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Comment by leaveitalone | Hacker News Reader

As a solid B student denied access to a PhD, folks that get PhDs for business reasons really bug me. Especially if they then go on to complain that it was hard.

You don't realise how much some of us want to do research but can't get into academia because other, smarter people take the spots for prestige or money. Like, go away and just work on wall street if you're not interested in doing actual science.

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I'm sorry that you were denied access, gatekeeping is real, especially in STEM fields.

I just want to offer that not everyone doing a PhD is doing so for reasons of money or prestige, and not all of them are coming from money or prestige. And the gatekeeping doesn't end once you get in, either. If anything it intensifies the further along you get, and by orders of magnitude the more your circumstances don't parse to something like {age = <30, marital_status = single, kids = false, parental_income = upper_class | middle_class, parental_support = true, needs_to_work_to_survive = false, parent_has_bachelors = true}

I'm not sure it was gate keeping, I think there just weren't enough spots and my grades weren't as good as my competitors. Just wish the ones who didn't want to do it didn't bother so that more spots for us lesser graded people could have got in.

But even the grades are highly contextual. I am unfamiliar with how much they vary across the US, but usually grades depend a lot on the university itself and the professors teaching or grading the courses. The prestige of the university may be taken into account as well. Perhaps it wasn't possible to go to a "better" university, due to financial or simply personal reasons.

Diversity is a really important aspect in building PhD cohorts and research teams - only choosing the best candidates based on grades introduces a bad bias that may even exacerbate the situation.

Not criticizing your take, just curious–grades and GPA have never been a primary factor for any of the PhD admissions committees that I've been on or exposed to. Usually other factors like research experience, letters of rec, and other personal experiences easily outweigh grades, especially if they're just Bs (very low grades would be an issue). Where are your B grades affecting your grad school applications?

It was 20 years ago now, and you couldn't get into grad school with less than an A average. This was in Ontario, Canada.

> you couldn't get into grad school with less than an A average

Then no one "took your spot."

Hi clipsy, it wasn't a cut off, it was just that there were enough people with higher grades taking the spots. If some of those people didn't want to be there and didn't take the spots that they earned, I'm sure they'd have reduced the entry requirements. Best of luck in your future endeavours.

Apologies for my misinterpretation; I can't honestly say I agree with your overall point of view but my objection was misguided.

The main complain in my environment (composed by both doctors and dropouts) is not about "it being hard" but "it being disappointing", specially when you are interested in doing actual science but you find that will be a small part of the process and many times not as rewarding as expected. You add department politics, personal differences with supervisors or the whole publishing business to the mix and it can get really ugly really fast.

Yeah, but I do wonder how much of the reason you're experiencing that is because a lot of the people who make it miserable are there for the wrong reasons?

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