/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10058648
>I have a ton of first author papers

Just copy paste your papers into your thesis and streamline the nomenclature what's the problem?

>>10058648
>Yet here I am on /sci/.
Because you know that once you hand in that thesis it won't be long until you have to defend. And once you've defended you'll stop getting your stipend. That means you'll need a new job. But you know you won't find employment after graduation or you'll find a shitty job where your work will never be as interesting as it was in the peak of your PhD. So instead you come here, to your comfort zone, to post and pretend the outside reality doesn't exist.

Just like the rest of us.

>>10058662
yea I did that. All I have to do is write the fluff that goes in between.

>>10058665
PhD has been a blast but actually I'm really looking forward to getting out of academia.

>>10058672
>out of academia.
There is no "out of academia".

There is no work in that direction. We have searched and found only poverty and starvation.

>>10058678
ehm.. ok well I guess I'll have to let my future employer know that.

>>10058680
You and I both know you don't have a job yet.

Just stay here in academia with us where it's safe and cosy Anon. We can ride out our grants for another few years.

>>10058686
your sweet siren song is luring me back... I must resist!

>>10058689
Think about it Anon. Is the money worth them bleeding you dry out there? You can go out and have a cheeky drink any time of the day. You can just go take a holiday right now and no one will notice. Postgrad is the best time of your life. Must it end so soon?

>>10058692
> You can just go take a holiday right now and no one will notice

isn't that just the best though? This summer I just didn't come in for three weeks straight and nobody noticed!

Anyways... back to writing this damned thesis. Your company is appreciated

>>10058694
Good luck Anon. I'm still on my last paper then it's thesis writing for me too.

Life is good.

>>10058696
godspeed sir

>>10058648
What's in the gif, anon?

>>10058732
quantum dynamics

>>10058648
Anyone else done with their undergrad and/or PhD, did you have a point at which you lost motivation and how did you get over it?

>>10058739
It's pretty. What is it specifically?

>>10058765
I numerically solved the time dependent Schrödinger equation to simulate a quantum wave packet propagating in a potential well. Other than that it doesn't represent anything physical, I just needed to verify that my code was working as intended.

>>10058739
>>10058765
not OP, but my best guess is that's what it looks like for a particle to start out localized (at a point) and rotate in orbit around some spherically symmetric inward attraction

>>10058774
you got it.

>>10058775
yay

>>10058765
Not him, but Wigner quasiprobability distribution, I think.

>>10058781
not quite, but that's a pretty good guess

>>10058665
bastard

You guys make academia sound so cozy.

>>10058665
delet this right now you nigger

>>10058648
dude who carez become an rapper

>>10059652
it's super cozy. I don't understand people that say it's a stressful experience.

>>10059886
Isn’t it extremely competitive and you have to constantly beg for grants?

>>10058686
>grad students are just enlightened NEETs

>>10058665
Damn. Some things should remain unsaid, anon.

>>10058694
>isn't that just the best though? This summer I just didn't come in for three weeks straight and nobody noticed!
I did the same, all the girls in the lab noticed and kept sending me text messages like "when do u come back"

>>10059652
It's extremely cozy for people who actually should be there (smart people; there's no other way to say this). You need to have both a good aptitude for academia (be able to read papers and advanced textbooks quickly, easily, have immaculate writing etc) and have your own creative ideas easily.

If you have that you will find that things like research proposals, papers etc. are routine admin tasks for you in between doing interesting work or coding. Your adviser does not reward "butt in chair time", but actual productivity measured by papers, coding submissions, data generation etc. Having one bright idea that leads to a publication will get you more kudos than a year's worth of diligent labwork following your PIs ideas.

There are a lot of tryhards in postgrad who find all this tremendously difficult. They dread coming up with original proposals, they take months to read a few papers. They will come to postgrad and spend 3 weeks faithfully cleaning labware etc. if they receive no further instructions from their PI.

If you're smart your typical day goes like this:
>Arrive at lab whenever you feel like it, go to the gym first if you want, have some good quality coffee
>Do some math or study some paper relevant to your work
>Have coffee/brunch in faculty lounge (they don't invite all postgrads, but once you get invited it is understood that you get to come and go as you please)
>Some TA duties if you have them (don't sign up unless your adviser makes you)
>Do some actual coding or writing
>Lunch with your lab mates (have a beer)
>Implement that brilliant idea you got while having a drink with the lads
>Go home whenever you feel like it


I myself am in my final semester of postgrad and I told my adviser I will be writing my last paper and thesis in my mountain cabin in another part of the country. He thought it was a brilliant idea.

>>10060827
By the way if you're an undergrad reading this and wondering if this is you, you probably are.

If you're one of those students who procrastinates studying, but still manages to pass upper level courses or you get really good grades, but studying doesn't consume your entire life and you still go out or read other fields etc. then postgrad will be a breeze for you.

>>10058771
it sounds so useless, i love it

>>10058648

very normal thing; you are probably so deep into the work that you think *anyone* could have done it; even a nigger

nothing could be less motivating than that

>>10058771
Open source license?

Please post code repo if possible.

>>10060850
what do you want some guy's ideosyncratic matlab code for his personal doodling for ? What do you think you would ever do with it? (are you indian btw? asking for an experiment)

>>10058747
Yep, during the PhD when the main work finished and now again when I am done with it. No real way to solve it I guess, just looking for work at a city where I have some family. After that who knows

>>10060859
Because I was going to write a TD wave integrator as well because I want to use it to visualise something I suspect regarding a time independent approximation I'm using to fit radial basis potential wells.

This could save me some time from finding an appropriate library since his simulator is clearly converging nicely and I can probably just modify his I/B conditions.

I'm white.

>>10059652

It is, but don't be too fooled by people saying it's a sea of roses.
Most people forget the hardships once they are through with them, but they have at least a few moments of stress.

Varies extremely between areas, varies extremely between countries, universities, depends on your the amount of funding you receive, if your work is theoretical or experimental, if you can do everything on your own or depend on other researchers/groups, if your experiments are very high risk/stakes or not, if you need to compete for time with others to use some cluster/equipment.

I'm not sure I agree that an academic life being stressful is a sign of stupidity. Different projects yield different amounts of pressure.

My PhD was a suffered experience in part because of health problems I faced at the time and having to deal with other groups and need of materials and that kind of shit. For my postdoc I just need to write code so it feels like a breeze.

In general I would say "Do what makes you happy", but if you really want to do science more than anything (as scientists should), I'm not sure happiness has to play a part. I'd seriously doubt scientists were historically happy fellows.

>>10060827
This is what I'm worried about, I'm pretty bad at working without a structure in place (for motivation) and I don't think I'm very creative and lack common sense.

I'm pretty intelligent in that I pass exams pretty easy without much studying (because I procrastinate) like >>10060831 said, and I do enjoy learning about Physics and science and doing maths, but I worry that I can't learn creativity or discipline and I have no idea what to do if I don't go into academia.

>>10060889

Do you have a topic that interests you? Maybe a supervisor in mind?

>>10058665
Not me! I'm an uneducated wage slave!

>>10060891
Not really, I'd like to do something more theoretical I think. I'm doing a masters (integrated) already and I haven't really bothered to look into much career stuff or internships.

>>10060887
>varies extremely between countries
Are physics, math or engineering depts in western europe generally more or less stressful than the US?

>>10060889
Creativity is not what people think it is in the usual sense. People often wrongly thing about it as developed skill in the arts, but very few people are actively creative in the sense of truly having their own unique ideas. You will not have had creative ideas in science or math until you reach the research frontier.

You might have had ideas that turned out to be common knowledge (for example, a lot of students figure out Euler integrations themselves after they're exposed to the high school differentiation definition, or work on their own idea of what eventually just turns out to be dynamics), this is a good sign.

Either way you can't really know how good of a researcher you'll be until you get to gradschool.

>>10060889
Also btw procrastination is not a good thing. Study your fundamentals well and drill it into your long term memory before you start with more advanced material.

>>10060887
>I'm not sure I agree that an academic life being stressful is a sign of stupidity.

I know there are things out of your control, but I think I would only really agree with you if your adviser was an extreme hardass.

I was supposed to work on a simulation that would supplement a postdoc's work and fit models on data she hadn't generated yet. She ended up using our linked equipment grant to buy herself a surface pro laptop and after drawing salary for a year she moved to another university without producing a single shred of data. We had money left, but just short of buying the equipment we needed.

Because I didn't want to sit around twiddling my thumbs I was already reading a lot of papers and eventually, since I had no data, drifted into more fundamental and theoretical fields related to our original problem.

I ended up writing a paper that has been described as "break through" by many professors in the field. I was really happy with all this because the original work was really boring and now my thesis is going to be a lot more interesting. Despite us not having any real funding for it. The only stress has been financial (we lost our grant thanks that incident so I lost my stipend due to poor planning on my adviser's part) but my adviser helped me out and I got everything else I needed doing freelancing. Most people I believe won't have the kind of experience of their stipend (different from other grants) being upruptly cut.

In any case I didn't even mind being beggar tier poor. I pilfered good from conference, swallowed my pride and let girls pay for my food/drinks etc. (I have since repaid everyone important) and moved to cheaper accomodation to live with a female friend.

>>10061112
pilfered food from conferences*

>>10060886
just look at the article "Time-Dependent Quantum-Mechanical Methods for Molecular Dynamics" by Ronnie Kosloff.

I'm using the split operator method. If you have a good fft algorithm it's quite fast in low dimensional space

anybody with half a brain can get it running with about 3 lines of code

>>10058665
Wrong. 4chan is just more fun than the real world.

>>10059915
that's if you're a postdoc. Which is why everyone should just do a PhD and then GTFO. PhD is the sweet spot; no exams, no grant begging, just pure goodness

>>10061260
>do a PhD and then GTFO
To go where?

>>10061237
>fft
A good pseudo-spectral method library is rare, I've found many that have been ineffective at simulating hyperbolic PDEs, maybe the linearity will make it more successful.

>>10061112
>moving in with a female friend

stop larping faggot