A PhD program will have some required classes, but should be primarily focused on research. (As in, you should be spending over half your time in the program doing only research.) Sometimes the courseload requirements are lighter for a PhD program than for a Masters.
Granted. Though I'm enjoying getting to think like a peon again. lalala! It's all power! No reponsibility!
Though in our case, before the bean counting comes grant writing (and grant writing and grant writing) - less accountability to management in the standard sense, but then there are department meetings and teaching obligations...
*sigh* I actually enjoy and am decent at both teaching and management. But I'm not sure if I even want a professorship. Even the friends who got tenure question whether it was really worth it.
Certainly when I was a hiring manager, real life experience was a big plus. Not that I avoided bright eyed young things in their 20s, but I generally found that people who had been through the product cycle a bunch of times were a lot more stable and reliable over the long term. And similarly, when I was applying to grad school, my background both in research and software were a huge bonus. At one point, over two thirds of the PIs* who taught a class or two of a course I was taking offerred me positions in their labs. (Though I'll admit, part of this is that in biomed there's a real hunger for people who are competant in both biology and programming. The real challenge was to find lab where I could do bench work some of the time instead of being chained to a computer.)
But I'm a simple woman with simple tastes. There's an awful lot of cool and interesting work to do, and so far people keep being willing to let me do it. I'm riding this as far as I can;-)
I left the computer industry and went into research in my thirties, working first in computational biochemistry, and am currently doing a PhD in Neurobiology. This isn't about the money - I'd have done better staying in software for that. But having cut my teeth in the industry when stock options actually amounted to something, I have a bit of elbow room on the financial side (and do not have a family). I wanted to do something that was interesting and meaningful, and I'm pretty darned happy with my choice there.
I'd be hesitant to seek a PhD for career betterment. Oh, sure, some career betterment is likely to come, but it's a lot of work at fairly lousy pay and I think one needs the motivation of actulaly loving the work.
Oh, and regarding letters of recommendation - having spent a while working in a research environment before I applied to grad school, my LoRs were part of how I documented my research background. In the programs I applied to - mostly on the biomed side of things - they're pretty darned important.
Making shallow, whiny generalizations about women? Really unattractive. And I'm a woman who has historically mostly dated quiet, polite geek guys. (But not sad pandas, or whiny or creepy "nice guys".)
I've been wondering how much we're seeing an increase in sexual assault in geek venues, and how much we're seeing a cultural shift where people are less willing to tolerate the assaults. (It may well be both.)
Time was, I was somewhat known in some of my social circles for putting men in joint locks who touched me inappropriately. Not that I was particularly hair trigger - I'm quite vocal, and would tell people to back off first. (Okay, the guys who would come up behind me, reach around and grab a breast? Often didn't get a verbal warning.) There used to be this joke about the one guy who was so stupid that he got put in a joint lock twice.*
Which is all very funny, but what underlies it is that this kind of bullshit was incredibly common. My reputation meant that I didn't have to deal with as much of it... eventually. But there were still the creeper guys, and if the women generally avoided them, and a lot of people didn't think well of them, they were still tolerated because, OMG, we're all geeks! How could we ostracize anyone? And anyhow the women are probably being overly sensitive or just need to stand up for themselves more.
* Not so long ago, I remarked to a male colleague that I sometimes felt like I was taking a fairly harsh approach to these things. His comment was that if someone tried this on a man, they'd be liked to get clocked, and if anything I might consider upping the response.
This had also been my experience... until it wasn't.
Now, seriously, there are some fairly major threads of misogyny running through large parts of geek culture. But they were generally at levels where I managed to be oblivious to them. (Or anyway, I was semi-used to having drunken idiots try to grope me at semi-social events - many of the social events being halfway work related. I'd put them into a joint lock, problem solved. Look, I can be pretty oblivious.) I didn't have much trouble with off color humor - especially as, in the teams I was on, it was pretty equal opportunity off color - and I generally liked my work environment. And really, most of the men I worked with were great. But I think it's really about where you are.
The first really problematic environment is still one that I think of as being political. A manager hit his Peter principle really hard and kind of went berzerk. He did an awful lot of damage before he was finally quarrantined. As it happened, I was one of two women in the organization (putting us at rather less than 2% of the population) and we were both targetted. It did not initially occur to me that this might have been in part for gender - and there certainly were other potential reasons. But it was a pretty major mess, and certainly doing things like putting derogatory language for women's anatomy into official emails and such was part of things. (And, BTW, no, I never sued for harassment. I think our HR person was terrified I was going to. And I had male coworkers encouraging me too. But not only was I just too exhausted, getting tagged as being the woman who goes crying discrimination is pretty major career poison in an industry that runs off of internal referrals as much as ours. Or so I thought at the time. I'm not sure I wouldn't make the same call now, though.)
Anyhow, eventually I fled, and not long afterwards he went down. Being in a bit of a rush, and with a few complications (like the next team I joined being re-org'd out of existance days later) I ended up in a team I would not otherwise have considered... and it was a hell hole. (Not just a misogynist hell hole, an anti- everything that isn't short haired button down shirt white male young republican hell hole. And the most technically unimpressive organization I've ever worked with.)
Worst, the guys actually tried to do well by me. Which meant that I got invited along for all of the trashing of every other woman who worked in the organization. And the trashing gays. And democrats. And people with accents. But hey! I was just one of the guys! Which proved they didn't have problems with women generally - just, y'know, all the women who weren't me!
And for the most part it wasn't about being offended. I was deeply, deeply frustrated as I realized what an incredibly toxic environment it was for so many people - including, though not foremost, the brogrammers in question, who were being given tacit managerial position not to get their heads out of their collective asses.
I sometimes wonder if it's not a bit like gaming, though - most of the gaming groups I've been involved with (primarily a paper gamer) have been one third to one half female. And yet, overall that's probably unusually high.
Which mostly means that there's a whole section of the gaming world that I've never been in contact with, and where folks haven't met many people like me, either.
I suspect 3D in movie theatres is here to stay - especially for the fun high on explosion summer flicks. And hopefully, past the initial wave of hype, people will focus on using it in interesting and intelligent ways. (I'm so tired of exaggerated perspective.)
...and really, I'm hoping it stays mainstream enough that the prices go down. In our lab we (well, mostly my roommate) has be retrofitting microscopes with the receptor arrays from high quality web cams (cheaper than buying the components) and then piping the image to a 3D monitor. Better ergonomics, good quality image - and a vast improvement when it comes to teaching or recording your work.
I'm not looking to describe anyone else's creed, just my own. (Though I will make comments about where it fits into Chan orthodoxy.)
As it happens, Chan and Zen are the same word in two different languages (there are some minor orthographic variants in how the character is written in versus Japanese, but seriously, minor - this is not disputed by anyone). Though I am a member of a Chan order, I currently live in a Zen center of a Japanese lineage. While the traditions are not identical, the core of the material, which originated in China, is shared between them. And these days there's also a lot of cross fertilization - there are Japanese Zen masters studied in Chan schools, and Korean Seon masters studied in Japan. A dear friend of mine did much of the research part of his ordination work on Chinul, a noted Koran master - but I gotta say, the differences tend to be more subtle variations in flavor than actual differences in doctrine.
(I guess it is worth noting that it at least used to be very common for books coming out of Japanese Zen lineages to say that Chan in China had in decline or dead for the last many centuries - basically dating from the end of a period where Chan was overtly supported by the state. Though the last century and a half or so in China has been rather tumultuous, Chan Buddhists in general would tend to disagree.)
I think the term you are looking for is "Hinayana" (small vehicle) which is what Mahayana Buddhists used to call other Buddhists, and is generally considered derogatory. Theravada (the teachings of the elders is the translations I've heard - but while I have a degree in Chinese L&L, and spoke some Japanese as a child, my Sanskrit is rudimentary at best) is the more acceptable term.
Personally, I'd run into Theravadan Buddhism long before I studied Chan seriously at all - I studied it in an academic context, and it really had very little appeal. Now that I've spent more time going over the Pali canon (in translation, don't have any Pali either, maybe someday) I have more sympathy there, but really? Not my cup of tea.
Among other things, I'm a woman. Bah.
In terms of what Siddhartha Gautama said, or meant... Would you like to have that conversation? I mean, I'm happy to go into it, but it does get a little involved. The really short version is that there is a distinction between what he stressed to be the core essential rules for being a good person and how to become enlightened, and the community rules that were established in a particular time, place and culture so that one set of monastic communities could run smoothly. Mahayana Buddhism (of which Chan is only one branch) generally has argued that the first set of principles are universal, but that many of the rules for the monastic communities were really particular to that time and place. If you look at how many of the monastic rules were tightly bound to the Hindi context in which they developed, this makes a lot of sense to me. As a really simple example, there was already an established cultural tradition of people who wanted to deal with spiritual issues shaving their heads, putting on robes and becoming wandering monks and supporting themselves through begging. This was a fairly respected and viable way of approaching one's spiritual practice.
That doesn't translate particularly well to modern american culture. More to the point, I find a lot of the focus on the vinaya to become legalist and counterproductive to me, personally. While I find the history and scholarship interesting (and am of a generally scholarly bend) it's only so relevant to my practice. I'm a member of a Chan order because it supports me in living a good life and being a good person. I don't think Theravadan Buddhism would do so nearly as well - which isn't to say it's bad, just that it's not a good fit for me.
So, I practice Chan Buddhism*. I consider mind to be illusion exactly as much as matter. Which is pretty orthodox Chan, as it happens, though there are certainly some folks who get more worked up about some idea of Mind. Not, you understand, that I particularly care about orthodoxy. If someone came up with a really good argument as to why I couldn't be a Buddhist unless I believed something I thought was silly, I'd shrug my shoulders and say "Hey, I guess I'm not a Buddhist after all. That's kind of a relief!" As a general heuristic, it has been my observation that believing in things is generally not that useful...
It appears to me that a lot of our ideas about how mind and matter are separate are pretty illusory. (I am also a neurobiologist, so this observation crosses a number of disciplines.) And, well, we are, as humans, are generally in the habit of having a lot of ideas about things. The ideas are of course real ideas, but one could certainly call our tendency to confuse our ideas about things with, well, actual things, an illusion. Or maybe a lot of illusions.
* Yeah, yeah, most people say Zen in the US, but I speak Chinese and belong to a historically Chinese order.
This (I mean the original allegation) would ring a lot more true if the architecture of WinNT* was more akin to that of VMS. Yes, there is some structural similarity - but not particularly a lot. (And I have to agree about NT on Alphas. Gah.)
And then, having put together a pretty decent, consistent architecture with a good security model, the rest of Microsoft largely ignored much of what NT set out to do and created the security swiss cheese we all know and love today...
* Remember, NT does not stand for New Technology.
How much of the point of this is to suggest that gay folk are scary and threatening, and that social conservatives are oppressed?
I don't think the intimidation argument is necessarily invalid in all cases - posting the names and addresses of abortion providers does constitute a threat. I'm not saying this is a parallel, and the petition process is rather different, but it's an interesting line to work through.
But. I'm from Washington State. I grew up in the queer district in Seattle. I remember an awful lot of gay bashing. Conservative bashing? Not so much. And that would be news - it's got the man bites dog thing going for it.
Slashdot Mirror
A PhD program will have some required classes, but should be primarily focused on research. (As in, you should be spending over half your time in the program doing only research.) Sometimes the courseload requirements are lighter for a PhD program than for a Masters.
Even if it were decent certification, a PhD is a research degree, and has relatively little to do with taking and passing classes.
Granted. Though I'm enjoying getting to think like a peon again. lalala! It's all power! No reponsibility!
Though in our case, before the bean counting comes grant writing (and grant writing and grant writing) - less accountability to management in the standard sense, but then there are department meetings and teaching obligations...
*sigh* I actually enjoy and am decent at both teaching and management. But I'm not sure if I even want a professorship. Even the friends who got tenure question whether it was really worth it.
But I'm a simple woman with simple tastes. There's an awful lot of cool and interesting work to do, and so far people keep being willing to let me do it. I'm riding this as far as I can ;-)
* "Principle investigator" - god-boss of a lab.
I'd be hesitant to seek a PhD for career betterment. Oh, sure, some career betterment is likely to come, but it's a lot of work at fairly lousy pay and I think one needs the motivation of actulaly loving the work.
Oh, and regarding letters of recommendation - having spent a while working in a research environment before I applied to grad school, my LoRs were part of how I documented my research background. In the programs I applied to - mostly on the biomed side of things - they're pretty darned important.
Making shallow, whiny generalizations about women? Really unattractive. And I'm a woman who has historically mostly dated quiet, polite geek guys. (But not sad pandas, or whiny or creepy "nice guys".)
I've been wondering how much we're seeing an increase in sexual assault in geek venues, and how much we're seeing a cultural shift where people are less willing to tolerate the assaults. (It may well be both.)
Time was, I was somewhat known in some of my social circles for putting men in joint locks who touched me inappropriately. Not that I was particularly hair trigger - I'm quite vocal, and would tell people to back off first. (Okay, the guys who would come up behind me, reach around and grab a breast? Often didn't get a verbal warning.) There used to be this joke about the one guy who was so stupid that he got put in a joint lock twice.*
Which is all very funny, but what underlies it is that this kind of bullshit was incredibly common. My reputation meant that I didn't have to deal with as much of it... eventually. But there were still the creeper guys, and if the women generally avoided them, and a lot of people didn't think well of them, they were still tolerated because, OMG, we're all geeks! How could we ostracize anyone? And anyhow the women are probably being overly sensitive or just need to stand up for themselves more.
* Not so long ago, I remarked to a male colleague that I sometimes felt like I was taking a fairly harsh approach to these things. His comment was that if someone tried this on a man, they'd be liked to get clocked, and if anything I might consider upping the response.
This had also been my experience... until it wasn't.
Now, seriously, there are some fairly major threads of misogyny running through large parts of geek culture. But they were generally at levels where I managed to be oblivious to them. (Or anyway, I was semi-used to having drunken idiots try to grope me at semi-social events - many of the social events being halfway work related. I'd put them into a joint lock, problem solved. Look, I can be pretty oblivious.) I didn't have much trouble with off color humor - especially as, in the teams I was on, it was pretty equal opportunity off color - and I generally liked my work environment. And really, most of the men I worked with were great. But I think it's really about where you are.
The first really problematic environment is still one that I think of as being political. A manager hit his Peter principle really hard and kind of went berzerk. He did an awful lot of damage before he was finally quarrantined. As it happened, I was one of two women in the organization (putting us at rather less than 2% of the population) and we were both targetted. It did not initially occur to me that this might have been in part for gender - and there certainly were other potential reasons. But it was a pretty major mess, and certainly doing things like putting derogatory language for women's anatomy into official emails and such was part of things. (And, BTW, no, I never sued for harassment. I think our HR person was terrified I was going to. And I had male coworkers encouraging me too. But not only was I just too exhausted, getting tagged as being the woman who goes crying discrimination is pretty major career poison in an industry that runs off of internal referrals as much as ours. Or so I thought at the time. I'm not sure I wouldn't make the same call now, though.)
Anyhow, eventually I fled, and not long afterwards he went down. Being in a bit of a rush, and with a few complications (like the next team I joined being re-org'd out of existance days later) I ended up in a team I would not otherwise have considered... and it was a hell hole. (Not just a misogynist hell hole, an anti- everything that isn't short haired button down shirt white male young republican hell hole. And the most technically unimpressive organization I've ever worked with.)
Worst, the guys actually tried to do well by me. Which meant that I got invited along for all of the trashing of every other woman who worked in the organization. And the trashing gays. And democrats. And people with accents. But hey! I was just one of the guys! Which proved they didn't have problems with women generally - just, y'know, all the women who weren't me!
And for the most part it wasn't about being offended. I was deeply, deeply frustrated as I realized what an incredibly toxic environment it was for so many people - including, though not foremost, the brogrammers in question, who were being given tacit managerial position not to get their heads out of their collective asses.
I sometimes wonder if it's not a bit like gaming, though - most of the gaming groups I've been involved with (primarily a paper gamer) have been one third to one half female. And yet, overall that's probably unusually high.
Which mostly means that there's a whole section of the gaming world that I've never been in contact with, and where folks haven't met many people like me, either.
I'm not looking to describe anyone else's creed, just my own. (Though I will make comments about where it fits into Chan orthodoxy.) As it happens, Chan and Zen are the same word in two different languages (there are some minor orthographic variants in how the character is written in versus Japanese, but seriously, minor - this is not disputed by anyone). Though I am a member of a Chan order, I currently live in a Zen center of a Japanese lineage. While the traditions are not identical, the core of the material, which originated in China, is shared between them. And these days there's also a lot of cross fertilization - there are Japanese Zen masters studied in Chan schools, and Korean Seon masters studied in Japan. A dear friend of mine did much of the research part of his ordination work on Chinul, a noted Koran master - but I gotta say, the differences tend to be more subtle variations in flavor than actual differences in doctrine. (I guess it is worth noting that it at least used to be very common for books coming out of Japanese Zen lineages to say that Chan in China had in decline or dead for the last many centuries - basically dating from the end of a period where Chan was overtly supported by the state. Though the last century and a half or so in China has been rather tumultuous, Chan Buddhists in general would tend to disagree.) I think the term you are looking for is "Hinayana" (small vehicle) which is what Mahayana Buddhists used to call other Buddhists, and is generally considered derogatory. Theravada (the teachings of the elders is the translations I've heard - but while I have a degree in Chinese L&L, and spoke some Japanese as a child, my Sanskrit is rudimentary at best) is the more acceptable term. Personally, I'd run into Theravadan Buddhism long before I studied Chan seriously at all - I studied it in an academic context, and it really had very little appeal. Now that I've spent more time going over the Pali canon (in translation, don't have any Pali either, maybe someday) I have more sympathy there, but really? Not my cup of tea. Among other things, I'm a woman. Bah. In terms of what Siddhartha Gautama said, or meant... Would you like to have that conversation? I mean, I'm happy to go into it, but it does get a little involved. The really short version is that there is a distinction between what he stressed to be the core essential rules for being a good person and how to become enlightened, and the community rules that were established in a particular time, place and culture so that one set of monastic communities could run smoothly. Mahayana Buddhism (of which Chan is only one branch) generally has argued that the first set of principles are universal, but that many of the rules for the monastic communities were really particular to that time and place. If you look at how many of the monastic rules were tightly bound to the Hindi context in which they developed, this makes a lot of sense to me. As a really simple example, there was already an established cultural tradition of people who wanted to deal with spiritual issues shaving their heads, putting on robes and becoming wandering monks and supporting themselves through begging. This was a fairly respected and viable way of approaching one's spiritual practice. That doesn't translate particularly well to modern american culture. More to the point, I find a lot of the focus on the vinaya to become legalist and counterproductive to me, personally. While I find the history and scholarship interesting (and am of a generally scholarly bend) it's only so relevant to my practice. I'm a member of a Chan order because it supports me in living a good life and being a good person. I don't think Theravadan Buddhism would do so nearly as well - which isn't to say it's bad, just that it's not a good fit for me.
Huh.
So, I practice Chan Buddhism*. I consider mind to be illusion exactly as much as matter. Which is pretty orthodox Chan, as it happens, though there are certainly some folks who get more worked up about some idea of Mind. Not, you understand, that I particularly care about orthodoxy. If someone came up with a really good argument as to why I couldn't be a Buddhist unless I believed something I thought was silly, I'd shrug my shoulders and say "Hey, I guess I'm not a Buddhist after all. That's kind of a relief!" As a general heuristic, it has been my observation that believing in things is generally not that useful...
It appears to me that a lot of our ideas about how mind and matter are separate are pretty illusory. (I am also a neurobiologist, so this observation crosses a number of disciplines.) And, well, we are, as humans, are generally in the habit of having a lot of ideas about things. The ideas are of course real ideas, but one could certainly call our tendency to confuse our ideas about things with, well, actual things, an illusion. Or maybe a lot of illusions.
* Yeah, yeah, most people say Zen in the US, but I speak Chinese and belong to a historically Chinese order.
This (I mean the original allegation) would ring a lot more true if the architecture of WinNT* was more akin to that of VMS. Yes, there is some structural similarity - but not particularly a lot. (And I have to agree about NT on Alphas. Gah.) And then, having put together a pretty decent, consistent architecture with a good security model, the rest of Microsoft largely ignored much of what NT set out to do and created the security swiss cheese we all know and love today... * Remember, NT does not stand for New Technology.
How much of the point of this is to suggest that gay folk are scary and threatening, and that social conservatives are oppressed? I don't think the intimidation argument is necessarily invalid in all cases - posting the names and addresses of abortion providers does constitute a threat. I'm not saying this is a parallel, and the petition process is rather different, but it's an interesting line to work through. But. I'm from Washington State. I grew up in the queer district in Seattle. I remember an awful lot of gay bashing. Conservative bashing? Not so much. And that would be news - it's got the man bites dog thing going for it.