Today I had a chat with Wu Ga, a PhD worked in the same lab with me at UofT. We talked about PhD degree, University dropout, and self-evolving.
From Wu’s perspective, one of the most important values he wants to achieve throughout the PhD program in Machine Learning, is the forward-looking vision: the vision of how things in the field will evolve in the future time, from the development of algorithms to the trend in industries. This is not about future-telling, which can be closed to impossible. Instead, he wants to establish a thought framework, through years’ work on the cutting-edge technology in the field, to evaluate problems from the core and foresee the probability of coming trends. The vision can help a person to go beyond a high performing and productive programmer, but become a leader who can form a team and find the right point to make disruptions.
Next is about dropout and self-evolving. University degree program has its limitation and is not suitable for everyone. We have seen many examples of dropout students who made amazing success in the end. Their talents and achievements worth a respect. However, we should not only look at their decisions of dropout, but also pay attention to their tremendous effort in learning and self-evolving outside of the school. One good example will be Mark Zuckerberg: yes, he dropped out from Harvard in his sophomore year, but later in his career, he keeps pushing himself to learn to transit from a product person to CEO, and finally such a legendary figure in the world. No matter whether you want to finish your degree in Bachelor, Master, or PhD, you should keep learning and self-evolving throughout the life.
Evolution of Mark Zuckerberg