Kudos to you for writing such a long ordeal in a humorous manner or at least that’s what I felt while reading it.
On topic, it’s probably another example of why scaling a system is so hard. Especially when it comes to tasks that require deep thinking. I can’t help but notice the government policy of sponsoring mass PhDs in the hope of raising a knowledge based society is itself changing the definition of knowledge here.
Yes, fifteen years after the fact, during which time my mind constantly bombards me with, "Why did I happen? Did I do something wrong? It was not fair! I did my best!" and such, I can't help it but write in in a humorous manner, otherwise it's hard to put it behind you and forget about it.
On the second point, yes the total number of PhD graduates for a similar time period was 12.000 (official Government numbers) so this was a doubling of PhD's just like that, out of the blue. No wonder it was chaotic. There was also enormous political pressure regarding "the Government is incompetent as it cannot absorb what is basically free EU money". So, ok, they've absorbed it, sort of.
I think you are right. Reading the online articles and official documentation from that period, which is really scarce (there is no such program available on the EU official website, for example, or I wasn't able to find it), it feels like this was a big experiment, the success of which is not mentioned in the news either.
What I could find is that it was part of the Lisbon Strategy [1], also mentioned in the official documents published by the Government. From the linked wikipedia article: "Its aim was to make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, by 2010. It was set out by the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000. By 2010, most of its goals were not achieved. It was succeeded by the Europe 2020 strategy."
Oh, that page is darkly funny itself. ‘[The Lisbon Strategy’s] aim was to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion,” by 2010.’ Yeah, that didn’t happen.
‘Spain's prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero pointed out that the non-binding character of the Lisbon Strategy contributed to the failure.’ Typical bureaucratic response: freedom is the problem.
There is definitely a role for government in fostering innovation and productivity, but it is very much a secondary role. Providing a predictable, stable, safe environment, and using government funds for things that the government actually needs to use seems to have worked for the U.S. for a long time, even before the two world wars.
They just continued the same way of working they had already before. I went through a similar stunt around the end of the 90s (yes also Romania) but I called it quits after half a year. Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I'm aware that either I or the group would have exploded had I stayed more. I respect your resilience.
Had I decided to call it quits, I would have probably asked myself, even to this day, questions like: did I make the right choice, what if things would have improved, what would have happened if I've tried harder, maybe there was just a misunderstanding, maybe it was my fault, maybe working at the University would have been the smart choice, etc.
I actually still have the emails asking for the project coordinator, the one responsible for scholarships for all of us (I've searched them out, out of curiosity while writing this article and their CV is 12 pages long and, naturally, this project is listed there as a success) for ways to abandon the whole thing. I didn't even get a reply. I was already 2 years in so I've would have had to return the whole sum back, money I didn't have. I was penniless, as all PhD candidate seem to be. So I did what I had and could do, which is summarized in the post.
We were the friends and family attending my cousin defending his thesis. He spent half his time title-ing, naming, and thanking Professors, chairs, heads, and what not. When it was all over, I asked him why did you name them all? He answered, "because they like the sound of their name."
This was very painful to read. Thanks for sharing. It hits a nerve to hear someone say, "I start to develop a faint feeling that I sleep better at night when I play along and nod approvingly to things I don't actually agree with instead of being pigheaded."
While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.
“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
"he is the best professor, I am so glad he is my supervisor"
to
"he is the worst supervisor, I am wondering how I can get the university to transfer me"
to
"he is the best professor, he helped me get a job after I graduated"
Which I think is a fairly normal rollercoaster ride.
I never got my PhD, my first day as a lowly research assistant in a university in central london (which shall remain nameless) I was given a professorial suite to camp in, and I remained there for 3 months, imposing furniture and a giant oak table and all. Another staffer used to sleep on the floor and park his bicycle there. Eventually I was evicted and sent to the top floor, an ex-statistics research unit teaching room, like army Barracks, where I and a fellow research assistant opened a cupboard to find the 10 Brunsviga calculators left over from a mechanical actuarial risk calculation exercise the department did for money up until the advent of electronic computers. Their entire previous 5 years work was completed in under 1 days run of the machine code on the new University of London computer in the early 60s. Oh, the Joys.
My experience from the academia is that there just isn't enough research topics. It wasn't as bad as in this article but I can't imagine how bad it would be if somebody dumped hundreds of millions of EUR into it to mass produce PhDs.
Romania, if the author's current location is also where this ordeal took place.
I just looked that up to be sure; the article itself has a very strong eastern Europe vibe to it. I was figuring it would be Bulgaria, Slovakia, or Romania initially.
I had a slightly better experience on my PhD in Central-Eastern Europe. My supervisor - a politician with little academic results mostly cared about the formal part of my results.
I used the PhD to get into a new field (statistics) just in time for me to get into Data Science as it started being cool. My papers weren't interesting, but I got to try things out on real data and report on them.
Funny, I was just thinking how much this reminded me of Stanisław Lem's "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". Must have been one hell of a vibe in Iron Curtain bureaucracies.
Romania, judging from the blog URL. But this type of PhD experience feels like the norm in most of eastern-european/ex-soviet countries. In mine, getting a PhD was one of the ways to get out of compulsory military service. Both profs and students knew that, of course. So real research is very scarce. Other small details, like worshipping titles and putting out a spread for the PhD commission also feel familiar.
Ironically, the only one of my university friends who I'd regard as "actual PhD material" ended up _not_ finishing their PhD in 3yrs time (I surmise because they picked a topic they _actually_ thought worthy) and went to serve in the army.
> "You know C++?" I ask enthusiastically, as I am looking to become a software engineer myself at this point. "I don't," she informs me, "but there's enough time until Monday to learn it."
Suddenly, everything about my professor's bizarre lack of development skills in my computer science course makes sense.
My dad got a job laying out circuit boards for Control Data in the 1980s on a Friday, knowing nothing about it. Spent the weekend in the library and started Monday morning.
People that belong in the job, even the creator of C++ himself, take decades to mature to the point of daring to use the language properly and then teach it. C++ is not meant to be learned in a week.
idk, if you have a decent grasp of the fundamentals you can get up to speed these days in pretty much whatever language/sub discipline with a couple days of hard study with LLMs
i made the transition from embedded C to low level tensor wrangling in about a week, it takes some work but it's definitely doable, of course i'm not an expert but it's enough time to go pretty deep, i went from "yeah i've run ollama" to optimizing inference code to get research papers to run on consumer hardware
if the task is to get up to speed on C++ enough to teach undergrads and you're a reasonably competent academic programmer who gives at least half a shit about the task at hand a weekend is plenty
C++ is famously hard. I know C++ for at least 15 years, made a reasonably successful side project in is, worked professionally for 2 years, and I still don't think I should teach it to others. I could probably do a decent job, but if they ask me about SFINAE or modern (after C++11 with bits of 14 maybe) features or "is this snippet UB" I would have to concede. Learning C++ in a week good enough to teach it is a cruel joke and laughing students straight in their face.
I'm sorry, but your reply suggests an incredible disdain for both technical expertise and for educators. There is value in depth&breadth of knowledge, and it takes great skill to craft a good curriculum.
From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.
Interesting, I feel the opposite, I agree that an excellent teacher who knows the material back to front is invaluable.
My general model for how "being good at programming works" is that it's just mostly a stacking buff based on how much you've touched, I'm choosing to give the person in the anecdote the benefit of the doubt and believe in both their technical expertise and skill as an educator. Most technical things are kind of like other technical things, and if you've been around for a while everything is kind of like something you've done before, it makes it very easy to pick up new tools/domains. I fully believe that someone can open up a VAST gulf of knowledge of C++ between themselves and intro to C++ folks in a weekend if they're already a seasoned practitioner.
Nope, some superficially similar technical things are founded on very different concepts from other technical things. For example, grokking a functional language requires a whole different mental model than for an imperative language.
Also, remember that you could pick up a new language and start to dabble in it after a few days, but teaching it, ah, that requires much more than using it . Usually teaching something requires a much deeper understanding than just using it.
As an educator I disagree. In my field of expertise I am so far in advance of my students’ skills that I can be three standard deviations in skill better than the average student in my class in any cognate field in two days and further ahead than that in a week or a month. That’s what “technical expertise” is.
I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.
Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.
Wtf is this take. You are the worst candidate for a teacher if you have no experience with the language and have rushed to teach it.
The article talks about a literal "learn c++ in 48hs".
Give me a break. You'd be absolutely mediocre and those of us who know our shit do notice. Source: I've been that student that worked and studied the topic he worked with and found some of the TAs absolutely wanting.
If you want to do a PhD, DO NOT limit yourself to your home country. Many countries simply are not capable of properly training researchers. The US can. China mostly can by now, I expect. Northern Europe can, to some degree, in some fields. Elsewhere, you are at risk of wasting important years of your life.
Trump might end US dominance, but the general point that academia is international and entire countries can simply not have a functioning pipeline for new researchers.
> Northern Europe can, to some degree, in some fields.
Europe can etc. FTFY.
And since with such decision one frequently sort of selects where they will reside afterwards (ie by finding partner and settling down), its also about choosing a society one wants to grow older and potentially raise kids in.
We all have our preferences but me personally I would never choose US for such, even when disregarding current admin excesses (which in some form are not going away, its the new norm and don't hold your breath for next election cycle).
The OP is from Romania, and from my own experience too, I think you are mistaken. I would think very carefully before starting a PhD in many European countries. I'd also ask searching questions of the faculty, ("how many people do you graduate a year?" and "what % of your graduates go on to an academic job?")
This applies to the UK and Germany, for example, not just Eastern Europe. There are certainly spots of excellence, but even among high quality UK universities, very often PhD training is on the "apprenticeship" model where you're just thrown into research without graduate-level courses. You can judge the result by looking at the proportion of US-trained staff in EU departments.
The writing style is really good. Having gone through a non-terrible PhD that still shared elements of this, it captures the essence so well, even with some technical detail. Even the admin assistant shenanigans brings back memories to similar events in my days long ago in some other institution. So enjoyable.
I was getting a Terry Pratchett-like-modern-day-Discworld vibe while reading the post (and Office Space film/Douglas Adams-Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference when reading about the office location).
What we have is an ignorance-based society. The more blind-spots you have, the higher you rise.
The higher your rise, the easier it is to maintain your blind-spots because nobody will dare question your worldview. Even those few who do, they're a nobody, so what could they possibly know about anything? Surely, it's only the people on top who have a bird's eye view of the big data, who know what's going on... Everyone else is like an ant following breadcrumbs laid out in front of them. What is there to learn about the real world that you cannot see from above?
I was bracing for the bit where Professor pokes his head into the tiny office and says "Hey Mihai, what's happening. We're gonna have to move some more of these boxes in here, so if you could just push your desk back there, against that back wall to make some room, that would be terrific. Thanks."
This was a depressing read. Now I desperately need some examples of Phd candidates who had a great time and managed to do well from a scientific point of view. To restore my faith in humanity.
My brother defended a thesis that actually made sense and had the means to do it though he did not write his story. (Caveat: I did not understand his subject. Caveat 2: Professor was his (and thus my) uncle.)
Eastern Europe it looks like, but this story is remarkably similar to my experience as a graduate student / technical staff at public research institutions in both the United States and Japan.
I don't wanna name and blame the country, and I didn't do it in the article as I don't think it matters that much, but the other replies are correct in their assumption, is all I can say.
Good instincts. It's not relevant and anyone who has seen state or academia up close in different countries knows that, no matter if people from some countries may want to pretend it's "these other countries".
Taking into account the 500€/month scholarship ("about the average salary", euros), Eastern EU. Add in the Romanian sounding author's name, it's probably Romania.
Yet another example of how academics serve no purpose in real life. Yes, there have been ground breaking innovations and discoveries from academic folks but that's likely 10% of the good ones. Rest is just pure misery, like the one OP describes
> Yet another example of how <startups/stock brokers/etc> serve no purpose in real life. Yes, there have been ground breaking innovations and discoveries from <startups/stock brokers/etc> folks but that's likely 10% of the good ones. Rest is just pure misery, like the one OP describes
True, but I also found my professors to be ridiculously incompetent and unprofessional (and perhaps unethical considering that at least one wanted me to work for free) compared to the people I’ve worked with.
How much of this account is realistic? If this is the writing of an educated young person. Imagine how despondent must the average young person be? And are we to presume this is the material that will help Ukraine?
It seems the pendulum of the world has reached its opposite climax. There was a time when young students fought communism, sacrificed theiir lives for ideals (egged on by unfullfilled promises from the west - remember Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50s?). Now the enemy is not ideological but generational. The old guard seeing the base of the pyramid's numbers eroded, realize they dont have enough meat to do the work. So the old prey on the young - even making them dance for entertainment.
But do not despair my Romanian friend, you are not alone. Millions of PhDs in America and the west are also in your shoes. Spending the best years of our lives in the service of our masters, publishing papers and writing grants, we were hoping for a 'career' of even a job. But now we see the world turned inside out. The budgets of the NSF and the NIH are being sacrificed and burned on the altar of a new 'reich'.
There is a saying - 'idle hands are the devil's workshop'. Payback is a bitch.
Kudos to you for writing such a long ordeal in a humorous manner or at least that’s what I felt while reading it.
On topic, it’s probably another example of why scaling a system is so hard. Especially when it comes to tasks that require deep thinking. I can’t help but notice the government policy of sponsoring mass PhDs in the hope of raising a knowledge based society is itself changing the definition of knowledge here.
Yes, fifteen years after the fact, during which time my mind constantly bombards me with, "Why did I happen? Did I do something wrong? It was not fair! I did my best!" and such, I can't help it but write in in a humorous manner, otherwise it's hard to put it behind you and forget about it.
On the second point, yes the total number of PhD graduates for a similar time period was 12.000 (official Government numbers) so this was a doubling of PhD's just like that, out of the blue. No wonder it was chaotic. There was also enormous political pressure regarding "the Government is incompetent as it cannot absorb what is basically free EU money". So, ok, they've absorbed it, sort of.
I think you are right. Reading the online articles and official documentation from that period, which is really scarce (there is no such program available on the EU official website, for example, or I wasn't able to find it), it feels like this was a big experiment, the success of which is not mentioned in the news either.
What I could find is that it was part of the Lisbon Strategy [1], also mentioned in the official documents published by the Government. From the linked wikipedia article: "Its aim was to make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion, by 2010. It was set out by the European Council in Lisbon in March 2000. By 2010, most of its goals were not achieved. It was succeeded by the Europe 2020 strategy."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Strategy
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Strategy
Oh, that page is darkly funny itself. ‘[The Lisbon Strategy’s] aim was to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion,” by 2010.’ Yeah, that didn’t happen.
‘Spain's prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero pointed out that the non-binding character of the Lisbon Strategy contributed to the failure.’ Typical bureaucratic response: freedom is the problem.
There is definitely a role for government in fostering innovation and productivity, but it is very much a secondary role. Providing a predictable, stable, safe environment, and using government funds for things that the government actually needs to use seems to have worked for the U.S. for a long time, even before the two world wars.
For what its, worth, given your situation, and given the circumstances, you did what could be done.
As a fun question, what would you do now, to do what you did, but better?
They just continued the same way of working they had already before. I went through a similar stunt around the end of the 90s (yes also Romania) but I called it quits after half a year. Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I'm aware that either I or the group would have exploded had I stayed more. I respect your resilience.
Had I decided to call it quits, I would have probably asked myself, even to this day, questions like: did I make the right choice, what if things would have improved, what would have happened if I've tried harder, maybe there was just a misunderstanding, maybe it was my fault, maybe working at the University would have been the smart choice, etc.
I actually still have the emails asking for the project coordinator, the one responsible for scholarships for all of us (I've searched them out, out of curiosity while writing this article and their CV is 12 pages long and, naturally, this project is listed there as a success) for ways to abandon the whole thing. I didn't even get a reply. I was already 2 years in so I've would have had to return the whole sum back, money I didn't have. I was penniless, as all PhD candidate seem to be. So I did what I had and could do, which is summarized in the post.
Ah yes I wasn't paid for it, so there was no financial pressure to stay...
truth (knowledge) and force (government) are the antithesis of each other.
mix the two, and one gets annihilated.
Oh I thoroughly enjoyed this post.
We were the friends and family attending my cousin defending his thesis. He spent half his time title-ing, naming, and thanking Professors, chairs, heads, and what not. When it was all over, I asked him why did you name them all? He answered, "because they like the sound of their name."
This was very painful to read. Thanks for sharing. It hits a nerve to hear someone say, "I start to develop a faint feeling that I sleep better at night when I play along and nod approvingly to things I don't actually agree with instead of being pigheaded."
Look what they've made us do.
It seems to me that instilling conformity and obedience to authority are the true purpose higher education.
(Also, tolerance and acceptance when faced with many arbitrary roadblocks.)
> conformity and obedience to authority are the true purpose higher education
In times of surplus/peace, perhaps.
In times of competition/conflict, results are needed.
...of institutionalized schooling in general, from kindergarten to higher ed.
While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic.
“Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired.
Albert Einstein: 'Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.'
Which country was that?
Romania?
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/ suggests it’s a made-up story based on an earlier explicitly fictional story.
A friend who completed their PhD went from
to to Which I think is a fairly normal rollercoaster ride.I never got my PhD, my first day as a lowly research assistant in a university in central london (which shall remain nameless) I was given a professorial suite to camp in, and I remained there for 3 months, imposing furniture and a giant oak table and all. Another staffer used to sleep on the floor and park his bicycle there. Eventually I was evicted and sent to the top floor, an ex-statistics research unit teaching room, like army Barracks, where I and a fellow research assistant opened a cupboard to find the 10 Brunsviga calculators left over from a mechanical actuarial risk calculation exercise the department did for money up until the advent of electronic computers. Their entire previous 5 years work was completed in under 1 days run of the machine code on the new University of London computer in the early 60s. Oh, the Joys.
My experience from the academia is that there just isn't enough research topics. It wasn't as bad as in this article but I can't imagine how bad it would be if somebody dumped hundreds of millions of EUR into it to mass produce PhDs.
Which country is this? I read the whole thing but can't find any context as to which country and university is involved
Romania, if the author's current location is also where this ordeal took place.
I just looked that up to be sure; the article itself has a very strong eastern Europe vibe to it. I was figuring it would be Bulgaria, Slovakia, or Romania initially.
Likely Romania based on the author's name & location.
On one hand, there is probably much value locked up in things we don't understand whose research is unlikely to be funded.
On the other hand, humans are pretty terrible at organizing and planning projects without pressures like profit.
My goodness, what a colossal waste of time. My condolences OP!
I had a slightly better experience on my PhD in Central-Eastern Europe. My supervisor - a politician with little academic results mostly cared about the formal part of my results.
I used the PhD to get into a new field (statistics) just in time for me to get into Data Science as it started being cool. My papers weren't interesting, but I got to try things out on real data and report on them.
That prof sounds like a real asshole
Most of the ones I encountered generally treated students who actually tried reasonably well
Ex-iron curtain, amirite?
Funny, I was just thinking how much this reminded me of Stanisław Lem's "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub". Must have been one hell of a vibe in Iron Curtain bureaucracies.
Romania, judging from the blog URL. But this type of PhD experience feels like the norm in most of eastern-european/ex-soviet countries. In mine, getting a PhD was one of the ways to get out of compulsory military service. Both profs and students knew that, of course. So real research is very scarce. Other small details, like worshipping titles and putting out a spread for the PhD commission also feel familiar.
Ironically, the only one of my university friends who I'd regard as "actual PhD material" ended up _not_ finishing their PhD in 3yrs time (I surmise because they picked a topic they _actually_ thought worthy) and went to serve in the army.
Yes, Warsaw pact country.
> "You know C++?" I ask enthusiastically, as I am looking to become a software engineer myself at this point. "I don't," she informs me, "but there's enough time until Monday to learn it."
Suddenly, everything about my professor's bizarre lack of development skills in my computer science course makes sense.
My dad got a job laying out circuit boards for Control Data in the 1980s on a Friday, knowing nothing about it. Spent the weekend in the library and started Monday morning.
Fake it until you make it
People that belong in the job can do that. Others, not so much.
People that belong in the job, even the creator of C++ himself, take decades to mature to the point of daring to use the language properly and then teach it. C++ is not meant to be learned in a week.
Someone showed me this comic, over a decade ago now. Everytime someone suggests something like this I usually like to share it with them.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
idk, if you have a decent grasp of the fundamentals you can get up to speed these days in pretty much whatever language/sub discipline with a couple days of hard study with LLMs
i made the transition from embedded C to low level tensor wrangling in about a week, it takes some work but it's definitely doable, of course i'm not an expert but it's enough time to go pretty deep, i went from "yeah i've run ollama" to optimizing inference code to get research papers to run on consumer hardware
if the task is to get up to speed on C++ enough to teach undergrads and you're a reasonably competent academic programmer who gives at least half a shit about the task at hand a weekend is plenty
C++ is famously hard. I know C++ for at least 15 years, made a reasonably successful side project in is, worked professionally for 2 years, and I still don't think I should teach it to others. I could probably do a decent job, but if they ask me about SFINAE or modern (after C++11 with bits of 14 maybe) features or "is this snippet UB" I would have to concede. Learning C++ in a week good enough to teach it is a cruel joke and laughing students straight in their face.
If you have very good C knowledge, maybe a weekend is enough to have decent C++. Maybe not to teach it, but decent.
However, assuming no C knowledge, there's no way in hell you'll be a good teacher of C++ in a weekend, even with LLMs.
I'm sorry, but your reply suggests an incredible disdain for both technical expertise and for educators. There is value in depth&breadth of knowledge, and it takes great skill to craft a good curriculum.
From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.
Interesting, I feel the opposite, I agree that an excellent teacher who knows the material back to front is invaluable.
My general model for how "being good at programming works" is that it's just mostly a stacking buff based on how much you've touched, I'm choosing to give the person in the anecdote the benefit of the doubt and believe in both their technical expertise and skill as an educator. Most technical things are kind of like other technical things, and if you've been around for a while everything is kind of like something you've done before, it makes it very easy to pick up new tools/domains. I fully believe that someone can open up a VAST gulf of knowledge of C++ between themselves and intro to C++ folks in a weekend if they're already a seasoned practitioner.
Nope, some superficially similar technical things are founded on very different concepts from other technical things. For example, grokking a functional language requires a whole different mental model than for an imperative language.
Also, remember that you could pick up a new language and start to dabble in it after a few days, but teaching it, ah, that requires much more than using it . Usually teaching something requires a much deeper understanding than just using it.
As an educator I disagree. In my field of expertise I am so far in advance of my students’ skills that I can be three standard deviations in skill better than the average student in my class in any cognate field in two days and further ahead than that in a week or a month. That’s what “technical expertise” is.
I won’t speak to crafting a good curriculum, God knows I’ve seen plenty of bad ones but it’s just not hard for me to be vastly better at any topic in English or History than any student I’m likely to see in a high school in two days because I’m that much better than them at what I do. I presume the same yawning gulf in capability exists between the average freshly minted PhD and undergraduates, or professors teaching graduate courses and PhD students.
Expertise exists, which is why I can be teaching a course that’s supposed to take 300 hours of instruction to cover in 15 hours, reasonably comfortably.
Wtf is this take. You are the worst candidate for a teacher if you have no experience with the language and have rushed to teach it.
The article talks about a literal "learn c++ in 48hs".
Give me a break. You'd be absolutely mediocre and those of us who know our shit do notice. Source: I've been that student that worked and studied the topic he worked with and found some of the TAs absolutely wanting.
The broad lesson here:
If you want to do a PhD, DO NOT limit yourself to your home country. Many countries simply are not capable of properly training researchers. The US can. China mostly can by now, I expect. Northern Europe can, to some degree, in some fields. Elsewhere, you are at risk of wasting important years of your life.
Trump might end US dominance, but the general point that academia is international and entire countries can simply not have a functioning pipeline for new researchers.
Easier said than done - having to live in a country in a different language, without family/friend support, having to deal with no money.
> Northern Europe can, to some degree, in some fields.
Europe can etc. FTFY.
And since with such decision one frequently sort of selects where they will reside afterwards (ie by finding partner and settling down), its also about choosing a society one wants to grow older and potentially raise kids in.
We all have our preferences but me personally I would never choose US for such, even when disregarding current admin excesses (which in some form are not going away, its the new norm and don't hold your breath for next election cycle).
The OP is from Romania, and from my own experience too, I think you are mistaken. I would think very carefully before starting a PhD in many European countries. I'd also ask searching questions of the faculty, ("how many people do you graduate a year?" and "what % of your graduates go on to an academic job?")
This applies to the UK and Germany, for example, not just Eastern Europe. There are certainly spots of excellence, but even among high quality UK universities, very often PhD training is on the "apprenticeship" model where you're just thrown into research without graduate-level courses. You can judge the result by looking at the proportion of US-trained staff in EU departments.
I would not recommend US from now on if you are not from US.
Just focus on school and not protesting.
Still might be not enough to be safe.
The writing style is really good. Having gone through a non-terrible PhD that still shared elements of this, it captures the essence so well, even with some technical detail. Even the admin assistant shenanigans brings back memories to similar events in my days long ago in some other institution. So enjoyable.
I was getting a Terry Pratchett-like-modern-day-Discworld vibe while reading the post (and Office Space film/Douglas Adams-Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference when reading about the office location).
I wonder what the ratio of good:bad professors is.
Someone should write a list of "Power Gradients Considered Harmful", eg Crew/Cockpit Resource Management
What we have is an ignorance-based society. The more blind-spots you have, the higher you rise.
The higher your rise, the easier it is to maintain your blind-spots because nobody will dare question your worldview. Even those few who do, they're a nobody, so what could they possibly know about anything? Surely, it's only the people on top who have a bird's eye view of the big data, who know what's going on... Everyone else is like an ant following breadcrumbs laid out in front of them. What is there to learn about the real world that you cannot see from above?
I was bracing for the bit where Professor pokes his head into the tiny office and says "Hey Mihai, what's happening. We're gonna have to move some more of these boxes in here, so if you could just push your desk back there, against that back wall to make some room, that would be terrific. Thanks."
This was a depressing read. Now I desperately need some examples of Phd candidates who had a great time and managed to do well from a scientific point of view. To restore my faith in humanity.
My brother defended a thesis that actually made sense and had the means to do it though he did not write his story. (Caveat: I did not understand his subject. Caveat 2: Professor was his (and thus my) uncle.)
I had a pretty good time! My supervisor was supportive, but fairly hands-off. I learned a lot, published pretty well, and mostly enjoyed it!
I don't have much of an interest in the topic but this writing was top notch.
What you describe is the traditional power game within universities to which narcissism, absence of empathy and sadism are added.
this reads like a chapter out a Kafka novel.
In what country did these facts happen?
Eastern Europe it looks like, but this story is remarkably similar to my experience as a graduate student / technical staff at public research institutions in both the United States and Japan.
I noticed several bizarre things in the story that were familiar.
Maybe Academic Batpoop Insanity disease is spread at international conferences.
Please share, if you feel inclined to.
I don't wanna name and blame the country, and I didn't do it in the article as I don't think it matters that much, but the other replies are correct in their assumption, is all I can say.
Good instincts. It's not relevant and anyone who has seen state or academia up close in different countries knows that, no matter if people from some countries may want to pretend it's "these other countries".
I think it might be relevant to know so to avoid it for people that might want to study outside their home country in Europe
This happens everywhere. In some shape or form. That's the point.
The name on the byline is Romanian, which sounds about right given what my Romanian friends have told me about their country.
Taking into account the 500€/month scholarship ("about the average salary", euros), Eastern EU. Add in the Romanian sounding author's name, it's probably Romania.
Yet another example of how academics serve no purpose in real life. Yes, there have been ground breaking innovations and discoveries from academic folks but that's likely 10% of the good ones. Rest is just pure misery, like the one OP describes
You definition fits a lot of fields.
> Yet another example of how <startups/stock brokers/etc> serve no purpose in real life. Yes, there have been ground breaking innovations and discoveries from <startups/stock brokers/etc> folks but that's likely 10% of the good ones. Rest is just pure misery, like the one OP describes
I have the same take about the atmosphere. 80% of it is stuff I can't breathe... I'm thinking of removing it
Those who can, do…
Those who can’t make shitty, sneering jokes in a desperate attempt to be vaguely interesting/clever via repeating middle school memes?
True, but I also found my professors to be ridiculously incompetent and unprofessional (and perhaps unethical considering that at least one wanted me to work for free) compared to the people I’ve worked with.
How much of this account is realistic? If this is the writing of an educated young person. Imagine how despondent must the average young person be? And are we to presume this is the material that will help Ukraine?
It seems the pendulum of the world has reached its opposite climax. There was a time when young students fought communism, sacrificed theiir lives for ideals (egged on by unfullfilled promises from the west - remember Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50s?). Now the enemy is not ideological but generational. The old guard seeing the base of the pyramid's numbers eroded, realize they dont have enough meat to do the work. So the old prey on the young - even making them dance for entertainment.
But do not despair my Romanian friend, you are not alone. Millions of PhDs in America and the west are also in your shoes. Spending the best years of our lives in the service of our masters, publishing papers and writing grants, we were hoping for a 'career' of even a job. But now we see the world turned inside out. The budgets of the NSF and the NIH are being sacrificed and burned on the altar of a new 'reich'.
There is a saying - 'idle hands are the devil's workshop'. Payback is a bitch.
> How much of this account is realistic?
Not Romanian, but Polish - that account is eerily similar to the vast majority of technical PhD stories amongst my friends.