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Yes, it is a small part of text, but one that may persuade someone into doing PhD, or give a false impression (e.g. the typical one, in which I used to believe: "follow your dreams in academia or get money at a dull job"). (BTW: I guess you know http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm. Also from an uber-successful PhD student, but the full story, rather than a set of advice.) It may be something about the field (growth, competition with industry). I think it was not a coincidence that out of many friends of mine who did their PhDs, only Wojciech Zaremba (now in OpenAI) had some non-trivial impact on the world. I don't want to imply that even if everything works (topic, advisor, funding, the sense of meaning, the sense of progress, ...) it is any easy path. And I am really sure that even with your skills, work ethics (and luck) it was a challenge. Still, even if one field is rosy (DL or maybe CS in general), a typical PhD experience is hardly sth I would recommend blindly (vide links there: https://pinboard.in/search/u:pmigdal?query=academia+depressi...). (On an unrelated note: thank you for "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks", ConvNetJS and CS231N - they brought me into the deep learning world. :)) |