8 ms·

A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)

174 points by vismit2000 7mo ago

setheron 7mo ago
I finished a PhD while working full time with 3 young kids. Feel free to reach out if you've been interested and I can share my experience with you.
- nine_k 7mo ago
  How did you keep the motivation up? (I tried doing a PhD while working full time, and quit the idea after 3 years.)
  - setheron 7mo ago
    The hardest part is near the end for me.. I had a paper rejected and I thought I would have to extend my graduation. When things went smooth (accepted paper) I tried to roll that motivation forward as much as possible.
- moezd 7mo ago
  Interesting. A couple of questions: - How young are the kids? - How do they behave, especially with essentials like eating and sleeping habits? - Could you carve out a morning and/or evening routine for yourself? - How much outside help could you rely on (grandparents nearby, lovely neighbours...)?
  - setheron 7mo ago
    My kids now are 7,5,2. They were obviously younger when I was doing it. 2 years was during COVID so I never really had to travel for classes which really saved time. I did most of the coding and ideation on either paternity leave or holidays. Evenings were often running smaller experiments or eventually endless iteration of a paper. My wife was great and helped me focus usually 8-11pm most nights and some weekends 1-4pm. We don't live nearby any family and friends were not much help.
teiferer 7mo ago
I can imagine that this will be similar to the "Emacs/Vim in the AI age" article - it will just be considered to matter less in the AI age. Why spend 3-5 years of your life with a sometimes frustrating experience to obtain this PhD degree if you have powerful models at your disposal that will just be able to solve everything for you? (Similar to why learn Elisp/VimScript/...) Especially considering the current trajectory, expecting where things will be in 5 or 15 years. It will just feel less and less appealing to get an in-depth education, especially a formal one. Which is quite ironic, considering who wrote the article.
- gwilikz 7mo ago
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- deleted 7mo ago
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- BinRoo 7mo ago
  LLMs fall victim to "garbage in, garbage out." Claude can solve open problems if you know what you're doing, but it can also incorrectly convince you it's right if you don't know what you're doing. A PhD teaches you how to think, how to learn, and how to question the world. That's a vital set of skills no matter what tool exists.
- LPisGood 7mo ago
  It seems your question largely boils down to: “why do anything when AI could do it instead?” I think there are many answers to this, not the least of which is that AI can’t really do it instead.
- gigabyte9592 7mo ago
  Models can solve the problem, but they can't tell you if the problem was worth solving in the first place.
- allreduce 7mo ago
  Doing hard things has consistently made me more generally (not only in the narrow hard thing) competent and comfortable with myself. Why go to the gym if you don't need physical strength? One needs to do something to not degenerate into a miserable state.
chrisaycock 7mo ago
The one piece of advice I give new PhD students is to maintain a list of your references for a bibliography ahead of time. For every paper you read, copy the citation in BibTeX format and write a couple of sentences to remind yourself what the paper was about. Do this for every source, even if it doesn't seem important at the time.
- ifh-hn 7mo ago
  Zotero and AI have this covered now. If there's one thing AI is good at it's summarising crappy formatted papers. Never understood the 2 and 3 column thing. Horrendous way to format something.
  - setopt 7mo ago
    2-column format has narrower columns, which means that your eyes move more vertically than horizontally while reading it. That is considered conducive to “skimming” long texts if you’re a “speed reader”. Do you mean that you’re using AI as a search engine for your local bibliography? I haven’t seen any AI plugins for Zotero.
    - ifh-hn 7mo ago
      I'm severely dyslexic and the columns are a massive hindrance for me, and I also cannot skim read due to this and meares irlen. So my dislike is not universal applicable, just personal experience. On the zotero front there a bunch of AI plugins. But I've not used them. But yes the premise is that your can speak and ask your library questions. Some are set up differently though. Personally I can fire a paper into an llm and get a good idea of the content immediately and then ask questions about it. It's more interactive and allows me to get a better idea of it prior to reading it.
      - somethingsome 7mo ago
        LLMs make too many mistakes when summarizing papers in their current state, I would never trust it to summarize a whole paper at the moment. I only use it on a sentence or paragraph basis, otherwise it misses the point 90% of the time. I would strongly advise against this use for the moment. The important part of reading a paper is not only to extract general rules, but to build your own internal model. Without it you cannot effectively do research. The main interesting points are often in the subtleties of the details deep in the paper. Internal tought that come easily to mind when I read : - 'oh they used that equation, but that could be also be interpreted totally differently, what happens if we change point of view, does it makes sense from this other perspective' - 'I see they claim to achieve better results than sota, but actually, they compared with other methods that are not solving exactly the same problem, what shortcut or changes did they had to do to obtain a fair comparison, is it a fair comparison, can I trust those numbers? ' - 'oh, the authors didn't realize that they solved this other problem, or did they realize but there was a block somewhere preventing it?' - 'I like this trick to achieve that result, but at the same time, it will prevent to solve a whole class of other problems, so their method will not work on those cases' ... Also, notice that a paper IS a summary of multiple months/years of work, and researchers summarize it already to the maximum to stay within the page limit, by summarizing a summary you will always miss many things.
wald3n 7mo ago
Karpathy is an interesting case of PhD gone industry and he mentions this topic in the article. In my field of computational social science it is sadly very taboo to happily leave the academy. Yet, they don’t do much to make it more appealing. My biggest win was to find a group of people outside of my research group that I liked collaborating with. Research is more fun as a team sport.
ifh-hn 7mo ago
I did a bachelor degree part time later in life around work and family life. I'm doing a masters full time around work and family life. My experience with academia so far have put me off further study. I really don't get the research thing, and the whole experience seems like bullshit to me. Out of all my experiences doing these things the best has been on the taught modules, that I enjoyed and I didn't feel were out of date, the worse has been the dissertations where you're doing "research". Think of a project off the top of your head and "research" it. Nonsense.
- belabartok39 7mo ago
  You are right, sir, you should stay away from research. Don't worry, there are others that will handle it.
  - ifh-hn 7mo ago
    Do I detect a hint of condescension? Hard to tell in text sometimes. I'm not sure how else to read your message, so in the event it is a passive aggressive attempt at being patronising I would caveat my original point with the fact I've spent the better part of a decade in higher education and I've done pretty well for myself in terms of marks, so if after all that I'm still not clear on what is meant by academic research or the point in the practice as presented to me during that time it's hardly my fault.
    - elteto 7mo ago
      About the same amount you had in your comment, to be honest.
      - ifh-hn 7mo ago
        I'd love to see where you think I was being passive aggressive and/or condescending... Like I said above it's hard to tell in text but what I read in my original comment is an overtly aggressive overview of my experience in academia. You my have a different experience and that's fine.
luzejian 7mo ago
One angle that's missing from this discussion: the cost asymmetry. The effort to do this well is disproportionate to the effort to do it poorly, which means most implementations in the wild are mediocre. That creates a weird market dynamic where quality becomes the differentiator by default — not because it's hard to build, but because most people stop at 'good enough' too early.
gskm 7mo ago
Loved this article. I'd add a few things I wish someone had told me when I was starting my PhD: 1) Maximize variance, but know when to stop. Karpathy's point is great. Explore early, say yes to different things. But at some point you need to pick a direction and commit. Too much variance and you end up with nothing solid. 2) Consider smaller labs. Big famous groups are tempting, but in a small group of 3-5 people your adviser actually knows your work and gives you real feedback. In large labs you can easily become invisible. 3) Collaborate outside your lab early. Don't wait, reach out to people at other universities working on related problems. Different groups think differently and that's where good ideas come from. 4) Visit other universities. Even a few weeks at another group forces you to explain your work to people with different assumptions. It's one of the most useful things you can do during a PhD. 5)Learn to write good, structured, reproducible and maintainable code. One of the things I regret I didn't, and many working hours were wasted. Good luck to anyone starting out.
Trickery5837 7mo ago
One thing that's not mentioned here: if you don't come from a top university, you have close-to-zero chances to have that kind of experience in your phd. If you're not incredibly picking some exceptionally relevant project soon enough, your career path after the phd will not be exactly the smooth sailing the author describes.
dhruv3006 7mo ago
Good to see this again resurface !
titanomachy 7mo ago
“How to get into a top PhD program: get ~3 famous professors to write letters saying you’re one of the five best students they’ve ever worked with.” I feel like this particular advice applies to a very small subset of people. If I’d had professors telling me that I certainly would have considered doing a PhD!
- mettamage 7mo ago
  Kind of feels a bit like How To Get Rich? Step 1: be rich Step 2: you're now rich
  - bonoboTP 7mo ago
    "How to be a top YouTuber" by MrBeast. "How to be a top athlete" by C. Ronaldo. "How to become a popstar" by Ed Sheeran. You know that such advice will have limited usefulness to most of the aspiring people. Karpathy is an exceptional person, maybe not as much as Ronaldo in football but taking advice from him similarly won't be guaranteed to work. You can't have guarantees in such things. In truth, the more literal but not fully literal thing that happens regarding surviving a PhD is that you try to publish a paper in a top venue but after several rejections you publish in a lower tier one, then you do two more followup in similarly second tier but not terrible venues and you get a "magna cum laude" or perhaps a "cum laude" once you reach 5 years and the prof wants to avoid the embarrassment of not having graduated you. Of course many people don't come into the PhD with such plans, they expect a summa cum laude and papers in top venues and talk invitations and so on, since they've always been a top student so far.
  - amelius 7mo ago
    Draw remainder of owl.
- jl6 7mo ago
  True, but on the other hand, maybe only a very small subset of people should be doing a PhD.
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orthoxerox 7mo ago
Why don't we assign grad students to PhD courses the way NFL draft works? Let directional universities pick first and Ivies (and other prestigious universities) pick last.
- vaylian 7mo ago
  What would the benefit of that procedure be?
  - orthoxerox 7mo ago
    A more equitable distribution of quality among the universities, in the long run.
- gus_massa 7mo ago
  Linked by Gemini: From https://en.as.com/nfl/these-are-the-lowest-paid-players-in-the-nfl-what-is-the-minimum-salary-for-pro-football-players-f202602-n/ https://en.as.com/nfl/these-are-the-lowest-paid-players-in-t... > The minimum salary for the 2025 NFL season was $840,000 Raise the minimum salary of a Ph.D. student to that level and we have a deal. (The pocket salary, not $830,000 self pay to the university and $10,000 for the pocket of the student.) Also, the work in NFL is more standardized, all teams play the same games per week, have a similar amount of training time, ... In a Ph.D. the topic depends a lot of the advisor. It would be like mixing all the sports in the same bag, and for a weird reason the Waterpolo team from Alaska can pick you that are an expert in Tenis.
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stared 7mo ago
These pieces of advice are useful. However, they don't touch the bottleneck: mental health. And no, it is not "like any other demanding job". A PhD hits on two fronts - one is "all or nothing". If you spend years and still haven't submitted your dissertation, it is a career-ending failure. The other is its tie to one's identity. You put sweat, blood, and tears into your research, only to be rejected at a journal or conference because the result is "technically correct but not significant enough". Sure, there are similar parts in other careers - from talking with people, it works a bit similarly in medicine (when it comes to "all or nothing") and art (when it comes to this identity). If people fail, it is mostly because they burn out. If they succeed, it is not unlikely that they will need to heal their burnout wounds anyway. I am sure Karpathy's experience is different. But most people starting their PhDs are not Karpathy. See also "The Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?" http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html Sure you may survive. But even if all goes well, you succeed, there will be a void in you after the quest.
- jwrallie 7mo ago
  The peer review paper requirement puts you in a situation where if your topic of research happen to not be interesting for the reviewers (that you have no control over), you can be a talented student that worked very hard and still fail due to being out of time after multiple successive rejections. Your supervisor may not understand this until it’s too late, and you may not have the ability to judge your adviser's ability to do so until you are committed. The main problem is that you were raised in a school system where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not like that.
  - bonoboTP 7mo ago
    Too many people stay in academia out of inertia and being comfortable with the "school" mode of existence and are afraid of the broad wide world and the decisions involved. They finish their masters and liked the classes and the thesis topic and so they stay. But as you said, a PhD is quite different than all schooling before that. And that's good. A PhD is supposed to signify that you contributed new scientific value as judged by the expert international community, not just your teacher. Of course there are many wrinkles on this story like sloppy knee-jerk reviews etc. But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable. If just showing up and doing what someone else decided for you is enough for a thing, that thing will lose value very soon. Similarly if you make sure almost everyone can do it, it won't have value, but will become a participation trophy. But nothing in real life work like that. School is fake. You don't get a job just by showing up or having a diploma. Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family with you for showing up and fulfilling some list of criteria. Nobody will fund your startup or strike a business deal with your company because you showed up and did some assigned tasks. In almost all aspects of life being proactive and exercising agency will get you much further than the teacher's pet mindset that school instills. And unfortunately rather than selecting for it, the PhD selects against such agency again because it's the safe option and people who are ready for an adventure usually dislike the academic environment. Not all of couse, I obviously don't mean every single person fits this. But in my experience this explains part of the mismatch in expectations and reality for the "I was a good student so a PhD felt natural" people. Not those come into the PhD with a well thought out plan, and knowing exactly why they want to pursue it, the upsides and downsides etc.
nicebumblebee 7mo ago
I discounted the remainder of the piece after reading this: Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure. Want to skip a day and go on a vacation? Sure. All that matters is your final output and no one will force you to clock in from 9am to 5pm. Of course, some advisers might be more or less flexible about it. . . For some programs, this is untrue. Your advisor, your experiments, or your conference deadlines govern your schedule.
- coffee_coffee 7mo ago
  In my part of the world (central Europe), the vast majority of PhD-students is actually employed by the university they aim to obtain the PhD from. So in addition to working on your thesis you most likely have to support other research projects as well as do a lot of teaching. The model of a free PhD student certainly exists, but it is rare.
  - whiplash451 7mo ago
    It's pretty common in ivy-leave US universities (which is what the article is biased towards). There, you only have to TA a bit and you certainly don't work for the uni or the dept.
- bonoboTP 7mo ago
  He is obviously talking about computer science. Yes, I know in biology or medicine you can often only access the experimental devices during set hours and the lab may not be accessible 24/7 etc. But in computer science the schedule is mostly free, except for meetings and teaching duties but those are specific time slots not a regular clock-in clock-out job like a cashier or bus driver.
- analog31 7mo ago
  I'd go further and say it's dangerously untrue. What I advise people is that your results are constantly decaying. Only a rate of progress that exceeds the rate of decay will get you out the door. Decay happens for a number of reasons: * Your records are never good enough to completely replace your memory of what you did. The longer it takes, the more studies, readings, etc., that you will have to repeat. * In physical and biological sciences, equipment breaks down, gets taken away, facilities get moved, etc. This stuff happens at a constant rate, and is a pure time cost. * Technological progress gradually raises the bar for the minimum quality of some results, e.g., in computation. Even "theory" is highly computational these days. There are also risks of career-ending accidents that can be treated as a constant risk per unit time: * Your advisor dies, retires, gets promoted to administration, loses funding, changes jobs, gets embroiled in ethical / legal issues, etc. * Some unexpected new result from another team or industry erases the relevance or novelty of your work. * You get sick, have family crisis, etc. * Burnout Results are the wrong unit of measure. A better KPI is results per unit time. The people who look like they fucked around for 4 years then submitted a brilliant thesis were either working hard all along, or were just brilliant, which I certainly wasn't. My then-fiancee and I were both grad students. We made a pact to meet at 7:00 every morning in the cafe across from the research building for coffee, to force both of us to stay on a work schedule.
olirex99 7mo ago
I am really curious to know how Karpathy would update this survival guide in the 2026. Hope to hear something from him!
nomilk 7mo ago
> You’ll sit exhausted on a beautiful, sunny Saturday scrolling through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries. You will have to throw away 3 months of your work while somehow keeping your mental health intact. Sounds strikingly similar to early-stage startup lifestyle.
jefffoster 7mo ago
I did a PhD in the late 90s. What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing (probably not recommended, but it worked out OK for me). What helped get me through it: 1) Doing something I genuinely enjoyed - I approached the Computer Vision professor who gave me some ideas. I super enjoy writing code, and the idea of processing gigabytes of video to produce answers seemed cool. I treated it as a super difficult programming project. 2) Breaking my leg - Just before starting, I broke my leg badly. And that meant working from home with a weekly visit from the professor with a stack of reading papers. That time spent understanding state of the art was super useful. 3) Funding - At some point, DARPA gave enough money for me not to worry about funding, so I never had to work a job or get distracted. 4) Marriage - The final straight of writing a thesis was tough and I was super lucky to have a supportive wife who pushed me to get-shit-done.
- butILoveLife 7mo ago
  >What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing This is actually how I view academia. "Couldn't get a job" It really lowered the prestige of a PhD for me. Heck, if I think through my PhD friends... none of them were A students. They were all C-tier.
  - bonoboTP 7mo ago
    This varies widely between fields and institutions. Getting a PhD position nowadays in ML or computer vision is much harder. You need to already have publications when you apply and need to have experience specifically in the subfield, give a good talk, an interview, a good motivation letter / research statement, recommendation letters from good internships and multiple PIs you worked with, good grades, etc. It can be different in other fields an in lower tier colleges.
  - otherme123 7mo ago
    As if "A" or "C" defined a person capacity. I know some straight A's that went directly for a repetitive and boring but well paid and stable job. Other stayed in academia and turned top scientists. Academia is a very particular dynamic very difficult to find elsewhere, and some people dig it. You can watch some people finding the same dynamic at Google for example, where they are allowed and encouraged to fiddle around and keep publishing (e.g. the Attention paper, why would Google allow such publication?). Such dynamics are explored in Terence Kealy book "The economic laws of scientific research".
butILoveLife 7mo ago
Its so esoteric. You do what your priest/advisor tells you. You honor the priest. You do the latex ritual. Did it actually do anything? Ah in 8 years someone is going to replicate your study, it wont work, but too late! You got a PhD!
ModernMech 7mo ago
Doesn’t really touch what to do when a new political administration comes in and pulls all your funding or makes your research illegal. This happened to me twice as a grad student now as a researcher funding PhD students.
bee326 7mo ago
I am a bit surprised that this article talks so much about actual PhD stuff than high level guidance. Maybe it has to do with the author's personal background/experience or field. Something I didn't see in the article: Depending on your field, it can be extremely hard to get tenure. Unless you are a genius and are seeing signs you are well on your way to getting professorship and tenure (publishing good and important papers, really good at communication, checking all the other boxes), you'd better consider an off-ramp as early as possible. In some fields, 100 people compete for 1 open positions, and that's rough. Having been involved in such a hiring process, I know it's extremely challenging. I was smart enough to realize I'd never be a good researcher relatively early during my PhD and started preparing for job interviews. Sadly, I see too many people still having unrealistic dreams about being a professor late in their PhD. They even do postdoc and do that for many years until they finally discover they are not hireable. Good news is that they often find an industry job quickly after switching. I could see that clearly -- their research, originality, communication and understanding of the field is just not there, and one doesn't become a professor without being completely in control of the direction of their academic research. But it's hard to tell people "you are just not good enough for this". In most situations, you'd be considered unsupportive. However, in this case, it's the best thing you can say to a struggling PhD/postdoc. (Many professors are completely incapable of advising on students' career. They often find it surprising that a student wants to go into industry. They hold completely incorrect assumptions like a PhD student just goes into a management role as soon as they graduate. Rarely a professor tells you that you should not pursue tenure.)
- cjamsonhn 7mo ago
  >I was smart enough to realize I'd never be a good researcher relatively early during my PhD and started preparing for job interviews What are some things that made you realize that? Im considering going into research and certainly have some doubts
  - bee326 7mo ago
    * Much of that was direct feedback from my advisor -- that I did't understand my research subject thoroughly, I could not explain or describe things very clearly, and even someone outside the field could ask a question which I have trouble responding. * I had difficulty coming up with my own ideas. A good PhD student should develop a good sense of direction halfway through their research PhD, and by the end they should be able to conduct their own research independently. I was nothing like that. * I attended talks from fellow students that were invited to the department and went to conferences. I know what good researchers are like -- they do good work, publish papers relatively early in their PhD, know everything about the field and what are they doing, have confidence, communicate with others well and have great delivery in presentation. -- * This might be the one that is most compelling. You could tell who is going to be a professor and who is not. (As I am typing this, I look up the guy I have in mind. He just got assistant professorship last year. I am not all surprised.) Granted, I am far from a model PhD student. My research is mediocre. But I have seen people who deliver even worse research and have even less chance of ever getting tenure spending more time in academia. So I hope my words can be helpful. All that said, I would say you don't need to self doubt. If you are smart and constantly think about your career, and if you go to conferences, you'll know whether this is for you and what to do.
d_burfoot 7mo ago
Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like taking advice about starting a cult from Joseph Smith. (This is not to say you shouldn't do it. Just get info and advice from a less biased source).
inaros 7mo ago
"Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot." ― Richard P. Feynman
- xtracto 7mo ago
  Or as a good friend told me when I was starting my PhD: "those of us that finish our PhDs are not the most intelligent, but the most stubborn "
  - perfect-blue 7mo ago
    Or lucky! I had a great time during mine because my advisory was amazing. However, my cohort mates, many of whom I'd say are much smarter/intelligent than I, got stuck with terrible mentors.
- tablarasa 7mo ago
  As my friend said of doing a PhD, “you learn more and more about less and less until sooner or later you know nothing at all”
jleyank 7mo ago
If you want to work in the biotech/pharma business, you can be a PhD or you can be a technician. The latter needs to have "a good pair of hands" in the lab to be successful. The former, at least in the 00's, needed lab skills as well, but they tended to acquire a group when they moved into more medchem than synthesis. There's a number of support groups (physical or computational chemistry) that has similar staffing.
perfect-blue 7mo ago
His guide to doing well in undergraduate courses is decent enough that I've sent it around to my students as well. I sometimes have to teach first or second year students and the amount of questions I get about how to study or how to do well is significant. We kind of forget that this is a learned behavior, and everyone learns it at different times in their lives (or not at all).
niemandhier 7mo ago
A PhD at a research focused experimental institution creates a particular kind of human that is absurdly resistant to stress and despair: Ask an x-ray physicist using DESY about the horrors of “Beam Time” or a chemist about crystallising proteins. Most people I know don’t use their actual skills anymore, but all of them shrug off whatever you throw at them at work without blinking.
tablarasa 7mo ago
IMO, speaking from the perspective of an ecology doctorate, while PhDs have much to contribute outside of academia, the training is laser focused on that route, to the detriment of students and funders (which is, generally speaking, society/taxpayers). The reality is more PhDs are minted than exist professorships, yet many advisors wish you to be their academic offspring, not just continuing in research but in their line of research. This dynamic was far more the cause of mental health issues than the work being “hard”, which checks out since there are innumerable other forms of hard and harder work.

174 points by vismit2000 7mo ago

I finished a PhD while working full time with 3 young kids. Feel free to reach out if you've been interested and I can share my experience with you.

nine_k 7mo ago
How did you keep the motivation up? (I tried doing a PhD while working full time, and quit the idea after 3 years.)
- setheron 7mo ago
  The hardest part is near the end for me.. I had a paper rejected and I thought I would have to extend my graduation. When things went smooth (accepted paper) I tried to roll that motivation forward as much as possible.
moezd 7mo ago
Interesting. A couple of questions: - How young are the kids? - How do they behave, especially with essentials like eating and sleeping habits? - Could you carve out a morning and/or evening routine for yourself? - How much outside help could you rely on (grandparents nearby, lovely neighbours...)?
- setheron 7mo ago
  My kids now are 7,5,2. They were obviously younger when I was doing it. 2 years was during COVID so I never really had to travel for classes which really saved time. I did most of the coding and ideation on either paternity leave or holidays. Evenings were often running smaller experiments or eventually endless iteration of a paper. My wife was great and helped me focus usually 8-11pm most nights and some weekends 1-4pm. We don't live nearby any family and friends were not much help.

teiferer 7mo ago

I can imagine that this will be similar to the "Emacs/Vim in the AI age" article - it will just be considered to matter less in the AI age. Why spend 3-5 years of your life with a sometimes frustrating experience to obtain this PhD degree if you have powerful models at your disposal that will just be able to solve everything for you? (Similar to why learn Elisp/VimScript/...) Especially considering the current trajectory, expecting where things will be in 5 or 15 years. It will just feel less and less appealing to get an in-depth education, especially a formal one. Which is quite ironic, considering who wrote the article.

gwilikz 7mo ago
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deleted 7mo ago
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BinRoo 7mo ago
LLMs fall victim to "garbage in, garbage out." Claude can solve open problems if you know what you're doing, but it can also incorrectly convince you it's right if you don't know what you're doing. A PhD teaches you how to think, how to learn, and how to question the world. That's a vital set of skills no matter what tool exists.
LPisGood 7mo ago
It seems your question largely boils down to: “why do anything when AI could do it instead?” I think there are many answers to this, not the least of which is that AI can’t really do it instead.
gigabyte9592 7mo ago
Models can solve the problem, but they can't tell you if the problem was worth solving in the first place.
allreduce 7mo ago
Doing hard things has consistently made me more generally (not only in the narrow hard thing) competent and comfortable with myself. Why go to the gym if you don't need physical strength? One needs to do something to not degenerate into a miserable state.

chrisaycock 7mo ago

The one piece of advice I give new PhD students is to maintain a list of your references for a bibliography ahead of time. For every paper you read, copy the citation in BibTeX format and write a couple of sentences to remind yourself what the paper was about. Do this for every source, even if it doesn't seem important at the time.

ifh-hn 7mo ago
Zotero and AI have this covered now. If there's one thing AI is good at it's summarising crappy formatted papers. Never understood the 2 and 3 column thing. Horrendous way to format something.
- setopt 7mo ago
  2-column format has narrower columns, which means that your eyes move more vertically than horizontally while reading it. That is considered conducive to “skimming” long texts if you’re a “speed reader”. Do you mean that you’re using AI as a search engine for your local bibliography? I haven’t seen any AI plugins for Zotero.
  - ifh-hn 7mo ago
    I'm severely dyslexic and the columns are a massive hindrance for me, and I also cannot skim read due to this and meares irlen. So my dislike is not universal applicable, just personal experience. On the zotero front there a bunch of AI plugins. But I've not used them. But yes the premise is that your can speak and ask your library questions. Some are set up differently though. Personally I can fire a paper into an llm and get a good idea of the content immediately and then ask questions about it. It's more interactive and allows me to get a better idea of it prior to reading it.
    - somethingsome 7mo ago
      LLMs make too many mistakes when summarizing papers in their current state, I would never trust it to summarize a whole paper at the moment. I only use it on a sentence or paragraph basis, otherwise it misses the point 90% of the time. I would strongly advise against this use for the moment. The important part of reading a paper is not only to extract general rules, but to build your own internal model. Without it you cannot effectively do research. The main interesting points are often in the subtleties of the details deep in the paper. Internal tought that come easily to mind when I read : - 'oh they used that equation, but that could be also be interpreted totally differently, what happens if we change point of view, does it makes sense from this other perspective' - 'I see they claim to achieve better results than sota, but actually, they compared with other methods that are not solving exactly the same problem, what shortcut or changes did they had to do to obtain a fair comparison, is it a fair comparison, can I trust those numbers? ' - 'oh, the authors didn't realize that they solved this other problem, or did they realize but there was a block somewhere preventing it?' - 'I like this trick to achieve that result, but at the same time, it will prevent to solve a whole class of other problems, so their method will not work on those cases' ... Also, notice that a paper IS a summary of multiple months/years of work, and researchers summarize it already to the maximum to stay within the page limit, by summarizing a summary you will always miss many things.

wald3n 7mo ago

Karpathy is an interesting case of PhD gone industry and he mentions this topic in the article. In my field of computational social science it is sadly very taboo to happily leave the academy. Yet, they don’t do much to make it more appealing. My biggest win was to find a group of people outside of my research group that I liked collaborating with. Research is more fun as a team sport.

ifh-hn 7mo ago

I did a bachelor degree part time later in life around work and family life. I'm doing a masters full time around work and family life. My experience with academia so far have put me off further study. I really don't get the research thing, and the whole experience seems like bullshit to me. Out of all my experiences doing these things the best has been on the taught modules, that I enjoyed and I didn't feel were out of date, the worse has been the dissertations where you're doing "research". Think of a project off the top of your head and "research" it. Nonsense.

belabartok39 7mo ago
You are right, sir, you should stay away from research. Don't worry, there are others that will handle it.
- ifh-hn 7mo ago
  Do I detect a hint of condescension? Hard to tell in text sometimes. I'm not sure how else to read your message, so in the event it is a passive aggressive attempt at being patronising I would caveat my original point with the fact I've spent the better part of a decade in higher education and I've done pretty well for myself in terms of marks, so if after all that I'm still not clear on what is meant by academic research or the point in the practice as presented to me during that time it's hardly my fault.
  - elteto 7mo ago
    About the same amount you had in your comment, to be honest.
    - ifh-hn 7mo ago
      I'd love to see where you think I was being passive aggressive and/or condescending... Like I said above it's hard to tell in text but what I read in my original comment is an overtly aggressive overview of my experience in academia. You my have a different experience and that's fine.

luzejian 7mo ago

One angle that's missing from this discussion: the cost asymmetry. The effort to do this well is disproportionate to the effort to do it poorly, which means most implementations in the wild are mediocre. That creates a weird market dynamic where quality becomes the differentiator by default — not because it's hard to build, but because most people stop at 'good enough' too early.

gskm 7mo ago

Loved this article. I'd add a few things I wish someone had told me when I was starting my PhD: 1) Maximize variance, but know when to stop. Karpathy's point is great. Explore early, say yes to different things. But at some point you need to pick a direction and commit. Too much variance and you end up with nothing solid. 2) Consider smaller labs. Big famous groups are tempting, but in a small group of 3-5 people your adviser actually knows your work and gives you real feedback. In large labs you can easily become invisible. 3) Collaborate outside your lab early. Don't wait, reach out to people at other universities working on related problems. Different groups think differently and that's where good ideas come from. 4) Visit other universities. Even a few weeks at another group forces you to explain your work to people with different assumptions. It's one of the most useful things you can do during a PhD. 5)Learn to write good, structured, reproducible and maintainable code. One of the things I regret I didn't, and many working hours were wasted. Good luck to anyone starting out.

Trickery5837 7mo ago

One thing that's not mentioned here: if you don't come from a top university, you have close-to-zero chances to have that kind of experience in your phd. If you're not incredibly picking some exceptionally relevant project soon enough, your career path after the phd will not be exactly the smooth sailing the author describes.

dhruv3006 7mo ago

Good to see this again resurface !

titanomachy 7mo ago

“How to get into a top PhD program: get ~3 famous professors to write letters saying you’re one of the five best students they’ve ever worked with.” I feel like this particular advice applies to a very small subset of people. If I’d had professors telling me that I certainly would have considered doing a PhD!

mettamage 7mo ago
Kind of feels a bit like How To Get Rich? Step 1: be rich Step 2: you're now rich
- bonoboTP 7mo ago
  "How to be a top YouTuber" by MrBeast. "How to be a top athlete" by C. Ronaldo. "How to become a popstar" by Ed Sheeran. You know that such advice will have limited usefulness to most of the aspiring people. Karpathy is an exceptional person, maybe not as much as Ronaldo in football but taking advice from him similarly won't be guaranteed to work. You can't have guarantees in such things. In truth, the more literal but not fully literal thing that happens regarding surviving a PhD is that you try to publish a paper in a top venue but after several rejections you publish in a lower tier one, then you do two more followup in similarly second tier but not terrible venues and you get a "magna cum laude" or perhaps a "cum laude" once you reach 5 years and the prof wants to avoid the embarrassment of not having graduated you. Of course many people don't come into the PhD with such plans, they expect a summa cum laude and papers in top venues and talk invitations and so on, since they've always been a top student so far.
- amelius 7mo ago
  Draw remainder of owl.
jl6 7mo ago
True, but on the other hand, maybe only a very small subset of people should be doing a PhD.
- 7mo ago

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orthoxerox 7mo ago

Why don't we assign grad students to PhD courses the way NFL draft works? Let directional universities pick first and Ivies (and other prestigious universities) pick last.

vaylian 7mo ago
What would the benefit of that procedure be?
- orthoxerox 7mo ago
  A more equitable distribution of quality among the universities, in the long run.
gus_massa 7mo ago
Linked by Gemini: From https://en.as.com/nfl/these-are-the-lowest-paid-players-in-the-nfl-what-is-the-minimum-salary-for-pro-football-players-f202602-n/ https://en.as.com/nfl/these-are-the-lowest-paid-players-in-t... > The minimum salary for the 2025 NFL season was $840,000 Raise the minimum salary of a Ph.D. student to that level and we have a deal. (The pocket salary, not $830,000 self pay to the university and $10,000 for the pocket of the student.) Also, the work in NFL is more standardized, all teams play the same games per week, have a similar amount of training time, ... In a Ph.D. the topic depends a lot of the advisor. It would be like mixing all the sports in the same bag, and for a weird reason the Waterpolo team from Alaska can pick you that are an expert in Tenis.

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stared 7mo ago

These pieces of advice are useful. However, they don't touch the bottleneck: mental health. And no, it is not "like any other demanding job". A PhD hits on two fronts - one is "all or nothing". If you spend years and still haven't submitted your dissertation, it is a career-ending failure. The other is its tie to one's identity. You put sweat, blood, and tears into your research, only to be rejected at a journal or conference because the result is "technically correct but not significant enough". Sure, there are similar parts in other careers - from talking with people, it works a bit similarly in medicine (when it comes to "all or nothing") and art (when it comes to this identity). If people fail, it is mostly because they burn out. If they succeed, it is not unlikely that they will need to heal their burnout wounds anyway. I am sure Karpathy's experience is different. But most people starting their PhDs are not Karpathy. See also "The Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?" http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html Sure you may survive. But even if all goes well, you succeed, there will be a void in you after the quest.

jwrallie 7mo ago
The peer review paper requirement puts you in a situation where if your topic of research happen to not be interesting for the reviewers (that you have no control over), you can be a talented student that worked very hard and still fail due to being out of time after multiple successive rejections. Your supervisor may not understand this until it’s too late, and you may not have the ability to judge your adviser's ability to do so until you are committed. The main problem is that you were raised in a school system where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not like that.
- bonoboTP 7mo ago
  Too many people stay in academia out of inertia and being comfortable with the "school" mode of existence and are afraid of the broad wide world and the decisions involved. They finish their masters and liked the classes and the thesis topic and so they stay. But as you said, a PhD is quite different than all schooling before that. And that's good. A PhD is supposed to signify that you contributed new scientific value as judged by the expert international community, not just your teacher. Of course there are many wrinkles on this story like sloppy knee-jerk reviews etc. But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable. If just showing up and doing what someone else decided for you is enough for a thing, that thing will lose value very soon. Similarly if you make sure almost everyone can do it, it won't have value, but will become a participation trophy. But nothing in real life work like that. School is fake. You don't get a job just by showing up or having a diploma. Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family with you for showing up and fulfilling some list of criteria. Nobody will fund your startup or strike a business deal with your company because you showed up and did some assigned tasks. In almost all aspects of life being proactive and exercising agency will get you much further than the teacher's pet mindset that school instills. And unfortunately rather than selecting for it, the PhD selects against such agency again because it's the safe option and people who are ready for an adventure usually dislike the academic environment. Not all of couse, I obviously don't mean every single person fits this. But in my experience this explains part of the mismatch in expectations and reality for the "I was a good student so a PhD felt natural" people. Not those come into the PhD with a well thought out plan, and knowing exactly why they want to pursue it, the upsides and downsides etc.

nicebumblebee 7mo ago

I discounted the remainder of the piece after reading this: Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure. Want to skip a day and go on a vacation? Sure. All that matters is your final output and no one will force you to clock in from 9am to 5pm. Of course, some advisers might be more or less flexible about it. . . For some programs, this is untrue. Your advisor, your experiments, or your conference deadlines govern your schedule.

coffee_coffee 7mo ago
In my part of the world (central Europe), the vast majority of PhD-students is actually employed by the university they aim to obtain the PhD from. So in addition to working on your thesis you most likely have to support other research projects as well as do a lot of teaching. The model of a free PhD student certainly exists, but it is rare.
- whiplash451 7mo ago
  It's pretty common in ivy-leave US universities (which is what the article is biased towards). There, you only have to TA a bit and you certainly don't work for the uni or the dept.
bonoboTP 7mo ago
He is obviously talking about computer science. Yes, I know in biology or medicine you can often only access the experimental devices during set hours and the lab may not be accessible 24/7 etc. But in computer science the schedule is mostly free, except for meetings and teaching duties but those are specific time slots not a regular clock-in clock-out job like a cashier or bus driver.
analog31 7mo ago
I'd go further and say it's dangerously untrue. What I advise people is that your results are constantly decaying. Only a rate of progress that exceeds the rate of decay will get you out the door. Decay happens for a number of reasons: * Your records are never good enough to completely replace your memory of what you did. The longer it takes, the more studies, readings, etc., that you will have to repeat. * In physical and biological sciences, equipment breaks down, gets taken away, facilities get moved, etc. This stuff happens at a constant rate, and is a pure time cost. * Technological progress gradually raises the bar for the minimum quality of some results, e.g., in computation. Even "theory" is highly computational these days. There are also risks of career-ending accidents that can be treated as a constant risk per unit time: * Your advisor dies, retires, gets promoted to administration, loses funding, changes jobs, gets embroiled in ethical / legal issues, etc. * Some unexpected new result from another team or industry erases the relevance or novelty of your work. * You get sick, have family crisis, etc. * Burnout Results are the wrong unit of measure. A better KPI is results per unit time. The people who look like they fucked around for 4 years then submitted a brilliant thesis were either working hard all along, or were just brilliant, which I certainly wasn't. My then-fiancee and I were both grad students. We made a pact to meet at 7:00 every morning in the cafe across from the research building for coffee, to force both of us to stay on a work schedule.

olirex99 7mo ago

I am really curious to know how Karpathy would update this survival guide in the 2026. Hope to hear something from him!

nomilk 7mo ago

> You’ll sit exhausted on a beautiful, sunny Saturday scrolling through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries. You will have to throw away 3 months of your work while somehow keeping your mental health intact. Sounds strikingly similar to early-stage startup lifestyle.

jefffoster 7mo ago

I did a PhD in the late 90s. What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing (probably not recommended, but it worked out OK for me). What helped get me through it: 1) Doing something I genuinely enjoyed - I approached the Computer Vision professor who gave me some ideas. I super enjoy writing code, and the idea of processing gigabytes of video to produce answers seemed cool. I treated it as a super difficult programming project. 2) Breaking my leg - Just before starting, I broke my leg badly. And that meant working from home with a weekly visit from the professor with a stack of reading papers. That time spent understanding state of the art was super useful. 3) Funding - At some point, DARPA gave enough money for me not to worry about funding, so I never had to work a job or get distracted. 4) Marriage - The final straight of writing a thesis was tough and I was super lucky to have a supportive wife who pushed me to get-shit-done.

butILoveLife 7mo ago
>What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing This is actually how I view academia. "Couldn't get a job" It really lowered the prestige of a PhD for me. Heck, if I think through my PhD friends... none of them were A students. They were all C-tier.
- bonoboTP 7mo ago
  This varies widely between fields and institutions. Getting a PhD position nowadays in ML or computer vision is much harder. You need to already have publications when you apply and need to have experience specifically in the subfield, give a good talk, an interview, a good motivation letter / research statement, recommendation letters from good internships and multiple PIs you worked with, good grades, etc. It can be different in other fields an in lower tier colleges.
- otherme123 7mo ago
  As if "A" or "C" defined a person capacity. I know some straight A's that went directly for a repetitive and boring but well paid and stable job. Other stayed in academia and turned top scientists. Academia is a very particular dynamic very difficult to find elsewhere, and some people dig it. You can watch some people finding the same dynamic at Google for example, where they are allowed and encouraged to fiddle around and keep publishing (e.g. the Attention paper, why would Google allow such publication?). Such dynamics are explored in Terence Kealy book "The economic laws of scientific research".

butILoveLife 7mo ago

Its so esoteric. You do what your priest/advisor tells you. You honor the priest. You do the latex ritual. Did it actually do anything? Ah in 8 years someone is going to replicate your study, it wont work, but too late! You got a PhD!

ModernMech 7mo ago

Doesn’t really touch what to do when a new political administration comes in and pulls all your funding or makes your research illegal. This happened to me twice as a grad student now as a researcher funding PhD students.

bee326 7mo ago

I am a bit surprised that this article talks so much about actual PhD stuff than high level guidance. Maybe it has to do with the author's personal background/experience or field. Something I didn't see in the article: Depending on your field, it can be extremely hard to get tenure. Unless you are a genius and are seeing signs you are well on your way to getting professorship and tenure (publishing good and important papers, really good at communication, checking all the other boxes), you'd better consider an off-ramp as early as possible. In some fields, 100 people compete for 1 open positions, and that's rough. Having been involved in such a hiring process, I know it's extremely challenging. I was smart enough to realize I'd never be a good researcher relatively early during my PhD and started preparing for job interviews. Sadly, I see too many people still having unrealistic dreams about being a professor late in their PhD. They even do postdoc and do that for many years until they finally discover they are not hireable. Good news is that they often find an industry job quickly after switching. I could see that clearly -- their research, originality, communication and understanding of the field is just not there, and one doesn't become a professor without being completely in control of the direction of their academic research. But it's hard to tell people "you are just not good enough for this". In most situations, you'd be considered unsupportive. However, in this case, it's the best thing you can say to a struggling PhD/postdoc. (Many professors are completely incapable of advising on students' career. They often find it surprising that a student wants to go into industry. They hold completely incorrect assumptions like a PhD student just goes into a management role as soon as they graduate. Rarely a professor tells you that you should not pursue tenure.)

cjamsonhn 7mo ago
>I was smart enough to realize I'd never be a good researcher relatively early during my PhD and started preparing for job interviews What are some things that made you realize that? Im considering going into research and certainly have some doubts
- bee326 7mo ago
  * Much of that was direct feedback from my advisor -- that I did't understand my research subject thoroughly, I could not explain or describe things very clearly, and even someone outside the field could ask a question which I have trouble responding. * I had difficulty coming up with my own ideas. A good PhD student should develop a good sense of direction halfway through their research PhD, and by the end they should be able to conduct their own research independently. I was nothing like that. * I attended talks from fellow students that were invited to the department and went to conferences. I know what good researchers are like -- they do good work, publish papers relatively early in their PhD, know everything about the field and what are they doing, have confidence, communicate with others well and have great delivery in presentation. -- * This might be the one that is most compelling. You could tell who is going to be a professor and who is not. (As I am typing this, I look up the guy I have in mind. He just got assistant professorship last year. I am not all surprised.) Granted, I am far from a model PhD student. My research is mediocre. But I have seen people who deliver even worse research and have even less chance of ever getting tenure spending more time in academia. So I hope my words can be helpful. All that said, I would say you don't need to self doubt. If you are smart and constantly think about your career, and if you go to conferences, you'll know whether this is for you and what to do.

d_burfoot 7mo ago

Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like taking advice about starting a cult from Joseph Smith. (This is not to say you shouldn't do it. Just get info and advice from a less biased source).

inaros 7mo ago

"Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot." ― Richard P. Feynman

xtracto 7mo ago
Or as a good friend told me when I was starting my PhD: "those of us that finish our PhDs are not the most intelligent, but the most stubborn "
- perfect-blue 7mo ago
  Or lucky! I had a great time during mine because my advisory was amazing. However, my cohort mates, many of whom I'd say are much smarter/intelligent than I, got stuck with terrible mentors.
tablarasa 7mo ago
As my friend said of doing a PhD, “you learn more and more about less and less until sooner or later you know nothing at all”

jleyank 7mo ago

If you want to work in the biotech/pharma business, you can be a PhD or you can be a technician. The latter needs to have "a good pair of hands" in the lab to be successful. The former, at least in the 00's, needed lab skills as well, but they tended to acquire a group when they moved into more medchem than synthesis. There's a number of support groups (physical or computational chemistry) that has similar staffing.

perfect-blue 7mo ago

His guide to doing well in undergraduate courses is decent enough that I've sent it around to my students as well. I sometimes have to teach first or second year students and the amount of questions I get about how to study or how to do well is significant. We kind of forget that this is a learned behavior, and everyone learns it at different times in their lives (or not at all).

niemandhier 7mo ago

A PhD at a research focused experimental institution creates a particular kind of human that is absurdly resistant to stress and despair: Ask an x-ray physicist using DESY about the horrors of “Beam Time” or a chemist about crystallising proteins. Most people I know don’t use their actual skills anymore, but all of them shrug off whatever you throw at them at work without blinking.

tablarasa 7mo ago

IMO, speaking from the perspective of an ecology doctorate, while PhDs have much to contribute outside of academia, the training is laser focused on that route, to the detriment of students and funders (which is, generally speaking, society/taxpayers). The reality is more PhDs are minted than exist professorships, yet many advisors wish you to be their academic offspring, not just continuing in research but in their line of research. This dynamic was far more the cause of mental health issues than the work being “hard”, which checks out since there are innumerable other forms of hard and harder work.