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Applying to Ph.D. Programs in Computer Science (2011) [pdf]
- arjunnarayan 13y agoAs far as I can see, the top PhD programs are getting better and better applications for the same number of slots, and the process is becoming far more competitive. There are plenty of students coming in with publications at good venues (maybe not NIPS, SOSP, STOC level). It used to be that students came in without doing research, but that doesn't seem to be the norm any more. I don't know how I got into grad school --- looking at the qualifications the incoming students have these days I don't think I'd make it --- and I only started my PhD 4 years ago. This ratcheting up in qualifications is happening at every level in academia (and not just in CS). I know some grad students whose work and lifestyle is best described as "tenure track professors in the 80s." I know researchers at top labs like MSR who were hired on the strength of a _single_ OSDI publication. I had one as a second year PhD student, and I'm so far off the ball that I don't think I will even be attempting to go on the academic job market when I graduate. At this point I think it's pretty fruitless to apply to do a PhD without having prior research experience, ideally with a publication. I may be getting too jaded and pessimistic though. Consider alternate points of view. On the other hand, if you can get in, it's a pretty amazing life of learning and developing industry relevant skills (if you're smart about it) on the NSF's dime. I know some of y'all are cynical about academia and like to badmouth PhD students as being unhirable and writing crap code, but consider that RTM is a top academic, and is pretty relevant as far as the startup scene is considered.
- ekm2 13y agoAre there any fellowships open to international students?
- arjunnarayan 13y agoAll good PhDs are funded (if it isn't categorically don't go). Typically this is through advisor's grants, which are usually from the NSF. I'm an international student (originally from India) and I'm funded through my advisor's NSF grant (I think. I'm not 100% sure since I don't know the exact details and he also has some additional funding from other sources like DARPA that he could be using). You should take the fact that I don't really know where my funding comes from as a good sign that PhD funding is very stable.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- throwaway1979 13y agoI'm curious what you plan to do after finishing your PhD? Have you considered doing/working at a startup? I assume post-doc is off the table since you are not interested in the tenure track grind.
- arjunnarayan 13y agoI'm not 100% sure. For now I'm concentrating on finishing a serious PhD (my plan is not to quit academia with a pity-PhD consisting of no serious publications). I'm working on a couple projects leading up to publication, and that doesn't leave much time for strategic planning :) But for future plans I would very much like to work on some large scale projects building out large scale infrastructure. I don't have much experience writing production code for large scale distributed systems --- my research has, by necessity, concentrated on prototypes and theoretical innovations. I would be very excited to join a group that rolls out cutting edge systems, such as what Matt Welsh, or Jeff Dean, or Eric Brewer are doing at Google. I'm not sure a consumer focused startup would offer such an opportunity (although I'm willing to be convinced).
- throwaway1979 13y agoHere is some unsolicited advise from an old timer. As a backup, do one of your internships in a dev shop. It can be Google, Amazon, Facebook, whatever. The key thing is ... it has to be non-research. It is far easier to do this kind of exploration as a student than later. Best of luck with your PhD and beyond!
- mtdewcmu 13y ago"...a pity-PhD consisting of no serious publications" ... right... that would probably be the worst of all worlds, considering that the piece of paper doesn't offer any guarantees, so hanging around just to get the diploma would be risky.
- Nate75Sanders 13y agoRTM is a massive outlier who isn't representative of the distribution you're describing.
- arjunnarayan 13y agoMatt Welsh, Eric Brewer, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Mike Dahlin all have PhDs and lead teams that write serious production code at Google. Ion Stoica and Hui Zhang have started technically heavy networking startups. Joe Hellerstein has a new startup (I'm not familiar with the details). You don't hear much about them because they aren't sexy consumer facing startups of the type that HN is obsessed about. They typically focus on unglamorous but technically challenging problems of the kind that require deep expertise.
- timsally 13y agoAdd Tom Leighton (Akamai), Frans Kaashoek (Mazu Networks), Dawson Engler (Coverity), and maybe David Brumley (ForAllSecure) to that list. Profitable startups are not uncommon among professors in top departments.
- _delirium 13y agoSome more, fairly randomly chosen: Peter Norvig (USC->Berkeley->Google), Chris Lattner (Illinois->Apple, LLVM), Daniel J. Bernstein (Illinois, qmail/djbdns), Donald Knuth (Stanford, LaTeX), Hadley Wickham (Rice, ggplot2), the whole PLT Scheme/Racket team, etc.
- thearn4 13y agoPretty good advice, much of it not exclusive to CS alone. In particular the notes about the opportunity cost involved with getting a PhD. I'd add to this: find out with absolute clarity upfront what the terms are for applying as a doctoral student vs. a masters student (with option to matriculate). Often there is an expectation that doctoral students can and will pass qualifying exams within a pretty short period of time (a year perhaps) of being accepted to their program. This was the case in my own program.
- throwaway1979 13y agoI wish the opp cost was made more clear cut in some way. Maybe a rite of passage where you take a picture of a house and burn it or something. These days when an undergrad can pull 6 figures, a PhD is very, very costly.
- Thaxll 13y agoIn Europe a PhD is 3years~ why such a difference?
- arjunnarayan 13y agoEuropean PhD students don't do as much research, or publish as much. They are not competitive with US PhD students for academic jobs in the US. This is not a function of their quality, but a function of how much time they've had. It's also more usual to do a postdoc in Europe for 1-2 years, at which point their publication list and resumé looks about the same as a 5-6 year graduating US PhD student.
- throwaway1979 13y agoTalking to european grad students, it appears they have lives during grad school. People talk about it like a job with fixed hours. The average systems PhD student at a top US or Canadian school lives in the lab.
- arjunnarayan 13y agoYes. This is also a reason why top US PhDs get more done. I suppose I should have been more transparent about this fact.
- pcrh 13y agoI would dispute the "getting more done" claim. One reason whay UK PhDs are shorter is that they typically don't have any classes or rotations. You dive straight into the research.
- arjunnarayan 13y agoThat's an empirical claim. So let's try at an empirical test. Show me European PhD students (current, or recently graduated) who have a publication list as impressive as http://web.mit.edu/ralucap/www/#Publications http://web.mit.edu/ralucap/www/#Publications or http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jduchi/ http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jduchi/ or http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/parno/parno-cv.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/parno/parno-cv.pd... (counting only papers 2010 and before) This is a best vs best test (as opposed to an average vs average test which requires more painful empirical effort), so focus on the top European PhD students. If you have methodological issues with a best vs best test because it doesn't not reflect the average PhD experience, let me know as I cannot think of any realistic reasons why it would be a bad test.
- stokedmartin 13y agoManuel Blum's page on research[1] is also relevant. He was Mor's advisor. [1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mblum/research/pdf/grad.html
- blueblob 13y agoSorry for the aside, this opened for me in pdf.js in firefox (on archlinux) and the font rendered very poorly, but when I downloaded it and looked at it in zathura (vi-like pdf viewer) the font looked fine. Does anybody know what I can do to fix the fonts in pdf.js?
- pcx66 13y agoI am using pdf.js with Firefox 27 Nightly on Ubuntu, and its rendering fine for me.
- mhchitsaz 13y agoIt was a very good article and I agreed with most of it except that people who decide to leave academia after PhD still have learned a lot: self management, self motivation and critical thinking as well as learning how to think are several of them. I would say that thinking of PhD as a wasted time assuming that the person is not pursuing academic career is something I don't agree with.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoIt may be worth noting that in many areas of CS, you can still do research and think deeply about hard problems even if you don't go to grad school. You can read papers on the internet, which are free in some cases, and use your own computer. It will be a lot harder to publish anything, you won't have a faculty adviser to steer you in the right direction, and you won't get to go to conferences. But nothing stops you from doing research anyway, and if you happen to solve some important problem and can prove it, eventually word will get out and people will notice (one would hope).
- chubot 13y agoA big problem is the lack of publication access though. I happen to have most accounts through work (ACM, IEEE, etc.), but if I didn't, I'd have to find other ways to get about half the papers I read. I think the "unschooled" approach is more appealing for practitioners / systems software. BitTorrent and BitCoin both have had papers, though of course that's wasn't their real point, and not their real impact. If you want to prove results, it seems rare to have the motivation outside the academic community. The environment and feedback is important. But I'd be interested in any examples of people who have done this. I recall seeing some examples of professors without Ph.D.'s a few months back on HN. I think anyone who is proving good theoretical results will be quickly offered an academic job, and take it, since they likely won't have another way of supporting themselves.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoYeah... I wasn't so much suggesting that it's a viable path to a career in research as observing that if you missed your chance to do a PhD, you're not cut off for life from the subjective rewards of research that Dr. Harchol-Balter alluded to, like the satisfaction that comes from working on fundamental problems. You'd need more self-motivation. However, when research isn't your real job, there's no pressure, so you can take your time, and produce results or not, as you wish.
- mathattack 13y agoThe real question is "What's the research for?" If it's to advance the state of the art in academia, or to push an academic career, the Phd really is required. (Much of it is the habits and network too) If it's art for art's sake, the Phd is not required. If it's to advance a professional (non-academic) agenda, the Phd isn't required either. In the latter two cases, it can help, but it's an expensive degree when you factor in opportunity cost.
- Vega-Lyra 13y agoI have BS in CS, MBA-FINANCE, neither will provide the real experience in a real hacker world, less will do a Ph.D a total waste of money and a debt that will hunt you for a long time. Time=Money https://www.coursera.org/ https://www.coursera.org/
- patelmiteshb 13y agoThanks for share great doc.