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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

Yes. A phd has very little overlap with learning broad topics about a field (unlike masters and bachelors/associates). Unless your job is literally to do research on the subject of your dissertation, it will not help.

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What about working harder than your peers? If you're 2x harder working than the avg phd student shouldn't you be able to dedicate half or a third of that time to work and still finish the phd in 5 years?

How many PhD students have you known? The successful ones at least work extremely hard already; there is no such thing as working twice as hard as them.

Take the top 1% of successful phd students. Does your statement apply equally to them? What about the 0.01%?

If anything those denote even more time to their academic work than the average.

That's my point, can someone in that group instead of devoting more time than the average to their academic work take that extra time and devote it to their job?

No. If you plan to be successful, there is little to no time outside of being a PhD student. If you want to be in the top 1%, and especially the top 0.01%, you should plan to spend your free time researching to become an expert in your field. But such numerical distinctions are typically meaningless since, by virtue of working towards a dissertation, you should be pushing the boundaries of your field of knowledge and thus have few exact comparables as peers.

Source: me (several years now complete w/ PhD), my cohort in my program, and my PhD-earning friends outside my field.

Take olympic athletes. There are differences not only in the level of work but also physiologically between those who win gold medals and those who can't be olympic athletes. If you're a would-be gold medalist why isn't it possible to settle for getting into the olympics and have a job on the side?

That's an interesting analogy. If you can find recorded examples of part-time Olympic athletes from a competitive country that would help your point. By a competitive country, I mean one with non-negligible chance of getting a medal in that sport.

I wonder if they exist and if so, how rare.

I suspect it's extremely rare or non-existent for an athlete who holds another full-time job up to the selection time to get selected into a US Olympic swimming team, for example.

So if you had the capability to be one of the greatest PhD students in the world your strategy would be "do a bunch of stuff average instead"? How would you achieve such a high level of performance in the first place? Being a good grad student is as much learned and practiced as any other skill.

Being quite good at two things can sometimes be much more advantageous than being top notch at just one thing.

Scott Adams offered this as “Career Advice” (http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...) in July of 2007:

"But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.

2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort."

See also https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2010/04/18/jack-of-all-trades/ for an exploration of how deep knowledge of multiple domains enables opportunities for knowledge brokerage.

If you don't mind anecdata: I'm in the third year of my PhD and would classify myself as an average hard worker compared to my peers. It is highly improbable for someone to work three times as hard as an average PhD in any half-decent program. A lot depends on your adviser but anyone serious about their work will demand a certain level of output from their grad student (like any other manager situation) which necessitates a certain level of work. PhDs and post-docs are notoriously underpaid for the amount of work they do.

So you take the 0.01% of all university students, that are accepted into a PhD program, and then take the 0.01% of that ?

So 0.0001% of all university students, and then... work three times as hard as them ?

Working harder gets exponentially harder the harder you work. So... 0.0000000000001% of all students then ?

And now, in your application form for a PhD program, you want to convince an employer that they should hire you because you think in you are in that bracket, without any proof that backs it up, even though if for some reason you are not, things catastrophically fail for your employer ?

Yeah good luck with that.

If you were somehow twice as productive as the average PhD student you wouldn't worry about finding a professor...

IME (US) the typical successful phd student works 60-80 hours a week, so… good luck working twice that hard for 5 years.

Often more than that. During the dissertation phase 16 hour days almost every day can be common.

It is brutal. It can be worth it, but it is brutal.

What productive thing could you do 16 hours day? Study paint drying in a lab?

Typically not one specific activity, but a slew of different activities all pointed towards the goal.

An example:

8AM - wake, prepare for day, take bus to campus

9AM - teach class

10:30 AM - office hours, grade, read relevant papers

12:00 PM - short lunch window

12:15 PM - research, write code, notes. Short intermittent breaks. Library visits. Seminar attendance / prep, seminar/journal reading, prep, etc. Consult with advisor, others

7:00 PM - break for dinner, bus home

8:00 PM - research, write code, notes. Short intermittent breaks. Seminary reading, journal reading, etc. Class prep.

3:00 AM - sleep

Weekends were similar to weekdays without class or bussing.

Let’s assume this is a CS PhD (so no “lab” work). Is this person doing 60 hours of actual research a week? If I did a PhD while working full time, I would expect to do purely research. I’m not interested in teaching or grading papers or anything non-dissertation related.

Btw, this is how most people do their PhDs here. It’s a quick in and out 3 year seal-team like operation. Caveat: We see Ph.D as a degree you do after a 2 year Masters degree. So in total 5 years after undergrad.

Where is this?

When I was in grad school (Econ, not CS) teaching, etc., was less than 10h a week. The rest of the time was research. So yeah, 60+ hours of actual research a week.

That seems... excessive? 60 hours a week / 5 days a week is 12 hours a day. Even working Saturdays, that would give you 10 hours a day 6 days a week. I personally have never met any single PhD student who did that amount of pure research each week for 5 or 6 years. Again, I'm not talking about "lab" type research.

“Hard work” in the context of phd studies is not measured in a number of hours one works per week. It’s measured in a number of first author publications in top journals/conferences.

Which is really really correlated with the number of hours you put in. Hard work means working hard, whatever context you’re imagining.

I'm not sure what your ideal of a good PhD student is; there's no measurable level of "good enough" that once met allows you to do a bunch of other things. It's supposed to be an all-consuming, single-focus period of intense research and knowledge generation.

> It's supposed to be an all-consuming, single-focus period of intense research and knowledge generation.

This is mostly a recent phenomenon. Definitely not true for many I knew, nor of their professors when they were students.

Lots of people got a PhD by just being disciplined and working 8-5 on it in the usual time frames. I wager many still do.

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