Applying to PhD Programs in Computer Science (2014) [pdf] (opens in new tab)

I'm in this camp (haven't published since I graduated and joined industry), and I also strongly disagree with this statement. The value of the PhD is how it changes the way you think, how you break down big fuzzy problems, and how it helps you navigate the literature when you need help, and how it helps you know where to look and who to ask.

I've worked on much harder problems than my PhD, but none have felt as hard as the PhD, because of the PhD.

> Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential.

There's also plenty of industry positions that benefit from you having a PhD. Certain fields can basically require them, like Chemistry. In CS, you might be able to get a lot of them without one, but the PhD lets you get paid to develop your skill set in niche areas.

Agreed, a PhD is absolutely not useless in this industry, even if you don't end up in the research community. Understanding where the research frontiers of various fields are and being able to quickly find / digest relevant technical papers feels like a superpower. The gap between an undergrad education and a research frontier is enormous, and only working on a PhD really gives you the time and incentive to cross it. Having done it once, it gets easier to do it again.

For me, it has turned a huge volume of "unknown unknowns" into "known unknowns" and equipped me with the tools to then convert those into "knowns". Without it I'd be a fine coder, sure. With it I can work on a different tier of projects, and direct my career much better.

The costs are very real, though. Giving up ~6 years of early career earnings in a high-paying industry is utterly insane; you will never, ever make it up short of your startup lottery ticket number coming up. It's a meat grinder for mental health. Dozens of things outside of your control can go wrong and torpedo your aspirations. It is the right choice only for a vanishingly small minority.

This statement reflects the writers' large ego, not reality. It's a shame how this point of view is prominent in the scientific community. I've seen similar rude statements from academic scientists who say that working in R&D at a corporation isn't "real science".

The opportunity cost of a PhD can be pretty high. In CS you could theoretically make back a lot of that money with a higher salary after graduation if you then enter industry, but the gap in lifetime earnings up until that point is huge.

They could be wrong about the latter, but if they believe it strongly at CMU, it's good (especially for students who might go there) that they say so.

My strategy, which worked out okay, was to "bracket" the field by choosing a couple of schools that looked solid and had very large MS class sizes and to just view my "elite" apps as lottery tickets unlikely to pay off (which they didn't).

Beyond that, and especially today, I'd look seriously at targeting specific future advisors at the schools in question, and worrying far less about the school's reputation. An excellent advisor at Mississippi State will do you far more good than a crappy one at Stanford. And will probably cost a lot less.

my hack: when you're traveling to a city with a brand name school you might be interested in attending, shoot some professors an email asking to drop by and chat about their research. they will usually tell you to come by during their office hours. this has worked for me no less than 3 times and led to 2 admissions.

if you're an undergrad and you've never sold/pitched yourself to someone i strongly suggest you read some salesy stuff about how to approach a sales meeting. you have to keep in mind that PIs are kind of like CEOs of small startups - they do research, publish papers, and win grants. That's their business cycle. when they're evaluating new students they're trying to determine how effectively you'll fit into that cycle. that means if you've done all 3 of those things you're in a good position to be hired (and it is out and out hiring) but if you lack experience in one area (e.g. writing grants) you can make up for it by being strong in another (or giving the impression that you will be). ultimately you need to speak to their needs and goals rather than your own.

Then a job is even more so trading time for money, and easy to lose 6 years, or even 40 years in a blink. And what do you have to show for it? Half the projects get cancelled, 95% of projects at a corporation don't last past 5 years. Your name does not even appear on any work you have done.

Most of the the skills you gain are about how to navigate that specific corporation. This feel to me like the biggest waste of time when I was refreshing Reddit to death at my desk.

At least with a Ph.D., you're at least learning a skill, and gaining a globally recognized credential. Having 10 years at AT&T or Oracle is a decaying credential in comparison. Like you, I'd suggest for people to "get outside your comfort zone" of a business/company and "try something before you default" to a corporate desk job.

Yeah, this doesn't apply to mathematics, where the undergraduate degree often doesn't even prepare you to understand the problem you would eventually get to work on.

I participated in REUs and was a co-author on a published paper before I started my math PhD, and it was still a long journey to arrive at a project that ended up in a dissertation.

One of the great things about grad school was that I got to learn mathematics that I wouldn't otherwise - not just in classes, of course. Getting more educated would have been a good enough reason.

Aimless wandering was just a part of the journey, and a nearly inevitable one.

While I am talking about mathematics here, theoretical computer science is just a branch of math, and is not much different.

Looking back, there are many things that I could have done differently, lots of bullshit I could have avoided, and many things in that broken system that I could have dodged.

But "don't go to grad school if you don't already have a project" just isn't a solid advice, in my opinion. It's great if that is the case, but you need to be very lucky for that to happen.

I don't think many supervisors will let you do this. 1) you'll need to find someone who has funding and already works in the area of your good idea 2) people overestimate how much they can do during a PhD 3) you probably aren't aware of the field coming out of undergrad 4) not a lot of theses will ever be read outside of the examiners, let alone be a breakthrough.

I'd say do a PhD if you feel like it, you can work for years on mundane tasks that likely wont culminate in a breakthrough, aren't prone to depression/stress, and don't care about money.

> Go into grad school and pursue a PHD because you've got a burning desire to turn one of your good ideas into a breakthrough. If you don't have such an idea based on your undergrad experience, that's already a warning sign that you shouldn't just go to grad school.

When this happens, I think the person usually realizes the idea is too naive, too small, too vague, too already-studied, etc. to be a good research problem. It generally requires quite a bit of PhD time before even being able to recognize a good idea, and more to have one. Also, most good ideas simply don't lead to breakthroughs; they lead to nice advances at best.

I agree it's a very good idea to know which professors you probably want to work with when you apply. So a burning desire to become expert in a specific area is a very good indicator for a PhD.

I'd imagine that working at a real company isn't really the best occupation and place to generate new ideas unless what you're interested in is more practical. It just seems like it'd be more distracting than inspiring.

I've thought about getting a second undergrad degree (math, very closely related to the area) to broaden my horizon and I'm from Europe so I wouldn't be in debt or anything, but the idea feels quite silly.

I've only read a fifth of it (the downfall) and I feel like some of his not so good experiences could actually be easily avoided by anyone with some work experience. Im already accustomed to knowing that half of the time the leader/professor might not actually know what he's doing or get you to do something that's obviously not gonna work because what the hell why not. Usually I just do enough to keep him happy but not get too emotionally invested, like I don't intentionally muck it but I don't get so committed that I feel depressed.

I'm almost done with my first year and I was pretty much aware that I wouldn't be able to do any decent research so I just tried to get as much of my coursework out of the way as possible

I followed the path in his prologue: a BS/MS student with a lot of internships, which were mostly uninspiring but less uninspiring than school. Always vaguely disappointed that problems weren't "big" or "intellectual" enough (something I kind of look back on in shame). However, I took a different turn by getting very "in" to the engineering part of software in my last two years.

This led me to being purposefully selective with my last internship and eventual job search (optimizing for hard problems, interesting business models, and OSS/mature infrastructure), and I ended up very happily in industry, satisfying my intellectual curiosity at work and on the side.

And yet, I have always wondered what it would have been like to be a PhD student instead. From this narrative, it sounds very similar to being a junior engineer: you don't really know what's going on, and you're dependent on the graciousness and good will of more senior people to point you in the right direction, until you can build a compass of your own.

Thank you very much for this link, it's like gazing into another branch of the universe for me.

It feels like in many ways academia has it worse than the corporate world (lower pay, similar or more politics, more personal fiefdoms, greater chance of harassment / coercion), yet people propagate the image of a certain unfairly romanticized wonderland.

1) it gives advisors a lot of influence over the student's career (obviously, if you have an actively hostile advisor things will be hard in any system, but I have known successful faculty who had indifferent fund-and-forget-style advisors who wouldn't know enough about the student's field to write a good recommendation)

2) informal "I like this person, hire them" networks tend to select for people who are like current participants in the network

I agree that a coarse "do they have at least x papers?" way of evaluating researchers is silly. But it's not crazy to have 10 papers when you graduate. That's about one paper every 6 months in a 5-year program. Six months is a long time, almost a thousand hours of work. If three people are focused on a project, it's pretty plausible to get a cool result in six months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker

First, this is not indicative of other fields. I did my PhD in space science, I now work out of an astrophysics office. Astronomy is a competitive field by academic standards, certainly beyond PhD, but even at places like Oxford and Cambridge, the acceptance rate is probably something like 1:2 (really not bad) if you have a good undergrad result. Postdocs at top places like Harvard-Smithsonian can be extremely competitive though. I asked around my colleagues here and they didn't seem to think that PhD applications are significantly up recently.

Computer vision has always been quite a competitive field. Again, I think because it's a field where a lot of cutting edge stuff is happening actively and academically these researchers are famous. In itself that's quite weird when you think about it. This may be bias because I'm familiar with the field. However I was at NeurIPS last year and there was a perpetual queue of people waiting to get a photo with Andrew Ng at the closing party. I've never seen anything like that at another conference. It's actually quite annoying because it makes it very difficult to speak to top people in the field. Compared to say ecology where I can just email people and I'm highly likely to get a positive response.

Some places are just competitive full stop. Max Planck Institute (MPI), ETH Zurich, Oxbridge, etc. These places will always have a lot of international interest and everyone knows the big names in the US. My theory is that this is in part due to media representation. Movies teach us that getting into Harvard/Yale/Princeton/MIT/Stanford is a big deal. Can you name the top 2 or 3 universities in France beyond the Ecole Polytechnique, for example?

Thirdly, ML has skewed this significantly, especially since it's actively a good field to get into and a lot of the big names are still in the business of supervising people. Skeptically, I think many people applying are in it for the money and the prestige, not due to a deep interest in the theory. Bear in mind there are tons of fields where you can do applied ML - where there's more low hanging fruit, easy high impact papers, opportunities to work on novel architectures and datasets, etc. I would really recommend this route, it worked well for me.

The matching process varies with institution. In the UK it's common for a department to get funding for X students. Those students are doled out between supervisors - there may be many more potential projects than there is actually funding. This is the case for research council funding. However there are also funded PhDs which are usually some deliverable on a project that has a well-defined goal. When I started, I knew what my project would be at a high level. Lots of people in my cohort picked an advisor after they had been accepted. This is quite normal, most physics departments allow you to put in a general application.

So you do get problems when students say, I want to come to your department and work for X professor. That isn't necessarily something that can be guaranteed. The department might hire 5 really good applicants who all want the same advisor. However again, this is quite rare outside CS I think.

Finally I think people don't really understand what they're taking on when they want to work with a hotshot advisor. They need to ask questions like does this person actually have time for me? Working in a top lab is undoubtedly good, but it can be very high pressure and some people will suffer under those conditions.

> From my experience during my short PhD attempt, the amount of time spent studying (classes, reading papers, etc) versus simply working for an advisor was smaller than I expected, and I don't know if that's because of a real change in the PhD process or simply my own naïveté.

My advisor was more of a PM as he was (is) out of the active research game; he sat on tons of high profile committees at this point. So I worked largely independently and then got feedback at regular meetings. That was fine for me, but other people who wanted more active mentorship struggled I think. I did find it hard that nobody in my group had any significant overlap with my project. But it varies a lot. Some people get given a very tightly defined project due to funding, some work closely with their supervisor or act as a cog in a larger group.

I got a PhD from a public university that's probably considered tier-2 in 2018. I got rejected from every other university I applied to for the PhD program for but I learned a lot about how academia works in the process.

There's another post in this thread about making the jump across tiers into the elite university tier. They are right on the money when they say how hard it is and how much of it depends on who you know in the department you're applying to or who your references know in that department.

Being from a different country puts you at a severe disadvantage in the networking aspect of the application. If you really want to attend a top tier institution for your PhD, the most sensible path would be to get into a Master's program at a school where you have a few advisors you'd like to work under.

Once you're in the Master's program, you can do your best to impress them and convince them to take you on as a PhD candidate. Otherwise it's really really difficult to convince them to take a chance on you without knowing you personally.

Anecdotally, even at my tier-2 university it was an anomaly for a "stranger" to be accepted straight into the PhD track. The professors would almost never take a chance on anyone they didn't personally know or didn't have good personal references about. I can't imagine how it would be a tier-1.

Tl;Dr: Unless you make a big name for yourself in a specific area, it's nearly impossible to get into the elite universities without connections. If you're hell bent on doing your PhD at a tier-1, go into the same university's Master's program and build a personal relationship with whomever you want your advisor to be.