Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

This article only take the money value of PhDs. It forgot the most important stuff in doing a PhD: Networking. Doing PhD is like doing SEO in the real world.

First, you need to pay attention to your supervisor, select a good one, one ready to trust you and give you freedom of action.

Second, grab a university where there is effectively budget for you to travel to conferences and meet people.

Then, work hard and network a lot.

I am French but did my PhD in Denmark (DTU), it was 3 years with a very good salary, with a lot of travels all over the world, with an insane level of networking. Now, after some work in a company, I have setup my small consultancy, the quality of the network I have from my PhD is a gold mine.

If you do your PhD to just enter in a company with a higher salary after some years of feeling like a slave, you are doing it for the wrong reason.

View on HN

Your experience is completely atypical.

Most PhD students -- at least the ones I know in the states and overseas -- spend most of their time in school trapped in a lab or office. A few make time to "network" with people outside the department, but most have to be forced to socialize with a broader audience than can be found at the weekly beer hour.

The far more common pattern for a PhD student is to spend years busting his/her ass in near-isolation to accomplish research goals and graduate, only to find that it's hard to get a job without real-world contacts. So you're absolutely correct in the sense that PhD students should be networking, but it just doesn't seem to happen very much in practice.

So the PhD students you know don't go to conferences and the like? Odd.

They did...but the one or two conferences you attend a year as a student isn't even close to what I'd call "networking". And frankly, that kind of interaction doesn't get you closer to a job, and it doesn't matter even a little bit for getting a professorship, unless you're giving a major talk (which, in all likelihood, you aren't).

The best networking I did in grad school was attending startup-related events. That got me my first paid gig, which led to greater street cred as a developer. Attending events held by the career center was a close second, because those led to interviews. Everything else was fluff.

Although PhD is a lot of work, its non-fixed schedule allows for some kind of freedom that you can use for networking. For example, PhD is a great time to be involved with open source projects where you can significantly contribute to, which can bring a lot of valuable opportunities if you're good at it and the project fills a marketable niche.

I know that my PhD completely changes the nature of jobs I can hope to get - not really because of what I learned directly at my PhD, but for everything else.

Also seems odd that there were no collaborations or internships with businesses. People in my lab have interned in research labs at IBM, AT&T, and Telefonica. Additionally, we've worked on projects with people from Google, Akamai, Vuze, and Skype. These seem like pretty decent opportunities to establish contacts and fairly typical (at least in CS). On top of that we've also collaborated with researchers at other universities.

Sure the majority amount of my/our time is spend sitting and working in the lab, but going to a few conferences per year, doing an internship most summers, and having weekly meetings with other researchers adds up to establishing a lot of contacts in the research community that I wouldn't have without graduate school.

This very much depends on what field you're in. You'd be hard pressed to find business internships in astrophysics.

As a third year Ph D student I'd say that it's on the student to make the most out of their time in school. Part of that is networking, meeting people in related fields and mastering some of the softer sciences (presentations, writing style, etc.) A student that fails to build connections seems no different to me than the student that didn't gain as much knowledge from their courses or didn't master writing because they didn't have to.

All the "networking" opportunities I had in graduate school were all with academics on the research track and were utterly worthless once I started doing something else.

The other day I found that a bunch of braniacs at the local Uni were working on something a lot like what I'm doing... More advanced in principle, but without the need to have a product that actually works at the end of the day. I talked with four people involved with the project but there wasn't a single one who had any interest in commercialization or knew anyone who was interesting in commercialization of this kind of technology.

Of course, I'm the kind of guy who shows up at seminars and always asks the same question "Is this development commercializable?" although I always ask it in different words... It's just a whole different world.

From what I hear, Denmark universities pay grad students unusually high salaries.

I do agree that networking is very valuable. As a PhD student I do about 95% of my work from home, but I also have been able to attend a lot of conferences and workshops. (I already have 5 lined up for 2011.) My experience has been that I will meet random people and then see them again and again. This has lead to collaborations, letters of support for grant applications, and ideas for new projects. I have no doubt that it will help me when I take the next step after graduating.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com