Physics heroes, classes and graduate school

I wrote most of this five years ago but didn't publish it because I was still thinking about it. I am sharing it now, including my original opinions, despite my opinions changing. My new opinions are given in the last three paragraphs.

Over the years, I have thought about physics heroes. A lot of people love Feynman, and while I enjoyed his autobiography and had a professor I TAed for compare me to him, I didn't really consider him my hero. The same with many other physicists. I think that Einstein and Newton were my heroes as I started to pursue physics, but over the last 15 years, I have discovered that I consider Freeman Dyson a hero, and I have since read several of his books. While I understand the point of how heroes hurt science, I also think that they can do a lot of good. And not just by providing inspirational role models like Jim Gates.

When I was a freshman, Freeman Dyson visited my college. He taught a class for non-majors and gave a couple of lectures for the physics students. One I attended had several of us, including Dyson, leave the lecture hall to go to the theater and watch the Matrix. One thing he said at the time stuck with me, at least the concept (since the words didn’t). That was that physics was something you do and not what you study, that you needed to get involved in research and not just take classes.

I didn’t truly understand and internalize this idea until I almost dropped out of my third year of graduate school. It has become one of my guiding philosophies as a physicist and physics professor. 

I have observed that online graduate degrees are popular (universities withstood moocs but risk being outwitted by opms). I don’t see the point of them. Even a non-lab undergraduate degree loses out on a lot of value being online only, and graduate degrees lose out on most of their value. I think a good undergraduate degree should be 70-80% coursework, a master's degree should be 30-50% coursework, and a PhD should be around 10% coursework. The non-coursework component can be done with industrial mentors instead of academic mentors, but the good mentors will generally be at the same location as the good academic mentors. Who will do the legwork, and how is that legwork going to be valid for industrial mentors in a location without academic mentors?

I think the real signal with these online graduate degrees is that new things have been learned. But that isn’t the purpose of a graduate degree.

Since I graduated with my PhD, I have continually learned new things and worked in new fields. I have never taken a course, just reading papers (and books sometimes) to understand where the field is or to find a good technique. I think that instead of doing this, many people are taking a Master's degree (and spending money on it). They do get a certificate that others can see, but they don’t get the deep knowledge that traditionally comes from a Master's (or PhD).

This opinion of mine has changed.

In the last 8 months I have searched for a new position in industry. The requirements for finding a software engineering adjacent position have changed since I left academia for industry in 2019. I did not get the interviews I expected and ran into rounds of coding assessments that were well beyond my level (especially 8 months ago when I received my first interview at a top AI startup).

I didn't pursue an online graduate degree, but if I had the funds to do so, I would have done so, and it would have benefitted me. Both as a signal for the recruiters and hiring managers and because, while I have self-studied and learned a lot and have been following free online self-study courses (without reputable certificates) like those found at CodeSignal and NeetCode, it would have been beneficial to have the direction of a professor.

So, my position on this has changed because I think the signal is important and valuable. I may still never do an online Master's. But if I had had the assets to do one in the last year, I would have done one. And it would have been beneficial for me.