I'm starting a PhD — essentially from tomorrow. It's a shame to see so much discouragement here, but at this point I'm no longer surprised. I also don't care because if left to my own devices I would do research anyway.
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.
Yes! Be very aware of your time and opportunity costs. It can be an amazing journey, struggles and all, but make sure to not get stuck long-hauling on something you’re not passionate about.
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!
Great! The view of almost anything hard is gloomy online, probably because the conversation is dominated by those who either wish they'd tried and now have a chip on their shoulder or who made the wrong choice for them and are self-therapising by writing about it. Those who thrived in a PhD programme likely don't have a reason to bang on about their experience in quite so many words.
> You still have to be realistic
I'm expecting it to be very challenging. But that's the point — isn't it?
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!
"PhD Envy" is a real part of office politics outside of academia. Remember that the naysayers are just jockeying for their own status. On the one hand, you can ignore it. On the other, learning to manage it is a good starting point to navigating the social and political side of any career.
Also, this is HN, which revolves around an occupation -- computer programming -- that is unique in terms of having high demand while remaining flexible about how and where people learn their skills. Not all fields are that way.
I got a PhD in physics, in 1993, and have worked in industry since then. There are a couple of "negatives" that I still think are wroth pointing out:
1. PhD programs have very high attrition, and you bear most of the risk on your own shoulders. It's worth going in with eyes open, and knowing the risks. Getting out with your PhD may require some compromises along the way. I won't necessarily call them ethical compromises, but perhaps compromises to the (typically) idealistic views that many students start out with.
2. The little nub of specialized knowledge shown in TFA is your research, not your brain. You can do specialized research without becoming a specialized person if you want. This is a personal choice (academic freedom and all that). My dad, who also had a PhD and a good industry career, always told me to avoid hyper-specialization.
Don't forget to learn how to code, just in case. ;-)
> PhD programs have very high attrition, and you bear most of the risk on your own shoulders.
How many people do you know who “failed to meet the standard”? Zero. If you do the time and work for your professors you will get the reward. There is no risk.
> PhD Envy" is a real part of office politics
The most vocal critics are not bachelor degree holders, but those who did it and had a bad experience.
>>> If you do the time and work for your professors you will get the reward. There is no risk.
1. Your experiment fails to produce a result after a few years of effort (my project, we don't know to this day what went wrong, and I was lucky to find a new project).
2. Loss of funding or institutional support. (A large program at my state's university pulled its support for a process that required regulatory approval, and an entire group of faculty and students all had to leave.)
3. Your advisor quits, changes jobs, gets fired, goes to prison, dies. (Many cases).
4. Your advisor holds your thesis hostage until you publish a certain number of articles (a friend of mine, she sued and won).
5. Mental health issues (high incidence of clinical depression).
6. Personal animosity between members of your committee (another friend).
How these risks instantiate themselves is that you have to start from scratch, often with a completely new research project, and finding one isn't guaranteed by your department. You are almost completely at the mercy of one person -- your advisor. There is virtually no oversight.
I agree, those are all real, especially the advisor and committee.
Most of these are factors in any employment, and I would argue things like chance of losing funding at your job is worse than academic funding threats.
Perhaps a higher likelihood but also a lower cost to the individual. You presumably work for a competitive salary. When you lose funding you presumably jump employers for a comparable position.
In comparison, most PhD students work for a very low salary on the expectation of a payoff after something like 3 to 6 years. Framed that way, being forced to either start over or depart is incredibly costly.
I wouldn't say it's about "failing to meet the standard". Sure, there is no exit exam you can fail, but there are still people dropping out of a PhD.
It could be because you realize you don't really like research - that involves reading and writing a lot of papers, going to conferences not just tinkering. It could be because you had the wrong professor who failed to lead you and left you by yourself. It could be because you gave up at a low point, where most PhD student go through. It could be because after 4 or 5 years your professor keep saying "you're not ready yet" (I've seen that in humanities).
So it's not really a problem of "not being good enough", but it definitely happens.
PhD now is an expensive way to signal that you can persevere longer than the average human.
Unfortunately, that is not always a positive as many real life situations require you to make decisions under extreme paucity of information and reverse or change course at short notice. For such professions and roles it is a liability.
I can see why you might think that; in some cases I'd agree. But there are parts of science — indeed of human knowledge in general — that are very difficult to break into if you don't have the opportunity a PhD affords. These disciplines also require perseverance longer than the average human. Without this system, we're not going to make fundamental progress.
I'm pretty sure that without the research done by people with PhDs and people who don't give up at the first hurdle, we wouldn't be able to be sitting at our keyboards now having this conversation. Of course, it's not for everyone. Maybe it's not for most. But I don't think you should write all of it off as 'signalling'. Some research simply cannot be done without several years of focus, outside of industry or 'the real world'.
I just left academia (after one three-year postdoc). Good riddance. For myself at least. I do think one can thrive in it, if you are a good salesman, don’t mind sucking up to those with money with lies and exaggerations, and don’t mind isolation
I did a PhD and about a decade in postdoc/early-career researcher posts before moving into tech. That was in Computational Mathematics, it was clear that the most successful people in the field were the ones who had found areas where they could publish "Technique X applied to field Y" type papers, so for each new X they could get 10 publications (by way of 10 different PhD students). These people generally could steer the core funding in the discipline their way.
Everyone else basically had to reformulate their research to pretend it was applicable to the government's funding subject de jure. This led to some quite large stretches in definition to achieve "<Main area of research>, and some applications in <funding stream>". This very much felt like it was sucking up to money.
I got out of the academia in the end because it felt like the more senior I got the more time I spent applying for funding and managing the spending and the less time I spent doing research/development. (Also given I was in a UK public sector institute, the pay was shit due to 40 years of below inflation pay rises crippling the institution).
Yeah that’s the thing. Not only do you have to beg for money but actually you make fake papers to do so. My supervisor taught me this early on, every single tiny discovery or synthesis can be made into a paper even if it really doesn’t warrant it
I left because the only path forward here in Germany is to become a professor, aka a life full of admin and sales
'Immune' might be too strong — we are all humans after all. But it's certainly plausible that the magnitude of the effect varies between disciplines.
As the commenter above observes, physics is (supposed to be) falsifiable, so it should be clear when you have a result and when you don't. In the some of the more 'wooly' disciplines, this is not the case. You can write BS and as long as you're able to argue sufficiently eloquently that your particular strain of BS is valid, you win — in some cases, you needn't even supply data or perform experiments. It is in those fields that I assume the forces of politics/fashion/social pressure are strongest.
I agree about the content of the material. But the process of promoting work, securing funding, and getting positions isn’t different.
There is a technical floor to participate, but to potential funders all the physics project proposals from Physics professors sound equally probable. They are going to choose projects based on internal initiatives (fad), name recognition, track record, etc.
Even if that is true, though, I don’t see how it’s that different to any other human activity. In business you have to persuade investors and customers too. Constantly. More so than in academia.
I feel like people are needlessly bitter about all of this stuff. Life isn’t fair; no one ever said it was. And why does anyone expect that you’d be able to get research funding without having to form relationships and make some effort to sway influential people in your direction? Yes, it’s not ‘pure research’, but it’s still part of life. I don’t see how it could be any other way… unless we get AGI as promised and then we’re free to sit on our backsides all day and become philosophers with infinite funding.
It is a part of all organisations, but usually spread across multiple people.
As I mentioned, my wife is a mechanical engineer. "All" she needs to do is do her work, and her manager will be happy. Going out and selling to customers and convincing them they want your product is not her job.
In academia, you can do the work, you can know it's excellent and groundbreaking, as I did for my own work, but unless you go out and sell it, no one cares. You can't just do science, you also have to do sales.
And, to pre-empt a response, yes, it is true that you still have to "sell" the idea that you've done the work properly to your boss in the industry, but it's totally different to in academia, where you will very often be in the situation where no one even knows that you've done any work at all, let alone is expecting something from you. Academia is just a very different working dynamic. Much more independent, much less collaborative, much more responsibility, much less praise
I’m in complete agreement. Sales and politics are even more an integral part of academia and which science becomes relevant is a direct outcome of those social processes.
Could you be more specific about the pressure you felt to 'suck up' and 'lie'? I read this kind of thing often, but it's usually left quite vague. What exactly are people lying about?
Physics (since it's supposed to be rigorous) seems like a less likely area than some to be driven by politics and trends, but I suppose I can imagine that competing research programmes and ideas benefit from a certain amount of marketing and smooth-talking of people with funding rather than relying purely on empirical evidence for their claims.
Physics absolutely is dominated by politics and trends. I was constantly expected to over exaggerate the impacts of my work and its possible applications, on both science in general and wider technology. For example, we used to always say that it had some impact in quantum computing even if it was a total lie, because that makes it way easier to get funding
Physics may be in some sense more falsifiable, but it is absolutely subject to politics and social norms, both in how it lies about itself for money, and literally in which theories are chosen (since we can rarely empirically distinguish between them)
Right. That's a shame, but it seems like that's just life. The idea that it helps to constantly emphasise (or, as you say, exaggerate) the importance of your work if you want to have a career is certainly not restricted to academia. It seems to apply to most industry engineering jobs too — from what I've heard. I guess in that context funding isn't the issue, but being promoted (and, conversely, not being sacked) certainly is.
The nice thing about mathematics is that there probably won't be any failed or non-reproducible experiments in the lab. That doesn't mean that a math PhD is going to be easy, but you should be aware that a lot of people will have a different idea of what you are doing if you don't tell them that your PhD is in math.
Thanks! I hope so. Experiments (to the extent that there are experiments in mathematics, which arguably there very much are) often fail, but once they succeed they're usually fairly bulletproof, and reproducibility is barely even a concept.
From what I've read, graduate study on your side of the pond is a lot better than in the US. I really can't say why. The people I know who got their PhDs in Scotland were, for one thing, really sharp. That helps. For another, it seems there's more of an expectation of a difficult but manageable workload and risk level. Maybe more focus on research and less on politics. Of course, a better safety net, meaning less pressure to drop out if something happens like your spouse or child needs medical care.
I hope you have decent source of secondary income or your family is reasonably well off.
A math PhD might take 6-7 years to complete and I hope that, at the end of it all, you won’t have to come to London to look for C++ or Ocaml jobs at hedge funds or banks.
Because i have worked with many math phds who lost their youth to something that they could not make a living on (research positions at universities are few and the competition is intense) and were writing C++ implementations of derivatives pricing models for a (comfortable) living.
I am not trying to discourage you, just a different perspective.
Well, luckily I'm not doing this in the hope of increasing my earning potential. It's an entirely separate pursuit. I have no doubt that what you're saying is true, but I don't think I'm bothered by it since it's not my goal.
Yes. Which is why I'm trying to push back a bit and say 'hang on... none of this is intrinsic to the PhD system'. Of course it's true that some PhDs — hell, some disciplines — are built to an embarrassing degree on BS and academic schmoozery, but there's no need to tar everyone with the same brush. It seems as though some commenters have difficulty conceiving of intellectual pursuits that don't involve 'data' and 'graphs'.
I'm only very junior, though, so I don't have total confidence that I'm right. But I'm pretty certain I am.
@xanderlewis I don't think anyone's comments are meant for you specifically, nor to discourage you or anyone particularly.
If anything, take it all with a "grain of salt" and reflect on whether or not anyone you meet might resemble these comments. Hopefully, not your future self.
In the kindest possible way: screw all of you!