5 ms·

its more amusing than accurate, IMO

lamename 2y ago
In all seriousness, I think you're lucky then. (I can only speak for my experience and those of my peers in my field, at the end of the day)
- IshKebab 2y ago
  I agree, but my estimate 90% of my peers' PhDs (including mine) were essentially 3 years of work on an idea that did not work, or trying and failing to find an idea that did work. Then writing up your work as if it was great. The 10% of "successful" PhDs were on ideas that were almost guaranteed to work - more development than research. This was in a proper hard engineering field though. I think in other fields can be much more likely to be things that can't really fail. For example in computer science, a lot of PhDs are just like "I implemented this thing" where there's very little risk of it simply not working. An exception in computing is AI research where it is very much like the "try some stuff; it didn't work" experience of engineering and science research. I imagine a PhD in AI is not a fun experience...
  - XorNot 2y ago
    In hindsight it should've been a huge red flag to me when the only "what's it like to do a Ph. D" students at the induction were comp. sci. My advice to most people would just be "don't". My second run of advice would be "find the most boring project imaginable" since it's likely to succeed on the basis of "do a bunch of fairly predictable experiments and publish them".
impossiblefork 2y ago
I liked the aspect of it where you get an idea, and then work on it to get a result, and then a major result, supporting figures etc.; and while this rigidity in finishing the ideas one starts may not be optimal there's at least an element of it which could motivate people to finish things first, before moving on. I think this is often useful. Maybe it's obvious, but it can be very tempting to develop ideas, or develop new shiny results, when you still have other ideas that haven't yet been turned into definite packages of well-supported results.

In all seriousness, I think you're lucky then. (I can only speak for my experience and those of my peers in my field, at the end of the day)

IshKebab 2y ago
I agree, but my estimate 90% of my peers' PhDs (including mine) were essentially 3 years of work on an idea that did not work, or trying and failing to find an idea that did work. Then writing up your work as if it was great. The 10% of "successful" PhDs were on ideas that were almost guaranteed to work - more development than research. This was in a proper hard engineering field though. I think in other fields can be much more likely to be things that can't really fail. For example in computer science, a lot of PhDs are just like "I implemented this thing" where there's very little risk of it simply not working. An exception in computing is AI research where it is very much like the "try some stuff; it didn't work" experience of engineering and science research. I imagine a PhD in AI is not a fun experience...
- XorNot 2y ago
  In hindsight it should've been a huge red flag to me when the only "what's it like to do a Ph. D" students at the induction were comp. sci. My advice to most people would just be "don't". My second run of advice would be "find the most boring project imaginable" since it's likely to succeed on the basis of "do a bunch of fairly predictable experiments and publish them".

impossiblefork 2y ago

I liked the aspect of it where you get an idea, and then work on it to get a result, and then a major result, supporting figures etc.; and while this rigidity in finishing the ideas one starts may not be optimal there's at least an element of it which could motivate people to finish things first, before moving on. I think this is often useful. Maybe it's obvious, but it can be very tempting to develop ideas, or develop new shiny results, when you still have other ideas that haven't yet been turned into definite packages of well-supported results.