I have some questions about step 1 (find a flexible program):
My understanding is that there are two sources of inflexibility for PhD programs: A. Requirements for your funding source (e.g. TA-ing) and B. Vague requirements of the program (e.g. publish X papers). I'm excluding Quals, since you just have to pass a test and then you're done.
Elsewhere in the comments, someone wrote:
"Grad school is free. At most good PhD programs in the US, if you get in then they will offer you funding which covers tuition and pays you a stipend on the order of $25K per year. In return, you may have to do some work as a TA or in a professor's lab."
So, there are two types of jobs you can have to fund your PhD (TA-ing and being a RA/Research Assistant to a professor). How time-consuming is TA-ing generally? I imagine it varies based on the school/class. How do you find a TA-ing gig that isn't time consuming? Can you generally TA during your entire PhD? I think I vaguely recall a university that only would let you TA for so many semesters.
You could also fund your PhD by getting a fellowship. Philip Guo has written about applying for the NSF, NDSEG, Hertz fellowships. I'm poorly calibrated about how hard it is to get one of these fellowships. I've also heard that certain schools will offer fellowships to some of their students. How hard are these to get relative to the fellowships mentioned above? There are ~33K science PhDs awarded each year. I wonder what distinguishes the ~4% who get fellowships from the median science PhD student.
Let's say that you were really frugal and/or financially independent already. My impression is that many schools would still require you to TA in order to have your tuition waved.
Let’s assume you have the financial aspect of your PhD taken care of (e.g. You have an easy/enjoyable TA job). What other requirements are there other than passing Quals? Could I read interesting books indefinitely until I find something interesting to publish?
I'd like to believe that achieving step 1 is possible, but as eli_sennesh pointed out, this is hard.
How hard your quals are depends on how well you know your field. I went to a top 5 physics program, and everyone passed their qualifying exams, roughly half of whom opted to take the qual their first year of grad school. Obviously, we weren't randomly selected though.
Fellowships are a crapshoot that depend on a lot of factors outside your control, but getting funding is generally pretty easy in the sciences. When you work as an "RA" you are basically just doing your thesis research. TAing can be time consuming, but literally no one cares if...
Among my friends interested in rationality, effective altruism, and existential risk reduction, I often hear: "If you want to have a real positive impact on the world, grad school is a waste of time. It's better to use deliberate practice to learn whatever you need instead of working within the confines of an institution."
While I'd agree that grad school will not make you do good for the world, if you're a self-driven person who can spend time in a PhD program deliberately acquiring skills and connections for making a positive difference, I think you can make grad school a highly productive path, perhaps more so than many alternatives. In this post, I want to share some advice that I've been repeating a lot lately for how to do this:
That's all I have for now. The main sentiment behind most of this, I think, is that you have to be deliberate to get the most out of a PhD program, rather than passively expecting it to make you into anything in particular. Grad school still isn't for everyone, and far from it. But if you were seriously considering it at some point, and "do something more useful" felt like a compelling reason not to go, be sure to first consider the most useful version of grad that you could reliably make for yourself... and then decide whether or not to do it.
Please email me (lastname@thisdomain.com) if you have more ideas for getting the most out of grad school!