Reimagining the PhD

Institutions can also help enable more independent research. I’m lucky to have found an organization, Protocol Labs, that funds research in all sorts of unusual ways. Having tried this both ways, I can say that having a steady salary (and health insurance!) allows me to do much better work than when I was worried about my next source of funding. Li

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Life is short. Do whatever you can’t stop thinking about. Documenting your findings in public (regardless of outcomes!) is a worthy contribution to society, full stop. If you’re doing something new, and you care about understanding the problem, people will pay attention. What’s more, they’ll take your ideas and make them better than you’d ever imag

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You don’t need a PhD to study something you care about. You don’t need to publish papers in academic journals to become widely respected. You just need a curious mind, a bankroll, and a commitment to learning in public. Producing work that makes other people think, and perhaps change their behavior, is the validation, and it’s enormously satisfying

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Nadia Eghbal: It’s not just the discovery of knowledge (i.e., learning new things) that’s easier now, but also the validation (where your peers, rather than an accredited institution, decide whether your insights are worth discussing) and distribution of knowledge. Sharing new ideas previously required working with centralized gatekeepers, like a u... See more

The idea of taking your time to find the right idea was central to my experience. As a graduate student, I was sent all around Europe to present papers at various conferences. The meetings themselves weren’t the point. It was the conversations that mattered—one good idea, sparked on a rooftop in Bologna or beside Lake Geneva in Lausanne, was worth

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