[HN Gopher] A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)
___________________________________________________________________
A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)
Author : vismit2000
Score : 167 points
Date : 2026-03-10 02:16 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (karpathy.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (karpathy.github.io)
| setheron wrote:
| I finished a PhD while working full time with 3 young kids. Feel
| free to reach out if you've been interested and I can share my
| experience with you.
| nine_k wrote:
| How did you keep the motivation up?
|
| (I tried doing a PhD while working full time, and quit the idea
| after 3 years.)
| moezd wrote:
| Interesting. A couple of questions: - How young are the kids? -
| How do they behave, especially with essentials like eating and
| sleeping habits? - Could you carve out a morning and/or evening
| routine for yourself? - How much outside help could you rely on
| (grandparents nearby, lovely neighbours...)?
| teiferer wrote:
| I can imagine that this will be similar to the "Emacs/Vim in the
| AI age" article - it will just be considered to matter less in
| the AI age. Why spend 3-5 years of your life with a sometimes
| frustrating experience to obtain this PhD degree if you have
| powerful models at your disposal that will just be able to solve
| everything for you? (Similar to why learn Elisp/VimScript/...)
| Especially considering the current trajectory, expecting where
| things will be in 5 or 15 years. It will just feel less and less
| appealing to get an in-depth education, especially a formal one.
|
| Which is quite ironic, considering who wrote the article.
| BinRoo wrote:
| LLMs fall victim to "garbage in, garbage out." Claude can solve
| open problems if you know what you're doing, but it can also
| incorrectly convince you it's right if you don't know what
| you're doing.
|
| A PhD teaches you how to think, how to learn, and how to
| question the world. That's a vital set of skills no matter what
| tool exists.
| LPisGood wrote:
| It seems your question largely boils down to: "why do anything
| when AI could do it instead?"
|
| I think there are many answers to this, not the least of which
| is that AI can't really do it instead.
| gigabyte9592 wrote:
| Models can solve the problem, but they can't tell you if the
| problem was worth solving in the first place.
| allreduce wrote:
| Doing hard things has consistently made me more generally (not
| only in the narrow hard thing) competent and comfortable with
| myself.
|
| Why go to the gym if you don't need physical strength? One
| needs to do something to not degenerate into a miserable state.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Why spend your life doing anything at all? I'm biased on the
| topic since im writing up atm, but it was, if nothing else, a
| very itnerseting way to spend 4 years of my life.
| teiferer wrote:
| People seem to get my comment wrong.
|
| I find it very fulfilling to do a PhD and did so myself. More
| people should. What I mean is that I'm expecting the general
| view on it to evolve as described.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Ah. I did indeed misunderstand. Also, as I said, I've got a
| personal stake, right at the tale end of the PhD, looking
| for jobs, so I guess im feeling pretty defensive. I
| certainly hope the general public doesn't feel this way,
| but I've seen plenty of people say similar things about
| college degrees now, so it kind of makes sense.
| hasley wrote:
| Because you may have fun working in a scientific environment
| and doing research.
|
| I liked my job at the university - independent of the final
| PhD. I enjoyed what I was doing. Most of the time I also
| enjoyed writing my dissertation, since I was given the
| opportunity to write about my stuff. And mostly I could write
| it in a way how I felt things are supposed to be explained.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't really know how to optimize for a world where AIs would
| be smarter than everyone and able to do everything.
|
| If that comes to pass, I guess there won't be any economic cost
| to having done my PhD because the entire economy will be AI
| driven and we'll hopefully just be their happy pets.
|
| If that doesn't come to pass, and AIs just remain good at
| summarizing and remixing ideas, I guess people with experience
| generating research will still be useful.
| chrisaycock wrote:
| The one piece of advice I give new PhD students is to maintain a
| list of your references for a bibliography ahead of time. For
| every paper you read, copy the citation in BibTeX format and
| write a couple of sentences to remind yourself what the paper was
| about. Do this for every source, even if it doesn't seem
| important at the time.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| Zotero and AI have this covered now. If there's one thing AI is
| good at it's summarising crappy formatted papers. Never
| understood the 2 and 3 column thing. Horrendous way to format
| something.
| setopt wrote:
| 2-column format has narrower columns, which means that your
| eyes move more vertically than horizontally while reading it.
| That is considered conducive to "skimming" long texts if
| you're a "speed reader".
|
| Do you mean that you're using AI as a search engine for your
| local bibliography? I haven't seen any AI plugins for Zotero.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| I'm severely dyslexic and the columns are a massive
| hindrance for me, and I also cannot skim read due to this
| and meares irlen. So my dislike is not universal
| applicable, just personal experience.
|
| On the zotero front there a bunch of AI plugins. But I've
| not used them. But yes the premise is that your can speak
| and ask your library questions. Some are set up differently
| though. Personally I can fire a paper into an llm and get a
| good idea of the content immediately and then ask questions
| about it. It's more interactive and allows me to get a
| better idea of it prior to reading it.
| somethingsome wrote:
| LLMs make too many mistakes when summarizing papers in
| their current state, I would never trust it to summarize
| a whole paper at the moment.
|
| I only use it on a sentence or paragraph basis, otherwise
| it misses the point 90% of the time.
|
| I would strongly advise against this use for the moment.
| The important part of reading a paper is not only to
| extract general rules, but to build your own internal
| model. Without it you cannot effectively do research. The
| main interesting points are often in the subtleties of
| the details deep in the paper.
|
| Internal tought that come easily to mind when I read :
|
| - 'oh they used that equation, but that could be also be
| interpreted totally differently, what happens if we
| change point of view, does it makes sense from this other
| perspective'
|
| - 'I see they claim to achieve better results than sota,
| but actually, they compared with other methods that are
| not solving exactly the same problem, what shortcut or
| changes did they had to do to obtain a fair comparison,
| is it a fair comparison, can I trust those numbers? '
|
| - 'oh, the authors didn't realize that they solved this
| other problem, or did they realize but there was a block
| somewhere preventing it?'
|
| - 'I like this trick to achieve that result, but at the
| same time, it will prevent to solve a whole class of
| other problems, so their method will not work on those
| cases'
|
| ...
|
| Also, notice that a paper IS a summary of multiple
| months/years of work, and researchers summarize it
| already to the maximum to stay within the page limit, by
| summarizing a summary you will always miss many things.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| Fair points. And likely why I'm not suited to academia
| too. I've just never really groked the practice. I've
| obviously only experience from bachelor's and masters but
| it always seems that you have an idea and the research is
| finding papers to back it up, and then some that might
| not. The work you do doesn't really matter as it seems
| secondary to the nonsense around "the literature".
| aragilar wrote:
| In what, that does not align at all with my experience in
| the sciences (where the point is the novelty, not
| summarise the literature)?
| ifh-hn wrote:
| I've a bachelors of science (first) in computer science,
| and currently doing a dissertation for a master's in
| cyber security, on route for a first but that might
| change depending on the mark for this dissertation.
|
| My experience with the bachelors was that despite my
| project being derailed by the bullshit around formatting
| the document, doing "research" by searching the library
| for peer reviewed papers that backed up my claims, etc,
| etc; I got a excellent mark. In short I set out to make
| something and due to the academic processes failed in
| making anything, but because I was able to critically
| reflect on it, I got a good mark. Waste of time, unless
| you were just are a good mark.
|
| For my masters I know the project doesn't matter, I'm
| concentrating on the academic nonsense because that's
| where the marks are.
| ModernMech wrote:
| The work you were given in your undergraduate and
| master's was not research, it was homework. The task was
| critical reflection, which is repeatable and achievable
| for students; whereas research is expensive, one off, and
| generally out of reach for undergrads, and requires
| intensive oversight by an experienced researcher.
|
| The waste of time would be for a professor to train you
| up to be a researcher before you've proven you are ready,
| hence the homework assignments.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| If that's the case then and researching is way above
| masters level then how is it you get on a PhD? Genuine
| question. If everything I've done to date is a pale
| imitation of the real thing how can I make a fair
| assessment as to whether I want to pursue a PhD?
| ModernMech wrote:
| You don't really, and why a lot of people become
| researchers only to discover they hate it. But that's
| true with all things.
|
| I think the way to know if you want to be a researcher is
| more along the lines of: do you like finding the answers
| to questions no k e has thought to ask let alone
| answered? If so then it doesn't really matter the
| training you've or the amount t of the field you've
| experienced, you can focus on that bit as your guiding
| force.
| otherme123 wrote:
| I have found _a lot_ of pearls casually buried in the
| paper, that there is no way a summary, either human or
| AI, would extract. Things like changing a method
| slightly, or recovering an old method to apply to a
| current problem, menctioned like it is not important but
| actually you have a project blocked in a similar spot.
| bobmarleybiceps wrote:
| I feel like that's true when the font is insanely small,
| which I guess was good when people would print entire
| proceedings. Reading two column super small font on a
| computer is super annoying though tbh.
| pks016 wrote:
| There are few. I use zoteroGPT to extract things(e.g.
| methods, sample size, species etc.) from a bunch of
| papers/collection. I don't use it for summary.
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| The comments you write in to Zotero are not what paper is
| about - abstract covers this well enough - it's about what
| you found interesting or useful about the paper.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Use zotero and betterbibtex. By all means type a comment so you
| know which ideas came from where but I'm a big advocate of
| taking notes by hand when you really want to understand
| something, as opposed to reminding your future self about
| something you already understand.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| There's also better notes too for this.
| whateverboat wrote:
| The lack of good tools to have good research notes with good
| search is kind of mind-boggling. I have reverted to having a
| website for myself, a private one that I run on my machine,
| using mkdocs which comes close to what I would want.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Not within a PhD, but as a side project I work on a research
| project on wikiversity about grammatical gender in French. It
| does reference a bunch of books and academic works, like
| probably a hundred I guess. The most tedious work though is to
| check which nouns are used only in a single gender of do have
| some epicenic or specific inflection used in the wild and
| giving a reference that attest that when it's not already so
| consensual that most general public dictionary would already
| document the fact. For that the research refers to thousand of
| webpages. I'm glad that most of the time I just need to drop
| the DOI, ISBN, or page URL and MediaWiki will handle the filing
| of the most relevant fields. That's not perfect, it generates
| the output with many different models currently (some don't
| have an excerpt field), and some required fields might be left
| blank, url to pdf won't work, and so on. But all in all it make
| the process of taking note of the reference quick and not going
| too much in my way. Creating a structured database out of it
| can certainly be done later.
| DamonHD wrote:
| I have had some fun exhuming my old LaTeX skills and assembling
| a BibTeX bibliography from which I automatically extract the
| right entries presented in whichever style is needed for a
| given paper and for my own (HTML) site. I even publish the
| collection in Zenodo in case useful to others. I use the
| 'annote' field for the reminder you suggest.
| geokon wrote:
| why? like what are you doing with this mega list later? Ive
| never felt the need for something like this in my research but
| maybe im missing something
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Presumably the idea is that you put the relevant parts of the
| list in your thesis. You need to convince your examiner that
| you understand the background to the original research you
| did, and a solid reference list (with supporting text in the
| introductory/background section of your thesis) is part of
| doing that.
|
| Personally I did the references at the end and didn't feel
| like I suffered from that decision, but the key references in
| my particular area were a relatively small and well-known
| set.
| geokon wrote:
| Hmm, yeah. I mean you often see huge reference lists which
| always just makes me feel like the person can't possible be
| actually well acquainted with the stuff that's being
| referenced. So who are you really fooling? Seems all very
| performative, though I guess I understand the motivation
| RhysU wrote:
| Citeulike [1] was great but is sadly no more.
|
| Add any paper you pick up to your tracking system before you
| read it. Make that part of your reading ritual.
|
| Save the PDF right away, too. You may later lose access to the
| journal. Or, CiteULike (where I^Hyou uploaded all those
| articles) may go away.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citeulike
| whiplash451 wrote:
| This is very good advice for a few reasons:
|
| 1. It reduces the odds of missing a key reference in your
| papers and accelerates the write-up of the (often mandatory)
| Related Work section
|
| 2. It helps you maintain a mental map of the field as your
| research progresses
| xtracto wrote:
| Ha! You just made me remember how much I used JabRef (open
| source bibtex reference app) back in 2004 when I did my PhD.
|
| It was the best/worst 4 years of my life. I studied overseas
| (uk), met my future wife and got a PhD that really wasn't
| useful for much to me. Fortunately it was under a scholarship.
| wald3n wrote:
| Karpathy is an interesting case of PhD gone industry and he
| mentions this topic in the article. In my field of computational
| social science it is sadly very taboo to happily leave the
| academy. Yet, they don't do much to make it more appealing. My
| biggest win was to find a group of people outside of my research
| group that I liked collaborating with. Research is more fun as a
| team sport.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| I did a bachelor degree part time later in life around work and
| family life. I'm doing a masters full time around work and family
| life. My experience with academia so far have put me off further
| study. I really don't get the research thing, and the whole
| experience seems like bullshit to me. Out of all my experiences
| doing these things the best has been on the taught modules, that
| I enjoyed and I didn't feel were out of date, the worse has been
| the dissertations where you're doing "research". Think of a
| project off the top of your head and "research" it. Nonsense.
| belabartok39 wrote:
| You are right, sir, you should stay away from research. Don't
| worry, there are others that will handle it.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| Do I detect a hint of condescension? Hard to tell in text
| sometimes. I'm not sure how else to read your message, so in
| the event it is a passive aggressive attempt at being
| patronising I would caveat my original point with the fact
| I've spent the better part of a decade in higher education
| and I've done pretty well for myself in terms of marks, so if
| after all that I'm still not clear on what is meant by
| academic research or the point in the practice as presented
| to me during that time it's hardly my fault.
| elteto wrote:
| About the same amount you had in your comment, to be
| honest.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| I'd love to see where you think I was being passive
| aggressive and/or condescending... Like I said above it's
| hard to tell in text but what I read in my original
| comment is an overtly aggressive overview of my
| experience in academia. You my have a different
| experience and that's fine.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > so if after all that I'm still not clear on what is meant
| by academic research or the point in the practice as
| presented to me during that time it's hardly my fault.
|
| Perhaps, but the mindset of delegating your intellectual
| advancement to others really is not compatible with being
| in academia, let alone getting a PhD.
| ifh-hn wrote:
| Apologies if that's the way I'm coming across, my intent
| was the opposite. My mindset isn't one of delegating my
| intellectual advancement to others, my experience of
| academia is that academia actively stifled it. I almost
| dropped out of my bachelors be ause I felt I wasn't
| learning anything, but my wife talked me out of it.
|
| I'm certainly interested in learning and exploring and
| finding out stuff, but my experience so far is that the
| academic processes stand in the way of this.
| luzejian wrote:
| One angle that's missing from this discussion: the cost
| asymmetry. The effort to do this well is disproportionate to the
| effort to do it poorly, which means most implementations in the
| wild are mediocre. That creates a weird market dynamic where
| quality becomes the differentiator by default -- not because it's
| hard to build, but because most people stop at 'good enough' too
| early.
| gskm wrote:
| Loved this article. I'd add a few things I wish someone had told
| me when I was starting my PhD: 1) Maximize variance, but know
| when to stop. Karpathy's point is great. Explore early, say yes
| to different things. But at some point you need to pick a
| direction and commit. Too much variance and you end up with
| nothing solid. 2) Consider smaller labs. Big famous groups are
| tempting, but in a small group of 3-5 people your adviser
| actually knows your work and gives you real feedback. In large
| labs you can easily become invisible. 3) Collaborate outside your
| lab early. Don't wait, reach out to people at other universities
| working on related problems. Different groups think differently
| and that's where good ideas come from. 4) Visit other
| universities. Even a few weeks at another group forces you to
| explain your work to people with different assumptions. It's one
| of the most useful things you can do during a PhD. 5)Learn to
| write good, structured, reproducible and maintainable code. One
| of the things I regret I didn't, and many working hours were
| wasted.
|
| Good luck to anyone starting out.
| Trickery5837 wrote:
| One thing that's not mentioned here: if you don't come from a top
| university, you have close-to-zero chances to have that kind of
| experience in your phd. If you're not incredibly picking some
| exceptionally relevant project soon enough, your career path
| after the phd will not be exactly the smooth sailing the author
| describes.
| dhruv3006 wrote:
| Good to see this again resurface !
| titanomachy wrote:
| "How to get into a top PhD program: get ~3 famous professors to
| write letters saying you're one of the five best students they've
| ever worked with."
|
| I feel like this particular advice applies to a very small subset
| of people. If I'd had professors telling me that I certainly
| would have considered doing a PhD!
| mettamage wrote:
| Kind of feels a bit like
|
| How To Get Rich?
|
| Step 1: be rich
|
| Step 2: you're now rich
| bonoboTP wrote:
| "How to be a top YouTuber" by MrBeast. "How to be a top
| athlete" by C. Ronaldo. "How to become a popstar" by Ed
| Sheeran. You know that such advice will have limited
| usefulness to most of the aspiring people.
|
| Karpathy is an exceptional person, maybe not as much as
| Ronaldo in football but taking advice from him similarly
| won't be guaranteed to work. You can't have guarantees in
| such things.
|
| In truth, the more literal but not fully literal thing that
| happens regarding surviving a PhD is that you try to publish
| a paper in a top venue but after several rejections you
| publish in a lower tier one, then you do two more followup in
| similarly second tier but not terrible venues and you get a
| "magna cum laude" or perhaps a "cum laude" once you reach 5
| years and the prof wants to avoid the embarrassment of not
| having graduated you.
|
| Of course many people don't come into the PhD with such
| plans, they expect a summa cum laude and papers in top venues
| and talk invitations and so on, since they've always been a
| top student so far.
| amelius wrote:
| Draw remainder of owl.
| jl6 wrote:
| True, but on the other hand, maybe only a very small subset of
| people should be doing a PhD.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| That's what used to be thought about any school at all, then
| about high school diplomas then about a university diploma.
| Each time it was decided that by expanding the number of
| people they would get uplifted to a better standard of life,
| a higher class etc. But social status is relative and mostly
| zero-sum, so the value of a diploma simply goes down when
| everyone has one. Chasing credentials without actual value
| contributions cannot cash out in anything real.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Why don't we assign grad students to PhD courses the way NFL
| draft works?
|
| Let directional universities pick first and Ivies (and other
| prestigious universities) pick last.
| vaylian wrote:
| What would the benefit of that procedure be?
| orthoxerox wrote:
| A more equitable distribution of quality among the
| universities, in the long run.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Linked by Gemini: From https://en.as.com/nfl/these-are-the-
| lowest-paid-players-in-t...
|
| > _The minimum salary for the 2025 NFL season was $840,000_
|
| Raise the minimum salary of a Ph.D. student to that level and
| we have a deal. (The pocket salary, not $830,000 self pay to
| the university and $10,000 for the pocket of the student.)
|
| Also, the work in NFL is more standardized, all teams play the
| same games per week, have a similar amount of training time,
| ...
|
| In a Ph.D. the topic depends a lot of the advisor. It would be
| like mixing all the sports in the same bag, and for a weird
| reason the Waterpolo team from Alaska can pick you that are an
| expert in Tenis.
| stared wrote:
| These pieces of advice are useful. However, they don't touch the
| bottleneck: mental health. And no, it is not "like any other
| demanding job". A PhD hits on two fronts - one is "all or
| nothing". If you spend years and still haven't submitted your
| dissertation, it is a career-ending failure. The other is its tie
| to one's identity. You put sweat, blood, and tears into your
| research, only to be rejected at a journal or conference because
| the result is "technically correct but not significant enough".
| Sure, there are similar parts in other careers - from talking
| with people, it works a bit similarly in medicine (when it comes
| to "all or nothing") and art (when it comes to this identity).
|
| If people fail, it is mostly because they burn out. If they
| succeed, it is not unlikely that they will need to heal their
| burnout wounds anyway.
|
| I am sure Karpathy's experience is different. But most people
| starting their PhDs are not Karpathy.
|
| See also "The Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?"
| http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html
|
| Sure you may survive. But even if all goes well, you succeed,
| there will be a void in you after the quest.
| jwrallie wrote:
| The peer review paper requirement puts you in a situation where
| if your topic of research happen to not be interesting for the
| reviewers (that you have no control over), you can be a
| talented student that worked very hard and still fail due to
| being out of time after multiple successive rejections.
|
| Your supervisor may not understand this until it's too late,
| and you may not have the ability to judge your adviser's
| ability to do so until you are committed.
|
| The main problem is that you were raised in a school system
| where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are
| pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not
| like that.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Too many people stay in academia out of inertia and being
| comfortable with the "school" mode of existence and are
| afraid of the broad wide world and the decisions involved.
| They finish their masters and liked the classes and the
| thesis topic and so they stay.
|
| But as you said, a PhD is quite different than all schooling
| before that. And that's good. A PhD is supposed to signify
| that you contributed new scientific value as judged by the
| expert international community, not just your teacher. Of
| course there are many wrinkles on this story like sloppy
| knee-jerk reviews etc.
|
| But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill
| some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable. If
| just showing up and doing what someone else decided for you
| is enough for a thing, that thing will lose value very soon.
| Similarly if you make sure almost everyone can do it, it
| won't have value, but will become a participation trophy.
|
| But nothing in real life work like that. School is fake. You
| don't get a job just by showing up or having a diploma.
| Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family with
| you for showing up and fulfilling some list of criteria.
| Nobody will fund your startup or strike a business deal with
| your company because you showed up and did some assigned
| tasks.
|
| In almost all aspects of life being proactive and exercising
| agency will get you much further than the teacher's pet
| mindset that school instills. And unfortunately rather than
| selecting for it, the PhD selects against such agency again
| because it's the safe option and people who are ready for an
| adventure usually dislike the academic environment. Not all
| of couse, I obviously don't mean every single person fits
| this. But in my experience this explains part of the mismatch
| in expectations and reality for the "I was a good student so
| a PhD felt natural" people. Not those come into the PhD with
| a well thought out plan, and knowing exactly why they want to
| pursue it, the upsides and downsides etc.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _But anything in life where you "just show up" and
| fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very
| valuable._
|
| Including paramedic or trauma surgeon, where the explicit
| assignment is to stabilize the human being in front of you?
|
| Or how about plumber, to stop water where it shouldn't be,
| making it come out faucets and go down drains where it
| should? Had furnace issues when we switched it on in
| October, the HVAC technicians made the magic box generate
| warm air: his explicit assignment was 'make the house warm'
| and he showed up and did that.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Depends on your goals. Even as a plumber you have to
| think about what's worth what, how you specialize, and
| what the price is. Even as a doctor you may be under
| appreciated and the explicit goal is not so explicit all
| the time and sometimes curing the patient requires
| inventiveness and not only following a script or a
| textbook. The patients survival is often not purely a
| cookie cutter application of rules as it works in school.
|
| And in some sense we can make the PhD requirements
| explicit too: prove that you are able to provide valuable
| and novel contributions to the scientific community as
| recognized by them. But it's not box ticking. But so is
| becoming an especially appreciated and respected doctor
| in your city. It's not just don't kill too many patients
| and you're golden.
|
| If you want a mediocre run of the mill PhD it's not super
| hard. It is hard, but not super hard if you have academic
| aptitude. You can do something incremental and follow the
| trends, and eventually some venue will publish it. Not
| many will read it though and you won't become a leading
| voice though. There are many incremental paper that help
| many average PhD students get their degrees.
|
| There are plenty of other non academic fields where you
| have to work hard and long hours, such as finance or law
| firms. You can choose less demanding alternatives too but
| they are less prestigious. Of course finance pays better.
|
| I think the problem is that people want to treat a
| scientific career as both a regular job and also as
| something of a pop star personal brand type of thing, and
| they only want the upside of both.
|
| There are many problems with academia, power balance etc
| of course. It's not unlike problems for aspiring movie
| stars or in other somewhat isolated bubbles within
| society like in sports or the theater scene, or how
| kitchens work in high end restaurants etc etc. If you
| want to become an acclaimed top expert in a subfield,
| it's not easy. And humans are going to do their human
| things around such opportunities for status advancements.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family
| with you for showing up and fulfilling some list of
| criteria.
|
| The "date-me doc" community might disagree:
|
| * https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/style/date-me-
| docs.html
|
| * https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-
| describable-d...
|
| * https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-
| comment...
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| >A PhD is supposed to signify that you contributed new
| scientific value
|
| You forgot about the humanities, but it's hard to blame
| you. So do most grant offices.
| stared wrote:
| > The main problem is that you were raised in a school system
| where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are
| pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is
| not like that.
|
| It was not my case and bold of you to assume so. I had peer-
| reviewed publications before I even applied for PhD.
|
| While I do know some people who expected PhD to be "more
| classes with more difficult assignments", the mast majority
| of PhDs I know had nothing to do with mentality you
| described.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| This is very true especially nowadays. You typically need
| several publications to even start a PhD in competitive
| fields like AI, so people are familiar with the system
| already.
| jwrallie wrote:
| Sorry, my choice of word was not great, I was not targeting
| you in specific, but the way the education system works
| prior to a PhD in general.
|
| I'm aware the experience will not be the same everywhere as
| PhD programs can be quite different, but many students that
| asked me if they should do a PhD are surprised when I tell
| them it's not just up to the university or their advisors
| that they will get their degree and even more surprised
| when I tell them how early they have to start submitting
| their papers.
|
| Even though I was well warned by my seniors, I admit that I
| also had this misconception to some degree.
| ptero wrote:
| PhD programs are very different. The environment Karpathy
| describes is fairly similar to what I saw as a math PhD in a
| good school, but not an ivy. My theoretical physics PhD friends
| had the same setup as I had, but experimentals lived in a
| different world, long hours in the lab every day, including
| weekends.
|
| My advisor was well established, tenured prof with a number of
| students. I had to teach, but the effort was light. We taught
| large, basic courses that are boring for tenured profs. We
| usually requested the same 1-2 classes to teach and after the
| first round had all the materials (homework, quizzes, etc.) and
| could teach on autopilot. University gave us undergrad graders
| to grade assignments but I never used them since I wanted to
| see what my students wrote. Which is a testament that the load
| was light; if I was drowning I would use all free help I could.
|
| But there was a cult of academia. "Get an academic job or you
| are a loser" mentality was prevalent. My advisor was
| disappointed, but OK when I decided to go into industry after
| PhD, but a friend's (Physics PhD from Harvard, CEO of a
| profitable startup now) advisor does not talk to him anymore
| because he did not stay in academia.
|
| And I only realized long after finishing my PhD how incredibly
| lonely PhD path is. You live in your bubble for years, with
| minimal interactions outside a few other folks at the same grad
| school. Stipend was enough for basic living, but not much else.
| No good vacations, ski trips with friends, etc. And a few
| somewhat creepy characters that grow in this lifestyle. This is
| all surmountable, but the mental toughness required is
| certainly something to keep in mind. I did not have that mental
| toughness, but was an introvert, which helped a lot. But
| looking back I see that I also could have gone off the rails.
| My 2c.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Your point is valid in many ways. The picture can be a little
| brighter. The PhD path does not have to be an all or nothing.
|
| 1. You can hedge your bets by submitting your work to various
| conferences of various qualities (without going 3rd-tier, you
| can bet across 1st-tier and 2nd-tier)
|
| 2. You can spend time choosing the professor and the topic
| before going all in
|
| 3. You can seek advice and social interactions within your
| research group, departement and school
|
| None of this is a silver bullet, but it compounds in the right
| direction.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > 2. You can spend time choosing the professor and the topic
| before going all in
|
| To a point. If you stray too far from your personal interest,
| you increase the risk of burnout.
| y-curious wrote:
| I have never been more depressed than grad school working for a
| complete sociopath. Even people working for "normal" PIs
| suffered. You are so right
| lich_king wrote:
| Eh. It's different, but framing it as uniquely challenging
| seems silly. There are very few other jobs where you don't need
| to deliver any specific, measurable results for months or
| years. And your "career-ending" outcome is that you go and get
| a cozy industry job in the same field because you already have
| a degree. Now, you might have a difficulty adjusting to that
| because they _will_ want you to get stuff done.
| eslaught wrote:
| > it is a career-ending failure
|
| It depends highly on the field. In history, sure. The point of
| getting a history PhD is to become a history professor, and you
| can't do that if you don't get the PhD, and meanwhile history
| PhDs don't meaningfully open up any other job prospects, so
| attempting and failing to get a PhD provides negative value.
|
| In CS and many engineering disciplines, there is a long history
| of people dropping out of PhDs and landing in industry. The
| industry is therefore much more accustomed to, and therefore
| accommodating to, people taking this path. Whether it's a
| maximally efficient use of time is another question, but it's
| certainly not wasted effort.
|
| But I do agree that it's stressful nonetheless because it still
| feels like a failure even if it is not actually in reality. I
| wrote about this when I put down my own PhD journey here [1].
| In particular after the control replication (2017) paper, I
| very nearly quit out of academia entirely despite it being my
| biggest contribution to the field by far.
|
| [1]: https://elliottslaughter.com/2024/02/legion-paper-history
| (written without any use of LLMs, for anyone who is wondering)
| nicebumblebee wrote:
| I discounted the remainder of the piece after reading this:
| Personal freedom. As a PhD student you're your own boss. Want to
| sleep in today? Sure. Want to skip a day and go on a vacation?
| Sure. All that matters is your final output and no one will force
| you to clock in from 9am to 5pm. Of course, some advisers might
| be more or less flexible about it. . .
|
| For some programs, this is untrue. Your advisor, your
| experiments, or your conference deadlines govern your schedule.
| coffee_coffee wrote:
| In my part of the world (central Europe), the vast majority of
| PhD-students is actually employed by the university they aim to
| obtain the PhD from. So in addition to working on your thesis
| you most likely have to support other research projects as well
| as do a lot of teaching. The model of a _free_ PhD student
| certainly exists, but it is rare.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| It's pretty common in ivy-leave US universities (which is
| what the article is biased towards). There, you only have to
| TA a bit and you certainly don't work for the uni or the
| dept.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| He is obviously talking about computer science. Yes, I know in
| biology or medicine you can often only access the experimental
| devices during set hours and the lab may not be accessible 24/7
| etc. But in computer science the schedule is mostly free,
| except for meetings and teaching duties but those are specific
| time slots not a regular clock-in clock-out job like a cashier
| or bus driver.
| analog31 wrote:
| I'd go further and say it's _dangerously_ untrue. What I advise
| people is that your results are constantly decaying. Only a
| rate of progress that _exceeds_ the rate of decay will get you
| out the door. Decay happens for a number of reasons:
|
| * Your records are never good enough to completely replace your
| memory of what you did. The longer it takes, the more studies,
| readings, etc., that you will have to repeat.
|
| * In physical and biological sciences, equipment breaks down,
| gets taken away, facilities get moved, etc. This stuff happens
| at a constant rate, and is a pure time cost.
|
| * Technological progress gradually raises the bar for the
| minimum quality of some results, e.g., in computation. Even
| "theory" is highly computational these days.
|
| There are also risks of career-ending accidents that can be
| treated as a constant risk per unit time:
|
| * Your advisor dies, retires, gets promoted to administration,
| loses funding, changes jobs, gets embroiled in ethical / legal
| issues, etc.
|
| * Some unexpected new result from another team or industry
| erases the relevance or novelty of your work.
|
| * You get sick, have family crisis, etc.
|
| * Burnout
|
| Results are the wrong unit of measure. A better KPI is results
| per unit time. The people who look like they fucked around for
| 4 years then submitted a brilliant thesis were either working
| hard all along, or were just brilliant, which I certainly
| wasn't.
|
| My then-fiancee and I were both grad students. We made a pact
| to meet at 7:00 every morning in the cafe across from the
| research building for coffee, to force both of us to stay on a
| work schedule.
| perfect-blue wrote:
| This is the kind of advice I give incoming graduate students.
| The sooner you start to treat grad school like a full-time
| job, the better. I was in a similar boat: my wife and I were
| both in grad school at the same time. We worked 9-5 every
| day, even if we weren't going in to the office. We both
| finished on time, and generally didn't have a difficult time
| with our degrees.
| olirex99 wrote:
| I am really curious to know how Karpathy would update this
| survival guide in the 2026. Hope to hear something from him!
| nomilk wrote:
| > You'll sit exhausted on a beautiful, sunny Saturday scrolling
| through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic
| trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries. You will have to
| throw away 3 months of your work while somehow keeping your
| mental health intact.
|
| Sounds strikingly similar to early-stage startup lifestyle.
| jefffoster wrote:
| I did a PhD in the late 90s.
|
| What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job
| and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing
| (probably not recommended, but it worked out OK for me).
|
| What helped get me through it:
|
| 1) Doing something I genuinely enjoyed - I approached the
| Computer Vision professor who gave me some ideas. I super enjoy
| writing code, and the idea of processing gigabytes of video to
| produce answers seemed cool. I treated it as a super difficult
| programming project.
|
| 2) Breaking my leg - Just before starting, I broke my leg badly.
| And that meant working from home with a weekly visit from the
| professor with a stack of reading papers. That time spent
| understanding state of the art was super useful.
|
| 3) Funding - At some point, DARPA gave enough money for me not to
| worry about funding, so I never had to work a job or get
| distracted.
|
| 4) Marriage - The final straight of writing a thesis was tough
| and I was super lucky to have a supportive wife who pushed me to
| get-shit-done.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| >What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job
| and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing
|
| This is actually how I view academia. "Couldn't get a job"
|
| It really lowered the prestige of a PhD for me. Heck, if I
| think through my PhD friends... none of them were A students.
| They were all C-tier.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| This varies widely between fields and institutions. Getting a
| PhD position nowadays in ML or computer vision is much
| harder. You need to already have publications when you apply
| and need to have experience specifically in the subfield,
| give a good talk, an interview, a good motivation letter /
| research statement, recommendation letters from good
| internships and multiple PIs you worked with, good grades,
| etc.
|
| It can be different in other fields an in lower tier
| colleges.
| otherme123 wrote:
| As if "A" or "C" defined a person capacity. I know some
| straight A's that went directly for a repetitive and boring
| but well paid and stable job. Other stayed in academia and
| turned top scientists.
|
| Academia is a very particular dynamic very difficult to find
| elsewhere, and some people dig it. You can watch some people
| finding the same dynamic at Google for example, where they
| are allowed and encouraged to fiddle around and keep
| publishing (e.g. the Attention paper, why would Google allow
| such publication?). Such dynamics are explored in Terence
| Kealy book "The economic laws of scientific research".
| butILoveLife wrote:
| Its so esoteric.
|
| You do what your priest/advisor tells you. You honor the priest.
| You do the latex ritual.
|
| Did it actually do anything? Ah in 8 years someone is going to
| replicate your study, it wont work, but too late! You got a PhD!
| ModernMech wrote:
| Doesn't really touch what to do when a new political
| administration comes in and pulls all your funding or makes your
| research illegal. This happened to me twice as a grad student now
| as a researcher funding PhD students.
| bee326 wrote:
| I am a bit surprised that this article talks so much about actual
| PhD stuff than high level guidance. Maybe it has to do with the
| author's personal background/experience or field.
|
| Something I didn't see in the article:
|
| Depending on your field, it can be extremely hard to get tenure.
| Unless you are a genius and are seeing signs you are well on your
| way to getting professorship and tenure (publishing good and
| important papers, really good at communication, checking all the
| other boxes), you'd better consider an off-ramp as early as
| possible.
|
| In some fields, 100 people compete for 1 open positions, and
| that's rough. Having been involved in such a hiring process, I
| know it's extremely challenging.
|
| I was smart enough to realize I'd never be a good researcher
| relatively early during my PhD and started preparing for job
| interviews. Sadly, I see too many people still having unrealistic
| dreams about being a professor late in their PhD. They even do
| postdoc and do that for many years until they finally discover
| they are not hireable. Good news is that they often find an
| industry job quickly after switching.
|
| I could see that clearly -- their research, originality,
| communication and understanding of the field is just not there,
| and one doesn't become a professor without being completely in
| control of the direction of their academic research.
|
| But it's hard to tell people "you are just not good enough for
| this". In most situations, you'd be considered unsupportive.
| However, in this case, it's the best thing you can say to a
| struggling PhD/postdoc.
|
| (Many professors are completely incapable of advising on
| students' career. They often find it surprising that a student
| wants to go into industry. They hold completely incorrect
| assumptions like a PhD student just goes into a management role
| as soon as they graduate. Rarely a professor tells you that you
| should not pursue tenure.)
| cjamsonhn wrote:
| >I was smart enough to realize I'd never be a good researcher
| relatively early during my PhD and started preparing for job
| interviews
|
| What are some things that made you realize that? Im considering
| going into research and certainly have some doubts
| d_burfoot wrote:
| Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had
| the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of
| people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically
| worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like taking advice about
| starting a cult from Joseph Smith.
|
| (This is not to say you shouldn't do it. Just get info and advice
| from a less biased source).
| inaros wrote:
| "Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD
| and still be an idiot." -- Richard P. Feynman
| xtracto wrote:
| Or as a good friend told me when I was starting my PhD: "those
| of us that finish our PhDs are not the most intelligent, but
| the most stubborn "
| perfect-blue wrote:
| Or lucky! I had a great time during mine because my advisory
| was amazing. However, my cohort mates, many of whom I'd say
| are much smarter/intelligent than I, got stuck with terrible
| mentors.
| jleyank wrote:
| If you want to work in the biotech/pharma business, you can be a
| PhD or you can be a technician. The latter needs to have "a good
| pair of hands" in the lab to be successful. The former, at least
| in the 00's, needed lab skills as well, but they tended to
| acquire a group when they moved into more medchem than synthesis.
| There's a number of support groups (physical or computational
| chemistry) that has similar staffing.
| perfect-blue wrote:
| His guide to doing well in undergraduate courses is decent enough
| that I've sent it around to my students as well. I sometimes have
| to teach first or second year students and the amount of
| questions I get about _how_ to study or _how_ to do well is
| significant. We kind of forget that this is a learned behavior,
| and everyone learns it at different times in their lives (or not
| at all).
| niemandhier wrote:
| A PhD at a research focused experimental institution creates a
| particular kind of human that is absurdly resistant to stress and
| despair: Ask an x-ray physicist using DESY about the horrors of
| "Beam Time" or a chemist about crystallising proteins.
|
| Most people I know don't use their actual skills anymore, but all
| of them shrug off whatever you throw at them at work without
| blinking.
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