2024 The PhD Grind

Year One

In general, I wanted to create innovative tools to help people become more productive when doing computer programming. This area of interest arose from my own programming experiences during summer internships: Since my assigned day-to-day work wasn’t mentally stimulating, I spent a lot of time in my cubicle reflecting on the inefficiencies in the computer programming process at the companies where I worked. I thought it would be neat to work on research that helps alleviate some of those ine"ciencies.

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 graduate with a Ph.D. from the Stanford Computer Science Department, students are expected to publish two to four related papers as the first author and then combine those papers together into a booklength technical document called a dissertation. A student is allowed to graduate as soon as a three-professor thesis committee approves
their dissertation. Most students in my department take between four
to eight years to graduate, depending on how quickly they can publish.

Professors usually earn tenure (a lifetime employment guarantee) if they have
published enough notable papers in their first seven years on the job.

Note that it’s possible to publish more than one paper on a particular research project (i.e., follow-up papers), as long as each paper contains new ideas, improvements, and results that are dierent enough from the previous ones.

A prestigious top-tier conference accepts 8 to 16 percent of submitted papers, and a second-tier conference accepts 20 to 30 percent. Due to these relatively low acceptance rates, it’s not uncommon for a paper to be rejected, revised, and resubmitted several times before being accepted for publication—a process that might take several years. (A paper can be submitted to only one conference at a time.)

Year Two

I've realized from this summer and my previous work experiences that it’s
going to be really hard for me to push ahead with a Ph.D. project
unless I feel a strong sense of ownership and enthusiasm about it, so
I really want to work to find the intersection of what I feel passionate
about and what is actually deemed ‘research-worthy’ by professors and
the greater academic community.

Epilogue

1

But as I matured, I learned to channel my anger into purposeful action in what I call a productive rage. Every rejection, doubt, and criticism spurred me to work harder to prove the naysayers wrong. Lessons learned from earlier failures led to successes later in grad school.

2

As I discovered at the end of my first year, it’s nearly impossible to come up with substantive ideas in a vacuum. Ideas are always built upon other ideas, so it’s important to find a solid starting point. Also, ideas can sometimes take years to blossom, usually after several false starts.

3

I’ll end by answering a question involving the F-word: Was it fun?

Some aspects of the Ph.D. experience were very fun: Coming up with new ideas was fun; sketching out software designs on the white board was fun; having coffee with colleagues to chat about ideas was fun; hanging out with interesting people at conferences was fun; giving talks and inciting animated discussions was fun; receiving enthusiastic emails from CDE users around the world was fun. But I probably spent only a few hundred hours on those activities throughout the past six years, which was less than five percent of my total work time.

In contrast, I spent about ten thousand hours grinding alone in front of my computer—programming, debugging, running experiments, wrestling with software tools, finding relevant information, and writing, editing, and rewriting research papers. Anyone who has done creative work knows that the day-to-day grind is rarely fun: It requires intense focus, rigorous discipline, keen attention to detail, high pain tolerance, and an obsessive desire to produce great work.

So, Was it fun?

I’ll answer using another F-word: It was fun at times, but more importantly, it was fulfilling. Fun is often frivolous, ephemeral, and easy to obtain, but true fulfillment comes only after overcoming significant and meaningful challenges. Pursuing a Ph.D. has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and I feel extremely lucky tohave been given the opportunity to be creative during this time.