5+5 Commandments of a Ph.D.

[Co-authored and co-posted with my colleagues-in-blogging, John Regehr and Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Comments go to Suresh's blog.]

There have been a lot of Ph.D.-bashing articles lately. There have been some spirited defenses of a Ph.D. too. Most of these articles make good observations, but they're often about the larger Ph.D. ecosystem and therefore fail to provide actionable advice to (potential) Ph.D. students.

We observe that most failures of the Ph.D. system -- including both failure to get the degree and failure to see a good return on time and money invested in obtaining the degree -- boil down to a small set of root causes. These causes are on both sides of the implicit contract between advisor and advisee. Here's our pragmatic view of the conditions that need to be met for a Ph.D. to make sense. (Please keep in mind that we're all computer science professors, though we've made an effort to avoid field-specificity.)