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).
In this light, while it contain a large number of helpful tips and valuable pieces of advise, why is it called "survival guide"?
Karpathy has the benefit of being one of the best known bloggers/teachers in the most popular graduate-level course in possibly the most financially successful subfields ever while graduating at the peak of industry spending (so far). He's almost certainly the student described in http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/technology/the-race-is-on-... His experiences and successes are not generalizable.
But he's probably my favorite blogger too and its at the very least interesting to hear his take on his experiences.
It seems that a larger-than-I-expected fraction of the response to my post concentrates on a very small part of it, especially the part where I enumerate some considerations for thinking about whether a PhD might be a good fit for you.
By far the largest fraction of the post is concerned with tips/tricks for effectively navigating the PhD experience once you commit to going through it. I jokingly refer to it as a "survival guide" because (as I mention in the disclaimer paragraph) the experience is by no means a walk in the park.
> I do data science freelancing. That is, I take contracts related to machine learning (predicting things, e.g. user growth of a company), data visualization (custom charts in D3.js), preparing and conducting trainings in data analysis [...]
Would you mind sharing a bit on your approach to contracting in this space?
Here are a few questions: Do you do blind calls? Do you use a freelancing site? Do you work remotely? What is the typical contract, how much do you bill? Does one have to do public talks to get recognised? How much do clients value your having a PhD? How do you animate the networking? Do clients find you, or do you find them? Why are they buying, FOMO on a marketing dataset, or just plain curiosity on the subject? If you had to specialise in one niche market, what would be, what would be your approach? Basically: what would be the steps you would take should you start only with the data science technical knowledge?
I recently met a professor, he said that most of his students are working in Deep Learning and he is finding it difficult to get people to work on other interesting problems. So there is really a demand of students to work on other areas as well. But most of the students get carried away by the trending fields.
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.
A good 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').
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 think it's more of a continuum than you suppose in your comment. It's not a binary of "great" vs "average" PhD. There's plenty in between and many types of averages. Karpathy had it good, as did Might, Guo, and other purveyors of wisdom on PhD. But that doesn't invalidate their arguments and observations.
Isn't what you are saying a bit extreme? I mean, PhDs in Europe are very short and thus students don't have the opportunity to do that much. So in a way they are quite mediocre. Yet some recover afterwards. But I agree it's hard to revert the trend if you're in a down-spiral.
"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: ..."
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).
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?
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.
* Getting into a PhD program: references, references, references
* Student adviser relationship
* Pre-vs-post tenure
* Impressing an adviser
* (Topic) Plays to your adviser’s interests and strengths
Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Reading this, I'm so thankful I didn't enter academia. I still pursue my academic interests on my own.
Edit: A few people insist on casting a float into a bool. Every job has politics, ranging from 0.01% (anonymous author of 1-man SaaS) to 99% (politician). It's not very informative to note that both are non-zero.
Agreed completely. I did a PhD knowing that I had zero interest in going into academia, and it provided a major boost to my professional career. I find it surprising when people talk about doing a PhD as exclusively useful for academics.
"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?"
Good point. Several, nice examples from my field of study are AbsInt, Kesterel, Galois, and AdaCore.
AbsInt turns elite work of Ph.D.'s into commercial products and enhances them. Doubt it's boring. Kesterel has people doing academic-style research on hard problems and applying it to real-world. Galois does that too. AdaCore does a combo of tooling for grunt work, advanced tooling (esp compiler), and cutting-edge work (eg SPARK provers) involving academics remote or in-sourced. A good PhD in relevant subjects might get a job at any of these companies with similarly interesting work. Or, if tool is good enough, make a company out of it by partnering with people good at the business/sales side.
So, definitely opportunities here beyond black and white of academic-only or grunt work.
>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?
The discussion of what now? Not everyone wants to start a business. Not everyone has the domain and market knowledge to start a successful business. "Blazing your own path to glory" fails 90% of the time, usually repeatedly.
If you're gonna be that damned persistent, you might as well have the freedom of academia.
Hm... are there any options other than hoping against all odds to successfully navigate the tenure-track rat-race, working for The Man as an anonymous cog at BigCorp, or starting a business and pouring myself into businessy businessperson busywork? I'm afraid... I'm afraid I may be a defective individual in that none of these sound terribly appealing as a way to spend the bulk of my life.
Break free of the political shackles of academia and go on trying to convince people to invest in your business, become employees, and convince customers to use your services? At least the political shackles of academia are intellectually stimulating and not pure dreary salesmanship like the political shackles of business ownership.
Eventually I decided that I wanted to do research and I couldn't be more happy about it. My experience as a PhD student was awesome, I did a postdoc on a topic that interested me very much but quite different than what I did during my PhD, and I've just landed a permanent position in academia as an associate professor!
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.
> Good teaching, blogging, and sharing software probably hurts you.
Karpathy is pretty famous for his blogging and open software. His code and blog post about recurrent neural networks practically got him a language model named after him.
He also recommend you to release code in this article, so I'm not really sure what you are getting at.
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.
Could you maybe go over some experiences of your PhD that are orthogonal to those of Karpathy? I'm really interested and I'm sure there are others who are as well.
> Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure.
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.
> Personal growth. ... you’ll become a master of managing your own psychology
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.
> Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school
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]).
> So you’ve entered a PhD program and found an adviser. Now what do you work on?
You will not be interested in the same exact topic for ~5 years straight, so keep that mind. Try to keep it broad.
> Giving talks
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.)
[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] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc
> > Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school
> 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]).
Isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens after you want to progress to the next environment?
Is it realistic to be in the top 1% anywhere? Isn't that like being the best graduate ever from a small program, or the best in a decade at a larger one? You're not competing with a large population anymore, you're competing with someone who has passed dozens of filter steps in their lifetime and have gotten just as far as you have.
What "graduating class"? In undergrad studies, your peers are your classmates, but in PhD studies, your peers are the global community of your sub-subfield. For feeling like you're the best, your competition will be someone across the ocean who happens to work on a topic very close to your thesis, and most of students in your department will be largely irrelevant since they'll work in a different field and interact with different topics, papers, ideas and people.
If anything, being in one of the few labs that work on "top" things in a specific domain pretty much guarantees that you'll be in that 1% of your subfield; and if your lab is weak in that (though possibly world class in other fields), then you won't.
How do you quantify being top 1% of your graduating class in a PhD?
I can potentially see how your advice could work for undergrad, but doing good research is difficult if your peers aren't as good. Your discussions are less interesting, your ambitions are scaled down, and so on.
These reasons for getting a PhD seem extremely one-sided and, frankly, inaccurate.
> Exclusivity. There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs.
Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate.
> 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
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.
> Ownership. The research you produce will be yours as an individual. Your accomplishments will have your name attached to them.
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.
> Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate.
Acceptance rate is meaningless unless the base populations are the same. Considering only the (hopefully) top graduates are interested in applying for PhD, whereas most graduates have to look for jobs, acceptance rates between grad school and companies are really comparable.
> I think it's patently ridiculous that professors get "authorship" credit on papers even when they had a minimal, at best, role in it.
Think of professor as a spiritual mentor. I don't think Jony Ive put his hands on the drawing of latest apple watches anymore, and he gets to sit in the white room every year. It's the philosophical guides he puts into his team that earn him the privilege.
In terms of material compensation, I totally agree with you that companies generally pay much better. The credit part is really nominal. I've know some people working in google, facebook. Their projects range from google cardboard, google daydream, fb live video, to fb 360 video. Honestly, I have never seen their names/credits anywhere else but our private conversations. It's nowhere to be found.
>> 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
> 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.
I was wondering if you could comment on this? Personal experience? I may be naive for not believing this in the first place; why would there be disdain expressed towards PhD applicants at a company? Is it a business perspective ("PhDs are too expensive"), technical ("they are too specialized, cannot practically implement solutions we expect of a new hire"), social ("I don't understand academia and couldn't achieve that high"), or something else?
> Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate.
False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities.
> > 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
> 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.
I agree.
> 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.
The results come from products you did not solely produce. There are plenty of other co-workers or teams which helped contribute large components to your product.
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.
Experiences differ. A lot. Personally, I had an awful time during my PhD, and between the penury and the toil and the bleak prospects afterward, I'd say you're definitely in the minority on this one.
I wouldn't recommend a PhD to anyone who isn't dead set on a job that requires one.
I just finished my PhD in CS. Took me about 7 years, damn it feels good to be done.
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.
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.
>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 :).
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.
> Many otherwise good students don't get taught this coded language.
Almost no one is taught this coded language. You absorb it by reading tons and tons of papers, then more papers. Karpathy is unusual and fun to make it explicit like this. He's a canny person.
The reception to your work cannot be judged just on its technical merit. Writing good papers is part of your job in academia; that involves explaining your work in a descriptive, easy-to-follow (for experts in the field) manner.
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.
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...).
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....
18 papers now (bioinformatics & molecular biology) and I have never seen a single authorship dispute. If you are a middle author, complaining about position is biting the hand that feeds you. Most people know better than that. Also, it doesn't even matter as there are only 3 real positions on papers: first, last, and everything else.
Coauthorship IME has always been extremely amiable. Often, when I am a middle author, I almost feel that I'm being done a favor by being put as a coauthor when I didn't do that much work (but I did make a material contribution). Conversely, as a first or senior author, it costs you nothing to add coauthors and gains you goodwill. It's win-win. It's very easy to get coauthorships if you keep your eyes open.
In my experience, if you want to succeed as a Ph.D. in the sciences you have to find a niche that puts you in the position of being useful to other people rather than in competition with them. If you don't, you will fail. If you do, it is almost comically easy to be at least moderately successful.
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.
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: http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/
I walked this path. Think about where you want to be when you're done. Are you married? Do you have kids? Do you want to do those things? If you want to be an academic, you have at least a decade of grueling work ahead. That's 4 years to do the Ph.D., and another 6 to get tenure, which is like doing three more dissertations worth of research while trying to manage a small group of young, inexperienced engineers. And that's if everything goes well. Precious little time for a spouse and kids. Ignore this ridiculous talk about learning to golf and taking vacations abroad. Nobody I know did that.
Personally, I finished the PhD in May and moved on to a really fantastic job in my field. I have time and money that I wouldn't have as an academic.
I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions I had about the academic lifestyle going in. This is about the professor job, not grad school.
1. Being a professor is not about teaching. I went into grad school thinking I could make a difference. Address the rampant gaps in my colleagues' education. It turns out that professors generally abhor teaching, and that departments actually use teaching assignments to punish underperforming faculty. Performance means papers and even more importantly grant money. Teaching doesn't enter into it.
2. Professors do not have any free time. Even tenured ones. That appealing academic calendar is a mirage. If you are a professor, you're a professor every waking minute. You spend your vacations at conferences, your summers trying to get ahead on research. You read papers before breakfast and after dinner. Or you burn out after getting tenure, get a heavy teaching load as punishment for your lack of productivity, and turn into the kind of professor everybody has an anecdote about. The one with nutjob politics who never turns up for office hours, or the one who lectures while hung over or still drunk.
Sorry to rant, grad school is no picnic and I wish I'd gone into it with my eyes wider open. I'm happy with the end result, personal growth, seeing things on a higher level, being "doctor" so-and-so, having an awesome job, but it's not at all an easy way out if you're tired of what you're doing now.
If you want a CS Ph.D., demonstrate that you're a REALLY REALLY GOOD programmer; that can make up for lack of significant research experience. I've advised a few dozen students of various ranks, and I still rate programming ability as amongst the top prerequisite ... everything else can be learned more easily in a short time, imho:
I did a MEng in CS, then went into work in a totally different industry for four years where I hardly touched a computer, and managed to come back in to do a PhD in CS without any research experience.
I literally cold-emailed some potential advisors that I found from looking at university websites and told them what I was passionate about. I got asked in for an interview and pitched what I wanted to work on.
I think if you are grown up and passionate about doing a PhD you are already going to look pretty impressive, as most advisors will usually be dealing with young undergraduates who can often be drifting into a PhD without really knowing what they want.
Someone dumping a paying career they have have already invested most of their 20s into has obviously thought about it very carefully and knows what they want.
Find a topic you like and mail some people in the field directly. If you make it personal you'll probably get a response. I've finished one PhD and dropped out of another. In both cases, it started off with a friendly chat with my potential supervisor.
"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.
It practically is a litmus test on answering what you should do, not necessarily in research, but in life.
For those interested, Hamming course on "You and your research" is on Youtube and has a _ton_ of _practical_ advice to future engineers.
> 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.
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.
And for the love of God, never ever call yourself a "doctor." WTF is wrong with you? No.
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.
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 think the larger point is that you won't have time to take those vacations. That being said, a fresh grad that can make it into a top PhD can probably pull 200k+ in Silicon Valley.
> 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.
Love Andrej but really, this isn't a common experience.
stared|9 years ago
Here is a blog post on my transition from theoretical physics to data science (and how it made my life much better): http://p.migdal.pl/2015/12/14/sci-to-data-sci.html
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).
In this light, while it contain a large number of helpful tips and valuable pieces of advise, why is it called "survival guide"?
laxatives|9 years ago
But he's probably my favorite blogger too and its at the very least interesting to hear his take on his experiences.
shkr|9 years ago
karpathy|9 years ago
By far the largest fraction of the post is concerned with tips/tricks for effectively navigating the PhD experience once you commit to going through it. I jokingly refer to it as a "survival guide" because (as I mention in the disclaimer paragraph) the experience is by no means a walk in the park.
BenoitP|9 years ago
> I do data science freelancing. That is, I take contracts related to machine learning (predicting things, e.g. user growth of a company), data visualization (custom charts in D3.js), preparing and conducting trainings in data analysis [...]
Would you mind sharing a bit on your approach to contracting in this space?
Here are a few questions: Do you do blind calls? Do you use a freelancing site? Do you work remotely? What is the typical contract, how much do you bill? Does one have to do public talks to get recognised? How much do clients value your having a PhD? How do you animate the networking? Do clients find you, or do you find them? Why are they buying, FOMO on a marketing dataset, or just plain curiosity on the subject? If you had to specialise in one niche market, what would be, what would be your approach? Basically: what would be the steps you would take should you start only with the data science technical knowledge?
codepie|9 years ago
glangdale|9 years ago
A good 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').
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).
shas3|9 years ago
nextos|9 years ago
michaelvoz|9 years ago
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).
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?
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.
throwawaymsft|9 years ago
Edit: A few people insist on casting a float into a bool. Every job has politics, ranging from 0.01% (anonymous author of 1-man SaaS) to 99% (politician). It's not very informative to note that both are non-zero.
JoshTriplett|9 years ago
nickpsecurity|9 years ago
Good point. Several, nice examples from my field of study are AbsInt, Kesterel, Galois, and AdaCore.
https://www.absint.com/products.htm
http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html
https://galois.com/blog/
http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects
AbsInt turns elite work of Ph.D.'s into commercial products and enhances them. Doubt it's boring. Kesterel has people doing academic-style research on hard problems and applying it to real-world. Galois does that too. AdaCore does a combo of tooling for grunt work, advanced tooling (esp compiler), and cutting-edge work (eg SPARK provers) involving academics remote or in-sourced. A good PhD in relevant subjects might get a job at any of these companies with similarly interesting work. Or, if tool is good enough, make a company out of it by partnering with people good at the business/sales side.
So, definitely opportunities here beyond black and white of academic-only or grunt work.
eli_gottlieb|9 years ago
The discussion of what now? Not everyone wants to start a business. Not everyone has the domain and market knowledge to start a successful business. "Blazing your own path to glory" fails 90% of the time, usually repeatedly.
If you're gonna be that damned persistent, you might as well have the freedom of academia.
Chinjut|9 years ago
Retra|9 years ago
p4bl0|9 years ago
Eventually I decided that I wanted to do research and I couldn't be more happy about it. My experience as a PhD student was awesome, I did a postdoc on a topic that interested me very much but quite different than what I did during my PhD, and I've just landed a permanent position in academia as an associate professor!
aab0|9 years ago
wodenokoto|9 years ago
Karpathy is pretty famous for his blogging and open software. His code and blog post about recurrent neural networks practically got him a language model named after him.
He also recommend you to release code in this article, so I'm not really sure what you are getting at.
baby|9 years ago
I haven't read that. The author says that poorly incremental work is discouraged.
> Get into only the elite colleges and betwork at conferences as much as possible
It's about being part of the community, having brilliant people around you to push you and exchange ideas with, meeting people to collaborate with...
fatjokes|9 years ago
Rainymood|9 years ago
sndean|9 years ago
> Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure.
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.
> Personal growth. ... you’ll become a master of managing your own psychology
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.
> Picking the school. ... your dream school should 1) be a top school
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]).
> So you’ve entered a PhD program and found an adviser. Now what do you work on?
You will not be interested in the same exact topic for ~5 years straight, so keep that mind. Try to keep it broad.
> Giving talks
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.)
[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] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc
laxatives|9 years ago
> 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]).
Isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens after you want to progress to the next environment?
Is it realistic to be in the top 1% anywhere? Isn't that like being the best graduate ever from a small program, or the best in a decade at a larger one? You're not competing with a large population anymore, you're competing with someone who has passed dozens of filter steps in their lifetime and have gotten just as far as you have.
PeterisP|9 years ago
If anything, being in one of the few labs that work on "top" things in a specific domain pretty much guarantees that you'll be in that 1% of your subfield; and if your lab is weak in that (though possibly world class in other fields), then you won't.
Ar-Curunir|9 years ago
I can potentially see how your advice could work for undergrad, but doing good research is difficult if your peers aren't as good. Your discussions are less interesting, your ambitions are scaled down, and so on.
morgante|9 years ago
> Exclusivity. There are very few people who make it to the top PhD programs.
Top companies are even more exclusive than PhD programs in terms of acceptance rate.
> 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
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.
> Ownership. The research you produce will be yours as an individual. Your accomplishments will have your name attached to them.
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.
dilly_li|9 years ago
Acceptance rate is meaningless unless the base populations are the same. Considering only the (hopefully) top graduates are interested in applying for PhD, whereas most graduates have to look for jobs, acceptance rates between grad school and companies are really comparable.
> I think it's patently ridiculous that professors get "authorship" credit on papers even when they had a minimal, at best, role in it.
Think of professor as a spiritual mentor. I don't think Jony Ive put his hands on the drawing of latest apple watches anymore, and he gets to sit in the white room every year. It's the philosophical guides he puts into his team that earn him the privilege.
In terms of material compensation, I totally agree with you that companies generally pay much better. The credit part is really nominal. I've know some people working in google, facebook. Their projects range from google cardboard, google daydream, fb live video, to fb 360 video. Honestly, I have never seen their names/credits anywhere else but our private conversations. It's nowhere to be found.
eatbitseveryday|9 years ago
> 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.
I was wondering if you could comment on this? Personal experience? I may be naive for not believing this in the first place; why would there be disdain expressed towards PhD applicants at a company? Is it a business perspective ("PhDs are too expensive"), technical ("they are too specialized, cannot practically implement solutions we expect of a new hire"), social ("I don't understand academia and couldn't achieve that high"), or something else?
chronic102|9 years ago
False. Do you even know how many people apply online to Uber, Slack, Facebook, and Google? More than the entire population of flagship state universities.
> > 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
> 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.
I agree.
> 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.
The results come from products you did not solely produce. There are plenty of other co-workers or teams which helped contribute large components to your product.
enmi2015|9 years ago
johan_larson|9 years ago
Experiences differ. A lot. Personally, I had an awful time during my PhD, and between the penury and the toil and the bleak prospects afterward, I'd say you're definitely in the minority on this one.
I wouldn't recommend a PhD to anyone who isn't dead set on a job that requires one.
slashblake|9 years ago
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.
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.
elmar|9 years ago
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179
ppod|9 years ago
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.
robotresearcher|9 years ago
Almost no one is taught this coded language. You absorb it by reading tons and tons of papers, then more papers. Karpathy is unusual and fun to make it explicit like this. He's a canny person.
Ar-Curunir|9 years ago
jccalhoun|9 years ago
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...).
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....
xaa|9 years ago
Coauthorship IME has always been extremely amiable. Often, when I am a middle author, I almost feel that I'm being done a favor by being put as a coauthor when I didn't do that much work (but I did make a material contribution). Conversely, as a first or senior author, it costs you nothing to add coauthors and gains you goodwill. It's win-win. It's very easy to get coauthorships if you keep your eyes open.
In my experience, if you want to succeed as a Ph.D. in the sciences you have to find a niche that puts you in the position of being useful to other people rather than in competition with them. If you don't, you will fail. If you do, it is almost comically easy to be at least moderately successful.
lifebeyondfife|9 years ago
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: http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/
Or to be more succinct, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
shazam|9 years ago
sevensor|9 years ago
Personally, I finished the PhD in May and moved on to a really fantastic job in my field. I have time and money that I wouldn't have as an academic.
I'd like to clear up a few misconceptions I had about the academic lifestyle going in. This is about the professor job, not grad school.
1. Being a professor is not about teaching. I went into grad school thinking I could make a difference. Address the rampant gaps in my colleagues' education. It turns out that professors generally abhor teaching, and that departments actually use teaching assignments to punish underperforming faculty. Performance means papers and even more importantly grant money. Teaching doesn't enter into it.
2. Professors do not have any free time. Even tenured ones. That appealing academic calendar is a mirage. If you are a professor, you're a professor every waking minute. You spend your vacations at conferences, your summers trying to get ahead on research. You read papers before breakfast and after dinner. Or you burn out after getting tenure, get a heavy teaching load as punishment for your lack of productivity, and turn into the kind of professor everybody has an anecdote about. The one with nutjob politics who never turns up for office hours, or the one who lectures while hung over or still drunk.
Sorry to rant, grad school is no picnic and I wish I'd gone into it with my eyes wider open. I'm happy with the end result, personal growth, seeing things on a higher level, being "doctor" so-and-so, having an awesome job, but it's not at all an easy way out if you're tired of what you're doing now.
pgbovine|9 years ago
http://pgbovine.net/prospective-students.htm
chrisseaton|9 years ago
I literally cold-emailed some potential advisors that I found from looking at university websites and told them what I was passionate about. I got asked in for an interview and pitched what I wanted to work on.
I think if you are grown up and passionate about doing a PhD you are already going to look pretty impressive, as most advisors will usually be dealing with young undergraduates who can often be drifting into a PhD without really knowing what they want.
Someone dumping a paying career they have have already invested most of their 20s into has obviously thought about it very carefully and knows what they want.
soVeryTired|9 years ago
crististm|9 years ago
It practically is a litmus test on answering what you should do, not necessarily in research, but in life.
For those interested, Hamming course on "You and your research" is on Youtube and has a _ton_ of _practical_ advice to future engineers.
iamtrask|9 years ago
perhaps instead of discounting his experience... it would be better to take his advice
makeset|9 years ago
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.
And for the love of God, never ever call yourself a "doctor." WTF is wrong with you? No.
If you're still a graduate student ("working towards"), this is all moot, because they shouldn't have let you into the party.
hiq|9 years ago
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.
argonaut|9 years ago
maxschumacher91|9 years ago
avmich|9 years ago
Yeah, I've heard someone - Euclid may be? - said something similar about the road to science... :)
adamnemecek|9 years ago
karpathy|9 years ago
wuschel|9 years ago
akhilcacharya|9 years ago
Love Andrej but really, this isn't a common experience.
Abimelech|9 years ago
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