EPTWhat is a PhD? - Page 19
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States45443 Posts
On September 06 2013 17:15 Hadronsbecrazy wrote: What happens if your PhD thesis is rejected? Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahaha + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/3xUvW7A.jpg) But in all seriousness, you make changes to it, re-run experiments to find more data, and do whatever else your committee says. | ||
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Belisarius
Australia6233 Posts
On September 07 2013 00:40 farvacola wrote: Are you saying that folks need to write bad articles in order to learn how to write? The writing is a very small part of the "work" in many fields. The rest, being data collection, experiments, theory, networking/professional development/teaching/whatever, takes a long long time to get good at. It's pretty normal for a group or an individual academic to work their way up, making minor contributions to a field in minor journals before managing some kind of breakthrough. You need to publish the minor work in order to both gain experience and demonstrate competence, so you can continue to be funded long enough to make the breakthrough. If you swore to publish nothing but the final, amazing product, you'd never have a job long enough to get there. Of course, it's also fairly common for rising stars to get a leg-up by walking into an already top-tier laboratory, and publishing fantastic papers from the start due to the people they're working with. That's great for them (and their fields) but it obviously doesn't mean everyone else should lose funding or the ability to publish. I can't comment on humanities. Those (poop-covered?) halls just mystify me. But in the harder sciences you need a good runup. | ||
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farvacola
United States18856 Posts
On September 07 2013 00:49 oneofthem wrote: can't blame the runner for bad form when there's an alligator behind chasing, and it helps to make them run better. yea It would be more akin to ignoring that massive discrepancy in arch height as you plod forward, ultimately leading to a total collapse of the knee. Learning good form is the first step. On September 07 2013 00:55 Belisarius wrote: The writing is a very small part of the "work" in many fields. The rest, being data collection, experiments, theory, networking/professional development/teaching/whatever, takes a long long time to get good at. It's pretty normal for a group or an individual academic to work their way up, making minor contributions to a field in minor journals before managing some kind of breakthrough. You need to publish the minor work in order to both gain experience and demonstrate competence, so you can continue to be funded long enough to make the breakthrough. If you swore to publish nothing but the final, amazing product, you'd never have a job long enough to get there. Of course, it's also fairly common for rising stars to get a leg-up by walking into an already top-tier laboratory, and publishing fantastic papers from the start due to the people they're working with. That's great for them (and their fields) but it obviously doesn't mean everyone else should lose funding or the ability to publish. I can't comment on humanities. Those (poop-covered?) halls just mystify me. But in the harder sciences you need a good runup. This isn't about punishing those who are complicit to a shitty system, as appealing as that thought may be. It is about identifying the bad tendencies in higher ed and doing our best to ameliorate them. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
the problem with the humanities compared to the sciences is that in science you only have to understand a little piece to do your work. The humanities is not like that, you really have to know a little bit about everything. The diagram in the OP therefore doesn't really apply to humanities. Especially now that we are all becoming increasingly skeptical that there are really separate fields called 'history' 'literature' 'philosophy' etc. You really can't understand any one of those without understanding the others. So as we know more, the time required to get up to speed just balloons. It will take me another 30 years until I'm really someone that anyone should listen to, but it doesn't work like that unfortunately. edit: and in the meantime I'm just some idiot who hasn't read anything publishing papers that are of no use to anyone, because I have to. I think when I get my degree I might move to tibet or something and come back when I'm 60. | ||
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ZenithM
France15952 Posts
On September 07 2013 00:52 DarkPlasmaBall wrote: Ha. Ha ha. Hahahahaha + Show Spoiler + But in all seriousness, you make changes to it, re-run experiments to find more data, and do whatever else your committee says. But honestly, you kinda know beforehand if your shit is gonna be accepted or rejected :D No surprise. Over here in France, it's almost accepted by default. People who wouldn't have gotten theirs quit long before they even start to write their dissertation :D | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States45443 Posts
On September 07 2013 01:14 ZenithM wrote: But honestly, you kinda know beforehand if your shit is gonna be accepted or rejected :D No surprise. Over here in France, it's almost accepted by default. People who wouldn't have gotten theirs quit long before they even start to write their dissertation :D Yeah, that's a good point. You should be keeping your advisor in the loop with what you're working on, how effective your research is, etc. You can certainly make changes to your subject and design before defending your final product. | ||
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Kal_rA
United States2925 Posts
Woo cs! | ||
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On September 07 2013 00:56 farvacola wrote: It would be more akin to ignoring that massive discrepancy in arch height as you plod forward, ultimately leading to a total collapse of the knee. Learning good form is the first step. given the extremely casual (bad) analogy, you are not supposed to put features like arch height into it. but anyway, if we are going to discuss bad humanities papers i'm afraid i'll say something offensive to someone so it's best to just drop it here. teehee one thing though, the effect of journal prestige functions as a signal for the quality of ideas found in them, so there's a meta level effect that more or less affects all soft disciplines, making journal 'ranking' more incestuous and not purely objective indicator of quality, if there is anything like that | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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Ender985
Spain910 Posts
On September 06 2013 01:09 GhastlyUprising wrote: See, this shit is why I get so ornery. When I said that, I did not mean to imply any sort of hidden conspiracy. The fact that you will probably never be able to publish anything by yourself in any half-reputable journal it is NOT because of the lack of a 'big name' in your authors list. It's simply because with the knowledge you have when your are fresh out of any faculty, there is simply no way you can write up anything meaningful for the rest of the scientific community. The graph in the OP explains it really clearly, in order to push the boundaries of human knowledge you first need to BE in that boundary, and a faculty degree does not bring you anywhere near there. To be in that boundary, you need to: 1) Read all the papers relevant to your field that have been published up to today, and keep reading everything that comes up every single day. 2) Be surrounded by people that are also part of that boundary, meet with them, expose your ideas and listen to what they have to say. Attend conferences and make presentations of your data yourself. You need to exchange ideas with others, explain your thoughts and see if they make sense to them: generally other people can point out flaws in your thoughts that you'd never have found by yourself. 3) And most important of all, be under the supervision and guidance of someone who has already done everything I mentioned above for several years, plus published a few papers. I know all these things now, but if you asked me this question 4 years ago, I would be completely clueless as to what does it take to get a paper published. Experience gets you a long way, and when you lack it, you better be next to someone who does have it. Plus you probably need to eat, and you are never going to get your research funded if you have not yet produced outstanding research; on the other hand a PI with a solid CV can get your food money for you much more easily. On September 06 2013 01:13 HeartOfTheSwarm wrote: So why is that a questionable life choice? I heard quite many physicists advising sudents to NOT do theoretical physics. Is that some kind of your inner circle plot so that you can grab all the funding for yourself? Btw you are doing research (albeit not theoretical physics), so what's the situation in research, what are the hot spots for the next 15 years (can be any field) It is a questionable life choice because as somebody has already mentioned in this thread, to dedicate your life to research means earning a meager salary in comparison with industry standards, means no financial stability since you will only have a guaranteed money income until your grant runs out in a few months/years, means you will have to relocate to a different lab/probably a different country every 3 o 4 years, etc. Plus in todays economic environment, the money available for research is diminishing while the amount of people trying to pursue a research carreer is only increasing, which stresses further all points I made above. Again I did a physics degree but I'm currently doing research in genetics and biomedicine, so take my oppinion with that in mind. But IMHO the research opportunities in physics are quite dim at best. Physics is a very old science and basically everyhting that could be easily figured out or proved, already has. In my oppinion the only 2 worthwhile current areas of research in physics are high energy particle phyiscs and quantum information. For the first one you basically HAVE to be in the LHC, and there are so many people able to work in there. You could work in a lesser collider but you are never going to make impactful sicence in there. And for the second one the possiblilities are a bit better, since setting up a lab with a handful of lasers and beam splitters is far more doable than building another LHC, but again there are already many groups doing just that and you would probably be hard pressed to find way into one of those. The advantage of theoretical physics is that it is a very cheap research line, since you basically only need your food money, a pen and a paper and maybe a computer to run simulations. The downside is that there are already many extremely clever people doing exactly that, and that the great majority of theories that are being researched and proposed at the moment by these very guys are simply not demonstrable/probable by any currently doable experiment, basically rendering any theory as good as the next one, and ultimately making them all pretty useless, at least for the time being. What I see blooming in comparison to phyiscs is the genetics field. The human genome was sequenced only 10 years ago, and we still don't know what 75% of it means or is supposed to do. In my oppinion, the discovery of DNA is what marked the start of biology as a true science, since up to that point the discipline was basically descriptive and oriented into making catalogs of living specimens, with only some scientific exceptions like Mendel or Darwin. Compare that to astronomy where the first instances of mathematical predicitons of celestial events were performed more than 3000 years ago, and you will see what I mean when I say that biology is a very new science and that it offers a lot of room for research. Right now you can sequence a whole human genome for less than 2000$ and in less than 3 weeks, while the first one 10 years ago took 7 years and 3 billion dollars. Right today you can insert zinc fingers to perform point mutations in a specific part of a cell's genome and then grow that mutated cell line, which was simply impossible 2 years ago. And you can research human genetics or any of the genetic diseases, but also mouse or dog or fish or bacteria or virus genetics, or even plant genetics, which is a field that is also blooming due to the GMO interests. And in contrast to research in physics, you can start a lab with a non ridiculous budget, and there is a good chance that you can find something useful in any of those subfields. Well that is my biased oppinion anyway. This is also the reason why I choose to go from a physics degree to a biophysics master to a PhD in biomedicin while doing computational genetics, because I think the field is much more open and accessible, and because I find it incredibly interesting as well. Edit: On September 06 2013 06:11 Cascade wrote: Wow, that is exactly me as well! Moved from particle physics to bioinformatics just half a year ago.  We should exchange experiences!Haha God creates them and they join TeamLiquid xD | ||
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
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Ender985
Spain910 Posts
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Whole
United States6046 Posts
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GhastlyUprising
198 Posts
On September 07 2013 01:44 Ender985 wrote: I think what you mean is that YOU wouldn't be able to progress with these things because you don't have that particular set of skills and dispositions. Some people work better in a team, and vice versa, too.When I said that, I did not mean to imply any sort of hidden conspiracy. The fact that you will probably never be able to publish anything by yourself in any half-reputable journal it is NOT because of the lack of a 'big name' in your authors list. It's simply because with the knowledge you have when your are fresh out of any faculty, there is simply no way you can write up anything meaningful for the rest of the scientific community. Don't think that you speak for everyone, because clearly you don't. No less a physicist than Gerald 't Hooft has a webpage in which he encourages people to take the independent route and provides resources in that direction. As for attending conferences and reading papers that come up every day...you simply don't seem to have a very good understanding of the history of science and how scientists make their discoveries. As one example, Richard Feynman arrived at his "sum over histories" formulation by digging up a paper of Dirac's that was 15 years old and noticing a passage in which Dirac said that one expression can be regarded as "analogous" to a Lagrangian. He didn't have to attend conferences or stay abreast of recent papers. (Yes, he had a lot of help from Wheeler with his early work, but he probably would have done good work even without that collaboration, and what's more, he didn't have the Internet and all the other advantages that the modern age brings.) On September 07 2013 01:44 Ender985 wrote: As for this nonsense...I already made clear that I'm working as a programmer and I have patent coming out that could set me up financially for quite some time. If you can't be bothered to read people's posts, then don't presume to give advice. Experience gets you a long way, and when you lack it, you better be next to someone who does have it. Plus you probably need to eat, and you are never going to get your research funded if you have not yet produced outstanding research; on the other hand a PI with a solid CV can get your food money for you much more easily. | ||
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ZenithM
France15952 Posts
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Subversive
Australia2229 Posts
On September 07 2013 02:25 GhastlyUprising wrote: I think what you mean is that YOU wouldn't be able to progress with these things because you don't have that particular set of skills and dispositions. Some people work better in a team, and vice versa, too. Don't think that you speak for everyone, because clearly you don't. No less a physicist than Gerald 't Hooft has a webpage in which he encourages people to take the independent route and provides resources in that direction. As for attending conferences and reading papers that come up every day...you simply don't seem to have a very good understanding of the history of science and how scientists make their discoveries. As one example, Richard Feynman arrived at his "sum over histories" formulation by digging up a paper of Dirac's that was 15 years old and noticing a passage in which Dirac said that one expression can be regarded as "analogous" to a Lagrangian. He didn't have to attend conferences or stay abreast of recent papers. (Yes, he had a lot of help from Wheeler with his early work, but he probably would have done good work even without that collaboration, and what's more, he didn't have the Internet and all the other advantages that the modern age brings.) Why are you so defensive? No one is attacking you. On the contrary, people are bending over backwards to not offend you. If what you say is true, you'll be published and a success and an exception and anyone who thought otherwise (not that anyone is expressing this view) will have to eat their words. Just take what they're saying as advice based on personal experience, not as a criticism. | ||
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GhastlyUprising
198 Posts
On September 07 2013 02:32 Subversive wrote: Hogwash, I'm afraid. Ender's post was obviously designed to masturbate. He ignored the basic facts of my situation, treating me as some neophyte with wild (or even "lunatic", as he called them) dreams of doing research. I repeatedly made clear that I have ALREADY completed much work that I believe is objectively important. He's free to give his opinion, though one wonders who the hell he thinks he is to lay those assertions down like stone tablets...Why are you so defensive? No one is attacking you. On the contrary, people are bending over backwards to not offend you. If what you say is true, you'll be published and a success and an exception and anyone who thought otherwise (not that anyone is expressing this view) will have to eat their words. Just take what they're saying as advice based on personal experience, not as a criticism. | ||
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sam!zdat
United States5559 Posts
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