The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010)

https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

158 106 5 years ago

matt.might.net

Twisol• 5 years ago

Original by Matt Might at https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/.

I'm not sure what this version adds. It mostly seems to copy the original wholesale. And there's more than a little bit of humanity after the copied part that's been left off:

If you zoom in on the boundary of human knowledge in the direction of genetics, there's something just outside humanity's reach:
[image with isolated dot labeled "Knowledge to save my son's life"]
My wife and I chose to start funding these graduate students after we learned that our son has a rare, fatal genetic disorder.

Ryoung27• 5 years ago

I believe it adds a very bad website design and typos.

hemmert• 5 years ago

I totally agree.

myself248• 5 years ago

It would be good to change the URL, this is unquestionably a better source.

tomrod• 5 years ago

Indeed. The Happy Schools source wholesale copied Matt's pictures and thought.

On top of that, introducing people to Matt's work is a pleasure and a joy.

Consider my input as voting for the Matt Might source to replace the HappySchools link.

docflabby2• 5 years ago

Looks like a good case for a DMCA (but we all know that's not what they are for) it's pretty much copy paste rip...

You wouldn't steal a car......

wheybags• 5 years ago

Just clicked through and read his blog post[1] about identifying the genetic disorder his child has. Jesus, that was an emotional read :(

1: https://matt.might.net/articles/my-sons-killer/

DoreenMichele• 5 years ago

I didn't realize it had been so long ago. I went looking for a follow up. The boy died just over a year ago:

https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/03/bertrand-might-matt-migh...

Radim• 5 years ago

As a dad – heart breaking!

…Once the shock of the A-T diagnosis wore off, we started researching. Within days, we were convinced that Bertrand did not have it.
…In Bertrand's case, the cause of long QT turned out to be erythromycin, which had been used to treat his infection in the hospital.

Yet many doctors will actively discourage patients from doing their own research. "Amateurs!" I found that a very familiar part in Matt's otherwise unique story. I've seen two similar stories unfold in my family.

Here in the Czech Republic (ex-communist Eastern Europe), many doctors (esp. older ones) still cultivate that "don't speak to us, mere mortal!" aura and I hate that. I'm sure doctors have their reasons, but as soon as you fall outside their "typical bucket" of symptoms and causes, best do you own due diligence and remain proactive.

I now view doctors more as steam rollers – very efficient, backed by some impressive technology. But once off the beaten path… they're not that far from where you stand, as a HN reader capable of complex abstract thought, reasoning and research synthesis. Too many people put doctors on a pedestal (scientists too BTW, I'm saying as one).

throwawaygh2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure what this version adds.

Links to an opportunity to pay for almost certainly useless immigration advice. They're plagiarizing to get good SEO so that they can prey on young people hoping to immigrate to the USA.

(e: I'm highly supportive of skilled immigration and think there should be more of it... these "services" are a pox.)

chubot• 5 years ago

Yeah I suggest flagging this as blog spam.

andrewclunn• 5 years ago

Were all degrees teaching actual real knowledge, and only those in the academic system able to acquire new knowledge, this would be correct. These "charts" are arrogance posing as humility.

k__• 5 years ago

In that image the master is longer than the bachelor, but I learned so much more in my bachelor than in my master.

learc83• 5 years ago

The bachelors is the whole pink part not just the bump. It looks like more volume overall than the masters. It’s meant to represent the additional breadth.

But yeah masters programs do vary widely. When I was in undergrad there were students doing a CS masters coming from other disciplines. They mostly took classes with us and had to write maybe an extra paper to “make it a 6000 level class” (granted I did take more of the theory heavy CS classes than was required).

In that case their masters was basically equivalent to just the bump from the bachelors.

0xTJ• 5 years ago

This does depend on where you are. I think that in the US master's degrees are different that they are in other many places. It also depends a lot on the master's degree. Some degrees are just more school. Some are a little school with new and innovative research.

spyremeown• 5 years ago

Very true in my experience. In Brazil, for example, the common engineering curriculum is 5 years and requires an internship and a dissertation, which is gonna be basically a master's thesis - in a good university, which is not the norm around these parts, so I'm very biased -.

Many colleagues of mine go to Germany for their master's and get surprised when they realise they already studied most of the material in their undergrad education here.

seahawks78• 5 years ago

This is mostly accurate and true. A PhD degree is basically "knowing absolutely everything about practically nothing".

rosetremiere2• 5 years ago

In my experience (math, small european university), this is the romantic idea of a Ph.D. more than how it ends up being in practice. In my case (and quite a few others around me), a Ph.D. is some research of varying novelty and complexity, far from making you an expert in the subject(s) at hand, but hopefully enough for your committee to think you deserve the title. In the cases I'm talking about, you're far from becoming this idealized "expert in your specific subfield" with new insights and that further researchers will base their work on; it's mostly grabbing whatever small questions you can try to explore and if possible answering them. Still, I think the idealized version does hold for quite a few people, if not all of us.

Ar-Curunir2• 5 years ago

I think it depends on the field, and on factors like quality of advisor, quality of peers, how much teaching you have to do, etc.

In CS, for example, people definitely come out as experts in some niche of their research. Of course, there's a difference between their expertise and that of an experienced professor, but both are quite far from a normal person's knowledge of the field.

morelandjs• 5 years ago

While learning the process that enables you to do that.

BenoitP• 5 years ago

An addition I'd like to make is that this circle is a high dimensional sphere (>300 dimensions IMHO in our current age).

Another one is that an alternate representation of this circle can be made by having theta as the x axis, and r as -y. In this representation, a PhD would sort of look like a T: a horizontal bar for general knowledge, and a vertical one going deep down for the PhD.

That's the T shape Valve refers to in their handbook [1]. Enough generic knowledge to communicate with your peers, and a deep enough specialty to make an impact.

Other areas of specialty would make it look like paint-drip.

I believe such a map can be build for an individual through a series of ML-chosen Questions and Answers (ML because this is the tool to explore that high dimensional space), but I don't have time to try to build it :/

I believe one could also assign economic value to some paint-drip patterns. The biology + deep learning paint drip seems to be very hot right now.

[1] p.46 https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...

blueflow• 5 years ago

Don't take the model itself too seriously - its a helper for our brain to conceptualize a few situations, but like all other models, it has its limits.

techcode• 5 years ago

This totally skipped the fact that some (or most of the world?!?) a while ago started to split applied from theoretical sciences/studies.

So in that circle - they would go into slightly different directions.

cupofcoffee• 5 years ago

People that have spent their entire lives in academia consoling themselves for their wasted years with fancy graphics. :)

chrisseaton3• 5 years ago

Why post something so negative like this?

tonytuttle• 5 years ago

You should really look Matt Might up. He was an entrepreneur while working on his PhD. While he was a CS professor he had a child who had an extremely rare genetic disorder. He pivoted his entire life and focused all of his energy on learning about his son's condition. Since then he has become the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama. Hardly a career of "wasted years" of an "entire life in academia".

shagie• 5 years ago

While he was a CS professor he had a child who had an extremely rare genetic disorder.

From January of this past year:

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210126/Genetic-interacti...

In 2012, four-year-old Bertrand Might became the first-ever patient diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called N-glycanase (NGLY1) deficiency. The discovery of this condition and Bertrand's diagnosis allowed doctors to look for other children with the same genetic defect. Since then, more than 60 additional patients have been found.
The disease affects every system of the body and is characterized by low muscle tone, seizures, developmental delays, and an inability to produce tears.
Sadly, Bertrand passed away in October at the age of 12. Although his life was cut short, his legacy will benefit children around the world. Through their website, NGLY1.org, Bertrand's parents collect and share a wealth of research and family stories to help educate and inform the community. As more patients have been identified, it's become apparent that even though the same gene is deactivated in all of them, their symptoms and severity of disease vary widely.

0xB31B1B• 5 years ago

IMO the PhD description here isn’t really useful for STEM fields and is too simple/idealized. What you learn in a PhD is how to do science. You learn about: experiment design, getting funding in your field, writing papers in your field, using the tools to understand data, learning who are the people in your field you want to work with/for to achieve your personal research goals etc. It’s not “you make a dent in the universe of knowledge”, its “you learn the stuff you need to know to make a dent in the universe of knowledge”. Actually making the dent is ancillary.

localhost3• 5 years ago

I certainly pushed the boundaries of knowledge by a tiny amount during my PhD - that's what publishing is all about. Sure, you're learning how to write the paper, how to conduct the research, how to think about science, etc. but you're also __researching__. Matt gets it exactly right in this description.

I remember many years ago a friend's father commenting on my PhD by saying "isn't it wonderful to be the only person in the world to know about this thing that you're working on?" That's the moment when you have your unusual observation, something that nobody else has seen before (or at least nobody has published before) and it truly is a wonderful feeling. You rely on your advisor to tell you work to look initially, and eventually you get good at finding those places to look yourself.

As Frank Westheimer once said (paraphrased) "Science starts with an unusual observation. When you have an unusual observation, one of two things has happened: you've made a discovery or you've made a mistake.". That's also an important lesson, and one that formed the core of my PhD.

achillesheels6• 5 years ago

Sir or Madam, isn’t the ultimate motivation for the pursuit of scientific knowledge to enlighten humanity with the experience of wisdom? If so, how enlightened has humanity become thanks to your contributions? I ask because your subjective “wonderful feeling” of possible arcanum may be as pointless as, say, a science of coffee tables, to human progress.

I suppose this is the reassurance of being educated in the engineering sciences: the results speak for themselves.

bumby3• 5 years ago

pushed the boundaries of knowledge

I agree this should be the goal, but I’m not sure it’s consistently realized in practice. It seems an awful lot of research is derivative or auto-cited, so I’m not not sure it would fall into the “pushing the boundaries” category.

dahfizz• 5 years ago

Sure, but if you learn all that stuff without actually making a dent, you don't get granted your PhD. All the procedural stuff you learn along the way is necessary, but that's not what the PhD is.

Ar-Curunir2• 5 years ago

You do learn those things, but at the end of the day, you're not going to graduate without having some novel research in your thesis.

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

It's also learning to manage how to live on a criminally low salary. If I were to give advice to my kids, that would be a resounding - don't get a PhD. You can do research in industry while getting paid extremely well and most likely your work won't go waste. The only problem is that industry only hires PhDs for serious research - this needs to be reformed. There should be a possibility of allowing non-PhDs learn the process of research while they're working there.

cycomanic• 5 years ago

Salary/stipends vary significantly with country and research area. I can tell you that in Sweden for example a PhD student earns significantly above median wage and more than a teacher for example. In engineering you earn about on the same level as a masters graduate (slightly below typically).

soumyadeb2• 5 years ago

Mirrors another popular quote.

After bachelors, you feel, you know everything. After masters, you feel, you know nothing. After PhD, you feel, noone knows anything.

giantg22• 5 years ago

I must have skipped the "know everything phase". I've always felt like I know nothing. I have also discovered that no one knows anything (only have an MS, no PhD). Maybe it's just due to the nature tech - even if I know it know it in one tech right now, the tech changes and I dont know it in the other tech.

soumyadeb2• 5 years ago

Well, that's your humility. Most undergrads I have come across (me included) feel top of the world after the bachelors and landing a tech job. The better the job offer, more the feeling of you know everything

kwhitefoot• 5 years ago

What on earth did they study that left them with the impression that they knew everything after a bachelor's degree? I and most people I know were left with the impression that we had merely scratched the surface. I studied applied physics in the 70s if that is relevant.

throwawaygh2• 5 years ago

Blatant plagiarism by a website that's being used as a sales funnel for immigration attorneys. Kinda gross and exploitative. Maybe change the link to https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

nabla9• 5 years ago

Today PhD is just demonstration that you can do research and be understood by other researchers. Maybe 1 in 100 PhD's is meaningful contribution.

Postdoc research is where people truly become experts and expand their knowledge.

dahart4• 5 years ago

Geophysicist David Chapman once told me a story that has stuck with me for life…

There’s a boundary of what you know, and a boundary of what you think you don’t know. Not the limits of all knowledge, but a belief about where that limit is.

When you’re a kid, you already know you don’t know everything, but you see the radius for the rest of it as not that far off, maybe achievable some day.

As you grow and learn and go to college and keep studying, the radius of what you know increases proportionally, accumulating little by little. And the radius of what you start to realize that you don’t know increases faster and faster, not just multiplied by the population of the earth, but also by the dawning realization that we collectively know very little.

The take home message being that your relative size of knowledge, the more you learn, shrinks asymptotically to zero. In a strange way I find this more comforting than believing that graduate school research is at or even pushing the boundary of collective knowledge; the reality is that most advanced degrees aren’t broaching the boundary nor feeding into the collective.

achillesheels6• 5 years ago

Hear hear! The “doctorate” is a blank paper compared to its former grandeur. It’s astonishing to me, for example, how unmotivated so many disciplines which rely upon human biological phenomena, eg the social sciences, do not actually mandate knowing cellular biology, let alone its electromagnetic phenomena (I’m looking at you medical schools!). It’s not like the knowledge is absent - it’s the will power to continue to learn, as opposed to secure a salary, that is absent. This is the largest divergence between aristocratic and proletarian science: the pursuit of knowledge for its very sake.

mrbukkake3• 5 years ago

This comment is pretentious gibberish. What are you actually trying to say? The only concrete critique you seem to be making is that people don't learn "cellular biology" or its "electromagnetic phenomena" at medical school which is just laughably wrong. The second sentence doesn't even make grammatical sense

johan_felisaz• 5 years ago

I'd advice reading the famous article "More is different" by P. W. Anderson. It takes condensed matter physics as a counter example that knowledge is a pyramid, and that e.g. biology is just applied chemistry, which is just applied physics, which is just applied math and so on. I am glad social science people do not need to know quantum physics, nor medecine does group theory ; their fields are dense enough on their own sake ...

MayeulC2• 5 years ago

You're alluding to, without naming it, the "Dunning-Kruger" effect: you need to be knowledgeable enough to determine the complexity of a field. Beginners will often overestimate their ability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

kkylin• 5 years ago

Reminds me of two things that readers of this post may also find interesting:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/dont-prematurel...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/be-sceptical-of...

Tao is specifically speaking to mathematicians, but some of the lessons carry to other fields (and perhaps other areas of life).

dahart4• 5 years ago

No no no!! Oh man, I’m really sad my comment invoked DK, I don’t think this is the same thing at all, and I have a strong dislike of this paper because it’s both misrepresented and almost universally misunderstood. (And the authors are complicit in encouraging this misunderstanding, because the paper made them famous.)

The paper did not show confidence being inversely proportional to knowledge or skill as many people believe. It shows a positive correlation between confidence and skill.

But the paper itself is very hyperbolic and draws invalid conclusions that are unsupported by their own data IMO. You should read the actual paper, it’s enlightening to look at what they actually tested, and compare that to how they wrote about it. They didn’t test high skill tasks. And they didn’t test incompetent people. They tested only Cornell undergrads who were volunteering for extra credit. They didn’t control for this completely skewed population sample in any way.

They also didn’t test people’s estimation of themselves either. Not at all. They asked people to rank themselves in a group of others, without knowledge of the others’ skills. This simply means people were guessing, not that they were overestimating themselves!!

This is a great post explaining what’s most likely happening with DK: regression to the mean. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

jdonaldson• 5 years ago

The curse of dimensionality strikes again!

ad404b8a372f2b9• 5 years ago

I was hoping this would be a guide on how to make that dent because I'm four years in and so far I've got nothing to show for it beside personal growth ... which is nice but you can't put that in a thesis.

orforforof• 5 years ago

That can be really difficult. Having just read the fantastic addendum in the blog post, "HOW TO: Get tenure", I think there is good information in there for finishing a PhD too. My advice is to not be afraid to bring new ideas to the table at this stage; do what your advisor says to do, but also add in your own ideas. In my experience it is normal for a PhD to follow a course of minor progress for 4 years, followed by major success in year 5 once the student hits on a good direction and (more importantly) is able to recognize that for themselves and push forward, while taking on the risk and responsibility that goes with that. Then things start to click into place, your advisor learns to see you as "ready", you start executing as a team, and stuff gets done fast. Maybe this has no relation to what you're struggling with, but just my 2c.

inetsee• 5 years ago

My first job after college was as a laboratory assistant at the university where I'd gotten my degree. My minor was in computer science, so my job was doing computer programming for the professor I'd done my senior thesis with. The plan was to work for a year or two, then start graduate school.

The nice thing about this plan was that I got to see what graduate school was like without actually going to graduate school. After a couple of years I got a job as a programmer at another company (not at another university). I never did go to graduate school.

whatever15• 5 years ago

The Ph.D. is a piece of paper that shows that for 5+ years you were able to consistently push towards a (previously considered) unattainable goal.

It is gruesome, the idea might not work, nobody else can help you because nobody else has tried, nobody cares about the myriad things that you tried and failed.

You will literally become a different person after the phd experience. But trust me, these 2-3 nights over the span of 5+ years, when pieces somehow come together and the goddamn thing works, are really worth the effort.

yodsanklai• 5 years ago

My experience of PhD is more mundane. I didn't discover anything particularly meaningful, or hard, or even useful.

Basically, I read papers until I understood the field well-enough so that I was able to make tiny contributions worth publishing and presenting in conferences. That led to a few papers that I eventually compiled in a thesis.

I certainly got something out of the experience, but I can't say it made me a different person, or that it gives me an advantage of any sort at my current job (software engineer).

apohn• 5 years ago

My experience of PhD is more mundane. I didn't discover anything particularly meaningful, or hard, or even useful.

Agreed. I feel the same about my PhD. I did write a book that I could use to put myself to sleep though :)

downrightmike• 5 years ago

That's the positive sum game. To gain something, a lot of people have to put work in to move us all in inch further. That's progress.

djenendik• 5 years ago

All PhDs are not equal. As mentioned by others in this thread, generalizing probably means fitting to noise.

fwilliams• 5 years ago

I was a software engineer briefly before starting grad school. During that time, I found I didn't have the time to sit down and learn about topics that interested me. I also wanted to be in research-y roles where I could build things that were more experimental and less well understood.

During my PhD, I got to spend time learning, and attending talks/seminars/conferences. Gaining deeper background knowledge in my field as well as learning how to quickly evaluate and explore new ideas gave me the tools to have the type of job I wanted. I'm a research scientist at an industrial lab now and quite enjoy it.

That being said, I agree with the grandparent post that doing a PhD can be a grueling experience. I had to carry the bulk of the work for many of the papers I submitted. If I took a day off, nobody would pick up the slack. Tight deadlines meant the only way to succeed was putting in long hours. My advisors were also spread very thin so it was difficult to get a lot of time with them. There were times when I felt very alone. This was a really stark contrast to how collaborative engineering in industry was and I don't think I ever fully adjusted to it. My current job feels like a happy middle ground. I publish papers alongside other people and we split the work.

N1H1L• 5 years ago

Pretty much. To me all a PhD signifies is that you can read papers quickly, form a workable hypothesis from what you have read and publish a solution to that in a reasonable timeframe.

It's specialized training that's great for some fields, and completely orthogonal to the requirements of many others.

named-user2• 5 years ago

It's not though is it. It's a piece of paper to say for 2 years or so you worked as a researcher employed by the university, at least that's my experience in the UK.

Much better off just going in to industry. People praise PhDs too much. No one at work knows of mine. It's not on my CV either.

What is awful is when someone with a PhD in, say, biology uses this as leverage in a completely unrelated field (data science). Malicious ambiguity...

You're not an authority on something just because you have a PhD, certainly not an authority on everything. This is, damagingly, how many behave... You're barely scratching the surface at that level. It warrants a lifetime of work to get anywhere near the level of respect some put up on them. I guess that speaks volumes to the general level of insight into education by most..

analog312• 5 years ago

Oddly enough, early on when "data science" was becoming a thing, I thought that being a scientist would give me an edge in data science. I no longer believe that.

whatever15• 5 years ago

In UK the PhD is mostly an extended masters degree. In the US it is 5+ years of effort.

Even if you have a masters in the US, the only benefit you get as a PhD student, is having less core courses in the first two semesters of your program.

_jx7j• 5 years ago

a (previously considered) unattainable goal.

I've got a PhD. Personally, I'd say "unrealized" instead of "unattainable." Unattainable makes it seem like a dissertation topic is always some magical effort.

Lots of PhD work is a investigating some mundane area that somebody else hasn't (due to lack of time or interest) investigated yet. I wonder how many dissertations come from a random comment by a professor saying like "Well here is some minor tangential topic I/somebody should look into."

dnautics3• 5 years ago

my PhD was "hey guys all the research that was done in this field is bullshit, because you are using a terrible technique, here is a better technique, look at all the things that it fixes and enables if you don't faff around". People are still using the bullshit technique though, even citing my seminal paper, because it's less of a pain in the ass.

huijzer• 5 years ago

This is exactly my experience as well. Old techniques are easier approved by peer review, I guess so there is little incentive to change?

whatever15• 5 years ago

Better ideas eventually win. Unfortunately there is no guarantee that you will be alive to see your recognition, and that sucks. But cheer up, your name will be there!

gsich• 5 years ago

*Mains

zohch• 5 years ago

Like really, how hard is it to rename a degree, get with the times people, it's 2021.

amelius• 5 years ago

Until some Ph.D. student invents the AI that will make dents everywhere and in rapid succession ...

btrettel• 5 years ago

I'm glad to see that several other commenters here are picking up on the fact that many PhDs don't actually make novel contributions, contrary to the suggestions of the article [0][1][2].

To add my own 2 cents, I think many people with PhDs believe they pushed the boundaries of knowledge, but many actually did not. As dahart indicated, the boundaries of knowledge look different to different people. Given that, one frequently "reinvents the wheel" because they think they're at the boundary, but they are not. There's this idea that science is incremental, but I don't think it is. It's more of a random walk. And given that much (if not most) research is conducted by relatively ignorant people (PhD students) who do not have much experience in their fields, we should expect people to be starting far from the boundary and "pushing" into areas already explored. The advisor is supposed to provide more knowledge, moving people closer to the boundary, but again, I don't see that happening as often as it should. Too frequently I see exploring previously seen territory while thinking it's unexplored or just accepting ideas about previously explored territory that are wrong.

Reinventing the wheel is becoming increasingly likely in my view as the number of published documents increases dramatically, but search technologies, strategies, and habits (most PhDs don't do a comprehensive search or use good search strategies) aren't keeping up.

While I do think I had some actually novel contributions during my PhD, I view myself as more of an "intellectual janitor", cleaning up the mess/technical debt that previous researchers left behind. Unfortunately this sort of work is perceived by many researchers as not research. My own PhD advisor was not a fan of this aspect of my work.

I tried to be aware of the literature far more than most PhD students. Many people seem to be offended when I point out that their "novel" idea isn't actually novel. In my view, novelty should not be required to get a PhD or publish a paper. One should never be offended that their ideas aren't novel. Disappointed, sure, but offended, no. The only way to have high confidence that an idea is novel/pushes the boundaries is to do a comprehensive search, and even then you can't be 100% sure that you're not missing something. Most PhDs spend far too little time on this aspect.

0xB31B1B got it right: A PhD is training. Because PhD students are so inexperienced, they should not be expected to produce novel research or even recognize what novel research looks like. I think the US should greatly decrease the amount of funding available for PhD positions while increasing the amount of funding for permanent research positions. Total researcher headcount would decrease, sure, but a smaller number of more experienced researchers with stable positions would do a better job overall in my view.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139842

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139567

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29139621

Derbasti• 5 years ago

Very true. Regrettably, janitorial work is extremely hard to publish, as I had to find out. Mostly because reproducing other people's work, or comparing methods, is bound to find unfavorable conditions where a method does not work as well as published, or error measures that highlight common problematic behavior. At least in my area of research, such findings were unpopular with reviewers, to say the least. Probably not least because the reviewers tended to be the very people whose work was reproduced.

Which is sad, because this sort of work is well-suited to get PhD students acquainted with a field, and provides real scientific information.

analog312• 5 years ago

Because PhDs are still relatively few and far between, most people have never interacted more than superficially with a small handful of them. And if they happen to meet one who's an asshole or an idiot, that becomes memorable.

What if generalizing about PhDs is impossible? What if that's partly the case because the point of the PhD is to let someone establish their own character as a researcher or scholar? Things that deliberately try to elude generalization, are hard to generalize about. If you took me and my lab-mates in grad school, and followed us through our careers, I doubt that any common theme would emerge.

What if generalization is further complicated by confounding variables? For instance, PhDs are more common in some fields than others. At my workplace, all of the PhDs have degrees in math or the physical sciences, even if they are working as engineers or programmers. There are no engineering or CS PhDs.

Disclosure: Physics PhD

billfruit• 5 years ago

What if one makes an small contribution through independent study? Will that be sufficient to be granted a Phd?

I do hear that some universities offer a PhD by publishing, wherein they grant a degree for already published work.

Perhaps a bit like the film making model whose name presently eludes me, where instead of trying to get a funding from a studio to make a film, the filmmakers make it out of their own resource arrangements, and later try to sell the finished film to studios (perhaps for a profit).

xen0• 5 years ago

In a previous job, I knew a scientist colleague who obtained their PhD in this manner. The number of Universities that allow this is quite small, I believe he said 'two' (in the UK), and he still had to undergo a viva/defense.

dang• 5 years ago

Some past threads:

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13381843 - Jan 2017 (46 comments)

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5385881 - March 2013 (49 comments)

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1588727 - Aug 2010 (42 comments)

Chilicow• 5 years ago

What a cynical message. What a letdown to prospective entrants to the Distinguished Order of Idealistic Discoverers to be told by a gatekeeper, "Psst.. this Order sucks and nobody discovers or accomplishes much."

I was stirred to write a post about the message here and what I believe the message should be. https://telegra.ph/On-Cynicism-11-08

david38• 5 years ago

I have a BS in Computer Science from a pretty good program. I thought it was quite difficult. I’ve met many people with a master’s who did less for their master’s than I did for my BS.

I’ve met people with PhDs who didn’t have to write a dissertation. I’ve met PhDs who have who I wonder with true amazement how any institution granted them a PhD.

It’s absolutely wild what the variation in quality is for the same piece of paper (if you ignore the name of the institution).

klobosi• 5 years ago

Ph.D is all about the certificate, which is a symbol of achievement.

One can simply self-study a particular topic to gain more knowledge and become an expert.

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D. (2010)

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