Question: how did you get your phds

Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 15 Nov 2017:

If with your question you meant “how did you find a PhD”, I personally used academic mailing lists. Those lists are used to broadcasts things like an upcoming conference, or a new software and are used to advertise job openings too. There are multiple mailing lists for each topic, if you are interested in robotics you can check robotics-worldwide and euron-dist (the European version), for AI I won’t be able to say much other than imageworld (for computer vision and image processing). UK nationals are lucky, because universities must advertise new positions on a website called jobs.ac.uk that is a place to check too. Otherwise findaphd.com is the last resort. If you get into academia be prepared to travel because the best supervisors tend to clutter all in few universities. Before applying for a PhD, carefully check who will be your supervisor: check what his students did after graduation and whether he was signing the papers he supervised as a first author (the first author gets most of the credit, the last author is generally considered to be a supervisor). A PhD done with the wrong supervisor might not be of much help to you.

If you meant “how was the process to get a PhD”, I am a non-standard case. In this country a full-time PhD is 3 years long, or 6 years part-time (this is my case). I started with a contract on a EU project and then moved to industry to finish, which normally does not happen. Getting a PhD is not an easy job, it requires a lot of work, a lot of thinking and generates an enormous amount of frustration when things don’t work or you research is not appreciated or understood. You became a doctor “surviving” the process: not being over ambitious, not claiming things that you haven’t proven, explaining your work to very different people etc. and you learn this the hard way: trials and errors (and guidance from your supervisor). My advise is, if you want a PhD you are doing it for yourself primarily for example you are interested in exploring never-tried-before things or ask deep questions like “can a machine think?” and trying to find an explanation for it. If you are rather the person that wants “a lot of cash quickly” I won’t advise you to do a PhD as you can achieve the same thing by just being a committed employee, but – at present – only a PhD can give you the confidence and knowledge to put into doubt the statements of influential people or criticize the whole point of having an equation for something (which is what Einstein did: he proven wrong Newton’s principles) and getting away with it successfully.