Should I Pursue a PhD?
Currently I'm studying for my M.Sc in Vancouver. My field of research is natural language processing and more specifically neural machine translation. I recently published a paper in a workshop of a major NLP conference (EMNLP 2019) and attended the conference in Hong Kong. I also have two published papers in my undergrad in top tier conferences.
In my home country, I used to work as a software engineer in a top tech company in which millions of people were using our products and it was somehow the google of my country. I did software engineering 2 years part time and 1.5 years full time.
Why I'm struggling:
Advantage of software engineering to me:
1. Team work (much more than research)
2. Less stress compared to being a PhD student (you are worried about conference deadline and wether or not this idea is gonna work)
3. Features are delivered faster and you feel the impact.
4. You are directly having impact on your customers.
5. Good money -> Use my youth -------------------
Advantages of a PhD:
1. Research is intellectually satisfying as fk.
2. Diversity of the problems (Much more than engineering)
3. Future is AI.
I was not even considering pursuing a PhD but after attending the conference I got inspired but still have my doubts. If I pursue a PhD it takes a couple of years of my youth. You are still a student and students are somehow poor financially. I want to use my youth to explore life as much as possible.
The reason I'm asking it on HN rather than reddit is that people here are generally curious and understand what I mean by saying that research is very very intellectually satisfying.
Any advice for me to consider?