Ask HN: Advice for feeling like a failure in PhD?
I am doing a PhD in R1 public uni on Computer Engineering in the USA. PhD is something I really wanted to do because it allows me to dive deep into stuff. Turns out what I thought initially was not the whole story.
I am nearing the end of second year of my PhD. My advisor is in HPC but doesn't do hot research and I want to do efficient hardware AI research (faster kernels, ML systems etc). But whenever I read papers and see the authors and what they have accomplished and the team behind them and the prestigious schools/labs doing them while I am deep in some cuBLAS function hoping to optimize register tiling to be a nanosecond faster, I feel like a failure. I don't know what problems to work on. I wonder if what I want to do even requires a PhD.
I question if I will ever be able to do anything publishable as the labs in MIT/Stanford, their cohort of brilliant minds basically alone? There's so much out there that I don't know. The more I think I know the more stuffs keep popping up. I thought I had finally understood LLMs to their nitty gritty details but then there's even more new variants of attentions popping up. I am not sure if I will be able to read everything needed to be able to research. I want to be able to get a job in the US after my PhD(home is terrifying) and I am an international so quiting is not an option.
I am looking for any advice or if you were in a similar boat anything would be helpful. Thank you.
That is the second year of a PhD - the first year you're distracted by your literature survey of the area you're interested in. The second year is where you're trying to dig out a little niche that you can work in and expand the knowledge of what's there. The third year is where you're supposed to be writing up, but in reality you're probably still working on building up enough new knowledge in the area to actually write up.
It's not uncommon to feel the way you are during the second and third years - my advice is to recognise how you're feeling and then work out how to push forward (which is what you've already started to do).
My advice for how you can compete with large research projects full of postdocs is, don't try to. You're not in competition with them, you are doing your own research. It might be in a tiny niche area, but it's your area and it's new knowledge.
Just a comment someone once made to me - the PhD is a medieval institution <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy#History>. It's a lot like medieval medicine - it might do you good, but you're also lucky if it doesn't kill you.