PhDs from the Faculty's Perspective

http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/157012-phds-from-the-facultys-perspective/fulltext

by jnazario • 14 years ago

95 58 14 years ago

cacm.acm.org

    Perhaps the best way to close this column is with something I once heard attributed to Stu Card, a pioneer the field of human-computer interaction: "Grad school will be the best years of your life. Having said that, get out as soon as you can."

Yes, this is indeed the best way to close the column. Wonderful article, thanks for sharing.

jamesrcole• 14 years ago

Except that he doesn't give any explanation of why. Considering that it is an introductory-type article handing out advice, he should have.

ronyeh2• 14 years ago

Why: grad school is a great time to be independent and work on a lot of things that you want. But, after your 6th-7th year in the PhD program, it will quickly flip from being the best time in your life to being one of the worst times of your life, if you can't manage to graduate.

You will question yourself. You will envy your friends who've graduated from the program and are now working as a professor, or for Google or for MSR. You'll look around at all the new grad students and realize you don't know their names.

So the quote is right on. Enjoy your time, but get out as fast as you can. :-)

denzil_correa5• 14 years ago

Why? I will answer it in just one word - money.

polyfractal2• 14 years ago

PhD's from the Faculty's Perspective: cheap slave labor.

drpgq2• 14 years ago

I was actually expecting something more along these lines. Such as pointing out faculty don't necessarily have your best interests at heart.

denzil_correa5• 14 years ago

As pointed out by others, it is not good to paint everyone by the same brush. My advisor has always had the best of intentions in his mind for me. I know of other studens who say something similar as well. I understand that there an be varying experiences but do not let these experiences make you generalize any fraternity.

af3• 14 years ago

+1, totally agreed. Now, what slave is suppose to do in order to make himself/herself any good, not only contribute to master's good? publish: papers, code, articles, notes! the higher quality and larger amount, the better! The goal is to be observed by the next employer (hopefully not a master), but just a team lead ;)

andrewcooke2• 14 years ago

offensive bullshit. my partner is a prof. she works her fucking heart out trying to help her students.

downvote all you like, you ignorant fools (so ready with a cheap piece of cynicism). everyone i know cares deeply about their students. they're like surrogate kids.

EvilTerran2• 14 years ago

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marshallp• 14 years ago

If she's a prof, then she's engaging in the scam that is the current university system. Is she or the other profs you know advocating for the abolition of undergraduate degrees to be replaced by online learning like coursera or udacity. Also, abolishing phds/tenure and replacing with funding their research from kickstarter/indiegogo. Probably not. They might care about their few chosen students (selfishly, for the social company and labor it provides) but they're putting their finger up at the entire rest of the world (which includes potential students that never were, like in africa or india).

mcguire5• 14 years ago

That's actually true, for the most part. I don't know about "surrogate kids", but in my experience, most faculty realize that the strongest effect they're going to have is through the students they graduate. They're strongly motivated to graduate their students and make sure those students do well after they've graduated.

[Edit: I forgot to mention that] One of the best examples of that is the Racket conspiracy: http://racket-lang.org/common-plt-app.html

I have my own favorite version of the joke ("Graduate school: Not just a job, it's an indenture!"), but the idea is pretty offensive and isn't especially relevant to anything I've seen.

[And yes, I'm sure I'm a great disappointment to Mohamed.]

I don't have any experience with fields that require a large laboratory of techs to get anything done, though. If you are in biology, physics, chemistry, or what-not, your mileage may vary.

001sky2• 14 years ago

why would you write this? faculty themselves are working class. they are more akin to accomplices than masterminds of the system. even if you agree with the analogy of the parent comment. this is emotional and poor analysis. serious money now runs the system, and that is handled by the gov't, the trustees, and the president. very few academics are ever 'fully funded' -- they all must suck at the tit, themselves for future nourishment.

polyfractal2• 14 years ago

Woah, chill man. I was in science, I've seen the ugly side of academia. I'm glad your partner is a good PI...the world needs more of them.

That said, there are plenty of PIs who see grads and post-docs as nothing more than a revolving door of cheap labor. My comment may have been snarky and short, but I stand by the statement and don't apologize for it.

As a whole, academic science is a horribly backward place to work. In my field (biology), most grads stick around because of a misplaced sense of honor/duty/guilt.

"If you can't stay in science, you can't hack it! Now go finish that experiment over the weekend."

ucee054• 14 years ago

offensive bullshit.my partner is a prof...you ignorant fools

The ignorant fool is the one who thinks he has the right not to be offended by the truth. Or the one who generalizes from his personal interest.

You want to contest something, do it with actual fact and logic. Not name calling.

I'll wager that all the publish-or-perish, empire-building psychopath profs I've encountered more than average out all the profs you know.

_delirium4• 14 years ago

They're actually not great from that perspective: when you count the portion of tuition that professors are expected to pay (at least at U.S. institutions), PhD students aren't any cheaper than postdocs, and typically less productive / require more hand-holding.

Now postdocs, there's a deal: accomplished researcher who already has several degrees in the field and knows how to write papers and conduct experiments, available for ~$45-50k.

mcguire5• 14 years ago

On the other hand, you don't get to count coup for postdocs.

microtonal• 14 years ago

Well, depends on where you are really. For instance, here in the Netherlands, you barely follow courses (20-25 EC in four years) and the teaching load is small (usually at least one 5 EC course in four years, more if you want).

So, you can dedicate ~80% of your time to research as a paid employee of the university, including ~ 1.5 months paid leave including weekends, holiday money (8% of year income), 13th month (one month extra salary per year) and benefits (retirement fund, unemployment benefit).

I have just finished my thesis, and during the last four years I have felt as welcome and as much part of the staff as any other employee.

arethuza• 14 years ago

I worked as a Research Associate (contract researcher) for a UK university in the 1990s - this paid a decent salary, had minimal teaching requirements (a couple of hours a week) and if your supervisor was decent the topic you were paid to work on was pretty close to your PhD research topic - usually they would find money from some contract to pay you for the 6 months or so required to do nothing but write your thesis.

Most people doing things this way took 4 or 5 years rather than the 3 of full time PhD students - but at least you got a decent salary - not a bad trade off (not to mention the other perks of working on EU funded projects).

[Of course, some supervisors were good some were awful - I heard some horror stories from colleagues].

nachteilig• 14 years ago

Probably the hardest lesson from grad school was learning that my adviser wasn't always right. Learning to push back against what he said made me a much better scientist.

mcguire5• 14 years ago

Make sure you get your colleagues to do the pushing back, too. Once you get out in public, it's far too late. No one is going to point out that you're being an idiot.

"I came away from the presentation feeling quite embarrassed, pretty much the same way you feel after watching Ricky Gervais doing another one of his cringeworthy performances."

Oh, yeah.

omnisci6• 14 years ago

The truth is that there is a lot of variability between PIs and their students. Some see them as lab techs/free labor, others see them as their family. I"m currently sitting in my lab and experiencing both, one PI is really interested in their students/post-docs lives, has parties for their students, and has a close knit group, whereas the other has the polar opposite. Care to guess which lab is more successful?

In regards to the article, yes. It hits all of the points that all grad students should understand. Especially the social part, which tends to be difficult when PhDs are known to be socially awkward. Hence Beer :D.

Re:Delirium, in my experience (Biology) Professors don't pay for their students tuition. That should be covered by the department for 3-5 years.

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

> The truth is that there is a lot of variability between PIs and their students. Some see them as lab techs/free labor, others see them as their family.

Very true.

I'd add: There is also a wide range of management styles of the profs. Some are hands-off (come back and see me in a month), others want hourly updates. The best ones dial their style upon recognizing which way the student works best.

denzil_correa5• 14 years ago

>The best ones dial their style upon recognizing which way the student works best.

So true! Each one of us is different. Personally, I love my freedom and ability to work at my own hours. My advisor always respects that and allows me to do so. He however adopts a different strategy for other students.

denzil_correa5• 14 years ago

I was told most of these points by my advisor when I entered my PhD program. I just forwarded this article as well. :-)

_delirium4• 14 years ago

On the last point, my experience is in CS, but it's worked similarly in other departments where I know PhD students and/or profs. When a professor at the places I've been hires a research assistant on grant money, the grant account is charged stipend + tuition (plus overhead, but that's usually already been taken out up front). It might be a reduced tuition, e.g. at state universities it's common to give an out-of-state tuition waiver so the grant is only charged the in-state graduate tuition rate, even for out-of-state students. But that's often still in the $10-20k range.

If the student isn't grant-funded, then yes, the prof isn't expected to pay them anything: the department will cover their tuition, and they'll work as a TA to earn their stipend. But at R1 universities it's nowadays expected that profs will fund at least a substantial proportion of their PhD students each year on RAships paid out of grant money.

The difference is not always obvious from the student perspective, though: when departments say they guarantee funding for 3 years, they just mean that somehow the student will be funded each year, not that the department will pick up the funding each year. The goal is to get the profs to pay for as much as possible out of grants, with departmental internal funding as a backstop.

omnisci6• 14 years ago

Thanks for that info, I wasn't aware of how PhDs worked in CS.

It sounds very similar to Bio with the exception that the department typically has money for their students coming in(the best schools have training grants from NIH which cover incoming students). Tuition is always covered and is only up to the PI to pay when the student's departmental money runs out, but in practice, the dept. picks it up if the student TAs.

At good schools, students are encouraged (and in some cases, mandated) to submit a grant to NIH which covers their tuition/stipend and provides some travel money for conferences. That grant is really difficult to get, so most 3-6th year students are covered under their PIs grant, or they teach to cover tuition.

mahesh_rm2• 14 years ago

I'm handing over my thesis in less than one month. In fact, most of my friends and colleagues think of grad school as a sort of institutionalized enslavement. On the contrary, I find my PhD years have been a good school of entrepreneurship. Among other things, they taught me how to fail fast and come back stronger, how big institutions work, and how people behave and trust other people in productive relationships and partnerships. As an Italian moving to SF in order to develop my MVP and incorporate my startup, I can truthfully state I would have never been able to figure out this was my path, let alone to find the right attitude, confidence, and determination to follow it, without my PhD years.

beambot• 14 years ago

(Based on "as an Italian") how are you dealing with visa issues? My good grad school friends all had issues with that transition. Many of them are slaving away at MegaCorps until they get green cards.

mahesh_rm2• 14 years ago

Nice question. Exploring the window of possibilities at the moment. There are a bunch of them, some involving enslavement, some not necessarily...

jobu• 14 years ago

From an outside (undergrad) perspective, I always thought that the focus of any faculty or PhD was toward attracting government grants or alumni donations.

omnisci6• 14 years ago

It is, and in order to get the gov grant, you need to have data. That data is typically generated by PhD students and Post-docs.

timr2• 14 years ago

"How do I know when a student is doing really well? It’s when the best thing I can do for them is to just get out of their way."

I wish more "real world" managers believed in this principle.

Academics tend to want their students and post-docs to function independently. They don't have the money to hire "managers" (a.k.a. "people who boss other people around and don't contribute"), and therefore prize autonomy. It's not universal, but it's common. Even on large projects, there tend to be very few formal "managers" on a scientific team. The research organization tends to be flat, and the leaders are the people who produce.

When I first left grad school, I assumed that this sort of autonomy would be a prized commodity in the real world, but instead I've found that most businesses have a natural revulsion to independence. Politics, money and laziness conspire to produce a class of people who want mainly to exercise authority without doing much work. These folks are easily threatened, resort to micro-management to control situations that they don't understand, and generally just try to get in the way of any progress that occurs without their consent. It's a weird pathology of the commercial world, but I don't think I've ever encountered a professional manager who thought that his most effective role was "getting out of the way".

pnathan2• 14 years ago

I've encountered here and there. One of my mentors did when I worked with him.

Also, Michael Lopp, aka rands of rands in repose seems to hold that philosophy.

guylhem• 14 years ago

Maybe that's because management is required for 95% of the employees who don't have a PhD and wouldn't know what to do next (no idea of the big picture) or just play on their worktime (no internal drive)?

timr2• 14 years ago

I think that's a cynical way of looking at it (and I'm a pretty cynical guy). Some people are just lazy, but they're in the minority. I think most smart people will rise to the occasion, if they like their work and feel respected.

Most new grad students drift for a while until they find their internal ass-kicker. The job of the "manager" is to help them find the thing that lets them excel, then get out of the way.

rayiner2• 14 years ago

PhD programs are by and large an utter scam at all levels and in many different ways.

Downvotes away.

fayden• 14 years ago

Why don't you take some time to explain your opinion? Currently, your comment is only noise and completely useless.

rayiner2• 14 years ago

Within universities, PhD's are sources of cheap labor. Depending on how big of a research mill yours happens to be, you'll often get little or uneven support on your research agenda.

In the real world, a PhD has very little utility. If you're smart enough to get a PhD, you're smart enough to do something else that doesn't have 5 years of opportunity cost and a negative expected ROI. You might make important social contributions as a research engineer, but your employer owns them all anyway and you'll never see a dime of the value you add to the economy.

My brother graduated top of his undergraduate class at an Ivy with a BS in physics and two publications. He was leaning towards going into a PhD program, but I told him to do business/consulting/finance recruiting for his last summer in college instead of doing more research, just to see how he liked it. He did that, then went back full time, and has abandoned any plans to do a PhD. He is tremendously happy with the decision.

PhDs from the Faculty's Perspective

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