cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/2444019

I have electronics and digital design/verification background (MSc and some industry experience). As in the title, I am interested in learning and lately I got particularly interested in formal verification and started reading books, watching tutorials, on top of applying it at work. I really would like to learn more, participate to its advancement and contribute even slightest. I also enjoy academic environment. This is why I am considering a PhD. However leaving my job for full-time PhD means significant paycut even if I get into a funded PhD, also I am here on visa and many programs require you to pay the difference between foreign student price and domestic student price out of your packet, after receiving the funding. So leaving my job is likely not an option. I thought about doing a PhD part-time on top of my job. It will be very time and energy consuming, but I think I can take that. My bigger concern is, part-time PhD will take long time (6-8 years) and field is ever-changing, I am afraid my thesis may become irrelevant by the time I finish it. Also what I hear is that, if you do it part-time, you will not get the best subjects since professors would like to provide better supervision to and quick return from a full-time student. So I am hesitant about a PhD, even though it was something I was thinking of since a very young age. What do you think about a PhD, do you have any advice, some opportunity or downside which I did not consider? And if not with a PhD, how do I learn and research more? Reading and taking online courses are always options, but the problem is without any supervision, clear goal and guidance, I am sure I will get sidetracked and it may not be very fruitful.

20 points

Hi I have one. Grad school was the most fun part of my life, but let me give you some advice:

  1. Your relationship with your advisor makes or breaks grad school for you. Don’t take a gamble.

  2. Research is not what most people think it’s going to be. Almost regardless of field these days, get ready to learn how to write code, and get ready to teach yourself everything.

  3. If they don’t have a plan to pay your salary for at least 4 years, don’t bother. No, you can’t count on external money in this funding climate.

  4. Read the book “getting what you came for”

  5. Talk to potential advisors. The ones you want to be with won’t have time to talk to you. It’s a paradox.

  6. You want to be a person who wants a “hands-off” advisor, and then you want to get one. If you want a hands-on advisor, my advice is to go do some work on your confidence, and come back when you think you’re ready to teach yourself everything.

  7. Don’t go into grad school thinking you know what you will work on. Projects evolve and change based on funding and whims and chance.

permalink
report
reply
8 points
*

Adding to this:

  1. Publications are important and the journal is too. Research the journal find out impact factor and the unspoken reputation of journals (pay to publish sorts of stuff).
  2. Get comfortable reading, presenting, and writing publication style works. Most hands off labs have at least one day for journal club where you meet with everyone in the lab and the PI.
  3. If you’re good at talking in front of crowds go to conferences! Not many people like them, but if you can flex that extrovert muscle you can make some extremely valuable connections.

Also don’t worry about your research being irrelevant. Most phd projects are niche and cutting edge. You will be pushing your field forward, you’re not just along for the ride anymore as a phd.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

That’s all fantastic advice, thanks for adding to my post! Especially agree about not worrying about broad impact in grad school.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
  1. Be prepared to be seen as pigeonholed and overqualified for 95% of jobs and struggle to make something of yourself outside of academia.
permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

Yes and no. I would say for the field OP is in, a lot of jobs will have B.S. or M.S. as the “required” education, and then M.S. or Ph.D. as “preferred”. The U.S. just dumped $280B into the CHIPS act, so now is a pretty good time to be in semiconductor R&D. The folks I work with seems to have little trouble popping back and forth between industry, academia, and government.

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

The experience will be exactly what you make of it. Yes you might have trouble of finding your initial advisor taking you on a part-time role. But if you can demonstrate domain knowledge, the ability to be more functional, less handholding than a normal student, you can build a relationship with an advisor and be able to woo them into your increased contributions even at a part-time level.

If you love learning, and doing research, and being challenged, and forced to self-evaluate, do it. It’s a great experience. It is a long experience. But it’s great

permalink
report
reply
3 points

It is definitely not something I will rush. There is nothing that forces me to get PhD right away so I will wait until I find something very interesting, and a good advisor.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Hey! I’m in a similar boat. I also do electronics design and can’t deal with the 100% pay cut that a PhD would incur. At least not yet.

My current solution is just to research things on my own, without a university. I design things I think might be interesting, then get the boards made at a factory (cheap these days), then populate them and test it out. Cost tends to be quite low per project (under 100$ even for fairly advanced things like particle physics). Then I write it up online or do a conference talk if people think it’s interesting enough – and if they don’t, I really don’t care: I’m already all about the next project!

If I strip away all the “publish or perish” nonsense as well as grant applications and teaching requirements, it turns out I can do a satisfying amount of research in my spare time. Equipment costs are not a disaster either – maybe a 1000$ oscilloscope (which I need for work anyway), but very ordinary other stuff otherwise.

A good side effect is the stuff I work on keeps me sharp at work, and on rare occasions produces something commercially useful. It also forms a body of work that I use to advance my career, as examples of neat stuff I know how to do. I’d have a hard time putting a number do it, but I’d estimate my research has a negative cost.

Right now, I’m trying to do audio processing in 16 bytes of RAM and under 500 bytes of program. So far, it looks like it will work, but I don’t know yet!

permalink
report
reply
3 points

I hire people like you (ASIC verification) and generally the more academia someone has been through, the bigger problem I’m going to have getting them functional in a project.

I am interested in learning and lately I got particularly interested in formal verification and started reading books, watching tutorials, on top of applying it at work. I really would like to learn more, participate to its advancement and contribute even slightest.

Formal verification is a great topic, but the experts at actually applying it to problems are in industry, not in universities. What I’d suggest is trying to find companies that:

  1. Are heavy users of formal verification techniques. This means they are either big, because the software costs so much, or a company developing the software)
  2. Have somebody at them that speaks at industry events on the topic. Ideally they should be presenting new ways to do things.
  3. Have good mentoring systems

Then get a job there, ideally for the person that you identified and learn as much as you can from them.

permalink
report
reply
1 point

One worry I usually have about working with academia is working on something so specialized with so many limitations that it cannot go further than becoming a toy example. I agree with you that industry probably is more promising for future development with many more experts. Thanks for your advice

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

One thing you can do to see if you really have the ability to handle PhD could be, try to replicate a recent paper’s work, provided you don’t need huge amount to resources for it. If you are able to do it, then you might be able to handle a PhR.

It is a pretty dumb method, but it could give you a lot more insight into whether you want to be in academia for PhD or not.

permalink
report
reply
2 points

Lol. 95% of the literature is irreproducible bullshit. I suppose it’s good to verify that for oneself.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Asklemmy

!asklemmy@lemmy.ml

Create post

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it’s welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Icon by @Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de

Community stats

  • 9.6K

    Monthly active users

  • 5.9K

    Posts

  • 319K

    Comments