10 ms·

The Illustrated Guide to a PhD

410 points by chii 2y ago

liontwist 2y ago
It’s a nice idea that you’re going to help the boundary of human knowledge expand but I don’t think infinite progress is the right model. All the evidence shows that fields are completely ignorant of each other and reinvent the basic solutions. This coincides with the theory that cohorts of experts develop expertise which is not transferrable. Watch as ML rediscovers harmonic analysis while awarding plenty of Phds to those involved. Rediscovery is a great thing. You bring new meaning and context. I’s just not “expanding circle of knowledge” More likely is you will dig further down the track of the fads your advisor is into. The trend will be forgotten in a few decades, with a small change of unforeseen utility later. And its contribution will be to your personal life. The model proposed is also lacking in ambition because historically PhDs were significant.
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  For example https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10739 https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10739
asicsp 2y ago
See also this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29138570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29138570 (158 points | Nov 7, 2021 | 121 comments)
oezi 2y ago
PhDs' unfortunately have lost much of their value. - There aren't enough post-doc and tenure positions for the glut of PhDs. - Plagiarism scandals have reduced the public's perception of a PhD to become almost something unprestigous.
- someothherguyy 2y ago
  Thankfully not everyone feels this way, and humanity continues to benefit from the work that PhD holders do.
  - oezi 2y ago
    That certainly would be nice, but the risk to the individual that they are just exploited on a meagre salary for 3-6 years to only benefit their advisor has become so large that I don't recommend doing a PhD to anyone (or at least think very hard and very diligently investigate the prospective advisor and the faculty). Even if this means we as a society are losing out on scientific discoveries.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      Exploitation doesn't often end at certification. Academic world is very harsh for post-doc too. And permanent positions are rarer than degree holders.
    - deleted 2y ago
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- CaffeineLD50 2y ago
  As AI becomes better the quality of plagiarism should improve. So there's that.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Yes exactly. If you’re not a plumber are you even really contributing to human progress.
wanderingmind 2y ago
I can do better, the one line guide to PhD. ``` For safety and well being of you and your family, EVACUATE NOWWW. ```
- microtonal 2y ago
  This is most likely a very American perspective. There are countries where you get paid like a normal employee (not much worse than an entry-level job) with unemployment benefits, building up pension, etc. and where you can focus on doing your research (only a lightweight teaching obligation). I really treasure my (non-US) PhD time. I had a great adviser, was decently paid, and had a lot of time/opportunity to explore things, which I think lead to interesting research. And when I retire, it provides part of my pension. Also when I look back I often realize how relaxed my PhD time was compared to the much more stressful life after doing a PhD. The field really changed after doing my PhD (I'm in NLP/CL and when I did my PhD, HPSG-like grammars and maxent models were still reigning), but I think I still benefit a lot from the methodologies I learned while doing my PhD.
  - maxweylandt 2y ago
    I just completed my PhD at an American university, and I had a great time. Granted, my institution's stipend was on the higher side for the social sciences and I lived in an affordable city, which helped a lot, as did the kind and supportive faculty. I often feel the negative voices dominate discourse on this topic --- which is maybe fair given the many structural issues --- but it is possible, sometimes, to enjoy it. (to clarify I'm not disagreeing with you, US academia does have lots of issues that lead to many having a bad time. But still, getting paid to learn is a dream)
  - blharr 2y ago
    Even in America I've seen similar opportunities. Engineering PhDs at state schools have offers where you get paid a small but livable amount and get your tuition paid for. I think the big difference is that in industry you can just get paid way more in America compared to engineering elsewhere.
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deleted 2y ago
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linkerdoo 2y ago
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- relyks 2y ago
  You don't typically pay for a PhD. You're accepted into a program and the schools pays for you, sometimes even with a stipend to help with living costs
  - gylterud 2y ago
    And on the Nordic countries you are employed and given a living wage while doing a PhD.
    - ks1723 2y ago
      This is the case not only in the Nordic countries, but also across Europe like Germany, Netherlands, Italy, UK and probably others.
      - DiscourseFan 2y ago
        The UK has a highly competitive system for a limited pool of public funds, many students are self-funded in PhD programs. The UK has some great programs but unlike the US and continental Europe it is highly skewed towards the upper classes as the only requirements for entry are basic competence and money for the fees.
        xanderlewis 2y ago
        It depends on the subject. Amongst mathematics PhD students, at least, it seems that almost no one is self funded. But you're doing history or literature or something, that's another matter.
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  I do not understand how this misconception is so pervasive especially on hacker news. Every time phds are discussed someone says this. If you don’t know anything at all about a topic why say something?
ulrischa 2y ago
A phd ist not a phd. A phd in medicine is like a Bachelor thesis. While a phd in engineering can become a 10 year nightmare
- chaosite 2y ago
  That's not right. A PhD is a PhD. An MD (Medical Doctorate) is like a master's degree. It's not like a bachelor's because many MD programs start out with or require a BSc, biology is a popular choice but a lot of STEM majors are possible. But MD+PhD programs exist and those are definitely PhDs. You are right that an MD is not a PhD, though. Notice how they don't call it a PhD.
  - mnky9800n 2y ago
    MDs are also obsessed with calling each other “doctor”. It always comes across as imposed authority from people who are essentially body mechanics.
    - blitzar 2y ago
      Doctor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhkwh8u30mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhkwh8u30mo
  - reshlo 2y ago
    > It’s not like a bachelor’s because many MD programs start out with or require a BSc In many countries, the degree you must obtain to qualify as an MD is indeed a bachelor’s degree, the “Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery” (often abbreviated MB ChB or MBBS).
    - chaosite 2y ago
      It's still a 5-6 year degree, as opposed to a 3-4 year bachelor's. I agree it's not a research degree though... But some master programs don't include writing a research thesis either.
  - 2y ago
ySteeK 2y ago
You don't need a PhD to push the boundaries. You need a PhD to make others believe you pushed the boundaries!
- mr_mitm 2y ago
  You got it backwards. You need to push the boundaries to get a PhD.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - brulard 2y ago
    Maybe at the worlds best universities. For sure not at an average one.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    you should read some PhD dissertations outside of top schools /s :)
  - amelius 2y ago
    Push the boundaries but not actually move them.
    - Over2Chars 2y ago
      LOL. Hey!
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Yes, because so many contemporary breakthroughs have come from some guy in his garage.
fl4tul4 2y ago
Yes, I can attest that nowadays, in some fields, research has become a 'game', where: - people torture data until it yields unreproducible results; - people choose venues that maximise their chances of getting published (and pay for publication sometimes, I'm looking at you, APC); - little concern given to excellence, rigour, and impact; - the chase for a 'diploma' from a renowned institute without putting the effort; I could go on and on, but I'll stop now. Perhaps something changes, I am waiting for this to happen for some time now (10y and counting). It's a bad system but that's what we have (at the moment).
- antegamisou 2y ago
  Yes it's horrifying indeed. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that there are many that fall into this rat race and treat it as another type of MSc credential.
- 3abiton 2y ago
  > - people choose venues that maximises their chances of getting published (and pay for publication sometimes, I'm looking at you, APC); > > - little concern given to excellence, rigour, and impact; It's because the kpis of assessment are built like this. Goodhard's law. I know lots of good researchers who get frustrated with the system and end up giving up and faltering to those 2 points. If within a uni 2 research groups are putting out research at different rate at different quality, the one with higher quality, lower frequency, and higher standard and ambition gets heavily penalized. Seen it in action.
  - graycat 2y ago
    Yes, in the STEM fields, for published papers, it's easy just to count them; much harder to read them; to evaluate them, some people just count awards, etc. So, the hard work that makes the good material in the paper may never be noticed. There is, "You get what you pay for." So, want papers, you will get papers, and you can count them. It goes, did Haydn write 101 symphonies or 1 symphony 101 times? Early on, had a good career going in computing but where occasionally some math made a lot of difference. So, to help that career got a Ph.D. in applied math. Never had any intention of being a professor but for a while did to try to help my seriously, fatally, stressed out wife (Valedictorian, PBK, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, Summa Cum Laude, Ph.D.) -- took a professor job near her family home and farm. In my little Ph.D department, saw the Chair and four professors get fired and one more leave, fired or not. The career I had before grad school was a lot better than the one those professors had. Had to conclude that, tenure or not, being a professor is, on average, a poor way to even reasonable financial security. Generally there is low pay, e.g., too little to buy a house, keep cars running, support a wife and family. There's a LOT of dirty politics, infighting, higher-ups who don't want you to be successful. Bluntly, a research university takes in money that a lot of people care about and puts out papers that only a few people care about: Net, there is no very strong reason to pay professors enough for even reasonable financial security. Key sources of the money are short term grants from the usual suspects, NSF, DOE, DARPA, NIH ("too many for them all to be turned off at once" -- JB Conant?), but that is essentially just contract work and not steady employment, with little promise that when a Professor's baby is ready for college there will be money enough for them to go. It's a house built on paper that can be blown away by any thunder storm. Now, for a career, e.g., financial security, to leave something for the kids in the family tree, regard business, e.g., now involving the Internet, as the best approach, and there regard computing and math as important tools but only tools. Research? Did some, and it is a key to the business. Academic research? Did some, published, on my own dime, still waiting for the checks. History, how'd we get here? Used to be that some guy built a valuable business and had several sons. One of the sons inherited the business, and the rest went to the military as an officer, academics as a professor, or to politics. Then WWII showed that the STEM fields can be crucial for national security, and some related funding started, e.g., summer math programs for selected high school students, research grants. "If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?" Ah, "The business of America is business."
dataflow 2y ago
I just pray that everyone denigrating PhDs is making even greater contributions to humanity.
- CaffeineLD50 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Posting rude comments is worse than nothing, though.
    - Over2Chars 2y ago
      Why is getting a piece of paper after sitting in dozens of classes, and writing a essay considered automatically "beneficial to humanity"? Just pulling a random site (first hit on a search) https://www.findaphd.com/phds/browsebysubject.aspx https://www.findaphd.com/phds/browsebysubject.aspx It appears you can get a phd in dance, event management, or dozens of fields that aren't curing cancer, or AI. I'm reminded of the Olympic break dancer who did the "kangaroo" move. She has a PHD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Gunn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Gunn thesis: "Her PhD thesis, titled Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney's Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl's Experience of B-boying" (from Wikipedia) Now I'm sure it was worthwhile, but I'm struggling to see it as a presumptive positive move to humanity for her work. And there's lots just like it. I'd even go so far as to assume that it's the extreme minority of phds that actually make a difference "for humanity" and not simply a good career move for the degree holder.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        I'm unsure whether I should reply because I get the feeling that you think "beneficial to humanity" looks like someone working at OpenAI and not doing research on, say, anthropology.
        2y ago
KnuthIsGod 2y ago
Not in here Australia. At many of our leading institutions in the hard sciences, rehashed work, data stolen from other teams, photoshopped images and a bit of plagiarism is enough to get you by. Once you get to the social "sciences", it is much worse. Karma cannot be denied and the result is that work outcomes with a PhD are derisible, since employers have worked out that something does not compute about the quality of freshly minted PhDs.
- paulpauper 2y ago
  People complain about the US education system and higher-ed being bad or dumbed=-down. I'm like, compared to what? Much of the rest of the worst is worse in this regard. Cheating and plagiarism rampant. I've seen math papers in arxiv where the stuff is rehashed. Almost never US institutions.
giacomoforte 2y ago
If you don't pick your lab/PI wisely you might end up stroking you PI's ego without accomplishing anything of value. Or you might end doing four years of work that ends up obsolete before you even graduate.
- kowlo 2y ago
  For most (nowadays), the journey is about becoming a competent researcher.
InkCanon 2y ago
I'm considering getting a masters or PhD (in PL) under a professor I work with now for my undergrad thesis. It has been my observation that the standard path of getting a standard corporate job tends to nullify all impact you could have (with a few rare exceptions). And after that I could get a job, become a professor, turn my research into a startup etc. The pros are 1) I know my professor and he's a solid guy 2) Pays decently well, money isn't too much of a concern 3) I get paid to do research, university provides generous grants if turned into a startup Cons 1) Hear a lot of bad things about the academic rat race, pressure to public even at masters/PhD level 2) I could probably hack out some paper into journals but whether I could have any real impact "on demand" (versus say spontaneously coming up with something) is a big question mark, especially within the deadlines given in the program Any thoughts on this? Especially heuristics, methods or ways to increase impact?
- sashank_1509 2y ago
  Ask yourself this, has there been any useful Programming Language that has come out of PL research/ Academia in the last 20 years? The only example I can think of is Julia, and it only seems to be used by other academics. If you’re looking to be impactful, you are much better off joining a job and working in your free time, than doing a PhD. A PhD is a program to compete for academic prestige. Grad students want to publish papers that get them noticed at conferences, invited to talks at prestigious universities etc, those are the incentives, always has been in academia. The brightest minds join academia because they care more about prestige than money (as they should, anyone can earn money, few can win a Nobel prize). In a healthy academic system, prestige is linked to real world societal impact. That is still somewhat true in fields like Machine Learning, in some fields it seems to be completely dis-aligned from any real world impact whatsoever (which seems to be PL research). Our academic system unfortunately is a rotten carcass. You could still, advisor willing, do research that interests you and not care at all whether you get noticed by conferences/ journals, your peers etc. But that takes a certain level of anti-social behavior that very few humans possess and so I say join a job. Plenty of companies are still building programming languages, like Google, Apple etc which are being used by engineers worldwide and if you finagle your way into a job at those teams, you will have a meaningful, impactful job, which is also well paying as a side bonus.
MeteorMarc 2y ago
And now imagine this as a hypersphere in 10 dimensions. The choice of two dimensions in the post is arbitrary, isn't it?
jokoon 2y ago
I also like what Dyson had to say about the PhD Can't find it now
- Sid950 2y ago
  Can't deny tbh
- ioblomov 2y ago
  Dyson is the (super) rare exception of a full professor without a PhD. But then again he did unify quantum electrodynamics. https://www.ias.edu/sns/dyson https://www.ias.edu/sns/dyson
kowlo 2y ago
I would show this to all prospective PhD students, and then again on their first day if they were selected.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
I was expecting https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=2031 https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=2031
lihua919 2y ago
[flagged]
fastneutron 2y ago
Most discussions I see online about whether or not someone should do a PhD tend to assume: - The student becomes hyper focused and pigeonholed into some esoteric and unemployable domain, destined to run on the postdoctoral treadmill for decades. - The PI is a control freak who only cares about publications, and considers students who leave for industry jobs after graduation to be failures. These stereotypes can have an element of truth, but there are more enlightened PhD programs and PIs that understand the value of cross-cutting and commercializable research than you’d expect from the discourse. Not everyone is stuck working on a pinprick of knowledge, and if you choose your program and PI wisely, you can go much further and do many more things than you would never have access to with just an undergraduate background.
- hikingsimulator 2y ago
  One big issue is that industry jobs in some areas increasingly expect academic excellence in the shape of "publishing in top 3 conferences" for example.
  - Over2Chars 2y ago
    An obviously totally arbitrary barrier. Why not 4 or even 5? Someone who only published in 2 top conferences is obviously not worth anyone's time. But 3, now we're talking.
    - halgir 2y ago
      Most quantitative recruitment criteria are arbitrary to some degree. Unless you rigorously examine every single applicant, you need some heuristics for initial filtering.
      - Over2Chars 2y ago
        So you need some arbitrary filtering to give you breathing room for your objective heuristics? For some reason that seems slightly non-optimal.
    - 2y ago
xanderlewis 2y ago
I'm starting a PhD — essentially from tomorrow. It's a shame to see so much discouragement here, but at this point I'm no longer surprised. I also don't care because if left to my own devices I would do research anyway. In the kindest possible way: screw all of you!
- j_bum 2y ago
  Good luck with your PhD. Stay focused and enjoy this time, you will have a freedom to explore and study that’s almost unparalleled in post-grad life!
- Over2Chars 2y ago
  @xanderlewis I don't think anyone's comments are meant for you specifically, nor to discourage you or anyone particularly. If anything, take it all with a "grain of salt" and reflect on whether or not anyone you meet might resemble these comments. Hopefully, not your future self. Good luck in your career.
- megaloblasto 2y ago
  Most of these people have never been in a PhD program, so take their words with a grain of salt. If you have a good advisor, your passionate about your project, and you got some good funding, you'll have a wonderful time of exploring interesting ideas and becoming a competent researcher. Good luck!
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    So far, I seem to have all three. Let's see how it goes! Thanks.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    All that’s true, and that is completely different than what’s advertised in this article.
- j_maffe 2y ago
  I also started my PhD last week and honestly from my talks with the people there thus far I'm much more optimistic than the general HN view of PhDs. You still have to be realistic however. Best of luck!
hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
It's more or less that except the scale - the inner circles are far too big and the "ray" of the particular branch too wide. What actually happens is a small dot in the middle with very tiny branches going in various directions, some just a bit wider and longer than others.
worldmerge 2y ago
Is it possible to be a professor without a PhD? I would like to teach at a college level but the PhD path seems so risky to me to take a pay cut for years and you might not get the degree, and not a get a job.
- enum 2y ago
  In the U.S., in most fields, it is virtually impossible.
  - ioblomov 2y ago
    The only exception would be community colleges, which still require at least a masters. At my university, my favorite professor’s title was “senior lecturer” because he only had a bachelors. This was despite being a Times bestselling author. (He taught literature and writing.)
- gtmitchell 2y ago
  In the US at least, it is entirely possible to teach at a university without a PhD. Community colleges are full of instructors with masters's degrees, and tons of classes offered by major universities are taught by graduate students or adjunct faculty without doctorates. Your job title probably won't be 'professor', but you'll be doing basically the same work as one.
  - lapcat 2y ago
    Graduate students teach classes at their own universities as part of their departmental funding. This is only a temporary situation and exists only while they're enrolled. It's not a career path. As a former graduate student myself, I'm actually not aware of any non-PhDs who are adjuct faculty or community college instructors. I'm not claiming that they don't exist anywhere, but given the number of PhDs and the number of available academic jobs, the competition is fierce, and non-PhD candidates are likely to lose out to PhD candidates.
    - 2y ago
0xTJ 2y ago
I'm a bit confused about why the Master's degree is set before "reading papers". I had to do a whole lot of reading (and be at least involved in the writing of) papers in the research of my Master's.
stared 2y ago
The illustrated guide (which I had known during my PhD) focuses on progress—however, niche progress. Yet, PhD students' life experiences are usually not centered around progress but frustration, disillusionment, and depression. If you want to compare it with anything else, it may be like creating pieces of novel art with great effort, with one's identity tied to it. Yet, even in the case of success, it is unlikely to be appreciated by contemporary people. So, I prefer a narrative guide to PhD - "The Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?" by Dave Pritchard, http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html
skalarproduktr 2y ago
Matt has also written a great follow-up, "How to get tenure", see https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/ https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/ Highly relevant for the aspiring researcher, and it describes really well the nonlinearities of (academic) life.
mattmight 2y ago
Original author of the guide here. Wonderful to see these little illustrations still making the rounds. I first published them in 2010! To those in the comments who mentioned you are just starting your own PhD: Good luck to you! And, I hope you, like I once did, find a problem that you can fall in love with for a few years. To those just finished: Congratulations! Don’t forget to keep pushing! To those many years out: You have to keep pushing too, but there can be tremendous value in starting all over again by pushing in a different direction. You have no idea what you may find between the tips of two fields.
- skalarproduktr 2y ago
  Thank you, Matt! Loved your guide when I started my own PhD in ye olden days, and I've shown it to a lot of people since then.
  - mattmight 2y ago
    Happy to hear that! Thank you for sharing it with others. :)
- azhenley 2y ago
  Your blog really helped me during the early years of my PhD. Thank you!!!
  - mattmight 2y ago
    So happy it helped! Thank you for the kind words!
- gtmitchell 2y ago
  Any advice for PhD dropouts? I spent years and years pushing against that boundary in an obscure corner of my field and it never moved. What little funding I had dried up and I left grad school with a half finished dissertation, no PhD, and giant pile of broken dreams. I'm sure over the years you've known students who have started a PhD and not finished. What (if anything) have you said to them? Do you feel their efforts had any value?
croissants 2y ago
My fairly generic PhD advice, as somebody who did one, graduated a bit early, and is happy about the process and where it's taken me: * Choose your advisor with care. This is not very easy as an applicant looking at professors' websites, but if you are admitted, any good school will probably have an in-person or virtual admitted students day where you can talk to current students out of faculty earshot. Take advantage of these times to ask about your potential advisor. A truly bad advisor will probably produce at least one person who will warn you about them. If you can't do this in person, try to get a quick phone/video chat -- something off-record where they can be honest. I was always happy to do these for my advisor, because I liked him and wanted him to get more good students. Conversely, I know people who were warned off specific advisors during these events, for good reasons. A bit of subjectivity: a good advisor at a decent school is usually better than a bad advisor at a good school. * The financial niceness of doing a PhD in field X seems to correlate pretty well with the current job market value of a masters in field X, at least partially for reasons of leverage -- if you can leave and transition into a cushier job, advisors have to provide a bit more value. Computer science scores highly on this metric. * There is a ton of negativity about PhDs in places like HN. This isn't unjustified: doing a PhD with a bad advisor can be a very bad experience. At the same time, I think "person who had a bad PhD experience" is also "person who writes comments on the internet" with higher probability than "person who had a good PhD experience".
resiros 2y ago
That's a way of looking at it. Another way is looking at it inwardly, as a journey of self. Personally, a PhD for me was being punched in the face every morning (i.e., experiment failed) for years, yet getting up to try again. It's the archetypal hero's journey where you dive into the deepest darkness, discover yourself, and emerge triumphant. At the end, you get a hat.
deleted 2y ago
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scaradim 2y ago
Nice! but... are these graph steps roughly at scale e.g. area of initial blue circle compared to all of human knowledge circle? or the small PhD pimple compared to the blue circle? If not then can someone (original author or someone else) try to review the steps with roughly realistic average scales assuming surface represent knowledge volume and color complexity spectrum from advanced (indigo) to advanced (red)? Any candidate to make another pimple on the outer circle?
jofer 2y ago
My wife rather derisively calls this the "penis pimple model of science". It's a great article and a great set figures, but folks sometimes push it a bit too much, especially in grad school. It has a lot of truth to it and it's been making the rounds for well over a decade. Unfortunately, sometimes it can set folks up to feel bad about themselves if what they do doesn't line up well with whatever is in vogue as the boundary of knowledge that's currently being pushed. There's a _ton_ of value in more pragmatic parts of fields that focus on applications or combining relatively well-know parts of different sub-fields. Those parts of science often don't feel like you're pushing some "boundary". It's more layering on top of, filling in holes, and building up than building "out". Sometimes what you do is to use multiple things that lots of folks already knew, but the people who knew X and the people who knew Y didn't talk to each other, so no one thought about how to combine them. It can also be hard to get papers published because reviewers will consider one part obvious/well-known and the other part irrelevant because they come from one sub-field and not both. It will often feel like you don't belong because your work doesn't look like these figures. Applied and interdisciplinary fields "feel" different. However, this type of integrative work can be among the most valuable parts of modern research. Don't feel like what you do has to fit into the "penis pimple model" of science. There's also nothing wrong with pushing some known boundary of a field, either! Both are valid.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  But this isn't a model is science, it's a model of what different kinds of academic credentials mean. Sure there's plenty of ways to contribute to society without publishing academic research, but that's not what a PhD is.
  - jofer 2y ago
    Not all PhDs push boundaries of knowledge in quite that way. Often what you do was already known, but no one really figured out how to correctly apply it. Alternatively, it's often combining different things that were already well known, but no one had combined. It's novel work that makes a PhD. Novel work is distinct from pushing the boundary of knowledge. Often what you do doesn't change what "humanity knows" in any way. Both my wife and I have PhDs. Neither of us did things that look like the figures there. It's not a good mental model for what all PhDs mean, though it is a good model for some. I combined fields and reinterpreted a ton of things that had already been done to draw very different fundamental conclusions about what was going on in a particular location. I put out alternative hypotheses for observations that had already been collected. It's not new knowledge at all and I didn't add to what we "know". I just added an additional hypothesis to the set of multiple working hypotheses that will hopefully be tested decades from now. My wife worked on how to actually apply well-known methods in other fields to our field. Her work was half engineering, half field experiments. Lots of folks had been working with fiber optic strain gauges for decades. However, no one was using them to measure in-situ strain in rock masses yet (which has since become common). The application was broadly "known", but actually doing it and demonstrating that is novel.
kkoyung 2y ago
I read this article before starting my PhD. A few months ago, I successfully defended my thesis and completed my PhD. Even though it was just a small contribution, I’m proud to have pushed the boundaries of human knowledge.

410 points by chii 2y ago

It’s a nice idea that you’re going to help the boundary of human knowledge expand but I don’t think infinite progress is the right model. All the evidence shows that fields are completely ignorant of each other and reinvent the basic solutions. This coincides with the theory that cohorts of experts develop expertise which is not transferrable. Watch as ML rediscovers harmonic analysis while awarding plenty of Phds to those involved. Rediscovery is a great thing. You bring new meaning and context. I’s just not “expanding circle of knowledge” More likely is you will dig further down the track of the fads your advisor is into. The trend will be forgotten in a few decades, with a small change of unforeseen utility later. And its contribution will be to your personal life. The model proposed is also lacking in ambition because historically PhDs were significant.

mnky9800n 2y ago
For example https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10739 https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10739

asicsp 2y ago

See also this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29138570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29138570 (158 points | Nov 7, 2021 | 121 comments)

oezi 2y ago

PhDs' unfortunately have lost much of their value. - There aren't enough post-doc and tenure positions for the glut of PhDs. - Plagiarism scandals have reduced the public's perception of a PhD to become almost something unprestigous.

someothherguyy 2y ago
Thankfully not everyone feels this way, and humanity continues to benefit from the work that PhD holders do.
- oezi 2y ago
  That certainly would be nice, but the risk to the individual that they are just exploited on a meagre salary for 3-6 years to only benefit their advisor has become so large that I don't recommend doing a PhD to anyone (or at least think very hard and very diligently investigate the prospective advisor and the faculty). Even if this means we as a society are losing out on scientific discoveries.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Exploitation doesn't often end at certification. Academic world is very harsh for post-doc too. And permanent positions are rarer than degree holders.
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CaffeineLD50 2y ago
As AI becomes better the quality of plagiarism should improve. So there's that.
dyauspitr 2y ago
Yes exactly. If you’re not a plumber are you even really contributing to human progress.

wanderingmind 2y ago

I can do better, the one line guide to PhD. ``` For safety and well being of you and your family, EVACUATE NOWWW. ```

microtonal 2y ago
This is most likely a very American perspective. There are countries where you get paid like a normal employee (not much worse than an entry-level job) with unemployment benefits, building up pension, etc. and where you can focus on doing your research (only a lightweight teaching obligation). I really treasure my (non-US) PhD time. I had a great adviser, was decently paid, and had a lot of time/opportunity to explore things, which I think lead to interesting research. And when I retire, it provides part of my pension. Also when I look back I often realize how relaxed my PhD time was compared to the much more stressful life after doing a PhD. The field really changed after doing my PhD (I'm in NLP/CL and when I did my PhD, HPSG-like grammars and maxent models were still reigning), but I think I still benefit a lot from the methodologies I learned while doing my PhD.
- maxweylandt 2y ago
  I just completed my PhD at an American university, and I had a great time. Granted, my institution's stipend was on the higher side for the social sciences and I lived in an affordable city, which helped a lot, as did the kind and supportive faculty. I often feel the negative voices dominate discourse on this topic --- which is maybe fair given the many structural issues --- but it is possible, sometimes, to enjoy it. (to clarify I'm not disagreeing with you, US academia does have lots of issues that lead to many having a bad time. But still, getting paid to learn is a dream)
- blharr 2y ago
  Even in America I've seen similar opportunities. Engineering PhDs at state schools have offers where you get paid a small but livable amount and get your tuition paid for. I think the big difference is that in industry you can just get paid way more in America compared to engineering elsewhere.
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linkerdoo 2y ago

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relyks 2y ago
You don't typically pay for a PhD. You're accepted into a program and the schools pays for you, sometimes even with a stipend to help with living costs
- gylterud 2y ago
  And on the Nordic countries you are employed and given a living wage while doing a PhD.
  - ks1723 2y ago
    This is the case not only in the Nordic countries, but also across Europe like Germany, Netherlands, Italy, UK and probably others.
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      The UK has a highly competitive system for a limited pool of public funds, many students are self-funded in PhD programs. The UK has some great programs but unlike the US and continental Europe it is highly skewed towards the upper classes as the only requirements for entry are basic competence and money for the fees.
      - xanderlewis 2y ago
        It depends on the subject. Amongst mathematics PhD students, at least, it seems that almost no one is self funded. But you're doing history or literature or something, that's another matter.
mnky9800n 2y ago
I do not understand how this misconception is so pervasive especially on hacker news. Every time phds are discussed someone says this. If you don’t know anything at all about a topic why say something?

ulrischa 2y ago

A phd ist not a phd. A phd in medicine is like a Bachelor thesis. While a phd in engineering can become a 10 year nightmare

chaosite 2y ago
That's not right. A PhD is a PhD. An MD (Medical Doctorate) is like a master's degree. It's not like a bachelor's because many MD programs start out with or require a BSc, biology is a popular choice but a lot of STEM majors are possible. But MD+PhD programs exist and those are definitely PhDs. You are right that an MD is not a PhD, though. Notice how they don't call it a PhD.
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  MDs are also obsessed with calling each other “doctor”. It always comes across as imposed authority from people who are essentially body mechanics.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Doctor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhkwh8u30mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhkwh8u30mo
- reshlo 2y ago
  > It’s not like a bachelor’s because many MD programs start out with or require a BSc In many countries, the degree you must obtain to qualify as an MD is indeed a bachelor’s degree, the “Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery” (often abbreviated MB ChB or MBBS).
  - chaosite 2y ago
    It's still a 5-6 year degree, as opposed to a 3-4 year bachelor's. I agree it's not a research degree though... But some master programs don't include writing a research thesis either.
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ySteeK 2y ago

You don't need a PhD to push the boundaries. You need a PhD to make others believe you pushed the boundaries!

mr_mitm 2y ago
You got it backwards. You need to push the boundaries to get a PhD.
- deleted 2y ago
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- brulard 2y ago
  Maybe at the worlds best universities. For sure not at an average one.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  you should read some PhD dissertations outside of top schools /s :)
- amelius 2y ago
  Push the boundaries but not actually move them.
  - Over2Chars 2y ago
    LOL. Hey!
dyauspitr 2y ago
Yes, because so many contemporary breakthroughs have come from some guy in his garage.

fl4tul4 2y ago

Yes, I can attest that nowadays, in some fields, research has become a 'game', where: - people torture data until it yields unreproducible results; - people choose venues that maximise their chances of getting published (and pay for publication sometimes, I'm looking at you, APC); - little concern given to excellence, rigour, and impact; - the chase for a 'diploma' from a renowned institute without putting the effort; I could go on and on, but I'll stop now. Perhaps something changes, I am waiting for this to happen for some time now (10y and counting). It's a bad system but that's what we have (at the moment).

antegamisou 2y ago
Yes it's horrifying indeed. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that there are many that fall into this rat race and treat it as another type of MSc credential.
3abiton 2y ago
> - people choose venues that maximises their chances of getting published (and pay for publication sometimes, I'm looking at you, APC); > > - little concern given to excellence, rigour, and impact; It's because the kpis of assessment are built like this. Goodhard's law. I know lots of good researchers who get frustrated with the system and end up giving up and faltering to those 2 points. If within a uni 2 research groups are putting out research at different rate at different quality, the one with higher quality, lower frequency, and higher standard and ambition gets heavily penalized. Seen it in action.
- graycat 2y ago
  Yes, in the STEM fields, for published papers, it's easy just to count them; much harder to read them; to evaluate them, some people just count awards, etc. So, the hard work that makes the good material in the paper may never be noticed. There is, "You get what you pay for." So, want papers, you will get papers, and you can count them. It goes, did Haydn write 101 symphonies or 1 symphony 101 times? Early on, had a good career going in computing but where occasionally some math made a lot of difference. So, to help that career got a Ph.D. in applied math. Never had any intention of being a professor but for a while did to try to help my seriously, fatally, stressed out wife (Valedictorian, PBK, Woodrow Wilson, NSF, Summa Cum Laude, Ph.D.) -- took a professor job near her family home and farm. In my little Ph.D department, saw the Chair and four professors get fired and one more leave, fired or not. The career I had before grad school was a lot better than the one those professors had. Had to conclude that, tenure or not, being a professor is, on average, a poor way to even reasonable financial security. Generally there is low pay, e.g., too little to buy a house, keep cars running, support a wife and family. There's a LOT of dirty politics, infighting, higher-ups who don't want you to be successful. Bluntly, a research university takes in money that a lot of people care about and puts out papers that only a few people care about: Net, there is no very strong reason to pay professors enough for even reasonable financial security. Key sources of the money are short term grants from the usual suspects, NSF, DOE, DARPA, NIH ("too many for them all to be turned off at once" -- JB Conant?), but that is essentially just contract work and not steady employment, with little promise that when a Professor's baby is ready for college there will be money enough for them to go. It's a house built on paper that can be blown away by any thunder storm. Now, for a career, e.g., financial security, to leave something for the kids in the family tree, regard business, e.g., now involving the Internet, as the best approach, and there regard computing and math as important tools but only tools. Research? Did some, and it is a key to the business. Academic research? Did some, published, on my own dime, still waiting for the checks. History, how'd we get here? Used to be that some guy built a valuable business and had several sons. One of the sons inherited the business, and the rest went to the military as an officer, academics as a professor, or to politics. Then WWII showed that the STEM fields can be crucial for national security, and some related funding started, e.g., summer math programs for selected high school students, research grants. "If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?" Ah, "The business of America is business."

dataflow 2y ago

I just pray that everyone denigrating PhDs is making even greater contributions to humanity.

CaffeineLD50 2y ago
[flagged]
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Posting rude comments is worse than nothing, though.
  - Over2Chars 2y ago
    Why is getting a piece of paper after sitting in dozens of classes, and writing a essay considered automatically "beneficial to humanity"? Just pulling a random site (first hit on a search) https://www.findaphd.com/phds/browsebysubject.aspx https://www.findaphd.com/phds/browsebysubject.aspx It appears you can get a phd in dance, event management, or dozens of fields that aren't curing cancer, or AI. I'm reminded of the Olympic break dancer who did the "kangaroo" move. She has a PHD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Gunn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Gunn thesis: "Her PhD thesis, titled Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney's Breakdancing Scene: A B-girl's Experience of B-boying" (from Wikipedia) Now I'm sure it was worthwhile, but I'm struggling to see it as a presumptive positive move to humanity for her work. And there's lots just like it. I'd even go so far as to assume that it's the extreme minority of phds that actually make a difference "for humanity" and not simply a good career move for the degree holder.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      I'm unsure whether I should reply because I get the feeling that you think "beneficial to humanity" looks like someone working at OpenAI and not doing research on, say, anthropology.
      - 2y ago

KnuthIsGod 2y ago

Not in here Australia. At many of our leading institutions in the hard sciences, rehashed work, data stolen from other teams, photoshopped images and a bit of plagiarism is enough to get you by. Once you get to the social "sciences", it is much worse. Karma cannot be denied and the result is that work outcomes with a PhD are derisible, since employers have worked out that something does not compute about the quality of freshly minted PhDs.

paulpauper 2y ago
People complain about the US education system and higher-ed being bad or dumbed=-down. I'm like, compared to what? Much of the rest of the worst is worse in this regard. Cheating and plagiarism rampant. I've seen math papers in arxiv where the stuff is rehashed. Almost never US institutions.

giacomoforte 2y ago

If you don't pick your lab/PI wisely you might end up stroking you PI's ego without accomplishing anything of value. Or you might end doing four years of work that ends up obsolete before you even graduate.

kowlo 2y ago
For most (nowadays), the journey is about becoming a competent researcher.

InkCanon 2y ago

I'm considering getting a masters or PhD (in PL) under a professor I work with now for my undergrad thesis. It has been my observation that the standard path of getting a standard corporate job tends to nullify all impact you could have (with a few rare exceptions). And after that I could get a job, become a professor, turn my research into a startup etc. The pros are 1) I know my professor and he's a solid guy 2) Pays decently well, money isn't too much of a concern 3) I get paid to do research, university provides generous grants if turned into a startup Cons 1) Hear a lot of bad things about the academic rat race, pressure to public even at masters/PhD level 2) I could probably hack out some paper into journals but whether I could have any real impact "on demand" (versus say spontaneously coming up with something) is a big question mark, especially within the deadlines given in the program Any thoughts on this? Especially heuristics, methods or ways to increase impact?

sashank_1509 2y ago
Ask yourself this, has there been any useful Programming Language that has come out of PL research/ Academia in the last 20 years? The only example I can think of is Julia, and it only seems to be used by other academics. If you’re looking to be impactful, you are much better off joining a job and working in your free time, than doing a PhD. A PhD is a program to compete for academic prestige. Grad students want to publish papers that get them noticed at conferences, invited to talks at prestigious universities etc, those are the incentives, always has been in academia. The brightest minds join academia because they care more about prestige than money (as they should, anyone can earn money, few can win a Nobel prize). In a healthy academic system, prestige is linked to real world societal impact. That is still somewhat true in fields like Machine Learning, in some fields it seems to be completely dis-aligned from any real world impact whatsoever (which seems to be PL research). Our academic system unfortunately is a rotten carcass. You could still, advisor willing, do research that interests you and not care at all whether you get noticed by conferences/ journals, your peers etc. But that takes a certain level of anti-social behavior that very few humans possess and so I say join a job. Plenty of companies are still building programming languages, like Google, Apple etc which are being used by engineers worldwide and if you finagle your way into a job at those teams, you will have a meaningful, impactful job, which is also well paying as a side bonus.

MeteorMarc 2y ago

And now imagine this as a hypersphere in 10 dimensions. The choice of two dimensions in the post is arbitrary, isn't it?

jokoon 2y ago

I also like what Dyson had to say about the PhD Can't find it now

Sid950 2y ago
Can't deny tbh
ioblomov 2y ago
Dyson is the (super) rare exception of a full professor without a PhD. But then again he did unify quantum electrodynamics. https://www.ias.edu/sns/dyson https://www.ias.edu/sns/dyson

kowlo 2y ago

I would show this to all prospective PhD students, and then again on their first day if they were selected.

BlueTemplar 2y ago

I was expecting https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=2031 https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=2031

lihua919 2y ago

[flagged]

fastneutron 2y ago

Most discussions I see online about whether or not someone should do a PhD tend to assume: - The student becomes hyper focused and pigeonholed into some esoteric and unemployable domain, destined to run on the postdoctoral treadmill for decades. - The PI is a control freak who only cares about publications, and considers students who leave for industry jobs after graduation to be failures. These stereotypes can have an element of truth, but there are more enlightened PhD programs and PIs that understand the value of cross-cutting and commercializable research than you’d expect from the discourse. Not everyone is stuck working on a pinprick of knowledge, and if you choose your program and PI wisely, you can go much further and do many more things than you would never have access to with just an undergraduate background.

hikingsimulator 2y ago
One big issue is that industry jobs in some areas increasingly expect academic excellence in the shape of "publishing in top 3 conferences" for example.
- Over2Chars 2y ago
  An obviously totally arbitrary barrier. Why not 4 or even 5? Someone who only published in 2 top conferences is obviously not worth anyone's time. But 3, now we're talking.
  - halgir 2y ago
    Most quantitative recruitment criteria are arbitrary to some degree. Unless you rigorously examine every single applicant, you need some heuristics for initial filtering.
    - Over2Chars 2y ago
      So you need some arbitrary filtering to give you breathing room for your objective heuristics? For some reason that seems slightly non-optimal.
  - 2y ago

xanderlewis 2y ago

I'm starting a PhD — essentially from tomorrow. It's a shame to see so much discouragement here, but at this point I'm no longer surprised. I also don't care because if left to my own devices I would do research anyway. In the kindest possible way: screw all of you!

j_bum 2y ago
Good luck with your PhD. Stay focused and enjoy this time, you will have a freedom to explore and study that’s almost unparalleled in post-grad life!
Over2Chars 2y ago
@xanderlewis I don't think anyone's comments are meant for you specifically, nor to discourage you or anyone particularly. If anything, take it all with a "grain of salt" and reflect on whether or not anyone you meet might resemble these comments. Hopefully, not your future self. Good luck in your career.
megaloblasto 2y ago
Most of these people have never been in a PhD program, so take their words with a grain of salt. If you have a good advisor, your passionate about your project, and you got some good funding, you'll have a wonderful time of exploring interesting ideas and becoming a competent researcher. Good luck!
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  So far, I seem to have all three. Let's see how it goes! Thanks.
- liontwist 2y ago
  All that’s true, and that is completely different than what’s advertised in this article.
j_maffe 2y ago
I also started my PhD last week and honestly from my talks with the people there thus far I'm much more optimistic than the general HN view of PhDs. You still have to be realistic however. Best of luck!

hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago

It's more or less that except the scale - the inner circles are far too big and the "ray" of the particular branch too wide. What actually happens is a small dot in the middle with very tiny branches going in various directions, some just a bit wider and longer than others.

worldmerge 2y ago

Is it possible to be a professor without a PhD? I would like to teach at a college level but the PhD path seems so risky to me to take a pay cut for years and you might not get the degree, and not a get a job.

enum 2y ago
In the U.S., in most fields, it is virtually impossible.
- ioblomov 2y ago
  The only exception would be community colleges, which still require at least a masters. At my university, my favorite professor’s title was “senior lecturer” because he only had a bachelors. This was despite being a Times bestselling author. (He taught literature and writing.)
gtmitchell 2y ago
In the US at least, it is entirely possible to teach at a university without a PhD. Community colleges are full of instructors with masters's degrees, and tons of classes offered by major universities are taught by graduate students or adjunct faculty without doctorates. Your job title probably won't be 'professor', but you'll be doing basically the same work as one.
- lapcat 2y ago
  Graduate students teach classes at their own universities as part of their departmental funding. This is only a temporary situation and exists only while they're enrolled. It's not a career path. As a former graduate student myself, I'm actually not aware of any non-PhDs who are adjuct faculty or community college instructors. I'm not claiming that they don't exist anywhere, but given the number of PhDs and the number of available academic jobs, the competition is fierce, and non-PhD candidates are likely to lose out to PhD candidates.
  - 2y ago

0xTJ 2y ago

I'm a bit confused about why the Master's degree is set before "reading papers". I had to do a whole lot of reading (and be at least involved in the writing of) papers in the research of my Master's.

stared 2y ago

The illustrated guide (which I had known during my PhD) focuses on progress—however, niche progress. Yet, PhD students' life experiences are usually not centered around progress but frustration, disillusionment, and depression. If you want to compare it with anything else, it may be like creating pieces of novel art with great effort, with one's identity tied to it. Yet, even in the case of success, it is unlikely to be appreciated by contemporary people. So, I prefer a narrative guide to PhD - "The Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?" by Dave Pritchard, http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html

skalarproduktr 2y ago

Matt has also written a great follow-up, "How to get tenure", see https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/ https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/ Highly relevant for the aspiring researcher, and it describes really well the nonlinearities of (academic) life.

mattmight 2y ago

Original author of the guide here. Wonderful to see these little illustrations still making the rounds. I first published them in 2010! To those in the comments who mentioned you are just starting your own PhD: Good luck to you! And, I hope you, like I once did, find a problem that you can fall in love with for a few years. To those just finished: Congratulations! Don’t forget to keep pushing! To those many years out: You have to keep pushing too, but there can be tremendous value in starting all over again by pushing in a different direction. You have no idea what you may find between the tips of two fields.

skalarproduktr 2y ago
Thank you, Matt! Loved your guide when I started my own PhD in ye olden days, and I've shown it to a lot of people since then.
- mattmight 2y ago
  Happy to hear that! Thank you for sharing it with others. :)
azhenley 2y ago
Your blog really helped me during the early years of my PhD. Thank you!!!
- mattmight 2y ago
  So happy it helped! Thank you for the kind words!
gtmitchell 2y ago
Any advice for PhD dropouts? I spent years and years pushing against that boundary in an obscure corner of my field and it never moved. What little funding I had dried up and I left grad school with a half finished dissertation, no PhD, and giant pile of broken dreams. I'm sure over the years you've known students who have started a PhD and not finished. What (if anything) have you said to them? Do you feel their efforts had any value?

croissants 2y ago

My fairly generic PhD advice, as somebody who did one, graduated a bit early, and is happy about the process and where it's taken me: * Choose your advisor with care. This is not very easy as an applicant looking at professors' websites, but if you are admitted, any good school will probably have an in-person or virtual admitted students day where you can talk to current students out of faculty earshot. Take advantage of these times to ask about your potential advisor. A truly bad advisor will probably produce at least one person who will warn you about them. If you can't do this in person, try to get a quick phone/video chat -- something off-record where they can be honest. I was always happy to do these for my advisor, because I liked him and wanted him to get more good students. Conversely, I know people who were warned off specific advisors during these events, for good reasons. A bit of subjectivity: a good advisor at a decent school is usually better than a bad advisor at a good school. * The financial niceness of doing a PhD in field X seems to correlate pretty well with the current job market value of a masters in field X, at least partially for reasons of leverage -- if you can leave and transition into a cushier job, advisors have to provide a bit more value. Computer science scores highly on this metric. * There is a ton of negativity about PhDs in places like HN. This isn't unjustified: doing a PhD with a bad advisor can be a very bad experience. At the same time, I think "person who had a bad PhD experience" is also "person who writes comments on the internet" with higher probability than "person who had a good PhD experience".

resiros 2y ago

That's a way of looking at it. Another way is looking at it inwardly, as a journey of self. Personally, a PhD for me was being punched in the face every morning (i.e., experiment failed) for years, yet getting up to try again. It's the archetypal hero's journey where you dive into the deepest darkness, discover yourself, and emerge triumphant. At the end, you get a hat.

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scaradim 2y ago

Nice! but... are these graph steps roughly at scale e.g. area of initial blue circle compared to all of human knowledge circle? or the small PhD pimple compared to the blue circle? If not then can someone (original author or someone else) try to review the steps with roughly realistic average scales assuming surface represent knowledge volume and color complexity spectrum from advanced (indigo) to advanced (red)? Any candidate to make another pimple on the outer circle?

jofer 2y ago

My wife rather derisively calls this the "penis pimple model of science". It's a great article and a great set figures, but folks sometimes push it a bit too much, especially in grad school. It has a lot of truth to it and it's been making the rounds for well over a decade. Unfortunately, sometimes it can set folks up to feel bad about themselves if what they do doesn't line up well with whatever is in vogue as the boundary of knowledge that's currently being pushed. There's a _ton_ of value in more pragmatic parts of fields that focus on applications or combining relatively well-know parts of different sub-fields. Those parts of science often don't feel like you're pushing some "boundary". It's more layering on top of, filling in holes, and building up than building "out". Sometimes what you do is to use multiple things that lots of folks already knew, but the people who knew X and the people who knew Y didn't talk to each other, so no one thought about how to combine them. It can also be hard to get papers published because reviewers will consider one part obvious/well-known and the other part irrelevant because they come from one sub-field and not both. It will often feel like you don't belong because your work doesn't look like these figures. Applied and interdisciplinary fields "feel" different. However, this type of integrative work can be among the most valuable parts of modern research. Don't feel like what you do has to fit into the "penis pimple model" of science. There's also nothing wrong with pushing some known boundary of a field, either! Both are valid.

tbrownaw 2y ago
But this isn't a model is science, it's a model of what different kinds of academic credentials mean. Sure there's plenty of ways to contribute to society without publishing academic research, but that's not what a PhD is.
- jofer 2y ago
  Not all PhDs push boundaries of knowledge in quite that way. Often what you do was already known, but no one really figured out how to correctly apply it. Alternatively, it's often combining different things that were already well known, but no one had combined. It's novel work that makes a PhD. Novel work is distinct from pushing the boundary of knowledge. Often what you do doesn't change what "humanity knows" in any way. Both my wife and I have PhDs. Neither of us did things that look like the figures there. It's not a good mental model for what all PhDs mean, though it is a good model for some. I combined fields and reinterpreted a ton of things that had already been done to draw very different fundamental conclusions about what was going on in a particular location. I put out alternative hypotheses for observations that had already been collected. It's not new knowledge at all and I didn't add to what we "know". I just added an additional hypothesis to the set of multiple working hypotheses that will hopefully be tested decades from now. My wife worked on how to actually apply well-known methods in other fields to our field. Her work was half engineering, half field experiments. Lots of folks had been working with fiber optic strain gauges for decades. However, no one was using them to measure in-situ strain in rock masses yet (which has since become common). The application was broadly "known", but actually doing it and demonstrating that is novel.

kkoyung 2y ago

I read this article before starting my PhD. A few months ago, I successfully defended my thesis and completed my PhD. Even though it was just a small contribution, I’m proud to have pushed the boundaries of human knowledge.