malloc47's comments

If you consider the sheer number of hours I tend to spend on my dissertation work compared to the stipend I get, I'm paid criminally less than minimum wage. But you're not given the leeway to focus "exclusively" on a single research contribution in a focused manner in other higher-paying options.

Even if you're not taking out a loan in the monetary sense, you're taking out a loan from your long term earnings, one that has little chance of being repaid, to put your mental assets/skills to a non-remunerable task, and get a certification that you did so. The problem is that the option to continue doing this (tenure-track academic jobs) are limited and (naturally) highly contested.

However, you make a good point--there's an underlying and insidious opportunity cost that is often unknowingly sacrificed: that of atrophying skill sets. It's easy for a PhD to be a hugely insular experience, if you let it, and if you take the easy way out and don't stretch your engineering skills (speaking in terms of CS here, since that's what I know), you're in for a rude awakening if you determine that academia is not for you. If you're not careful, you'll get good at writing papers, but might actually get /worse/ at writing portable, readable, and maintainable code. And as brilliant as your papers may be, if you can't ship good code, you're going to have trouble in industry.

The good thing, again at least for CS students like me, is that the "fun and enriching" environment of academia means a lot of opportunity for starting companies, creating libraries/frameworks, working on side projects, and doing contract work, so there's no reason you have to atrophy. Which is something that, sadly, the visions of the tenure-track academic job are engineered to beat out of you.

Absolutely. I'm sure I pilfered the idea from somewhere else and tweaked it a bit. Glad it may be of use to you.

I was trying to stay away from the typical "Some Experience" to "Expert" scale typically used for skill proficiencies, and instead provide a sense of the scale at which I had used each skill directly.

Hope it helps (even if that means ruling out LaTeX!). I'm going to be on the job market in the near future too, so I spent some time evaluating the LaTeX vs. HTML options not too long ago.

If you do end up going with LaTeX, I would highly recommend XeTeX/XeLaTeX so you have a larger font selection.

I'm going to plug LaTeX. LaTeX macros are ugly to use, but they're suitably powerful, and since it's compiled, you don't have to worry about cross-browser issues once you have it generated. I prefer to point to LinkedIn instead of producing a separate webpage since I'm less of a frontend dev, so YMMV.

My resume [1] and source [2] for reference:

[1]: http://resume.malloc47.com

[2]: https://github.com/malloc47/cv/

This is what I have noticed several social scientists reference when discussing survey/questionnaire development:

http://www.amazon.com/Asking-Questions-Definitive-Questionna...

It's good to know there are still realistic perspectives in academia. To be fair, the "anti-industry" attitude is probably adviser rather than department dependent, as I have heard a few first-hand data points regarding advisers that align much more with your experience than mine.

Given the 1/10 statistic, sooner or later professors will have to satisfy themselves with student's "real-world" contributions, whether they like it or not. I'm just worried how often I see real skill sets (e.g. proper software engineering) being devalued among graduate students because it's not directly relevant to a hypothetical future job as a professor. I feel lucky that I've been able to make extra time to write "real" code from my dissertation work, but it's rather unfortunate that this isn't always the norm.

One very good point this article brings to light is the emphasis academia places on the tenure-track job as the end-all be-all of getting a Ph.D. I can't even begin to count how many times I've heard how getting a professorship is the only worthy job, and how there's no point to a Ph.D. if you don't get such a job.

It's nearly to the point of brainwashing (a sweeping generalization, of course, which likely varies greatly from department to department). As a soon-to-be Ph.D. graduate, it's refreshing to know that industry is not only a viable option, but doesn't have the same [superhuman][1] expectations.

[1]: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Pap...

One of the most efficient everyday optimizations I've made in the past few years was to adopt the lisp-style naming convention for my local file system hierarchy. Removing all capitalization and special characters (other than the dash) makes navigating via CLI much easier. And having a predictable naming scheme means I rely on tab completion slightly less too, as I have more predictive capability regarding how I might have named things in the past. More generally, treating my home folder as, essentially, an exposed API for which I'm the primary consumer has paid dividends.

I've been authoring a post on solving interview questions in map/reduce between experimental runs myself, so I guess I already hit the "bored graduate student" point too...