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The N=1 Guide to Grad School: Advice for Aspiring PhDs
- pond_lilly 13y agotl;dr the shorter advice will be: forget about it.
- batgaijin 13y agoIt's what he's doing now that doesn't mesh with me... doesn't working at Locu feel like a huge step down in terms of how interesting the problems are? I've always been worried about being spoiled with ideal situations and infinite time to read and catch up in CS.
- fixxer 13y ago"infinite time to read" Depending on what you do (and where you do it), the private sector can actually be quite liberating. I find academia stifling.
- batgaijin 13y agoCould you elaborate? I mean I agree about academia being stifling, but I have trouble imagining it easy to find a research/reading sort of job in CS today.
- fixxer 13y agoSure... here is an example (there are others): Finance is in the crapper, but I still know people getting research gigs with hedge funds. In those jobs, you get to do all that chalk talk/intellectual masturbation, but you also get to test ideas in real-time... very cool when they work out.
- _delirium 13y agoI've run into people with great private-sector positions, but they seem to almost all be ex-academics who first established themselves in academia, and then jumped to something high-level and researchy, like a position at Microsoft Research, or a senior position at Google with considerable freedom [1]. For a junior person, academia does have a lot of downsides, not least because of the massive move towards rationalization, metrics-counting, and a focus on how much grant money you bring in. But the junior people I know in the private sector have even less freedom regarding what they spend their day doing, and much less freedom when it comes to formal working conditions, such as choosing to work from home or a coffee shop a few days a week. Is there a way to find positions with research freedom in the private sector without first becoming established in academia? [1] Matt Welsh is a good example of someone who did the senior-academic-to-industry transition. He went into academia, got tenure, got promoted up the ranks through to Full Professor at Harvard, and then left for a senior position at Google with considerable freedom: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/ http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/
- fixxer 13y ago"Is there a way to find positions with research freedom in the private sector without first becoming established in academia?" Define "established"?
- _delirium 13y agoMost relevant to the hypotheticals here, one question is whether you can get a position with research freedom in the private sector without going into academia at all. If you choose industry rather than academia, is it possible? Or do you need to first get that "professor" line on your resume to be able to land those kinds of industry positions?
- scott_s 13y agoI work for IBM Research. While I do not have complete freedom, I feel that my research and development mandate is quite broad within my project. I came straight from grad school. Most people that are hired into IBM Research were not professors, but are coming from grad school or post-docs.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoDidn't they just shutdown Hawthorne, move everyone in software to Yorktown, and lose a lot of people to Google New York in the process? What's left?
- scott_s 13y agoWe moved, yes, but I'm not aware of anyone who left because of the move. I'm actually happier up in Yorktown - it's a better building than Hawthorne.
- zura 13y agoAnyone with a Masters degree (working as a researcher)?
- pserwylo 13y agoI've wrestled with this in the past. As a CS PhD student, I will be working full time as a web developer when I graduate. For me it came down to either (sweeping generalisations): 1) Continuing research on interesting problems, or perhaps working for interesting companies like the Bearau of Meteorology or the CSIRO (the Australian governments industry research organisation). The problems would be intriguing, and you would feel very satisfied with what you have done most days at work. However when you get home, I imagine you would be pretty mentally exhausted, and may not find much time or energy to work on your own projects. or 2) Working for a web dev company, where the problems are (not always, but often) relatively straight forward, and don't take too much mental energy to solve. Sure, building business apps is not the most satisfying job for everybody, but the people are great, the company is great, you get looked after well, etc. The best bit is that when you get home, there is probably more mental energy to work on your own side projects that interest you. I like contributing to Open Source projects, and I also find that after a difficult day at work or uni, I don't have the energy to punch out an hour of coding when I get home. So for me, I'm currently leaning towards option 2.
- aheilbut 13y agoThere are more than those 2 options.
- jdotjdot 13y agoSuch as?
- petercooper 13y ago3) Use your R&D skills to create a useful technology or service in an area that interests you and either license it or found your own company around it. Quite a common route for academic types.
- pserwylo 13y agoI'm familiar with a few people who have done this, and they really enjoy what they do. I wish anyone doing this all the best. However it suffers the same problem as 1). That is, you may not have the energy for other projects. I understand the sentiment of your suggestion, which is: "My side project is also my work", but then you are committed to that project for X amount of time. Whereas with a typical side project that I might play with on the weekend, or with open source contributions, I am free to dabble with whatever interests me on that particular day. It is this freedom and flexibility that I am seeking in my life (partially because I have the attention span of a newt :)
- sbisker 13y agoI work at Locu over here - I was going to tell Adam his writeup made the front page so he could respond (I don't think he was expecting this), but I think he's asleep on the East Coast, so I'll post this before this falls off the front page. Hacker News is not the target audience of our merchant-facing product, but it is certainly the target audience of our technology, such as our local business API at dev.locu.com :) Adam is our Director of Data over at Locu. Our operation is powered by a very unique data structuring system, crucial to which is a heavy crowd computing component. Adam's research was in crowd-powered databases at MIT, and Locu seems to follow from his research nicely. (I briefly worked in his advisor's lab when doing my masters at MIT as well.) As best as I can tell, he is not bored yet. If he is, he is hiding it well. Here's a blog article he's written for us about our crowd computing process: http://blog.locu.com/post/25389032496/the-locu-workflow-a-crawler-a-learner-and-a-crowd http://blog.locu.com/post/25389032496/the-locu-workflow-a-cr... And here's a more general article about our technology: http://blog.locu.com/post/36602971835/7-reasons-to-nominate-locu-for-crunchies-best http://blog.locu.com/post/36602971835/7-reasons-to-nominate-... I'll see if I can't get him on this thread if it's still alive tomorrow morning.
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- thelittlelisper 13y agoThe major problem with Academia (actually the Academia subset where I'm unfortunately stuck in) is entirely different. Here it is very rare that people above grad students and perhaps postdocs do any research at all. They're just managers, except in rare occasions or in the very best places. Naturally, it is extremely difficult that anything good science-wise comes out of this. The structure is frighteningly similar to a corporation, except that corporations usually end up dying if they're inefficient, whereas research institutions only need to produce papers to get funding—and that's an easy game to play. I can hardly think of Professors in say a Math dept. managing their students. Yes, they're advisors, but they also conduct their own research.
- acadien 13y agoYou can often tell how much research a prof does by the size of their group. If they have 2 grad students and no post docs, they're probably active in a lot of research. If they have 45 grad students and 15 post docs, they're probably sitting on committees, writing grants proposals or are travelling to conference for 99% of their time. That's not necessarily a bad thing either, there is plenty of good work done by profs in a management role.
- pcrh 13y agoNot the same subject area, but this is why places such as Janellia Farms [1] restrict the size of their research groups. A PI with more than 6 people under her is considered a manager rather than a researcher. [1] http://www.hhmi.org/janelia/ http://www.hhmi.org/janelia/
- thelittlelisper 13y agoWell, Janellia is actually in my research area, so you pretty much nailed it.
- arctangent 13y agoThis was interesting to read. But I would have liked to have learned a bit more about the "politics" involved in an academic career.
- pseut 13y agoMy experience (not in CS) is that grad students don't really have to worry about politics.
- twelve40 13y agoCan't speak for the entire academic career, but in my CS grad school, for students and post-docs politics did not exist. Maybe it kicks in later when going after tenure or trying to win a proposal over 500 other submissions.
- stevenbedrick 13y agoA properly-run academic department insulates its students as completely as possible from politics. If, as a student, you're having to concern yourself with departmental politics, it's a sign that your advisor isn't doing their job.
- stevenbedrick 13y agoThat said, while your advisor's job is in part to protect you from whatever politics are going on in your department, it is important that you not be completely politically naïve when you finish. So your advisor probably shouldn't try to keep you totally in the dark if there are political shenanigans going on in your department or university... but they should do what it takes to ensure that those shenanigans are "not your problem." In other words, said shenanigans should be educational (possibly even entertaining), but not distracting, stressful, or have any other impact on your primary purpose in life: getting your dissertation out the door.
- mad44 13y agoHere is a guide to grad school from the advisor perspective: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/04/my-advice-to-my-students.html http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2013/04/my-advice-to-my-stu...
- jurassic 13y agoMy N=1 advice for aspiring PhDs is: you probably shouldn't go. Outside of CS, the prospects are shitty for all but the rockstars; might as well save yourself 5-10 years of slave wages by not getting the degree.
- enjo 13y agoNot just CS, there are a handful of disciplines doing well. For instance, there is a huge shortage of Accounting academics these days. They're basically writing their own ticket.
- jdotjdot 13y agoCan you talk more about this? I hear more and more PhDs aren't worth it, which is really sad. What's a guy who wants to continue studying to do?
- jurassic 13y agoA big step for me was realizing that I don't need a university to keep learning and discovering. There's never been a better time to be an independent learner. If there's something you want to learn, then learn it. If you've got something to say, then say it online. And if you're interesting, people will listen and engage with you. A PhD is training to be a professor, so don't do one unless that is your goal and you know how long the odds are and what the job of a professor really is. Plenty of people realize how hard it is to get a tenured faculty job, but I don't hear many people talking about how crappy the job of being a professor is for someone who primarily wants to do research. I routinely got emails as early as 6AM and as late as 1:30AM from the same faculty members while I was a PhD student; it seemed like my rockstar professors, well past middle age, were still working 80+ hour weeks to do their administrative duties, and teaching, and grant writing, and student mentorship, and still have any time left for their own research.