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 career-ending 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.

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jwrallie 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The peer review paper requirement puts you in a situation where if your topic of research happen to not be interesting for the reviewers (that you have no control over), you can be a talented student that worked very hard and still fail due to being out of time after multiple successive rejections.

Your supervisor may not understand this until it’s too late, and you may not have the ability to judge your adviser's ability to do so until you are committed.

The main problem is that you were raised in a school system where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not like that.

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bonoboTP 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Too many people stay in academia out of inertia and being comfortable with the "school" mode of existence and are afraid of the broad wide world and the decisions involved. They finish their masters and liked the classes and the thesis topic and so they stay.

But as you said, a PhD is quite different than all schooling before that. And that's good. A PhD is supposed to signify that you contributed new scientific value as judged by the expert international community, not just your teacher. Of course there are many wrinkles on this story like sloppy knee-jerk reviews etc.

But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable. If just showing up and doing what someone else decided for you is enough for a thing, that thing will lose value very soon. Similarly if you make sure almost everyone can do it, it won't have value, but will become a participation trophy.

But nothing in real life work like that. School is fake. You don't get a job just by showing up or having a diploma. Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family with you for showing up and fulfilling some list of criteria. Nobody will fund your startup or strike a business deal with your company because you showed up and did some assigned tasks.

In almost all aspects of life being proactive and exercising agency will get you much further than the teacher's pet mindset that school instills. And unfortunately rather than selecting for it, the PhD selects against such agency again because it's the safe option and people who are ready for an adventure usually dislike the academic environment. Not all of couse, I obviously don't mean every single person fits this. But in my experience this explains part of the mismatch in expectations and reality for the "I was a good student so a PhD felt natural" people. Not those come into the PhD with a well thought out plan, and knowing exactly why they want to pursue it, the upsides and downsides etc.

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throw0101c an hour ago | parent [-]

> But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable.

Including paramedic or trauma surgeon, where the explicit assignment is to stabilize the human being in front of you?

Or how about plumber, to stop water where it shouldn't be, making it come out faucets and go down drains where it should? Had furnace issues when we switched it on in October, the HVAC technicians made the magic box generate warm air: his explicit assignment was 'make the house warm' and he showed up and did that.

	▲	bonoboTP 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Depends on your goals. Even as a plumber you have to think about what's worth what, how you specialize, and what the price is. Even as a doctor you may be under appreciated and the explicit goal is not so explicit all the time and sometimes curing the patient requires inventiveness and not only following a script or a textbook. The patients survival is often not purely a cookie cutter application of rules as it works in school. And in some sense we can make the PhD requirements explicit too: prove that you are able to provide valuable and novel contributions to the scientific community as recognized by them. But it's not box ticking. But so is becoming an especially appreciated and respected doctor in your city. It's not just don't kill too many patients and you're golden. If you want a mediocre run of the mill PhD it's not super hard. It is hard, but not super hard if you have academic aptitude. You can do something incremental and follow the trends, and eventually some venue will publish it. Not many will read it though and you won't become a leading voice though. There are many incremental paper that help many average PhD students get their degrees. There are plenty of other non academic fields where you have to work hard and long hours, such as finance or law firms. You can choose less demanding alternatives too but they are less prestigious. Of course finance pays better. I think the problem is that people want to treat a scientific career as both a regular job and also as something of a pop star personal brand type of thing, and they only want the upside of both. There are many problems with academia, power balance etc of course. It's not unlike problems for aspiring movie stars or in other somewhat isolated bubbles within society like in sports or the theater scene, or how kitchens work in high end restaurants etc etc. If you want to become an acclaimed top expert in a subfield, it's not easy. And humans are going to do their human things around such opportunities for status advancements.

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stared 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The main problem is that you were raised in a school system where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not like that.

It was not my case and bold of you to assume so. I had peer-reviewed publications before I even applied for PhD.

While I do know some people who expected PhD to be "more classes with more difficult assignments", the mast majority of PhDs I know had nothing to do with mentality you described.

	▲	jwrallie 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sorry, my choice of word was not great, I was not targeting you in specific, but the way the education system works prior to a PhD in general. I’m aware the experience will not be the same everywhere as PhD programs can be quite different, but many students that asked me if they should do a PhD are surprised when I tell them it’s not just up to the university or their advisors that they will get their degree and even more surprised when I tell them how early they have to start submitting their papers. Even though I was well warned by my seniors, I admit that I also had this misconception to some degree.
	▲	bonoboTP 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is very true especially nowadays. You typically need several publications to even start a PhD in competitive fields like AI, so people are familiar with the system already.