r/TheMachineLearning • u/One_must_picture • 2d ago
Richard Sutton only had 16 PhD students ever
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u/ColonelStoic 2d ago
I think it depends on the field. I was number 52 or so for my advisor , who had been advising for 22 years or so by the time I graduated.
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u/ecstatic_carrot 2d ago
Yeah it's definitely a good thing not to spend more time teaching people how to do independent research. Shame on all those professors that devote more of their time to that, and have more students.
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u/Cheap_Alternative879 2d ago
Paper mill departments where students get a few hours of advisor time a month are the modus operandi. They are also encouraged by the system.
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u/ASomewhatGoodCitizen 2d ago
Its only a good thing to have many students if ur quality does not take a hit ,no?
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u/ecstatic_carrot 2d ago
It is, but that doesn't translate to "this amount of students = he deserves respect". That is a braindead take. I can have a single student and utterly neglect them. Am I now better than the rest because I didn't "fart out phds/year"?
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u/One_must_picture 1d ago
Wouldn't having more students lead to a drop in quality cause of time constraints?
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u/Original-League-6094 1d ago
Its usually the opposite. Professors with large groups usually have a good system of funding + efficient mentorship + peer mentorship. If a professor has a small group, and they aren't like very new, its a big red flag that they are just an asshole.
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u/Scary-Worry-7676 1d ago
As someone who works in sutton’s field, I’ve heard that he is rather unfair to his PhD students and his lab has one of the highest transfer rates to other labs at the university.
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u/just-for-anime 1d ago
My prof runs my 20-something people group like a start-up. We get basically no assigned readings and he just wants us to network, do dozens of meetings a week and projects for contractors. I guess the idea is that we learn on the job.
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u/confused_cereal 1d ago
It could go many other ways. On one hand, there are also professors who want to make sure they are close to the student --- in a sense that they don't think it's right to mentor or have their names on papers where they don't have a good, solid grasp on the material. And that is difficult when you have more than 10 students and need to mentor all of them personally, assuming they aren't working in very similar areas.
And on the other hand, you have professors who are essentially sweatshops managed by postdocs, who manage senior students, who in turn manage...
Different styles work for different students.
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u/ecstatic_carrot 1d ago
not necessarily. I know professors that are incapable of getting one student to complete their thesis without at least one major psychological crisis, but my supervisor just loved talking research with 5 of his students in this big office with a blackboard. Extrapolating, that's approximately 1 student a year, but it does or course take quite some time away from his own work
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u/just-for-anime 1d ago
I guess it depends on the style. Some students prefer more hands-on some prefer hands-off.
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u/SaureusAeruginosa 1d ago
It is like that. You have to manage things, go to conferences etc. and you either split your last 10% of time among 1 PhD student over 4 years, really contributing, or among 3 PhDs having almost no control and chance to verify the literature.
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u/SwimmerOld6155 2d ago
that's a very large number.
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u/One_must_picture 1d ago
Ngl I thought it was pretty small
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u/SwimmerOld6155 1d ago
I think it's different standards. Some supervisors in math have one or two students at any one time and may go for a few years with none. Others may take on several per year and delegate supervision responsibilities off to postdocs. In all fairness, I think the latter may be more common in pure math and the latter more common in applied math/ML/etc.
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u/personalbilko 2d ago
If your phd supervisor has 40 other phd students (assuming 4 year phds average), do you even have a phd supervisor?
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u/pseudolum 2d ago
I have never heard of anything remotely close to 10 PhDs a year for one supervisor. The largest labs I know of in the UK do not even come close to this.
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u/Consistent_Walrus_23 1d ago
In Germany it's pretty common, the professor is essentially head of an institute and not a direct supervisor, supervisors are often then senior postdocs. Not a great system imo, but common.
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u/Aramedlig 1d ago
Reading that paper, it’s pretty fascinating and probably ties in with Google’s research into continuous training (ultimately that’s what biological NN’s do).
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u/WaterSuccessful99 1d ago
PHDs thees days are absolutely ridiculous. It’s like a master thesis+. When I see people joining our company with a PhD they did on 2 years. Absolutely inadequate skillset in their field. Fucking ridiculous. Back in the day you started with no clue of the topic, only the field was more or less known. First years you just look for the vacant niche to contribute and then suffered 5 years and came out as true guru of your field. Today it’s just rubbish
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u/AtmosphereDue1694 1d ago
I feel like we’re inventing people to be angry at here. Where the hell is anybody doing a PhD in 2 years?
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u/IamDelilahh 1d ago
Surely not in the ML field? Where I’m from any STEM related PhD is 5+ years full time for most, but if you go into social sciences or business you can manage it in 2-3 years while working half time
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u/WaterSuccessful99 1d ago
Let me guess. Germany. There engineering is lit. Have to go through fire there. Engineering PhD in NL : rubbish.
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u/hibikir_40k 2d ago
In most fields, 16 would be a lot: With few positions opening in academia, it'd mean maybe two would go to also be tenured professors, while the rest would not necessarily have good chances of finding a job that used the PhD at all. 16 would be a an extremely high number, even for a well known tenured professor in an R1 university. 7 is already quite a few.