The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time
economist.com
economist.com
First, you need to pay attention to your supervisor, select a good one, one ready to trust you and give you freedom of action.
Second, grab a university where there is effectively budget for you to travel to conferences and meet people.
Then, work hard and network a lot.
I am French but did my PhD in Denmark (DTU), it was 3 years with a very good salary, with a lot of travels all over the world, with an insane level of networking. Now, after some work in a company, I have setup my small consultancy, the quality of the network I have from my PhD is a gold mine.
If you do your PhD to just enter in a company with a higher salary after some years of feeling like a slave, you are doing it for the wrong reason.
Most PhD students -- at least the ones I know in the states and overseas -- spend most of their time in school trapped in a lab or office. A few make time to "network" with people outside the department, but most have to be forced to socialize with a broader audience than can be found at the weekly beer hour.
The far more common pattern for a PhD student is to spend years busting his/her ass in near-isolation to accomplish research goals and graduate, only to find that it's hard to get a job without real-world contacts. So you're absolutely correct in the sense that PhD students should be networking, but it just doesn't seem to happen very much in practice.
The best networking I did in grad school was attending startup-related events. That got me my first paid gig, which led to greater street cred as a developer. Attending events held by the career center was a close second, because those led to interviews. Everything else was fluff.
I know that my PhD completely changes the nature of jobs I can hope to get - not really because of what I learned directly at my PhD, but for everything else.
Sure the majority amount of my/our time is spend sitting and working in the lab, but going to a few conferences per year, doing an internship most summers, and having weekly meetings with other researchers adds up to establishing a lot of contacts in the research community that I wouldn't have without graduate school.
The other day I found that a bunch of braniacs at the local Uni were working on something a lot like what I'm doing... More advanced in principle, but without the need to have a product that actually works at the end of the day. I talked with four people involved with the project but there wasn't a single one who had any interest in commercialization or knew anyone who was interesting in commercialization of this kind of technology.
Of course, I'm the kind of guy who shows up at seminars and always asks the same question "Is this development commercializable?" although I always ask it in different words... It's just a whole different world.
I do agree that networking is very valuable. As a PhD student I do about 95% of my work from home, but I also have been able to attend a lot of conferences and workshops. (I already have 5 lined up for 2011.) My experience has been that I will meet random people and then see them again and again. This has lead to collaborations, letters of support for grant applications, and ideas for new projects. I have no doubt that it will help me when I take the next step after graduating.
But there is real value in doing a PhD at a prestigious university: it opens doors. Many many doors. I think of it as a cognitive short cut for others that, magically, you're now someone worth listening to. I actually don't like this, but that's what I've observed on multiple occasions.
This is a bit less than one would earn going into business immediately, but it buys you a lot of freedom. The education/research split is 0.2/0.8 FTE. There are specific goals with respect to the research project, but other than that there is plenty of time to pursue your interests.
Our university tried to implement a scholarship/bursary system, which was not welcomed by potential Dutch PhD candidates. Foreign candidates do not seem to mind as much, since such scholarships are common in other countries. In my opinion, the scholarship system was a bad move, since pursuing a PhD becomes less attractive to the best of students, due to higher wages in the industry. In the end the scholarship system was shot down by the court (they see a PhD as a normal employment), and seems to have vanished for the time being.
Conclusion: you get what you pay for. Higher PhD candidate wages equals less PhDs, but more high-quality PhDs. With lower wages or scholarships universities can have more PhD candidates, but you will probably lose out on talent who'd rather go to the industry, and the PhD population has a miserable life (low income, long working hours).
> Example 1: Highschool dropout with no advanced education earning minimum wage; 23 years old:
Gross minimum wage for 23yo and above € 1424,40 per month, assuming a 40h workweek. Usually with paid overtime and some benefits depending on employer.
> Example 2: Student who excelled at high school until 18, completed bachelor at 21, completed master in science at 23, started PhD at 24:
Gross wage[1] €2000 per month, with realistically a 45h to 50h workweek. Better benefits and usually a 13th month. Intellectually more challenging work (probably), but few career possibilities in the academic field.
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Also you have to take into account that the grad student has to pay substantially more in taxes than the minimum wage employee. The difference was only 1.5x to start with, after taxes the PhD student will probably only earn 25% more than the minimum wage employee. Just for the record, I'm not arguing against education here, or even making any statement about whether it makes sense to do a PhD. Just adding some numbers because your message makes it seem like PhDs are well compensated given their intelligence and the work they have to put in. From my point of view they're ridiculously underpaid.
A few of my friends are grad students, and they all live in 600 square feet (55 meter squared) apartments. It kind of sucks to live a 600 square foot apartment until you're 29-30, with no substantial savings for a down-payment on a house for after you graduate.
Source 1: https://intranet.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=91ae4d5c-5d21...
There are a decent number of ding dongs in PhD programs too. The level of ding dong-ery doesn't seem to change wherever you go.
Besides, in the UK at least the scholarship funding is not bad at all. I found the £12K per year tax free funding was easily enough to be comfortable on whilst doing my research.
I spent three years in a computational biology PhD program before getting an e-mail from a college friend looking for people to join a new startup (where I am now a co-founder). I enjoyed the research I was doing, but I asked myself: should I really spend three more years here toiling away at very cool but very obscure science just to purchase a lottery ticket? Where if I lose the lottery (which is the most likely result by far) I will have languished in postdoc roles until I burnt out past my prime?
You have a lot of energy between age 25 and 35. I decided to apply that energy to something where the expected value of total reward (both intellectually and monetarily) is much higher.
Oh man, +1,000,000. As someone who made the other choice from the same position you were in, this is exactly the advice I give to any fresh-faced grad student who gets all glassy-eyed and weak-minded in the face of doing "cool research" for some wonk professor for years while letting the real world slide by in the background.
You don't realize it when you're 22, but you've only got so much irrational exuberance and tolerance for crazy work schedules in reserve. Once that phase of your life is gone, it's gone, and you'll never get it back. Also, your friends are all moving on, too: the people with whom you can do things like co-found companies won't be in the same risk-tolerance categories when you're finally done with your research-based vacation from life.
During the time I was getting a PhD, I missed out on the second-biggest technology wealth creation event of my lifetime. My best friends -- the guys with whom I'd want to found companies -- got older, married, and had children. They're not able to take risks like that now. The world is harder and more expensive.
Now I'm working in the technology industry anyway, and I look around the world and see younger guys who are VP or C-level roles, leading large teams, and otherwise further along on the career ladder. But I have a PhD.
Now, my friends, who have finished, are either super depressed about (not) finding academic jobs or have moved to other fields entirely. Pretty sad.
I made more of a lateral move within my field, so am hoping for better results, but that has its own set of challenges.
Look on the bright side: your PhD is an insurance policy against ageism. When you are 50 you will still be able to find (or make for yourself) low-risk, high-paying work doing neat technical stuff. The VP and C-level peers that you envy so much now will essentially be managers for the rest of their lives.
Yes, life is always a dice roll. The difference is that one of the two bets has a much higher positive expectation. Done intelligently, neither choice will leave you destitute, but entrepreneurship could leave you rich.
I don't beat myself up over past choices that I can't change -- but I try to make my point forcefully to people who are about to go down the same blind alleys that I already know well.
The problem is far less in Computer Science, where your skills transfer over to The Real World relatively easily, and companies like Microsoft and Google value them. This means the potential job pool is much bigger.
As a CS PhD student, of course I feel underpaid. Universities have reached a point where they can convince students that what they are doing is being paid for being taught, which must be a great deal, right? However, everyone else calls this "on the job training" or "starting at the bottom of the ladder" and they get paid better for it. However, I think about the benefits I get (work when/where I like, use whatever language I like, nap when I like, release all my work as open-source, never feel like I'm waking up to "work", don't have to worry about mundane but potentially catastrophic life things like health insurance), and it does even out somewhat.
Paul Halmos, a famous mathematician, was often approached by undergraduates who asked him if he thought they should go to grad school. He gave all of them the same advice: "No."
Now mind you, he was extremely enthusiastic about academia, and he would cheerfully encourage students who didn't immediately walk away, but insisted that they really wanted to do academic research.
I quit a well-paying job [added for HN: at a late-stage startup, no less] to slog through a difficult, low-paying PhD program and it was the best decision of my life. It was not a "practical" decision, certainly not for my earning prospects, but I wanted to do advanced research more badly than I wanted to do anything else.
The Ph.D. is designed to introduce you to the world of academic research and prepare you for a career as a professor. Full stop. I have no problem whatsoever with anyone who enters a Ph.D. program for any other reason, but they should not come with illusions about what they are getting into.
I know several brilliant scientists (postdocs and PhD students) from my time at Princeton who had / are having a very hard time finding an academic job. At some point even the purest motivations will succumb to feeling used in these circumstances.
In math it is sort of hard to outsource the boring parts of your project to people working beneath you, so I didn't hear people complain that they were getting used. But I can imagine that this might not be the same in other disciplines.
"One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”"
"Workers with “surplus schooling”—more education than a job requires—are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs."
Undergrad: 80k Masters: 87k PhD: 114k
I think that society today needs people to do all of those things, and more. We all need to find our own place, and excel there.
I'd posit that writ large this won't actual create a functioning society. Some in society need to be content where they are because we need people to do the "dirty" jobs that others won't do.
In addition to the fact that the Undergrad may be making more than $114K by the time the PhD student has acquired a PhD, there's also the issue of selection bias. Perhaps, on average, people choosing to get PhDs are more capable than people with Bachelor's degrees. In this case, the extra degree could be absolutely useless, and yet people having a PhD would still earn more.
MBA is also way up there.
not sure about medicine...
keep in mind that elite MBA, JD, and even MD programs have very high completion rates, much higher than PhDs, and that MD and JD degrees can take less than half the time. MD degrees take as long as PhDs when you factor in the residency, but the job prospects and earnings are probably much higher.
From a purely financial point of view, it just doesn't make sense for someone who already has US citizenship to do a PhD. For non-citizens, though, it can be an excellent way to get into the country (though even then, an MS is usually enough to get that first work visa).
There's going to have to be a little bit of realignment, I think, and some disciplines are going to have to start letting go of being "we're the practical ones and you could deploy our tech tomorrow" to pushing out a little bit, maybe incorporating things like AI and stuff.
I wonder what this number would be like if you cut the number of academic jobs in half. Because that's what I see happening in the future.
I mean, I don't want to say the people on HN are smarter than the rest of the world but we do tend to spot trends earlier only because of the collaborative nature of the site and that people here actually evaluate the world around them. Which means societal trends can become apparent here before the rest of the world realizes they're going on.
So I think it's instructional that we see a "Higher Education is broken" item about every couple of days. In the years to come I suspect we'll see a lot more competition from lower priced options that provide education using online tools and who don't need armies of research fellows and "postdocs". Combine that with Governments making serious budget cuts and I think you'll see the demand for PhD's plummet.
Also, my guess is that academic jobs don't influence the earning premiums that much... the pay is quite low, unless you really reach the top
What you're forgetting is that if there are a ton of hungry PhD's running around looking for work where your Joe-Master's Degree or Jim-Bachelor's Degrees are looking for work, chances are they may displace quite a few of those guys if they look to enter the standard work force. Not because a PhD makes one inherently better, but because it seems like so many employers look at paper qualifications, and actually a lot of PhD's did work REALLY HARD to get their PhD...so at least they've shown they can work really hard on something and come up with a contribution.
Also, government budget cuts never seem to affect military research, where a TON of research dollars stems from. I have a feeling that the government will get its house in order without massive research spending cuts.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, though. In some of these fields, one of the bottlenecks seems to be the low numbers of researchers worldwide in the area. While the students do provide cheap labour, they also (depending on the fame of the professor) get immense networking resources. Since the field has comparatively few people, the big names all know each other, and all help get their students hired post-thesis.
Nepotism? Perhaps. But for the research program I'm thinking of in particular, if the problem does get solved, it'll revolutionize mathematics. Talking to some of the students involved, I feel that's why they're willing to put up with being cheap labor -- they're getting paid in happiness and a feeling of being worthy.
I think good advisors (should) enjoy supervising for the sake of supervising, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also boost their CV's.
We did co-author a paper later, but it wasn't about anything in my thesis. I certainly didn't hear any indication from him that he disapproved of my thesis, though -- he was just happy to let me work independently, and it would have been entirely improper for his name to appear on work he hadn't contributed to.
I do agree with that, but I think it's far from rare in academia.
For instance, you are not guaranteed a PhD in Chemistry from Berkeley even if you go for 8 years. You don't get one until your research pans out.
This is very different from some countries where you're essentially guaranteed one after 2-4 years.
This is a such a different feeling to what students I have met from the the UK/Europe experience, that it's almost like a different degree. They typically have 3 years to complete their projects, but I have no idea what "completion" means in that context.
The other one is funding, in that American PhD students could potentially be funded indefinitely, but that's a different issue...
The "3 years" came from the length of time the standard PhD student was funded for - there was no guarantee that you would finish within the three years. Quite a lot of people did PhDs while working as Research Associates - where you were typically on a 3 year fixed contract, paid a decent salary but your focus then was the research project paying your wages - not strictly your own research. Most people I knew doing it this way took between 4 or 5 years - some as long as 7 or 8 years.
However - I am quite concerned that it may decrease my salary or even make me border line unemployable. Right now I have a good number of years experience in software development under my belt. I can search for jobs on any given day and find hundreds or even thousands of opportunities that I would be able to make a credible application for. I'm quite concerned that once I have a PhD many of these people would look at my PhD and turn me down as overqualified.
I'm curious if anyone with strong software skills has any experience in what the effect of a PhD is on employability?
In science and engineering (engineering in particular), PhD students rarely have to pay their own way, with stipends around $25000 or even up to around $30000 with a fellowship. The job prospects are certainly a lot better as well- since research funding in the US is very much focused on science and engineering.
Oh wait, but, it's The Economist.