A Survival Guide to a PhD
Well, I went from academia (after finishing my PhD) to industry, to get more Freedom, Ownership, Personal growth, Status and Expertise.<p>Here is a blog post on my transition from theoretical physics to data science (and how it made my life much better): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;p.migdal.pl&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;14&#x2F;sci-to-data-sci.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;p.migdal.pl&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;14&#x2F;sci-to-data-sci.html</a><p>I understand that Andriej Karpathy (my favourite author&#x2F;lecturer in Deep Learning, by a large margin) had a wonderful PhD, in a fast-growing field, with a golden fall-back option. But most PhD students I know (including my former self) do things in disciplines no-one else cares about and are tied to their institute&#x2F;advisor&#x2F;place with little to no opportunity to change things when they go awry (cf. it&#x27;s super easy to change a company). A non-trivial fraction of my friends suffered from depression or had a serious mental breakdown (again, including myself).<p>In this light, while it contain a large number of helpful tips and valuable pieces of advise, why is it called &quot;survival guide&quot;?