I wound up at Caltech by pure luck, finding an institute particularly well suited to my personality and what I needed. For one example, Caltech has an honor system where the default is for the professors and students to be collaborators and trust each other rather than be adversaries.<p>Thanks, Caltech!
I'd love figures on how many PhDs are issued broken down by school in timeseries format. JDs don't count. Would be helpful to know who is debasing the currency. Caltech definitely isn't. One of the few actually elite institutions left. No fake subjects either.<p>I'm guessing places like Harvard, UCB and MIT each issued close to 1000 last year. Lower ranked schools, maybe 500 each; probably cumsum to significantly higher than CalTech even with short histories.
In the beginning of my career I hoped somehow my path would take me in the direction of a PhD. It's a thing that I still hold in very high esteem, pretty much regardless of the area of study. The amount of work, expertise and determination still seems incredible to me.<p>As I get older, I get closer and closer to thinking it'll never happen for me. Not because of life or kids or money or whatever, but because I just don't have that amount of commitment to put towards one area of study. Almost a decade (or an actual decade) devoted to just one thing seems insane to me.<p>It's the thing that, if I won the lottery (or my options become of any value), I'd give a shot. Not sure in what really. I'd start with a master's probably. But if I didn't have to care if what I was doing was kind of ridiculous, I would try.
Fun fact: The Caltech campus is a popular location for Hollywood productions. For example, an episode of the Amazing Spider-Man was filmed there. The photo on wikipedia:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-Man_(TV_series)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Spider-Man_(TV_ser...</a><p>is one I took :-) I remember wandering to class one day in a sleep-deprived haze and saw the filming, went back and got my camera.
More children in the academic family tree!<p>I would love for a well funded organization to use big data analysis to try to build as complete as possible a full family tree of every PhD:<p><a href="http://nghiaho.com/?p=978" rel="nofollow">http://nghiaho.com/?p=978</a><p>It might help show where there a blind spots :)