The Ph.D. Grind Quotes

“Be proactive in talking with professors to find research topics that are mutually interesting, and no matter what, don’t just hole up in isolation.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“That’s how research marches forward bit by bit: Each successive generation builds upon the ideas of the previous one.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“In the end, like most Ph.D. dissertations, mine expanded the boundaries of human knowledge by a teeny microscopic amount.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“In sum, the purpose of academic research is to produce validated ideas, not polished products.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“I had to make a convincing case for how IncPy was different enough from similar projects. Within a few days, I had sketched out an initial project plan, which included arguments for why IncPy was unique, innovative, and research-worthy.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Online submission forms are black holes. Anything
is better than blindly submitting online.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“The professor might need to go through several rounds of student failures and dropouts before one set of students eventually succeeds. Sometimes that might take two years, sometimes five years, or sometimes even ten years to achieve. Many projects last longer than individual Ph.D. student “lifetimes.” But as long as the original vision is realized and published, then the project is considered a success.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Fellowships are important not for the money, but rather for the freedom from grant-related constraints.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“In the end, it took three attempts by four Ph.D. students over the course of five years before Dawson’s initial Klee-UC idea turned into a published paper. Of those four students, only one “survived”—I quit the Klee project, and two others quit the Ph.D. program altogether. From an individual student’s perspective, the odds of success were low.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Properly calibrating your pitch to the academic sub-community you’re targeting is crucial for getting a paper accepted”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“The lesson here is that it’s very hard to publish on a
topic if your advisor isn’t also obsessively thinking about it, since you’re directly competing against
other students whose advisors are obsessively
thinking about it.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“correlate project activity with bugs”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“If an automated bug-finding tool finds, say, 1,000 possible bugs, which ones are likely to be important?”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Here is how HCI projects are typically done:
1. Observe people to find out what their real problems are.
2. Design innovative tools to help alleviate those problems.
3. Experimentally evaluate the tools to see if they actually help people”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“The importance of the third point—thinking in terms of experiments—when proposing research project ideas.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Real research is never done in a vacuum.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Although I was interested in developing new ways to measure software quality, I acknowledged that it was only a fuzzy dream with no grounding in formal research methodologies that the academic community would deem acceptable.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Having full intellectual freedom was actually a curse, since I was not yet prepared to handle it.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Without proper guidance or context, I ended up wasting a lot of time and not extracting any meaningful insights from my readings”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“It usually takes at least four weeks to write up a respectable paper submission, especially when there are six students involved in the project who need to coordinate their efforts.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“It’s impossible for Klee to “surgically extract” the code of each device driver and analyze its 1,000 lines in isolation.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Learning to send succinct and effective professional emails has benefited my career tremendously”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“In the midst of all of this manual labor, I tried to come up with some semi-automated ways to make my daily grind less painful.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“If it’s already been done before, then it wouldn’t be research!”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Like all tenured professors, his role was not to be “fighting in the trenches” alongside his students.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Too bad Klee couldn’t automatically find bugs in its own code!”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“Any piece of prototype software developed for research purposes will have lots of unforeseen bugs”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir

“He was an ardent pragmatist who cared more about achieving compelling results than demonstrating theoretical “interestingness” for the sake of appearing scholarly.”
― Philip J. Guo, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir