alt Hacker News> previously a […] PhD candidate in Plasma Physics at Princeton University
The advice is generally not to advertise yourself as having been a PhD candidate: you're basically advertising that you couldn't complete a PhD. (Insert obligatory caveats about academia having problems, and failure to complete a PhD not implying that somebody is incapable.)
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"Didn't" is not the same as "couldn't". Priorities change, and completing a PhD is a massive time commitment.
Well, he did pass his qualifiers so I guess that means something.
Given he left Princeton early and is now supposedly synthesizing gold merely two years later, the narrative seems in his favor.
As a former PhD candidate, yes that.
Honestly in my case I discovered I like being paid actual money and despise academic politics. Got a job offer so I phoned in sick on a catch up with my adviser and never went back. No one even checked on me for 6 weeks (!)
During my research internship, I met many PhD students whose labs simply ran out of funding. In some cases, they'd ended up having to scrap their PhD as the topic was too specialist to do anywhere else (e.g. requires a high level of biocontainment) and nobody wanted to fund it.
I think if you got three years into a PhD and were faced with the prospect of starting it all over again in another lab, it wouldn't take much to convince you to throw in the towel and do something else instead.