From "I've spent the last six months working on a deep learning system to improve virtual screening for drug discovery"
To "I’m currently working on a new startup in the blockchain space with a couple co-founders."
I don't get why invest time in PhD if your work afterwards seems totally unrelated to your expertise. Is this how most of the PhD stories end, working at a completely-unrelated-to-your-expertise job for a good pay?
But he came back to drug discovery:
"Bharath is currently the founder and CEO of Deep Forest Sciences, which is building an AI-powered suite for drug and materials design and discovery."
There are mechanics who did not do any theoretical work at all that later in life really need some university. My point is that some people really should go back to university because their work gets better after.
Doing a PhD later in life is a cool thing to do too.
Depending on how the supervision chain is arranged, a PhD can a journey of discovery, of new science but first and foremost of yourself and your interests. It can be very self-directed and the only mandate is to discover something new. For this reason it is common for people to dip their toes in a few distinct but related subfields during those years until they find something that sticks (if at all), and the person that comes out of a PhD can be very different from the person who started it.
He was one of my strongest interns and I learned a lot from him. We selected him to join the team because he was highly recommended by Vijay Pande (creator of Folding@Home), whose work I've followed for several decades (Vijay left academia for VC and I think he's currently starting a new fund (https://www.wsj.com/articles/healthcare-investors-vijay-pand...) in tech/healthcare.
My anecdotal experience was that courses are sort of idiotic at the PhD level. The course work is incredibly distracting from your research and projects. It's really hard to get into a flow state with your work when you have to do a bunch of homework. My productivity during the semesters I did course work was an order of magnitude lower.
The lectures are interesting and sort of useful.. but they're not a good use of time. At the PhD level you should be comfortable enough to just pick up some textbooks, read them on your own time, do some problem sets and learn on your own. B/c that's essentially what the professors are doing to prepare the course material in the first place..
Your advisor should just assign you some reading or something. It should be enough
Seminar style courses where you intensively interact with a professor are maybe an exception.. Maybe..
I think for me the problem was "unknown unknowns". If I knew I needed to know something, I could pick up a textbook and learn it, but that doesn't help if you don't even know something exists.
Grad courses are all over the place. Some are just a series of chill lectures and discussions. Some are incredibly difficult all consuming and with lots of grueling excruciating problem sets after class... And nothing in between :)
Yes, that would have been nice :(
All the collab is impressive also- Google, Pfizer, Merck, and some startups.
I’m a fan of PhDs open-sourcing and providing open datasets also. DeepChem, MoleculeNet, etc. I heavily referenced open PhD work in one of my last jobs that I wouldn’t have been able to do myself. I’d bet many solutions provided by LLMs are based on published PhD work also.
It would’ve been nice to get a PhD. It takes more focus and discipline though than I think I’ll ever have.
Most advisors literally do not care what you do during your PhD as long as you're publishing papers. I too spent almost all of my time doing co-ops and internships at various companies/start-ups.
In the US? Interesting.
Doctorate only, MsC is a prerequisite
flobosg•4mo ago