Your supervisor is key. You have to like them, because they’ll be criticising your work for the next 3-4 years.
This sentence resonates with me particularly. I was encouraged to choose my PhD based on love of topic rather than supervisor. I had multiple topics I enjoyed, but ended up going with a worse supervisor and a topic I thought more interesting than a better supervisor and a slightly less enthralling topic.
After a year, I quit my program.
What I learnt: even though a topic might be slightly less interesting, the people you work with (and in particular, your supervisor) can make you love something more.
(NB: Obviously I wouldn't recommend choosing a topic you have no interest in and/or hate just because you get along with the supervisor!)
How do you know whether your supervisor is a good fit? I have heard this advice, and similar stories, several times. But at the moment (I'm finishing my undergrad), it is not clear how the student is matched to a supervisor. For my dissertation, we were reandomly assigned teachers, and they insisted we cannot change them, etc.
Do you normally have time to chat with your potential supervisor, before deciding if you think it could work?
I found it is a bit odd that you couldn't pick your supervisor. I think in most universities who you want to work with are up to you and the supervisors who wish to accept you. The best advice for finding a good supervisor is to ask current graduate students. Some supervisors are well known to be good supervisors among grad students whereas others are known for being super mean to graduate students.. Current grad students usually know who are good at supervising. Also ask about the style of supervising. Some supervisors are very hand off but you get little support from them. Others can help you a lot but may impose their ideas onto you.
Had exactly that same grad school experience myself.
Lucked out after I left, and i'm doing even cooler stuff research wise in an industrial context! Building my own tech product that really require doing great Research and Dev both!
This is valuable advice. The supervisor is absolutely the most important consideration. It is worth pointing out two things that are different in many U.S. universities.
1) PhDs in the U.S. in CS take between 3-10 years to finish. Less if you are in theory and have a strong set of results off the bat that align around a single area. More if you need to build something with a long cycle time, such as create a new architecture and build a chip.
The first 2-3 years will have classes and feel a little like undergrad. After that it transitions into the free-form research as the post describes. Unlike in the U.K., typically you do not have a hard stop at 4 years, and you can find teaching assistantships or other sources of funding to keep going a year or two at a time.
The good news is that you have more time with relative freedom. The bad news is depending on your advisor, it is easy to drift for years without making much progress.
2) In all the U.S. universities I know, the standard state is for you to be employed by the university as a teaching assistant or a "graduate student researcher." This has impact on intellectual property. For example, the University of California used to ask and may still ask all employees to sign a "Loyalty Oath and Patent Assignment Agreement."
As a PhD dropout (computer science) who knew a lot of other PhD dropouts, my advice to anyone who thinks they want to do a PhD is to first have a very clear idea of why you want to do it. If you don't have that to motivate you, it's not likely that you'll make it through all those years of hard work, frustration, poverty and abuse.
Especially in computer science, there are lots of opportunities to work on cool stuff without spending several years of your life to get a PhD.
There is a large variance in how well departments look after their students. Some will give you a decent stipend and some security of income. Others you will be totally dependent on the good-will of your advisor, or have to fight for teaching assistant positions.
That's if you want to be a good programmer. But I don't see how programming experience is that relevant to solving a lot of the theoretical problems that exist.
I'm really interested in computer architecture. I somehow doubt that there's a company that's going to sit me down and do that straight out of undergrad...
Such a well written article on what doing a PhD is all about. Too bad that people start focus on the whether-PhD-worths-the-time debate or the PhD-earns-so-little-money talk again... That is not even the focus of the article
Hedge your bets by doing a start-up in year 2, which will hopefully be followed by the epiphany that a PhD is a poor metric of intelligence and "permanent sabbatical" has a nice ring to it.
The only point I was trying to make was that execution of an idea in the market is so much more impressive (and gratifying) than credentials. PhDs, like MBAs, get more credit than they deserve.
And my point is that most of those ideas that get executed in the market aren't very impressive. I was a lot more impressed with SRI's machine learning technology, then Summly's execution of that technology in an iPhone app. That's a great case of the "entrepreneur" getting more credit than he deserved when the PhD's were the one that create real value.
"Real value" requires a market, otherwise it is just chalk talk. Summly's execution is far more impressive to me for the simple fact that they actually executed it.
Some other kid would've come along and figured out how to use that technology to sell ads for cheap Chinese crap. Some kid wouldn't have come along and invented the technology in the first place.
Funny that you cite two projects that are still very "academic" (read: not market ready) as triumphs of PhDs. I don't think PhDs are useless and I know Google has some very good ones... but I'll bet dollars to donuts that they were good long before anyone called them "Doctor". For a pre-Google example of awesome projects not dominated by PhDs, consider Skunk Works.
It's true that Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson had "only" masters degrees, but Skunk Works was started back at a time when that was a common terminal degree for research engineers.
There is of course nothing magical about the PhD. What's magical is working within a research institution that has real resources to do real research. You generally don't have access to those resources if you go off on your own.
Again, your basis for making this "magical" statement is questionable. I'm in a research institution with considerable resources and it ain't magic. It is, however, a lot of bureaucracy and poor resource management (and 60% overhead! talk about an innovation killer!).
So true, gave you an upboat. I can seriously try 5 startups in 4 years and I'm a millionaire afterwards, can research on whatever I want and don't have to prove myself to nobody ever again. If you choose to do a PhD, you're still nothing afterwards and you still have to prove yourself to everybody, uargh...
Also, when I talk to PhDs, they seem like little kids who don't have an idea of anything in comparison to startup founders. --> Do a startup
Startup founders are usually discussing consumer products which are by neccessity easy to comprehend. Research students usually delve into issues of high complexity for the task of progressing the state of the art. They don't often have to communicate the importance of their work to people like you.
Yeah easy to comprehend in hindsight, obviously. Sorry didn't want to hate against PhD students, but I don't like the institution of a PhD. Most PhD thesises I have seen are just a waste of time of the PhD students. Less in science PhDs, more so in social studies, business...
> Most PhD thesises I have seen are just a waste of time of the PhD students
I'm curious why you feel qualified to judge the quality of PhD theses, or whether they were worth the authors' time. There's obviously a gradient in quality, but your post is overly dismissive.
Please see this article, which was here on hackernews and which gives you a bit more insight into my point of view "Dear brilliant students. Please consider not doing a PhD." http://liv.dreamwidth.org/389934.html
well there's 50,000 startups on Angellist right now. Approx. 5,000 of them are funded so that their founders are millionaires. Here's your answer ;) And if your startup is not on Angellist, you haven't tried really.
most importantly, have the ability to focus on your paper while same-age/younger folks around you are earning way better salary and banging much prettier girls.
I am a girl. I would like to date a hard working and knowledgeable PhD guy like that rather than some small minded people who work in some companies just for money. People who do PhD are often curious people who are very passionate about learning. That alone I found very attractive.
Hark! Unfortunately girls are just as shallow as guys, for the most part. Most want to date the cool guy, who cares if he is a looser in hindsight. Guys are just as shallow, to be fair.
No they are not, but they sure are important. Anybody who says otherwise is lying or being naive. We all want to find a mate, is in our genes. Those that profess not to want sex are either lying or are sick.
This sentence resonates with me particularly. I was encouraged to choose my PhD based on love of topic rather than supervisor. I had multiple topics I enjoyed, but ended up going with a worse supervisor and a topic I thought more interesting than a better supervisor and a slightly less enthralling topic.
After a year, I quit my program.
What I learnt: even though a topic might be slightly less interesting, the people you work with (and in particular, your supervisor) can make you love something more.
(NB: Obviously I wouldn't recommend choosing a topic you have no interest in and/or hate just because you get along with the supervisor!)