THE PH.D. GRIND.pdf博士磨难（The Ph.D. Grind）是一本很火的书，作者

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详细说明：博士磨难（The Ph.D. Grind）是一本很火的书，作者Philip是MIT的本科和硕士，Stanford的PhD。他读博的历程并非一帆风顺，也经历过不少迷茫和痛苦。想读博或正在读博的人可以借鉴吸取经验。仁者见仁智者见智。 Preface This book chronicles my six years of working towards a Ph. D. in com- These margin notes are 15. three puter science at Stanford University from 2006 to 2012. A diverse years after The P/ D Grind was published variety of people can benefit from reading it, including At this time, I have just finished my first year as an assistant professor undergraduates who might be interested in pursuing a Ph. D of computer science, so these notes reflect my current opinions as a current Ph. D. students who are seeking guidance or inspiration new faculty member To download a version without these notes, visit http://pgbovine.net/ professors who want to better understand Ph D students employers who hire and manage people with Ph.D. degrees professionals working in any creative or competitive field where self-driven initiative is crucial and educated adults(or precocious kids) who are curious about how academic research is produced The Ph. D. Grind differs from existing Ph. D.-related writings due its unique format, timeliness, and tone Format- The Ph. D. Grind is a memoir for a general educated audience, not a"how-to guide"for current Ph.D. students. Although Ph. D. students can glean lessons from my experiences, my goal is not to explicitly provide advice. There are plenty of how-to guides and advice columns for Ph.D. students. and i am not interested in contributing to the fray. These articles are filled with generalities such as“ be persistent”and“ make some progress every day,” but an advantage of the memoir format is that i can be concrete and detailed when telling my own story I already have selective hindsight, and I've been Timeliness- I wrote The Ph. D. Grind immediately after finish- out for only three years. ing my Ph. D which is the ideal time for such a memoir. In contrast, his book right when current Ph. D. students cannot reflect on the entirety of their exper way I can recapture those ences like I can, and senior researchers who attempt to reflect back on raw feelings ever again their Ph.D. years might suffer from selective hindsight Tone- Although it's impossible to be unbiased, I try to maintain a balanced tone throughout The Ph.D. Grind. In contrast, many people who write ph. D -related articles. books. or comics are either o successful professors or research scientists who pontificate stately advice, adopting the tone of "grad school is tough but it's a delectable intellectual journey that you should enjoy and make the most of.. because I sure did! or bitter Ph. D. graduates/ dropouts who have been traumatized y their experiences, adopting a melodramatic, disillusioned self-loathing tone of "ahhh my world was a living hell, what did i do with my life?!?” Stately advice can motivate some students, and bitter whining might help distressed students to commiserate, but a general audi- ence will probably not be receptive to either extreme cannot emphasize this Finally, before I begin my story, I want to emphasize that there is a point enough. I enjoyed ton of privilege during great deal of diversity in Ph. D. student experiences depending on ones my Ph. D, most notably because i was almost school, department, field of study and funding situation. I feel very fully-funded by fellow- ships and attended a fortunate that i have been granted so much freedom and autonomy top-tier school. My e perience would have d greatly if that throughout my Ph.D. years; I know students who have experienced was not the case far more restrictions. My story is only a single data point, so what I present might not generalize. However, i will try my best to avoid being overly specific. Happy reading So much has changed Philip guo, June 2012 in the past three years I've held four jobs since writing this book: soft ware engineer at Google, visiting researcher at edx, postdoc at MIT, and now assistant professor at the University of Rochester Prologue ince I majored in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in college, the majority of my classmates started working in engineering obs immediately after graduating with either a bachelor's or master's degree. I chose to pursue a Ph. D. instead due to a combination subliminal parental influences and my own negative experiences with engineering internships throughout college My parents never pressured me to pursue a Ph. D, but I could tell that the job they respected the most was that of a tenured universit professor, and a Ph. D. was required for that job. Why was being a professor regarded as their golden ideal? It wasnt due to some lofty reverence for the purity of scholarly pursuits. Although my parents respected intellectuals, they were highly pragmatic immigrants who were more captivated by the lifetime job security offered by a tenured professorship Many of my parents' friends were Chinese immigrants who worked in corporate engineering jobs. Due to their weak English language skills and lack of American cultural literacy, they mostly had negative experiences throughout their engineering careers, especially as they grew older. At holiday parties, I would constantly hear jaded-sounding stories of people suffering under oppressive managers, encountering age discrimination and "glass ceiling"effects, and facing massive rounds of layoffs followed by prolonged unemployment. Although my father was not an engineer, he worked in the high-tech sector and had similar THE PH. D. GRIND tales of struggling with management and bureaucracy, culminating in his final corporate layoff at the relatively young age of 45 My mother was the only exception to this dismal trend. She loved her job as a tenured professor of sociology at UCLA. Unlike most of her Chinese immigrant friends, she enjoyed lifetime job security never needed to report to a boss, could pursue her own intellectual interests with nearly full freedom, and was famous within her academic field. Seeing the stark contrast between my mother's successful career trajectory and the professional downward spirals of my father and many of their friends made a lasting impression on me throughout my high school and college years Of course, it would be foolish to pursue a Ph. D. solely out of ir rational childhood fears. To get a preview of corporate working life I did internships at engineering companies every summer during col lege. Since I happened to work in offices where I was the only intern was given the full responsibilities of a junior engineer, which was a rare privilege. Although I learned a lot of technical skills, I found the day-to-day work to be mind-numbingly dull. My coworkers were also unenthusiastic about their jobs, and there were few appealing prospects for career advancement. Of course, I'm not claiming that all engineering jobs are mind-numbingly dull; it just happened that the companies I worked for were not first-rate. Many of my college friends who interned at first-rate companies such as Microsoft and Ironically, my first full- Google loved their experiences and signed on to work at those compa time job after finishing my Ph. D was at Google. nies full-time after graduation Since i felt bored by my engineering internships and somewhat en joyed my time as an undergraduate teaching and research assistant back in college, I set my sights on university-level teaching and aca Late one night, I wrote demic research as future career goals. by the middle of my third year a shockingly-resolute diary entry that professed of college at MIT, I had made up my mind to pursue a Ph. D. degree my dedication toward his future goal. It even listed Stanford as my top since it was required for those kinds of jobs. I planned to stay at MIt hoice school for a five-year combined bachelors and masters program, since that PROLOGUE would give me more research experience before applying to Ph.D. pro- grams and hopefully increase my chances of admissions into top-ranked departments I found a master's thesis advisor and, like any ambitious kid, began proposing my own half-baked quasi-research project ideas to him. My advisor patiently humored me but ultimately persuaded me to work on more mainstream kinds of research that fit both his academic inter ests and, more importantly, the conditions of his grant funding. Since my master's program tuition was partially paid for by a research grant that my advisor had won from the u.s. government, i was obliged to work on projects within the scope of that grant. Thus, I followed his suggestions and spent two and a half years creating new kinds of pro- totype tools to analyze the run-time behavior of computer programs written in the C and C++ languages Although I wasnt passionately in love with my master's thesis Another benefit was the project, it turned out that aligning with my advisor's research inter- serious programming ests was a wise decision: Under his strong guidance, I was able to years, which made it eas. publish two papers-one where I was listed as the first(lead)author subsequent project ide and the other a latter author and write a masters thesis that won the annual department Best Thesis Award. These accomplishments, If I had stubbornly sisted on pursuing my along with my advisor's help in crafting my application essays, won me own half-baked quasi research ideas at that admissions into several top-ranked computer science Ph.D. programs. time, I wouldn't have Since Stanford was my top choice. I felt ecstatic and could barely sleep Botten these results during the night when I received my admissions notice I was also lucky enough to win the prestigious NSf and NDSEG Applying to Ph.D. pro- graduate research fellowships, each of which was awarded to only during my master's year gave me a huge advan- around five percent of all applicants. These two fellowships fully paid tage over students who applied during senior for five out of the six years of my Ph. D. studies and freed me from year of college, since I had an extra year the obligations of working on specific grant-funded projects. In con- research experience trast, most Ph. D. students in my field are funded by a combination of professor-provided grants and by serving as teaching assistants for heir department. Funding for Ph D students pays for university tu- THE PH. D. GRIND ition and also provides a monthly stipend of around $1, 800 to cover living expenses. (Almost nobody in my field pays their own money to pursue a Ph. D. degree, since it's not financially worthwhile to do so. Since i had a decent amount of research and paper writing experi ence, I felt well-prepared to handle the rigors of Ph. D.-level research paper when I started, yet When I came to Stanford in September 2006. However, at the time, I looked so good on I still got crushed. Like had absolutely no idea that my first year of Ph. D. would be the most the age-old saying about financial investments demoralizing and emotionally distressing period of my life thus far Past performance is not an indicator of fiture results Year One: Downfall In the summer of 2006, several months prior to starting my Ph.D. at Stanford, I thought about ideas for research topics that i felt moti vated to pursue. In general, I wanted to create innovative tools to help people become more productive when doing computer program- ming(i.e, improving programmer productivity This area of interest arose from my own programming experiences during summer intern- ships: Since my assigned day-to-day work wasnt mentally stimulatin i spent a lot of time in my cubicle reflecting on the inefficiencies in the computer programming process at the companies where I worked thought it would be neat to work on research that helps alleviate some of those inefficiencies. More broadly, i was interested in research that could help other types of computer users-not only professional programmers-become more productive. For example, I wanted to de- It's been a decade since I first sketched out these sign new tools to assist scientists who are analyzing and graphing data proto-ideas, but I still think that this is a system administrators who are customizing server configurations, or promising area of search. It's interesting novices who are learning to use new pieces of software how childhood interests can morph into long-term Although I had these vague high-level interests back then, I was still many years away from being able to turn them into legitimate publishable research projects that could form a dissertation. To grad- uate with a ph. D. from the Stanford Computer Science Department students are expected to publish two to four related papers as the first This isn't a hard-and-fast y author and then combine those papers together into a book- neans a smoother path length technical document called a dissertation. a student is allowed

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