The danger with grad school is that you don’t see the scary part upfront. PhD programs start out as college part 2, with several years of classes. So by the time you face the horror of writing a dissertation, you’re already several years in. If you quit now, you’ll be a grad-school dropout, and you probably won’t like that idea. When Robert got kicked out of grad school for writing the Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out without the stigma of failure.
On the whole, grad school is probably better than most alternatives. You meet a lot of smart people, and your glum procrastination will at least be a powerful common bond. And of course you have a PhD at the end. I forgot about that. I suppose that’s worth something.
From Paul Graham’s essay “Undergraduation.” The whole thing is worth reading.
Tags: education philosophy1 Comment
What ever else I have to say about that essay I won’t (expect that math, the sciences and history are all very influenced by fads), but I will respond to the quote below.
Getting recommendation from well know researchers is the conventional wisdom, as is the conclusion that going to a liberal arts college is damning.
However, I’d like to point to two pieces of data:
1) Search for “Baccalaureate Origins of Doctorate Recipients” (one link at http://www.cpst.org/hrdata/documents/pwm13s/C455E074.pdf) which calculates the number of of Science and Engineering PhDs per 100 graduates of a school 10 years prior. Note that Reed, Swarthmore, and Carleton are ranked 4, 5, and 6 on this ranking, with 4 libral arts college (5 if we inculde Harvey-Mudd) in the top 10. The only real outliers on this chart are Cal Tech and Harvy-Mudd, MIT has 16 per 100, Carleton 12, Harvard (which you would expect to do well, its ranked 11th) 10. And the numbers only change slightly when you look at all PhDs, this is a slightly different data set, (http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/baccorsum1995-2004.pdf), but the liberal arts college clime the list (Reed, Swarthmore, and Carleton move to 3, 4, and 6) with 6 in the top 10.
2) Many of the PhDs granted in the US are to foreign students (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/conferences/upload/2003may/chericonf2003_01.pdf , http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf96334/tables/tab1.xls ), who didn’t do their undergrad in the US. If we accept the proposition that the best research universities are in the US, and that professor at these US universities are likely to have mostly US networks, then why would they admit so many foreign grad students, who likely have recommendation from people who are not doing research that US professors have heard of?
Both of these things suggest that that, baring Cal-Tech (but including MIT) you are as likely to get a PhD from some liberal arts colleges as from the big research universities. While there might be some discrimination, its clearly not quite as conventional wisdom says it is.
“[6] One professor friend says that 15–20% of the grad students they admit each year are “long shots.” But what he means by long shots are people whose applications are perfect in every way, except that no one on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the recommendations.
So if you want to get into grad school in the sciences, you need to go to college somewhere with real research professors. Otherwise you’ll seem a risky bet to admissions committees, no matter how good you are.
Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts colleges are doomed. Most smart high school kids at least consider going into the sciences, even if they ultimately choose not to. Why go to a college that limits their options?”