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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (176905)	2/5/2004 9:00:01 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

I agree Berkeley is an excellent school, but you can't substitute a course or two or three for the extra years of schooling and most important, the years spent doing original research and a thesis (the requirement for a PhD) under the tutelage of an advisor....

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (176905)	2/6/2004 12:15:34 AM
From: Ali Chen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

"here's a class they teach at Berkeley, (apparently recently)- this is the kind of class that differentiates the really excellent engineering institutions from the average ones imho." That's what happens if a person does not have gone through any advanced degree program - lack of critical thinking, desperation to jump to [wrong] conclusion, lack of research skills, all shows up... This is not a class they teach, it is just a presentation from some conference they use as a class note. The example is 3 years old as per date of publication, and this kind of results usually reflect the "state of the art" in industry of 2-3 years back. The actual class CS252, Spring 2000, reads: "This course focuses on the techniques of quantitative analysis and evaluation of modern computing systems, such as the selection of appropriate benchmarks to reveal and compare the performance of alternative design choices in system design. The emphasis is on the major component subsystems of high performance computers: pipelining, instruction level parallelism, memory hierarchies, input/output, and network-oriented interconnections. Students will undertake a major computing system analysis and design project of their own choosing." Anyone who thinks that any University can teach you right into the middle of modern design "needs their head examined", as people frequently say on SI (and other) web forums. All university classes are _INTRODUCTIONS_ to respective disciplines. Period. You cannot teach an undergrad or grad anything of practical use for corporations, with exception of maybe few PhD-level research program that might fit into far perspective of the corporation, into very far, and far from immediate practical results. You cannot comprehend the distance between introductory courses and the real "state of the art" if you never got to the proper level, which means at least Ph.D (or "corresponding level of professional experience"), although the level of local Ph.Ds is frequently inferior to the level of academic "training" people got in other countries. Sorry. What an advanced degree gives you is an ability to see things in perspective, to see relationship between things that are invisible to people not exposed to "higher mathematical concepts" and their applications to deep physical (and biophysical, and chemical, or else) phenomena. The advanced degree is just a sign of qualification, seal of quality if you wish, mark of a potential, nothing more, but no guarantees at all. - Ali

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (176905)	2/6/2004 3:17:27 AM
From: Amy J	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Lizzie, just because getting a PhD is an extremely good idea, particularly these days, doesn't mean you are less value. You have experience. But don't confuse today's graduating environment with the one you had when you graduated. People should really get PhDs these days, a MS at a minimum. This doesn't mean BS's don't do well, many do extremely well and like Saturn said they can catch up, but the extra schooling gives them an initial edge as well as some additional years of training in critical thinking as Ali indicated. Why do you discourage people from getting PhD's? What do you gain? Regards, Amy J