But does a PhD improve your taste? Seems clear that it depends entirely on the taste and availability of your advisor.
Not obviously? Other potential mechanisms:
Frequent conversations + feedback from other PhD students
Reading lots of papers and learning through osmosis (I’m a bit skeptical of this one)
You try lots of ideas / projects quickly and learn from the consequences of your choices
Conditioned on that it seems pretty safe (70%?); unconditioned, it seems way less likely (20%?).
If the bar is “improves it at all”, and we assume the case I’m most familiar with (someone fresh out of undergrad or Masters doing a PhD at UC Berkeley) I’d say ~95% to both. It’s possible that “UC Berkeley” is doing a lot of the work there, I’m not very familiar with other universities.
Not obviously? Other potential mechanisms:
Frequent conversations + feedback from other PhD students
Reading lots of papers and learning through osmosis (I’m a bit skeptical of this one)
You try lots of ideas / projects quickly and learn from the consequences of your choices
If the bar is “improves it at all”, and we assume the case I’m most familiar with (someone fresh out of undergrad or Masters doing a PhD at UC Berkeley) I’d say ~95% to both. It’s possible that “UC Berkeley” is doing a lot of the work there, I’m not very familiar with other universities.
Yeah, I agree for Berkeley. I think I was silently assuming a domain of world top 200 or something.
One better bar could be “improves taste more than 4+ years of independent work fit around some other full time job”.