Sergio

The dangerous thing is that you can, in many science fields, get a PhD with minimal collaboration. Just pass the quals and focus on your disseration project, there you go. But you’ll be at a tremendous disadvantage during a faculty search, when you’re up against all those people who did internships early in their career, kept those research connections, led research projects in the local lab, joined student groups at conferences and helped organize a student workshop, reviewed for conferences, helped out on projects with people you met at conferences, contributed to funding proposals, etc.

The one “secret” I wish I’d known a lot earlier is that you don’t have to do it alone. In fact, the more you collaborate the more successful you’ll be: more research ideas, more publications, more committee memberships in workshops/conferences, more participating on teams being put together to apply for research funding, more people to reach out to when you’re looking for a job, etc. The most successful scientists I’ve known had huge networks of collaborators.

I dunno… getting a PhD just teaches you how to do research. If you want to get a faculty position, there’s a whole other set of skills on top of that; in the US for CS at larger universities it’s mostly about getting funding and becoming “respected” in your field. But you have to tell people that you want to learn those additional skills. That’s the part that’s hard to know about beforehand.

Best case scenario:

• The initial submission didn’t cite the crappy Gabor paper, and peer reviewers said that it should.
• The peer editor, summarizing feedback, said that the submission was accepted as long as it took into account the peer reviewer suggested revisions.
• The submitters don’t really care about the paper quality, all they need is the citation. So they assigned the revisions to the lowliest grad student.
• The lowliest grad student knows their advisor hates that crapmaster Gabor, so when they sent it to their advisor they asked whether they should cite that paper, thinking they might prefer to passive-aggressively “forget” to do so
• The advisor doesn’t care about the paper quality (see above) so they just skimmed it and saw the word “Gabor”. (alternate hypothesis: they thought this was a great opportunity to troll that crap-merchant Gabor, as well as those useless middlemen thieves at Wiley.)
• The peer editor: same as the advisor, they’re just doing this for a line-item on their CV.
• The Wiley “editor” doesn’t even read the paper, they just forward it to the typesetter subcontractors and demand that the submitters pay up.
• The typesetter subcontractors don’t care, it’s all just text to them.
• And so it becomes Science, and the writer of crappy papers Gabor is enshrined in the pantheon along with Ea-Nasir and William “I’m something of a scientist myself” Dafoe. Immortality, of a sorts.

Yeah, there’s electricity in the brain, for example.