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whoa i'm astonished people have the attention span to read this on a friday night :) here's an HTML version too ... http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm http://p

whoa i'm astonished people have the attention span to read this on a friday night :) here's an HTML version too ... http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm

unignorant 14y ago
Hey, sorry for scooping you if that messed something up :) I heard you'd graduated, so I wandered over to your site today. Didn't realize you'd put up this article so recently.
- pgbovine 14y ago
  oh, no worries at all! in fact, i just shipped today. thanks for posting, ethan.
dchichkov 14y ago
Really liked the Burrito tool. I'll definitely give it a try. It feels like it could be a perfect companion with iPython notebook (which sadly lacks version control and lab notes).
- pgbovine 14y ago
  thanks! just to warn you -- it is definitely "research-quality" code. out of all the tools i built for my dissertation, CDE is the only one that's remotely usable ... everything else is just a proof-of-concept.
kylebrown 14y ago
Thanks for writing this, much insight and honesty. I sense that your Mother's talent for sociology has rubbed off on you, don't you think? I see it both in your choice of and approach to research (interviews, case studies, etc. as opposed to purely technical), and in the way you recognized and clarified the socio-political barriers to graduating (the subtleties in finding the right project and people). A couple of childhood friends just finished their third year of their PhD programs, one in molecular biology and the other in physical chemistry, and are very much in that all-too-common third/fourth year rut. I wish they'd had this to read three years ago!
beambot 14y ago
Great read Philip. It brings back many fond, and sometimes not-so-fond memories. I actually chuckled during some of those early chapters... "It takes 4 weeks to write a good paper." Followed later by, "We ended up submitting an embarrassing jumble of text filled with typos, nonsensical sentence fragments, graphics without any explanations, and no concluding paragraphs. It was a horrid mess." It's even funnier when something like that gets accepted (or the really polished one gets rejected!). I plan to send this to some of the more junior grad students I know!
vr000m 14y ago
This is certainly a great read, especially since I am a PhD student in the middle of the process and find some of my papers in the resubmitting phase. I am sitting at an airport on my way back from a top-tier conference and the Epilogue on Page 99 resonates so much with my own experiences. Thanks a lot for writing this :)

whoa i'm astonished people have the attention span to read this on a friday night :) here's an HTML version too ... http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm

unignorant 14y ago

Hey, sorry for scooping you if that messed something up :) I heard you'd graduated, so I wandered over to your site today. Didn't realize you'd put up this article so recently.

pgbovine 14y ago
oh, no worries at all! in fact, i just shipped today. thanks for posting, ethan.

dchichkov 14y ago

Really liked the Burrito tool. I'll definitely give it a try. It feels like it could be a perfect companion with iPython notebook (which sadly lacks version control and lab notes).

pgbovine 14y ago
thanks! just to warn you -- it is definitely "research-quality" code. out of all the tools i built for my dissertation, CDE is the only one that's remotely usable ... everything else is just a proof-of-concept.

kylebrown 14y ago

Thanks for writing this, much insight and honesty. I sense that your Mother's talent for sociology has rubbed off on you, don't you think? I see it both in your choice of and approach to research (interviews, case studies, etc. as opposed to purely technical), and in the way you recognized and clarified the socio-political barriers to graduating (the subtleties in finding the right project and people). A couple of childhood friends just finished their third year of their PhD programs, one in molecular biology and the other in physical chemistry, and are very much in that all-too-common third/fourth year rut. I wish they'd had this to read three years ago!

beambot 14y ago

Great read Philip. It brings back many fond, and sometimes not-so-fond memories. I actually chuckled during some of those early chapters... "It takes 4 weeks to write a good paper." Followed later by, "We ended up submitting an embarrassing jumble of text filled with typos, nonsensical sentence fragments, graphics without any explanations, and no concluding paragraphs. It was a horrid mess." It's even funnier when something like that gets accepted (or the really polished one gets rejected!). I plan to send this to some of the more junior grad students I know!

vr000m 14y ago

This is certainly a great read, especially since I am a PhD student in the middle of the process and find some of my papers in the resubmitting phase. I am sitting at an airport on my way back from a top-tier conference and the Epilogue on Page 99 resonates so much with my own experiences. Thanks a lot for writing this :)