10 ms·

A Survival Guide to a PhD

319 points by wlrd 10y ago

michaelvoz 10y ago
"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.
- throwawaymsft 10y ago
  "Properties you find appealing..." * Freedom * Ownership * Personal freedom ... <Later...> * 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.
  - eanzenberg 10y ago
    From my super-limited experience in academia, I found politics is more important at top schools and much less important when you get to ~40-80 ranked US schools for PhD programs.
    - throwawaymsft 10y ago
      That's good to hear. I have the hankering to return to school at some point, and I really just want to learn and contribute.
    - pgbovine 10y ago
      Having spent time at schools of various "ranks" (whatever that means), "politics" (whatever that means ... that's super vague) is everywhere. It's what you make of it. Whenever you have people, money, and status mixing, there is politics. That's not exclusive to academia. Every company I've worked at also had those dynamics. Want to eliminate politics? Be independently wealthy and work alone :) Otherwise everyone needs to learn to work with and transcend the system in their own unique way.
      - stared 10y ago
        Well, with freelancing (in data science) I managed to avoid politics (and bureaucracy) completely (no, I am not independently wealthy).
    - phd_ 10y ago
      I went through a PhD at a non-top-tier school (borderline between second-tier and third-tier). I definitely dealt with politics extensively. A huge amount of people-pleasing, both with your advisor and with others in your chosen research area and the broader field it sits in. A fair bit of funding-related politics. And a fair bit of actual politics politics, if you want to fit in. There's a lot of in-group / out-group politics in academia; don't make life more difficult for yourself when you know a straightforward way to survive. Learn to deeply bury any opinions you might have that don't completely align with those of people who control your fate, especially in areas fundamental to their in-group identity, and if that fails, lie convincingly. (Remember that dodging a question where enthusiastic agreement was expected is a form of answer, and not the one you want to give.) You might get lucky and work with people accepting of differences of opinion, but I wouldn't recommend risking it when years of your life are on the line. I don't regret the experience, and quite frankly I learned a few other survival skills in the process that simply hadn't come up as an undergrad, but don't go into it thinking it's a purely technical experience, or that you won't have to deal with a pile of utterly ridiculous BS and unpleasantness.
  - baby 10y ago
    Spoiler Alert: politic is everywhere.
    - throwawaymsft 10y ago
      Yes, but (importantly) degrees vary. The politics of working for an adviser chasing tenure are different from, say, running a SaaS, writing an ebook, or selling a plugin.
      - baby 10y ago
        You mean, politic is different if you're not working for anyone? I can't even agree with that. You will still have politic in place if you have people working for you, or if you have critics reviewing your ebook, or if you're trying to get your plugin accepted in a store, etc... cqfd
        throwawaymsft 10y ago
        Correct. And are the politics of getting your plugin accepted in the Wordpress directory more or less than getting tenure? See the edit above. You are saying two things must be equal because they are both non-zero. It's a very strange argument.
        baby 10y ago
        Getting tenure is a life accomplishment. Getting a plugin accepted in a wordpress directory? Come on, we're comparing apples and oranges. If you look at some parts of getting a tenure, they are without politic as well. Example: studying a subject.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    > Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Yeah, internal corporate politics never gets people's entire project canceled with no notice in the corporate world. That would just be mean, so it doesn't happen /s. (Guess what I found out last Friday?)
    - throwawaymsft 10y ago
      That sucks, but politics in the workplace can be dialed from mega-corp to startup to consultancy to freelancer to anonymous author of a SaaS. How much politics did patio11 deal with when running Bingo Card Creator?
      - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
        Pretty sure that the same applies for academia. It depends on your department culture and lab environment.
        user5994461 10y ago
        I found the academia to be way more vicious and politics than a company. In academia, teachers/referees/directors were commonly there for 10-20 years, some will probably never have to live their positions and they have full unlimited authority for many things. The worse that could happen in academia as a student is to have politics goes against your back. You will be blocked from graduating, you will loose X years of study unlikely to start over or graduate at another place, and be stuck with your debt and no diploma. In a company, the worst that could happen is simply to be fired. You look for another job and keep your money, you keep your diploma, keep your experiences. In fact, if you have a problem with your boss at work, you can always change job. If you have a problem with your PhD (or master's) teacher in academia, you can't leave without failing your studies and you're fucked.
  - euske 10y ago
    > casting a float into a bool Haha, a geeky yet very apt expression.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    > Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics That's crazy. The way to get a great reference is to do outstanding work. If by 'playing politics' you mean not pissing people off by being an asshole or being unreliable, then, yeah, take care to be a good colleague. But almost entirely: do really good work.
    - hueving 10y ago
      Bash other people's novel work while peer reviewing it anonymously, then steal it and submit for publication at another conference before the rejection notification goes to the original author. Once someone makes it into the review pools for top conferences, they receive a constant feed of good ideas to harvest in the form of submissions.
      - robotresearcher 10y ago
        That's the pathological case, yes. People can also go steal cars and rob houses. But they usually don't. Good luck getting a reference from someone after stealing their idea.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  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.
  - eanzenberg 10y ago
    Same! I was super-interested in research and that's why I pursued a PhD. I never thought of running a lab or teaching classes.
    - tostitos1979 10y ago
      A friend and I (both PhDs) were just discussing how difficult having a PhD has made getting engineering positions.In the course of interviewing at top-5 companies, we both have experienced a$$hats/interviewers with complexes who seem bent on showing off how they are smarter than the PhD interviewee .. curious if you have run into this as well, and any strategies to guard against this? I've also seen people who think PhDs can't code to save their life (I've seen such people but those are very obvious ... people who couldn't do fizbuzz) or think PhDs would get bored and leave easily. How does a competent PhD job seeker deal with this crap?
      - JoshTriplett 10y ago
        I didn't run into any of that in any of the companies I interviewed with; if anything, I found that coming in with a PhD resulted in correspondingly higher expectations. I'd treat any of the items you mentioned as warning signs and look for a better opportunity. To specifically counteract the "can't code" item, have plenty of practical items on your resume; include your published papers and conference presentations, but also include projects you've contributed to and similar. (For people doing a PhD who plan to work in industry, make sure you present at some industry conferences, not just academic conferences, and publish your code as/into Open Source projects.) A CV for an academic position doesn't work unmodified as a professional resume (with possible exceptions if you want to work in an industry research lab). In the specific context of CS, if you look at medium to large companies, you should already ask questions about the technical job ladder (such as making sure that one exists, rather than the only promotion path leading into management). Ask specific questions about how a PhD affects your starting position on that ladder. If it doesn't at all, then seriously consider looking for somewhere that it does. A company that values PhDs seems less likely to hold the misconceptions you mentioned.
- p4bl0 10y ago
  Your comment reminded me of a 5 years old blogpost of mine: https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html. 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!
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >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.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "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. https://www.absint.com/products.htm https://www.absint.com/products.htm http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html https://galois.com/blog/ https://galois.com/blog/ http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects 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.
- Retra 10y ago
  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.
- Chinjut 10y ago
  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.
  - michaelvoz 10y ago
    Sure! I merely presented a few of the more common case paths! For instance, a good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless for anonymities sake) is currently exploring the world, working as a cook in cafes, restaurants, etc, never staying anywhere for long, living out of a backpack. Very romantic, I could never do it myself, but his life is his own. I dont think man has ever been as truly free as we are today, you can really do anything you set your mind to, not confined to the short, somewhat stuffy list you and I have walked over together.
  - tgarma1234 10y ago
    Please, don't do a PhD. The tenure track treadmill is brutal and on the wane. You would be much happier just getting a job. A normal job. With ordinary people. And I say that after a masters degree, many years in a PhD program and the having a normal job. A PhD is sort of useless at this point in history.
    - Chinjut 10y ago
      Good advice, but bad news: Too late. (Well, I quit ABD (with a consolation Master's) and got a BigCorp job, but wasn't too thrilled with that, and since now I've got this monkey on my back, I keep trying to finish writing my dissertation again, pointless though I know it to be... Actually, sounds like our experiences are quite similar except for the last bit!) [No one's ever going to put in the effort to de-anonymize me off Hacker News, right? Just in case: Dear future potential employers reading this, A) Please don't, and B) Hey, I was totally kidding about not being thrilled with the BigCorp job. I love working for The Man! Go you! You The Man!]
sndean 10y ago
With my own disclaimer [0], a few comments: > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc
- laxatives 10y ago
  > > 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.
enmi2015 10y ago
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.
- johan_larson 10y ago
  > A PhD is super fun 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.
  - gajjanag 10y ago
    > 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. Do you have any evidence for the minority claim beyond the personal anecdote? Also, this is field dependent, so a mention of the field could be helpful.
    - johan_larson 10y ago
      My claim is based on my own experience as a CS PhD student and my conversations with other graduate students within the department and outside it during my studies. Christ, there was so much bitching. And it consisted of the kind of grim complaints I never heard during undergrad days or later on the job. That said, CS PhDs are pretty lucky. The worst case fallback position of a job as a software developer isn't bad. It gets much worse for less commercial disciplines. God help the poor blighter with a PhD in Medieval Literature who doesn't snag an academic post.
shazam 10y ago
Does anyone have advice on applying to a PhD from industry & without significant research experience (but a BS + MS degree from Stanford)?
- pgbovine 10y ago
  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: http://pgbovine.net/prospective-students.htm http://pgbovine.net/prospective-students.htm
  - soVeryTired 10y ago
    They asked linear algebra and probability in the interview for machine learning in my school. Most rospective candidates got asked "what's an eigenvalue?" (among many other questions). I guess what you should learn depends on the field. But they'll be looking for demonstrable interest and possibly outside learning.
- soVeryTired 10y ago
  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.
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  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.
adamnemecek 10y ago
Does anyone have a link to his phd thesis btw?
- karpathy 10y ago
  I happen to :) http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf
  - adamnemecek 10y ago
    vďaka :)
  - adamnemecek 10y ago
    What sw did you use to draw those pictures btw?
    - karpathy 10y ago
      Google Drawings (or Slides) is good, and Pages/Keynote is very nice too.
  - eanzenberg 10y ago
    Congrats on your thesis! Saved it for future reading.
fatjokes 10y ago
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.
- Rainymood 10y ago
  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.
aab0 10y ago
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.
- baby 10y ago
  > Incremental, replication, or comparison work is discouraged 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...
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  > 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.
  - aab0 10y ago
    > Karpathy is pretty famous for his blogging and open software. Yes, he's famous for that, but that didn't earn him his PhD nor would it have gotten him tenure. As he remarks about his teaching of his course, him doing a good job actively worked against him because... it's not writing a sexy new paper or networking. > He also recommend you to release code in this article, so I'm not really sure what you are getting at. Releasing code isn't the same thing as creating polished end-user applicable stuff on the level of char-rnn. In ML, you're increasingly expected to at least chuck over the wall a barebones implementation to demonstrate it works at all, but there is no expectation that it will be generalized, well-written, or polished, or maintained, and typically they are not. (Most ML releases I've looked at are kind of horrifying from a software engineering perspective. Just thinking about improved-gan makes me shudder.)
maxschumacher91 10y ago
"If you’re unsure you should lean slightly negative by default" ha. that's a good heuristic!
stared 10y ago
Well, I went from academia (after finishing my PhD) to industry, to get more Freedom, Ownership, Personal growth, Status and Expertise. 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 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"?
- shkr 10y ago
  I think the title should have been more like "These are the great things that happened to me during my PhD"
- laxatives 10y ago
  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-to-control-artificial-intelligence-and-techs-future.html 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.
  - nl 10y ago
    I'd assumed Karpathy was the the $1M student too, but apparently it was someone else (source: inter-university gossip). The same source did say the big4 were marking $300K offers on the NIPS floor last year, which I find even more extreme.
elmar 10y ago
How Academia resembles a Drug Gang http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179
hiq 10y ago
> 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.
- argonaut 10y ago
  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.
slashblake 10y ago
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.
morgante 10y ago
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.
- chronic102 10y ago
  > 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.
  - morgante 10y 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. I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing. That's precisely my point: Google, for example, gets tens of thousands of applications. Their acceptance rate is incredibly low. > The results come from products you did not solely produce. Sure, but I don't see how that detracts from the fact that you can see meaningful rewards for your work in corporate life.
glangdale 10y ago
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).
- shas3 10y ago
  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.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    I wouldn't say Guo had it good, I mean his book is called the PhD grind; that's not a particularly happy sounding title.
ppod 10y ago
>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.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  > 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.
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  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.
jccalhoun 10y ago
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....
- xaa 10y ago
  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.
iamtrask 10y ago
many people seem to discount this thread because "Karpathy is one of the most successful PhD students in his field" perhaps instead of discounting his experience... it would be better to take his advice
akhilcacharya 10y ago
> 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.
avmich 10y ago
> I can’t find the quote anymore but I heard Sam Altman of YC say that there are no shortcuts or cheats when it comes to building a startup. Yeah, I've heard someone - Euclid may be? - said something similar about the road to science... :)
makeset 10y ago
> 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.
crististm 10y ago
"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.
Abimelech 10y ago
If anyone is interested, here's his PhD thesis: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf
wuschel 10y ago
1. Never give up. 2. Get to work.
lifebeyondfife 10y ago
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/ http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/ Or to be more succinct, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

319 points by wlrd 10y ago

"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.

throwawaymsft 10y ago
"Properties you find appealing..." * Freedom * Ownership * Personal freedom ... <Later...> * 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.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  From my super-limited experience in academia, I found politics is more important at top schools and much less important when you get to ~40-80 ranked US schools for PhD programs.
  - throwawaymsft 10y ago
    That's good to hear. I have the hankering to return to school at some point, and I really just want to learn and contribute.
  - pgbovine 10y ago
    Having spent time at schools of various "ranks" (whatever that means), "politics" (whatever that means ... that's super vague) is everywhere. It's what you make of it. Whenever you have people, money, and status mixing, there is politics. That's not exclusive to academia. Every company I've worked at also had those dynamics. Want to eliminate politics? Be independently wealthy and work alone :) Otherwise everyone needs to learn to work with and transcend the system in their own unique way.
    - stared 10y ago
      Well, with freelancing (in data science) I managed to avoid politics (and bureaucracy) completely (no, I am not independently wealthy).
  - phd_ 10y ago
    I went through a PhD at a non-top-tier school (borderline between second-tier and third-tier). I definitely dealt with politics extensively. A huge amount of people-pleasing, both with your advisor and with others in your chosen research area and the broader field it sits in. A fair bit of funding-related politics. And a fair bit of actual politics politics, if you want to fit in. There's a lot of in-group / out-group politics in academia; don't make life more difficult for yourself when you know a straightforward way to survive. Learn to deeply bury any opinions you might have that don't completely align with those of people who control your fate, especially in areas fundamental to their in-group identity, and if that fails, lie convincingly. (Remember that dodging a question where enthusiastic agreement was expected is a form of answer, and not the one you want to give.) You might get lucky and work with people accepting of differences of opinion, but I wouldn't recommend risking it when years of your life are on the line. I don't regret the experience, and quite frankly I learned a few other survival skills in the process that simply hadn't come up as an undergrad, but don't go into it thinking it's a purely technical experience, or that you won't have to deal with a pile of utterly ridiculous BS and unpleasantness.
- baby 10y ago
  Spoiler Alert: politic is everywhere.
  - throwawaymsft 10y ago
    Yes, but (importantly) degrees vary. The politics of working for an adviser chasing tenure are different from, say, running a SaaS, writing an ebook, or selling a plugin.
    - baby 10y ago
      You mean, politic is different if you're not working for anyone? I can't even agree with that. You will still have politic in place if you have people working for you, or if you have critics reviewing your ebook, or if you're trying to get your plugin accepted in a store, etc... cqfd
      - throwawaymsft 10y ago
        Correct. And are the politics of getting your plugin accepted in the Wordpress directory more or less than getting tenure? See the edit above. You are saying two things must be equal because they are both non-zero. It's a very strange argument.
        baby 10y ago
        Getting tenure is a life accomplishment. Getting a plugin accepted in a wordpress directory? Come on, we're comparing apples and oranges. If you look at some parts of getting a tenure, they are without politic as well. Example: studying a subject.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  > Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics and manage up to a level employees never have to. Yeah, internal corporate politics never gets people's entire project canceled with no notice in the corporate world. That would just be mean, so it doesn't happen /s. (Guess what I found out last Friday?)
  - throwawaymsft 10y ago
    That sucks, but politics in the workplace can be dialed from mega-corp to startup to consultancy to freelancer to anonymous author of a SaaS. How much politics did patio11 deal with when running Bingo Card Creator?
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      Pretty sure that the same applies for academia. It depends on your department culture and lab environment.
      - user5994461 10y ago
        I found the academia to be way more vicious and politics than a company. In academia, teachers/referees/directors were commonly there for 10-20 years, some will probably never have to live their positions and they have full unlimited authority for many things. The worse that could happen in academia as a student is to have politics goes against your back. You will be blocked from graduating, you will loose X years of study unlikely to start over or graduate at another place, and be stuck with your debt and no diploma. In a company, the worst that could happen is simply to be fired. You look for another job and keep your money, you keep your diploma, keep your experiences. In fact, if you have a problem with your boss at work, you can always change job. If you have a problem with your PhD (or master's) teacher in academia, you can't leave without failing your studies and you're fucked.
- euske 10y ago
  > casting a float into a bool Haha, a geeky yet very apt expression.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  > Much of your freedom goes to learning to play politics That's crazy. The way to get a great reference is to do outstanding work. If by 'playing politics' you mean not pissing people off by being an asshole or being unreliable, then, yeah, take care to be a good colleague. But almost entirely: do really good work.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Bash other people's novel work while peer reviewing it anonymously, then steal it and submit for publication at another conference before the rejection notification goes to the original author. Once someone makes it into the review pools for top conferences, they receive a constant feed of good ideas to harvest in the form of submissions.
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      That's the pathological case, yes. People can also go steal cars and rob houses. But they usually don't. Good luck getting a reference from someone after stealing their idea.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
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.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  Same! I was super-interested in research and that's why I pursued a PhD. I never thought of running a lab or teaching classes.
  - tostitos1979 10y ago
    A friend and I (both PhDs) were just discussing how difficult having a PhD has made getting engineering positions.In the course of interviewing at top-5 companies, we both have experienced a$$hats/interviewers with complexes who seem bent on showing off how they are smarter than the PhD interviewee .. curious if you have run into this as well, and any strategies to guard against this? I've also seen people who think PhDs can't code to save their life (I've seen such people but those are very obvious ... people who couldn't do fizbuzz) or think PhDs would get bored and leave easily. How does a competent PhD job seeker deal with this crap?
    - JoshTriplett 10y ago
      I didn't run into any of that in any of the companies I interviewed with; if anything, I found that coming in with a PhD resulted in correspondingly higher expectations. I'd treat any of the items you mentioned as warning signs and look for a better opportunity. To specifically counteract the "can't code" item, have plenty of practical items on your resume; include your published papers and conference presentations, but also include projects you've contributed to and similar. (For people doing a PhD who plan to work in industry, make sure you present at some industry conferences, not just academic conferences, and publish your code as/into Open Source projects.) A CV for an academic position doesn't work unmodified as a professional resume (with possible exceptions if you want to work in an industry research lab). In the specific context of CS, if you look at medium to large companies, you should already ask questions about the technical job ladder (such as making sure that one exists, rather than the only promotion path leading into management). Ask specific questions about how a PhD affects your starting position on that ladder. If it doesn't at all, then seriously consider looking for somewhere that it does. A company that values PhDs seems less likely to hold the misconceptions you mentioned.
p4bl0 10y ago
Your comment reminded me of a 5 years old blogpost of mine: https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html https://shebang.ws/startup-or-research.html. 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!
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>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.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
"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. https://www.absint.com/products.htm https://www.absint.com/products.htm http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html http://www.kestrel.edu/home/about.html https://galois.com/blog/ https://galois.com/blog/ http://www.adacore.com/academia/projects 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.
Retra 10y ago
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.
Chinjut 10y ago
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.
- michaelvoz 10y ago
  Sure! I merely presented a few of the more common case paths! For instance, a good friend of mine (who shall remain nameless for anonymities sake) is currently exploring the world, working as a cook in cafes, restaurants, etc, never staying anywhere for long, living out of a backpack. Very romantic, I could never do it myself, but his life is his own. I dont think man has ever been as truly free as we are today, you can really do anything you set your mind to, not confined to the short, somewhat stuffy list you and I have walked over together.
- tgarma1234 10y ago
  Please, don't do a PhD. The tenure track treadmill is brutal and on the wane. You would be much happier just getting a job. A normal job. With ordinary people. And I say that after a masters degree, many years in a PhD program and the having a normal job. A PhD is sort of useless at this point in history.
  - Chinjut 10y ago
    Good advice, but bad news: Too late. (Well, I quit ABD (with a consolation Master's) and got a BigCorp job, but wasn't too thrilled with that, and since now I've got this monkey on my back, I keep trying to finish writing my dissertation again, pointless though I know it to be... Actually, sounds like our experiences are quite similar except for the last bit!) [No one's ever going to put in the effort to de-anonymize me off Hacker News, right? Just in case: Dear future potential employers reading this, A) Please don't, and B) Hey, I was totally kidding about not being thrilled with the BigCorp job. I love working for The Man! Go you! You The Man!]

sndean 10y ago

With my own disclaimer [0], a few comments: > 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc

laxatives 10y ago
> > 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.

enmi2015 10y ago

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.

johan_larson 10y ago
> A PhD is super fun 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.
- gajjanag 10y ago
  > 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. Do you have any evidence for the minority claim beyond the personal anecdote? Also, this is field dependent, so a mention of the field could be helpful.
  - johan_larson 10y ago
    My claim is based on my own experience as a CS PhD student and my conversations with other graduate students within the department and outside it during my studies. Christ, there was so much bitching. And it consisted of the kind of grim complaints I never heard during undergrad days or later on the job. That said, CS PhDs are pretty lucky. The worst case fallback position of a job as a software developer isn't bad. It gets much worse for less commercial disciplines. God help the poor blighter with a PhD in Medieval Literature who doesn't snag an academic post.

shazam 10y ago

Does anyone have advice on applying to a PhD from industry & without significant research experience (but a BS + MS degree from Stanford)?

pgbovine 10y ago
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: http://pgbovine.net/prospective-students.htm http://pgbovine.net/prospective-students.htm
- soVeryTired 10y ago
  They asked linear algebra and probability in the interview for machine learning in my school. Most rospective candidates got asked "what's an eigenvalue?" (among many other questions). I guess what you should learn depends on the field. But they'll be looking for demonstrable interest and possibly outside learning.
soVeryTired 10y ago
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.
chrisseaton 10y ago
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.

adamnemecek 10y ago

Does anyone have a link to his phd thesis btw?

karpathy 10y ago
I happen to :) http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  vďaka :)
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  What sw did you use to draw those pictures btw?
  - karpathy 10y ago
    Google Drawings (or Slides) is good, and Pages/Keynote is very nice too.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  Congrats on your thesis! Saved it for future reading.

fatjokes 10y ago

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.

Rainymood 10y ago
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.

aab0 10y ago

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.

baby 10y ago
> Incremental, replication, or comparison work is discouraged 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...
wodenokoto 10y ago
> 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.
- aab0 10y ago
  > Karpathy is pretty famous for his blogging and open software. Yes, he's famous for that, but that didn't earn him his PhD nor would it have gotten him tenure. As he remarks about his teaching of his course, him doing a good job actively worked against him because... it's not writing a sexy new paper or networking. > He also recommend you to release code in this article, so I'm not really sure what you are getting at. Releasing code isn't the same thing as creating polished end-user applicable stuff on the level of char-rnn. In ML, you're increasingly expected to at least chuck over the wall a barebones implementation to demonstrate it works at all, but there is no expectation that it will be generalized, well-written, or polished, or maintained, and typically they are not. (Most ML releases I've looked at are kind of horrifying from a software engineering perspective. Just thinking about improved-gan makes me shudder.)

maxschumacher91 10y ago

"If you’re unsure you should lean slightly negative by default" ha. that's a good heuristic!

stared 10y ago

Well, I went from academia (after finishing my PhD) to industry, to get more Freedom, Ownership, Personal growth, Status and Expertise. 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 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"?

shkr 10y ago
I think the title should have been more like "These are the great things that happened to me during my PhD"
laxatives 10y ago
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-to-control-artificial-intelligence-and-techs-future.html 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.
- nl 10y ago
  I'd assumed Karpathy was the the $1M student too, but apparently it was someone else (source: inter-university gossip). The same source did say the big4 were marking $300K offers on the NIPS floor last year, which I find even more extreme.

elmar 10y ago

How Academia resembles a Drug Gang http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/ http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/12/11/how... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9950179

hiq 10y ago

> 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.

argonaut 10y ago
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.

slashblake 10y ago

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.

morgante 10y ago

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.

chronic102 10y ago
> 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.
- morgante 10y 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. I'm not sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing. That's precisely my point: Google, for example, gets tens of thousands of applications. Their acceptance rate is incredibly low. > The results come from products you did not solely produce. Sure, but I don't see how that detracts from the fact that you can see meaningful rewards for your work in corporate life.

glangdale 10y ago

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).

shas3 10y ago
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.
- Ar-Curunir 10y ago
  I wouldn't say Guo had it good, I mean his book is called the PhD grind; that's not a particularly happy sounding title.

ppod 10y ago

>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.

robotresearcher 10y ago
> 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.
Ar-Curunir 10y ago
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.

jccalhoun 10y ago

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....

xaa 10y ago
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.

iamtrask 10y ago

many people seem to discount this thread because "Karpathy is one of the most successful PhD students in his field" perhaps instead of discounting his experience... it would be better to take his advice

akhilcacharya 10y ago

> 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.

avmich 10y ago

> I can’t find the quote anymore but I heard Sam Altman of YC say that there are no shortcuts or cheats when it comes to building a startup. Yeah, I've heard someone - Euclid may be? - said something similar about the road to science... :)

makeset 10y ago

> 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.

crististm 10y ago

"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.

Abimelech 10y ago

If anyone is interested, here's his PhD thesis: http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf http://cs.stanford.edu/people/karpathy/main.pdf

wuschel 10y ago

1. Never give up. 2. Get to work.

lifebeyondfife 10y ago

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/ http://100rsns.blogspot.co.uk/ Or to be more succinct, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law