Maxwell Forbes, a software engineer and former PhD student, writes about academic career strategy, paper writing, and some programming projects.
HN commenters recommend his PhD Metagame series and paper-acceptance advice, calling it counterintuitive and useful on the social game of science careers.
The author has many other posts with solid advice, like "Don't Make Things Actually Work" https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-make-things-actually-work/
It seems to go 180 degrees against what a smart starry-eyed junior grad student would believe. Surely, it's all about actually making things work, right? We are in the hard sciences, we don't just craft narratives about our ideas, we make cold hard useful things that are objectively and measurably better and can be used by others, building on top of it, standing on our shoulders, and what could be more satisfying than seeing the fruits of our research being applied and used.
However, for an academic career you want to cultivate the profile of a guru, a thought leader, a visionary, a grand ideas person. Fiddling with the details to put a working system together is lowly and kinda dirty work, like fixing clogged toilets or something. Not like the glorious intellectual work of thinking up great noble thoughts about the big picture.
If you want to pivot to industry, it could help you to build a track record of having created working systems, sure. But I've often seen grad students get stuck on developing bepoke internal systems that are not even really visible to potential future employers. Like improving the internal compute cluster tooling, automating the generations of figures in Latex, building a course management system to keep track of assignment submissions and exam grading and so on. Especially when you're at a phase…
I think the professional sciences has, for a long time, been a social game of building ones career but it does feel like it's metastasized into something that's swallowed academia.
From the first article in the series [0]:
> Insiders ... understand that a research paper serves ... in increasing importance ... Currency, An advertisement, Brand marketing ... in contrast to what outsiders .. believe, which is ... to share a novel discovery with the world in a detailed report.
I can believe it's absolutely true. And yikes.
Other than the brutal contempt, TFA looks like pretty good advice.
[0] https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/your-paper-is-an-ad/
Agreed! I wrote a blog post about this a couple years back.[1] A few things I think are going on:
- layout and hyphenation algorithms on the web are worse (or often disabled!)
- the lines are often too long
- the site's margins aren't as strong as with print design
These factors combine to produce the mess you're describing.
I've spent so much time reading justified text in print that I do like it in general. But I think until places like NYT or Medium adopt it on their websites, it's probably not up to snuff on the web.
(edit: formatting)
[1] https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/web-justified-text/
I recommend reading this article which explains how you can get your papers accepted, and explains that a catchy title is the #1 most important thing: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/how-to-get-a-paper-accepted/ (not a plug, I just saved it because it was interesting)
The author elsewhere cautions “I write this because PhDs seem to attract a lot of smart, idealistic kids who are interested in doing Science 1 and don’t realize that they’ve signed up to do Science 2.”
https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/dont-try-to-reform-science/
With the author's emphasis on Science 2, I found quite provocative an earlier post of his: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/your-paper-is-an-ad/
Submitted it for discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43403596