Hello Andrew > If VT PhD students don't have the experience needed in the topics they study, > then shouldn't VT change either the students or the topics ? As I said, this is not about specific instances, people, or VT in particular.
It is more of an observation that while in 1988, you could go through RFC1031-1035 and have a rather complete overview of DNS (picked as an example here). That changed since then, not only for DNS; Mail, TCP,... they all grew. A lot. At the same time--sticking with DNS here--countless ways of 'holding it wrong' emerged in practice, far beyond RFC1537 and RFC1912. And to do proper measurements (in terms of 'not unethical' and imho also in terms of 'actually reliable') you MUST know all of this. When I look at the people with whom I graduated my master, who went on to work on DNS implementations: They spent _at least_ as much (likely more) time on DNS alone as I did on my whole PhD. And a PhD comes with a lot of other things added to it (teaching, funding, different topics); It is more like a mixed bag of beans. And still they will _always_ know more about DNS than me. Which brings us to the academic-philosophical point: Technically, I would expect a PhD to be exactly about that: Having the time to _really_ dig into something, getting to the bottom of it, and making meaningful contributions to the state of knowledge; if it takes five years, a decade, or more. But then again, as said earlier in this thread, I tend to be a bit (too) idealistic. Nevertheless, from your message, I believe that we actually agree on this. Closing the loop: Academia has grown into an output focused, measured, and managed ecosystem in many places*. People have 4 (EU) to 6 (US-ish) Years for a PhD, with an expectations of 3-5 papers in well regarded venues. There is simply not the time for engaging sufficiently deeply with many technologies, and--throwing another punch here--I think many CS BSc/MSC programs also do not necessarily provide the right foundation for that. Teaching is another chore many faculty run through, while all things fall of different corners of the plate at the same time (and far too often faculty members' mental health as well; Burnout in academia is a thing). And to circle back to on-topic: The result of that is what then pops up in /var/log/maillog. So it isn't about 'should VT change [something]'; It is more 'shouldn't society change the incentive structure and general setup around academia as a whole'? I have quite some opinions there, boiling down to the answers 'yes' (and suspect most here will agree with that). But that is not really in my power; So I try to do what I can instead (channeling results of the system into a more manageable frame, while trying to teach those students I directly work with at the institution I am at). In any case, I believe that harsh words when something (predictably and repeatedly) goes wrong with that system in place will not bring us closer to a solution. With best regards, Tobias *I am not really planning to make a full argument on why I believe that this approach is really detrimental to the acquisition of knowledge and education of students; It is beyond the scope of this ML, and I assume I'd be preaching to the choir. If you are more interested in this, I can recommend a (somewhat recent) measurement study of mine into/tangential to the topic; The discussion actually touches on some of these points, and provides good pointers to further work on it: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09462 _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
