
Can’t get time any lower than 3 years and 12 months but it’s fun trying to speedrun this
Aeolun 3y ago
That was surprisingly stressful
godelski 3y ago
I think the most realistic thing here is the luck element. You have people around you passing and making it look easy and saying to do exactly what they did and those people make it all out to be a skill game. But you follow their exact method and still fail. And keep failing. Making you think there's some secret sauce that they aren't telling you about. But in reality the difference was just luck. That in one game you can slack off half the time and graduate just fine and the other half of the time you can't even get a single paper submitted. The tyranny of the stochastic system is probably one of the most damning things in a PhD.
- laewirjtlawejtl 3y ago
  Reminds me of the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. Initially it seems like it's a poem about working hard and taking risks, but it's actually about old people lying to themselves, trying to forget that their success was actually just luck. About half the professors I worked with were responsible adults, and half were narcissistic children who would do exactly what you described, "just do what I did", and when it doesn't work they quickly changed to personal attacks and insults. And of course, the professors who had PhDs from MIT or Stanford just breezing through, getting approved for everything they applied to on the first round, even when their past deliverables and future proposals were garbage, and people who went to second-tier schools having to fight tooth and nail every incremental gain. Just a pile of crap. Couldn't stand it.
  - godelski 3y ago
    There's a saying I really like "the harder I work, the luckier I get." It being about how the time you invest makes you able to take advantage of more opportunities. BUT it also recognizes that the luck element exists. I think Veritasium also had a video along the luck+work lines. Basically if you just are unlucky you just have no opportunities and you'll fail no matter what work you put in. But if you don't put in work, you're also passing up possible lucky opportunities. Either way, it is a combination of a stochastic process plus skill (think about the design of any good {video,board} game. They require both skill and luck, just like life. You definitely need both, and I think this is what people forget. Work is incredibly important, but you can do a lot of good and hard work and just be unlucky. That honestly is probably one of the more distinguishing differences between students/faculty at top institutions vs mid. Especially since success is a compounding event, thus an early success can catapult someone forward. We shouldn't diminish their hard work by saying it is all luck, but neither should they diminish others hard work and frustration as a lack of working hard enough when luck plays a significant role in the system. Neither is failure strictly due to luck. It is messy and we need to accept that this is the reality of the world, especially if we want to make the system more efficient and more "meritocratic" (quotes because previous comments and their relationship to Goodhart, the difficulties in evaluation and necessity to embrace noise). Though your last point about the top tier breezing through, I can completely relate. I see a lot of low quality papers from those institutions get high marks and it is very surprising and definitely not consistent with a blind evaluation system... but I think most of us already know that.
xbkingx 3y ago
lol I wish it was this easy. I got through the simulator in 6yrs 11mos on the second try. At no point was hope above 40%, except once early on (ended at 33%). The funny thing is that I had 1 conf paper, 1 major result, and 1 figure left over. That's a good year extra, so I assume a perfect game would be to get the 3x papers and GTFO (which is the second best outcome, after not enrolling). There were a couple folks I knew that made it out in 5 years, but more that took 7+. Our lab was notorious for taking over 10, which I skirted by. Like others said, this was lacking outside events (social/political junk). Hopefully version 2 will take into account: at least 1 family death and 1 additional tragedy, at least two months lost to helping or waiting for help from another grad student or post doc (they did have the lab equipment breaking, which was good to see, but missed the lobbying for every little purchase), at least one scope change, a half dozen favors to gain some political cache, a few experiments and/or rewrites to satisfy faculty members that just read about a technical issue they should have known, but didn't so they're highly sensitive to it, at least 6 months of arranging the data/results in a way that faculty can understand, 3 months of arguing that the lab standard procedure for some basic component is a decade out of date, a few months worth of preparing premature data for unnecessary meetings, one (and it better be just one) instance of an offer to help getting waaaay out of control, the hope boost after your first big conference and subsequent conference hope drops, the drops with each thesis defense from folks a year younger, etc. There's more, but that's off the top of my head. Oh, and that slight boost in hope when you hear someone else has a worse problem than your current one. That's a fun one. Tip for those interviewing - ignore all the year 1-3 folks. 1 and 2 are basically undergrads plus some extra classes. 3 probably hasn't hit the first pile of bullshit yet. Find a year 5 or 6 in your field and talk to them alone. There's a reason they generally don't have senior grad students at recruiting events, and it isn't because they're too busy. Talk to them long enough to get to their exhausted attempts to rationalize some aspect of the experience. If their demeanor doesn't change, you might be safe. If they start hemming and hawing, that's a problem. They haven't even gotten to a specific, non-personal problem and they're having trouble keeping up the facade. The layers are: 1) Hey, social event, I get to take my mind off lab problems. 2) Getting a little boost by talking to someone still excited. 3) The quiet whisper, "Let me give you some advice." 4) The realization that there's nothing but lab to talk about. That's the threshold. 5) The rationalization alpha - The view from 30,000 feet isn't terrible. 6) The rationalization beta - The rundown of broad problems they're having. This is the point where they will probably, as if by magic, remember that thing they were going to do needs to be done now. (I've got some analysis running I need to check, I need to feed some lab animals, I promised my parents I would call, I told a lab mate I'd help them with this thing and will be up all night, etc.) 7) The rationalization gamma - Specific cases of major problems they're seen other have. 8) The rationalization delta - Specific problems they're having.
akomtu 3y ago
What's the typical motivation of getting a PhD? The desire to discover something novel? The need to look and feel better than others?
mjfl 3y ago
one issue is overemphasis on qualifying exam. Most advisors, at least for experimental disciplines, value publishing papers much higher than jumping through these academic hoops, and make sure that either qualifying exams are easy to pass or can be retaken.
_madmax_ 3y ago
It is as boring as getting a real PhD, good job to the dev lol
sarosh 3y ago
Looking at https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/rulesets/default/events.yaml https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/rulesets/default/eve... provides most of the key 'game loops', i.e. # idea -> prelim -> major -> 2 figures -> submitted paper interesting to see the hypothesis about reading more papers being borne out: # increase the success rate as the player reads more papers probability: 0.60 + player.readPapers / 100 - itemCount('idea') / 20 Also interesting to see that passing the qualification exam provides the largest player.hope boost (+10) Was fun to see the TooManyIdeas random event - now to actually get it to trigger.
LASR 3y ago
I wanted to go all the way to a PhD. So did my classmates. We were going to change the whole world. But after an internship at a FAANG during my 2nd year undergrad, the money was too good. Got some return offers and basically slacked off the rest of my undergrad, just waiting to graduate. I was not born into wealth. I am a 1/2-generation immigrant. My parents struggled to keep me afloat during my undergrad years. Even my internship pay was more than my parents' income at the time. So really I had no choice but to sell out early. Now 10 years after undergrad and a couple of FAANGs later, the baby crying in the other room at 3AM, parents retired and vacationing around, I think I made the only choice for me. But I cannot help wonder how life might have been different, and if I really did have a chance to change to world.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > But I cannot help wonder how life might have been different, and if I really did have a chance to change to world. You made the right choice. Life as a PhD student is ultimately a life of poverty and uncertain future. You might get lucky and be able to explore a meaningful research topic, but more often than not you would end up in a miserable path with no future, and with the best option at securing your material needs to be in an ungrateful and very hard to reach academic role.
  - mebassett 3y ago
    or after a few years of postdocs and job security that comes in 12-24 month bouts, you might have moved into industry anyway and just starting making 60% of what you're making now.
1270018080 3y ago
The text is too wide. It gave me a headache to read somehow.
chriskanan 3y ago
This is reasonably accurate as far as the average PhD experience goes. I do always encourage my PhD students to take some time off during holidays and after major deadlines, rather than berate them when "slacking off" (unless that's all they do). Stuff missing: holidays and deciding whether to travel home or study / read papers (I missed holidays myself during my PhD), feeling envious of peers from pre-PhD living great lives, having kids during one's PhD (that would be hard mode), drama in authorship of collaborative papers, etc. The last year anxiety is accurate for most. It is also missing the job search in the final years. For many disciplines, 3 strong papers is the minimum for graduating, but if one really wants to get a faculty position or even a job as a research scientist at more prestigious institutes, probably 6 papers is better.
imsaw 3y ago
Shout out to other last year phd students out there! The storm will pass
jldugger 3y ago
> UNIVERSITY NEWS: free cloud storage now available to all students and faculties. Your data are now safe on the cloud. This is a trap!
spencerchubb 3y ago
Tip for everyone bothered by the font document.getElementById('message_window').style.fontFamily = 'Times New Roman'
CobaltFire 3y ago
I've been debating on going for a graduate education now that I'm retired, and I know this is an amusing game, but holy hell is it depressing. Not sure I want that much stress in my life anymore!
j7ake 3y ago
I played this game and got my PhD after 4 years. I am super surprised that the timing was close to the real phd.
throwaway4837 3y ago
Finished in 5 years, 10 months, slacked off for the first two years (prepared for exams twice).
paraknight 3y ago
Not realistic (for me) the way the advisor relationship is portrayed, and not enough academic politics. I wrote about my own experiences here https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/views/phds/ https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/views/phds/
altilunium 3y ago
Spoiler warning : https://rentry.co/phd_sim https://rentry.co/phd_sim
DrNosferatu 3y ago
Aha - feels like that ZX Spectrum game "Dictator", by Don Priestley. (less like Jones in the Fast Lane)

828 points by Smith42 3y ago

Hi everyone, I wrote this game 5 years ago when I was going to graduate from my PhD program. I did not expect to suddenly become popular in the middle of this week. Hope you enjoyed it (and thank you for stress testing my personal website)! I wrote it to look back my PhD experience in a humorous way. However, each person may have a different experience and the game cannot simply capture all the scenarios. The road toward the PhD degree is full of challenges, and can be very stressful. I feel sometimes you also need a bit of luck like the randomness in the game. Thank you all for playing the game! Congratulations to those who already got their PhD, and best of luck for those who are still pursuing it! You can find the source code of the game here: https://github.com/morriswmz/phd-game https://github.com/morriswmz/phd-game. I haven't touched it for years and probably already forgot how to build it. From my memory all events/items/status are customizable through YAML files so you can easily mod it if you want to. Cheers!

sebmellen 3y ago
Welcome to Hacker News! Forwarding this game to some people who probably need the humor… Thank you for making it!

cyrillite 3y ago

This, and subsequent comments, are all experiences I’ve seen happen to my partner and three very close friends. I decided to pivot academic path ways and pursue a masters, so they all wound up ahead of me by a year. Watching their experiences, I decided I’d rather pursue financial security and independence before pursuing a PhD. I think I’ve made the right call. It may be harder to get into a programme this way, I’m not sure, but I fundamentally do not want the worst case scenarios of a PhD combined with needing it as a next step in my career or a source of income.

jesalg 3y ago

Is it bad that I feel like a massive failure for taking 7 years to complete a sim PhD?

ketzu 3y ago

> Your submission to [...] was REJECTED. The reviewers were not convinced of the significance your [preliminary!] results. Thanks for the flashbacks. At least we didn't have any qualifying exams.

JBorrow 3y ago

This is great! The ending phase really gives you the same feeling of “screw everything else, I need to finish this paper” rushing to get the final stuff out.

xp84 3y ago
By that time I had already grinded so long and lost so much hope that I HAD to slack off but couldn’t because every time I tried, my advisor caught me and reminded me of my progress. Repeat until I lost all hope!

geigco 3y ago

Confirmation that I was right not to get my PhD!

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lqet 3y ago

This is great and exactly captures the PhD experience. Both in the simulator and in real life, I mostly survived until the end by slacking off frequently, and needed around 5 years. Some highlights: > INBOX: Based on the reviewers' comments, we regret to inform you that your manuscript has been REJECTED for publication. One of the reviewers pointed out that there is no comparison with a state-of-art method. > You came up with a bunch of ideas. However, upon further searching, you found that they have already been done before. > You found the missing piece during a shower. You develop one of your preliminary results into a major result. > You found one of your ideas appears in a recently published paper. You can no longer work on it. > Three years passed. You have witnessed many graduations. You began to worry about whether your can graduate on time. > The simulation took a much longer time than you expected. The results are not available yet. What was missing: 1.) Growing feeling of getting too old 2.) Growing family obligations (marriage, kids, trying to write a thesis at 3am with a crying baby next room) 3.) Questions asked by friends and relatives regarding progress 4.) Teaching obligations

peteradio 3y ago
> 3.) Questions asked by friends and relatives regarding progress This one in particular had me temporarily cut off contact with people who could not be bothered to remember that I had no interest in answering this question!
chias 3y ago
One dynamic I experienced that also isn't in the simulation: if you focus too much on classwork early on in order to pass your RPE, it can actually be hard to find an advisor. Classwork is basically dead-end work and the more you focus on it the less you have to show for yourself when trying to convince an advisor to work with you. Your goal should be to optimize for doing just well enough to pass your classwork. Also, random catalysmic events, like in year 4 your advisor accepts a job at a different university in another state.
- dazed_confused 3y ago
  Or your advisor retiring in year 2...

jmercan 3y ago

Sounds like this is how my life will be like for a couple years if I get accepted :p

fwsgonzo 3y ago
I'm doing it right now and I kind of envy my colleagues that are doing normal work. There are times when I enjoy the ability to focus on things that really interest me, but the paper writing and publishing processes really suck. Also, the random stuff from the university that I have to jump over sucks fun out of the process, for no gain to anyone.

lusus_naturae 3y ago

Unrealistic because it doesn't have enough inter-dept. politics and other phd/msc students in-fighting.

drdunce 3y ago
...and the final step where having succeeded no one actually cares and you are now unemployable.
- lusus_naturae 3y ago
  Ah yes, the coup de grâce. Or you do find employment and then find that your major result paper is being challenged and have to submit a retraction. The fun is endless.

spacemanspiff01 3y ago

Wait... There was only one month where I was working on "finish your thesis"

armchairhacker 3y ago

That was...a lot more straightforward than I thought. First try: Year 4 Month 5 Second try: a lot more things went wrong. Year 5 Month 11. Third try: Year 5 Month 11. I just followed these rules: - Study for the qualifying exam until I'm "very confident" - If I have no ideas, read papers - If I have an idea, work on developing it. If I have a preliminary result, work on developing it. If I have a major result, conduct experiments etc...if I have a rejected paper, revise and resubmit. Prioritizing whichever option gets me closer to an accepted paper (because presumably the ideas get outdated quickly) - Whenever I get the "ask my advisor for a break?" say yes. Whenever I get "I am tired" and no "ask my advisor", "Slack Off" for one month. Fortunately I got no abusive advisor, rejected papers usually end up getting accepted later, no extreme life circumstances or cut funding. But my computer crashed way more often than I'd expect, especially since backups are so common nowadays.

azangru 3y ago
I lost all hope and quit. Something that happened to me in real life as well.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Every time I tried the game (using OP's described steps) I "lost all hope and quit". I thought that was the joke / funny commentary: that all paths through the game involve you ending up losing. Didn't know there was a path to actually win the game until reading the HN comments. So I kept trying it over and over doing the same steps and finally won once. I guess that's an even funnier commentary on how it's pretty much entirely luck based.
  - 19h 3y ago
    I actually got the PhD so it’s not all ways leading to failure — just accept when your advisor offers you to take time off.
  - 93po 3y ago
    i won on my first try at just under 6 years and my hope never got below 65 i think, maybe i got lucky

trojan13 3y ago

Now imagine this, but with a "LinkedIn feed" that shows updates from your peers, showing their professional accomplishments and current salary.

gonzo41 3y ago
It should also have a picture of you, Like a current one that slowly degrades over the course as you start eating crap and stop exercising.
- dhimes 3y ago
  haha that would be perfect. Receding hairline, expanding waistline...
  - drdunce 3y ago
    don't forget the back hump!
    - 1323portloo 3y ago
      I remember my advisor's most relevant advice, "Keep working toward your thesis, and one day, you, too, shall have a mighty hump!"
- SomewhatLikely 3y ago
  Reminds me of the early Duke Nukem games that showed your health as an increasingly beat up avatar.
tnecniv 3y ago
Also just pictures of them enjoying life in the city of their choice, the families they’ve started, the vacations they go on, the fun hobbies they have time for, etc.

liendolucas 3y ago

Some time ago I watched this movie: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416675/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416675/ (Dark matter). I don't know how accurately captures the essence of getting a PhD, maybe someone who went through it can expand on that, but I've always wondered if it's actually how is depicted in the film.

stolenmerch 3y ago
This film is a fictionalized depiction of the real-life 1991 University of Iowa shooting. A PhD student murdered his advisors, VP of Academic Affairs, and a fellow student for being passed over for a prestigious prize. There were other geopolitical influences on this event that I'd say make it unique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Iowa_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Iowa_shooting

JaceLightning 3y ago

I declined. Best decision ever.

dktnj 3y ago

This sounds less stressful than an average half a decade working at my current position. It is actually motivating. Whether or not that was the desired outcome, I don't know. At least I get to travel to half decent academic conferences and not large vendor marketing conferences.

dchftcs 3y ago
The stress comes from constant and abject failure, not really the life style. Travelling is also like 2% of the total time.
- dktnj 3y ago
  I haven't done any productive work for about 5 years so doing something and failing would be an improvement.
- aiisjustanif 3y ago
  Depends on the subject matter.

jebarker 3y ago

I'm interested in how specific this PhD experience is to the US, certain subjects or recent times. My own experience doing a maths PhD in the UK in the mid-2000s was not like this at all (but had a different set of challenges for sure).

mbustamanter 3y ago
I'm a chilean maths grad student and save for the qualifying exam, it's quite accurate. So much so that I think I made a mistake clicking on this because as it progressed I started feeling dizzy. Other commenters here also have their relatable experiences, which doesn't make me feel so bad.
dotnet00 3y ago
I'm about to wrap up my PhD in a few months here in the US, I find that while it's kind of close, it's a bit on the cynical side, as is most of the HN discussion about PhDs. Yes, my advisor emphasizes papers a lot, but there aren't any requirements for number of papers for graduation. While there are extremely busy periods of forgoing sleep to work (eg right before a major deadline), my advisor also constantly reminds us to take breaks and enjoy life. There was also the anxiety about graduating on time, but that too was sorted out by just having a meeting with my advisor and understanding how things work. On the other hand, the situation with the qualifying exam was the opposite, I had to constantly remind my advisor that I needed to get that done. It involved a 50 page report on the current status of my research and a thesis defense style presentation to my committee, so that was a bit of a challenge to make time for between normal research. Passing it didn't feel like much of a challenge, just meeting the 50 page requirement did. I had enough data, but it was still a lot of writing.

hospitalJail 3y ago

Didn't reach the roadblock I ran into: >Professors demand you do exactly what they want for your thesis. Also, what qualifying exam? It seems like as long as I was worker for my professors, they couldn't give a crap. (Although I was quite credentialed, so maybe they didn't care) If I do get a PhD, it will be on a topic I want. So far, I have done that better independently and have gotten a bunch of press on the topic without needing academia.

zelos 3y ago
I think some unis require students to start as an MPhil student and then transfer from MPhil to PhD via some kind of publication/presentation?
- jebarker 3y ago
  That's what I did (~17 years ago). I was registered as MPhil then transferred to PhD after submitting a mini-thesis after about 2 years. In the end the mini-thesis actually contained all the most significant results that formed the PhD thesis and the latter just explored some applications.

WaitWaitWha 3y ago

reading papers --> idea This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me. Ideas tend to come from working on real-world projects, which then shows the lack of understanding and need for research. The project forks to do the research and merge back to implement the findings. Thereafter, someone on the team will put it into a cohesive academic format, and use it for a PhD. Of course there is reading papers and such, but it is not the source of the idea. edit: I am also curious, how many really stop research because a similar or tangential topic was explored? "There can be only one"?! that said, the game is fun! Thank you.

Frost1x 3y ago
I'd say this is where more engineering approachable ideas come from or ideas that might be considered translational (or near translational). If you work near the bridge of theory and application, this is probably more the case. A lot of funding agencies are pressuring even theoretical or basic research to look at translational application anymore though (capitalism is all about immediate ROI) so I'd say this is increasingly shifting towards many research domains but in the past, there were a lot of pure theoretical areas you could work on where there are plenty of unexplored ideas you could build out and get paid to do the work. Application is certainly a great driver though because you have a demand signal to look at vs throwing darts at the board in work that may never manifest to anything solid.
sweetjuly 3y ago
> This is not exactly how it works in STEM, at least not around me You might want to take a different approach to reading papers then. No paper ever concludes by saying "yeah our method is perfect and no further work is needed" [1]. Instead, every solution has its quirks and questions which need to be explored further. Maybe their method has limitations which make it unusable for your applications, maybe they make somewhat faulty assumptions that don't always hold, maybe they wrongly ignore some technique. Seeing how other people approach a problem can often give you inspiration for how to take it another way. [1] https://xkcd.com/2268/ https://xkcd.com/2268/

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

foobarbecue 3y ago

Goat simulator is better

cosmic_quanta 3y ago

Very cool! I was surprised that writing the thesis was an immediate success. I've seen many PhD students struggle at this point, taking > 12mo to submit.

sgt101 3y ago

It shocks me so much that publication has become the only metric of a Ph.D.

milancurcic 3y ago
It's been mostly like this for a long time, but it is slowly changing. Open data repositories and scientific software libraries/products are beginning to count more and more (at least many of us are pushing for this). It also depends on the target career past graduation. Papers matter a lot for tenure-track positions, and much less for science support (scientific software developers, data engineers, lab managers etc.) in academia, or most jobs in the industry. The 3 paper requirement in the game is also not a formal requirement in most universities--it's more of an implied requirement by individual PhD advisors. FWIW, my first lead-author paper I published a year past my PhD. During my PhD, I produced two relatively large scientific software applications (one open and one closed source) and a few open datasets. I'm now 8 years past my PhD and relatively successful in my field, 90th or so percentile based on common metrics--papers, citations, and funds raised. Bottom line, papers are important but not the only thing that counts. Outside of tenure-track careers where they are crucial, it's possible to establish yourself as a scientist and be respected by your peers by publishing software and data.
- bogtog 3y ago
  In what fields is 3 papers expected? In my field, Psychology, 3 first-author papers sounds like a reasonable lower bound, but that seems like it would be a lot to expect out of Biologists or hard scientists.
  - milancurcic 3y ago
    Ah, good point. I'm in Earth sciences. 3 papers before PhD is reasonable here, just not a formal university requirement.
  - fht 3y ago
    Current 4th year in Biology. Generally, 1 paper is expected, but it is not strictly necessary to graduate. Highly doubt that the PI will let you go without finishing your project though.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gus_massa 3y ago

A very important part of the work of the advisor is to pick a subject that is not been researched by other group, so you can work on it without the fear of been sniped. It not foolproof, but if three or four ideas get sniped, it's probably better to kindly consider an advisor change.

bluish29 3y ago

As a current 4th year graduate student, I opened the link and found the choice to accept or decline the admission offer, I don't know why I clicked decline without thinking.

computomatic 3y ago
I did the same. The only way to win is not to play.
- diracs_stache 3y ago
  [flagged]
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Your prize is always wondering if you should have done it. I know people that say one of their biggest regrets was electing to pass on the PhD path. The grass, unfortunately, is always greener.
  - freilanzer 3y ago
    Add me to the list. It would have destroyed me but I still regret not doing it.
ketzu 3y ago
I was secretly hoping it will tell me "you win" when I clicked decline.
- DirkH 3y ago
  "You decline the PhD offer and end up happy with an intellectually satisfying six-figure role in tech. You are surprised when you learn that your older colleague with a PhD earns just as much as you do."
moffkalast 3y ago
"That is unfortunate."

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

This is as engrossing as MUDs from the 90s! Maybe an endless generation of MUD + LLM are actually the future of gaming

jannw 3y ago

seems quite accurate to me - reflects well my own experience.

tibbon 3y ago

I find this highly unrealistic. Advisors do not notice nor care for your mental health. Breaks and rest are not offered nor advised. Back to the lab!

gradstudent 3y ago
Claim your free time. No sane advisor would ever say no.
- blitzar 3y ago
  That explains a lot about my advisor then ...
  - wpietri 3y ago
    Yeah, that's one of the things I was looking for in this game. A friend of mine had an absolutely bonkers advisor who stopped answering my friend's emails. For a while they basically had to stalk their advisor, who would come in at erratic hours and quickly lock their office door, just ignoring any knocking. It was so wild to me, as my friend was just incredibly nice. My friend only graduated because other faculty sort of clubbed together as unofficial advisors. I get that if you select only for smarts, you're going to get some odd ducks. But I've heard so many stories from PhD-seeking friends about the level of dysfunction that gets visited upon grad students.
- BeetleB 3y ago
  Many advisors are not sane. Many will definitely not tolerate multiple leaves of absences (i.e. vacations) due to stress. People lie and make up family emergencies to get the time off. Highly dependent on the advisor.
moab 3y ago
You had a terrible advisor. I'm sorry.
- klysm 3y ago

joshcsimmons 3y ago

Pretty good but needs more Machiavellian power games

jack_riminton 3y ago

Now do an arts PhD!

jack_riminton 3y ago
lol at the downvotes, you know it's true. Most of the made up papers in the "Sokal squared" affair that made publication are considered PhD level within those fields and they're literal nonsense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair

spidersenses 3y ago

For some reason I found the font really hard to read. My brain has the impression that the text is vertically compressed, squished even. Just that no amount of resizing the window changed the strange effect. Is that only me?

spencerchubb 3y ago
It is vertically squished. I had to modify the CSS myself in the dev tools because I couldn't bear it

whatever1 3y ago

This is so brutally accurate

ccppurcell 3y ago

The proportion of slackings off for which you are caught by your advisor is unrealistically high, but exactly as high as it feels. I definitely got my fair share of those emails...

geysersam 3y ago

Thanks for the ptsd relapse.

eagleseye 3y ago

I notice a lot of negativity and "do not recommend" regarding pursuing a PhD on HN recently. That raises the question: Why would you go for it?

toast0 3y ago
A PhD, preferably from your destination country, is helpful for immigration.
whatever1 3y ago
1. If you manage to get through it, you will be a world expert in a niche that can be valuable. $$$$$$$$ 2. You will develop the invaluable skill of not giving up even when all the odds are against you 3. You will be able to swim by yourself, parsing enormous amount of literature, identifying what is useful and useless and solve problems that no one else before you has solved. 4. Access to academic positions that offer stability 5. Access to academic network that provide infinite talent
- bityard 3y ago
  > If you manage to get through it, you will be a world expert in a niche that can be valuable. $$$$$$$$ This depends highly upon your field, the current needs of industry, and your own work ethic. For example, if you want to write or architect software for a living, a PhD in computer science really doesn't get you much. Neither is it a good idea to go for a PhD just because you can't think of anything better to do to further your career. But if your goal is to make new discoveries in a field you are passionate about, then that would be a different story. Also I have met a lot of PhDs who are absolutely not experts on anything at all, except for knowing how to thrive in the socio-political academic system by being "book smart," and writing bullshitty articles/papers. > You will develop the invaluable skill of not giving up even when all the odds are against you Are you saying people don't wash out of PhD programs all the time? Even if this was somehow true, you don't need to throw money at a PhD program to learn this!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

maxmalkav 3y ago

"The only winning move is not to play."

jszymborski 3y ago

This is great but it's missing one thing: having to apply for funding each year (time consuming!) with the statistical expectation of not receiving it. Then having to TA to help towards making-up the difference (it does not). Then, spend egregious amounts of time each year filling out expense reports for conferences you attended. Also, take-up more part time work because it takes 4-6 months for the reports to get processed and you need to pay off your credit cards.

Ar-Curunir 3y ago
Do PhD students tend to apply for funding where you're at? In most CS PhD programs it's the advisors job to do that.
- ketzo 3y ago
  n=2 but my friends in humanities PhDs both have to do all their own funding work. sounds exhausting.
  - jszymborski 3y ago
    it is.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  Profs apply for research grants that, depending on the grant terms, can be used to pay your stipend. There is no guarantee that your prof can secure that funding or afford to allocate it to support you. As a result, it behooves you to apply to funding agencies to get studentships that fund you. Another note is that it is also a prestige thing. Getting grants as a graduate student makes you way more competitive when applying for PDF/PhD positions.

bradreaves2 3y ago

As a former PhD student who is now faculty, I have to say that the pace of the game is one of the most realistic aspects. Every small step forward takes about a month, it may or may not pan out, but it passes in the blink of an eye. It's a game, so it can't model everything. But I thought the biggest missing thing was "leveling up." As you accomplish more, you should have a higher likelihood of future success, and your hope should increase as you gain confidence and experience. That's how a PhD works -- those who can get early wins (or stick through a lot of bad bounces) can build on success will finish well. To rip off Tolstoy, "Happy PhDs are all alike; each unhappy PhD is unhappy in its own way."

TremendousJudge 3y ago
I have never heard of a "happy PhD"
- tnecniv 3y ago
  I heard of one but the guy went back to do his degree when he was in his late 30s. He came in with a game plan, executed, got out.
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  It's interesting because I know maybe two dozen people with PhDs and every single one of them has a story about a moment of hitting rock bottom during the process and losing all hope. Obviously they all pulled through and make it out to the other side but it really doesn't sound like a pleasant experience.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    My sister is the opposite. She's got her bachelors back in 2010 and got a Masters while working full time. This part was brutal, but not technically PhD yet. She's in Health Policy, a lot of statistics and junk. Anyway, she works for some special interest think-tank for a bit, works on insurance company some other bit, and finally settles down in the CDC where her skills in statistics / health policy were very much appreciated. She's getting to a point where it takes a Ph.D however before she can move forward with her career (she's already surrounded by Ph.Ds, and she sticks out in a bad way by not having one), so she's going for her Ph.D. From her side of the aisle, she's seeing a whole bunch of silly 20-something year olds who don't even know what the field of Health Policy is about, trying to create Ph.D Thesis topics that have obviously no relevance to anybody in any of the fields she's ever worked in (politics, insurance, or CDC). Meanwhile, her first idea was basically "Think of something CDC is blind at, which she can think of rather easily because she's worked there for 5+ years and everyone at the office is basically spitballing complaints about the CDC's statistics every damn day", and propose it as a Ph.D thesis. Granted, her day-to-day work is filled with constantly interacting with Ph.Ds who are interested in improving the CDC's statistical collection techniques / improving accuracy / finding new ways to slice the data and innovation. That's literally her job. And those subjects just so happen to be very useful Ph.D thesis material for advancing the state of Health Policy. -------------- How much blood, sweat, and tears are we setting up Ph.D candidates for because they're straight-out-of bachelors with no real world experience or knowledge of their damn field? Some of these things _are_ easy to figure out after you've got 5 to 10 years of real world experience. The treadmill of Bachelors -> Masters -> Ph.D is broken. It probably needs to be Bachelors -> Real world experience -> Masters -> Real World Experience -> Ph.D. This "Read paper -> Think of idea -> Woops, someone already did it -> Read another paper" loop from the video game, is that how most Ph.Ds try to come up with their thesis? Isn't that obviously broken compared to other "life-loops"? ----------- Ex: her office solved the question of "how to report statistics within one month to policy makers", because as late as 2018 or so, CDC was still on a yearly schedule of death statistics releases. Imagine if we were still on the yearly-schedule when COVID19 happened, instead of the rapid schedule of monthly-statistics that we actually had! Monthly statistics, much like Inflation NowCasting, is actually a forecast / prediction because not all the data is in. But coming up with a forecast for this month (or last month) of data is still a problem that needed to be solved, especially in a way that policy makers would accept in a political environment where everyone's nitpicking at the details. There's so many blind-spots and questions about how to improve statistics and statistical reporting at the Ph.D level in that field. But you are only aware of these blind-spots if you actually work in the field for a bit.

HelloNurse 3y ago

I find one month per turn quite coarse: much more fine-grained misery could be added with variable-length activities, waiting anxiously for something, real life commitments, or randomly wasting time. For example, 2d4 days to read some papers, 1d6+1 consecutive days to think about a new idea, a 50% chance per day of being busy teaching, resource contention with colleagues running their simulations, etc.

KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
The idea of a D&D campaign centred around this is hilarious
- NooneAtAll3 3y ago
  after graduation you become lvl 1 wizard that explains low hp stats

stusmall 3y ago

I slacked off until I failed the first year exam. I escaped a PhD program and was left full of hope. I consider that a win.

logifail 3y ago

In the sim, at "Year 3 Month 9" I apparently "lost all hope and quitted your PhD". In my real one (20+ years ago), I submitted my thesis after 3 years and 6 months, by which point I was no longer on speaking terms with my supervisor and was hanging on to my sanity by the skin of my teeth. My viva went surprisingly well, after which I did the minor corrections that were requested, handed in a copy of my thesis, packed up my stuff and left that hateful group behind me.

b555 3y ago
if given a chance to do it all again, would you?
- logifail 3y ago
  > if given a chance to do it all again, would you? Yes, definitely, but maybe(?) in a different research group.
- ikrenji 3y ago
  absolutely not lol

synergy20 3y ago

nobody is going to take on PhD after running the simulator I'm sure about that.

moffkalast 3y ago

> An item in your cart was on sale, you bought it immediately and felt much better. +5 hope Feeling personally attacked.

amir734jj 3y ago

I took qualifying exam on the last semester after I finished the thesis. They [university officials] thought in their system I have left the program. I had only 4 weeks to study for the exam because my advisor gave me a ultimatum after he thought I took the exam already. I was working full-time at this time and couldn't take 4 weeks off. After so much praying, I got the highest score, and I ended up becoming a Christian because of all the praying. It worked out at the end.

Lk7Of3vfJS2n 3y ago

Looking forward to a Job Search simulator.

ryandrake 3y ago
You could adapt the same game logic to a lot of things in life: Job Search, Career Success, Startup Founder, Stock Investor. In most life situations, it is possible--even likely--to "make no mistakes and still lose."

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

I got the most anxiety when I got cloud storage.

Derbasti 3y ago

LOL, wrote the thesis in one month. Very funny.

birdyrooster 3y ago

I like declining the offer and going on with my life. Relaxing.

rwxrwxrwx 3y ago

Too real.

footlose_3815 3y ago

TIL month-long breaks are required to pass a PHD

Lk7Of3vfJS2n 3y ago

[dead]

glomgril 3y ago

This is just brilliant. Brings back memories, some fond others less so. Only addition I'd suggest is a subplot involving teaching/TAing duties and/or money problems. Good to be occasionally reminded that slacking off is a legitimately important part of the scientific process. Wish this view was more popular in the industry.

warent 3y ago

I've never gone for a PhD, so I can't relate to the experience of this simulation, but found this game was actually really easy. I completed my PhD in 4 years and 11 months, which feels quite reasonable. My "hope" never dropped below 45, and by the end, hope was 76. If anything, this simulation just made me think getting a PhD would be a fun opportunity to do a lot of study, and didn't put me off at all. EDIT: Why downvote? haha I'm just sharing my experience.

johndhi 3y ago
My experience was: damn, I need to do tons of reading and research and writing. Like a full time job, not just chilling. Which is a bummer. I was hoping I could just chill.
- recursive 3y ago
  If you just want to chill, you definitely don't need any of the phd stuff. Pretty much everyone chills occasionally.
Derbasti 3y ago
That's actually sort of accurate. Some PhDs are lucky early, and can build on that success. Good for you! Good for them. Most PhDs aren't so lucky, regrettably.
smeej 3y ago
It took multiple tries for me, and at first I was convinced the game wasn't even winnable. I finally beat it in 6 years, 2 months, with 71 hope, 3 conference papers, 3 papers, an idea, some cloud storage, and some late year anxiety lol.

PakG1 3y ago

As a current PhD student, the stress of this simulator felt way too real to be comfortable.

aiertlaijrilej 3y ago

I completed the game the same way I completed real life. I left early with a MS instead of a PhD. Based on my experience, there needs to be a chance that your advisor is a narcissistic child who pushes you repeatedly to spend your entire PhD either fixing the mistakes in their own PhD thesis (without changing anything they did) or doing unpaid unpublishable production work for their half-assed startup. And hobbles your attempts to establish connections outside of their control. And also does a lot of things that could be termed "fraud" and "embezzlement" if the university cared to investigate when you and others before and after you complained about it. And probably some more mess involving petty politics with post-docs and competing professors. I loved grad classes and research, but I hated academia.

jacurtis 3y ago
> I loved grad classes and research but I hated Academia Truer words have never been spoken. I went back to get a PhD after a solid career where I was in a prominent leadership position at a respectable tech company (in my mid-thirties). I was bored, not motivated with work anymore, and wanted to do something that really pushed me and motivated me in ways that I hadn't felt in years. I also wanted to truly learn some advanced concepts through Grad classes. I really loved the grad classes (although they were much much much easier than I expected). That is why I moved into research, to really stimulate myself and do something interesting to me in my specific area of expertise. I really enjoyed doing the research too. I was personally motivated and curious on the topics I was researching. It gave me a lot of new-found motivation in life and I really flourished. But academia: the drama and games you need to engage in to do such simple (arguably trivial or non-important) tasks is ridiculous. I succeeded in my business career because it was results driven. If you produce results, people don't care how you got there exactly. But in academia I felt like it was a board game of "chutes and ladders", mixed with Risk and Monopoly where you had to own parts of the board that other people deem important, you hit chutes that set you back for no apparent reason, you were constantly collecting personal referrals and clout from other professors so you could get their blessing or IOUs. There's a lot of favors and ceremony around trivial tasks and the actual produced value often gets overlooked or forgotten about because you didn't march to the same drum as someone else.

dekhn 3y ago

Holy cow, I just played the rules I used when I did my PhD (1/4 time slacking off, 1/3 on developing major ideas and collecting results to support it and resubmitting the rejected papers) and graduated in 7 years. Exactly like real life.

voxl 3y ago

I was able to easily graduate in 5 years, only one false start because the simulation seriously overvalues preparing for the qualifying exam. Also, it doesn't consider that you usually get two attempts at such an exam, not just one.

joewferrara 3y ago

This game is exactly like graduate school in a PhD program! Love it!

mrcaosr 3y ago

This is so sad and pretty much captures the PhD experience.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nrabulinski 3y ago

Can’t get time any lower than 3 years and 12 months but it’s fun trying to speedrun this

Aeolun 3y ago

That was surprisingly stressful

godelski 3y ago

I think the most realistic thing here is the luck element. You have people around you passing and making it look easy and saying to do exactly what they did and those people make it all out to be a skill game. But you follow their exact method and still fail. And keep failing. Making you think there's some secret sauce that they aren't telling you about. But in reality the difference was just luck. That in one game you can slack off half the time and graduate just fine and the other half of the time you can't even get a single paper submitted. The tyranny of the stochastic system is probably one of the most damning things in a PhD.

laewirjtlawejtl 3y ago
Reminds me of the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. Initially it seems like it's a poem about working hard and taking risks, but it's actually about old people lying to themselves, trying to forget that their success was actually just luck. About half the professors I worked with were responsible adults, and half were narcissistic children who would do exactly what you described, "just do what I did", and when it doesn't work they quickly changed to personal attacks and insults. And of course, the professors who had PhDs from MIT or Stanford just breezing through, getting approved for everything they applied to on the first round, even when their past deliverables and future proposals were garbage, and people who went to second-tier schools having to fight tooth and nail every incremental gain. Just a pile of crap. Couldn't stand it.
- godelski 3y ago
  There's a saying I really like "the harder I work, the luckier I get." It being about how the time you invest makes you able to take advantage of more opportunities. BUT it also recognizes that the luck element exists. I think Veritasium also had a video along the luck+work lines. Basically if you just are unlucky you just have no opportunities and you'll fail no matter what work you put in. But if you don't put in work, you're also passing up possible lucky opportunities. Either way, it is a combination of a stochastic process plus skill (think about the design of any good {video,board} game. They require both skill and luck, just like life. You definitely need both, and I think this is what people forget. Work is incredibly important, but you can do a lot of good and hard work and just be unlucky. That honestly is probably one of the more distinguishing differences between students/faculty at top institutions vs mid. Especially since success is a compounding event, thus an early success can catapult someone forward. We shouldn't diminish their hard work by saying it is all luck, but neither should they diminish others hard work and frustration as a lack of working hard enough when luck plays a significant role in the system. Neither is failure strictly due to luck. It is messy and we need to accept that this is the reality of the world, especially if we want to make the system more efficient and more "meritocratic" (quotes because previous comments and their relationship to Goodhart, the difficulties in evaluation and necessity to embrace noise). Though your last point about the top tier breezing through, I can completely relate. I see a lot of low quality papers from those institutions get high marks and it is very surprising and definitely not consistent with a blind evaluation system... but I think most of us already know that.

xbkingx 3y ago

lol I wish it was this easy. I got through the simulator in 6yrs 11mos on the second try. At no point was hope above 40%, except once early on (ended at 33%). The funny thing is that I had 1 conf paper, 1 major result, and 1 figure left over. That's a good year extra, so I assume a perfect game would be to get the 3x papers and GTFO (which is the second best outcome, after not enrolling). There were a couple folks I knew that made it out in 5 years, but more that took 7+. Our lab was notorious for taking over 10, which I skirted by. Like others said, this was lacking outside events (social/political junk). Hopefully version 2 will take into account: at least 1 family death and 1 additional tragedy, at least two months lost to helping or waiting for help from another grad student or post doc (they did have the lab equipment breaking, which was good to see, but missed the lobbying for every little purchase), at least one scope change, a half dozen favors to gain some political cache, a few experiments and/or rewrites to satisfy faculty members that just read about a technical issue they should have known, but didn't so they're highly sensitive to it, at least 6 months of arranging the data/results in a way that faculty can understand, 3 months of arguing that the lab standard procedure for some basic component is a decade out of date, a few months worth of preparing premature data for unnecessary meetings, one (and it better be just one) instance of an offer to help getting waaaay out of control, the hope boost after your first big conference and subsequent conference hope drops, the drops with each thesis defense from folks a year younger, etc. There's more, but that's off the top of my head. Oh, and that slight boost in hope when you hear someone else has a worse problem than your current one. That's a fun one. Tip for those interviewing - ignore all the year 1-3 folks. 1 and 2 are basically undergrads plus some extra classes. 3 probably hasn't hit the first pile of bullshit yet. Find a year 5 or 6 in your field and talk to them alone. There's a reason they generally don't have senior grad students at recruiting events, and it isn't because they're too busy. Talk to them long enough to get to their exhausted attempts to rationalize some aspect of the experience. If their demeanor doesn't change, you might be safe. If they start hemming and hawing, that's a problem. They haven't even gotten to a specific, non-personal problem and they're having trouble keeping up the facade. The layers are: 1) Hey, social event, I get to take my mind off lab problems. 2) Getting a little boost by talking to someone still excited. 3) The quiet whisper, "Let me give you some advice." 4) The realization that there's nothing but lab to talk about. That's the threshold. 5) The rationalization alpha - The view from 30,000 feet isn't terrible. 6) The rationalization beta - The rundown of broad problems they're having. This is the point where they will probably, as if by magic, remember that thing they were going to do needs to be done now. (I've got some analysis running I need to check, I need to feed some lab animals, I promised my parents I would call, I told a lab mate I'd help them with this thing and will be up all night, etc.) 7) The rationalization gamma - Specific cases of major problems they're seen other have. 8) The rationalization delta - Specific problems they're having.

akomtu 3y ago

What's the typical motivation of getting a PhD? The desire to discover something novel? The need to look and feel better than others?

mjfl 3y ago

one issue is overemphasis on qualifying exam. Most advisors, at least for experimental disciplines, value publishing papers much higher than jumping through these academic hoops, and make sure that either qualifying exams are easy to pass or can be retaken.

_madmax_ 3y ago

It is as boring as getting a real PhD, good job to the dev lol

sarosh 3y ago

Looking at https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/rulesets/default/events.yaml https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/rulesets/default/eve... provides most of the key 'game loops', i.e. # idea -> prelim -> major -> 2 figures -> submitted paper interesting to see the hypothesis about reading more papers being borne out: # increase the success rate as the player reads more papers probability: 0.60 + player.readPapers / 100 - itemCount('idea') / 20 Also interesting to see that passing the qualification exam provides the largest player.hope boost (+10) Was fun to see the TooManyIdeas random event - now to actually get it to trigger.

LASR 3y ago

I wanted to go all the way to a PhD. So did my classmates. We were going to change the whole world. But after an internship at a FAANG during my 2nd year undergrad, the money was too good. Got some return offers and basically slacked off the rest of my undergrad, just waiting to graduate. I was not born into wealth. I am a 1/2-generation immigrant. My parents struggled to keep me afloat during my undergrad years. Even my internship pay was more than my parents' income at the time. So really I had no choice but to sell out early. Now 10 years after undergrad and a couple of FAANGs later, the baby crying in the other room at 3AM, parents retired and vacationing around, I think I made the only choice for me. But I cannot help wonder how life might have been different, and if I really did have a chance to change to world.

rewmie 3y ago
> But I cannot help wonder how life might have been different, and if I really did have a chance to change to world. You made the right choice. Life as a PhD student is ultimately a life of poverty and uncertain future. You might get lucky and be able to explore a meaningful research topic, but more often than not you would end up in a miserable path with no future, and with the best option at securing your material needs to be in an ungrateful and very hard to reach academic role.
- mebassett 3y ago
  or after a few years of postdocs and job security that comes in 12-24 month bouts, you might have moved into industry anyway and just starting making 60% of what you're making now.

1270018080 3y ago

The text is too wide. It gave me a headache to read somehow.

chriskanan 3y ago

This is reasonably accurate as far as the average PhD experience goes. I do always encourage my PhD students to take some time off during holidays and after major deadlines, rather than berate them when "slacking off" (unless that's all they do). Stuff missing: holidays and deciding whether to travel home or study / read papers (I missed holidays myself during my PhD), feeling envious of peers from pre-PhD living great lives, having kids during one's PhD (that would be hard mode), drama in authorship of collaborative papers, etc. The last year anxiety is accurate for most. It is also missing the job search in the final years. For many disciplines, 3 strong papers is the minimum for graduating, but if one really wants to get a faculty position or even a job as a research scientist at more prestigious institutes, probably 6 papers is better.

imsaw 3y ago

Shout out to other last year phd students out there! The storm will pass

jldugger 3y ago

> UNIVERSITY NEWS: free cloud storage now available to all students and faculties. Your data are now safe on the cloud. This is a trap!

spencerchubb 3y ago

Tip for everyone bothered by the font document.getElementById('message_window').style.fontFamily = 'Times New Roman'

CobaltFire 3y ago

I've been debating on going for a graduate education now that I'm retired, and I know this is an amusing game, but holy hell is it depressing. Not sure I want that much stress in my life anymore!

j7ake 3y ago

I played this game and got my PhD after 4 years. I am super surprised that the timing was close to the real phd.

throwaway4837 3y ago

Finished in 5 years, 10 months, slacked off for the first two years (prepared for exams twice).

paraknight 3y ago

Not realistic (for me) the way the advisor relationship is portrayed, and not enough academic politics. I wrote about my own experiences here https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/views/phds/ https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/views/phds/

altilunium 3y ago

Spoiler warning : https://rentry.co/phd_sim https://rentry.co/phd_sim

DrNosferatu 3y ago

Aha - feels like that ZX Spectrum game "Dictator", by Don Priestley. (less like Jones in the Fast Lane)