Advice for Prospective PhD Students

Dear Prospective PhD Student, Pay careful attention to the optics of this advice. It is addressing how you can best serve your PI. Your goals and aspirations are not addressed. It is advice on how to land a job, but does not address why you should want the job, or if it is a good fit for you.<p>Perhaps you are a good fit for the academic life. But seek out more advice on what the job of Prospective PhD Student is. Seek out more advice on the job market of jobs that require a PhD. If you are thinking of working in the university setting, there may be a lot fewer tenure track jobs, with a lot more applicants than you might imagine, available that you.<p>EDIT: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-022-03394-0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-022-03394-0</a>

I feel like this article is missing a gigantic point: your PI is everything as a PhD student, if you have a PI who’s a shitty person (sometimes even unknowingly), you are going to be in hell for four to seven years. Don’t pick your PI just based on «they seem to be at the forefront of research on this field », also check how they treat their students. This is not like a normal job where you can easily quit, you’re likely going to be stuck with your PI, so they better be good.

I would just flat out advise against it. Don’t set your life up for a dice roll on which PI you get. It can be good. It can be bad. But it’s not a wise gamble for any aspect of life quality that I think is particularly wise to orient towards.

As someone that runs a PhD program in economics, I&#x27;d like to see &quot;in a grant field&quot; added to the title. It&#x27;s completely different in fields with limited grants (those that hire TAs rather than GAs). One of the things I wasn&#x27;t expecting when I started this position is the number of students that use advice from the sciences&#x2F;engineering as if it applies to all fields. (And a lot of my email time is spent fixing those incorrect beliefs.)<p>&gt; Most PhD programs in science and engineering will come with free tuition, a stipend, and health insurance.<p>Don&#x27;t go if it doesn&#x27;t come with funding. There should be a tuition waiver (not always a full waiver, I didn&#x27;t get one), but...<p>&gt; fees typically aren’t. This can still be a significant amount of money each semester<p>This really is ridiculous. They can be in the thousands of dollars. Make sure you subtract fees from the stipend. You might need to pay taxes on the full stipend, but not be able to deduct the cost of fees (I don&#x27;t know current law).<p>&gt; Again, program stipends will vary widely. Some may offer a stipend, but not guarantee it past 1-2 yrs.<p>This is a concern if you&#x27;re funded by a grant. I know lots of programs that don&#x27;t guarantee five years of stipend, because they aren&#x27;t allowed, but in practice they&#x27;ll do everything they can to keep funding you if you&#x27;re making progress. That&#x27;s because completed PhD&#x27;s is a big deal when evaluating the research status of universities.<p>&gt; health insurance. Most programs will offer graduate student health insurance. But, as with stipends, the monthly premiums and quality of insurance can vary widely.<p>If you can get insurance through your parents, you almost always want to go that route. I was surprised when I saw how much this varies from school to school. My employer covers 75% of the cost (one of the highest I&#x27;ve seen) but it still costs the student $700&#x2F;year. As with fees, subtract the cost of health insurance from the stipend, but only after you determine the quality is sufficient for your needs.

My advice is find a PhD you want in Norway or the Netherlands. They have programs with competitive research groups, salaries that will get you a quality of life you will appreciate, they will end in 3-4 years, and they have money to pay for you to go to conferences, etc without you having to fight for it from your adviser. Everywhere else sucks.<p>This comment is based on my experience working as a scientist in academia in USA, Japan, Germany, France, Norway, UK, and now the Netherlands.

When I was an undergrad, I once asked one of the department professors &quot;I want to do a PhD, how do I do that?&quot; and the first thing he said to me was &quot;Don&#x27;t.&quot;<p>It turned out to be pretty good advice. I didn&#x27;t in the end, and having seen close friends do it, I&#x27;m glad I was dissuaded.

Since it seems just about everybody who&#x27;s been in or around a PhD program agrees it&#x27;s a miserable institution with low chances of satisfaction, I will continue to follow the advice that it is not for me.<p>However, are there alternative paths to a research career? I really enjoyed being in an academic environment in undergrad and dream of working on AI&#x2F;ML research in some capacity, but I&#x27;m a total outsider.

Having seen what my partner has been through in her PhD in generics in the UK. I can certainly advice against doing it.<p>PhDs are not worth the stress your will be through. You are barely paid to get by. PhD students are exploited left and right.<p>The whole concept is not suitable for what&#x27;s life in 2023. If you have a toxic colleague at a workspace you can do something about it, change team, change your manager, change workspace.<p>If you have a toxic colleague or supervisor it&#x27;s done, your will be miserable for 4 years. Then if you need extension suddenly fees will pop up.<p>It&#x27;s not worth it.

Does it ever make sense to do graduate school just to get by? If you’re desperate for work, does the stipend ever cover the cost of living, at least enough to spend all your time in the library?

Disclaimer: Did not read the whole thing.<p>The one advice I often do not see is: While there may be enough jobs for PhDs out there, there are very few that <i>you</i> will want to do.<p>People get a PhD because they are passionate about the field and want to do research. Not just any research but research on a few topics. Most jobs for PhDs will not let you do the research that you would like to do. It will be totally on you to target those few jobs that will. You have to work towards it throughout the program. Actively network at conferences, and get key people to know you. Position yourself for those jobs. Merely doing good research and publishing papers may not be enough.<p>Anyone who sticks to it can get a PhD. But no one feels sorry for a PhD grad who can&#x27;t get a job. It&#x27;s expected that if you&#x27;re smart enough to get one, you&#x27;re smart enough to figure out the job situation.

The PI on the only research project I ever worked on as a student was relatively chill and collaborative, so I assumed that&#x27;s how they all were. 20 years later, I once again work with big research projects, and was surprised to learn how tyrannical and petulant PIs are (or have a reputation for being). Much more so than CEOs in any private sector company I&#x27;ve worked at, the PI seems to be both at such a high level that they are disengaged from the daily work of their &quot;employees&quot;, and simultaneously inclined to micromanage that work when their attention turns to it at last—the worst of both worlds!

Best advice for quality of life for a PhD student living off the PhD stipend - live in a low cost of living area. In math (what I got a PhD in), you get paid the same amount (about $20,000 a year when I started in 2013) if you live the SF Bay Area (sat going to UC Berkeley) as you do if you live in Tucson, Arizona (say going to University of Arizona). There are good universities in low cost of living areas that prospective PhD students should heavily consider - at least I wish I did.

If you live in the US, have the ability to work in the US, and have a stem degree, the opportunity cost of a PhD is just way too high, many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Technically, one could do the PhD in the UK where PhD is 3 years, to minimize that opportunity cost, but not by much.

This is mediocre advice that largely won&#x27;t work for the members of this community. For neuroscience, where there is relatively little competition, it&#x27;s ok. For AI&#x2F;ML, where the competition is crazy, it&#x27;s bad advice.<p>&gt; Lastly - the dreaded Undergraduate Publication. Are you a co-author on a publication? Fantastic. It means you made a considerable contribution to a project which can only be done through a significant amount of dedication. Are you first author on a publication? Wow! Truly impressive and a rare feat for an undergraduate researcher. Do you not have any publications? Don’t sweat it. I’m looking for people with a history of a strong work ethic, an innate curiosity, and an ability to think and dream big.<p>Downplaying this, and cutely calling it the &quot;dreaded&quot; publication is the worst advice on this page by far. This is what gets you into good departments now. A publication as an undergrad can change your life. If you want to do a PhD, this is your goal as a student: publish a paper.<p>The majority of new PhD students who get into good departments now have at least one publication. And what you did for that publication is what matters. Your supervisor(s) should include in their letter exactly what your contribution was.<p>In our department the guiding philosophy for admitting PhD students mostly is: Are they already behaving like PhD students on the level of those we have in our department? A publication or more is a really good signal. The cleanest and strongest signal you can send.<p>&gt; There are two primary ways most undergraduates get research experience. One, a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). Two, working with a PI at your home institution for a few semesters. Neither is required for admission, but both are valuable for different reasons.<p>I can hardly imagine a student getting in to our department with zero research experience at all aside from exceptional situations. These are definitely required.<p>&gt; First zoom meeting ... Generally, I’ll try to keep this first meeting focused on you, your interests, your long-term goals, and whether my lab fits those interests and goals. Somewhat counterintuitively, I’ll actually avoid going into depth about science. Of course, we will talk about my research program and open projects in my lab, but I really try and keep this first conversation focused on getting to know you (and letting you get to know me). I want to know how you got to be where you are today, how you made the decision to pursue a PhD, and where you see yourself going in the future.<p>You must read the last few papers of the person who is calling you. You must be ready to talk about all of your work end to end, not just about what you did, but its limitations, what else you wanted to do, other approaches, etc.

As is frequently the case here, I feel most comments about whether or not to do a PhD are way too absorbed in cynicism and negativity.<p>Sure, a bad PI can make you miserable, and if you only catch on when you&#x27;ve already invested serious time into research, you might be stuck with that PI until you&#x27;re done. But, at least from what I&#x27;ve seen at my university, you have a good amount of flexibility during the first years of the program. Plus, after the first semester, our department expects PhD students to do teaching assistant work if not funded by other means, which gives them the chance to work with professors without getting tied down to a PI, making it easier to make a more informed decision.<p>It&#x27;s worth emphasizing that if you really love the topic, have confidence in your skills and can tolerate your PI, it can be a very fulfilling albeit stressful experience. My PI is typically well spoken, very demanding and often an asshole but also gives enough freedom and autonomy to grow. The pay is also definitely nowhere near as good as it would be in industry.<p>But as someone who would consider himself to have been pretty immature and mentally &#x27;weak&#x27; (struggling to cope with anything stressful that wasn&#x27;t an exam or project) when starting the program, I feel I have grown significantly as a person over the past few years in a way that would have likely involved a lot more exploitation and pain in industry (especially given my immigration status, which also tends to encourage exploitation). When I started, I struggled even with basic &#x27;adult&#x27; things, yet 4 years in, approaching the end of my program, I am able to operate in the group mostly autonomously, with just occasional progress updates and handling basic decision making - reducing my PI&#x27;s workload etc.<p>Additionally, as someone who had always been interested in physics, but pursued an education in computer engineering since that was my stronger skill, a PhD ended up giving me the chance to participate in cutting edge physics research despite my computer specialization.<p>I may have lost out on some wealth, but I feel I&#x27;ve more than made up for it through the personal growth, the satisfaction of unintentionally fulfilling a childhood dream, the satisfaction of making a measurable and meaningful contribution to science and the significantly expanded immigration opportunities compared to the conventional painful H1B-&gt;Green card route for Indians.<p>I can&#x27;t speak too much about admissions, as my experience with that was fairly unusual - I transferred in from a Masters at the recommendation of the department chair with most other requirements waived because they remembered my classwork from undergrad and felt a PhD would fit me better. I was also set up with an introduction at a lab to fund me (granted that this did mean I didn&#x27;t get any flexibility in choosing my PI). But I disagree with the general premise that PhDs are not worth it.

As a prospective PhD student, I greatly appreciate articles like this on hn

&gt; Non-academic jobs and experience - should I include it?<p>&gt; I am a huge supporter of two things not related to research and education: having a job while an undergraduate or showing a substantial dedication to an organization.<p>Sadly, this is a very ageist perspective, that I think is very common in academia. This advice is specifically geared towards undergrads who are applying to PhD programs without stating so. It&#x27;s fine to tailor your advice to certain audiences (in fact the post says it&#x27;s the author&#x27;s perspective), but at least state who the intended audience is. I think the reason this ageist persepctive is common in academia is two-fold:<p>1) Many academics came straight from undergrad (or maybe had a one&#x2F;two year gap), so they reflect their personal background as indicative of the path others will take to academia. 2) Older students typically have significantly higher self-esteem and understand their worth. They&#x27;ve potentially achieved success outside of academia where their talents were appreciated. It&#x27;s much harder to steer such students to eschew their self-worth.<p>I speak from personal experience here. I started my PhD program at 35 after a successful industry career where I was unhappy with the type of work I was doing. I realized after a terrible interview experience at OpenAI that a PhD was the only way to pursue my interests in the burgeoning AI&#x2F;ML&#x2F;NLP field. Luckily, I made it into a pretty good PhD program that I&#x27;m happy with. I now conduct research melding LLMs with video games an interest I&#x27;ve held since the 90s playing CRPGs (back then I didn&#x27;t have a specific technology in mind, just the idea of an &quot;AI narrator&quot;).<p>If I had to give advice to PhD students, it&#x27;s to know your worth. The fact that you made it into a PhD program is not a fluke. Imposter syndrome is rampant and many advisors take advantage of this, either explicitly or implicitly without realizing it.<p>I came from the video game industry, so I knew crunch times, but my first year as a PhD student was exceedingly brutal. To get my first paper out, I spent three weeks working 100 hours a week. I walked out of the lab the day before the paper deadline and nearly quite my PhD program. I just thought nothing is worth this stress.<p>If my wife didn&#x27;t take care of everything else during that time, I couldn&#x27;t have done it. During that exact same time, I was taking classes. I had a three week project that coincided with my paper deadline. I didn&#x27;t start the class project until the day after it was due (you lost 10% of your grade per day late). Having industry experience helped tremendously here: I was already quite familiar with distributed systems having been the lead engineer on a (never released) MMORTS.<p>Don&#x27;t do this to yourself. It&#x27;s not worth it. At least in CS, deadlines for conferences are pretty arbitrary. Good research doesn&#x27;t fit into fixed timelines.<p>As an aside, I don&#x27;t blame my advisor for my stressful first year. He became a professor the same year I started my PhD. He didn&#x27;t know any better and just assumed I was managing my time well while getting my work done. We had a good talk after the deadline and he&#x27;s been absolutely great since. That&#x27;s why I say, sometimes it might happen out of pure ignorance of the system. No one teaches you how to be a good advisor while you&#x27;re getting a PhD. You&#x27;re assumed to learn that once you become a professor.<p>Though there are those who DO take advantange knowingly. There&#x27;s a professor in our department who is an absolute nightmare and for each candidate weekend when new prospective students are deciding on programs, all the current CS PhD students actively warn them away from working with this individual. They quite literally work people to the brink of death at times, where people have been hospitalized for exhaustion, and the professor even contacted them to do work while they were in the hospital! Though, considering the one suicide in their lab, it&#x27;s debatable if &quot;brink of death&quot; goes far enough.

I stopped reading the original post and the comments here as my brain stuck at PI, what the heck is that? Not all the readers are PhDs and PI is 3.14 or Raspberry to me these days.

The only advice that a prospective PhD student needs to have is telling them to stay the hell away from a PhD and never even touch it in their dreams with a ten feet pole.

<i>Almost</i> completely unrelated to the article, but I figure a few of you prospective PhD candidates could use a mental break anyway, so here goes.<p>Had a nice Baader-Meinhof moment from the article. I have been obsessed with music from a young age, not just the output but also the creative and technical processes that come together to make it, yet despite reading and watching a lot about my favorite bands, the creative process, the music industry over the years I&#x27;ve never internalized his name (although I&#x27;ve doubtless encountered references to him many times).<p>I stumbled onto a documentary about Rubin and his studio Shangri-La last night and found it immediately captivating, musing to myself, &quot;Wow, what a cool and weird dude. How have I never picked up on his influence before?&quot; After the doc finished I enjoyed a nice session of creative thinking inspired by some things he and David Lynch were talking about. Cool, I&#x27;ve got a new person on my radar to seek out their words and wisdom when the mood or need arises. Then in the opening paragraphs of the first link I click this morning, on HN in a piece written for PhD candidates of all places, here is his name. Kind of wild.<p>The song &quot;Hurt&quot; by Johnnie Cash [0] is a long-time favorite. It&#x27;s one the greatest rock and roll covers ever, in no small part for how transformative and emotionally powerful the reinterpretation is, second only to &quot;Take It to the Limit&quot; by Etta James [1] imo. I just learned from that interview it was Rubin who brought Reznor&#x27;s song to Johnny, saying &quot;this is you, this is the man in black.&quot; It&#x27;s funny, I have sometimes wondered about Johnny listening to Nine Inch Nails, finding it weird. But this is somehow even crazier, that Rubin could hear that first song and somehow connect it to Cash, knowing he might be able to turn it into something so powerful and personal.<p>I feel like anyone who has a fair degree of creativity in their pursuits, whether professional or for personal fulfillment, can benefit from absorbing some of this dude&#x27;s process, thoughts, and vibes. Even if you find him and what he says completely ridiculous. Anyway, the entire 60 minutes interview that the clip linked in the article is from is worth a watch [2]. It&#x27;s pretty short. I particularly like an exchange from the end of that interview,<p>Rubin: &quot;The audience comes last.&quot;<p>Cooper: &quot;How can that be?&quot;<p>Rubin: &quot;Well, the audience doesn&#x27;t know what they want. The audience only knows what has come before.&quot;<p>In the brief time I&#x27;ve been exposed to the guy, one of my favorite concepts Rubin expressed is this idea that his best creative ideas come entirely from outside himself, so most of his life is about putting himself in a place where he can be receptive to that outside force or influence, whatever it is. That rather than being a generator of great ideas, he is merely an antenna that can be carefully tuned to receive the signal from somewhere else.<p>We all have heard the wisdom that you really can&#x27;t force creativity or flashes of insight, but this takes it a step further in a way that resonates with me. I don&#x27;t think what he is saying is necessarily true in any objective or empirical sense of course. The power of this concept is that it deeply acknowledges that almost everything inside us that we think of as ourselves, especially our ego, our sensory interpretations, and our conscious thought processes pouring through our knowledge base, are nowhere near enough on their own to produce the kind of brilliance which human beings are sometimes capable. And becoming overly focused on those more superficial (or at least obvious) parts of our consciousness can sometimes drown out or distort the signal that comes from deeper awarenesses which sometimes have unique and powerful things to say about reality.<p>Thanks for reading, and good luck to you in your creative and technical pursuits!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8AHCfZTRGiI">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=8AHCfZTRGiI</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EqhYXLVYQJ8">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EqhYXLVYQJ8</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EUbUn9FnrME">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=EUbUn9FnrME</a>