I'm at the end of my MSc. studies in CS. At the moment, I can choose to graduate in a month or two, or stay-on for another 9 months doing research in interactive theorem proving that will potentially lead to a PhD opportunity.
I'm doing my MSc in a foreign country and I'm very unhappy here. Another ~9 months seems like a huge hurdle to me. The current situation is if I choose to graduate soon, I will likely surrender my chance for a PhD.
I don't particularly love studying. I think interactive theorem proving is quite cool, but the actual practice of studying/research hasn't been that enjoyable to me, but I enjoy having the knowledge once I've acquired it. In many ways it seems like "the future" to me, and it'd be really neat to be one of the first passengers on that train, so to say.
I have no desire to become a professor/researcher. After I acquire my PhD, I surmise that I would go to industry.
The issue here is one of bad information: I don't have industry experience and I don't really know how any of this stuff plays out. I'm worried that if I chose to forego the PhD, I'll really regret it in a number of years. I'm afraid I won't be able to find interesting work with just a MSc, and I'm really afraid of getting a boring software engineering gig.
I'm concerned that without the expertise/knowledge/academic maturity that I would gain from a PhD, I'll be stuck doing things that bore me after a number of years, with no room to grow to more interesting things. Equally concerning to me is that I think I'd likely be miserable during the PhD process. It seems very lonely, and I don't find much enjoyment from, say, sitting in my office reading papers all day. I much prefer creating things. I also think I'm just not that bright and that a PhD would be a huge intellectual challenge for me. I'm also absolutely sick of living like a student with little financial freedom.
Does anyone have any guiding advice?
My experience was that I basically had to pick up a new physics set and tool set every year as I jumped from algorithm development, to constitutive model development, machine learning, and quantum computing. In all cases they were tackling problems in different areas: new toolset to learn, new math to learn and new physics to learn. I thoroughly enjoy working on research problems, however I felt that there was a lot working on made up problems and forcing a square pegs into round holes so we could declare success to the funding agency when really it was a probably worse way to tackle the problem than industry standard.
Pros: I was forced to ride a learning curve with a new skill set and new area of expertise every year. I have learning to pick up skills very quickly.
I took a lot of cross discipline classes in physics, mechanical engineering, mathematics, scientific computing, chemical engineering, and materials engineering. I have a large amount of cross discipline knowledge.
I found the work fun and I basically had no boss which was nice.
The downside: I worked 60 hours a week for $20,000/year for 5 years. Lost wages ~ $500,000
The tools and skills I developed for my PhD only peripherally translate to the work I do in industry.
Advice: Get a job, the PhD will be waiting for you in 2 years if you decide you want it then. Plus it sounds like you are thinking about getting a PhD because looking for a job is hard.
I mostly thought that I had to do a PhD to keep learning. But I was wrong - I learn every day as a developer. I also realized that I liked broad problems rather than narrow. E.g. make a system good enough in all dimensions vs working on "perfect" overload protection.
I wrote more about it here: https://henrikwarne.com/2016/03/07/ph-d-or-professional-prog...
Almost no one who takes that advice returns to get a PhD, the income is too hard to give up and often life moves on which makes it hard to take the financial hit and devote the time.
The only way it worked for me was to not need much money (tuition covered and receive a stipend) and have 80+ hours a week to geek out over things that interested me. Absolutely no way I could do that now with kids. That may be one of the reasons almost everyone in my program was in their mid 20s, and the hand full in their 50s after their kids went off to college.
As just someone with some business savvy and programming skills, I could go work as a staff engineer somewhere—but that probably won't be that interesting or impactful. If I go work at FAANG I'll probably work on ads or tweaking existing systems—a cog in the wheel.
So the idea of going back to school to try for a PhD in some interesting field is now something I'm considering seriously. I graduated from college 5 years ago and I remember thinking about how badly I wanted to stop studying and start making money in the 'real world'. Funny how retrospectively I can see how that was all subliminally motivated by finances; and now that such pressure has subsided, life is much more about fields of interest and purposeful work.
The question is then, will a PhD always lead to meaningful work, or am I digging myself into a hole, and I don't really know the answer to that.
These are all fair points and worth thinking about for the OP (or others in a similar situation). I got engaged and married while pursuing my PhD, and I found having a wife difficult, it wouldn't work (for me) with kids (although there were a few).
I worked for two and a half years before going back to school but I lived like a student for those years, so I didn't end up with a lifestyle change. I also saw a reason to get the PhD--I wanted (and still do) to be a P.I. on research endeavors.
That said, I'm not a PhD. How do you recommend one learning multi-disciplinary skills these without one?
PhD's tend to work in advanced areas of companies. When recessions hit, R&D is one of the first places to take a hit.
Academic research is like a marathon and the Ph.D. is like a marathon training program. If you don't want to run a marathon, you probably don't need a marathon training program. Yes, a marathon training program is an interesting and rewarding way to improve your running, but it's very likely you can find equally interesting and rewarding ways to improve your running that don't have the grind of a marathon training program.
I'd strongly recommend you read The Ph.D Grind at http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm before you consider starting a Ph.D program. It's a good summary of what a Ph.D. experience at a top CS university in the US is like.
Like many things in life a PhD is what you make of it, and I know many people who have had a miserable time, and those who’ve had an awesome time and everything in between. My PhD has been exceptionally tough, and not for the reasons Philip talks about, I have an awesome advisor, great lab, focus, lots of papers and it’s still just a challenging process. To me the PhD is much like ultra-marathon training, I’ve had the opportunity to do amazing things that I would have never got to do at a company for 5 or 6 years and wrote cool papers and built high impact systems. Though I’ve had to do all those things while making almost no money, and working with exceptionally limited resources.
This webcast sheds some light on his motivation and perspective: https://www.geekwire.com/2013/geekwire-podcast-windows-8-ash...
> I'm just not that bright and that a PhD would be a huge intellectual challenge for me
Don't think you need to be bright to complete a PhD. If you're able to get accepted in a program with a decent advisor, you should have what it takes to complete your PhD. It's also a matter of personality, perseverance.
I'm pretty happy that I completed a PhD. For one thing, it's great to have more than one professional life. I did a variety of things. Worked in academia, in several labs, several countries, and now in company. I had friends who went straight working for a company after their Msc. They earned more money, but I have the feeling I had a more diverse career, and that I learned more things (even though some of them are pretty useless). On the other hand, even in the industry, there are many opportunities to do interesting things. It's up to you not to get stuck in a boring job.
There's no definite answer.
TL;DR: Pick an advisor you're excited about.
Eight years later, the car runs great, and it still even gets some complements. I never once needed any extra power! But when someone asks me, "Does it have the V8?" I have to tell them, "Naw, it's just the V6."
At the Ford dealership, you're paying $10K for nothing else than to be able to tell people, for the next 8 years, that you bought the V8. And it might just be worth it.
That's advice on whether to get your PhD, by the way, but it's a few more than 8 years.
Perhaps people doing PhDs also have different motives and intentions for how to use them.
Are you sure you would not feel the same way had you gone straight to industry? Musing over those who stayed, got their PhDs, and are in fascinating, high paying jobs?
My suggestion is that you try not to have an external locus of control.
I spent 7 years in grad school, realized a PhD won't get me the job I was seeking, and quit. As a result, everything you say is also true for me, and I don't even have the degree to show for it.
But I also know that grad school was a great time for me, and I did get most of what I wanted out of it. As for my not-so-great industry outcome, I do know I'm not really putting a huge amount of effort to improve it.
The PhD is about the journey. The certificate at the end is just a technicality. Could it be that you valued the certificate more than the journey?
This is an incredibly worrying statement; nobody should feel that way. Do you mind if I ask why you think it has not only ruined your life but so much that it is unrepairable?
Maybe it is a lack of general life experience that is holding you back.
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Regarding being ghosted: 1) it's not you, it's the research job market and/or the the stupid way most companies hire people, and 2) companies routinely ghost applicants - it's incredibly rude but shockingly common. Job-hunting is a weird game but there are probably some winning strategies.
And as Kierkegaard didn't say: "Get a Ph.D., and you will regret it; don't get a Ph.D., and you will also regret it; get a Ph.D. or do not get a Ph.D., you will regret it either way...This, gentlemen, is the essence of all [doctors of] Philosophy." ;-)
This is unexpected. What's going on there?
1) No phd, because those either command a high salary, or are likely to jump ship for higher pay as soon as they meet qualification 2:
2) A phd and previous experience, because the job can't be trusted to someone fresh out of school without practical experience.
That was more or less the story from all of my circa 2008 friends who graduated with bio/chem engineering type degrees, trying to decide between grad school or entering industry, at least...
Along with the factors that @zdragnar mentioned, funding for industrial R&D isn’t very stable either. One place I interviewed lost the contract that would have funded my position; another place with a lot of goverment projects decided to freeze hiring due to “political uncertainty.” Neither place was particularly upfront about this, but their decisions do make a bit of sense.
There’s also a ton of misunderstandings between the academic and industrial folks. “Expert in machine learning” in a job posting might mean anything from “a few years experience” to “I literally wrote the book on this topic.” Likewise, it is also hard to present accomplishments in a way that impresses both sides. There’s certainly a lot of currently-empty room for specialized, savvy recruiters (and if you are one, looking for a neuro/ML person, let’s talk!)
Specialization only pays more when there's demand for the exact specialization. Nobody wants to pay a PhD and risk them moving onto the "perfect" position when the same job can be done by somebody more generalized.
And a survey at Berkeley (your rivals/colleagues across the bay) found nearly half of Ph.D. students showing signs of depression.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Grad-School-Is-Hard-on-Men...
Your friends maybe waiting for your call. Be proactive.
Basically, he sold his soul, and I don't blame him for thinking he's not going to get it back.
At least that's the impression I get from a lot of PhDs. I don't have one myself, and I used to regret that, but not anymore. PhD work is hard, thankless, underpaid work that has little to no value in industry. Although it does open up opportunities to even more hard, thankless, underpaid work in academia.
The one exception is Machine Learning. A PhD in ML can apparently get you paid millions in the industry.
But if you already consider 9 months a huge hurdle, consider what a hurdle 4 years will be.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti... (It's apparently not based on any actual Chinese proverb or curse.)
I got my PhD in 2008 and my room-mate was doing a PhD in object recognition. Fei-Fei Li (who now is a bigshot at Stanford now) was a professor at UIUC in the same group. In the pre deep-learning days, object recognition was tedious, boring and un-cool. Semantic web etc was hot then!! And look at things today.
At least in sciences, US universities don't typically even offer a MSc program; people can get MSc by enrolling into PhD, which is typically the only available graduate program, and quitting it after completing the coursework.
So what ? It has great value to history and humankind.
The analogy I've always used is that researchers are like miners in a gold rush. Most workers take their pickaxe, labour at the rock face, and come away with little more than sore muscles. A lucky few will strike gold (sometimes by looking in the right place, sometimes by working hard, and sometimes by being lucky). You need all those hundreds of people labouring away to find the gold, but the efforts of a single worker matter less than you might think.
If your goal is to maximize your lifetime income, academia is clearly not for you, but neither is the Peace Corps, the clergy, civil service, or anything like that. However, if you can afford to spend a few years trying to make the world a better, more interesting place then grad school isn’t a terrible option; you can always do something else afterward.
But, here's the important quote:
> After I acquire my PhD, I surmise that I would go to industry.
Go into industry first. Why do I say this? I've been involved in hiring for about 8 years, and I've only seen a very small amount of candidates with PhDs. (They usually come from inexperienced recruiters who don't know how to hire software engineers.) The candidates fresh from a PhD program usually have very little experience in complicated software engineering, and thus will work at the same level as a recent college grad. The only time they are useful is if their field of study directly applies to the work we're doing; but I've never seen a PhD candidate like that.
The thing to realize is this: (Computer Science) != (Software Engineering). Industry mostly does software engineering; it only gets into "computer science" if you're writing a compiler, a database, ect. So, unless you pick a field of study that industry will need when you graduate, you'll end up being as useful as an entry-level CS grad.
BTW: If you find something interesting, you can always leave industry to go back to school. It's critical, however, that you set up your finances to do that. Going back to school will be a huge paycut, so you need to make sure that you don't have a big mortgage, large car payment, ect. (That being said, assume that you'll work for 5-15 years before going for a PhD, so if you buy a nice car now, and pay it off, you'll start your PhD program with a free used car in good condition.)
I would extend this thinking even further...
Most industry jobs aren't even practicing "Software Engineering". Algorithms, data structures, discrete math... that's totally outside of the day to day work for most "Software Engineers"
If you're building an app (web, mobile, desktop) it's largely plugging pieces together nowadays. You're likely using libraries that were built using "Software Engineering", but the end user practice of assembling those pieces into a functional user-friendly application is more akin to a construction worker assembling the 2x4s to build a house.
Throughout my thinking process, I spent everyday and lots of weekends sitting at coffee shops crunching through research papers. And what I found was that a lot of of the papers were not directly relevant to the industries, it's just like what somebody said in the comments: a lot of research projects are like trying to hammer a square peg into a circle hole. I'm sure some of them will make great impact. For example, the research about neural network had been done since the 80s, it just happens to take off nowadays because computers back then weren't good enough. But when I asked myself: "What am I really looking for?" I realized that I wanted to work on something that makes an immediate impact. Especially because I grew up and raised in a developing country, a lot of problems here are super immediate. (i.e. poverty, hunger, lack of educations, etc) As so much as I'm genuinely curious and interested in many of the research topics, I realized that my stamina didn't lie in curiosity and interest alone, but more in the immediate impact I'm making. For example, I learned that I'm much more fulfilled to work on something super practical and can be immediately useful to people.
Even though I didn't end up doing a PhD, I still occasionally spend my time reading conference papers. My curiosity and interest are pretty much satisfied through that. I'm much more interested in exploring interesting applications of such ingenious research rather than doing going super deep in a particular topic and be the one doing the research. Magic Pony Technology is one of the companies I look up to. I think it's a brilliant way of turning research into something practical