Advice

Whatever your life plan is, being able to use English smoothly will offer you many practical benefits, such as studying abroad, travelling around the world, making friends from another country, etc. But more importantly, it opens up an intellectual gateway which, if you choose to take it, will profoundly change how you see the world. Learning English is one of the best ways that you can invest in yourself. How I learned English When I moved to Canada, my English was so bad that I had trouble to order food in restaurants. But I was already there and I planned to go to graduate school in half a year. So I had no choice but to get over English. ...

Some students asked me why I decided to leave IT industry and become an academic. I think the real question is whether I think it is a good idea to try to become a professor. And the answer is a firm no. I must emphasize that I am not advocating for abolishing PhD programs. It is important for a society to push for advancement in science and humanity. What I meant is that for the vast majority of people, a career in academic is not a good choice. ...

Photo by ThisIsEngineering from Pexels The joke A friend sent me an article titled Is Science a Pyramid Scheme? posted on viXra, an e-print archive. The abstract is as follows – A grievance expressed by some PhD students and Postdocs is that science works like a pyramid scheme: Young scientists are encouraged to invest into building scientific careers although the chances at remaining in science are extremely slim. … The super-prolific authors at the top of the pyramid … are usually heads of large institutes with many subgroups and large numbers of PhD students, while the bottom of the pyramid is populated by PhD students and Postdocs … A new index, the Ponzi factor, is proposed to quantify this phenomenon. ...