A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)

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 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.

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.

“How to get into a top PhD program: get ~3 famous professors to write letters saying you’re in the top 5 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good to see this again resurface !

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.

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.