PhD: Bad Idea, Terrible Idea or the Very Worst of All Ideas?

[Datepalm]

I love how these threads are always at their most useful when people disagree :-)

56 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

The Atlantic just came out with an article (http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/why-do-so-many-graduate-students-quit/490094/) about this, I suggest you peruse it if you plan to pursue a Ph.D in the US.

Having said that, one thing about US universities (not sure about Europe, so wont comment) is that they value diversity not just as a matter of demographics, but also in terms of 'life experience'. Therefore, I would not underplay your field work when it comes to applications. Most of the applications the committees will be looking at will be pretty cookie cutter, and yours may stand out because of your unique experiences.

Also, urban planning is something of an oxymoron in US cities, most of them grew threw some organic process resulting in a lot of sprawl. There are also many interesting racial aspects to it.....I think there might be a lot of good ideas for a thesis there somewhere.

Oh, awesome, 50% drop out not because they realize they want to something else with their lives, but because they are mentally broken by a cruel process of Darwinian survival? Excellent. 

A thesis or nine thousand :-) US cities today are relatively planned, sprawl and all. (Whether it was good planning is a whole other question...but they're not what you'd call informal or organic.) My interests are in the general direction of transit and landuse interactions in informal urban growth, ie the kind that happens (more or less) without zoning, land rights and infrastructure being laid down by a central authority, which is why I find it a bit sideways that the US is the place to go study that, but apparently it is. (I kind of assume anyone seriously applying for research in those areas has a bunch of relevant fieldwork experience, though.)

Well, I've watched a lot of the PhD Comics Movie, because I'm procrastinating writing a thing, so yeah, reflective of my life for sure...

I think my dilemma (because by and large I've made up my mind that it's something I want to pursue, (probably)) is where. Not the specific program, but in figuring out exactly what different places have and don't have to offer, both in long-term career prospects and in the experience of the thing itself, for five-to-ten-years, (50/50 mental breakdown.) So active relevant research projects and opportunities to work on them, connections with major organizations in the field, funding, actual location (I mean, it's a much higher chance than that 50% that I lose it if I move to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I'm sure it has a lot to offer a lot of people, but no.) etc, and understanding the tradeoffs and compromises i'd be willing to make - and then applying only to places that fit the bill, and if I don't get in, well, that's that, I'll go do something else.

My instincts, however, kind of run to applying to absolutely anywhere that will likely have me and going with that - since if I want to do a PhD, the honorable thing (somehow, in my head) is to do it anywhere without account for such petty, self-centered considerations...or something. So I'm presently trying to understand how this system works really, and how I go about identifying those things from faculty websites that haven't been updated in two years, from the other side of the world, and where the cutoff between "This will mostly be an OK bunch of years of your life, that will also lead to other things you want to do" and "This will either be deeply miserable, or a huge loss in opportunity cost, or very possibly both, (with substantial chances of bona fide mental breakdowns on the way!)" is. I recall the snooty MBA thread somewhere, where some argued there's a very wide, clear, immovable line in MBA programs that are worth it, and those that aren't. I suppose I'm trying to identify if a similar concept exists in PhDs as well - or whether I'm thinking about it all wrong, or what. 

So...I should go to Portland? 

 

[Aderyn]

2 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

In that case I apologise for my tone, Aderyn!

No need for that. You didn't come off as rude.

[Altherion]

3 hours ago, Datepalm said:

So...I should go to Portland?

I believe that you're curious enough for me to second your professor's recommendation of going to the conference (especially if the university pays your travel expenses).

3 hours ago, Datepalm said:

I recall the snooty MBA thread somewhere, where some argued there's a very wide, clear, immovable line in MBA programs that are worth it, and those that aren't. I suppose I'm trying to identify if a similar concept exists in PhDs as well - or whether I'm thinking about it all wrong, or what.

Some universities are definitely better than others. Keep in mind that in the US, the universities are to some extent specialized. There is a very small number which are good at almost everything (e.g. Harvard), but every field has several which are not very famous, but in that field are very near the top. I have no idea what the good ones are for urban planning though.

[Happy Ent]

10 hours ago, Datepalm said:

So I'm presently trying to understand how this system works really, and how I go about identifying those things from faculty websites that haven't been updated in two years, from the other side of the world, and where the cutoff between "This will mostly be an OK bunch of years of your life, that will also lead to other things you want to do" and "This will either be deeply miserable, or a huge loss in opportunity cost, or very possibly both, (with substantial chances of bona fide mental breakdowns on the way!)" is. 

A useful motto in academia is: the only criterion is excellence. 

As with all mottos, it’s overly simplistic. But you need to make decisions, and clear rules establish clarity. So decide based on academic excellence.

The mental breakdowns (or whatever you want to call them) are inevitable; you don’t want to be in an academically bad place (in all senses of the word) when they come, since academic values will be the only anchor you have. 

(By contrast, personal enjoyment or other “soft” issues are going to be in the toilet at that moment anyway, so they can’t be used as a coping mechanism.)

Measure is unceasing. —Scylvendi saying

The proposition “I am the centre” need never be uttered. It is the assumption on which all certainty and doubt turns. —Ajencis, Third Analytic of Men.

So: talk to your advisor. Go to the conference (provided it’s a good one). Read the hardest papers from the best contributors and take them seriously. Don’t be superficial (“fake smart”) when you talk to people, we have excellent bullshit detectors. If you have an academic that can help you (such as your advisor), trust him or her. Otherwise, academic credentials are a very, very good proxy for quality: Stanford, MIT, UCB, etc., even the graduate students from those places will be worth talking to (and they can point you in the right directions with respect to who to talk to). If your advisor has tenure at Hebrew U then you’re golden already. (Otherwise, entering an academic field “from the outside” is extremely difficult.)

[IheartIheartTesla]

11 hours ago, Altherion said:

Some universities are definitely better than others. Keep in mind that in the US, the universities are to some extent specialized. There is a very small number which are good at almost everything (e.g. Harvard), but every field has several which are not very famous, but in that field are very near the top. I have no idea what the good ones are for urban planning though.

Just as a digression, a famous physicist (Leo Kadanoff, lets call him....the father of renormalization theory) worked on urban planning in the latter half of his career at U Chicago, so I presume that school has some decent programs maybe. Or that the field may be more mathematical than one would surmise at first glance (I would imagine it is, just modeling traffic is a nightmare so a city is probably much worse).

[SpaceChampion]

Apparently, urban planning is the 2nd best ranked job in Canada.

If you want to study a transit system in need of vast improvement, Toronto might be interesting for you.  The city has been trying to upgrade it's transit for decades.  Plans get made, plans get reduced or cancelled.  I can't remember how many more cars were expected to be on the road in the coming decades, but it was lot, and the rush-hour crawl can last 6am to 6pm already it seems like.  I barely drive anymore, but yesterday in the 32C heat wasn't too bad for about 2 minutes here and there.  Maybe a few people decided to stay home.

[Datepalm]

10 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

If your advisor has tenure at Hebrew U then you’re golden already. (Otherwise, entering an academic field “from the outside” is extremely difficult.)

Out of curiousity, why does my adviser having tenure matter? (She's my seminar adviser, and probably won't be my thesis adviser, but I'm not sure non-tenured faculty can even be thesis supervisors. In short, isn't having a tenured advisor kind of standard?) 

And I do not take advice from Scott Bakker, you know that. ;-)

Transport has a lot of mathematical modelling going into it, and my sense is that planers feel like we're approaching some threshold of available data in all sorts of spatial stuff, not just transit per se - all those people walking around with GPS in their phones 24/7 and tracking their runs and their pets and their coffee stops and all the information you could want about real estate costs and the location of jobs and everything else - and it's all going to come together into something vaguely magical that would revolutionize planning, but hasn't yet quite really. (Apropos MIT, they did a project to track all the informal transport in Nairobi with GPS, for example. But I did something very similar in Lubumbashi, and it was pretty much a lot of people with clipboards still.)

ETA: What job is better than planning? 

[Happy Ent]

1 hour ago, Datepalm said:

Out of curiousity, why does my adviser having tenure matter? (She's my seminar adviser, and probably won't be my thesis adviser, but I'm not sure non-tenured faculty can even be thesis supervisors. In short, isn't having a tenured advisor kind of standard?)

I just want to make sure that the person who starts you on the process (points you to the right conference, potential thesis advisor, etc.) knows what he or she is talking about. It that person is an academic lightweight, you’ll get nowhere (you’ll be pointed to even weaker other people with dead-on-arrival projects, no academic network, unchallenging environment, etc), so it’s really important.

If, say, you have a tenured researcher at Hebrew U to point you in the right direction, then you can just trust that person, because Hebrew U is a good place. If not, you need to look at the mentor’s cv (publications, postdoc at Princeton, etc.). That’s already harder to decide, so you need to be more sceptical in evaluating the advice (which publication venues are good? You don’t know, neither do I.) Ask around. At the other end of the spectrum of trustability are internet fora quoting fantasy authors.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

On a similar note, at what age is it "too late" to go back to grad school, law school, etc. if you want to have a successful career in a given field?

[Eyelesbarrow]

DP, I just applied very recently for a PhD  only because I got a yes from my 1st choice supervisor (his work is on capitalism and the sea, so lots of hanging around in boats; my proposal was on coastal use change and aquaculture because I can't deal with high seas). Mine is  a tenured one, who also happens to edit various relevant journals in my field, ie Historical Materialism, lol.  I want to publish and get my theoretical shit sorted out so it was this professor/ senior lecturer or bust. Like you, I also need some techie knowledge. I did some forestry modelling, but they were peanuts. Carbon accounting, I almost failed that, need to do it properly again.  I should have done a GIS course too when I did my MA, but I was afraid of the math. Should have faced my fear!

Honestly though if I don't get this PhD and scholarship - it's in London - I'm happy to stay here in Berlin and do my B2 German and find a proper job.  Less complicated for my non-EU self that way, what with the Brexit and Berlin being my main residence. I just got an agreement from my stupid, but OK-paying student work that they can give me a freelance visa while I beef up my Deutsche. That means I get to stay and not marry Mr. EB (who is 110% supportive of the PhD even if it is London) for visa purposes (but maybe for tax purposes HA!) 

[Datepalm]

You don't need much math (or any, really) for basic GIS, thats the joy of it!

So...how did the process of getting in touch with ideal-supervisor-person go? Out-of-the-blue cold email? Relevant contacts? Number of coffee cups consumed? This is the kind of thing I am either actually objectively awful at, or just think I am and so stress myself out beyond all measure by worrying over, or most likely, some combination of both. Benchmarking is helpful!

(I'm currently (and by currently, I mean over the last three weeks) constructing some weird function in my head to figure out when to email a new professor who may be a good potential MA thesis supervisor, variables of which include things like whether to use her previous-institution email, arrived at by stalking, or wait until the department updates it's website with a new one (which may be never), time to the beginning of the year, time after the end of the last year, level of completion of my thesis proposal, time after discussion of contacting her with seminar supervisor to balance enthusiasm/desperation, time to proposal-approval deadline, geographic coordinates of all involved and proximity to Jewish holidays.) 

 

[Eyelesbarrow]

It was a cold email for me, prompted by Mr. EB, so really it was his fault. The email wasn't long, maybe 3 paragraphs. I am familiar with his work, told him what my thesis was all about, my idea for my PhD proposal, and name dropped a couple of institutes that I was involved with  as a shorthand for where I am theory-wise (yes, one of those was RosaLux haha). He replied yes, and from then on it was a back-and-forth. I was initially planning to apply in January 2017, but last month he sent an email saying there were scholarships available so I should apply NOW. I wrote my proposal (while finishing my thesis), sent it to him. He made some suggestions and passed it on to his another colleague who agreed to be my 2nd supervisor. I rewrote the thing, sent it 3 weeks ago. So for me, it was pretty painless getting somebody to agree to supervise me. Now, I just need the money. 

I was told that in the UK, and maybe UK boarders can weigh in on this, it's pretty much easy to get somebody to say yes to you.  The hard part is the funding. Here in Germany, I find it is a bit difficult to get somebody to supervise you. At least in my field, they create PhD positions based on projects and funding.  So you have to be a part of the research project already (via MA thesis or internship) or you are willing to work on a topic that they have set.  I once called a guy here who is doing aquaculture work to ask about PhD positions. He did not ask me what my proposal was all about, his only reply was: do you have funding? We only accept students who are part of research projects with funding. MEH.

ETA Timing: yeah important. My potential supervisor and his wife had a baby recently so he was not quick in replying to my research proposal. So get that proposal done waaaaay ahead of the deadline. Because babies. 

Re: GIS - they told me I have to be good at differential equations!!!! LIARS!!!!

[Happy Ent]

On 16 July 2016 at 9:23 AM, Datepalm said:

So...how did the process of getting in touch with ideal-supervisor-person go? Out-of-the-blue cold email?

People differ, so do schools. 

If you want to try a stone-cold email, here’s some advice on quora: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-write-the-first-email-to-a-professor-that-may-accept-me-as-his-graduate-student.

If you send a stone-cold email to me, I will just hit backspace. Seriously. Many years ago, I’d have still written a personalised email, commenting on your application, giving you advice (but still saying no). Some years ago, I would still have sent a standard, anonymous respons back. Today, to my shame, I don’t even respond anymore.

I’m sorry.

What you could do is to (1) be a published author already, in my own tiny, tiny subfield of research. I will probably have seen your paper already. (2) Chat me up at a conference. (3) Get somebody I trust to recommend you. (4)  Apply through the general admissions procedure of my university. (5) Tell me I know you from westeros.org, and what you handle is, and that you agree that Varys poisoned Shae.

Note that no matter how much I like you, this won’t produce any funding for either of us. Either I already have the money (in which case I’d advertise the project as an open position anyway), or you are academically excellent (and demonstrably so), so that I can ask the university to part with one of the very, very few open scholarships.

[Datepalm]

OK, that's helpful, I guess. 

On 19/07/2016 at 8:41 PM, Happy Ent said:

(4)  Apply through the general admissions procedure of my university.

That makes sense to me. There's a procedure. It's relatively straightforward, and in most cases, seems comprehensive. CV, statements, grades, sample of work, etc, etc. Very good. BUT, apparently, there's this secondary norm - except in cases where it's not - of the behind-the-scenes networking, conference schmoozing, etc. This is either totally compulsary or entirely meaningless, and there appears to be no sure way to understand in which category a particular institution, department or individual falls into, nor what the protocol is once this has been (un)ascertained. I do not find such a system rational. 

[Happy Ent]

18 minutes ago, Datepalm said:

That makes sense to me. There's a procedure. It's relatively straightforward, and in most cases, seems comprehensive. CV, statements, grades, sample of work, etc, etc. Very good. BUT, apparently, there's this secondary norm - except in cases where it's not - of the behind-the-scenes networking, conference schmoozing, etc. This is either totally compulsary or entirely meaningless, and there appears to be no sure way to understand in which category a particular institution, department or individual falls into, nor what the protocol is once this has been (un)ascertained. I do not find such a system rational. 

It’s a step above basing it purely on networking. 

One of my best graduate students appeared this way. Stone-cold application out of nowhere, no research plan, no prior work. Never heard of the person before. For this to work, you need perfect grades and an insanely good recommendation letter from somebody that the potential advisor trusts. (Of the form “this is the best student I’ve ever head, I’d take this student myself if I had the funding/project”).

So in that sense the transparent system works: the best candidate will be selected on merit.

If you can’t win on merit then you need the networking method in order to be visible at all. You don’t need a lot of networking. But the potential advisor needs to be convinced of the seriousness of your application.

(Many applications clearly are bulk applications that were automatically filled in. “I am very interested in X”, where X is something that is copied verbatim from the departement’s web page, sometimes of the form “databases/networks/social media/scientific computing”. Some applicants copy verbatim from my own web page at least. Hilariously, many applications retain the font from the web page, so the copied parts are typographically indicated! Other nuggets are “I look forward to a Ph.D. in Denmark, the land of windmills and tulips.” The vast majority of applications on my desk are of this form, easily 4 out of 5.)

The networking part can be reduced to a single personal meeting at a conference. (“I talked to Prof. Ent and the ‘Fertilisers and aphrodisiacs: a Japanese schoolgirl perspective’ conference in Banff in September, telling him about my work on BLABLA. (This now appears as report 5431 in BLABLA.) This idea links to Prof. Ent’s work on BLABLA [Ent et al, BLABLA, BLABLA, 2013] and I am enthusiastic about pursuing the ideas behind BLABLA.) Be short, be precise, be serious, be uncompromisingly academic. No slang. Help Prof. Ent remember you. Don’t lie.) This ensures that the application is noticed and ends on Prof. Ent’s desk.

Without stellar merits or previous networking investment, your application will just disappear. Unless you’re applying to a place or an area with very few applicants or desparate advisors. Then you should rethink what you want out of this part of your life anyway. I just talked to somebody else about a similar choice, and found a crisp way of saying this: A Ph.D. for self-expression is a terrible idea. (Not saying this is what you want. But it’s good advice, and half-way relevant to this thread.)

[Datepalm]

24 minutes ago, Happy Ent said:

(Many applications clearly are bulk applications that were automatically filled in. “I am very interested in X”, where X is something that is copied verbatim from the departement’s web page, sometimes of the form “databases/networks/social media/scientific computing”. Some applicants copy verbatim from my own web page at least. Hilariously, many applications retain the font from the web page, so the copied parts are typographically indicated! Other nuggets are “I look forward to a Ph.D. in Denmark, the land of windmills and tulips.” The vast majority of applications on my desk are of this form, easily 4 out of 5.)

Tell me you're making up at least some of that. 

My impression was that everyone applying to good programs has excellent grades, stellar recommendations, relevant experience, well thought-through research proposals etc, etc. Then the networking becomes some kind of (crucial) way just to get remembered. (FWIW, my academic merits, while not flawless - my chaotic and middling BA - are, I think, OK. My MA grades are fine, the standardized tests I'm not too worried about, my CV has shiny stuff on it, I can put together a substantial proposal/statement/etc, and I think I can get strong recommendation letters. I wouldn't be thinking about applying to anything if I felt that I didn't have those basics reasonably covered, is my point.)

[Happy Ent]

6 hours ago, Datepalm said:

Tell me you're making up at least some of that.

I’m not. The majority of applications is rubbish. They are weeded out early. After that, there’s still a bunch of applicants with stellar grades, good recommendation letters, a sensible research plan etc., so that’s who you are up against, and all bets are off at that point. The only use of my  advice is to make sure you aren’t weeded out in round 1.

[Angalin]

20 hours ago, Happy Ent said:

I’m not. The majority of applications is rubbish. They are weeded out early. After that, there’s still a bunch of applicants with stellar grades, good recommendation letters, a sensible research plan etc., so that’s who you are up against, and all bets are off at that point. The only use of my  advice is to make sure you aren’t weeded out in round 1.

Another advantage past round 1 is to put money on the table. I'm sure it didn't hurt my master's application to be paying international fees up front.

[Datepalm]

Just to say, that I have done some of the things, particularly sending cold-emails to faculty (this is, apparently, the practice in the UK, and there are even friendly and unhelpful instructions) and it is horrible and waiting is also horrible. That is all. 

[BLU-RAY]

Quick note - I found professors (Stateside) willing to talk based on the cold-call email when I did the behind-the-scenes networking thing as a prelude to possibly applying for a PhD (I didn't apply partly due to crippling self-doubt and partly due to a lack of surety that I wanted to spend 4 years getting the PhD).

Having some sort of decent "in" can help - did you work with a professor they might know? Are you interested in their research, have you read their papers? Did they teach at your school at one point? Etc. But I think I ended up speaking with maybe seven or eight professors at three separate universities in that way. This was in 2013, so I mention it simply to put it up against HE's "delete, delete, delete" policy.