Looking into doing a PhD

As regular readers of this blog have probably figured out, I’m a researchy sort of person.

A lot of my hobbies – maths, voting theory, weird corners of programming, etc – are research oriented, and most of my work has had some sort of research slant to it.

The last two years I’ve basically been engaged in a research project working on Hypothesis. It’s come quite far in that time, and I feel reasonably comfortable saying that it’s the best open source property based testing library on most metrics you’d care to choose. It has a number of novel features and implementation details that advance the state of the art.

It’s been pretty great working on Hypothesis like this, but it’s also been incredibly frustrating.

The big problem is that I do not have an academic background. I have a masters in mathematics (more technically I have a BA, an MA, and a CASM. Cambridge is weird. It’s entirely equivalent to a masters in mathematics though), but that’s where I stopped. Although it says “DR” in my online handle and the domain of this blog, those are just my initials and not my qualification.

As a result, I have little to no formal training or experience in doing academic research, and a similarly low understanding of who’s who and what’s what within the relevant fields. So I’ve been reading papers and trying to figure out the right people to talk to all on my own, and while it’s gone OK it’s still felt like fumbling around in the dark.

Which leads to the obvious solution that I spoilered in the title: If the problem is that I’m trying to do research outside of an academic context, the solution is to do research in an academic context.

So I’d like to do a PhD that is either about Hypothesis, or about something close enough to Hypothesis that each can benefit from the other.

There’s probably enough novel work in Hypothesis already that I could “just” clean it up, factor it out, and turn it into a PhD thesis as it is, but I’m not really expecting to do that (though I’d like that to be part of it). There are a number of additional directions that I think it would be worth exploring, and I expect most PhD funding will come with a focus subject attached which I would be happy to adapt to (a lot of the most interesting innovations in Hypothesis came because some external factor forced me to think about things in ways I wouldn’t otherwise have!). If you’d like to know more, I’ve written up a fairly long article about Hypothesis and why I think it’s interesting research on the main Hypothesis site.

Which, finally, brings me to the main point of the post: What I want from you.

I’m already looking into and approaching potential universities and interesting researchers there who might be good supervisors or able to recommend people who are. I’ve been in touch with a couple (some of whom might be reading this post. Hi), but I would also massively appreciate suggestions and introductions.

So, if you work in relevant areas or know of people who do and think it would be useful for me to talk to, please drop me an email at [email protected]. Or just leave a comment on this blog post, tweet at me, etc.

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2 thoughts on “Looking into doing a PhD

  1. Derek Jones

    Don’t believe the marketing hype about academic research (it’s all about quantity of papers and chasing ratings to pull in the grants). Have more self confidence in your own abilities.

    1. david Post author

      I don’t think I have an idealised view of academia TBH. What I’m expecting from this is not some magical improvement in my ability to work on Hypothesis, but a practical improvement in my ability to interact with other people’s related work. This isn’t a lack of confidence in my own abilities, just an acknowledgement that there are quite a lot of other smart people out there whose work I’d like to better take advantage of!

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