3 ms·

I'd recommend doing a PhD. Not everything in any science can be learnt from books. There is a lot of learning by doing. After that and a bit of experience, you

by dash2 2y ago

I'd recommend doing a PhD. Not everything in any science can be learnt from books. There is a lot of learning by doing. After that and a bit of experience, you don't necessarily need to be employed in academia. The obvious question is, how will you make money from doing research? If you are just doing it as a hobby, that's fine, but advancing the forefront of human knowledge is hard, intensive work and usually requires more than a part-time commitment. Here's something I published while not employed in the university system, just to show it is possible: https://github.com/hughjonesd/hrs-selection https://github.com/hughjonesd/hrs-selection, published version at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-024-10189-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10519-024-10189-8.

atrettel 2y ago
I hesitate to recommend getting a PhD as a general recommendation for all researchers, but I will say that I learned so much during my own PhD that I would never have learned otherwise. One problem with self-directed learning is that you tend to focus on areas that interest you directly or immediately. Doing a PhD exposed me to many topics that I was completely unaware of and basically forced me to learn much more broadly than I would have otherwise done in a self-directed manner.
kingkongjaffa 2y ago
masters/phd gives you a big portion of time and access to journal papers to really do the research. It's like a muscle you have to train, I'm not sure it's easily done while working full time. How much of your day can be spent reading journal papers? In my Masters degree I learned how to do proper academic research, literature reviews, paper writing, building up your body of knowledge from textbooks as the starting point to papers published in the past, to papers just being published now, and by that point you're at the cutting edge. By the time you finish a masters or PhD you should more or less know which academics around the world are working on your niche area and what they are publishing, and read all of their stuff. By the end of my masters I knew the ~10 people in the world who cared about my topic and had read all of their most recent papers.

by dash2 2y ago

atrettel 2y ago

I hesitate to recommend getting a PhD as a general recommendation for all researchers, but I will say that I learned so much during my own PhD that I would never have learned otherwise. One problem with self-directed learning is that you tend to focus on areas that interest you directly or immediately. Doing a PhD exposed me to many topics that I was completely unaware of and basically forced me to learn much more broadly than I would have otherwise done in a self-directed manner.

kingkongjaffa 2y ago

masters/phd gives you a big portion of time and access to journal papers to really do the research. It's like a muscle you have to train, I'm not sure it's easily done while working full time. How much of your day can be spent reading journal papers? In my Masters degree I learned how to do proper academic research, literature reviews, paper writing, building up your body of knowledge from textbooks as the starting point to papers published in the past, to papers just being published now, and by that point you're at the cutting edge. By the time you finish a masters or PhD you should more or less know which academics around the world are working on your niche area and what they are publishing, and read all of their stuff. By the end of my masters I knew the ~10 people in the world who cared about my topic and had read all of their most recent papers.