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What do you wish you had known before starting your PhD?

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Growing 60 pts 0 followers
Father Muller Medical College · Posted
Genomics & Bioinformatics Photonics & Optics Operations & Supply Chain

I recently had a difficult conversation with my PhD guide that I think many students can relate to.

The short version: my guide and I fundamentally disagreed about the direction of my thesis after 2.5 years of work. He wanted to pivot to a new application area that I thought was tangential to the core problem I was solving. I felt like I was being steered by his grant interests rather than the scientific question.

How I handled it:

  • Requested a formal committee meeting (not just a one-on-one with the guide)
  • Prepared a written document outlining both directions with pros and cons
  • Asked the committee to weigh in, which gave me cover to advocate for my position
  • Eventually reached a compromise where I did a smaller study in the new direction while keeping my core thesis intact

The relationship with my guide improved after this, partly because I approached it formally and professionally rather than emotionally.

Has anyone else navigated significant disagreements with their guide? What worked?

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6 Replies

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Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.

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Amit Joshi Starting 15 pts · Accepted answer

Flower (flwr) is the most actively maintained and research-friendly federated learning framework right now. My group has been using it for 18 months on a healthcare project with 4 hospital sites.

Strengths:

  • Clean simulation API that lets you test on a single machine before deploying
  • Good support for custom aggregation strategies (FedProx, FedNova)
  • Active Discord community with quick responses from the maintainers

For non-IID data specifically, look at the FedProx strategy.it handles heterogeneous data distributions much better than FedAvg.

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Replying to Amit Joshi
Fatima Sheikh Growing 95 pts · Accepted answer

+1 to everything said above. My experience was identical.

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Replying to Amit Joshi
Hema Suresh Starting 20 pts · Accepted answer

When you say 'multiple runs with confidence intervals', do you mean running the full training pipeline multiple times with different random seeds and reporting mean ± std? Or something more statistically rigorous?

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Replying to Amit Joshi
Royal Dsouza Starting 30 pts · Accepted answer

Overleaf + GitHub integration is underrated. You get version control and collaboration in one place.

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Dinesh Kulkarni Distinguished 730 pts · Accepted answer

Strongly agree with the point about choosing venues carefully. One paper in NeurIPS > five papers in obscure workshops.