Name: The Ph.D. Grind: Candid Discussions About Ph.D. Life
Uploaded: 2016-07-10T08:17:05.000Z
Duration: 56 min
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Present continuous

>>Presenter: So Philip joined Google last month and is working with Peter Norvig building

To-infinitive

tools to improve the teaching of programming and computer science. He's received degrees

Future simple

from MIT and a PhD from Stanford just recently. So I'll turn it over to Philip.

>>Philip Guo: Great, thanks Jaclyn. Everyone can hear me from the back right? There's no

>>Philip: Guo: Okay, anyway. I'm gonna just basically in this hour my goal is to be just

maximally useful to like everyone in this room. If it ends up with me talking for most

of the hour that's great, if you're all talking and asking questions that's also great because,

yeah, whatever I can do to be most useful to you today that's basically my goal for

the hour. So, the only notes I really have is this [inaudible] sheet and I'm just gonna

read off the Meta stuff and then I'm just gonna start going. So, basically the format

is I just have this one thing of HTML here and these are the 20, you know, lessons I

summarize in my PhD book and this is gonna be completely non linear so whatever people

are, you know, whatever the conversation diverges towards, you know, just for the sake of the

recording, the fact there, I'll just highlight that. So, this could be any one of these 2

to 20 combos, we can just talk about them. So, whatever direction stuff is going in,

again, this is very exciting cause I have no idea what's gonna happen. So, just to start

with, like I said, this is not a typical tech talk. There was a little surprise there it

was on the tech talk calendar or something cause I actually gave a tech talk here last,

uh, last year about my research and it was a very standard scheme like, "Here's my research,

here's the slides" and then I get a talk and, you know, you say that people can interrupt

with questions but people usually don't interrupt with questions and you give a talk for a half

an hour, 45 minutes and then some people ask you questions later and you respond to some

you can't answer. So I'm sure all of you, mostly intern students, have heard quite a

few people speak in this [inaudible] and it's like I'm gonna show off what I did and then

maybe ask some questions and then they're like did you consider doing this and we're

>>Philip Guo: So, this will not be like this. This is, I'm highly interruptible so like,

there should be mics going around or something but like, seriously, totally interrupt me

anytime. Is there an interruption right now? [Pause]

>>Philip Guo: There should be other mics everywhere else. Anyways, so, um, I'm here as a peer

and not as any kind of authority figure or anything. So I was in this audience, exactly,

last summer. I was an intern here. It was the final, almost the final year of my PhD

and I was an intern here at Mountain View and Jaclyn and others organized a bunch of

these great talks from Google leaders, right? So, there were vice presidents, research directors,

everyone talking, you know, to interns about how great Google is and about leadership and

about career building and everything and I thought it was some really interesting talks

but I always felt that I would like to hear more from people who are in my same position.

So, I, I, you know, when I first got here, one of the things I really wanted to do was,

since it was in the summer and there was a bunch of interns there and I had just been

in the audience one year earlier and I wanted to give a certain kind of talk like that.

So, um, so, this is kind of the talk that I would have maybe wanted to hear when I was

an intern here. So I'm gonna have to do a cheesy quick show of hands, this is the only

interactive thing I promise, so how many people here are full time? Oh, we've got quite a

few people full time, okay, cool. And how many are interns?

[Laughs] >>Philip Guo: Good. Okay, awesome. And out

of the interns, how many are currently undergrads or masters students, undergrads and master's

students? Very good. And how many are doing their PhD right now? Oh, wow, we've got quite

a lot. Okay, perfect. And these will get slightly more embarrassing, so who has just finished

>>Philip Guo: Okay, you see where this is leading. First year of PhD, sorry, first year

of PhD finished? Okay, good, then second year? Just finished two years? Okay and then just

finished 3? Okay, faces are looking more and more [inaudible]

[Laughter] >>Philip Guo: Just finished 4? Um, just finished

5? Okay, I'm not gonna ask about the rest. [Laughter]

>>Philip Guo: Okay, cool, so I just wanted to calibrate because everyone probably gets

different stuff out of it depending on what level you're at. Oh, actually, out of the

people here who are not currently doing PhD, how many of you might consider doing one in

the future? Oh wow, that's quite a lot. Okay, great, awesome. Cool, so I'm just gonna give

a bit of background about my PhD project and we'll just take it from there. So, just a

little background on myself, I did my PhD in computer science, it took about 6 years

to finish and I did not know I was, you know, I did not have the green light to graduate

until about 3 months before I graduated. I mean, I was working all the way to the end

and once I got the green light everything was good. I just scheduled to defend and then

write dissertation and everything checked out. But up until January 2012 I did not know

that I was gonna graduate and my date was still uncertain and I'm very lucky that everything

worked out very well in the last 6 months. So, toward the end of my PhD right when I

was around hopefully getting the green light I thought that, you know, that my dissertation

at most 5 people would get because it's basically that I convince this committee and maybe one

or two other suckers who I sucker into reading it. The papers I wrote, maybe like 50 might

read those total, right, that's like a reasonable number. But I wanted to, you know, I wanted

to have something that would be lasting beyond my PhD for this particular research. So, I

thought about the fact that, I looked at, throughout my PhD I've done a lot of writings

on my website about the expense of going to grad school and I've been reading a lot about

it and one thing that did not exist was a comprehensive account of one person's PhD

expense. There have been, say like professors that write about, oh, like, there's like,

I'm sure you all know that there's a few professors that have written about PhD advice and stuff.

Like top ten tips to getting into grad school or advice for getting your dissertation etcetera

or whatever and there's like a small set of that. So on one end there were people in authority

who were writing, in fact, wistfully about their experience and like, "Oh you guys should

work hard" and do well and stuff like I did and then the other end there were the super

whiner trend, so there were the PhD comics types of like grad students who might have

dropped out and they're like, "Oh my life sucks and I'm gonna rant about it" so if you

look up like PhD life or whatever, on Google you these 2 polar options; you get people

who are offering stately advice, you know, professors, research leaders, you know, perhaps

some of the people you've been hearing talk here and other places, you know, why are PhDs

good and so forth. And then on the very other extreme you have people who are

[Pause] >>Philip Guo: Is this working? Okay, good,

was the other one going in and out? Yeah, okay, sorry about that. So on the other end

you have, maybe it's my moving with the mic is that it? Okay, I'll try to hold it super

still; actually let me just put it on the podium here. Does this work better? Yeah,

I have to like lean in, it's weird, okay, I will try not to oscillate the mic too much.

[Laughter] >>Philip Guo: So, on the other end you have

people who are, you know, who are still going through their PhD that may be having issues

and such and I felt that neither side were able to write as sort of, you know, objectively

about their experiences. Also, there's this format thing, there's never a kind of full

account of their experience. So I decided, you know, that I wanted to be the one to write

about this. So I started accumulating notes about 6 months ago, you know, about the 6

years of my PhD and how it progressed and collecting old emails and notes that I had

taken and old papers and drafts and everything and after I finished my defense on, you know,