By the end of grad school, I wished I had started grad school fully formed as a superstar. Show up as an expert programmer with a fellowship, list my favorite papers from the last five SIGGRAPH conferences, make a case for the most promising new areas of research. Ask for nothing more than a famous name to put on my papers. Faculty dream of students like that.
Instead I was a math major with a programming hobby who had pivoted to computer science just two and a half years prior. On the foundation of my intensive math studies since eighth grade I had built a CS degree, worked in a research lab, and styled myself as a future graphics PhD. My undergraduate research advisor told me I could study graphics at Utah. Wide-eyed, I applied, and I got in with a teaching assistantship: tuition paid and a stipend to boot! I felt validated, and I moved to Salt Lake City to get trained as a graphics researcher.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Grad school is not school; it should be called grad job. Like many jobs, grad job writes off training as a loss. Grad job is about what you can offer your advisors, not the other way around. And if you don’t have an advisor when you start, it’s a little like grad unemployment. Getting accepted to a PhD program without knowing anybody on the faculty—or really knowing OF anybody on the faculty—is like getting hired for a job that nobody wants you to do.
Nobody told me that Dr. REDACTED’s web site listing ongoing
research projects
was ten years out of date. Nobody told me that
Prof. REDACTED was in the process of jumping ship to industry. I
expected a training program and found myself in a free market. I sent
email to professors that read, essentially:
Glad I got accepted, excited to start, your work seems cool, what should I do first?
And often the response was, essentially:
Who are you, and what do you want from me?
This, after letters of acceptance to this very school had been flying down my chimney by the hundreds! This, after hearing from an authority figure that I was, indeed always had been, a wizard. I hoped they’d at least tell me what they expected me to do next. I was there to learn!
Well, I was not at Hogwarts, and the real expectation was that I would wash out. Around half of each PhD cohort usually does. If—IF—someone were to train me, even my acceptance to the department wasn’t proof enough that it would be worth the time and money.
The money from my TA position paid my bills, but I couldn’t just start working on my PhD. I needed to be a formal research assistant paid from a research grant. I got as far as establishing relationships with professors who might want to advise me before I learned that some of them couldn’t pay me and hence couldn’t actually advise me. There was a hiring freeze at grad job.
I could have worked for the other professors, doing research I wasn’t passionate about. I chose instead to remain a TA and do the research I was interested in, with the advice of a professor I was particularly aligned with. In the meantime I applied for fellowships and hoped new grants might arrive. I did a fancy internship overseas, and when I came back I pored over my meshing algorithm until I discovered how to make it work. There was still no money for grad job, and I began to think about all those other jobs I could actually get paid for.
Why didn’t I know how this works? Why don’t we all just call it grad job? Calling it school implies a level of commitment to students’ formation that you see in the best public high schools and fictional boarding schools for wizards. Even undergraduate programs, which place more responsibility on students, still often take responsibility for the opportunities and guidance they provide.
In contrast, grad job recruits students more like employees, as a means to its other objectives. The students’ formation is almost entirely up to the students themselves; grad job offers a laissez-faire environment for opportunities and guidance to arise, or not. This might not be a bad thing at all, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a school.
One professor noted frankly at my orientation that PhD training is a vestige of the medieval apprentice system. And in advice to aspiring students, I read several authors’ warnings not to approach a PhD program the same way I approached college. These are small voices compared to the larger culture. They should have arrived sooner, louder, and more clearly saying:
IT’S A JOB, NOT SCHOOL.
In the end, it was a good job for me, and I’m happy I did it. I
learned a lot, formed some good relationships, and I got that TA
stipend! I switched to the Master’s program, and even after defending my
thesis I still worked hard to get my research published at a cool,
peer-reviewed conference. On a late night before a deadline my advisor
came back to the lab to check on me, and after going over everything I
was doing, he told me this is a taste of grad school.
I didn’t know what to say, but I wanted to say my guy, I already
know what it tastes like.