Before actually reporting from the life of a PhD student, I feel like it’d be nice to talk about why I chose to continue “studying”. After all, having studied for more than 13 semesters, it might be about time to follow the advice of some of my relatives and start working “properly” to finally make some money.
Since this blog is meant to be personal, I’d like first mention what currently drives me. Basically, I am obsessed with utopian futures since my early childhood where movies, TV series and video games have shown me beautiful worlds, incredible gadgets, and just so much potential for a cool life in general. Since I unfortunately can’t just choose to visit these universes, I have to make the best of this world full of misery and abundance, ignorance and wisdom, untapped and wasted potential.
Consequently, while I strive to advance our technology in general, I am also aware of the many problems we need to solve now in order to actually stay alive so that we can experience our imagined future: Climate change, social inequality, spreading diseases, political hostility and education.
People with a masters degree in CS (like the one I obtained a few weeks ago) are quite sought after currently, but many of the offered positions or job descriptions do not interest me as I would work towards creating products, services etc. that I can not identify with. Rather, I am much more interested in actively transforming the industry landscape – making it more sustainable and reducing social inequality – rather than becoming a part of the “machinery”. I am aware that if I stay true to my values I’d be able to achieve meaningful changes inside such companies as well, but adhering to the same values I feel like I can afford postponing a relatively secure and well-paid job in order to start the PhD (which, often times in the machine learning domain, is also quite well paid for an academic position).
Naturally, one would ask why I’m even bothering to enroll in a PhD position when I know already that I’d like to become active in an entrepreneurial sense. The first part of the answer is quite banal: There was no opportunity to proceed differently (e.g. through becoming an entrepreneur), or at least I did not see and seize them. The second part goes as follows: with the PhD, I am learning to become an expert in a certain research area and to define and solve a relevant and previously unsolved problem using solid scientific methods. A PhD degree indicates your ability to do just that – nothing else! To me, the foundations for new technologies are laid out by doing the exact same thing: It’s not so much about the specific field I’m going to be in (which happens to be Machine Learning X Computer Vision), but about finding and formalizing the right problems and creating technology that rigorously solves them. So, basically I’m hoping that the skills I learn during my PhD will help me to find ways to deliver the impact I’d like to have in the future.
There is still a lot to be thought about on how to best proceed after and even during the PhD. At least for now, I think that my journey in academia will end after the PhD. But then again, who am I to play oracle when I did not even work a full month?