“The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir”, 2015 (; backlinks; similar):
[Brutal, lengthy memoir of 6 years as a computer science/software engineering grad student at Stanford University. As positively as the author regards his experience, it comes off as a nightmarish publish-or-perish dystopia where professors burn through naive idealistic grad students doing grunt-work in an endless death-march towards conference deadlines and where marketing is far more important than merit (“sell, sell, sell”), peer reviewers are sadistic rolls of dice and reject papers for superficial problems like not using the exact jargon of a subfield; the software used is filled with endless bugs and takes months to be hacked into shape, never to be used in the real world, and even the original authors can’t get it to work a second time. Many students pursue a promising idea only for it to not work out, and wash out of the field—with so many people chasing so few academic positions, anything short of enormous success is a fatal failure. The notes added in 2015 as a followup, recounting the fate of various grad students or assistant professors, reinforce the daunting odds against an intellectually-satisfying career in academia. It is unsurprising that so many grad students appear to have minor mental breakdowns like him. Strikingly, his by far most successful year was the one spent outside academia, at Microsoft Research. Guo provides these lessons:
Results trump intentions
Outputs trump inputs
Find relevant information
Create lucky opportunities
Play the game
Lead from below
Professors are human
Be well-liked
Pay some dues
Reject bad defaults
Know when to quit
Recover from failures
Ally with insiders
Give many talks
Sell, sell, sell
Generously provide help
Ask for help
Express true gratitude
Ideas beget ideas
Grind hard and smart]
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