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

tjr 13y ago
An offer letter from Google or YCombinator (where you are the tech co-founder) which serves as evidence that you passed a challenging programming interview at Google, or that YCombinator believed you would be successful at developing your company product. Interesting. Because I have no intention of moving to a Google or YCombinator location, I never applied to either, but this makes me wonder if merely having been offered an opportunity at such a place could have value. Even if one never intended to follow through. Which might not be a great thing for the folks reviewing applications...
- agilebyte 13y ago
  In which case you move to #2 which (to me) seems much easier to get: A Github or other online repository of your source code demonstrating contributions to open source projects or impressive projects of your own.
  - jrs99 13y ago
    if you do that you might as well forget the PhD. Schools don't want to teach you, they want to accept the best applicants. Applicants who work on open source projects and can get a job anywhere. Applicants that became great learning from somewhere that is not the school that he is applying to. Whereas as a post doc you'll be someone's bitch working for 40K per year. Screw the PhD and whatever it is supposed to mean--that you did all your stupid homework assignments and kissed people's asses for three letters of recommendation and that you "gamed" the GRE.
    - pnathan 13y ago
      Sarcasm detector might be failing, but PhD work has very little to do with homework....
      - jrs99 13y ago
        to get into a phd program, i mean. a phd from a "top school" means you did your homework in college and high school.
        HarryHirsch 13y ago
        But to make it a meaningful experience (and get out of it with a PhD) you need a wholly different skillset. It's clear that you have never seen a kid who destroyed the productivity of a whole office because he treated his colleagues Just Wrong, and that you have never seen a fellow who just couldn't transfer what he learned in class to real-life application.
        jrs99 13y ago
        i've seen people who didn't know what a lac operon was get a PhD in biochemistry.
        lambdaphage 13y ago
        What.
        HarryHirsch 13y ago
        That's harmless. But if you have someone who continuously messes up shared equipment, leaving it for the next person to fix, and who won't improve their attitude, no matter how often you tell them, that's deadly for morale.
        jrs99 13y ago
        then you should leave your phd program for a garage.
        pnathan 13y ago
        That is an interesting dilemma, yeah. To be a sharp homework-hammering undergrad is not to be a good researcher & fuzzy situation manager. It's why there's such focus on undergrad research these days, it helps identify the capable people and build their skills (as well as getting some amount of budget help). The professor at Brown clearly enunciates some of the issues with the current system quite well.
  - btown 13y ago
    True - if the open source project you've contributed significantly to is, say, a well-acclaimed machine learning library, and you're applying to a machine learning Ph.D., then the sum of your accepted pull requests might be a reasonable proxy for a recommendation letter from the (presumably well-acclaimed) maintainers of said library.
    - agilebyte 13y ago
      It does not seems so to me. To show that your interests align, you do one of the challenges that Jeff lists in part 2. Part 1 is only to show you are a strong programmer/ambitious so your projects can be in anything it seems.
- chrisseaton 13y ago
  In the UK in some areas such as finance and business there are many people who apply to be an Army officer, and go all the way through selection, but never intend to join up. They do it just so that they can put on their CV (resume) that they've passed Army officer selection.
  - elemeno 13y ago
    Not to say that it's not true, but in a decade in finance I've never heard of anyone having gone through Officer Selection to help their career prospects. If you want to have a good start in finance, having a degree (preferably a 1st) in Maths, Physics or Economics from Oxford, Cambridge or LSE is probably the most useful thing you can do!
  - arethuza 13y ago
    Isn't Officer Selection where candidate for officer training are selected, not after the full training? According to this link it looks like a ~5 day process: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm [NB Not sure I approve of people using up forces resources just to pad their CVs]
    - chrisseaton 13y ago
      I think the Army likes it because it reinforces the idea that Army officers are an elite, and it exposes more future leaders to a little bit of Army life, so they're more positive about the Army when they make decisions when they're running a business or a government department.
- segmondy 13y ago
  Of course. I have no intention of moving to Cali, but one thing I do plan to do when I go to vacation West next year is to apply to Google, possibly Facebook or/and Amazon. If I get the offer letter, I can frame it and use it as negotiating tactic here in the midwest. It's almost as good as saying "I worked at Google"
  - mcguire 13y ago
    Possibly better: you don't have to actually work at Google. 80% of the benefit minus 1% of the opportunity cost.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - skj 13y ago
      That's a very interesting perspective on working for Google. That is, that it's a waste of time. In my experience, working at Google is a blast both in terms of compensation and exciting projects.
      - timburus 13y ago
        If you were luckier than others it doesn't necesserily make you an example to be followed.
        yetanotherphd 13y ago
        I wouldn't call it luck. Google is consistently ranked as one of the top workplaces. Out of a large number of my co-workers at Google, almost all of them seem to enjoy their work. Very few people are unhappy or seeking to leave. The main difficulty is getting in.
      - mcguire 13y ago
        Depending on what you want, what you can do, and from a certain perspective, any job is a "waste of time". For one thing, you will almost certainly spend the majority of your time working on someone else's grand idea. (By necessity, most of the people working at Google are doing the same kind of things that everyone is doing everywhere. The environment may be better, but it's the same stuff.) As one of my favorite supervisors said, repeatedly, "It's not supposed to be fun. That's why they call it a 'job'. Now get back to work."
- mathattack 13y ago
  I'd be curious if the folks at Google and YC would be flattered by this, put off, or both.
  - robrenaud 13y ago
    If it works, it's clever. But I am definitely not flattered and wouldn't be personally happy about knowing someone did it. The 45 minutes I spent interviewing you and the more than an hour I spend carefully writing up my interview feedback is totally wasted. Well, that sucks for me.
    - mathattack 13y ago
      Thanks for sharing. I think you hit the main point - it winds up wasting a lot of people's time, and also gives short shrift to others in the process. In a sense I put this up with the moral equivalent of practice interviewing with real companies. It's not illegal, but it isn't behavior one would advertise, and it's hard to call it ethical. It would be different if the answer were, "You've worked 2 years for Google or started a company that went through YC" because that's no different than a company asking for Big 4 Accounting experience when hiring a controller. (Having a Big 4 offer letter wouldn't suffice)
- latj 13y ago
  The other question is- if you have an offer letter from Google or YCombinator in hand, would you really want to go to Brown? At Google it will be like going to grad school except you will be better funded, working with more consistently smarter people, and you will be getting paid instead of racking up debt. As a YCombinator founder you'd basically already be in the position that a Brown computer science graduate hopes to one day get to. I like universities. I hope they figure out how to stay relevant.
  - pinhead 13y ago
    How exactly would you be racking up debt as a computer science Ph.D student? You don't pay for tuition, you get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance and you probably will do many industry/research internships (where you get paid very well). I say this with experience, as I am a CS Ph.D student and make more than enough to live on with a modest lifestyle and I have no debt. Plus if you get an outside fellowship, which most successful students do, you'll essentially be able to work on just about anything you want (I don't think this can be said for a random Google employee, however this is probably true for a YC founder). The Ph.D lifestyle is pretty great imho...at least in CS (non-CS, that's a whole other story).
    - flyrain 13y ago
      Get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance? Most Ph.D student got less than $2000/month before tax, even less than $1500/month and should pay for health insurance by themselves. OK, decent, how to define decent.
      - pinhead 13y ago
        The NSF GRFP provides ~3k/month plus tuition and health insurance are covered. If you do a 3-month internship each summer on top of that you can get an extra $20k-30k easy. I am not saying you'll have the same lifestyle as a Google employee but I think it's hard to argue that you will go into debt. Maybe I live a more modest lifestyle than others. Also all the schools I got into when I applied to grad school would pay health care/tuition, that's standard.
brucehart 13y ago
I'm surprised that admission into Computer Science PhD programs is so competitive. I would think that with the strong job market for computer scientists, there would not be as many students who would want to make the commitment to a PhD program over other job and entrepreneurial opportunities.
- DrSpock 13y ago
  Entry into elite PhD programmes is as competitive as ever. Others, not so.
  - mcguire 13y ago
    ...and of course Brown (where the author is) is top-twenty, in fact tied at #20 [according to US News & World Report[1]] with places like Rice. It's pretty elite. [1] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
    - ex_ex_nihilo 13y ago
      Wow, my school's not even on the list and our graduate program for CS/CE has less than a 13% acceptance rate.
      - aet 13y ago
        This lists are basically meaningless. However, I wouldn't argue with the top 10 or so.
- zerr 13y ago
  I believe someone who is not a good software engineer or even can't code at all, can still be admitted into some CS PhD program.
  - jrs99 13y ago
    i'm sure that's extremely rare though. maybe like 1 person per year may have no idea what coding is and get admitted to a program for CS.
huherto 13y ago
I love this. Especially the part where it gives you a few problems that you can try to solve. Not only is a good way to find talent that may otherwise be detected. It increases the chances of finding new ways to solve some problems. (Edit: grammar)
DrSpock 13y ago
Hmmm. This is an interesting spin the Brown Professor has taken on the PhD application process. For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must. Getting on to a prestigious PhD programme is incredibly competitive, and as someone who has gone through the whole process and seen it from both sides, I can say that I've seen individuals who'd make great computer science researchers not being given an opportunity because they don't tick the right "boxes". Sure it's not perfect, but worth a shot if you're interested.
- tanzam75 13y ago
  For those interested in a career in development, a PhD is rarely helpful. For the PhD candidate, it can even be counterproductive, as any gains in initial salary will be more than offset by the lost salary during the 5-6 years of the PhD. Only for a career in research is a PhD important.
  - DrSpock 13y ago
    That is true to an extent. But, most people don't do PhDs to end up doing purely software development.
  - elemeno 13y ago
    The parent comment should probably be read as 'research and development' - working for IBM's research arm, Microsoft Research etc.
    - tanzam75 13y ago
      And I read it as exactly that. I was pointing out that the PhD is useful for "research", but not for research "and development."
      - scott_s 13y ago
        In my experience, the people who can do the D are better at the R.
wschorn 13y ago
This got me to consider applying to brown whenever I'm looking at grad schools.
frozenport 13y ago
Application looks too involved for Brown. When applying to 10 schools I wouldn't do this one because it has no overlap with my other application. I can reuse my letters of recommendation, I can't reuse this application.
- benmccann 13y ago
  I graduated quite some time ago. Getting letters of recommendation from professors would be impossible for me. I doubt I'd have one professor that knew me when I graduated let alone now years later. And yet, fulfilling these requirements would be very easy for me. I think it's very nice to have multiple routes in. Even if very few candidates avail themselves of this latter route, they might be interesting candidates worth strong consideration.
  - jaynos 13y ago
    I'm in the same boat applying to a Master Program. It doesn't help that i spent the better part of my 20's as a business owner with no boss that can write a letter for me.
- nilkn 13y ago
  I think this would be useful for three groups of people: (1) People who were planning to go into industry and already have, say, an offer letter from Google, or just a strong open source profile, but now aren't sure if they want to go into industry or academia. Being able to apply to Brown with their offer letter could reduce a lot of friction in their consideration of the academic route. (2) People who've already tried to get into a top Ph.D. program the traditional route and failed. If this is your dream, and you don't have the grades or publications to get in otherwise, but you do have top programming chops, this could be a way for you to still get what you want. (3) People who are already in industry and want to go into academia. They may have lost their academic connections at this point in time. Even if they had great grades, they may struggle to reconnect with old teachers to write the requisite stellar recommendation letters.
wukix 13y ago
Submit your GitHub portfolio and join the Ivy League university that also develops Racket? Awesome!
clarebear 13y ago
Why would you be filling out a PhD application if you already had an offer letter from Google or YCombinator?
- stephencanon 13y ago
  Because you always wanted to do academic research? Because you someday want to teach at the college level? Because you have no idea what you want to do and you want to keep your options open a while longer? I left grad school to work in industry, but I’m not so naive as to think that everyone shares my preferences. I have friends who turned down Google offers c. 2001 to go to grad school, and they’ve never regretted that decision. (And I don’t regret the time I spent in grad school before leaving, either).
  - zura 13y ago
    Personally, I'd want to get a PhD to be able to work in such places as Microsoft Research. I don't want to become a teacher/professor. Other than that, I really hate some perils of academic world - bureaucracy, nepotism/favoritism/elitism, ...
- kskz 13y ago
  Google often also hires people to do work they are overqualified for. Had a friend turn down Google because it was boring compared to research.
- pgbovine 13y ago
  ha, i've been giving talks on this very subject ;) http://vimeo.com/73178238 http://vimeo.com/73178238 btw i'm a big fan of jeff's approach and hope it works out well.
bolu 13y ago
This reminds me of YC's "Apply without an idea" experiment. Both experiments seem to arise from a innovator's insight that a whole class of otherwise highly qualified candidates self select out because of a self perception that they don't "fit the mold". This is especially true of YC, where there are so many articles every day that tell the story of a founder who "saw a problem, and set off on this quest to solve it" that people who don't have an idea on hand when YC applications come up can immediately self exclude. Never mind that many great founders pivoted more than once on their way to success. I'm excited to see this experiment "meet the marketplace", and see what pans out. Given the small number of PhD students these top programs take each year, just yielding one or two great people into the PhD program that otherwise wouldn't have applied seems like it'd really move the needle. [Disclosure: I went to undergrad with Jeff and we're good friends. He really is a great "mold-breaker" himself and I'm excited to see how a great "hacker of systems" in the best sense of the word changes academia during his career]
- pgbovine 13y ago
  +1000, and latching on to this top comment for more visibility ... also check out jeff's related post on bringing startup culture to academic research! http://jeffhuang.com/adopting_the_startup_culture_for_research.html http://jeffhuang.com/adopting_the_startup_culture_for_resear...
zura 13y ago
I'm still waiting for a REMOTE PhD position :)
- bkamapantula 13y ago
  I doubt if it would happen at all. I'm a full time Ph.D. student. You might, of course, know that professors interact with the students very often (except if the professor is super busy always). I interact with mine almost every day. I do work with couple of collaborators in different countries. That is because my advisor knows them in-person before deciding to collaborate. I work with lab colleagues frequently. Remote makes all this extremely challenging.
  - tjr 13y ago
    What about it exactly is challenging? How is doing computer science research (probably what many people here would do; I don't know what your research field is) with a team of remote individuals harder than doing software development with a team of remote individuals?
    - pgbovine 13y ago
      remote software development is very challenging, and when it works well, it's due to super-clear specs and project management. by its very nature, research isn't as amenable to crystal-clear specs.
    - bkamapantula 13y ago
      I haven't worked in industry so far. So, cannot comment on that. In academia however you can possibly build connections with your peers (other labs) and lab colleagues through your work. One can attend on-campus seminars and exchange ideas with potential collaborators. Being remote voids these options. Opportunities to work on interesting projects (other than research. For instance, contributing to student organizations) will be lost as well. Edit: Regarding my research area. On most occasions, students will have to register for classes (not all classes are offered online). Once you complete classes, it is potentially viable to work remotely. However, it again depends on the funding scenario. How a student is supported etc. If I'm a Teaching Assistant, I'm expected to be on campus and available to students. Being a Research Assistant gives the flexibility to work remotely (if advisor agrees however not all universities might allow that).
mlyang 13y ago
Cool idea-- people inventive enough to go down an entrepreneurial route would probably be interesting/compelling candidates for academic innovation. I actually think that creating many interesting projects + one's corresponding Github would be a better metric than getting a Google (or even YC) acceptance letter. You want people who are constantly tinkering and thinking of new ideas/projects/approaches and inventing just for the sake of inventing. If you go too entrepreneurial, you might also be selecting for students who might be more amenable to dropping out from the program and doing a start-up (which then wastes the resources/time that Jeff mentioned he had to give to every PhD candidate).
smoyer 13y ago
That sounds right up my alley! I'm currently tracking the geolocation of computer science professors by tracking the gaze of the NSA's agents who are watching them through the myriad of security cameras in our country. My academic resume isn't going to get me noticed for a PhD program but it sounds like someone is finally looking at ability (I had great scores on the Computer Science GRE in 1990, but they apparently only last five years and that test has been discontinued)!
- tanzam75 13y ago
  The GRE Computer Science exam was pretty heavy on theory and systems. This made sense for 1990, when CS departments were heavier on theory and systems. It has grown less relevant as the field of CS grew to encompass additional areas. Thus, CS programs stopped requiring it, so fewer people took the exam, so the ETS decided to drop it.
  - smoyer 13y ago
    I understand the rationale for dropping the exam, but it's the last academic endeavor on my resume. I've got a ton of work experience since then and many of my projects would be worthy of today's buzzwords. My lament is that only forward-thinking advising professors would see the value in what I have done. Note that no professors have actually been tracked or harmed.
cmeiklejohn 13y ago
I think this is a very interesting idea, and I look forward to the results of the experiment! Allow me to take a moment to reiterate some of the comments I left on the Georgia Tech master's thread [1], specifically as a student who has taken graduate level computer science courses at Brown University with the majority of his experience working in industry. * I went directly into industry in 1998 working at a software/systems engineer for a telecom working on Solaris deployments. I worked full-time and paid for my undergraduate education which I pursued part-time and which took me 9 years to finish. I majored in "information technology," as there was no computer science online program at Northeastern University. I didn't take any theory courses at all, and the majority of my course work was programming in languages like Java, C++, and C# (also COBOL, and the like...) * I applied at Brown University after talking to the admissions and computer science departments multiple times, in which they told me I wouldn't be able to pursue a master's due to lack of independent or undergraduate research or an undergraduate education in computer science. The process of being told this was rather unfortunate, as the responses I received via e-mail telling me it wouldn't be possible were ended with "Sent from my iPhone." * At the time I talked with them, I had been working at Basho Technologies for a year on Riak, an open source distributed Dynamo-style data store, as well as serving as a maintainer of rubygems.org. * I was finally able to get accepted as a "non-degree" or "special" graduate student, which is allowed to take courses at full price. This role exists primarily to allow students to determine if they would be a fit for graduate school, at which point I would then have to re-apply for degree seeking status. This was possible because of an independent meeting I scheduled with Shriram Krishnamurthi, who, based on my industrial experience expedited the process along. * Since starting as a "non-degree" student, I've been heavily motivated to attempt to stand out from other candidates for when I eventually re-apply to be a degree seeking student by independently publishing papers, publishing a blog, organizing a podcast, and speaking at conferences. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510142
- pgbovine 13y ago
  what kind of research are you interested in for Ph.D.? i can't seem to find your academic info from your HN profile. email me if you want to chat more.
Balgair 13y ago
I'm applying as we speak, but in Bioeng. When I email professors and get to talking they always coach that they do NOT have control over the admissions process, that a committee acts as Maxwell's demon. Though I am not applying to Brown and do not know anything about the internals of their process, this seems to indicated that professor Huang has at least some control over the admissions. If I were professor Huang, I would be very very careful about this, as sparks of racism, sexism, and homophobia can quickly ignite into a fire. I want to be clear, I am not accusing professor Huang of this at all. Heck I don't know the guy a bit and I do like this alternative approach to the application a lot. Still, he needs to be careful.
- p1esk 13y ago
  Are you kidding? Of course a professor has control over the admission process. If he wants you on his team, you're in, unless you have a criminal record, or GPA below 3.0 (or whatever is absolute minimum for that particular grad school). Think of it as a hiring process, with the professor as a hiring manager.
  - Balgair 13y ago
    No, I am not kidding. Based on the conversations I have had, it seems to be typical that a committee selects the applicants, not the professors. That is what all the professors tell me. That being said, I would be stunned if this were the truth. There is no frickin way that this happens. Here's how I imagine it: 'Admissions committee is in session' 'So, which of these bozos we gonna pick?' 'I want Joe, Schmo, and Dingus' 'Sweet, I want Harry, and Fiona' 'Ok, we all cool?' 'Yep' 'Aite, lets get beers'
    - p1esk 13y ago
      Well, the committee also has a job of selecting the rest of the applicants, if there are still places left after professors made their recommendations.
mkramlich 13y ago
even better: don't apply at all. simply work/study/design/research/build whatever you wanted to do anyway. then share/publish/collaborate as you desire. or not. rinse, repeat. be a genius. or a crank. or an entrepreneur. or some mix. just do things and get it out there. see what sticks. not all smart people are in academia and not all people in academia are very smart. and you can publish, collaborate, ship and show accomplishments without/outside a university paradigm.
- chrismonsanto 13y ago
  Please don't underestimate how much it helps to have an adviser who has been through the ropes, or how awesome it is to have peers that are brilliant and working on similar stuff. I'm a self-taught programmer, so I know exactly what it's like to wing it, and I loved the PhD experience. The anti-PhD attitude on here is so weird, considering YC seems to be largely the same thing on a smaller timescale (weed out everyone but the very best, have them make things, give them connections, ...)
  - mkramlich 13y ago
    understood personally I think HN has both a pro-PhD, pro-academic, and also an anti-PhD or anti-academic segment. Sometimes within the same people! I certainly do. I think it has both strengths and weaknesses. I think to the extent that universities and PhD track stuff serves an unnecessary and embarrassing anachronistic echo from the Middle Ages then that is a bad thing. But to the extent it helps teach disciplined thinking, cultivate a new generation of teachers and researchers, and helps to cull out noise or invalid/false/dumb contributions to the advancement of an art, it's a very good thing. The weed-out effect is good. I think some antipathy comes from the folks who perceive there to be a lot of non-weeds outside academia, and weeds within it. All discipline and curation is good. But it's not the unique providence of universities or professorship tracks. A lot of programmers have a libertarian bent too and dislike profit-maximizing monopolies or priesthoods, and universities/academia has at least a little of that aspect to them.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
xSwag 13y ago
I'm almost certain that a Ph.D. in the UK takes 3-4 years max. Why does it take so much longer in USA?
- maximilian 13y ago
  You still need to do your masters, "along the way". If I remember correctly, in England, first you do you masters, and then start a PhD. 2 masters + 4-5 phd = 6. Most European countries require a masters degree before starting, but the PhD is officially supposed to take 3 years (but usually takes 3-4+)
graycat 13y ago
Usually the Ph.D. is aimed at being a college professor and working toward tenure. The CS Ph.D. now seems to be aimed at such a professor but also at a career as an employee. Sorry to say this, but Ph.D. or not, it is getting clear that in the US being an employee is no good for a career. Can get hired as an employee in your 20s, but the chances go down in your 30s, and the chances go to near zero long before your 40 year career is over. Exception: If you rise high into management, then you might be able to continue to get hired until, say, 50. And high management positions commonly don't last very long. E.g., a big tech company might hire 100 Master's or Ph.D. degree holders, promote 1 to management, and at age 35 or so fire the other 99. Then the other 99 can wish that they could convert their Ph.D., say, in electronic engineering, to an electrician's license or had followed the path of a friend in high school who was mowing grass and now has 5 crews mowing grass and is getting into landscape architecture and commercial instead of just residential clients. In broad terms, for a long career in the US, be a sole proprietor with a geographical barrier to entry. If want to do something technical, then be a CEO of a startup that takes advantage of your technical background. For being an employee, regard that as a temporary slot that will have to be replaced by owning part or all of the business from which you get your income. Then, a problem with a Ph.D. is that you spend in grad school most of your 20s when you are most employable. Then to go into the job market in your late 20s or 30s can be a big disappointment because, really, the jobs are for subordinates, not narrow subject matter expert researchers. Actually, a Ph.D. can be highly resented, can be a black mark on your resume. Be careful.
banachtarski 13y ago
As a person who was about to apply to PhD programs but changed my mind due to insufficient recommendations, I'm glad somebody else realizes that PhD admissions is utter bull crap. 185 dollar GRE that I can get in the 99th percentile on with ZERO studying? Grades that aren't normalized across institutions weighed heavily? Need recs from established professors who can slip in a good word for you? Oh sorry, you were actually doing things that interested you, not necessarily things that would impress the right people. Oh sorry you took tons of hard classes at a prestigious institution and so have something less than 4.0. Oh sorry you hopped labs for a bit instead of staying with that boring CS guy that would've gotten you into any PhD program in America for 4 years. Oh sorry you spent a year or two out of college doing startup tech work without building credentials with other PhD grads but nevertheless solving research grade problems. I've realized that the PhD admissions does not select candidates who actually want to do research. It selects candidates who want to be admitted into a PhD program. No thanks. I love science and math, and I love research, but I think the PhD application has been so harrowing for me, I won't consider it again unless drastic changes are made.
- ank286 13y ago
  HAHA. As a PhD student, I agree with most of your sentiments. The PhD application process is nothing, try applying for fellowships. Go to a prestigious institution, pull allnighters, to get a subpar gpa, and have no time for volunteering activities. These are the criteria you need to satisfy to get something like NSF GRP (Broader Impact is 50% of the application). You might have a better shot at a lesser prestigious university with a not-so-great engineering program and being a super smart person, killing it. Then, apply for fellowship --> you will get it. It is all a rubric. Now on to the game of academia. It is one that is based on reputation, papers, and not money. No one cares for efficiency either and no one is building crap. All they are doing is trying out different "solutions," which may or may not make any sense. For instance, "hey guys, let's apply game theory to problem X, it will be a good/novel experiment and we can get a paper out of it." Waste of tax dollars. The logical answer that solves problem X might have already been solved and can be solved using ordinary methods, but academia doesn't want that. Research labs have business models, keep proposing new complexity on complexities, very unnecessary. Overcrowded fields like computer vision reek of this.
kraskat 13y ago
Like Jeff I am also a young faculty member at Brown (http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/ http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/) and I couldn't agree more with him. The Ph.D. application process has a lot of flaws. We (the Big Data Management Group at Brown) are also always looking for very talented people and similar to Jeff we started to hand out small challenges to candidates interested in doing data-centric systems research (see also http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/phd14.html http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/phd14.html). In addition, last year we started a research internship program (http://database.cs.brown.edu/big-data-internship http://database.cs.brown.edu/big-data-internship) - it is quite competitive to get in, but still easier than to be admitted to the PhD program, and the best way for both sides to determine if there is a good fit with the group and the PhD program. Finally, I would like to mention, that we actually do consider MOOC courses and github portfolios as part of the candidate evaluation.
solarix 13y ago
While I agree the application process needs improvement, I think this entry greatly exaggerates how hard it is to get into a PhD program. Since when do you need to be published to even get into a PhD program? When I went through the application process, I got accepted by 6/6 schools that I applied to, with no publications and no real ideas for what I wanted to research on. In fact, most PhD students actually don't even have a research topic until the second or third year of grad school. I think more than anything, your personal statement is the deciding factor in a lot of cases. What had worked for me was to have a list of research topics and faculty from each school that you're interested in working with, and directly address them in your statement. Other than that, of course whatever supporting evidence to differentiate yourself is helpful. I thought proposing to use offer letters from Google or YC (both have much lower acceptance rates than a PhD program) just to prove you can code is pretty hilarious.
- GuiA 13y ago
  When did you apply, and to what schools? These days, good luck getting in a top tier institution for CS without a solid track record (I.e. a publication or two at an ACM/IEEE conference, and letters of rec from reputable professors/researchers in your field). The letters of rec are what make or break your application. I agree that it's a bit over the top, but that's how it is.
  - solarix 13y ago
    2005, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UIUC, and my alma mater UT Austin. Ended up at Cal. Granted, I was EE and admitted as EECS, so maybe a bit different.
imrehg 13y ago
I wonder how would this work in fields other than CS. I'm in physics, and I got my D.Phil, but has been thinking seriously about the state of academic research, including the admission process & finding good student/lab fit. Looking at the examples in the original post, I think the "demonstrate scholarship" section could directly apply for physics as well. Offer letters, github, are more more marginally useful... Tough one. I'd love to hear how this works out, he sounds like a very thoughtful professor.
af3 13y ago
Classifieds: "Master is looking for more cheap power with experience from Google to pay minimum wage". Good luck, professor Huang.
deleted 13y ago
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phdtrees 13y ago
Shameless plug: the 2nd problem "Create a list of computer science faculty by crowdsourcing" has been solved: http://phdtree.org/toplist/field/cs/ http://phdtree.org/toplist/field/cs/

tjr 13y ago

An offer letter from Google or YCombinator (where you are the tech co-founder) which serves as evidence that you passed a challenging programming interview at Google, or that YCombinator believed you would be successful at developing your company product. Interesting. Because I have no intention of moving to a Google or YCombinator location, I never applied to either, but this makes me wonder if merely having been offered an opportunity at such a place could have value. Even if one never intended to follow through. Which might not be a great thing for the folks reviewing applications...

agilebyte 13y ago
In which case you move to #2 which (to me) seems much easier to get: A Github or other online repository of your source code demonstrating contributions to open source projects or impressive projects of your own.
- jrs99 13y ago
  if you do that you might as well forget the PhD. Schools don't want to teach you, they want to accept the best applicants. Applicants who work on open source projects and can get a job anywhere. Applicants that became great learning from somewhere that is not the school that he is applying to. Whereas as a post doc you'll be someone's bitch working for 40K per year. Screw the PhD and whatever it is supposed to mean--that you did all your stupid homework assignments and kissed people's asses for three letters of recommendation and that you "gamed" the GRE.
  - pnathan 13y ago
    Sarcasm detector might be failing, but PhD work has very little to do with homework....
    - jrs99 13y ago
      to get into a phd program, i mean. a phd from a "top school" means you did your homework in college and high school.
      - HarryHirsch 13y ago
        But to make it a meaningful experience (and get out of it with a PhD) you need a wholly different skillset. It's clear that you have never seen a kid who destroyed the productivity of a whole office because he treated his colleagues Just Wrong, and that you have never seen a fellow who just couldn't transfer what he learned in class to real-life application.
        jrs99 13y ago
        i've seen people who didn't know what a lac operon was get a PhD in biochemistry.
        lambdaphage 13y ago
        What.
        HarryHirsch 13y ago
        That's harmless. But if you have someone who continuously messes up shared equipment, leaving it for the next person to fix, and who won't improve their attitude, no matter how often you tell them, that's deadly for morale.
        jrs99 13y ago
        then you should leave your phd program for a garage.
      - pnathan 13y ago
        That is an interesting dilemma, yeah. To be a sharp homework-hammering undergrad is not to be a good researcher & fuzzy situation manager. It's why there's such focus on undergrad research these days, it helps identify the capable people and build their skills (as well as getting some amount of budget help). The professor at Brown clearly enunciates some of the issues with the current system quite well.
- btown 13y ago
  True - if the open source project you've contributed significantly to is, say, a well-acclaimed machine learning library, and you're applying to a machine learning Ph.D., then the sum of your accepted pull requests might be a reasonable proxy for a recommendation letter from the (presumably well-acclaimed) maintainers of said library.
  - agilebyte 13y ago
    It does not seems so to me. To show that your interests align, you do one of the challenges that Jeff lists in part 2. Part 1 is only to show you are a strong programmer/ambitious so your projects can be in anything it seems.
chrisseaton 13y ago
In the UK in some areas such as finance and business there are many people who apply to be an Army officer, and go all the way through selection, but never intend to join up. They do it just so that they can put on their CV (resume) that they've passed Army officer selection.
- elemeno 13y ago
  Not to say that it's not true, but in a decade in finance I've never heard of anyone having gone through Officer Selection to help their career prospects. If you want to have a good start in finance, having a degree (preferably a 1st) in Maths, Physics or Economics from Oxford, Cambridge or LSE is probably the most useful thing you can do!
- arethuza 13y ago
  Isn't Officer Selection where candidate for officer training are selected, not after the full training? According to this link it looks like a ~5 day process: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8359547.stm [NB Not sure I approve of people using up forces resources just to pad their CVs]
  - chrisseaton 13y ago
    I think the Army likes it because it reinforces the idea that Army officers are an elite, and it exposes more future leaders to a little bit of Army life, so they're more positive about the Army when they make decisions when they're running a business or a government department.
segmondy 13y ago
Of course. I have no intention of moving to Cali, but one thing I do plan to do when I go to vacation West next year is to apply to Google, possibly Facebook or/and Amazon. If I get the offer letter, I can frame it and use it as negotiating tactic here in the midwest. It's almost as good as saying "I worked at Google"
- mcguire 13y ago
  Possibly better: you don't have to actually work at Google. 80% of the benefit minus 1% of the opportunity cost.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - skj 13y ago
    That's a very interesting perspective on working for Google. That is, that it's a waste of time. In my experience, working at Google is a blast both in terms of compensation and exciting projects.
    - timburus 13y ago
      If you were luckier than others it doesn't necesserily make you an example to be followed.
      - yetanotherphd 13y ago
        I wouldn't call it luck. Google is consistently ranked as one of the top workplaces. Out of a large number of my co-workers at Google, almost all of them seem to enjoy their work. Very few people are unhappy or seeking to leave. The main difficulty is getting in.
    - mcguire 13y ago
      Depending on what you want, what you can do, and from a certain perspective, any job is a "waste of time". For one thing, you will almost certainly spend the majority of your time working on someone else's grand idea. (By necessity, most of the people working at Google are doing the same kind of things that everyone is doing everywhere. The environment may be better, but it's the same stuff.) As one of my favorite supervisors said, repeatedly, "It's not supposed to be fun. That's why they call it a 'job'. Now get back to work."
mathattack 13y ago
I'd be curious if the folks at Google and YC would be flattered by this, put off, or both.
- robrenaud 13y ago
  If it works, it's clever. But I am definitely not flattered and wouldn't be personally happy about knowing someone did it. The 45 minutes I spent interviewing you and the more than an hour I spend carefully writing up my interview feedback is totally wasted. Well, that sucks for me.
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I think you hit the main point - it winds up wasting a lot of people's time, and also gives short shrift to others in the process. In a sense I put this up with the moral equivalent of practice interviewing with real companies. It's not illegal, but it isn't behavior one would advertise, and it's hard to call it ethical. It would be different if the answer were, "You've worked 2 years for Google or started a company that went through YC" because that's no different than a company asking for Big 4 Accounting experience when hiring a controller. (Having a Big 4 offer letter wouldn't suffice)
latj 13y ago
The other question is- if you have an offer letter from Google or YCombinator in hand, would you really want to go to Brown? At Google it will be like going to grad school except you will be better funded, working with more consistently smarter people, and you will be getting paid instead of racking up debt. As a YCombinator founder you'd basically already be in the position that a Brown computer science graduate hopes to one day get to. I like universities. I hope they figure out how to stay relevant.
- pinhead 13y ago
  How exactly would you be racking up debt as a computer science Ph.D student? You don't pay for tuition, you get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance and you probably will do many industry/research internships (where you get paid very well). I say this with experience, as I am a CS Ph.D student and make more than enough to live on with a modest lifestyle and I have no debt. Plus if you get an outside fellowship, which most successful students do, you'll essentially be able to work on just about anything you want (I don't think this can be said for a random Google employee, however this is probably true for a YC founder). The Ph.D lifestyle is pretty great imho...at least in CS (non-CS, that's a whole other story).
  - flyrain 13y ago
    Get paid a pretty decent stipend + health insurance? Most Ph.D student got less than $2000/month before tax, even less than $1500/month and should pay for health insurance by themselves. OK, decent, how to define decent.
    - pinhead 13y ago
      The NSF GRFP provides ~3k/month plus tuition and health insurance are covered. If you do a 3-month internship each summer on top of that you can get an extra $20k-30k easy. I am not saying you'll have the same lifestyle as a Google employee but I think it's hard to argue that you will go into debt. Maybe I live a more modest lifestyle than others. Also all the schools I got into when I applied to grad school would pay health care/tuition, that's standard.

brucehart 13y ago

I'm surprised that admission into Computer Science PhD programs is so competitive. I would think that with the strong job market for computer scientists, there would not be as many students who would want to make the commitment to a PhD program over other job and entrepreneurial opportunities.

DrSpock 13y ago
Entry into elite PhD programmes is as competitive as ever. Others, not so.
- mcguire 13y ago
  ...and of course Brown (where the author is) is top-twenty, in fact tied at #20 [according to US News & World Report[1]] with places like Rice. It's pretty elite. [1] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-schools/computer-science-rankings http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
  - ex_ex_nihilo 13y ago
    Wow, my school's not even on the list and our graduate program for CS/CE has less than a 13% acceptance rate.
    - aet 13y ago
      This lists are basically meaningless. However, I wouldn't argue with the top 10 or so.
zerr 13y ago
I believe someone who is not a good software engineer or even can't code at all, can still be admitted into some CS PhD program.
- jrs99 13y ago
  i'm sure that's extremely rare though. maybe like 1 person per year may have no idea what coding is and get admitted to a program for CS.

huherto 13y ago

I love this. Especially the part where it gives you a few problems that you can try to solve. Not only is a good way to find talent that may otherwise be detected. It increases the chances of finding new ways to solve some problems. (Edit: grammar)

DrSpock 13y ago

Hmmm. This is an interesting spin the Brown Professor has taken on the PhD application process. For those interested in a career in research and development, a PhD is almost a must. Getting on to a prestigious PhD programme is incredibly competitive, and as someone who has gone through the whole process and seen it from both sides, I can say that I've seen individuals who'd make great computer science researchers not being given an opportunity because they don't tick the right "boxes". Sure it's not perfect, but worth a shot if you're interested.

tanzam75 13y ago
For those interested in a career in development, a PhD is rarely helpful. For the PhD candidate, it can even be counterproductive, as any gains in initial salary will be more than offset by the lost salary during the 5-6 years of the PhD. Only for a career in research is a PhD important.
- DrSpock 13y ago
  That is true to an extent. But, most people don't do PhDs to end up doing purely software development.
- elemeno 13y ago
  The parent comment should probably be read as 'research and development' - working for IBM's research arm, Microsoft Research etc.
  - tanzam75 13y ago
    And I read it as exactly that. I was pointing out that the PhD is useful for "research", but not for research "and development."
    - scott_s 13y ago
      In my experience, the people who can do the D are better at the R.

wschorn 13y ago

This got me to consider applying to brown whenever I'm looking at grad schools.

frozenport 13y ago

Application looks too involved for Brown. When applying to 10 schools I wouldn't do this one because it has no overlap with my other application. I can reuse my letters of recommendation, I can't reuse this application.

benmccann 13y ago
I graduated quite some time ago. Getting letters of recommendation from professors would be impossible for me. I doubt I'd have one professor that knew me when I graduated let alone now years later. And yet, fulfilling these requirements would be very easy for me. I think it's very nice to have multiple routes in. Even if very few candidates avail themselves of this latter route, they might be interesting candidates worth strong consideration.
- jaynos 13y ago
  I'm in the same boat applying to a Master Program. It doesn't help that i spent the better part of my 20's as a business owner with no boss that can write a letter for me.
nilkn 13y ago
I think this would be useful for three groups of people: (1) People who were planning to go into industry and already have, say, an offer letter from Google, or just a strong open source profile, but now aren't sure if they want to go into industry or academia. Being able to apply to Brown with their offer letter could reduce a lot of friction in their consideration of the academic route. (2) People who've already tried to get into a top Ph.D. program the traditional route and failed. If this is your dream, and you don't have the grades or publications to get in otherwise, but you do have top programming chops, this could be a way for you to still get what you want. (3) People who are already in industry and want to go into academia. They may have lost their academic connections at this point in time. Even if they had great grades, they may struggle to reconnect with old teachers to write the requisite stellar recommendation letters.

wukix 13y ago

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

clarebear 13y ago

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

stephencanon 13y ago
Because you always wanted to do academic research? Because you someday want to teach at the college level? Because you have no idea what you want to do and you want to keep your options open a while longer? I left grad school to work in industry, but I’m not so naive as to think that everyone shares my preferences. I have friends who turned down Google offers c. 2001 to go to grad school, and they’ve never regretted that decision. (And I don’t regret the time I spent in grad school before leaving, either).
- zura 13y ago
  Personally, I'd want to get a PhD to be able to work in such places as Microsoft Research. I don't want to become a teacher/professor. Other than that, I really hate some perils of academic world - bureaucracy, nepotism/favoritism/elitism, ...
kskz 13y ago
Google often also hires people to do work they are overqualified for. Had a friend turn down Google because it was boring compared to research.
pgbovine 13y ago
ha, i've been giving talks on this very subject ;) http://vimeo.com/73178238 http://vimeo.com/73178238 btw i'm a big fan of jeff's approach and hope it works out well.

bolu 13y ago

This reminds me of YC's "Apply without an idea" experiment. Both experiments seem to arise from a innovator's insight that a whole class of otherwise highly qualified candidates self select out because of a self perception that they don't "fit the mold". This is especially true of YC, where there are so many articles every day that tell the story of a founder who "saw a problem, and set off on this quest to solve it" that people who don't have an idea on hand when YC applications come up can immediately self exclude. Never mind that many great founders pivoted more than once on their way to success. I'm excited to see this experiment "meet the marketplace", and see what pans out. Given the small number of PhD students these top programs take each year, just yielding one or two great people into the PhD program that otherwise wouldn't have applied seems like it'd really move the needle. [Disclosure: I went to undergrad with Jeff and we're good friends. He really is a great "mold-breaker" himself and I'm excited to see how a great "hacker of systems" in the best sense of the word changes academia during his career]

pgbovine 13y ago
+1000, and latching on to this top comment for more visibility ... also check out jeff's related post on bringing startup culture to academic research! http://jeffhuang.com/adopting_the_startup_culture_for_research.html http://jeffhuang.com/adopting_the_startup_culture_for_resear...

zura 13y ago

I'm still waiting for a REMOTE PhD position :)

bkamapantula 13y ago
I doubt if it would happen at all. I'm a full time Ph.D. student. You might, of course, know that professors interact with the students very often (except if the professor is super busy always). I interact with mine almost every day. I do work with couple of collaborators in different countries. That is because my advisor knows them in-person before deciding to collaborate. I work with lab colleagues frequently. Remote makes all this extremely challenging.
- tjr 13y ago
  What about it exactly is challenging? How is doing computer science research (probably what many people here would do; I don't know what your research field is) with a team of remote individuals harder than doing software development with a team of remote individuals?
  - pgbovine 13y ago
    remote software development is very challenging, and when it works well, it's due to super-clear specs and project management. by its very nature, research isn't as amenable to crystal-clear specs.
  - bkamapantula 13y ago
    I haven't worked in industry so far. So, cannot comment on that. In academia however you can possibly build connections with your peers (other labs) and lab colleagues through your work. One can attend on-campus seminars and exchange ideas with potential collaborators. Being remote voids these options. Opportunities to work on interesting projects (other than research. For instance, contributing to student organizations) will be lost as well. Edit: Regarding my research area. On most occasions, students will have to register for classes (not all classes are offered online). Once you complete classes, it is potentially viable to work remotely. However, it again depends on the funding scenario. How a student is supported etc. If I'm a Teaching Assistant, I'm expected to be on campus and available to students. Being a Research Assistant gives the flexibility to work remotely (if advisor agrees however not all universities might allow that).

mlyang 13y ago

Cool idea-- people inventive enough to go down an entrepreneurial route would probably be interesting/compelling candidates for academic innovation. I actually think that creating many interesting projects + one's corresponding Github would be a better metric than getting a Google (or even YC) acceptance letter. You want people who are constantly tinkering and thinking of new ideas/projects/approaches and inventing just for the sake of inventing. If you go too entrepreneurial, you might also be selecting for students who might be more amenable to dropping out from the program and doing a start-up (which then wastes the resources/time that Jeff mentioned he had to give to every PhD candidate).

smoyer 13y ago

That sounds right up my alley! I'm currently tracking the geolocation of computer science professors by tracking the gaze of the NSA's agents who are watching them through the myriad of security cameras in our country. My academic resume isn't going to get me noticed for a PhD program but it sounds like someone is finally looking at ability (I had great scores on the Computer Science GRE in 1990, but they apparently only last five years and that test has been discontinued)!

tanzam75 13y ago
The GRE Computer Science exam was pretty heavy on theory and systems. This made sense for 1990, when CS departments were heavier on theory and systems. It has grown less relevant as the field of CS grew to encompass additional areas. Thus, CS programs stopped requiring it, so fewer people took the exam, so the ETS decided to drop it.
- smoyer 13y ago
  I understand the rationale for dropping the exam, but it's the last academic endeavor on my resume. I've got a ton of work experience since then and many of my projects would be worthy of today's buzzwords. My lament is that only forward-thinking advising professors would see the value in what I have done. Note that no professors have actually been tracked or harmed.

cmeiklejohn 13y ago

I think this is a very interesting idea, and I look forward to the results of the experiment! Allow me to take a moment to reiterate some of the comments I left on the Georgia Tech master's thread [1], specifically as a student who has taken graduate level computer science courses at Brown University with the majority of his experience working in industry. * I went directly into industry in 1998 working at a software/systems engineer for a telecom working on Solaris deployments. I worked full-time and paid for my undergraduate education which I pursued part-time and which took me 9 years to finish. I majored in "information technology," as there was no computer science online program at Northeastern University. I didn't take any theory courses at all, and the majority of my course work was programming in languages like Java, C++, and C# (also COBOL, and the like...) * I applied at Brown University after talking to the admissions and computer science departments multiple times, in which they told me I wouldn't be able to pursue a master's due to lack of independent or undergraduate research or an undergraduate education in computer science. The process of being told this was rather unfortunate, as the responses I received via e-mail telling me it wouldn't be possible were ended with "Sent from my iPhone." * At the time I talked with them, I had been working at Basho Technologies for a year on Riak, an open source distributed Dynamo-style data store, as well as serving as a maintainer of rubygems.org. * I was finally able to get accepted as a "non-degree" or "special" graduate student, which is allowed to take courses at full price. This role exists primarily to allow students to determine if they would be a fit for graduate school, at which point I would then have to re-apply for degree seeking status. This was possible because of an independent meeting I scheduled with Shriram Krishnamurthi, who, based on my industrial experience expedited the process along. * Since starting as a "non-degree" student, I've been heavily motivated to attempt to stand out from other candidates for when I eventually re-apply to be a degree seeking student by independently publishing papers, publishing a blog, organizing a podcast, and speaking at conferences. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510142

pgbovine 13y ago
what kind of research are you interested in for Ph.D.? i can't seem to find your academic info from your HN profile. email me if you want to chat more.

Balgair 13y ago

I'm applying as we speak, but in Bioeng. When I email professors and get to talking they always coach that they do NOT have control over the admissions process, that a committee acts as Maxwell's demon. Though I am not applying to Brown and do not know anything about the internals of their process, this seems to indicated that professor Huang has at least some control over the admissions. If I were professor Huang, I would be very very careful about this, as sparks of racism, sexism, and homophobia can quickly ignite into a fire. I want to be clear, I am not accusing professor Huang of this at all. Heck I don't know the guy a bit and I do like this alternative approach to the application a lot. Still, he needs to be careful.

p1esk 13y ago
Are you kidding? Of course a professor has control over the admission process. If he wants you on his team, you're in, unless you have a criminal record, or GPA below 3.0 (or whatever is absolute minimum for that particular grad school). Think of it as a hiring process, with the professor as a hiring manager.
- Balgair 13y ago
  No, I am not kidding. Based on the conversations I have had, it seems to be typical that a committee selects the applicants, not the professors. That is what all the professors tell me. That being said, I would be stunned if this were the truth. There is no frickin way that this happens. Here's how I imagine it: 'Admissions committee is in session' 'So, which of these bozos we gonna pick?' 'I want Joe, Schmo, and Dingus' 'Sweet, I want Harry, and Fiona' 'Ok, we all cool?' 'Yep' 'Aite, lets get beers'
  - p1esk 13y ago
    Well, the committee also has a job of selecting the rest of the applicants, if there are still places left after professors made their recommendations.

mkramlich 13y ago

even better: don't apply at all. simply work/study/design/research/build whatever you wanted to do anyway. then share/publish/collaborate as you desire. or not. rinse, repeat. be a genius. or a crank. or an entrepreneur. or some mix. just do things and get it out there. see what sticks. not all smart people are in academia and not all people in academia are very smart. and you can publish, collaborate, ship and show accomplishments without/outside a university paradigm.

chrismonsanto 13y ago
Please don't underestimate how much it helps to have an adviser who has been through the ropes, or how awesome it is to have peers that are brilliant and working on similar stuff. I'm a self-taught programmer, so I know exactly what it's like to wing it, and I loved the PhD experience. The anti-PhD attitude on here is so weird, considering YC seems to be largely the same thing on a smaller timescale (weed out everyone but the very best, have them make things, give them connections, ...)
- mkramlich 13y ago
  understood personally I think HN has both a pro-PhD, pro-academic, and also an anti-PhD or anti-academic segment. Sometimes within the same people! I certainly do. I think it has both strengths and weaknesses. I think to the extent that universities and PhD track stuff serves an unnecessary and embarrassing anachronistic echo from the Middle Ages then that is a bad thing. But to the extent it helps teach disciplined thinking, cultivate a new generation of teachers and researchers, and helps to cull out noise or invalid/false/dumb contributions to the advancement of an art, it's a very good thing. The weed-out effect is good. I think some antipathy comes from the folks who perceive there to be a lot of non-weeds outside academia, and weeds within it. All discipline and curation is good. But it's not the unique providence of universities or professorship tracks. A lot of programmers have a libertarian bent too and dislike profit-maximizing monopolies or priesthoods, and universities/academia has at least a little of that aspect to them.
deleted 13y ago
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xSwag 13y ago

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

maximilian 13y ago
You still need to do your masters, "along the way". If I remember correctly, in England, first you do you masters, and then start a PhD. 2 masters + 4-5 phd = 6. Most European countries require a masters degree before starting, but the PhD is officially supposed to take 3 years (but usually takes 3-4+)

graycat 13y ago

Usually the Ph.D. is aimed at being a college professor and working toward tenure. The CS Ph.D. now seems to be aimed at such a professor but also at a career as an employee. Sorry to say this, but Ph.D. or not, it is getting clear that in the US being an employee is no good for a career. Can get hired as an employee in your 20s, but the chances go down in your 30s, and the chances go to near zero long before your 40 year career is over. Exception: If you rise high into management, then you might be able to continue to get hired until, say, 50. And high management positions commonly don't last very long. E.g., a big tech company might hire 100 Master's or Ph.D. degree holders, promote 1 to management, and at age 35 or so fire the other 99. Then the other 99 can wish that they could convert their Ph.D., say, in electronic engineering, to an electrician's license or had followed the path of a friend in high school who was mowing grass and now has 5 crews mowing grass and is getting into landscape architecture and commercial instead of just residential clients. In broad terms, for a long career in the US, be a sole proprietor with a geographical barrier to entry. If want to do something technical, then be a CEO of a startup that takes advantage of your technical background. For being an employee, regard that as a temporary slot that will have to be replaced by owning part or all of the business from which you get your income. Then, a problem with a Ph.D. is that you spend in grad school most of your 20s when you are most employable. Then to go into the job market in your late 20s or 30s can be a big disappointment because, really, the jobs are for subordinates, not narrow subject matter expert researchers. Actually, a Ph.D. can be highly resented, can be a black mark on your resume. Be careful.

banachtarski 13y ago

As a person who was about to apply to PhD programs but changed my mind due to insufficient recommendations, I'm glad somebody else realizes that PhD admissions is utter bull crap. 185 dollar GRE that I can get in the 99th percentile on with ZERO studying? Grades that aren't normalized across institutions weighed heavily? Need recs from established professors who can slip in a good word for you? Oh sorry, you were actually doing things that interested you, not necessarily things that would impress the right people. Oh sorry you took tons of hard classes at a prestigious institution and so have something less than 4.0. Oh sorry you hopped labs for a bit instead of staying with that boring CS guy that would've gotten you into any PhD program in America for 4 years. Oh sorry you spent a year or two out of college doing startup tech work without building credentials with other PhD grads but nevertheless solving research grade problems. I've realized that the PhD admissions does not select candidates who actually want to do research. It selects candidates who want to be admitted into a PhD program. No thanks. I love science and math, and I love research, but I think the PhD application has been so harrowing for me, I won't consider it again unless drastic changes are made.

ank286 13y ago
HAHA. As a PhD student, I agree with most of your sentiments. The PhD application process is nothing, try applying for fellowships. Go to a prestigious institution, pull allnighters, to get a subpar gpa, and have no time for volunteering activities. These are the criteria you need to satisfy to get something like NSF GRP (Broader Impact is 50% of the application). You might have a better shot at a lesser prestigious university with a not-so-great engineering program and being a super smart person, killing it. Then, apply for fellowship --> you will get it. It is all a rubric. Now on to the game of academia. It is one that is based on reputation, papers, and not money. No one cares for efficiency either and no one is building crap. All they are doing is trying out different "solutions," which may or may not make any sense. For instance, "hey guys, let's apply game theory to problem X, it will be a good/novel experiment and we can get a paper out of it." Waste of tax dollars. The logical answer that solves problem X might have already been solved and can be solved using ordinary methods, but academia doesn't want that. Research labs have business models, keep proposing new complexity on complexities, very unnecessary. Overcrowded fields like computer vision reek of this.

kraskat 13y ago

Like Jeff I am also a young faculty member at Brown (http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/ http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/) and I couldn't agree more with him. The Ph.D. application process has a lot of flaws. We (the Big Data Management Group at Brown) are also always looking for very talented people and similar to Jeff we started to hand out small challenges to candidates interested in doing data-centric systems research (see also http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/phd14.html http://cs.brown.edu/~kraskat/phd14.html). In addition, last year we started a research internship program (http://database.cs.brown.edu/big-data-internship http://database.cs.brown.edu/big-data-internship) - it is quite competitive to get in, but still easier than to be admitted to the PhD program, and the best way for both sides to determine if there is a good fit with the group and the PhD program. Finally, I would like to mention, that we actually do consider MOOC courses and github portfolios as part of the candidate evaluation.

solarix 13y ago

While I agree the application process needs improvement, I think this entry greatly exaggerates how hard it is to get into a PhD program. Since when do you need to be published to even get into a PhD program? When I went through the application process, I got accepted by 6/6 schools that I applied to, with no publications and no real ideas for what I wanted to research on. In fact, most PhD students actually don't even have a research topic until the second or third year of grad school. I think more than anything, your personal statement is the deciding factor in a lot of cases. What had worked for me was to have a list of research topics and faculty from each school that you're interested in working with, and directly address them in your statement. Other than that, of course whatever supporting evidence to differentiate yourself is helpful. I thought proposing to use offer letters from Google or YC (both have much lower acceptance rates than a PhD program) just to prove you can code is pretty hilarious.

GuiA 13y ago
When did you apply, and to what schools? These days, good luck getting in a top tier institution for CS without a solid track record (I.e. a publication or two at an ACM/IEEE conference, and letters of rec from reputable professors/researchers in your field). The letters of rec are what make or break your application. I agree that it's a bit over the top, but that's how it is.
- solarix 13y ago
  2005, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UIUC, and my alma mater UT Austin. Ended up at Cal. Granted, I was EE and admitted as EECS, so maybe a bit different.

imrehg 13y ago

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

af3 13y ago

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

deleted 13y ago

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phdtrees 13y ago

Shameless plug: the 2nd problem "Create a list of computer science faculty by crowdsourcing" has been solved: http://phdtree.org/toplist/field/cs/ http://phdtree.org/toplist/field/cs/