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Grad school by numbers

gleech.org · 1,752 words · saved by 1 readers

People are unwilling to tell you - partly because the variance really is large (e.g. a history PhD will involve a full order of magnitude more solitary reading than a CS phd; e.g. some people lose an effective year of work and inner life to environmental depression; e.g. Americans tend to take 7 whole years where a Euro is often half that). And partly because it’s so hard to nail down the size of the intangibles (your counterfactual intellectual development, new virtues and vices, mental health, credibility, increased and decreased job opportunities, a permanent sense of possibility or incapacity). With the usual caveats that I am not you and 2024 is not 2019 and my field and department are not your field and department: It’s supposed to take >10000 hours. You can do it in 3k. Three MCMC estimates of the amount of time I spent: This is pretty rough, inferred from my mood tracker and, later (from 2022 on), actually counted on my hours tracker at Arb. This is just hours above baseline,

What does a phd cost you? People are unwilling to tell you partly because the variance really is large (e.g. a history phd will involve a full order of magnitude more solitary reading than a CS phd; e.g. some people lose an effective year of work and inner life to environmental depression; e.g. Americans tend to take 7 whole years where a Euro is often half that). and partly because it’s so hard to nail down the size of the intangibles (your counterfactual intellectual development, new virtues and vices, mental health, credibility, increased and decreased job opportunities, a permanent sense o

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