Well, I went from academia (after finishing my PhD) to industry, to get more Freedom, Ownership, Personal growth, Status and Expertise.<p>Here is a blog post on my transition from theoretical physics to data science (and how it made my life much better): <a href="http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html" rel="nofollow">http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html</a><p>I understand that Andriej Karpathy (my favourite author/lecturer in Deep Learning, by a large margin) had a wonderful PhD, in a fast-growing field, with a golden fall-back option. But most PhD students I know (including my former self) do things in disciplines no-one else cares about and are tied to their institute/advisor/place with little to no opportunity to change things when they go awry (cf. it's super easy to change a company). A non-trivial fraction of my friends suffered from depression or had a serious mental breakdown (again, including myself).<p>In this light, while it contain a large number of helpful tips and valuable pieces of advise, why is it called "survival guide"?
I had a very different personal experience, but Karpathy did a wonderful PhD and I did a very marginal one (at a good school, which in many ways makes it worse). From the perspective of the "anchor" rather than the valedictorian, I'd say that he's right on almost all points as to what you should look to do if you decide to be a PhD. However, I do take exception at the rather false dichotomy between industry and academia that he creates.<p>A <i>good</i> PhD leads to many of the nice things he describes: freedom and ownership and personal growth and all that stuff. An average PhD (or worse) leads to pretty much the opposite. Most of the superstars I know went on to do pretty much whatever they are interested in at top schools. The non-superstars (and the real lumps, like me) can easily wind up in a death spiral - where your mediocre publishing record and mediocre PhD afford entry only into 3rd-tier institutions, where you will work with worse and worse people, more or less guaranteeing steadily declining quality of work. A mediocre result more or less guarantees that you will be a low-status drone in academia, trying to wedge world-class work in with a bunch of other activities (teaching, being a glorified research assistant, and other 'service').<p>No-one sets out to do a bad PhD, but people need to understand that the average outcome isn't nearly as glowing as Karpathy outlines. Similarly, the outcome of going to industry also has a huge range. I found myself immediately - I mean on Day 1 - doing more pure Computer Science going to work for a startup than I had any reasonable hope of doing as a semi-failed academic, and have had a steadily improving experience subsequently (some of this stems from a rather delayed growing-up on my part, so it's not entirely a judgement on industry vs academia).
"I’ll assume that the second option you are considering is joining a medium-large company (which is likely most common). Ask yourself if you find the following properties appealing: ..."<p>Why is every conversation about PHDs always cast in the light of as-opposed-to-working-for-the-man? I don't see discussions ever bring up the plethora of other life courses one can take. It is though the author sees a very clear binary: PHD or go work on fixing bugs in Gmail (or some other such cog-in-a-machine project).<p>Where is the discussion of starting a business? Of making your own company? Breaking free of the political shackles of academia and blazing your own path to glory?<p>I am all for PHDs, and all for people pursuing, and pushing, the boundaries of human knowledge. I would just like to see that discussion live on its own, without comparison, if that is possible.
All valid advice, but god is some of it depressing. Papers can be evaluated by flipping through and looking for pretty graphs and equations. Incremental, replication, or comparison work is discouraged. Never include the dead ends or what didn't work. Get into only the elite colleges and betwork at conferences as much as possible - it's not what you know but who you know. Hype up and make your paper as sexy and short as possible. Tell a story. Good teaching, blogging, and sharing software probably hurts you.
I feel one disclaimer that karpathy modestly left out is that he is perhaps one of the most successful PhD students in his field. This likely impacts his view of a PhD program. I personally survived a PhD myself (also in CS, also in ML, also in Computer Vision!), and I've passed through without so many warm, fuzzy feelings.
With my own disclaimer [0], a few comments:<p>> Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure.<p>This is largely true, but only if you're on good terms with your advisor and they're happy with your progress. God, I miss being able to sleep in until 2pm.<p>> Personal growth. ... you’ll become a master of managing your own psychology<p>Yes, it's definitely a roller coaster. I know what happens to your body after a month when your only calorie source is peanut butter and white bread. Depression, random trips to Canada, and more.<p>> Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school<p>No, at least, in mine and other's experience, you should go to the best school where you're still capable of being in the top ~1% of your graduating class. You'll feel like you're the best and that's almost all that matters (Malcolm Gladwell's talk [1]).<p>> So you’ve entered a PhD program and found an adviser. Now what do you work on?<p>You will not be interested in the same exact topic for ~5 years straight, so keep that mind. Try to keep it broad.<p>> Giving talks<p>Do this / practice this as often as possible. It's how you'll get hired (or not). I've had to sit through some embarrassingly bad ones, where the candidate then has to survive the next 7-hours of interviewing where everyone knows they're not getting hired. (In my experience the talk is first thing in the morning.)<p>[0] He gave the fields of "Computer Science / Machine Learning / Computer Vision research" as a disclaimer, my disclaimer is that I only know about experiences in molecular biology / chemistry / materials science / synthetic biology / microbiology.
[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc</a>
These reasons for getting a PhD seem extremely one-sided and, frankly, inaccurate.<p>> Exclusivity. There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs.<p>Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate.<p>> you’re strictly more hirable as a PhD graduate or even as a PhD dropout and many companies might be willing to put you in a more interesting position or with a higher starting salary<p>This is 100% false. Many many people have found a PhD to be a handicap when it comes to getting a job, particularly in software engineering. A large number of employers have anti-PhD biases which will work against you.<p>> Ownership. The research you produce will be yours as an individual. Your accomplishments will have your name attached to them.<p>My experience with academic research is just the opposite. I think it's patently ridiculous that professors get "authorship" credit on papers even when they had a minimal, at best, role in it. Meanwhile in companies you can have a tangible impact and see real results/credit from it (bonuses, promotions). Not to mention that many universities have draconian IP policies.
A PhD is super fun and super hard. But it is key to be realistic about the outcomes. It is a life changing experience, but definitely have a plan for the end of it. There are so few academic tenure jobs and so it pays to do a bit of research on what you want at the end off it beyond just academic life. If you can do that the experiences are amazing, learning to think and work at the higher level and learning to compromise and work through others work is utterly refreshing. It is definitely a space to let yourself really explore thinking and researching.
I just finished my PhD in CS. Took me about 7 years, damn it feels good to be done.<p>Mine experience was completely driven by my choice of advisor. He did not push me and therefore I had complete freedom. I was glad to have the funding through him, but did not get much direction. I did almost everything.<p>And while it took me 7 years to complete, I don't look back on the experience as only "getting my Phd". I learned so much about myself; I traveled around the world; I received my private pilots license; I learned about cars; I played a lot of golf; I had a great time. There were some shitty times where I had to push through, but I have no regrets. Most of my friends are buying houses and having kids, so I'm a little behind on my career/savings. But hey, I have three degrees in a pretty good field and my career is full steam ahead.
How Academia resembles a Drug Gang<p><a href="http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how...</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179</a>
>Over time you’ll develop a vocabulary of good words and bad words to use when writing papers. Speaking about machine learning or computer vision papers specifically as concrete examples, in your papers you never “study” or “investigate” (there are boring, passive, bad words); instead you “develop” or even better you “propose”. And you don’t present a “system” or, shudder, a “pipeline”; instead, you develop a “model”. You don’t learn “features”, you learn “representations”. And god forbid, you never “combine”, “modify” or “expand”. These are incremental, gross terms that will certainly get your paper rejected :).<p>This seems unfair. Many otherwise good students don't get taught this coded language. I understand that heuristic or incremental developments might not be accepted at top conferences, but the work should be judged on what it does rather than the inexact word choice of a student. It feels a bit cliquey.
I got my phd in the humanities. After following academic and grad school subreddits for the last years I could almost be convinced that grad school in the sciences is a pyramid scheme.<p>So much of the crap that I see people complaining about in the sciences simply doesn't occur in the humanities. Some of it I wish would (co-authorship would be a good way for those of us in the humanities to learn how to write an article for publication) but I am glad I didn't have to deal with a lot of the lab and advisor drama that I have seen (or arguing if someone should be fifth author or sixth...).<p>Of course I was making slightly more than half my peers in the sciences at the same university were making and they have a lot more career prospects than I do so maybe it is worth it....
As a PhD survivor, I liken it to a pyramid scheme these days. There aren't enough tenure track positions to have viable careers for all, so do not go into a doctorate program without considering your non-academia route to happiness and fulfillment.<p>My experience of getting the PhD was pretty positive (finished after three and half years, good university, good subject, great supervisor) but I still see so much truth in these essays: <a href="http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/</a><p>Or to be more succinct, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law</a>
"It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack." - That was the most non-obvious and profound thing I noticed when I saw and read Hamming about this.<p>It practically is a litmus test on answering what you should do, not necessarily in research, but in life.<p>For those interested, Hamming course on "You and your research" is on Youtube and has a _ton_ of _practical_ advice to future engineers.
many people seem to discount this thread because "Karpathy is one of the most successful PhD students in his field"<p>perhaps instead of discounting his experience... it would be better to take his advice
> Status. Regardless of whether it should be or not, working towards and eventually getting a PhD degree is culturally revered and recognized as an impressive achievement. You also get to be a Doctor; that’s awesome.<p>Ha, sarcasm, very funny. Seriously though, outside of academia, if you're at an actual cocktail party or something with normal people, don't ever say that you have a PhD. It's like admitting that you're into some really weird shit. If anyone else mentions it about you, quickly change the subject to something less cringeworthy, like herpes.<p>And for the love of God, never <i>ever</i> call yourself a "doctor." WTF is wrong with you? No.<p>If you're still a graduate student ("working towards"), this is all moot, because they shouldn't have let you into the party.
> You’ll sit exhausted and alone in the lab on a beautiful, sunny Saturday scrolling through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries.<p>You get around USD 70k per year in Switzerland for a Computer Science PhD in Switzerland (at ETHZ or EPFL). You could get up to five times this amount working in the industry, but usually not much more than that, especially when you have just graduated. It is definitely worth it to take the salary into account when you choose which universities to apply to for a PhD.
> I can’t find the quote anymore but I heard Sam Altman of YC say that there are no shortcuts or cheats when it comes to building a startup.<p>Yeah, I've heard someone - Euclid may be? - said something similar about the road to science... :)
> You’ll struggle with the realization that months of your work were spent on a paper with a few citations while your friends do exciting startups with TechCrunch articles or push products to millions of people.<p>Love Andrej but really, this isn't a common experience.