[HN Gopher] How to get a PhD in mathematics in a timely fashion ...
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How to get a PhD in mathematics in a timely fashion (2020) [pdf]
Author : paulpauper
Score : 130 points
Date : 2022-08-13 03:42 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sites.math.washington.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sites.math.washington.edu)
| graycat wrote:
| Still easier:
|
| (1) Pick a practical problem in physical science, engineering,
| medicine, some other field, e.g., ecology, or business, a problem
| not yet solved.
|
| (2) Get a good solution to this practical problem, mostly using
| math, hopefully at least a little new math.
|
| For publication, the math is supposed to be "new, correct, and
| significant" -- get the "significant" part from how much the math
| does for the practical problem. In medicine, your work might save
| thousands of lives. In business, your work might make/save
| millions of dollars. In ecology, you might help clean up a river.
|
| (3) Surprising blunt academic fact of life: Academics is very
| short on money and understands clearly that very little of their
| new theoretical work has any near term practical value. So,
| academics understands that they are short on money mostly because
| their work is short on valuable, current applications. Indeed,
| the words _and applications_ are commonly in the titles of
| journals. So, publish in such a journal.
|
| Some high end universities say that the requirement for a Ph.D.
| dissertation is "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of
| publication" -- so, remove all doubt and publish your work.
|
| Advisor? Show them the letter that your paper was accepted.
|
| Done, fully, _de facto_ , essentially, or nearly so.
|
| Where to get the practical problem? Typically outside of a math
| department and maybe off campus.
|
| For a job?
|
| Long the main source of good jobs for a Ph.D. in math was US
| national security, heavily near DC. That may still be the case.
|
| If you have any hope of a career that lets you be financially
| responsible, e.g., support a family and provide for retirement,
| stay away from academic careers.
|
| Academics just quietly assumes that any recent Ph.D. is just
| obsessed with research, even apparently useless research, and
| will pursue it neglecting nearly everything else in life
| including being financially responsible.
|
| Instead, go into business, e.g., start a business, own 100% of
| it, and make it successful. The business is likely a _sole
| proprietorship_ and LLC (limited liability company).
|
| In that business, maybe some math, new, or new to the field of
| the business, will be an advantage.
|
| In particular, currently take advantage of the not fully
| exploited amazing technology of current computing and the
| Internet.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| In that case do not do a Ph.d in math at all. Do it within an
| engineering department instead, much more funding and you get
| paid accordingly. And then it is much easier to network your
| way into an industry job as well.
|
| Frankly, there is nothing in math research that is going to be
| directly applied to industry. Even applied math is entirely
| theoretical. To get to the level of your work actually being
| used, you need to wait for it to siphon through to the
| engineering department.
| Test0129 wrote:
| > Academics just quietly assumes that any recent Ph.D. is just
| obsessed with research, even apparently useless research, and
| will pursue it neglecting nearly everything else in life
| including being financially responsible.
|
| This isn't even an assumption. It's borderline enforced. I
| dropped from the program after paying my own way because my
| lack of interest in being financially irresponsible put me at
| the bottom of the bin for good research opportunities.
|
| Academics _force_ you to take 9-10 /hr. and work 60 hours a
| week (of course on a contract for only 30 hours), because if
| they don't have the constant meat-mill of H1Bs and young
| financially irresponsible people the entire industry would
| collapse into itself. It's not unlike tech itself which relies
| on exploiting the revolving door of new grads to get cheap
| labor. The only difference is the new grad working for BigCo
| for sub-par dollars can usually afford to eat. Where I went to
| school the MAJORITY (not an exaggeration) were on some kind of
| assistance. Either food or housing. Post-docs were barely able
| to afford rent.
| sleepyams wrote:
| I think this is good advice but also not the only possible path
| towards completing a PhD in math. I get a lot of fruitful
| research done while binge-watching television, for instance. The
| key is that you have to find something that works for you. For
| some that may be logging hours but I know a lot of people for
| whom logging hours is a hindrance. There are mathematicians who
| have to actively hold back from just doing research all the time,
| and for these types there's no point in logging hours. My point
| is that if you don't think the work ethic described in this
| article is agreeable, don't let that dissuade you from pursuing a
| PhD in math.
| peterhalburt33 wrote:
| As a mathematician who works with many engineers and computer
| scientists, I wanted to expand on one of the points under the
| "Getting a Job" section. While it is certainly true that a
| mathematics education provides a great background for
| understanding other STEM fields, I would caution math Ph.D
| students who expect these jobs to be open to them because of
| their STEM connection: the onus is completely on you to bridge
| the gap between what you do and the field you want to work in.
| While it may be true that someone will hire you for your critical
| thinking skills (though I will personally say that I have never
| seen this happen), it is more likely that your deep
| specialization in a tangentially connected field (coupled with
| not being involved in the culture/conferences of the community
| you wish to enter) will be an impediment to entering a new field:
| you expect to be paid like a Ph.D., but will potentially require
| years of training to get up to speed.
|
| As an example, I remember the advice of "just go into data
| science" being handed out like candy to students interested in
| industry around the time I was in grad school (10 years ago). To
| be sure, there was a period where a STEM background + interest
| could get you in the door, but that time is over. These days you
| are competing with many equally brilliant students who have taken
| multiple courses and done research in this area, and it is highly
| unlikely that an employer will take a chance retraining an e.g.
| algebraic geometer with no precious data science experience to
| suit their needs.
|
| All this to say, if you have an interest in another area, you
| must know the players and their work in that area while
| simultaneously knowing your area in math. It is not easy by any
| means, you are essentially signing up for twice as much work
| learning your field and theirs, but the rewards are great - as a
| connector between two fields, you have precious expertise that is
| very employable across a broad range of industries (my first job
| out of grad school was essentially providing advice on research
| programs helping connect different STEM communities to government
| funding agencies, but I was able to use my connections from that
| job to get back into research).
| BossingAround wrote:
| > the onus is completely on you to bridge the gap between what
| you do and the field you want to work in.
|
| Yes, like for everyone else. Sounds like when I was getting
| into the field with no formal comp sci education, only I was
| expecting this to be true :).
| mmmmpancakes wrote:
| I want to re-frame what you're saying slightly.
|
| Yes, the onus is on you to learn the skills you need to show up
| and produce on day 1. That's 100% true and it is a lot of work.
| Having a math phd alone and interest is not enough.
|
| However, there are still plenty of paths from math phd into
| data science and adjacent fields. Those courses you mention are
| things that someone with a math phd can 100% self teach, almost
| certainly to a level of understanding that is stronger than
| someone coming out of a DS masters. Learning how to interview
| on those concepts is important but ultimately they are very
| easy for a math phd once they know what the rules of the game
| are.
|
| Personally, I spent the last year or so of my postdoc
| obsessively leetcoding and doing side projects in DS and landed
| a non-entry level data science position as my first job out of
| academia at a FANG. This is with a pure math research
| background totally unrelated to the position.
|
| So it is still very possible. I think painting it like you do
| is a bit pessimistic and will discourage the wrong people. From
| personal experience, I saw comments like yours over the past
| year while I was job hunting and found them very discouraging.
|
| The most important things are:
|
| - have a network of similar people who have also made the
| transition (recently!) to get good advice and maybe also some
| referrals. These are the people you met in grad school a few
| years ahead of you.
|
| - know exactly what type of position you want (or converge
| quickly) and focus on it relentlessly.
|
| - understand the value you bring and the value others perceive
| someone like you to bring. Talking to people in hiring
| positions for different roles is the fastest way to learn what
| you have that is valuable. Do that as much as possible. Then
| you can line up how you value yourself with how a hiring
| manager values you, which will be the happiest result.
|
| - take as many interview opportunities as possible to get that
| interview experience.
|
| - Work relentlessly to interview better than those people from
| DS masters or whatever other sources they might come from.
| lemursage wrote:
| << You will like any subject once you get to know enough about
| it. >>
|
| this is a really important observation -- good attitude will do
| wonders to your motivation for research.
| t_mann wrote:
| > << You will like any subject once you get to know enough
| about it. >> this is a really important observation
|
| And unfortunately false, as I've witnessed on multiple
| occasions. Don't underestimate mental health problems in
| academia, telling people that everything will fall into place
| if they just keep pushing can lead to bad outcomes.
| admissionsguy wrote:
| > Don't underestimate mental health problems in academia
|
| Having dropped out of my PhD due to - mostly - mental health
| reasons, I don't fully understand the preoccupation with the
| mental health situation in academia. Not that it is not bad,
| but is it worse than in most other occupations? Or is it just
| that academia is mostly populated by people of at minimum
| middle class upbringing who are not supposed to experience
| hardship of any kind?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It's statistically overrepresented in PhD students.
| Something like 40% fit the criteria for severe depression
| or severe anxiety.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Something like 40% fit the criteria for severe
| depression or severe anxiety.
|
| Psychological (indeed, medical) criteria are not
| necessarily all they're cracked up to be.
|
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3303
| t_mann wrote:
| I wasn't actually saying anything about outside academia.
|
| Makes me wonder, is there a name for that sort of reasoning
| where one person asserts 'A is associated with B', and the
| response tries to turn it into an argument about !A? I
| guess it's not a strawman, but I'm sure the philosophers
| have come up with a name for it.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| The poor do not have a monopoly on suffering. The middle
| class constitutes a large/majority portion of a lot of
| western countries, it's odd to believe they are living
| perfect lives free of pain and hardship.
|
| Academia is the worst environment I've ever worked in,
| worse than any industry job I've ever had whether blue
| collar or white collar.
| atq2119 wrote:
| I suspect it is in part the combination of academia being a
| somewhat "normatively standard" path for people to take
| but, unlike most other such paths, inherently requires a
| lot of self-discipline and self-motivation. The result is
| that mental health issues may cause worse extreme outcomes,
| for the sort of person who _can_ go into a PhD. The
| "standard" alternative path for somebody like that is some
| office job where you can just sort of muddle through: you
| may be deeply unhappy, but the money still comes in and
| it's easier to find satisfaction in other aspects of your
| life.
|
| There are other paths where self-discipline and self-
| motivation are important, like being an independent
| consultant, but those are generally not considered
| "normatively standard" paths for people to take.
|
| (My personal experience with academia was great. I was
| genuinely interested in the topics, had great colleagues
| and a great advisor. It probably helped that it was in
| maths, where there is money for decent pay but no lab work
| with which PhD students are routinely burdened.)
| watwut wrote:
| Mental health issues are not more likely to happen to
| middle class. Middle class do have them, of course, but
| lower classes have them more.
| wbl wrote:
| Academia has a uniquely personal importance: your work is a
| reflection of your personal effort and interests for years.
| It's also very isolated: the only people who did what I did
| were hundreds of miles away at other institutions.
| badpun wrote:
| Doing a PhD is a bit like doing a startup, in the way that
| you can work on something for years and produce nothing of
| value. This is way more stressful than regular job where
| your effort is validated every month with a paycheck. Many
| people are not built for this level of stress and
| uncertainty, but they're too young when they join the PhD
| program to know that about themselves yet.
| lemursage wrote:
| It's not a statement about your general motivation for a PhD
| -- I don't think you can easily find a subject for which you
| will find a non-stop motivation 24h/7days for 3-4 years (or
| so, eqv. period required to get a PhD). If you encounter a
| dip in interest, which most likely will happen, you need to
| understand that changing a PhD is not always a best option --
| just because it sounds good now, it doesn't mean it will in 2
| years time. You supervisor should be there to guide you into
| interesting areas of research and may play a substantial role
| in rekindling your motivation. Naturally, mental health
| issues are another problem -- but I think they have often
| different origins than "just boredom" with subject. I may be
| completely wrong though.
| imgabe wrote:
| I haven't done a Phd, but I always think of Paul Graham
| saying "If you think something's supposed to hurt, you won't
| notice if you're doing it wrong"
| j7ake wrote:
| Author says 20 hours / week of research, but computer work counts
| as half was because they are not deep thoughts.
|
| So for computational heavy research, this would mean 40 hours per
| week.
|
| Taking the statement further, experimental research maybe counts
| as a quarter because debugging machinery is even less deep?
|
| This would be eye opening and maybe explains why experimental
| phds are so much more brutal in terms of working hours than
| theory.
| orbifold wrote:
| Of course if you do theory you barely have to work more than 4
| hours a day can be counterproductive unless you are embarking
| on a Lurie or Grothendieck style project and work 12 hour a
| day.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| Not every Ph.d requires the same amount of deep thought.
| Experimenting and hypothesizing and writing code is just not
| the same as logically deriving a new proof, but not any less
| worthy of a Ph.d.
| bannedbybros wrote:
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| That bit about researchers being the CEOs of their own little
| companies really resonated with me. I'm myself not a PhD, but I
| worked at IBM Research for a while in a business development
| role, and I amazed at how incredibly good the researchers in the
| lab were at sales (when they took the time off from their
| research to find a customer for their idea). I came to the
| conclusion that it was their training as PhDs and their need to
| constantly be pitching for grants. The process forces you to sell
| your ideas, even when there is no concrete 'product' yet. And
| that is not so different from how a startup CEO works. Not
| surprisingly, many of them have gone on to start their own
| companies very successfully, desipite never having managed
| anything bigger their lab printer before.
| why5s wrote:
| > Computer programming work only counts at half the normal rate
| because debugging isn't quite the same as deep thought.
|
| This mentality is the reason why most software originating from
| academia is awful. Productivity is measured by research output
| (i.e. conference/journal papers) rather than the artifacts (i.e.
| code/software) built to support said research.
| blippage wrote:
| Brit here. It seems a little different than US. I didn't take any
| exams (except viva at the end). I was given some reports by PhD
| students/researchers working in a similar field in the same
| department as background reading. I thought that I'd never
| understand the stuff, but after awhile, it seemed fairly
| straightforward.
|
| My supervisor chose me rather than the other way around. It
| seemed an interesting subject, so I went for it. He set the
| subject and had a general idea of the direction it should be
| going.
|
| An alternative approach is to look at the PhD opportunities at
| various universities, and pick one that looks interesting. I
| don't think it's rocket science.
|
| The overwhelming number of theses will be a bunch of results that
| are "quite interesting" and extend the field incrementally. Don't
| expect to redefine the way people look at physics, mathematics,
| or whatever.
|
| My number one tip for getting a PhD in a timely fashion: work
| hard and don't arse around on the internet all day. You don't
| need the intellect of Gauss to get a PhD; although the brainier
| the better, obviously.
| groffee wrote:
| > and don't arse around on the internet all day
|
| I feel personally attacked!
| [deleted]
| Test0129 wrote:
| Comprehensive entry exams are being done away with a lot of
| schools. At the university I went to (before I dropped from the
| program for financial reasons) I simply had to have gotten A's
| in my last 4 semesters of CS classes. The last 4 semesters are
| graduate courses, and undergrads simply do marginally less
| work.
|
| Comprehensive exams in my opinion are extremely dumb. You take
| some classes and to take more classes you need to take
| sometimes up to a year to cram 4 years of various CS trivia,
| most likely unrelated to your core interest, to sit a 4-5 hour
| long exam to prove you can regurgitate things. It really is
| trivia too. My advisor issued these exams and showed me one of
| the old ones. I am not sure how regurgitating the finer details
| of computer architecture will ever help me produce research in
| computational mathematics but apparently it was required.
|
| It's just yet another shibboleth of academia. It provides the
| illusion of exclusivity for a group that is so smart, they're
| too dumb to see comprehensives prove nothing.
| runeblaze wrote:
| This article seems great. I can't help but think that given the
| job market, the "best choice" for somebody in the program can
| often be to get a masters and go into industry, which honestly
| seems quite a bit easier than finishing a math PhD. The academia
| jobs are hard to get and they pay relatively terribly.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This is a useful nuts-and-bolts discussion of the academic
| routine, but I'd disagree with this conclusion:
|
| > "It's your company. Mathematicians each run a small business.
| We work in malls called math departments. Your company sells
| theorems. Your advisor is a free consultant for your company, not
| your boss, not your employee. Ultimately YOU are responsible for
| the success of your company..."
|
| The adoption of corporate entrepreneur model of academic research
| is one of the worst, if not the worst, things about the current
| American academic system. Why?
|
| First of all, who is funding this 'company'? Not you, in all
| likelihood - it's the tax-paying public who finances the majority
| of the funding train that keeps academic institutions afloat.
| What does the public expect in return, ideally?
|
| Well, how about producing highly skilled teachers, that seems
| important in a technological society, where mathematical skills
| are in general critically important. Hence, a critical part of
| the PhD student's job (and the professor's) is the instruction of
| the undergraduate population. This article doesn't even mention
| the importance of that role.
|
| Secondly, corporate research is highly secretive and non-
| collaborative in nature, as the goal is creation of intellectual
| property that can be sold on for a profit. This attitude is
| entirely at odds with the most successful acadamic model for
| making scientific progress, i.e. collaboration and rapid sharing
| of results. If you spend your time in academia worrying about
| people stealing your work and not trusting anyone, it's going to
| be a fairly miserable experience.
|
| My advice is to toss the corporate enterpreneur model in the
| garbage bin.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| > Well, how about producing highly skilled teachers, that seems
| important in a technological society, where mathematical skills
| are in general critically important. Hence, a critical part of
| the PhD student's job (and the professor's) is the instruction
| of the undergraduate population. This article doesn't even
| mention the importance of that role.
|
| That makes zero sense. If you want to make teachers and
| lecturers, why not create the path of a pedagogy bootcamp or a
| MSc if you like fancy titles and wasting time? Why would you
| push people through PhDs? PhDs spend 3-5 years mastering a
| single narrow domain area, it has absolutely zero utility wrt
| teaching unless we are talking about graduate-level courses
| that PhD students take...
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| The highlighted sentence is a metaphor and it's the right one.
|
| You are selling in your academic career. You are selling
| results, papers, conference presentations, whatever counts
| _among your peers_ in your field.
|
| You will not have a career _as an academic_ in your field
| unless you can sell your work to your peers in the field.
|
| No one cares about your teaching, certainly not of undergrads
| (exceptions exist at some liberal arts colleges). Your
| department and your dean care about your research. That's it.
|
| You have to sell it both to get it published and to get it
| cited. Do that and you'll be fine. Don't and you won't have a
| career in a university.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| What you say is true... but that's also why American
| academics is widely viewed as corrupt and unproductive,
| ridden with fraudulent con artists, and falling into the same
| kind of failure mode seen in, for example, Soviet science
| under the regime of Lysenko.
|
| Now if you wanted to rise to a position of academic power
| under the likes of Lysenko, you'd want to follow this
| careerist path, you'd want to observe Lysenko, sing the song
| that Lysenko wanted to hear, and you'd be rewarded
| appropriately.
|
| That's the way of authoritarian bureaucratic
| institutionalism, not the way of high-quality science. It
| also doesn't really matter whether the structure is
| 'capitalist' or 'socialist', it's all about who sits at the
| top of the hierarchy in such systems. Crushing independent
| thought is what they have in common.
| mmmmpancakes wrote:
| > that's also why American academics is widely viewed as
| corrupt and unproductive, ridden with fraudulent con
| artists
|
| .... according to who exactly? This is total hearsay.
| arcanus wrote:
| > What you say is true... but that's also why American
| academics is widely viewed as corrupt and unproductive,
| ridden with fraudulent con artists, and falling into the
| same kind of failure mode seen in, for example, Soviet
| science under the regime of Lysenko.
|
| Citation needed. I'm a former academic, and seldom a
| defender, and I entirely dispute this statement. American
| academia is widely considered the international leader by
| any ranking I'm aware of.
|
| For some data, consider the rankings of international
| universities: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-
| universities/ra...
|
| Or, by largest concentration of highly cited researchers:
| https://clarivate.com/blog/highly-cited-
| researchers-2021-how...
|
| Bottom line: the American academy isn't perfect, but it's
| far from fraudulent, as the parent alleged.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The reluctance of the American academic bureaucracy to
| admit to the prevalence of fraud in academic research is
| understandable, but there are many examples. Some of the
| recent notables are the serotonin hypothesis of
| depression, and aspects of the amyloid theory of
| Alzheimer's. Data falsification is not uncommon, and it's
| often done for obvious reasons - a graduate student may
| want that positive result that finishes off their PhD
| work and gets them a needed publication, a professor may
| want to support their past work with new data and
| results, an academic startup may want to prop up their
| latest drug development results to draw in investors and
| big corporations, etc.
|
| The reason academic institutions don't want to talk about
| it is the same reason that religious institutions don't
| want to talk about child abuse - it makes a mockery of
| their whole enterprise. With the former, it's the search
| for truth via the scientific process, and with the later
| it's upholding moral standards and guiding society. Both
| institutions cover up such things in order to preserve
| their public image - which, of course, allows such
| behaviors to persist.
|
| Note also that the corporatization of research, i.e. the
| focus on generating lucrative patents and the resulting
| emphasis on keeping raw data secret, tends to amplify
| opportunities for fraud.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Citing a few highly damaging cases of fraud isn't enough
| to make your point. You have to show that it's more
| prevalent and damaging in the US system than in other
| systems.
|
| That seems an extraordinarily unlikely bar to meet based
| on my cursory knowledge of where large scale fraud is
| happening. But perhaps you know more and would like to
| enlighten me.
| psyklic wrote:
| I wasn't aware that the serotonin hypothesis was
| "fraudulent," nor can I find credible evidence of this on
| Google. Instead, it seems that the scientific process
| worked as intended. A reasonable hypothesis was initially
| proposed, then opposing evidence accumulated over time.
|
| This seems moreso an issue with the pharmaceutical
| industry. For example: "In 2005, two academics published
| a piece of research in which they compared the
| information on pharmaceutical websites with the
| pronouncements of certain researchers, and found a
| 'disconnect' between the marketing and the experts'
| views." - https://joannamoncrieff.com/2022/07/24/how-to-
| take-the-news-...
| jll29 wrote:
| > The reason academic institutions don't want to talk
| about it is the same reason that religious institutions
| don't want to talk about child abuse - it makes a mockery
| of their whole enterprise.
|
| This is why in science, replication of past work is
| essential. Every new Ph.D. student should replicate a
| paper's results in their area of interest as a warm-up
| exercise.
|
| In Information Retrieval (the part of Computer Science
| concerned with search for information - search engines
| etc.), conferences like ECIR have regular
| reproduceability tracks, where such works of scrutiny get
| published, and are highly regarded.
|
| There needs to be a cultural change to the effect that
| genuine errors and fraud can happen, but we can weed it
| out to an extent by independently repeating past work.
| krastanov wrote:
| In the last 15 years academic institutions have
| definitely started talking about it, especially in new
| mandatory classes on ethics for their students.
| saberience wrote:
| You may be accurate (or not) in your assertions but I
| would be wary of citing "usnews.com", when using it as
| proof that US universities are the "best".
|
| I think Americans are generally very biased when looking
| objectively and rationally at their own country. E.g.
| Looking at Iran as a barbaric backwards country, when the
| US just banned abortion and has spent the last 50 years
| killing more people in international wars than any other
| country.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| That's horrible.
|
| If what you claim is true true, public funding of
| universities should end. Universities should serve the public
| interest, and teaching is an essential part of that.
|
| The public spends untold billions funding universities and we
| should at least get a well educated workforce out of it.
|
| The thousand year old college system's time is over if what
| you say is true. There's no point to it.
| mirker wrote:
| You can only do teaching but it's a different career path
| entirely. Some people don't like it because you lose out on
| power and tenure.
| graycat wrote:
| The bomb. The hydrogen bomb. It's about the bomb!
|
| Due to the bomb, US academics got a big dose of money aimed
| at:
|
| Making sure the US is never behind in anything in math,
| science, or even medicine in any way that could hurt US
| national security or even the US economy or US health care.
| Or "Never again will US academics be permitted to operate
| independent of the US military" -- or some such, and I do
| recall the thought but just now don't recall the source.
|
| So, the departments of math, physical science, and
| engineering get grants from the US NSF, DARPA, DoE, NIH,
| etc.
|
| The university takes 60% or so for _overhead_ and, thus,
| pays for the nice campus landscaping, the limo for the
| President, the glass walled coffee shop, the theater group
| and the string quartet concerts, the social science
| departments, the humanities departments, the art
| departments, the artist in residence program, the library,
| etc.
|
| But the US stays up in number theory, mathematical and
| theoretical physics, computer science, ....
|
| "Education"? There, sure, the first requirement is that the
| prof knows what the leading edge results are and
| understands them well enough to teach them and, more
| important, direct research in them.
|
| How to make sure the profs are not just wasting time? Use
| competition, have all the profs in competition with all the
| other profs in the world and insist that the US profs
| getting funded look like the best profs in the world.
|
| How to evaluate a prof? Count published papers. Weight the
| counts by the prestige of the journals. Count citations.
| Count prizes. See what job offers the profs are getting.
|
| If the US starts to fall behind, then Congress can vote
| more money. Congress can vote lots of money, plenty to be
| sufficient to keep the US ahead.
|
| Uh, Congress has lots of money because, net, the US is
| rich. E.g., the last time I added the retail cost of the
| ingredients for one of my pizzas for one, the cost was
| $0.39, that is, 39 cents. When a lot of US people are
| getting paid $30+ an hour, the 39 cents represents some
| astoundingly high economic productivity -- for the flour,
| cheese, sausage, trucks, railroads, farm machinery, wheat,
| corn, soy bean seeds, etc. involved.
|
| Education for good jobs in the economy for the students?
| Naw, .... Instead, the main issue is the bomb, the hydrogen
| bomb!!!! Did I mention the bomb?
| analog31 wrote:
| As it stands, more and more college level teaching is being
| done by non tenure track employees. Also, the non-tenure-
| track teaching jobs are a miserable grind. The thousand
| year old college system has evolved continuously from
| decade to decade, and is not the same thing that it was,
| even 50 years ago.
| sgregnt wrote:
| If an adviser is a free consultant what is his incentive to
| provide this consultation?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > The adoption of corporate entrepreneur model of academic
| research is one of the worst, if not the worst, things about
| the current American academic system. Why?
|
| That's not how I read the paragraph you quoted.
|
| I think the point is that you're basically working for yourself
| when you do a PhD, not for your boss. You're given carte
| blanche for a few years, and it's your responsibility to
| produce value out of this time. The value here isn't measured
| in money but in publications.
| [deleted]
| conformist wrote:
| It can, at the same time, be correct as an (individual-level)
| descriptive statement but counterproductive as a (system-level)
| normative statement.
|
| As in, it's probably realistically good advice to a PhD
| student, because it reflects the state of affairs, but it's
| possibly unfortunate that that is the case.
| mmmmpancakes wrote:
| You misinterpret the spirit of the quote. What it means is the
| following.
|
| > Having very good research is a necessary condition to succeed
| in academia, but it is not sufficient.
|
| The reason why this is emphasized to starting academics is that
| many naively believe the system is purely meritocratic and that
| their work will speak for itself. This is borne out of an
| ignorance of how fundamentally important it is to communicate
| the importance of your work to others.
|
| The reality is that there is a total glut of research. Even the
| best do not have time to sift through all recent results in
| their broader field. Even if they scan abstracts, understanding
| the true value of results is a hard process that takes time.
| The most effective way to understand value of research is to
| interrogate the researcher directly (e.g., in a seminar talk).
| Thus, self-advertisement through seminar talks and other modes
| is crucial to getting your message out. Otherwise you will wilt
| into obscurity.
|
| I can assure you, the space for some sort of corporate style
| huckster selling poor research with flashy branding in pure
| math is very small. This stuff is not easy to fake.
| patrick451 wrote:
| > Well, how about producing highly skilled teachers, that seems
| important in a technological society, where mathematical skills
| are in general critically important. Hence, a critical part of
| the PhD student's job (and the professor's) is the instruction
| of the undergraduate population. This article doesn't even
| mention the importance of that role.
|
| They don't mention it because it's unimportant. Your thesis
| committee cares about your research and that's it. If your
| advisor is well funded, you can easily finish a stem PhD and
| never teach a single class. If you do have to teach, getting
| perfect feedback or terrible feedback from student evaluations
| has zero bearing on whether you earn a PhD.
| _of wrote:
| mandatory phd comics:
|
| https://bashify.io/images/JAgsAM
|
| No but seriously, it was one of the best periods of my life. A
| lot of creativity, freedom and long nights working on things that
| are far away from the corporate world.
| meltyness wrote:
| I feel like writing this in LaTeX is a way of saying, "someone
| should study this."
|
| My takeaways are the 20 hours a week. That's a hard wall to break
| through, beyond which you can't really consolidate, I'm running
| into that, and I don't have any BS to put up with.
|
| On finding an advisor -- why would a graduate even apply to a
| school without having selected a research interest / target?
| Undergrads are all research-exposed, so I don't know why you'd
| subject yourself to more if that wasn't your purpose! Yikes! What
| happened to the 3-4 LetRecs to even get in the door?!
| woopwoop wrote:
| Undergrads are mostly not exposed to research in mathematics.
| klyrs wrote:
| Mathematician here. For me, writing in latex is the lowest
| possible barrier to making a document, because I write all my
| documents in latex. Professors get free and easy static
| webspace, fancier web services are a headache. It's not a
| statement. It's the familiar and accessible technology.
| supernova87a wrote:
| There really is one question that people should grapple with
| early in their academic path, and think about hard (because it is
| rarely deliberately posed as a question to students):
|
| Unless you are extremely talented and have some gift for a very
| specific topic or subfield, I would argue that finding a good
| environment (e.g. lots of adjacent collaborative research
| opportunities, and other productive students) and a good advisor
| is far more important than any particular thesis topic.
|
| What I have observed is that few people at the end of their
| academic careers (esp. those who decide to do something else
| later) would say that the topic of their thesis was really all
| that important. They might have equally chosen some other related
| topic out of sheer luck or accident.
|
| Far more important were the experiences of:
|
| -- developing critical thinking
|
| -- how to organize your life and work methods while trying to get
| a research project done
|
| -- how to collaborate with others and use self-initiative to seek
| out opportunities
|
| -- learning how to pick yourself up after ideas fail, or how to
| power through adversity and difficulty phases in your work
|
| Almost all academic programs (or just tradition) make it seem
| like the thesis question you answer is the entire goal of your
| career. I doubt it.
|
| As I said maybe for the rare few with a calling to be expert in
| <xyz tensor manifold number theory> etc. etc. it matters. But
| given that so few people reach the pinnacle of academia, for
| many, many others, these things are far more important outcomes
| that you keep with you in life.
|
| Maybe it's a similar logic to "it doesn't actually matter that
| much what particular app you're building, it's that you launch
| something and have the experience of doing that, in prep for your
| next thing".
| kkwteh wrote:
| What would have really helped me during my PhD, would have been
| to learn some project management skills. Just basic stuff like
| tracking where you've spent your time and using documents to
| track various projects. I wasn't exposed to any of these things
| until I entered industry and by that time it was too late.
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