I* believe that implicit in the curriculum of a doctoral program is the education on how to take on any question or problem and contribut...
I* believe that implicit in the curriculum of a doctoral program is the education on how to take on any question or problem and contribute to it. I'm not a computer scientist but do a lot programming and work with many people with a CS education. Many have an incredible ability to architect a solution to a problem by breaking it down into straightforward operations. A PhD is like that, but for questions and bigger problems. If you want to build something that other people haven't built before, or answer a question that nobody else has answered before, a PhD will give you great confidence and experience in doing that. It is incredibly enabling and will change how you approach problems for the rest of your life. However, you also learn why nobody has done it before: because those things take a lot of time. And in a PhD program time is not a limited resource, money is. You will be doing stuff that is a waste of time by any objective measure. You have to be very mindful of the time cost of tasks, work, and your choices, because nobody else is. If you're not careful, a very meaningful period of time will have gone by without a lot to show for. My advice for people who ask me about getting a PhD is that it is risky entering a PhD program without certainty in what you want to do. You can go to college and figure out what to do. But in a doctoral program, you are too likely to get lost in the system, have a bad experience, waste too much time, and accrue too much opportunity cost. You will regret it if that happens. _______ *PhD in a Physics/Engineering program and research work in neuroscience and medicine. My one reccurring nightmare in life is waking up certain that I'm missing a credit, signature, or form and I'm still in graduate school.
Posted by alexalex on Dec 9, 2014, 5:53 AM
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Raise real-world problems, find people facing the same issue, and discuss solutions.9,000 issues0 comments
pricing (EdTech)
Yeah PC was a horrible platform before Win2k, but there was a beautiful short time period when we had alternatives like Amiga, Atari, NeX...
Living in a 200+ year old house, I've seen a lot of this first-hand through both planned and unplanned renovations and repairs.
Is anything with the pebble time able to capture heart rate for historical data analysis?
Datastar has evolved into a suite of tools [1].
> real issue is that MSG is basically a public utility.
Everything good is a slippery slope: every step in the right direction is bad if you overshoot.
Status Update - May 2026
I think what you wrote makes sense, and you missed one critical aspect : shared access to excessively expensive capitalized facilities an...
I* believe that implicit in the curriculum of a doctoral program is the education on how to take on any question or problem and contribut...
I* believe that implicit in the curriculum of a doctoral program is the education on how to take on any question or problem and contribute to it. I'm not a computer scientist but do a lot programming and work with many people with a CS education. Many have an incredible ability to architect a solution to a problem by breaking it down into straightforward operations. A PhD is like that, but for questions and bigger problems. If you want to build something that other people haven't built before, or answer a question that nobody else has answered before, a PhD will give you great confidence and experience in doing that. It is incredibly enabling and will change how you approach problems for the rest of your life. However, you also learn why nobody has done it before: because those things take a lot of time. And in a PhD program time is not a limited resource, money is. You will be doing stuff that is a waste of time by any objective measure. You have to be very mindful of the time cost of tasks, work, and your choices, because nobody else is. If you're not careful, a very meaningful period of time will have gone by without a lot to show for. My advice for people who ask me about getting a PhD is that it is risky entering a PhD program without certainty in what you want to do. You can go to college and figure out what to do. But in a doctoral program, you are too likely to get lost in the system, have a bad experience, waste too much time, and accrue too much opportunity cost. You will regret it if that happens. _______ *PhD in a Physics/Engineering program and research work in neuroscience and medicine. My one reccurring nightmare in life is waking up certain that I'm missing a credit, signature, or form and I'm still in graduate school.
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