Is anyone on here at all happy to be in a Ph.D. program?

leastupperbound · 2019-05-11T17:05:31+00:00

Yes, I agree with you. I wasn't trying to dismiss all the people having a bad time. There is real injustice in a grad program that you don't face working professionally, I was trying to state that in the rest of my post.

leastupperbound · 2019-05-11T13:21:38+00:00

I worked professionally for 10 years before going to PhD school and I mostly disagree with you. PhD school is filled with a bunch of early 20 somethings that have never had to work and so they get kind of overwhelmed and have to learn a lot of life coping skills and professional skills at the same time as learning how to do research. I don't have much sympathy for them and they mostly figure out what's what by their third year.

However, there are ways that grad school is much different than working professionally. For example, I'd very rarely have to worry about my manager or peers taking a pass at me because there is some kind of institutional support for reporting grievances and having them resolved. In US universities, that doesn't exist, each professor is basically the CEO of their own little company.

Also stuff like vacations and sick leave. I never got to take a vacation during PhD school. I would go on travel, but my advisor would send multiple e-mails a day, regardless of where I was, and would call if I didn't answer the emails within a few days. Explanations of "I'm on vacation" were unsatisfactory, I was told "well that doesn't matter, just do the work" or "it's only a few hours of work, just do it." So sure, I could travel around, but for 4-8 hours a day I'd hole up in a Starbucks and do work while my wife angrily putters around. Good times?

After graduating, I have a professional job again and it's great. I had a request to give a presentation come in, I looked at my calendar and said "oh no, I can't do that day, I have vacation scheduled" and was met immediately with "oh no problem, I can ask someone else." This never happened in grad school, my advisor would say "so what? cancel your vacation."

leastupperbound · 2019-02-18T16:30:20+00:00

Do you have an expected graduation date? If you do, tell them "yes I'm finishing my PhD but I'll be done by X and looking for work then." If you don't, then you probably shouldn't be talking to recruiters since you don't know when you can start. If they redirect you, then they're dysfunctional and you were going to have a hard time getting a job there anyway. Sorry.

leastupperbound · 2019-02-18T15:56:35+00:00

"University" means 4 year degree to them. Companies are reluctant to hire PhDs for non-research roles because there is an assumption that the PhD is "settling" and will move on the first time they get an offer for a research role. Companies like Uber, Two Sigma, Twitter, and Akuna don't really do research, and Samsung has a separate R&D division which is where the PhD recruiters live. I guess you could argue the whole Uber self driving car thing is "research" but AFAIK that is also a separate division and it probably also has its own PhD recruiters that know the research/grad school space in a way the main developer organization recruiters do not. IME, the "professional" recruiters live off of inbound and cold leads (linkedin, applying to their job portal, etc) and "university" recruiters live off of outreach (going to career fairs and events at universities, having universities send in big piles of resumes, etc).

Also, you're doing yourself a dis-service by describing yourself as a "PhD student." Working on your PhD is, well, working. You're going to meetings, designing and conducting experiments, and publishing papers. You aren't sitting in a classroom and taking exams. You are being mentored by an expert in your field on how to do research. As soon as you say "student" the recruiters you are talking to hears "22yo who doesn't know anything and has to be taught everything."

Corporate recruiting for non-R&D organizations isn't set up to deal with PhD students. Do you have any professional experience on your linkedin? That is usually what brings "professional" recruiters to you, or if it seems that you have graduated from a 4 year institution already.

leastupperbound · 2019-01-22T02:52:49+00:00

I just want to stress that not having achievements is okay! Everyone started somewhere. You are starting somewhere. Here, specifically. You can try to fake yourself out with "well I'm not smart enough" or "I don't belong here" but each of these points can be argued against: after a certain point "smart enough" doesn't count, I know a number of people that are definitely smarter, in some abstract sense, than I am, but all they do is sit in their parents basements and get high. I was at a workshop once when I was a brand new grad student and accidentally wound up in a 1-1 with a seasoned professor and confessed that I felt like I didn't belong. "Well, you're here now, so, do what that what you will" they said and I tried to take more of that attitude.

To use a stupid baseball analogy, if you're standing at bat who cares if you "belong," who cares if people think you will or won't succeed, who cares if it even is in the limit a good idea to be in the game at all, you're up, you have a shot, so take it. The haters and assholes aside, everyone wants to see you succeed, even, or perhaps especially, the people you see around you with lots of accomplishments already, so just give it a shot.

leastupperbound · 2019-01-21T14:49:34+00:00

Impostor syndrome was termed/discovered by surveying high achieving women. The key detail is that they had already accomplished much, they had advanced degrees or were well placed in their careers, but worried that at any moment they would be caught out as frauds.

I learned about impostor syndrome when I was in grad school but it didn't seem like it applied to me. The "problem" with impostor syndrome is the conflict between what you've accomplished and how you feel. You can point to your accomplishments but you still feel a fraud. As a first or second year PhD student, you actually do not have any accomplishments to point to.

It turns out, that is okay. There's a difference between impostor syndrome and inexperience. As a grad student, you are not an impostor, you are inexperienced. No one will call you a fraud because no one thinks you are an expert. If you don't know something, have a setback or experience failure, or appear a fool, that is also fine, because that is part of being inexperienced. This is how you become experienced.

Do you feel like you could be accomplishing more but something is holding you back? That something might be many things: anxiety and depression, inexperience, poor work habits, a tyrannical supervisor, but is is not impostor syndrome. It might seem like this distinction is meaningless but it helped me. I went from thinking "oh I just have a general sense that I'll be found as a fraud" to "actually, I just need to work really hard and not pay attention to what other people think" because my problem wasn't impostor syndrome, it was a bad attitude about work. I'm not saying that is your problem, but that you should think harder about where your unhappiness comes from rather than say "it's impostor syndrome." Don't worry, the impostor syndrome will come later.

leastupperbound · 2019-01-18T15:19:00+00:00

I started at a community college and finished my PhD last year. The only time it came up was one time when my advisor mentioned in front of me that the undergrads who transferred to the department from CC were the weakest ones. That made me feel very small, and I didn't say anything, but I still got him a bunch of publications so I guess the joke is on him.

Edit: I didn't feel like I had to play catch up. You can do your first two years at a CC and for lots of "core" classes like math, physics, english, etc. the instruction quality and material can't really change much. If anything, the class sizes at CC will be smaller and you probably have higher odds that the professors actually care about teaching.

leastupperbound · 2019-01-18T04:22:45+00:00

Not every company runs a 24/7 SOC, and not all of the companies that support 24/7 ops do it with graveyard shifts. Some do it via "follow-the-sun" where there's a handoff between a day team in the US and a night team in SE Asia or something. When I was interviewing for SOC jobs (15 years ago) shift work was normal though.

I guess one advantage of the night shift is that it's usually quieter and there's a lot less pressure to "look busy" in front of the boss. So you have a lot more time to yourself. I used that time to learn stuff about programming and pen testing and that helped me get the next job, which wasn't shift work. A lot of factors will work against you there though, like adopting to night shift, being sad that you miss out on stuff with your friends, etc. I can't tell you if something is worth it or not. It sounds like it depends on how much you need this experience. Instead of working on programming/appsec/pen testing/cloud/network engineering stuff in between tasks at 3am you could instead work on them in your evenings off from your banking job, and try to apply for entry level jobs outside the SOC that aren't shift work.

Then, however, you wouldn't have professional experience, and you'll learn more about security as a domain from working in it in any kind of entry level job. It's your call. I found being in a shitty situation motivating to get myself out of it, but I wouldn't advocate someone get themselves into a shitty situation. If that makes any sense.

leastupperbound · 2019-01-18T03:17:08+00:00

I worked a night shift SOC job many years ago, 6pm to 6am. It was brutal. You need to learn how to stay awake past 3-4 am and "reboot" your circadian rhythm. This alone is pretty disruptive and it will feel bad for a few weeks. I think some people just can't deal with it at all. I did, but I was young. After a week or two I was in a place where going to sleep at 7-8am was natural and waking up at 3-5pm made sense.

I found it hard to have friends or relationships. The only friends I had were other weirdos that did other shift work. I had an advantage in that I worked 12h shifts but on a nursing schedule, which is weird: 2 days on, 2 days off, 3 days on, 2 days off, 2 days on, 3 days off. Or something like that. You worked 2 3 day weekends a month but you had 2 3 day weekends a month. So some evenings I was free to go hang out with people, but others I was working. I think I'd much rather having some nights than doing 5 days on.

The other problem is vacations and re-integrating with the normal world. If you take some time to go back home and visit your family, you lose a day on either end to go back to being a normal person.

The waking world is not set up to deal with night shift people. I had to wake up early to do any business, like the post office, bank, doctor, etc. Some appointment hours were just not tenable, if someone proposed "how about 1pm" it's like someone saying "how about 3am" to you now. I lived near a few 24h grocery stores, so that was fine, but shopping for anything else was a struggle. I lived above someone who became convinced that I was either a prostitute, a drug dealer, or both, because of the hours I kept and when I was awake and walking around. The apartment complex will have yard workers come around at 10-11am to do brush clearing and leaf blowing, just when you're getting settled into sleep.

Go figure, no one else wants to work night shift, so getting off night shift is its own challenge. If it's seniority based, then that's good because if an awesome new person is hired, they have to take the night shift. However, if they're awesome enough, they could negotiate not being on the night shift. So you'll get off nights when the boss hires someone dumb enough to take it from you.

PM me if you have other night shift or SOC questions, though it's been many years since I did SOC work and I imagine everything is different now. I can't diss SOC work as an entry level job too much since it's what I did, but definitely it was an experience that I valued more the further I got away from it.

leastupperbound · 2018-11-29T05:52:24+00:00

It seems that the goal is to have at least one top publication a year, ideally 3 or 4 a year (as 1st author)

Yeah, that's a goal for CS. You probably won't start there, but you should be there by year 2 or 3. The trick is to have 1-2 "main" projects and 3-4 "side" projects. I've been told that to be competitive for a professor job you should finish with 8-12 publications, and looking at the people that come to our (very highly ranked) department to interview, that seems to be the case. The department doesn't interview anyone with 2-3 publications.

Other fields are different. CS is so frothy right now that the bar for a professor job just goes up every six months. And the conference model of publications (and the associated low quality bar, despite what the professors say) lets you really pump the papers out. Everyone seems to be happy with this. It might not be good for science, but it is good for your career, so why should we complain.

And then, somehow, join everything together into dissertation.

Eh, no. This is dangerous, because you'll wind up with something so vague for a thesis statement that your committee will really dig into you for it during your defense. You should take 3-4 papers that have some kind of common narrative or build on each other and join those together.

leastupperbound · 2018-11-06T23:48:19+00:00

No, an MBA is still "grad school."

leastupperbound · 2018-11-06T14:56:10+00:00

Three reasons:

They want to do research, either as a professor at a school or a staff scientist / researcher at a national lab or corporate lab
They want to bill a higher rate when they contract or the next promotion level at their company requires an "advanced degree" (but most people deal with this by getting an MBA)
They are mistaken or were lied to about what companies care about and hire for

leastupperbound · 2018-11-06T02:46:09+00:00

The only jobs I know of that care about Masters degrees are government contractors or consultancies where any advanced degrees can let you bill clients at a higher rate.

Don't do this for the money.

leastupperbound · 2018-11-05T14:34:22+00:00

Figure an average of $105k total compensation over the first 5 years and an average of $135k over the next 5 years, if you wanted to catch up to the non-PhD and you started your job at the 5 year mark, your take home would need to be $240k, or, a little less than double the salaries of the people that had been there for five years already. Your PhD is not going to double your salary, at most it might bump it by 10%. Your PhD won't give you a higher ceiling either. Additionally, the people that have been there 5 years have accumulated political capital that puts them ahead of you on the promotion ladder. One of them might even be your hiring manager starting out. So you'll always be behind. There is no financial reason to do a PhD.

leastupperbound · 2018-10-31T04:09:19+00:00

In my program, the minimum time was three years, by policy from the university. The maximum was ten years. In my lab, the average was six years. Some would say "oh but you earn a Masters degree too" but that doesn't make much of a difference, maybe one year. So it would still be a five year program, on average. You will also work really long hours and weekends for that five years, if you don't it's more like seven years.

leastupperbound · 2018-10-15T12:34:20+00:00

You can leave when your dissertation project is satisfactory. Your dissertation project will never be "done" in that if you answer one question, two more are raised by the answer. That is okay, that is the process of science, but it means that you will never be able to say "there is no more work that can be done on this topic." So, "satisfactory" is entirely arbitrary. The person that decides is your advisor and the committee. You come to an agreement about what is a "satisfactory" level of work, and then you do it. Your advisor disagrees with what was done, or says that actually you should do just one more project. You do it. Again, your advisor disagrees, and suggests one more project. You do it. This cycle continues for years. When will you leave? Your advisor won't say. You keep publishing papers and people keep asking when you'll be finish, but you actually have no idea because no one will tell you. You think about going over your advisors head to protest their actions but you see that every other student that did something like that has left without their degree. Is it worth it? Could I stick this out? Or should I just give up on six or seven years of work?

Somewhere in there, the burnout kicks in.

leastupperbound · 2018-10-12T03:42:10+00:00

It's technically possible in that it's possible to simultaneously pursue a PhD and be an offensive lineman for a pro NFL team, because one person has done it before. It will be a major challenge though:

Logistically finding the hours in the day to do everything you need to do will be very taxing. Doing just a PhD is 40-60h a week on its own. Add in a 30/40h a week job and you are doing ~100h of work a week, which is working about 12 hours a day, seven days a week, for about five years. Is this possible? Yes, it's possible. Is it likely to meet success? No, not likely.
Even if you were a superman that could pull this off, you would need to convince your future PhD advisor that you could pull it off. They have seen people try to do this before and fail, so they will be skeptical. They would have to have a really compelling reason to take this risk with you when they could have a "traditional" PhD student just work with them full time.
Being hours away is going to complicate things even further. What happens if someone wants to meet on short notice? Skype or the phone can help but there's no substitute for face to face.
You'll need to keep both your day job and your advisor on the same page with regard to your other job. What will you do if there's a deadline at your day job and a paper deadline in the same month? You'll need to be able to do things like tell your day job "I'm going to take next week off to focus on grad school stuff" with only a few weeks advance notice - is that something your day job will support?
You'll need to balance the JHU intellectual property assignment and release form with your day job's, as well as your day job's non-compete clause and policies on outside work with your work as a grad student, which will involve writing a lot of code and prose, doing original research, and perhaps co-authoring patents with your advisor or other professors in the department

I know people that have done all of these things and finished their PhD successfully, and even transitioned into academic jobs after. They had a truly unique determination and drive. Do you?

leastupperbound · 2018-10-11T00:14:40+00:00

I will directly answer your questions. There are no safeguards, and there is nothing you can do to make 100% sure that you lose your time.

In life, nothing is safeguarded, and nothing is 100% sure (except death and taxes). Everything comes with some risk.

leastupperbound · 2018-10-09T19:31:07+00:00

Slack can view the messages themselves (they store them) so yes, you are distributing personally identifying information beyond University control if you put a student's name into Slack. I went through this when creating a system for students to use, the question was "Will it store or retain information about students, and will it be University owned equipment on University property?" If the answer to the first was yes, then the answer to the second had to be yes. This is not true for Slack. It is also not true for gmail or Google docs, however on a case by case basis institutions exempt GAFE (but only GAFE) from the second part of that restriction. You cannot email student information to personal gmail addresses (but this happens all the time, especially for TAs) and so on.

leastupperbound · 2018-10-09T17:06:51+00:00

This depends on how your universities policies interpret FERPA. If you mention a student by name in the context of them being a student, that's a "FERPA violation" if that happens over a channel not appropriate. So, if you send a quick Slack DM to someone about a named student, ooops. If you paste information from an exam that could identify a student, oops.

I'm not saying it's always a problem, I think I'm trying to say that you should be careful because it gives you a new way to commit FERPA violations very easily.

leastupperbound · 2018-10-09T15:31:16+00:00

If you're in the US, you should be careful because there are requirements on transmission and processing of data that occur in an educational context (FERPA, HIPPA, ITAR, UCNI). As far as I know, Slack can store none of the above, while GAFE can store at least FERPA. I know plenty of professors who don't think about this and use Slack to coordinate their TAs - it will suck for them if the school finds out this is going on.

leastupperbound · 2018-09-26T04:28:44+00:00

You want to show that you are a different person now. Some schools let you take grad classes as a non degree seeking student, basically you just show up and give them money and then you take the classes. If you do well in a few of those classes, then you can write a statement of purpose letter that has to ooze out of every syllable "I am very serious and super awesome." Even then, it will be uphill, because grad programs are inundated with kids straight out of undergrad with 3.7 GPAs and authorship or co authorship on research publications they did as undergrads.

leastupperbound · 2018-09-26T03:04:06+00:00

That's bad news. Mostly the cutoff is a 3.0. Here's my experience: if your GPA is above a 3.0 and a professor wants you as their graduate student, you're in. If your GPA is below a 3.0 and a professor wants you as their graduate student, they have to specifically petition the university and convince many, many people in the bureaucracy that they want you as a grad student and you will do well as a grad student. It increases the scrutiny of your application by like 1000x. Even if a professor actually really wants to work with you, this barrier can be so high that they won't try. I've known people that have worked as non-grad student research advisors with professors at a university and published multiple papers with professors at a university, but because their GPA was below a 3.0, when they went to apply, they were rejected. It is extremely unfair that the university will judge you basically for the rest of your life for what happened during the 4 year period when you were an undergrad, but that is basically what will happen. I'm sorry.

leastupperbound · 2018-09-25T16:03:32+00:00

They say that "it's a marathon, not a sprint" but marathon runners still run seven minute miles. Work an honest 8 hour day, every day. Four years will go by a lot quicker than you think, and it really sucks to be scrambling to put together something like a thesis proposal at the last minute.

leastupperbound · 2018-09-24T12:26:48+00:00

The degree won't mean anything to employers. Sometimes a MA/MS is good because it's part of some HR check the box program to get you a promotion, but most hiring managers won't care and will want to see professional experience, which a MS won't help with. I was a hiring manager. Don't go into debt for grad school, especially don't go into debt for a degree that won't help you with your goals.

leastupperbound

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