These pieces of advice are useful. However, they don't touch the bottleneck: mental health. And no, it is not "like any other demanding job". A PhD hits on two fronts - one is "all or nothing". If you spend years and still haven't submitted your dissertation, it is a career-ending failure. The other is its tie to one's identity. You put sweat, blood, and tears into your research, only to be rejected at a journal or conference because the result is "technically correct but not significant enough". Sure, there are similar parts in other careers - from talking with people, it works a bit similarly in medicine (when it comes to "all or nothing") and art (when it comes to this identity).

If people fail, it is mostly because they burn out. If they succeed, it is not unlikely that they will need to heal their burnout wounds anyway.

I am sure Karpathy's experience is different. But most people starting their PhDs are not Karpathy.

See also "The Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?" http://danny.oz.au/danny/humour/phd_lotr.html

Sure you may survive. But even if all goes well, you succeed, there will be a void in you after the quest.

The one piece of advice I give new PhD students is to maintain a list of your references for a bibliography ahead of time. For every paper you read, copy the citation in BibTeX format and write a couple of sentences to remind yourself what the paper was about. Do this for every source, even if it doesn't seem important at the time.

I did a PhD in the late 90s.

What was the motivation? Honestly, I was too lazy to get a job and staying in academia for another 3+ years seemed amazing (probably not recommended, but it worked out OK for me).

What helped get me through it:

1) Doing something I genuinely enjoyed - I approached the Computer Vision professor who gave me some ideas. I super enjoy writing code, and the idea of processing gigabytes of video to produce answers seemed cool. I treated it as a super difficult programming project.

2) Breaking my leg - Just before starting, I broke my leg badly. And that meant working from home with a weekly visit from the professor with a stack of reading papers. That time spent understanding state of the art was super useful.

3) Funding - At some point, DARPA gave enough money for me not to worry about funding, so I never had to work a job or get distracted.

4) Marriage - The final straight of writing a thesis was tough and I was super lucky to have a supportive wife who pushed me to get-shit-done.

A PhD at a research focused experimental institution creates a particular kind of human that is absurdly resistant to stress and despair: Ask an x-ray physicist using DESY about the horrors of “Beam Time” or a chemist about crystallising proteins.

Most people I know don’t use their actual skills anymore, but all of them shrug off whatever you throw at them at work without blinking.

I discounted the remainder of the piece after reading this:

  Personal freedom. As a PhD student you’re your own boss. Want to sleep in today? Sure. Want to skip a day and go on a vacation? Sure. All that matters is your final output and no one will force you to clock in from 9am to 5pm. Of course, some advisers might be more or less flexible about it. . .

Karpathy is an interesting case of PhD gone industry and he mentions this topic in the article. In my field of computational social science it is sadly very taboo to happily leave the academy. Yet, they don’t do much to make it more appealing. My biggest win was to find a group of people outside of my research group that I liked collaborating with. Research is more fun as a team sport.

“How to get into a top PhD program: get ~3 famous professors to write letters saying you’re one of the five best students they’ve ever worked with.”

I feel like this particular advice applies to a very small subset of people. If I’d had professors telling me that I certainly would have considered doing a PhD!

"Never confuse education with intelligence, you can have a PhD and still be an idiot."

  ― Richard P. Feynman

I finished a PhD while working full time with 3 young kids. Feel free to reach out if you've been interested and I can share my experience with you.

I am a bit surprised that this article talks so much about actual PhD stuff than high level guidance. Maybe it has to do with the author's personal background/experience or field.

Something I didn't see in the article:

Depending on your field, it can be extremely hard to get tenure. Unless you are a genius and are seeing signs you are well on your way to getting professorship and tenure (publishing good and important papers, really good at communication, checking all the other boxes), you'd better consider an off-ramp as early as possible.

In some fields, 100 people compete for 1 open positions, and that's rough. Having been involved in such a hiring process, I know it's extremely challenging.

I was smart enough to realize I'd never be a good researcher relatively early during my PhD and started preparing for job interviews. Sadly, I see too many people still having unrealistic dreams about being a professor late in their PhD. They even do postdoc and do that for many years until they finally discover they are not hireable. Good news is that they often find an industry job quickly after switching.

I could see that clearly -- their research, originality, communication and understanding of the field is just not there, and one doesn't become a professor without being completely in control of the direction of their academic research.

But it's hard to tell people "you are just not good enough for this". In most situations, you'd be considered unsupportive. However, in this case, it's the best thing you can say to a struggling PhD/postdoc.

(Many professors are completely incapable of advising on students' career. They often find it surprising that a student wants to go into industry. They hold completely incorrect assumptions like a PhD student just goes into a management role as soon as they graduate. Rarely a professor tells you that you should not pursue tenure.)

His guide to doing well in undergraduate courses is decent enough that I've sent it around to my students as well. I sometimes have to teach first or second year students and the amount of questions I get about how to study or how to do well is significant. We kind of forget that this is a learned behavior, and everyone learns it at different times in their lives (or not at all).

If you want to work in the biotech/pharma business, you can be a PhD or you can be a technician. The latter needs to have "a good pair of hands" in the lab to be successful. The former, at least in the 00's, needed lab skills as well, but they tended to acquire a group when they moved into more medchem than synthesis. There's a number of support groups (physical or computational chemistry) that has similar staffing.

> You’ll sit exhausted on a beautiful, sunny Saturday scrolling through Facebook pictures of your friends having fun on exotic trips, paid for by their 5-10x larger salaries. You will have to throw away 3 months of your work while somehow keeping your mental health intact.

Sounds strikingly similar to early-stage startup lifestyle.

Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like taking advice about starting a cult from Joseph Smith.

(This is not to say you shouldn't do it. Just get info and advice from a less biased source).

One thing that's not mentioned here: if you don't come from a top university, you have close-to-zero chances to have that kind of experience in your phd. If you're not incredibly picking some exceptionally relevant project soon enough, your career path after the phd will not be exactly the smooth sailing the author describes.

Loved this article. I'd add a few things I wish someone had told me when I was starting my PhD: 1) Maximize variance, but know when to stop. Karpathy's point is great. Explore early, say yes to different things. But at some point you need to pick a direction and commit. Too much variance and you end up with nothing solid. 2) Consider smaller labs. Big famous groups are tempting, but in a small group of 3-5 people your adviser actually knows your work and gives you real feedback. In large labs you can easily become invisible. 3) Collaborate outside your lab early. Don't wait, reach out to people at other universities working on related problems. Different groups think differently and that's where good ideas come from. 4) Visit other universities. Even a few weeks at another group forces you to explain your work to people with different assumptions. It's one of the most useful things you can do during a PhD. 5)Learn to write good, structured, reproducible and maintainable code. One of the things I regret I didn't, and many working hours were wasted.

Good luck to anyone starting out.

I am really curious to know how Karpathy would update this survival guide in the 2026. Hope to hear something from him!

I did a bachelor degree part time later in life around work and family life. I'm doing a masters full time around work and family life. My experience with academia so far have put me off further study. I really don't get the research thing, and the whole experience seems like bullshit to me. Out of all my experiences doing these things the best has been on the taught modules, that I enjoyed and I didn't feel were out of date, the worse has been the dissertations where you're doing "research". Think of a project off the top of your head and "research" it. Nonsense.

One angle that's missing from this discussion: the cost asymmetry. The effort to do this well is disproportionate to the effort to do it poorly, which means most implementations in the wild are mediocre. That creates a weird market dynamic where quality becomes the differentiator by default — not because it's hard to build, but because most people stop at 'good enough' too early.

Why don't we assign grad students to PhD courses the way NFL draft works?

Let directional universities pick first and Ivies (and other prestigious universities) pick last.

Good to see this again resurface !

Doesn’t really touch what to do when a new political administration comes in and pulls all your funding or makes your research illegal. This happened to me twice as a grad student now as a researcher funding PhD students.

Its so esoteric.

You do what your priest/advisor tells you. You honor the priest. You do the latex ritual.

Did it actually do anything? Ah in 8 years someone is going to replicate your study, it wont work, but too late! You got a PhD!

I can imagine that this will be similar to the "Emacs/Vim in the AI age" article - it will just be considered to matter less in the AI age. Why spend 3-5 years of your life with a sometimes frustrating experience to obtain this PhD degree if you have powerful models at your disposal that will just be able to solve everything for you? (Similar to why learn Elisp/VimScript/...) Especially considering the current trajectory, expecting where things will be in 5 or 15 years. It will just feel less and less appealing to get an in-depth education, especially a formal one.

Which is quite ironic, considering who wrote the article.