The Illustrated Guide to a PhD

Reading the original post led me to this article on your site: https://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/#full

This is just to say I found it incredibly compelling and moving; I hope mentioning it doesn't make you feel bad.

Any advice for PhD dropouts? I spent years and years pushing against that boundary in an obscure corner of my field and it never moved. What little funding I had dried up and I left grad school with a half finished dissertation, no PhD, and giant pile of broken dreams.

I'm sure over the years you've known students who have started a PhD and not finished. What (if anything) have you said to them? Do you feel their efforts had any value?

>>> but there can be tremendous value in starting all over again by pushing in a different direction.

This rings true for me at this time. Done about 10 years now, never went into academia but direct into industry. Things seem a bit stale, maybe its time to pick and research something new. I've been hesitating on the "going back to school" thing. But quantum does show promise, for curiosity and potential rather than immediate impact.

Your blog really helped me during the early years of my PhD. Thank you!!!

Matt thanks for the encouraging words... enjoyed your compiler class and sad that you didn't end up in my PhD committee... done 3 years now but stuck lol.

When I was interviewed for starting my PhD and asked what I knew about a PhD I referenced this example by name.

Thanks for the articles!

I’ve read through them and they are timeless.

Also the finding cures pivot from CS was inspiring how I could start one problem space and pivot. Definitely a top computer scientist story.

Thank you, Matt! Loved your guide when I started my own PhD in ye olden days, and I've shown it to a lot of people since then.

I’ve seen this with a PhD student publishing several rapid fire papers in MDPI journals. They are repeating well understood physics work done 50 years ago using off the shelf commercial simulation software. They don’t cite any papers older than a decade and claim without irony that the work is “significant” while none of their papers are cited. They will go to events where no one is an expert in the field and win prizes for showing lots of pretty pictures but nothing that isn’t already well understood.

When I, an expert in the field, tell them they need to produce something novel at their research panels I’m told I’m wrong. When I list all the work they are ripping off I’m told it’s somehow different without explanation. When I question the obvious sloppiness in their work (the simulation data showing major artefacts) they blow up at me screaming and shouting.

I’ve never experienced arrogance like this before. It’s shocking. Their supervisors tell me that they are close to firing them but then also celebrate all the publications they are getting.

The mind boggles.

> - people choose venues that maximises their chances of getting published (and pay for publication sometimes, I'm looking at you, APC); > > - little concern given to excellence, rigour, and impact;

It's because the kpis of assessment are built like this. Goodhard's law. I know lots of good researchers who get frustrated with the system and end up giving up and faltering to those 2 points. If within a uni 2 research groups are putting out research at different rate at different quality, the one with higher quality, lower frequency, and higher standard and ambition gets heavily penalized. Seen it in action.

> Perhaps something changes, I am waiting for this to happen for some time now (10y and counting).

What will change is that PhD will become an inherited title. If your parents were/are PhDs, you will ceremoniously be granted the title when coming of age. That title can then be rented out to people or organizations (such as companies) who are required to have a PhD by government regulation for the activity that they are in. You can of course also mortgage this title to a bank or other company that will take care of the process.

Chiming in with my own experience. I was with a new PI that was a charlatan; I am grateful for the experience because I now know how to recognize these sorts of people and avoid them.

"There is no journal of negative results." he would say at our weekly meetings. In order to secure his future, he set ablaze the dreams of 5 PhDs in my lab (all of which took their masters and went into industry; One developed severe OCD). Data was massaged, lies were told to his bosses.

Guess what? He's still a professor there, his lab still publishes dubious, unreproducible research. No recourse was to be had at the university (all of the PhDs went to the head of the department and were told to f*ck off).

Academia is on a death spiral at many schools, and I worry that it's up to the industry to carry the torch of research in the future.

Yes it's horrifying indeed. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that there are many that fall into this rat race and treat it as another type of MSc credential.

Any evidence that this approach works? Are people who do this able to move from the PhD to a solid position afterward that they could not have had without the PhD?

> if left to my own devices I would do research anyway.

Then you're going to have a great time during your PhD, good luck and have fun!

> screw all of you!

"Disregard!" https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-brea...

Most of these people have never been in a PhD program, so take their words with a grain of salt.

If you have a good advisor, your passionate about your project, and you got some good funding, you'll have a wonderful time of exploring interesting ideas and becoming a competent researcher. Good luck!

I did my PhD (mapping and studying the physics of caves in the ice on an antarctic volcano) purely for fun, and it was awesome.

I hope you have a similarly rewarding experience. You will encounter unfair systems and unscrupulous people, and it will be frustrating. The data will be confusing as hell. My only advice is stay true to yourself. Maybe look into some of the new trends that could fix academia -- pre-registration, open access with public comment periods, reproducible code, etc. For inspiration, I cheer for crusaders like Data Colada who are trying to save the academic system.

Disregard them. A lot of people fixate on the 1 in a billion celebrity exceptions like Musk, Thiel, Gates, Dyson, et al and go “look look you don’t need a PhD!”

Yes, a highly motivated college dropout with a computer, a strong financial safety net, and the right social connections can be in the right place at the right time to seize big opportunities. Most people are not in that position. Many high-impact technologies need more than what just a computer can do.

The main thing is to be self aware enough to know the path you’re on, what paths are available to you, and how to make the most of the connections and resources you have available to you. The second you start to get pigeonholed, wrap things up and move on.

I don't think there's any reason to be discouraged. There's a lot of bias against PhDs for various reasons (good and bad).

I have a PhD, got an academic position and then worked in various companies (startups, big tech company). These paths aren't exclusive.

I'm glad I did the PhD.

- it gave me time to work on a variety of interesting topics. In my company, I always feel rushed and don't have time to learn as much as I'd like to.

- I had more than one career. Working only in industry after graduation would have been pretty sad I think. Not that it's bad but it's great to see something different

- I developed some skills (for instance talking in front of audience, write scientific papers) and got to meet a lot of interesting people, and worked in different countries.

I also learned that research wasn't for me but it was worth doing the PhD anyway. If I had to do it again, I would pick my topic more carefully, and go straight to industry rather than pursuing an academic position (which I actually didn't like). Also money wise, even though I'm not materialistic, the pay was too low. Certainly enough to live, but not enough to secure my future and retirement.

I also started my PhD last week and honestly from my talks with the people there thus far I'm much more optimistic than the general HN view of PhDs. You still have to be realistic however. Best of luck!

Please consider that not everyone has the luxury of having (had) a PhD advisor who really cares. There's a wide spectrum, ranging from micromanagers, to people you see once during your PhD, to advisors that are genuinely great (intellectually and as a person) and caring.

I wish you the best of luck for your PhD, a caring and supportive advisor, and great results!

This is the best possible answer to Internet-based negativity! I wish you luck in your PhD :)

For example

https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.10739

Understand that a PhD is an apprenticeship to become a researcher. You are not expected to do career defining work as a PhD student, and indeed that is unlikely.

Your relationship with your advisor is very important. It seems like you already have that sorted out.

Most successful PhDs (in CS) involve tackling a relatlively small and easy project, usually suggested by your advisor, early on, and then expanding and iterating on this. Once you make some progress on a topic you'll easily find more directions to take it.

Working with other people is one of the easiest ways to increase your productivity. All the great groups I saw had a lot of collaboration. Don't fall into the "lone scholar locked in the library" stereotype.

Avoid bad people. Avoid getting stuck in your own head. Realize a PhD is a project like many others. It doesn't define you. You start it, you work consistently on it, you finish it.

Doing a research Masters is usually a waste of time. Doing a taught Masters is a lot of fun, but something quite different to a PhD.

As a professor many years after the PhD my advice is to do the PhD only if you are genuinely excited / cannot stop yourself from doing research. Only then it will outweigh the negatives of difficulties of getting the jobs, somewhat low pay etc. At least from my point of view I always tried to work on what was interesting to me and what I was good at/or it was interesting to learn vs optimising what is more high profile/sexy. I don't think it is a universal advice but at least I always enjoyed what I did

>getting a standard corporate job tends to nullify all impact you could have

It's very strange to me that you think other people would pay you millions or tens of millions of dollars over an average 30- or 40-year career, without you generating at least that amount of value back to the external world as a whole, and probably generating some huge multiple more, and yet all that counts as "no impact" to you. Especially when your comparison point isn't oncology or something, but doing research in PL theory of all things.

But I thank you for giving me the opportunity to get a little riled up on a lazy Sunday morning, it's one of my favorite hobbies. My recommendation to you for "increasing [overall] impact" is to read https://80000hours.org/ and follow their advice, and for "increasing impact [in this niche I really care about]" is simply to be more bounded with your claims.

> Hear a lot of bad things about the academic rat race, pressure to public even at masters/PhD level

Strongly depends on the advisor and your goals. If you want to stay in academia, some amount of publications is required. Your advisor, especially if he pays your salary, may also push you to publish. If both are not an issue, I guess you can even finish without publications.

> I could probably hack out some paper into journals but whether I could have any real impact "on demand" (versus say spontaneously coming up with something) is a big question mark, especially within the deadlines given in the program

Nobody comes up with good ideas on demand. As you progress in your academic career the rate of ideas (theoretically) grows. That's why you need the advisor: he can come up with ideas at rate sufficient for his students

> The main reason being getting a standard corporate job tends to nullify all impact you could have (with a few rare exceptions).

"Impact" is an ambiguous term, so it's quite vague what you mean. I assume "positive impact on the world and knowledge".

While this mantra is indeed motivational, it can set you up for disappointment, both in corporate as well as research/PhD settings, at the moment you realize how many hurdles there can be (toxic colleagues, bureaucracy, ignorance, etc.).

Also, for this interpretation of "impact", a corporate job can be very impactful as well.

Ask yourself this, has there been any useful Programming Language that has come out of PL research/ Academia in the last 20 years? The only example I can think of is Julia, and it only seems to be used by other academics.

If you’re looking to be impactful, you are much better off joining a job and working in your free time, than doing a PhD. A PhD is a program to compete for academic prestige. Grad students want to publish papers that get them noticed at conferences, invited to talks at prestigious universities etc, those are the incentives, always has been in academia. The brightest minds join academia because they care more about prestige than money (as they should, anyone can earn money, few can win a Nobel prize). In a healthy academic system, prestige is linked to real world societal impact. That is still somewhat true in fields like Machine Learning, in some fields it seems to be completely dis-aligned from any real world impact whatsoever (which seems to be PL research). Our academic system unfortunately is a rotten carcass.

You could still, advisor willing, do research that interests you and not care at all whether you get noticed by conferences/ journals, your peers etc. But that takes a certain level of anti-social behavior that very few humans possess and so I say join a job. Plenty of companies are still building programming languages, like Google, Apple etc which are being used by engineers worldwide and if you finagle your way into a job at those teams, you will have a meaningful, impactful job, which is also well paying as a side bonus.

> And after that I could get a job, become a professor, turn my research into a startup etc.

chances of getting professor-ship, tenure, or even a post-doc is close to nil, due to extreme competition and limited seats. academia is the most slowly moving enterprise, some folks in their 80s still around, when young grads kicked out.

getting a job after PhD may also be very hard. you would be very over-qualified, likely huge ego, and very narrow skillset in your domain, that is likely lagging behind industry. managerial (or even just "work at corporate") skills will be lacking. unemployment of PhDs is wildly high, even higher than if you did not do PhD.

turning research into startup may be much harder than you would expect. milking government funding for years (and surviving jungle of academic politics to get its cut) is very different from market outside of it (i.e. venture capital, startups, tech, etc.), at the time you would want to make startup you would have to learn all from scratch, or even un-learn, as many would be detrimental.

then there is toxic academic culture (funding, publishing, power dynamics). and in recent years academia become pit of wild woke left agenda, even more oil on fire.

tbh, if you want to do something special, academia as we have it today is not the best place.

if you still want to do it, guess best strategy is to "do it quick and get out". some smart people I know doing exactly that. doing accelerated PhD asap and getting the hell out of academia. (but then, it depends all on your professor power dynamics. in some places they would not let you graduate unless they wish so.)

One big issue is that industry jobs in some areas increasingly expect academic excellence in the shape of "publishing in top 3 conferences" for example.

I never understood point 1. Your PhD thesis will almost definitely be on a very specific topic, you don't have the time or knowledge to cover multiple distinct fields.

I'm not saying you're wrong but...

Elon Musk skipped his PhD program and did many more things than spending time in school would have allowed him to do. Of course, most people aren't Elon (probably a good thing).

Other than preparing you for a career in academia or some highly regulated environment where education is erected as a barrier to entry, it's hard for me to think of "many more things" that are open to a phd holder than to someone who is not.

You got it backwards. You need to push the boundaries to get a PhD.

Yes, because so many contemporary breakthroughs have come from some guy in his garage.

Thankfully not everyone feels this way, and humanity continues to benefit from the work that PhD holders do.

As AI becomes better the quality of plagiarism should improve.

So there's that.

Yes exactly. If you’re not a plumber are you even really contributing to human progress.

No one’s denigrating those who choose to do a PhD, most of them I am sure are bright, ambitious and thoughtful individuals. Unfortunately the Academic Meat grinder system, successfully grinds them into working 80hr weeks on meaningless projects, meaningless papers that just serve to create jobs for other academics. They could be doing so much more with the faculty they possess, alas they would be more useful as a barista. (I am not picking on humanities PhD system, which is a bigger cesspool than normal, all my criticism is aimed at STEM PhD system. My actual advice would be do a PhD if you judge the lab you are joining as doing great work, lab is everything, don’t join a PhD if it’s not a lab that you’ve vetted or if you didn’t get into that lab.)

> making even greater contributions to humanity.

than writing papers nobody will ever read? yes I am.

A PhD can be a great contribution to your life, and the opportunities it can bring you and your family.

The phony marketing that appeals to young people is that you are advancing the progressive human narrative.

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