Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

http://jeffhuang.com/rethinking_the_phd_application.html#

187 142 13 years ago

tjr2• 13 years ago

An offer letter from Google or YCombinator (where you are the tech co-founder) which serves as evidence that you passed a challenging programming interview at Google, or that YCombinator believed you would be successful at developing your company product.

Interesting. Because I have no intention of moving to a Google or YCombinator location, I never applied to either, but this makes me wonder if merely having been offered an opportunity at such a place could have value. Even if one never intended to follow through.

Which might not be a great thing for the folks reviewing applications...

agilebyte2• 13 years ago

In which case you move to #2 which (to me) seems much easier to get: A Github or other online repository of your source code demonstrating contributions to open source projects or impressive projects of your own.

jrs996• 13 years ago

if you do that you might as well forget the PhD. Schools don't want to teach you, they want to accept the best applicants. Applicants who work on open source projects and can get a job anywhere. Applicants that became great learning from somewhere that is not the school that he is applying to. Whereas as a post doc you'll be someone's bitch working for 40K per year. Screw the PhD and whatever it is supposed to mean--that you did all your stupid homework assignments and kissed people's asses for three letters of recommendation and that you "gamed" the GRE.

btown• 13 years ago

True - if the open source project you've contributed significantly to is, say, a well-acclaimed machine learning library, and you're applying to a machine learning Ph.D., then the sum of your accepted pull requests might be a reasonable proxy for a recommendation letter from the (presumably well-acclaimed) maintainers of said library.

chrisseaton2• 13 years ago

In the UK in some areas such as finance and business there are many people who apply to be an Army officer, and go all the way through selection, but never intend to join up. They do it just so that they can put on their CV (resume) that they've passed Army officer selection.

elemeno2• 13 years ago

Not to say that it's not true, but in a decade in finance I've never heard of anyone having gone through Officer Selection to help their career prospects.

If you want to have a good start in finance, having a degree (preferably a 1st) in Maths, Physics or Economics from Oxford, Cambridge or LSE is probably the most useful thing you can do!

arethuza• 13 years ago

Isn't Officer Selection where candidate for officer training are selected, not after the full training? According to this link it looks like a ~5 day process:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm

[NB Not sure I approve of people using up forces resources just to pad their CVs]

segmondy• 13 years ago

Of course. I have no intention of moving to Cali, but one thing I do plan to do when I go to vacation West next year is to apply to Google, possibly Facebook or/and Amazon. If I get the offer letter, I can frame it and use it as negotiating tactic here in the midwest. It's almost as good as saying "I worked at Google"

mcguire5• 13 years ago

Possibly better: you don't have to actually work at Google. 80% of the benefit minus 1% of the opportunity cost.

8_hours_ago• 13 years ago

Idea: Apply before you plan your vacation, then extend you stay when they fly you out to interview. Free flights!

HelloMcFly• 13 years ago

Unlike employment, there's very little to stop this probably-currently-useful tactic from being rendered valueless by fakers.

mathattack2• 13 years ago

I'd be curious if the folks at Google and YC would be flattered by this, put off, or both.

robrenaud• 13 years ago

If it works, it's clever. But I am definitely not flattered and wouldn't be personally happy about knowing someone did it. The 45 minutes I spent interviewing you and the more than an hour I spend carefully writing up my interview feedback is totally wasted. Well, that sucks for me.

latj2• 13 years ago

The other question is- if you have an offer letter from Google or YCombinator in hand, would you really want to go to Brown? At Google it will be like going to grad school except you will be better funded, working with more consistently smarter people, and you will be getting paid instead of racking up debt. As a YCombinator founder you'd basically already be in the position that a Brown computer science graduate hopes to one day get to. I like universities. I hope they figure out how to stay relevant.

pinhead3• 13 years ago

How exactly would you be racking up debt as a computer science Ph.D student? You don't pay for tuition, you get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance and you probably will do many industry/research internships (where you get paid very well). I say this with experience, as I am a CS Ph.D student and make more than enough to live on with a modest lifestyle and I have no debt. Plus if you get an outside fellowship, which most successful students do, you'll essentially be able to work on just about anything you want (I don't think this can be said for a random Google employee, however this is probably true for a YC founder). The Ph.D lifestyle is pretty great imho...at least in CS (non-CS, that's a whole other story).

blahedo3• 13 years ago

...racking up debt

This is FUD. While there is arguably opportunity cost involved, it is not at all difficult to avoid "racking up debt" in grad school, at least if you're at the PhD level and in a STEM field. It is standard in such programs to get tuition waived (so, no cost) and to receive stipends for assistantship or fellowship (so, you get paid).

To get into specifics: I got my PhD in CS from Brown ten years ago, and my stipend was around $20K (I think about $22 or $23K my final year). During my time there the students clamoured for, and received, a healthcare benefit (free for the student, and they could pay extra if they had spouse and/or dependents). Because I was lucky enough to be debt-free going in, I actually finished grad school with about $15K in savings, but even my friends who had debt from ugrad were not accruing additional debt (and at the time were able to defer payment interest-free, although I gather that's no longer true). I was not exactly living the high life but was able to afford a decent apartment, ate out fairly regularly, and kept myself supplied with geeky tools and toys (laptop, wifi, etc).

So no, "racking up debt" is not a worry here.

brucehart• 13 years ago

I'm surprised that admission into Computer Science PhD programs is so competitive. I would think that with the strong job market for computer scientists, there would not be as many students who would want to make the commitment to a PhD program over other job and entrepreneurial opportunities.

DrSpock4• 13 years ago

Entry into elite PhD programmes is as competitive as ever. Others, not so.

mcguire5• 13 years ago

...and of course Brown (where the author is) is top-twenty, in fact tied at #20 [according to US News & World Report[1]] with places like Rice. It's pretty elite.

[1] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

zerr4• 13 years ago

I believe someone who is not a good software engineer or even can't code at all, can still be admitted into some CS PhD program.

jrs996• 13 years ago

i'm sure that's extremely rare though. maybe like 1 person per year may have no idea what coding is and get admitted to a program for CS.

dominotw• 13 years ago

How about theoretical computer science? That probably doesn't need one to be a good software engineer.

blahedo3• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how these students are filtered out at other places, but in Brown's CS department, PhD students are required to pass a "programming comp" that involves a fairly intense week-long programming project. You don't need to be a superstar coder, but you do need to be able to program effectively in order to pass.

mcguire5• 13 years ago

I am not surprised that it is competitive (PhD's in general are kind of oversupplied), but the form the competition takes:

"Maybe you didn't publish as an undergraduate.... Maybe you can't even write a very compelling research statement yet."

When I was applying, no undergraduates had published research. And the "research statement" could hardly be described as "compelling"; that was one of the points of the breadth requirements for the graduate program---my eventual research topic was completely unrelated to my interests or knowledge coming out of my undergraduate program.

HarryHirsch3• 13 years ago

It's a positive development that admission into a decent PhD program requires research experience. Some people somehow cannot make the jump from classroom exercises to production work, and you would rather that they don't get accepted, instead of having to throw them out a year later.

Besides, a research lab is a workplace after all, and some kids are completely missing the social skills that are needed in a working environment. You can't have that sort in a PhD program either.

trentmb• 13 years ago

It feels like requiring 5+ years of experience in entry level positions...

ryuu2• 13 years ago

Many US students do not go into PhD, because, as you mentioned, due to the strong job market (and also a 20k/year stipend). Most of the PhD students are foreign.

huherto• 13 years ago

I love this. Especially the part where it gives you a few problems that you can try to solve. Not only is a good way to find talent that may otherwise be detected. It increases the chances of finding new ways to solve some problems. (Edit: grammar)

DrSpock4• 13 years ago

Hmmm. This is an interesting spin the Brown Professor has taken on the PhD application process.

For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must. Getting on to a prestigious PhD programme is incredibly competitive, and as someone who has gone through the whole process and seen it from both sides, I can say that I've seen individuals who'd make great computer science researchers not being given an opportunity because they don't tick the right "boxes".

Sure it's not perfect, but worth a shot if you're interested.

tanzam755• 13 years ago

For those interested in a career in development, a PhD is rarely helpful. For the PhD candidate, it can even be counterproductive, as any gains in initial salary will be more than offset by the lost salary during the 5-6 years of the PhD.

Only for a career in research is a PhD important.

DrSpock4• 13 years ago

That is true to an extent. But, most people don't do PhDs to end up doing purely software development.

elemeno2• 13 years ago

The parent comment should probably be read as 'research and development' - working for IBM's research arm, Microsoft Research etc.

pgbovine9• 13 years ago

i will vehemently argue that a Ph.D. in CS is one of the best ways that a young hacker can spend his/her 20s, regardless of which career they end up pursuing in the future. pursuing a Ph.D. + interning at several companies during summertimes = amazing combo for a wide variety of future careers.

the ONLY enduring downside (which you mentioned) is the lost income.

see: http://vimeo.com/73178238

mattgreenrocks• 13 years ago

Do you have any thoughts on how to get started on this road? I feel like I missed the boat sometimes, though I'm using doing interesting-ish work professionally and in open source. I'm not interested in chasing the framework-of-the-week, I want to work on tools that advance how we think about software.

This may be something I do later in life, but I feel very wired for R&D + tooling, and a bit locked out of these types of jobs without a PhD.

DrSpock4• 13 years ago

mattgreenrocks it's never too late! But, I agree without a PhD R&D jobs are difficult to come by.

It sounds like you know what you want to work on. My advise would be to do some more reading in the area and find research papers in your field. Soon you'll know how to extend or improve on prior work. At this point it's a good idea to identify schools and supervisors you want to work with, especially those whose papers you've read or reach you are interested in extending. You might even propose a research collaboration with them based on the papers you read. This is a good way to open channel of communication and get your foot in the door.

There's a great deal that can be said on how to get into a PhD programme. Let me know if you want to continue this discussion offline.

gms7777• 13 years ago

Its never too late to get started down the PhD road. At least in my department, most PhD canidates aren't fresh out of school, they've usually taken at least a year or two and worked in industry of some sort and then applied.

My own experience: I had had no research experience in school and worked in industry for a bit before decided that it bored me to death, but I felt shut out from PhDs at the time. I started looking into research that might be interesting and sent out a bunch of emails to professors at universities explaining who I was, my goals and asking if they were looking for a research tech or anything. I probably sent out like 30 letters, got a handful or responses. I took a bit of a pay cut, but I got a fantastic job that I loved as a research programmer for a professor. I worked there for a while, worked on some interesting research, read a ton of papers, got a handful of co-authors on papers, and then was able to apply to grad programs with a strong application.

PeterisP4• 13 years ago

Pick a specific area, read lots of papers, find out what the bleeding edge statements 'we can do X' and 'Y would be nice and seems within reach but we're not doing it now' are there.

Do something interesting and novel based on that - not neccessarily a detailed implementation, but at least a quick&dirty proof of concept; and then also describe and publish it as a formal paper, it's not particularly much work compared to actually doing the stuff. For example, if you "want to work on tools that advance how we think about software" then picking some specific narrow area of how, say, Bret Victor's concepts could/should be implemented in real practice would be an interesting topic.

All of this can be done w/o a PhD as a hobby/side-project, and such a project+publication would also be a ticket to a decent PhD spot.

wschorn• 13 years ago

This got me to consider applying to brown whenever I'm looking at grad schools.

frozenport• 13 years ago

Application looks too involved for Brown. When applying to 10 schools I wouldn't do this one because it has no overlap with my other application. I can reuse my letters of recommendation, I can't reuse this application.

benmccann• 13 years ago

I graduated quite some time ago. Getting letters of recommendation from professors would be impossible for me. I doubt I'd have one professor that knew me when I graduated let alone now years later. And yet, fulfilling these requirements would be very easy for me. I think it's very nice to have multiple routes in. Even if very few candidates avail themselves of this latter route, they might be interesting candidates worth strong consideration.

jaynos• 13 years ago

I'm in the same boat applying to a Master Program. It doesn't help that i spent the better part of my 20's as a business owner with no boss that can write a letter for me.

nilkn• 13 years ago

I think this would be useful for three groups of people:

(1) People who were planning to go into industry and already have, say, an offer letter from Google, or just a strong open source profile, but now aren't sure if they want to go into industry or academia. Being able to apply to Brown with their offer letter could reduce a lot of friction in their consideration of the academic route.

(2) People who've already tried to get into a top Ph.D. program the traditional route and failed. If this is your dream, and you don't have the grades or publications to get in otherwise, but you do have top programming chops, this could be a way for you to still get what you want.

(3) People who are already in industry and want to go into academia. They may have lost their academic connections at this point in time. Even if they had great grades, they may struggle to reconnect with old teachers to write the requisite stellar recommendation letters.

wukix• 13 years ago

Submit your GitHub portfolio and join the Ivy League university that also develops Racket? Awesome!

clarebear• 13 years ago

Why would you be filling out a PhD application if you already had an offer letter from Google or YCombinator?

stephencanon• 13 years ago

Because you always wanted to do academic research? Because you someday want to teach at the college level? Because you have no idea what you want to do and you want to keep your options open a while longer?

I left grad school to work in industry, but I’m not so naive as to think that everyone shares my preferences. I have friends who turned down Google offers c. 2001 to go to grad school, and they’ve never regretted that decision. (And I don’t regret the time I spent in grad school before leaving, either).

zura6• 13 years ago

Personally, I'd want to get a PhD to be able to work in such places as Microsoft Research. I don't want to become a teacher/professor. Other than that, I really hate some perils of academic world - bureaucracy, nepotism/favoritism/elitism, ...

kskz• 13 years ago

Google often also hires people to do work they are overqualified for. Had a friend turn down Google because it was boring compared to research.

pgbovine9• 13 years ago

ha, i've been giving talks on this very subject ;) http://vimeo.com/73178238

btw i'm a big fan of jeff's approach and hope it works out well.

bolu• 13 years ago

This reminds me of YC's "Apply without an idea" experiment. Both experiments seem to arise from a innovator's insight that a whole class of otherwise highly qualified candidates self select out because of a self perception that they don't "fit the mold". This is especially true of YC, where there are so many articles every day that tell the story of a founder who "saw a problem, and set off on this quest to solve it" that people who don't have an idea on hand when YC applications come up can immediately self exclude. Never mind that many great founders pivoted more than once on their way to success.

I'm excited to see this experiment "meet the marketplace", and see what pans out. Given the small number of PhD students these top programs take each year, just yielding one or two great people into the PhD program that otherwise wouldn't have applied seems like it'd really move the needle.

[Disclosure: I went to undergrad with Jeff and we're good friends. He really is a great "mold-breaker" himself and I'm excited to see how a great "hacker of systems" in the best sense of the word changes academia during his career]

pgbovine9• 13 years ago

+1000, and latching on to this top comment for more visibility ...

also check out jeff's related post on bringing startup culture to academic research! http://jeffhuang.com/adopting_the_startup_culture_for_resear...

zura6• 13 years ago

I'm still waiting for a REMOTE PhD position :)

bkamapantula2• 13 years ago

I doubt if it would happen at all.

I'm a full time Ph.D. student. You might, of course, know that professors interact with the students very often (except if the professor is super busy always). I interact with mine almost every day. I do work with couple of collaborators in different countries. That is because my advisor knows them in-person before deciding to collaborate. I work with lab colleagues frequently. Remote makes all this extremely challenging.

tjr2• 13 years ago

What about it exactly is challenging? How is doing computer science research (probably what many people here would do; I don't know what your research field is) with a team of remote individuals harder than doing software development with a team of remote individuals?

zura6• 13 years ago

Right, that is the difference between PhD in USA versus mainland Europe - where PhD is regarded as a regular salaried job (albeit very low-paying). Basically, after some intro time with the professor, you're really on your own. Interactions happen, but nothing that can't be done remotely.

pgbovine9• 13 years ago

remote Ph.D. is a bad idea; the Ph.D. experience is isolating enough as-is, and pushing it remotely will exacerbate those problems. plus, innovation often happens in serendipitous in-person encounters in the hallway, lounge, and lab with students, professors, and research staff incidentally bumping into one another. see:

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Good-Ideas-Come-From/dp/15944853...

Fomite3• 13 years ago

I essentially did a remote PhD for the last three years of my doctorate.

While it was possible, and I'd defend my decision to do it, it's a tough road, and not one I'd start out on if I could avoid it.

zura6• 13 years ago

First two years in the US PhD is like a master's degree studies - regular lectures/courses. That is way US PhD program is usually 5 years long and you apply with Bachelor's degree.

In Europe, mostly, you're required to have a master's degree to apply for a PhD.

mlyang• 13 years ago

Cool idea-- people inventive enough to go down an entrepreneurial route would probably be interesting/compelling candidates for academic innovation.

I actually think that creating many interesting projects + one's corresponding Github would be a better metric than getting a Google (or even YC) acceptance letter. You want people who are constantly tinkering and thinking of new ideas/projects/approaches and inventing just for the sake of inventing.

If you go too entrepreneurial, you might also be selecting for students who might be more amenable to dropping out from the program and doing a start-up (which then wastes the resources/time that Jeff mentioned he had to give to every PhD candidate).

smoyer2• 13 years ago

That sounds right up my alley! I'm currently tracking the geolocation of computer science professors by tracking the gaze of the NSA's agents who are watching them through the myriad of security cameras in our country.

My academic resume isn't going to get me noticed for a PhD program but it sounds like someone is finally looking at ability (I had great scores on the Computer Science GRE in 1990, but they apparently only last five years and that test has been discontinued)!

tanzam755• 13 years ago

The GRE Computer Science exam was pretty heavy on theory and systems. This made sense for 1990, when CS departments were heavier on theory and systems. It has grown less relevant as the field of CS grew to encompass additional areas.

Thus, CS programs stopped requiring it, so fewer people took the exam, so the ETS decided to drop it.

smoyer2• 13 years ago

I understand the rationale for dropping the exam, but it's the last academic endeavor on my resume. I've got a ton of work experience since then and many of my projects would be worthy of today's buzzwords. My lament is that only forward-thinking advising professors would see the value in what I have done.

Note that no professors have actually been tracked or harmed.

cmeiklejohn2• 13 years ago

I think this is a very interesting idea, and I look forward to the results of the experiment!

Allow me to take a moment to reiterate some of the comments I left on the Georgia Tech master's thread [1], specifically as a student who has taken graduate level computer science courses at Brown University with the majority of his experience working in industry.

* I went directly into industry in 1998 working at a software/systems engineer for a telecom working on Solaris deployments. I worked full-time and paid for my undergraduate education which I pursued part-time and which took me 9 years to finish. I majored in "information technology," as there was no computer science online program at Northeastern University. I didn't take any theory courses at all, and the majority of my course work was programming in languages like Java, C++, and C# (also COBOL, and the like...)

* I applied at Brown University after talking to the admissions and computer science departments multiple times, in which they told me I wouldn't be able to pursue a master's due to lack of independent or undergraduate research or an undergraduate education in computer science. The process of being told this was rather unfortunate, as the responses I received via e-mail telling me it wouldn't be possible were ended with "Sent from my iPhone."

* At the time I talked with them, I had been working at Basho Technologies for a year on Riak, an open source distributed Dynamo-style data store, as well as serving as a maintainer of rubygems.org.

* I was finally able to get accepted as a "non-degree" or "special" graduate student, which is allowed to take courses at full price. This role exists primarily to allow students to determine if they would be a fit for graduate school, at which point I would then have to re-apply for degree seeking status. This was possible because of an independent meeting I scheduled with Shriram Krishnamurthi, who, based on my industrial experience expedited the process along.

* Since starting as a "non-degree" student, I've been heavily motivated to attempt to stand out from other candidates for when I eventually re-apply to be a degree seeking student by independently publishing papers, publishing a blog, organizing a podcast, and speaking at conferences.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510142

pgbovine9• 13 years ago

what kind of research are you interested in for Ph.D.? i can't seem to find your academic info from your HN profile. email me if you want to chat more.

cmeiklejohn2• 13 years ago

Distributed systems.

My website is located here: http://christophermeiklejohn.com.

shiven• 13 years ago

... And go fellow Huskies!

Love the co-op that NEU is so well known for. Excellent way to earn a degree while gaining real-world experience on the job :-)

Balgair2• 13 years ago

I'm applying as we speak, but in Bioeng. When I email professors and get to talking they always coach that they do NOT have control over the admissions process, that a committee acts as Maxwell's demon. Though I am not applying to Brown and do not know anything about the internals of their process, this seems to indicated that professor Huang has at least some control over the admissions. If I were professor Huang, I would be very very careful about this, as sparks of racism, sexism, and homophobia can quickly ignite into a fire. I want to be clear, I am not accusing professor Huang of this at all. Heck I don't know the guy a bit and I do like this alternative approach to the application a lot. Still, he needs to be careful.

p1esk2• 13 years ago

Are you kidding?

Of course a professor has control over the admission process. If he wants you on his team, you're in, unless you have a criminal record, or GPA below 3.0 (or whatever is absolute minimum for that particular grad school).

Think of it as a hiring process, with the professor as a hiring manager.

Balgair2• 13 years ago

No, I am not kidding.

Based on the conversations I have had, it seems to be typical that a committee selects the applicants, not the professors. That is what all the professors tell me.

That being said, I would be stunned if this were the truth. There is no frickin way that this happens. Here's how I imagine it:

'Admissions committee is in session' 'So, which of these bozos we gonna pick?' 'I want Joe, Schmo, and Dingus' 'Sweet, I want Harry, and Fiona' 'Ok, we all cool?' 'Yep' 'Aite, lets get beers'

mkramlich2• 13 years ago

even better: don't apply at all. simply work/study/design/research/build whatever you wanted to do anyway. then share/publish/collaborate as you desire. or not. rinse, repeat. be a genius. or a crank. or an entrepreneur. or some mix. just do things and get it out there. see what sticks. not all smart people are in academia and not all people in academia are very smart. and you can publish, collaborate, ship and show accomplishments without/outside a university paradigm.

chrismonsanto• 13 years ago

Please don't underestimate how much it helps to have an adviser who has been through the ropes, or how awesome it is to have peers that are brilliant and working on similar stuff. I'm a self-taught programmer, so I know exactly what it's like to wing it, and I loved the PhD experience. The anti-PhD attitude on here is so weird, considering YC seems to be largely the same thing on a smaller timescale (weed out everyone but the very best, have them make things, give them connections, ...)

mkramlich2• 13 years ago

understood

personally I think HN has both a pro-PhD, pro-academic, and also an anti-PhD or anti-academic segment. Sometimes within the same people! I certainly do.

I think it has both strengths and weaknesses. I think to the extent that universities and PhD track stuff serves an unnecessary and embarrassing anachronistic echo from the Middle Ages then that is a bad thing. But to the extent it helps teach disciplined thinking, cultivate a new generation of teachers and researchers, and helps to cull out noise or invalid/false/dumb contributions to the advancement of an art, it's a very good thing. The weed-out effect is good. I think some antipathy comes from the folks who perceive there to be a lot of non-weeds outside academia, and weeds within it. All discipline and curation is good. But it's not the unique providence of universities or professorship tracks. A lot of programmers have a libertarian bent too and dislike profit-maximizing monopolies or priesthoods, and universities/academia has at least a little of that aspect to them.

xSwag• 13 years ago

I'm almost certain that a Ph.D. in the UK takes 3-4 years max. Why does it take so much longer in USA?

maximilian• 13 years ago

You still need to do your masters, "along the way". If I remember correctly, in England, first you do you masters, and then start a PhD. 2 masters + 4-5 phd = 6.

Most European countries require a masters degree before starting, but the PhD is officially supposed to take 3 years (but usually takes 3-4+)

graycat• 13 years ago

Usually the Ph.D. is aimed at being a college professor and working toward tenure. The CS Ph.D. now seems to be aimed at such a professor but also at a career as an employee.

Sorry to say this, but Ph.D. or not, it is getting clear that in the US being an employee is no good for a career.

Can get hired as an employee in your 20s, but the chances go down in your 30s, and the chances go to near zero long before your 40 year career is over. Exception: If you rise high into management, then you might be able to continue to get hired until, say, 50. And high management positions commonly don't last very long.

E.g., a big tech company might hire 100 Master's or Ph.D. degree holders, promote 1 to management, and at age 35 or so fire the other 99. Then the other 99 can wish that they could convert their Ph.D., say, in electronic engineering, to an electrician's license or had followed the path of a friend in high school who was mowing grass and now has 5 crews mowing grass and is getting into landscape architecture and commercial instead of just residential clients.

In broad terms, for a long career in the US, be a sole proprietor with a geographical barrier to entry. If want to do something technical, then be a CEO of a startup that takes advantage of your technical background. For being an employee, regard that as a temporary slot that will have to be replaced by owning part or all of the business from which you get your income.

Then, a problem with a Ph.D. is that you spend in grad school most of your 20s when you are most employable. Then to go into the job market in your late 20s or 30s can be a big disappointment because, really, the jobs are for subordinates, not narrow subject matter expert researchers. Actually, a Ph.D. can be highly resented, can be a black mark on your resume.

Be careful.

banachtarski4• 13 years ago

As a person who was about to apply to PhD programs but changed my mind due to insufficient recommendations, I'm glad somebody else realizes that PhD admissions is utter bull crap.

185 dollar GRE that I can get in the 99th percentile on with ZERO studying? Grades that aren't normalized across institutions weighed heavily? Need recs from established professors who can slip in a good word for you?

Oh sorry, you were actually doing things that interested you, not necessarily things that would impress the right people. Oh sorry you took tons of hard classes at a prestigious institution and so have something less than 4.0. Oh sorry you hopped labs for a bit instead of staying with that boring CS guy that would've gotten you into any PhD program in America for 4 years. Oh sorry you spent a year or two out of college doing startup tech work without building credentials with other PhD grads but nevertheless solving research grade problems.

I've realized that the PhD admissions does not select candidates who actually want to do research. It selects candidates who want to be admitted into a PhD program. No thanks. I love science and math, and I love research, but I think the PhD application has been so harrowing for me, I won't consider it again unless drastic changes are made.

ank286• 13 years ago

HAHA. As a PhD student, I agree with most of your sentiments. The PhD application process is nothing, try applying for fellowships. Go to a prestigious institution, pull allnighters, to get a subpar gpa, and have no time for volunteering activities. These are the criteria you need to satisfy to get something like NSF GRP (Broader Impact is 50% of the application). You might have a better shot at a lesser prestigious university with a not-so-great engineering program and being a super smart person, killing it. Then, apply for fellowship --> you will get it. It is all a rubric.

Now on to the game of academia. It is one that is based on reputation, papers, and not money. No one cares for efficiency either and no one is building crap. All they are doing is trying out different "solutions," which may or may not make any sense. For instance, "hey guys, let's apply game theory to problem X, it will be a good/novel experiment and we can get a paper out of it." Waste of tax dollars. The logical answer that solves problem X might have already been solved and can be solved using ordinary methods, but academia doesn't want that. Research labs have business models, keep proposing new complexity on complexities, very unnecessary. Overcrowded fields like computer vision reek of this.

banachtarski4• 13 years ago

Don't even get me started on funding and fellowships haha. I think trying to get funding in math must be the worst. Every formula has to boil down to "security this" or "missile navigation that."

jxtx• 13 years ago

As a person who reads PhD applications and works with graduate students, bullshit.

I care a little about your GRE scores, it is a filter, you need some kind of standardized comparable. Congrats on getting in the 99th percentile (that's expected). I don't care much about your GPA. I might look at what classes you took. I will probably look at your reference letters briefly. They might be from professors, they might not. I don't care. I love the fact that you have some startup or industry experience, you are slightly more likely to actually know how to get things done.

The very first thing I read is your cover letter, then straight to your research statement which I will read in great detail. The only thing I care about is do you have a passion for research, are you likely to be successful at it.

At most research institutions in most areas of science, we have to pay our graduate students stipend and tuition, either right away or after a year. This is a damn good incentive to get students in who are going to do great research.

All I care about is getting great researchers in the door and (eventually, hopefully) into my lab. So, my advice: focus on your research statement. Tailor it to the department your are applying to, talk about the research they are doing there. But, have your own agenda. At least know what research areas you are passionate about.

banachtarski4• 13 years ago

What you are telling me is completely at odds with what others have told me (including faculty on admissions committees) so I imagine it varies from institution to institution. I had a pretty compelling application a year ago and my statement (in my opinion anyways) demonstrated that I was caught up with the academic literature on a particular topic and I had done some work myself implementing and attempting to improve existing techniques. I realized that I may not have worked on that topic in particular, but my hope was that it would demonstrate research aptitude. My application was rejected from 8 schools and I contacted several to see what the problem may have been.

The GRE point I was trying to make was that since 99th percentiles are expected, the test shouldn't exist at all as it is clearly a poor filter.

kraskat• 13 years ago

Like Jeff I am also a young faculty member at Brown (http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/) and I couldn't agree more with him. The Ph.D. application process has a lot of flaws. We (the Big Data Management Group at Brown) are also always looking for very talented people and similar to Jeff we started to hand out small challenges to candidates interested in doing data-centric systems research (see also http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/phd14.html). In addition, last year we started a research internship program (http://database.cs.brown.edu/big-data-internship) - it is quite competitive to get in, but still easier than to be admitted to the PhD program, and the best way for both sides to determine if there is a good fit with the group and the PhD program. Finally, I would like to mention, that we actually do consider MOOC courses and github portfolios as part of the candidate evaluation.

solarix2• 13 years ago

While I agree the application process needs improvement, I think this entry greatly exaggerates how hard it is to get into a PhD program. Since when do you need to be published to even get into a PhD program? When I went through the application process, I got accepted by 6/6 schools that I applied to, with no publications and no real ideas for what I wanted to research on. In fact, most PhD students actually don't even have a research topic until the second or third year of grad school. I think more than anything, your personal statement is the deciding factor in a lot of cases. What had worked for me was to have a list of research topics and faculty from each school that you're interested in working with, and directly address them in your statement. Other than that, of course whatever supporting evidence to differentiate yourself is helpful. I thought proposing to use offer letters from Google or YC (both have much lower acceptance rates than a PhD program) just to prove you can code is pretty hilarious.

GuiA• 13 years ago

When did you apply, and to what schools?

These days, good luck getting in a top tier institution for CS without a solid track record (I.e. a publication or two at an ACM/IEEE conference, and letters of rec from reputable professors/researchers in your field). The letters of rec are what make or break your application.

I agree that it's a bit over the top, but that's how it is.

solarix2• 13 years ago

2005, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UIUC, and my alma mater UT Austin. Ended up at Cal. Granted, I was EE and admitted as EECS, so maybe a bit different.

imrehg• 13 years ago

I wonder how would this work in fields other than CS. I'm in physics, and I got my D.Phil, but has been thinking seriously about the state of academic research, including the admission process & finding good student/lab fit.

Looking at the examples in the original post, I think the "demonstrate scholarship" section could directly apply for physics as well. Offer letters, github, are more more marginally useful...

Tough one. I'd love to hear how this works out, he sounds like a very thoughtful professor.

af33• 13 years ago

Classifieds: "Master is looking for more cheap power with experience from Google to pay minimum wage". Good luck, professor Huang.

Ph.D. 2.0: Rethinking the Ph.D. Application

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