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Comment by chronic839 | Hacker News Reader

> Consider the plight of the medical student though.

While not as bad, ML/NLP/CV/AI grad school is still pretty bad. Maybe 60-70% of what med students (more specifically, residents) go through.

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No way. It's not even close. And I say this as a PhD candidate in one of these fields at Stanford. Grad school is what you make of it, to a large extent. There's definitely toxicity, but it's not as systematic or ritualized to the extent that it is in medicine. In grad school, you have wide leeway over who you work with, and you can distance yourself from the toxic personalities if that's what you want to do without taking a career hit. That's not really possible in medicine.

Yeah, med school is the only “brainy” career path that endures military-style hazing on a ritualized and widespread basis.

To be precise: med school is (comparatively) a walk in the park. Years 3 and 4 of med school are a sort of "residency lite" where you rotate in different specialties, but the doctors don't really expect you to be useful, so it's fairly low-pressure other than odd hours. Study up so you can know what you're talking about, don't get in people's way, and you'll be fine. Residency is when the 80+hrs/week institutional hazing happens.

Yes, “medicine” would have been the correct term.

At a top tier university, sure. Try a department with 20% faculty turnover where all the junior faculty leave before the third year review as soon as they get their NSF CAREER award and you don’t know if you’re getting paid in the summers.

>While not as bad, ML/NLP/CV/AI grad school is still pretty bad.

Uhhhhh what? I'm in grad school right now. I feel... a lot better-off than any medical student or resident I've ever met, or even than my wife, who's a high-school science teacher (God help her!).

Currently getting a PhD at respectable grad school, my Girlfriend is currently at medical school. She has it way harder than I ever have, medical school is just on another level.

Graduate school is probably worse because it's not time boxed and what you're trying to do may not actually be possible. When you leave your medical residency for the day you don't have the option to continue working.

Wife is in surgery residency, they do a lot of research projects, there is a lot of work to take home

It never ends. Wife is an attending surgeon, and she's currently working on refining a grant proposal at 9pm on Sunday =).

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