One thing to note is that, after I submitted the final draft of this article, the Japanese government ended the MEXT university track or is at least planning to. There was a memo, but the status is not clear.
Anyway, I had a great time doing my PhD this way, and generally I recommend that people work before a PhD and try to work during it (if you are in CS). It gives you a lot of freedom and, at least for me, it is very helpful to have more than one pipeline of work at a time so that when one slows down (as it inevitably does in research), you can draw on the other.
Congrats! I am surprised that you first chose Korea for PhD. As myself being Korean, I hear a lot of horrendous stories about PhD students in Korea. They tend to spend for more than +8 years. I know a few people who went through their PhDs and certainly it took +8 years for all of them. I did my PhD by the way in France and it took me 4 years.
Did you know that it could take so long when you first started your PhD in Korea? Could this be one of your reasons to move to Japan?
FWIW, the "extended" Korean PhD is an artifact of grant projects that need people to do the busy work (usually reports), and it seemed to be uncommon to have foreign students thrown into that pool. Scholarship max durations are also a limiting factor.
One aspect worth calling out as a huge plus of Japanese national institutions which the author didn't disclose is funding for compute is much better than what one would get from a Korean institution (e.g. the author's school runs one of the biggest GPU clusters in Japan).
mcyc · · focus · HN ↗
One thing to note is that, after I submitted the final draft of this article, the Japanese government ended the MEXT university track or is at least planning to. There was a memo, but the status is not clear.
Anyway, I had a great time doing my PhD this way, and generally I recommend that people work before a PhD and try to work during it (if you are in CS). It gives you a lot of freedom and, at least for me, it is very helpful to have more than one pipeline of work at a time so that when one slows down (as it inevitably does in research), you can draw on the other.
sbinnee · · focus · HN ↗
Did you know that it could take so long when you first started your PhD in Korea? Could this be one of your reasons to move to Japan?
sstim · · focus · HN ↗
One aspect worth calling out as a huge plus of Japanese national institutions which the author didn't disclose is funding for compute is much better than what one would get from a Korean institution (e.g. the author's school runs one of the biggest GPU clusters in Japan).