Dropped out of my Phd in Physics. Have a Masters and Undergrad in Physics. Was thinking about long term goal and what kind of work I would want to do and I keep dreaming about working for deep learning companies such as Nvidia, FAIR, OpenAI, etc. Thinking about going back to school to get a PhD but I'm wondering if this is even necessary or enough work experience would suffice and overcome this. Currently a Machine Learning Scientist working on NLP and Graph Machine Learning. #Edit I want to ask you all. Do you think a person holding a Masters degree can eventually do the same cool research work in positions that traditionally require a PhD? TC: 120k #AI #Software #MachineLearning #Nvdia #Meta
1% of PhDs are the smartest people you will ever meet, have incredible research, and are leading experts in their domain. 99% are people who simply became addicted to the validation that more schooling provides. Their parents were proud of their report cards and they bought into the fact that their crowning achievement was each successive level of graduation. They write crappy, meaningless dissertations and likely squander their life away as a post doc for several years getting paid a $20k stipend until they finally decide to leave their PhD off their resume and get a job in industry making 10x.
By Academic Research do you mean at Universities or are research companies at big tech included under that term?
If you’re going to be brilliant and do amazing work it starts with what you love, what gets you excited, not another degree. Look inward first, be the person who gets the job you want, then use degrees or other fodder to get there (if necessary). If you’re not feeling brilliant yet, keep learning, thinking, and pushing yourself. Show people through living your passion the world and ideas you see—very different from dreaming to do cool work or even thinking of it as a LT goal. You dropped out of your program. There was a reason—probably good truth there to reveal more about what you actually care about.
Got a masters degree, honestly I think masters are perfect enough especially nowadays where they target it towards the industry. It really has to be in STEM though and hard sciences like physics is perfect for ML. For me personally it allowed me to be a better researcher literally by like tenfold. I would say I didn’t really start learning and applying my knowledge until my masters. Bachelors was almost BS and just trying to survive LOL. PhD seems like just a long masters. Maybe more practice makes perfect and gives more confidence in some people though so it really depends.
I'm ABD and wish I spent more time in the industry so my years would count as experience and I could get promoted or higher pay. Only full time roles count as years of experience in determining seniority and most places just look at years to make an offer
It depends on what, where and when. What research you do as part of PhD is really important. If you can work on cutting edge of industrially relevant topics, it will help your career. Where matters in terms of prestige. MIT, CMU, etc. will be prestigious 30yrs from now, unlike IBM, GE, etc. A good place will also help you network better. When: doing a PhD during recession reduces your opportunity cost. Doing it quickly, I.e., at most 4 years also reduces opportunity cost. Also consider personal situations, can you afford to be poor for a few years? People handle little kids fine. Having an advisor you get along with is super important.
My understanding is that FAIR at Meta requires PhD.
CTO at OpenAI doesn't have a PhD
As a PhD holder, I cared more about it before getting it than after. It hasn’t impacted my ability to get senior roles and I’ve found some non-PhDs to be far more brilliant than those who hold it. If you’re ABD, you’re fine. If you don’t finish it, you’ll be fine. Life goes on.
Would you say after you landed a decent job in what you wanted to work on, you stopped caring about the degree? I know logically once I finish my PhD, there's still going to be a metric ton for me to learn. In terms of learning, I honestly don't see a difference between doing it grad school vs outside, the only difference would be having access to research opportunities and working on certain problems.
Oh yeah. It almost became a sense of “why did I bother spending all those years in research?” I get it and not many of my direct colleagues hold PhDs. They got even further ahead quicker than I did because they went into industry first.