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

This reminds me of YC&#x27;s &quot;Apply without an idea&quot; experiment. Both experiments seem to arise from a innovator&#x27;s insight that a whole class of otherwise highly qualified candidates self select out because of a self perception that they don&#x27;t &quot;fit the mold&quot;. This is especially true of YC, where there are so many articles every day that tell the story of a founder who &quot;saw a problem, and set off on this quest to solve it&quot; that people who don&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;m excited to see this experiment &quot;meet the marketplace&quot;, 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&#x27;t have applied seems like it&#x27;d really move the needle.<p>[Disclosure: I went to undergrad with Jeff and we&#x27;re good friends. He really is a great &quot;mold-breaker&quot; himself and I&#x27;m excited to see how a great &quot;hacker of systems&quot; in the best sense of the word changes academia during his career]

<i>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.</i><p>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.<p>Which might not be a great thing for the folks reviewing applications...

I think this is a very interesting idea, and I look forward to the results of the experiment!<p>Allow me to take a moment to reiterate some of the comments I left on the Georgia Tech master&#x27;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.<p>* I went directly into industry in 1998 working at a software&#x2F;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 &quot;information technology,&quot; as there was no computer science online program at Northeastern University. I didn&#x27;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...)<p>* I applied at Brown University after talking to the admissions and computer science departments multiple times, in which they told me I wouldn&#x27;t be able to pursue a master&#x27;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&#x27;t be possible were ended with &quot;Sent from my iPhone.&quot;<p>* 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.<p>* I was finally able to get accepted as a &quot;non-degree&quot; or &quot;special&quot; 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.<p>* Since starting as a &quot;non-degree&quot; student, I&#x27;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.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510142" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6510142</a>

Hmmm. This is an interesting spin the Brown Professor has taken on the PhD application process.<p>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&#x27;ve seen individuals who&#x27;d make great computer science researchers not being given an opportunity because they don&#x27;t tick the right &quot;boxes&quot;.<p>Sure it&#x27;s not perfect, but worth a shot if you&#x27;re interested.

I&#x27;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.

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

Like Jeff I am also a young faculty member at Brown (<a href="http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.brown.edu&#x2F;~kraskat&#x2F;</a>) and I couldn&#x27;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 <a href="http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/phd14.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cs.brown.edu&#x2F;~kraskat&#x2F;phd14.html</a>). In addition, last year we started a research internship program (<a href="http://database.cs.brown.edu/big-data-internship" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;database.cs.brown.edu&#x2F;big-data-internship</a>) - 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.

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&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t last very long.<p>E.g., a big tech company might hire 100 Master&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>jobs</i> 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.<p>Be careful.

I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t know the guy a bit and I do like this alternative approach to the application a lot. Still, he needs to be careful.

Cool idea-- people inventive enough to go down an entrepreneurial route would probably be interesting&#x2F;compelling candidates for academic innovation.<p>I actually think that creating many interesting projects + one&#x27;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&#x2F;projects&#x2F;approaches and inventing just for the sake of inventing.<p>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&#x2F;time that Jeff mentioned he had to give to every PhD candidate).

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)

As a person who was about to apply to PhD programs but changed my mind due to insufficient recommendations, I&#x27;m glad somebody else realizes that PhD admissions is utter bull crap.<p>185 dollar GRE that I can get in the 99th percentile on with ZERO studying? Grades that aren&#x27;t normalized across institutions weighed heavily? Need recs from established professors who can slip in a good word for you?<p>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&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;t consider it again unless drastic changes are made.

I&#x27;m still waiting for a REMOTE PhD position :)

Application looks too involved for Brown. When applying to 10 schools I wouldn&#x27;t do this one because it has no overlap with my other application. I can reuse my letters of recommendation, I can&#x27;t reuse this application.

I wonder how would this work in fields other than CS. I&#x27;m in physics, and I got my D.Phil, but has been thinking seriously about the state of academic research, including the admission process &amp; finding good student&#x2F;lab fit.<p>Looking at the examples in the original post, I think the &quot;demonstrate scholarship&quot; section could directly apply for physics as well. Offer letters, github, are more more marginally useful...<p>Tough one. I&#x27;d love to hear how this works out, he sounds like a very thoughtful professor.

That sounds right up my alley! I&#x27;m currently tracking the geolocation of computer science professors by tracking the gaze of the NSA&#x27;s agents who are watching them through the myriad of security cameras in our country.<p>My academic resume isn&#x27;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)!

I&#x27;m almost certain that a Ph.D. in the UK takes 3-4 years max. Why does it take so much longer in USA?

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

This got me to consider applying to brown whenever I&#x27;m looking at grad schools.

even better: don&#x27;t apply at all. simply work&#x2F;study&#x2F;design&#x2F;research&#x2F;build whatever you wanted to do anyway. then share&#x2F;publish&#x2F;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&#x2F;outside a university paradigm.

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