Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

That was...a lot more straightforward than I thought.

First try: Year 4 Month 5

Second try: a lot more things went wrong. Year 5 Month 11.

Third try: Year 5 Month 11.

I just followed these rules:

- Study for the qualifying exam until I'm "very confident"

- If I have no ideas, read papers

- If I have an idea, work on developing it. If I have a preliminary result, work on developing it. If I have a major result, conduct experiments etc...if I have a rejected paper, revise and resubmit. Prioritizing whichever option gets me closer to an accepted paper (because presumably the ideas get outdated quickly)

- Whenever I get the "ask my advisor for a break?" say yes. Whenever I get "I am tired" and no "ask my advisor", "Slack Off" for one month.

Fortunately I got no abusive advisor, rejected papers usually end up getting accepted later, no extreme life circumstances or cut funding. But my computer crashed way more often than I'd expect, especially since backups are so common nowadays.

I lost all hope and quit. Something that happened to me in real life as well.

Every time I tried the game (using OP's described steps) I "lost all hope and quit". I thought that was the joke / funny commentary: that all paths through the game involve you ending up losing. Didn't know there was a path to actually win the game until reading the HN comments. So I kept trying it over and over doing the same steps and finally won once.

I guess that's an even funnier commentary on how it's pretty much entirely luck based.

I actually got the PhD so it’s not all ways leading to failure — just accept when your advisor offers you to take time off.

i won on my first try at just under 6 years and my hope never got below 65 i think, maybe i got lucky

I think you need to "Slack Off" more than once when your hope is low.

I wonder if there are other issues you can get e.g. if you slack off too much but your hope is still low, it just stops working.

> Whenever I get the "ask my advisor for a break?" say yes.

I thought that was a trap, and I was surprised my initial strategy of "say no but then slack off" didn't work

That depends on how good your advisor is and whether they understand mental health.

I did this and was warned, but got some progress for work during shower

I followed this strategy + parallelized developing preliminary ideas and wrapped up in 3 years, 11 months with 100/100 Hope. If it only it was that easy! Haha

Nice, but judging from what I have heard about academia, I think I beat you and won in month 1 by rejecting the offer!

A bit disappointing it doesn't go into other details like being a women. As most PhD candidates are in their mid 20s and often by the end of the beginning of their academic careers they immediately have to decide to either have a family or pursue academia.

Didn't realise at the time but you have made me appreciate that that was one good thing about the British system - I was 24 when I submitted my PhD which is fairly typical so still time before such decisions (it was another 11 years before I discovered the challenges of combining a career with motherhood!)

Reducing a PhD program to 4 years can help but in many fields this is still a problem. For many fields and form of absence of leave can be the end of your academic career. If I recall correctly the average PhD graduate is still 26-27 years old. Which doesn't help much too much even though the average US grad is 31. For many field though this would help a lot. In tech and stem not so much. I remember some of the female faculty I knew telling me exactly how and why so many women end up filtered out. Simply because they wanted to have a child and by the time they came back their research was outdated and their works published by others. They themselves never having children. It's why many women often leave academia for industry jobs.

I personally believe how we conduct research and academia is outdated and does not allow for the proper inclusion of women. And does not allow men to be proper fathers. Sorry for the long talk.

Edit: Got the average age for PhDs in UK wrong it's mid 30s. Even if they started right at the age of 22 it's a wall they will face almost immediately.

How should the system be changed to accommodate women? (And men/fathers?)

In my opinion, a first step is to equalize maternity and paternity leave. It should be equally disrupting for men to have children as for women (from the perspective of an employer). I like the Swedish implementation of this model, where partners get 480 days of leave per child which they are free to divide among themselves, with a minimum of 90 days for either.

That's a ridiculous amount of leave. A man does not need much time outside abnormal circumstances for paternity leave. I would almost never work, as my wife and I have a baby every year or two.

> I was 24 when I submitted my PhD which is fairly typical

Good for you - that's very fast. According to [1] the median age for starting a PhD in the UK is 24 to 25 for full-time students. So you actually graduated around when the typical student starts.

[1] https://www.hepi.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PhD-Life_T...

I basically followed this approach but my paper kept getting rejected from the conference which really put a ceiling on my hope; ended up quitting the PhD after just under 5 years.

Second try the conference paper got accepted right away. Advisor even asked me if I needed a break after I'd had some success (never happened on the first run) and was getting tired. Wrote my thesis in 5.5 years.

There is also a hidden variable about being tired too, and if you don't slack off you waste months in forced situations with asking for breaks with the supervisor or burning out.

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