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.
Hi I have one. Grad school was the most fun part of my life, but let me give you some advice:
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Your relationship with your advisor makes or breaks grad school for you. Don’t take a gamble.
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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.
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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.
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Read the book “getting what you came for”
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Talk to potential advisors. The ones you want to be with won’t have time to talk to you. It’s a paradox.
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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.
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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.
Adding to this:
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
That’s all fantastic advice, thanks for adding to my post! Especially agree about not worrying about broad impact in grad school.
- Be prepared to be seen as pigeonholed and overqualified for 95% of jobs and struggle to make something of yourself outside of academia.
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.
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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
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.
TBH the longer you wait, the more you aren’t going to want to do it. Depends on who you are as a person, but if you working toward getting married and havinf kids, then doing a PhD is going to feel like a truckload of extra responsibility that really isn’t worth it. The only reason I am doing my now is that it gave me an excuse to leave my previous residence, but I was in a really stable place making plenty of money. That is a hard thing to give up.
Also usually you get a PhD because you want a specific job. If you want to do it to learn, it is a mistake most of the time. You want to be setting up your post-degree career sooner than later, because your pre-degree career is likely not going to count for much after the first few years.
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!
the 100% pay cut
The only people who choose to get a PhD without receiving a stipend are either stupid or wealthy. Don’t get me wrong, in the US you make very little as a PhD student, but not a 100% pay cut. Most students are not working for free.
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:
- 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)
- Have somebody at them that speaks at industry events on the topic. Ideally they should be presenting new ways to do things.
- 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.
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
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.
Lol. 95% of the literature is irreproducible bullshit. I suppose it’s good to verify that for oneself.
Can you switch to a job with more of a research focus? Maybe that is hard to find in the area that you want (I have no idea what formal verification actually is).
As someone who has been through it the mental and financial toll is indeed significant, so you are smart to be asking about it.
Thank you for your advice. It is a nice idea to look for a job with more research focus. I am guessing the tool vendors may offer research related jobs regarding formal verification which limits the options to a few US-based companies, but I will definitely look into it.
I’m not sure of your country, but are you tied to it? (For example, do you have family, or are trying to attain citizenship?)
Opening up your search might be helpful. Look at a variety of universities in many countries to see what options there are.
