About reading a blog, about becoming an expert

About reading a blog, about becoming an expert

Source: "China Computer Society Newsletter" 6th issue "column"

Origination

A few years ago, with a few senior colleagues in academia, we all said that the percentage of outstanding undergraduates and master students who chose to pursue doctoral studies declined. I also have several students who are reading Bo to master or drop out. This is two cases where the former is directly not trying, the latter is trying to give up after.

Why does this happen? After thinking deeply, I think the reason why the proportion of outstanding students reading Bo is two points. The 1th can be explained from an economic point of view. Generally speaking, people are striving for better economic conditions and social status. Before the scarcity of domestic resources, excellent students, even if they do not work, only by taking overseas doctoral scholarship is more than direct work to earn more money, not to mention the doctor after graduating from overseas to obtain job opportunities to get the high salary. Now China's middle class is gradually formed, the IT industry has a lot of job opportunities, excellent undergraduates are also easy to find a high-paying job, has no need to study for the livelihood. The second reason is that students now accept the concept of "cool" in their undergraduate course, make a website, write a mobile game app, be seen as a cool thing, a sense of accomplishment, at the same time, the business environment is good, the investment has been more. Newspapers and social media are all talking about entrepreneurship, and gradually people feel that these are the coolest things. When we were in college, we thought the coolest thing was the heroes in my heart (a mathematician anecdote), and the prospect of the Turing Award winner. The 1th embodiment is the internal law of Economic Society. It is because everyone is driven by the immediate or long-term interests to achieve their respective values in society, we have a colorful and diverse society. 2nd, I wrote the original intention, I think the university should be purely a point to help students see a little farther. This "far", need to look ahead, know the ins and outs of computer science, this "far", but also to look back, to develop students to identify the beauty of the eye, in choosing what to do in the future when there is a higher standard.

The significance of the

reading Bo, or the significance of doing several research projects, is a very large and broad topic, can be elaborated from different aspects, this article is about the doctor's expert attributes. To put it simply, reading a blog is a process of being trained to be an expert. Experts have two sides. One side is the expert attribute of the doctoral study itself. A successful PhD student will be a world-class expert in a small field when he graduates. It may sound a bit difficult, but since your field of study tends to be at a point where you have to make a breakthrough at this point, you are the expert at this point. If you are lucky and smart enough to be diligent, able to do a very useful job, or give an important theoretical result, then this doctor's work will affect the world, and many people will use your results later on, and this joy does not have to be spoken. The most recent spark platform for the industry is the evolution of Mateh Zahariya (Matei Zaharia) from the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley) at the time of the study.
farther away, Google's two founders, page and Brin, also published PageRank's paper during their graduate studies, implementing prototypes from web crawlers to algorithms, followed by an engineered Google search engine. Of course, the doctoral work of most doctoral students can not be written into textbooks, and can not become industry standards. But it has been a great achievement for them to exercise themselves in a few years as a world-class expert in a small field. To become an expert in the field, compared with other routes, reading Bo is Straight path. If you graduate as a software engineer or into another industry, the probability of becoming a domain expert is very low, while a PhD, if the failure rate is 50%, still has a 50% chance of becoming a domain expert. This is a very high probability. It's not surprising that to work for the company, the main purpose of the company is not to let you become an expert, but to let you create value for the company, and many projects do not have any technical difficulties, for individuals can achieve the same effect. and the main purpose of a good mentor is to allow you to become a world expert in a small field through five or six years of training, and to publish peer-approved papers in international conferences/periodicals; Your doctoral dissertation is complete before the end of the world, no one can foresee the final content, your PhD mentor is not available; your job is unique. , can not be replaced at all. The uniqueness of your work, the influence, and even the admiration of the person you admire is a higher level of human desire.

Of course not all PhD graduates will embark on the path of academic research, and academics are only a subset of the many problems that humans need to delve into. For those PhD students who are not ready to be professors, what is the use of them to develop themselves into a small expert? So now I'm going to talk about the other side of the expert, the attachment to being an expert. This subordination, simply put, is that you get a set of ways to become an expert, and you will soon become an expert in another field. This can be an academic field, or it can be a field. A lot of the work that the professor later became famous for was not very much in the direction of his PhD, but his research training during his studies was certainly helpful for him to become an expert in another field. More PhD graduates have been employed in non-academic careers. I give some examples of successful career change, they are first in the field of statistics, computer science experts, followed by their current work experts. Professor Journal of Berkeley is a very remarkable statistician in the Chinese, and she has repeatedly (slightly annoyed) mentioned a student who has a high academic achievement but not a professor. In less than 8 years, the student, a quantitative researcher on Wall Street, has managed an entire quantitative group of the hedge fund. There are countless such young talent in the IT community, such as Facebook's Lars Backstrom, who did a good job of social networking research during the Cornell University, and has been taking over the entire new News Feed department over the years. Primsmatic (a Flipboard-like social blogging referral platform) was founded by four talented people with a PhD in Berkeley, one of which was Aria Hakiki (Aria Haghighi). He had a good academic achievement during his PhD (two of the best papers in the Natural Language Processing conference), and he and his partner successfully created Primsmatic, who now works for Apple (on his homepage: I ' m currently a senior manager at Apple working on none of the Your business.). It took only 5-10 years for these people to graduate from PhD to great success (this is the time to get another doctorate), and their success in their careers is highly correlated with their research work during their doctoral studies. They may be smarter than ordinary people, but as long as you work as hard as they do, create some good luck yourself (yes, good luck is created by yourself), even if they only 1% of their achievements, do not have to buy these life chores worry.

Having the skills to be an expert not only brings you a prosperous life and success in your career, but also gives you the skills to gain knowledge and research that will enable you to understand a lot of other wonderful things in the world more profoundly. The famous Chinese statistician, Zhongkaile, loved the language, taught himself Russian, Italian, and so on, and later translated his maths book in English into Russian. Leslie Lamport, a 2014 Turing Award winner, Leslie Lambert to recite Eliot's poems, saying to students in the technical writing class: "They [Halmos and Kunth] can not match Fowles and Eliot:we Sho Uld read great literature in order to learn how to write good mathematical literature. " (It can also be seen from this passage how high the standard of Lambert's scholarship is). It is more difficult for adults to appreciate them if they are not trained in literature. Once experienced the doctor's training, has the study and the research ability, then sees these to have the trace to follow, also can gradually discover the pleasure. When you climb a high peak in the mountains, you often enjoy the beautiful scenery near the peaks.

Becoming an expert and being the person you admire must be through great effort. Only on the top of the mountain will there be more choices; Academic research can allow you to climb a mountain peak within a few years. I quote Elliot's "four quartet" in a paragraph, even if it is said more than once, say it again no harm, encouraged to read Bo and are reading Bo's friends. It may be particularly appropriate to cite Eliot here, where he was a PhD in philosophy, a teacher from Russell and Baibide, and later turned into an expert in the field of poetry, winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Here's the poem:

Get to where you are now, leave the place where you are not,

You have to go through a path that has no attractions.

In order to finally understand what you don't understand,

You must go through a path of ignorance.

In order to possess what you have never possessed,

You must go through the path of deprivation.

(to arrive where is,

To get from where is not,

You must go by a-wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at the what does not know

You must go by a-a-which is the ignorance.

In order to possess the what does not possess

You must go by the dispossession.)

Origination

PhD, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. is now a hedge fund quantitative researcher. The main research direction during Ph. D is migration learning and behavioral recognition. [Email protected]

Reference documents

Perlis et al ACM Turing award lectures. ACM, 2007.

Uppin (Ukim). Heroes in my heart. Network Serial, 2005.

Zaharia et al resilient distributed datasets:a fault-tolerant abstraction for In-memory Cluster Computing. NSDI 2012.

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web Search Engine. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems 30:107~117.

About reading a blog, about becoming an expert