[n3ur0n]

As a rising 5th year PhD in ML -- I could not agree with this advice more! I have very hands-off advisors. I spent the first 3 years "wandering the woods to find something". Last year, I really had to sit down and think about how I can finish up my PhD on time. I pretty much did what you outline here. A lot of tools I used were organization tools I learned from my business school/product manager friends.

I honestly think the PhD system needs to be overhauled. even at a "top-tier" program like mine, it is amazing to me that at no point do we receive any training regarding practical components of research. 100 years ago, the way you became a physician was to follow around a physician and one day you were ready to be a physician yourself. In the year 2020, this is how PhDs are trained. I do realize that a PhD is not a "professional" degree like MD or JD, however, given that most PhD grads will 1) go to industry 2) go into academia, we need to teach students about project management, planning etc.

[eslaught]

> at no point do we receive any training regarding practical components of research

I think the fact is that most advisors get no training regarding the practical components of being an advisor. So it really shouldn't be a surprise that there's a huge amount of variation here.

One my big takeaways from my own PhD was that different professors have wildly different levels of ability in terms of people management. All of the professors I met were very smart, but some of them were clearly very poor at the people management aspect of things.

Having said that, I'm not sure what I would actually suggest to a student going into a PhD program today. My observations were formed after watching a few projects crash and burn, and that's not necessarily the path I'd recommend for finding out if your advisor is a good one.

[Spooky23]

That’s true in undergrad too.

I had an advisor who just didn’t have a skill in or desire to advise. I didn’t discover this until in my junior year he went on sabbatical and the professor in transitioned to was really amazing. I still communicate with him 20 years later and hear about intern candidates, etc.

It’s one of those areas you need to know about — it never occurred to me to ask about or really look into what an advisor relationship can or should be!

[ta1234567890]

> we need to teach students about project management, planning etc.

This is a problem with education in general. Those things should be taught in middle/high school as essential tools for modern life. Same as personal finances, effective strategies for team/group work, overcoming social anxiety, managing stress and building/maintaining relationships (personal and professional).

[HenryBemis]

Project Management. I once was working with two CS professors in a UK university. One was full of words (let's call him A). The other was one of the brilllian minds in UI science that helped design the Nokia phones' keypads (let's call her B). Most people disliked B because she had a start, middle, end. She required timelines, milestones, deliverables. Because of that everyone working with her was getting better grades, was more productive, because she was helping people manage themselves better. Prof A had the lazy ones the "deep thinkers, but not the doers.

One thing that (many) academics lack is project management skills. This is why many (that I know) sit on a desk, with a mountain of papers, having a thousand things unfinished. Try doing that in an actual business and see how it plays out..

Being a good teacher doesn't make you a good project manager.

[ta1234567890]

Project management is definitely very important. As a group/team manager where do you put the "deep thinkers, not doers" though? What is their place in business or society?

I personally identify with being a thinker instead of a doer and for most of my professional life struggled trying to find a position from where to contribute without feeling inadequate for not doing/executing.

[HenryBemis]

I don't feel you "push them" to a specific slot. Thinking is good but something needs to come out. A book, a paper, a.. something. A number of people thinking for a common subject need to produce something, not think for 3 months and then start thinking of something else.

The PM skills is to get them to produce efficiently and effectively. Not perpetuate the "sitting and thinking".

[ec2y]

Very true! And you can even be a good project manager and be nice about it. For example, setting clear expectations, working together toward deadlines, etc.

[asciident]

I'm not sure I agree. Everyone's situation in a PhD is different enough that the only general concepts you could teach would be high level and useless. Personal finance classes in high school are filled with junk like "make sure to spend less than you earn" and "here's how you balance a checkbook" and "never forget to pay your bills". For group work, the workshops I've taken for it talk about "listen before speaking", "repeat what the other person said so you are sure to understand it". Sure they're kind of useful, but mostly not.

[ta1234567890]

You are saying that you've had bad experiences with courses trying to teach those things. Those things might not be easy to teach. But that doesn't mean they are useless or that they shouldn't be taught. To me, it means the methods of teaching those things, in the workshops you took, should be improved.

[asciident]

I think it's likely that there's no way to teach those courses that is useful to a broad population. It's just such a subjective thing, like imagine teaching a course on "how to be happy". Even someone trying really hard may have limited impact.

[quineoa]

Couldn’t agree more. Instead of learning those things in school. I got lucky and had privilege and learned some of them outside of school, and still need to learn others.

But instead, they made sure I knew the name of the boats Columbus sailed in, in 1492. The Niña the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. I was forced to submit to whatever story they told me about the relationship between Columbus and the natives, no matter how untrue it was. But maybe that was the real lesson....

[hinkley]

One of the reasons I recommend volunteer work to people who graduated or are about to graduate with nothing like a plan for getting a job is that this is how I learned a lot of organizational skills (and got my first references).

It also makes that, “what have you been doing for the last five months?” question a lot less uncomfortable to answer.

[haakonhr]

What do we cut out of the curriculum to find space for these things? We are barely able to teach people how to read, write and do arithmetic properly. I agree that these skills are essential, but it is so easy to just say that we should teach it in school.

[galoisgirl]

It's not a space problem if that's all we can teach people in 12 years, it's a teaching problem.

[johntfella]

I preferred wandering the woods. I transferred to a university that was more about wandering than coaching.

I'm skeptical of the calls to overhaul. Undergrads and even masters degrees went through this and now we have group projects and less individual learning. Too much focus on team work and collaboration. If anything we need to be teaching more wandering through the woods, more being on the out over the in of the group.

I would say there should be sort of a short PhD, maybe akin to MPhils, and ideally a step above the masters but below the PhD. The MPhils fulfil this ideal of more professionalized programs while PhD programs can remain more to their traditional styles.

[jasonzemos]

Or bring back the Habilitation above PhD for serious academics. PhD is already sought after too much for professional reasons. Another 10 year commitment distills the lovers of wisdom from the lovers of cash.

[johntfella]

I like this idea. Longer time commitments would filter this out.

[rleigh]

Many years ago, I would have disagreed with you about the group projects. Today, I'm more in favour of them. The reason for my change of heart is that the moment you step outside acadaemia, be it industry in the same field, a research organisation, or any company, you'll be working on "group projects" as the default way of working. They are group efforts, and learning to work well in a group context is a valuable skill.

One big problem acadaemia has is the individual nature of research, even within research groups. A vast amount of time and effort is wasted on trivia due to working alone, which would be quickly resolved in a group. And while there is value in individual intellectual effort and reward, it can be vastly greater returns in a group context.

None of this is to say that lone investigation of out there ideas is bad. I think that's essential. But not for 100% of your time.

In many research settings, the scale of projects requires being a small part of a larger group. And while groups can squash good ideas, they can also kill bad ideas, and there needs to be a balance.

Not all PhD students are Einsteins, and it's as important to prevent people diving down a rabbit hole which leads nowhere as it is to give them the freedom to explore or else they might find they wasted several years rediscovering something already known or discovering nothing. I saw this happen to one of my fellows as well as myself. A good supervisor should be guiding appropriately. I found to my horror a PubMed search revealed a paper dating back to 1992 which had done several months of my research nearly two decades prior. When there are so many millions of papers, it's all to easy to miss stuff in the noise.

[johntfella]

I had to leave the company I was at. Group projects were too confining. Work for myself now. The killing of bad ideas it just creates groupthink and encourages echo chambers. Some need it, some don't need it. I think the more we baby guide people into things without them discovering how to do things themselves the more they require the assistance of groups. The more they work in groups the less capable they are doing things on their own.

[g_p]

I have seen a trend in UK PhDs in the last 10 years or so to include much more of the "practical skills" type work. There's certainly been a big push around the "Researcher Development Framework" [0].

I would say that there's no one-size fits all for a PhD, but that I think something PhD students need taught how to do early on is identify their own development needs, and either address them, or seek the support to do that.

It's important that we don't turn PhDs into a taught course though, since ultimately the goal is to learn to direct your own research project from fruition to results, as an independent researcher. There's also a growing number of "structured taught first-year" PhDs (that then last 4 years rather than 3, with the first year akin to a "professional masters" with qualification at the end of it)

EngD degrees are probably a bit more like the JD or MD (if you're doing engineering, that is), but I don't have much experience of that approach. It does seem to be more along the lines of what you highlight a need for though (the project planning, management, etc.)

[0] https://www.vitae.ac.uk/researchers-professional-development...

[chrisseaton]

> I have seen a trend in UK PhDs in the last 10 years or so to include much more of the "practical skills" type work.

Gah I think this is a terrible idea.

In practice it means courses that aren't really relevant to anyone that you have to take when you really want to be getting on with your research.

Everyone's putting in minimum effort and getting nothing out of it. What a waste of time.

They're also taught by people slightly outside your field since they're taught across the department, so they teach you things that are seriously wrong for your field (I was told to publish in journals not conferences, for example, which is incorrect for my field).

They were always a frustrating waste of time. I just wanted to get on with my work.

It's only popular because it's aping the American PhD, and in my opinion the British PhD is better in practice (shorter, more focused, more grown-up, more independent, more professional) and should not be watered down.

[g_p]

I felt your way actually about it at the time. I like the 3 year timescale and greater level of self led work. I pretty much avoided doing any "taught" courses for the reasons you outlined, but I have found some of my students did benefit from them. I think it comes down to individuals and what they need. It wasn't right for you or me, but I think there are some students who perhaps come in needing a little bit of a push on some of the supporting skills, and they found some of the courses helpful.

I definitely don't like the trend towards the 4 year PhD with taught courses in year 1 though - I had enough time in 3 years to mess around on side projects and other things I didn't need, but which were fun and interesting, even if irrelevant. When you add the inevitable consulting and startup advice on the side, it seems to me 3 years should really be the upper bound, rather than extending the process any further.

[Beldin]

I'm not from the UK. The idea of someone becoming an actual PhD in 3 years is rather quaint to me. Perhaps it's just a different approach, or perhaps the PhD system I'm used to produces a level of results that UK PhDs typically only achieve after their first PostDoc.

Or, perhaps there is an initial period of a year or so where the student is not yet doing a PhD, but is trying to produce results nevertheless. Saw that in Surrey, but can't remember how long students had after defending their PhD proposal and being promoted to PhD student.

[chrisseaton]

In the UK you just get going on your research. You don’t do initial courses. You effectively defend your proposal when you apply.

Ultimately the goal of a PhD is to learn to be a researcher and to produce a good new research result. If you can do that in three years why wait around another two or more for the sake of it?

I had a colleague who did a PhD in two years in Austria. In that time he got two top-tier papers published. If you’re getting multiple papers into top-tier venues then surely you’ve past the test? You obviously can do research and you obviously are producing good results as judged by a wide group of peers.

Why does the US drag it out so much?

I’ll tell you why - US PhD students also only spend about three years on their PhD. They spend the rest of their time doing masters-level taught classes, teaching (!) and working on their advisors’ projects instead of their own!

[widforss]

I don't think US PhD's are required to have a Master's to begin with, no?

[g_p]

You certainly don't need a Masters to do a UK PhD either.

[iib]

Would you want to list those organization tools--if they are publicly available?

I find that a lot of important nitty-gritty knowledge is dismissed as besides the point, something akin to why MIT designed the "Missing Semester" course [1]. I would have a very hard time progressing with research if I didn't find Zotero [2], for example.

[1] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/ [2] https://www.zotero.org/

[Upvoter33]

"it is amazing to me that at no point do we receive any training regarding practical components of research" - this varies A LOT based upon advisor. I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from a small data set. I've seen huge variances in what students learn from advisors, within the same department, within the same discipline, etc. It's too easy to paint "the PhD process" with broad brush strokes...

[rleigh]

Part of my PhD programme was a "transferrable skills" set of courses which included planning and project management, Gantt charts and all that stuff to enable you to plan several years of work.

[petemir]

Care to point to the specific organization tools you used? May come in handy...

[hpph]

Can you share with us your organization tools/methods?

[chrisseaton]

What does 'rising' mean?

[Donthatme]

Just about to start their 5th year.