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>At first I was thinking you are doing an excessive amount of fear mongering but then I read this sentence >"I bet that at least one of your fellow students wil

by moyix 12y ago

>At first I was thinking you are doing an excessive amount of fear mongering but then I read this sentence >"I bet that at least one of your fellow students will wind up in a psychiatric hospital." >I knew two students in my Ph.D. program in math who ended up in a psychiatric ward. Sorry, but this is also anecdotal fear-mongering. I just graduated with a PhD in CS, currently doing a postdoc, and do you know the number of people in my program who ended up in a psychiatric ward? None. So, what does this tell us? Nothing. These are anecdotes. They give you at best a sample size of ~50 people, and a highly biased one at that. I agree that we need to share both positive and negative stories from PhD programs (and honestly, I've seen plenty of both sorts posted to HN – the stories being told are not as uniformly rosy as the GP claims), but maybe we need to supplement these with an actual accounting of the risks and outcomes of a PhD in a given field, rather than ghost stories and fairy tales.

yequalsx 12y ago
If you agree that sharing both positive and negative stories is needed then what is the point of your post? I didn't claim to provide any evidence. I merely stated that I thought the GPs post was overly negative until it hit me that I did indeed know two people who ended up in a psychiatric ward. That is all. There aren't any claims about this being normative or in everyone's experience. EDIT: I stated in my post that I'm ABD and that I did not complete my program so that people would know that possibly my statements nothing more than sour grapes.
swuecho 12y ago
most of cs PhD means a good job and good future. this does not apply to most of other major.
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Most of CS is that Not necessarily a CS PhD
  - jboy55 12y ago
    After your BSc, every degree has a negative impact on your hireability. Every hiring manager has seen a flood of domestic Masters of CS and foreign BSc of low quality. I'd say a hack bootcamp has more weight now than a masters. PhDs are considered 'tainted' by academia.
    - Ar-Curunir 12y ago
      That really depends on what kind of job you are pursuing after your PhD. I don't think most PhD holders in CS would go and become run of the mill software devs, but instead would hold a researchy/freeish position in the company.
      - ehurrell 12y ago
        One of the most difficult things to learn as a CS PhD is that you aren't an engineer, you are a scientist, so you spend your time learning to approach problems in rigorously scientific ways. In some ways it's a career switch. Doing development work after that can be a strange shift.
        raverbashing 12y ago
        "approach problems in rigorously scientific ways" CS is more math than science. Running an algorithm to find out its (asymptotic) running time would be laughed at by most CSs,they would go by calculating big-o
        ehurrell 12y ago
        Having done a CS PhD it very much depends on the field. Yeah you'd be laughed at for running an algorithm to find out run time, but areas like information retrieval tends to involve humans and their reactions enough that experimental design is at the forefront, rather than big-o.
dalke 12y ago
In general, people don't discuss mental health problems openly, so anecdotes about not seeing mental health problems should be weighted less than those that observe problems. Still if you had done a search for '"graduate student" "mental health"' instead of complaining about anecdotes you would have found a few things more substantive: According to http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2014_02_04/caredit.a1400031 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou... : > According to a report from the University of California (UC), nearly half of graduate students said that a mental or emotional problem had interfered with their academic work in the past year. Yet, little is known about the mental health problems that affect graduate students, including those in science. > In one of the few studies on the subject, ... Nearly 40% of graduate students reported feeling hopeless during the previous year, 78.5% said they had felt overwhelmed, 27.2% said they had felt depressed, and 54.5% said they had felt stress over the past year ranging from “more than average” to “tremendous.” > A 2006 report from UC paints a similar picture. About 60% of graduate students said that they felt overwhelmed, exhausted, hopeless, sad, or depressed nearly all the time. One in 10 said they had contemplated suicide in the previous year. More details about that study are at http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2009/02/23/grad-school-fosters-depression/ http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2009/02/23/grad-schoo... : > 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The American Psychological Association, at http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/01/heal.aspx http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/01/heal.aspx , says "87 percent of psychology graduate students reported experiencing anxiety, and 68 percent reported symptoms of depression. Even suicidal thoughts — with a prevalence of 19 percent — were relatively common." To follow up on the suicide issue, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357084 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357084 says graduate students were at greater risk for suicide than undergraduates.
- moyix 12y ago
  It's true that people don't discuss mental health problems openly, and so they're less observable. However, the initial comment was about being committed to a psych ward, which is observable, so I think it's fair to offer anecdata in the opposite direction. You are right that I should have done a search for the relevant data before criticizing the use of anecdotes. Perhaps this should be a rule for online discussions involving anecdotal evidence – the poster should also make an effort to see if there's real evidence out there. Thanks for posting data!

by moyix 12y ago

yequalsx 12y ago

If you agree that sharing both positive and negative stories is needed then what is the point of your post? I didn't claim to provide any evidence. I merely stated that I thought the GPs post was overly negative until it hit me that I did indeed know two people who ended up in a psychiatric ward. That is all. There aren't any claims about this being normative or in everyone's experience. EDIT: I stated in my post that I'm ABD and that I did not complete my program so that people would know that possibly my statements nothing more than sour grapes.

swuecho 12y ago

most of cs PhD means a good job and good future. this does not apply to most of other major.

raverbashing 12y ago
Most of CS is that Not necessarily a CS PhD
- jboy55 12y ago
  After your BSc, every degree has a negative impact on your hireability. Every hiring manager has seen a flood of domestic Masters of CS and foreign BSc of low quality. I'd say a hack bootcamp has more weight now than a masters. PhDs are considered 'tainted' by academia.
  - Ar-Curunir 12y ago
    That really depends on what kind of job you are pursuing after your PhD. I don't think most PhD holders in CS would go and become run of the mill software devs, but instead would hold a researchy/freeish position in the company.
    - ehurrell 12y ago
      One of the most difficult things to learn as a CS PhD is that you aren't an engineer, you are a scientist, so you spend your time learning to approach problems in rigorously scientific ways. In some ways it's a career switch. Doing development work after that can be a strange shift.
      - raverbashing 12y ago
        "approach problems in rigorously scientific ways" CS is more math than science. Running an algorithm to find out its (asymptotic) running time would be laughed at by most CSs,they would go by calculating big-o
        ehurrell 12y ago
        Having done a CS PhD it very much depends on the field. Yeah you'd be laughed at for running an algorithm to find out run time, but areas like information retrieval tends to involve humans and their reactions enough that experimental design is at the forefront, rather than big-o.

dalke 12y ago

In general, people don't discuss mental health problems openly, so anecdotes about not seeing mental health problems should be weighted less than those that observe problems. Still if you had done a search for '"graduate student" "mental health"' instead of complaining about anecdotes you would have found a few things more substantive: According to http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2014_02_04/caredit.a1400031 http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou... : > According to a report from the University of California (UC), nearly half of graduate students said that a mental or emotional problem had interfered with their academic work in the past year. Yet, little is known about the mental health problems that affect graduate students, including those in science. > In one of the few studies on the subject, ... Nearly 40% of graduate students reported feeling hopeless during the previous year, 78.5% said they had felt overwhelmed, 27.2% said they had felt depressed, and 54.5% said they had felt stress over the past year ranging from “more than average” to “tremendous.” > A 2006 report from UC paints a similar picture. About 60% of graduate students said that they felt overwhelmed, exhausted, hopeless, sad, or depressed nearly all the time. One in 10 said they had contemplated suicide in the previous year. More details about that study are at http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2009/02/23/grad-school-fosters-depression/ http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2009/02/23/grad-schoo... : > 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The American Psychological Association, at http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/01/heal.aspx http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/01/heal.aspx , says "87 percent of psychology graduate students reported experiencing anxiety, and 68 percent reported symptoms of depression. Even suicidal thoughts — with a prevalence of 19 percent — were relatively common." To follow up on the suicide issue, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357084 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357084 says graduate students were at greater risk for suicide than undergraduates.

moyix 12y ago
It's true that people don't discuss mental health problems openly, and so they're less observable. However, the initial comment was about being committed to a psych ward, which is observable, so I think it's fair to offer anecdata in the opposite direction. You are right that I should have done a search for the relevant data before criticizing the use of anecdotes. Perhaps this should be a rule for online discussions involving anecdotal evidence – the poster should also make an effort to see if there's real evidence out there. Thanks for posting data!