Ask YC: Should you go to graduate school?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64147

by cowmoo • 19 years ago

2 2 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I am currently a college CS senior. One of the biggest bind I am going through right now, is deciding whether I should go to graduate school for computer science. Like most people here, I am very much interested in applying CS to exciting and important problems in the everyday world. It would seem like then, I should just start heading out to either Cambridge/Seattle/The Valley.

The thing is after having worked at various tech companies, both small and Fortune 500, I realized that companies don't really push you to do research or learn on your own; it's all about "bringing yesterday's technology one step closer to today" and dumbed-down powerpoint presentations to the pointy-haired boss.

As for joining or founding a Web start-up, I have tried to launch a few sites with my college friends and honestly, I have come to a conclusion that copying-and-pasting php, playing with photoshop and dreamweaver isn't cutting-edge CS either; Web startups, IMHO, has become more about designs, social networking and hype.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to sit in a closet office in the ivory tower, writing proofs about lambda calculus. But there's just this one paradox: I happen to see all of the new exciting area's in CS: Bioinformatics, data-mining of online community intelligence, computational finance all have graduate school as a barrier of entry; and yet it is the college/grad school dropouts (see every successful software/web company founder) that made it out of the ivory tower to make an actual difference.

So is there a third way out of this lesser of three evils, career IT corporate ladder, trendy style-over-substance web start-up's, academia ivory tower? Any ideas would be appreciated.

P.S I tend to use unnecessary adjectives for dramatic effect, I actually think anyone who is involved in IT/Web/CS is a great person and I actually don't mean to offend anyone's professional or academic background.

npk• 19 years ago

The grad school choice was easy for me, I was 100% sure I wanted to be an academic. Also, grad school in the physical sciences is a little different than in CS (i think.) Here are some things to consider: Are you currently doing research in a good research lab? Do you like it? Are there any professors/groups that you are ecstatic about working with? Do these profs/groups have funding for a grad student?

If you answer yes to all of the above, then you have done enough due diligence to make an educated decision, go work for the groups you identified. So you know, I answered yes to all these questions, and I still hate grad school ;)

Fundamentally, and we are all guilty of this, we think that the most important problems to solve are obvious from the get go. Worst, we think important problems must be personally interesting. Try another approach. Solve a problem that's interesting to you, better than anyone else, see where it takes you. The only reason a phd is fun is cause you get to do that.. It's not clear that these style-over-substance startups do not offer you the same opportunity.

DaniFong• 19 years ago

cowmoo,

The vast majority of startups fail. An important corollary: The vast majority of social networking startups will fail. Social networking has, predictably, massive network effects. There's only going to be room for maybe a dozen major winners. Everything else will be a niche or be eventually undercut by open source. For some reason most founders don't recognize that.

I'm someone who can't handle corporate dronery. In a graduate school environment (at a top school in physics) I was, intellectually, quite happy -- some of the smartest people in the world go to grad school, and while they're shirking on their advisors they can be incredibly interesting and productive.

So far, the only experience I have with startups is trying to, unsuccessfully, suggest to them what to do (it's difficult to convince people to modify their sacred ideas...) and trying to found two (one, something that was to be a working web annotation engine, I was working on this before Diigo was announced and got millions in funding, in retrospect I could have beaten them anyway because their entire approach is ill-conceived) and my project that I'm working on now (it's going to change the paradigm of Healthcare online and perhaps fix healthcare in the USA -- no joke. I merely need to avoid being jailed for hyperbole -- email me if interested, especially if interested in cofounding for the winter founders program.)

But grad school in CS isn't really school. You're given a lot of free time, a license to basically study what you want, if you play it right. That's extremely valuable, but it isn't necessary, and it might be more productive to learn how to do that without going to grad school at all.

Just avoid the corporate vampires, that's all.

Dani

(Dani <dot> Fong <at symbol> gmail)

Ask YC: Should you go to graduate school?

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