Philip J. Guo

The Ph.D. Grind

Akinwale Oshodi

A concise and well documented account of a computer science graduate student’s journey to obtain a Ph.D. His account even though unique and cannot be generalized to to reflect the experience in all fields still gives a pointer to what to expect.

Gavin

Question: Is your book meant as a critique of academia or a call for reform?
Absolutely not. I don't have any agenda besides telling my own story as honestly as possible.


  most Ph.D. students are directly training for a job that they will never get. (Imagine how disconcerting it would be if medical or law school graduates couldn’t get jobs as doctors or lawyers, respectively.)

Strange one. It's 100 pages of minor mental breakdowns, ten thousand hours of mind-numbing gruntwork, stupid status games, and disillusionment - all in plain, businesslike, affectless prose. Also, there's very little technical detail in it. You'd think he was describing painting a house, rather than a painful initiation into the partially-insane system of placing logic incarnate in harness (a system with surprisingly weak links to discovery and progress).

  research was my only job, and I wouldn’t be able to earn a degree unless I succeeded at it. My mood was inextricably tied to how well I was progressing every day, and during those months, progress was painfully slow.


He spends two years of his life on nasty little problems, thousands of hours of config and debugging, nothing to show for it, no papers, no new results. The top CS schools don't let you graduate until you get 4 papers in "top" conferences: layers upon layers of luck and gatekeeping, only modestly correlated with your efforts. Oh, and you are unlikely to have much choice of project either. A recipe for misery. This is at the very top of the game, too: Stanford with full funding and annual internships at the big lads. It is both reassuring and horrifying to hear that elite groups waste months and submit total shit sometimes.

  In the end, it took three attempts by four Ph.D. students over the course of five years before Dawson’s initial Klee-UC idea turned into a published paper. Of those four students, only one “survived”—I quit the Klee project, and two others quit the Ph.D. program altogether.

Guo is no Jeremiah: despite his suffering, despite his very penetrating analysis of the waste and the idiocies, he doesn't declaim the system. He just analyses the narrow, nonscientific incentives of those around him and gets on with winning the game. He talks like this: "i think that leveraging [software] and aligning with both of your interests and incentives will be the best way for me to both make a contribution and also to feel satisfied about making concrete forward progress every day.”. He uses 'top-tier' without scare quotes. At one point he dispassionately notes that half a dozen of his papers were rejected because he wasn't fluent in the specific sub-field's “rhetorical tricks, newfangled buzzwords, and marketing-related contortions required to satisfy reviewers". That is, he comes up against bullshit Bourdieuan micro-distinctions, boundary work, irrelevant to science, and shrugs and sets about learning how to pass as an insider. Look elsewhere for the relevant denunciations. 

It would be cynical to think that he doesn't milk the politics of postgraduate pain because he landed well, is a professor now - instead just envy him his inner calm:

  my six years of Ph.D. training have made me wiser, savvier, grittier, and more steely, focused, creative, eloquent, perceptive, and professionally effective than I was as a fresh college graduate. (Two obvious caveats: Not every Ph.D. student received these benefits—many grew jaded and burned-out from their struggles. Also, lots of people cultivate these positive traits without going through a Ph.D. program.)... 
Pursuing a Ph.D. has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and I feel extremely lucky to have been given the opportunity to be creative during this time.


There is this to be said for the American seven year ditch: Guo was able to suffer and wander for three entire years before he had his first big idea. That's the other side: the incredible privilege of being paid to read, paid to talk to clever people, paid to think new thoughts. But who says privileges have to feel nice, or not drive you half-mad?

A very valuable warning for some tiny fraction of the world, a flat curio for some other tiny voyeur fraction.

The Ph.D. Grind

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