I got PhD and I am still not sure how I feel. It took me 6 years, a lot of doubts and putting my life on hold.
You never know if you will finish your PhD. In fact, 50% drop out. Imagine spending 4 years of your life and then quitting with little to show for it.
First of all, PhD is too long (in the US). You spend 1 - 1.5 years taking grad classes that have little relevance to your subfield. If you haven't done research in undergrad, you spend the first year figuring out what is research. IF you did, there's still a lot less hand-holding as a PhD researcher compared to an undergrad researcher.
Now let's talk about research. First, you need to come up with a good idea that no one thought of it before. This requires understanding of all the previous research.
Then you try to implement the idea. Even if you implemented everything correctly, if your method is not better than the state of the art, you just wasted your time. (Of course, you need to implement the state of the art also)
Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings. Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.
I'm not even talking about PhD in other subfields like Physics, where people become Google's SWE after finishing their PhD. Such a waste.
I think people from the US who consider a PhD should really look outside the US too, as many (not all, of course) of the disadvantages don't apply globally.
For example, in Spain:
- Typical PhD duration: 4 years. It's not even possible to go beyond 5 years (there is a hard cap) and if you want to do it fast, typically 3.5 years or so is enough in most fields if you do it full time.
- Tuition is a symbolic amount (something like 100 €/year or so).
- Most students do their PhD either with a grant or a contract. So it's basically a normal job. Not a high-paying one, mind you, but a job. You typically get something in the range of 1200-1600 €/month and social security. Enough to live reasonably well (not luxuriously, but comfortably) in almost any city that is not Madrid or Barcelona (in those two you'd need to share a flat and it wouldn't be very good, but in most of the rest of the country, a typical rent is around 600 €).
- I don't have figures on drop out but I don't think it's anywhere near 50%, if I had to give a pessimistic estimate I would say 20% at most.
Of course, the bit about becoming a professor is still true (although the competition is somewhat different, less about brilliance and more about sweat... very roughly speaking, churning out more papers than your competitors even if the papers aren't that great. But there are still much fewer professor jobs than PhD candidates).
No remotely reputable STEM PhD program in the US actually charges you tuition, they also pay you a modest wage like you describe in Europe. You might have to TA some semesters if you don't go to a top program or work for a well established prof. But the compensation even for that case includes tuition, health insurance, and stipend. It's not a bad deal especially in the early years of a program when you are actually spending most of your time taking classes and learning other background.
The capped length sounds nice, but I think the years they shave off are mostly just at the start, not the years you spend grinding out research. The first year of a US PhD would typically be separated out as an independent Master's degree in Europe.
I have no idea what the academic culture is like over there, so I can't actually say whether it would've been better with regards to the things I disliked about PhD. But the facts you presented don't make me optimistic. A lot of them I don't consider problems in the US personally, and the absolute biggest problem for me is the ridiculous professorship job pipeline.
I'd also be cautious about that 50% US drop out number. It is likely < 20% at a T25 program in any STEM field in the US, certainly in my field that is the case. Perhaps it is higher in CS because people intentionally master out after 2 years to take a lucrative tech job. But I wouldn't consider that failing with the kind of connotation "drop out" has.
I would suggest extra caution before attending a mediocre (or worse) program of course.
Don't made me start to talking about science in Spain.
> It's not even possible to go beyond 5 years
And we still wonder why nobody is trying to paint a new Giocconda now, and where are the big results
First they repeat "ad-nauseam" that only want the very passionate and ambitious people, but then force you to choose a mediocre theme to work on it, or to solve very complex problems that nobody has figured before in a couple of years, plus one to land and other to write.
- "We have very serious environmental problems that treat our survival as species. What we could do?... Oh; What if we give the people only four years to solve it and save everybody. Just to create suspense?"
This happens by two very simple rules
1. Anybody starting in science must be dumber than this boss. Scientists must be all mediocre and equally talented, have the same background and fit to the current ideas.
If I want to study a complex problem for six or ten, or twenty years with my own money, well... is my problem. I repeat. Is -my- problem.
No other fields have this restriction. You will never see things like:
- "You are an architect? If you can't build an airport or major monument in <4 years you quit and everything is burnt down. This called Sidney Opera is taking too much to build, I can't understand this shape, lets start again and trow the investment in the dumpster"
- "You are a politician?. If you don't became president in three years and a half (or are more than 30 Yo), you are fired"
Who are the politicians to say how much of my time I can invest in something, when they don't apply the same rule to themselves?. Oh, I forgot the second rule:
2. Any grant money graciously given for a politician must benefit the politician career. Period. This means that science is now crushed to fit electoral intervals of four years
Unexpected maternity? Two years of covid?, say bye to your career and the investment of decades of study
And then they delay the grants payment for two or three years, just for laughs.
> I think people from the US who consider a PhD should really look outside the US too, as many (not all, of course) of the disadvantages don't apply globally.
>
> For example, in Spain:
>
> ...
>
> - Tuition is a symbolic amount (something like 100 €/year or so).
Is that €400 total to complete a PhD programme? Or do you mean specifically _tuition_ fees are small, but there are still other fees applicable? (Just clarifying, cause in Ireland when I was at university, they spoke a lot about "free tuition fees", but universities still charged thousands per year to students for "administration fees", to cover everything that wasn't explicitly tuition).
Also worth bearing in mind that international students (i.e. non-EU) often have higher fees, which can be as high as double or triple what home students (EU) pay. (Though if the total is only €400 that's still obviously really good!)
The thing that bugs me most about the PhD is how much of the final years are controlled by your advisor and the committee. You have a bit of leeway in your first few years to do some "blue sky" research, scoped by the grants your advisor has of course, but the last 1-3 years can be a nightmare since you're expected to produce work that is funded by and within the scope of your grant BUT also be innovative and something that your advisor and committee approve and let you graduate with.
> but the last 1-3 years can be a nightmare since you're expected to produce work that is funded by and within the scope of your grant BUT also be innovative and something that your advisor and committee approve and let you graduate with.
Great summary! This is exactly how it feels at 3 years in. Every sentence in a paper is a careful balance between adhering to science, the funding agency, the supervisors, and myself.
An important caveat I think: your mentor is critical. I’m a PhD student, and I have an incredibly lucky mix of subject matter and mentorship (my mentor has actually gotten some awards in the past for being a good one). (Also, he’s funny.) Every day my research is a blast. My mentor is truly an expert in his field (he’s actually mentioned in Norvig’s AI textbook introduction) and has the answers to my questions. I get just enough steering to make sure I’m on track to producing something novel, but I’m totally free to explore. This is all bolstered by me being truly extremely intrinsically interested in my sub field. It’s really a very pleasant experience. I’m not terribly worried about the prospects afterwards as furthering humanity’s knowledge is rewarding enough to me. Heading to industry as a code monkey afterwards wouldn't upset me as I’m really just having fun as a PhD student, and it’s all because my mentor is incredible.
It’s important to try working with multiple mentors if you can. I actually started with a different person, and he probably would have been considered by most to be ideal. I was basically totally funded to do whatever I wanted with very little mentor interaction. Interestingly, this wasn’t great for me. In part I wasn’t interested in the subject, but more than that I greatly benefit from weekly mentor interaction to check in with my direction. Now I don’t have funding (working to support myself while doing research), but I’m happy as a pig in mud.
Isn't working towards the top of any field going to have just as many chances of failure at every step? My wife was the very top candidate for her surgical sub-specialty in the year she completed her fellowship and she still barely got an attending position due to how few openings were available. I am nowhere near as talented as she is, but I still had a tremendous battle to get where I am in tech and I watch brilliant engineers tap out before hitting even PE routinely. Working hard for 4 years and having nothing to show for it is de rigueur. Most effort spent in the world is spent in vain, but you have no chance of winning if you don't play the game.
The difference with software engineering is even if you "fail" you usually have a nice pile of money to show for it. If you drop out of a PhD all you have is some cool stories and obscure knowledge.
> I'm not even talking about PhD in other subfields like Physics, where people become Google's SWE after finishing their PhD. Such a waste.
There are senior high - paying FAANG roles outside webdev where quantitative skills like the ones acquired in subjects like Math/Physics/Theor. CS are imperative, in which you can get straight into after graduation without even having to go through the absurd LeetCode hiring process (it's significantly easier if your advisor recommends you to an old friend on the industry).
> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings. Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.
This is very accurate, especially in the US where tenure seems to be largely reserved for people that come from financially strong families who effectively support them from undergrad to tenure track.
For comparison - UK/mathematics, I went into research on day one, my supervisor set me an 'easy' problem straight off the bat, and I learned on the job. A couple of extra research problems came up naturally during my PhD. Had a paper submitted by end of year 1, was ready to write-up my thesis by end of year 3. I had some teaching responsibilities, but nothing heavy like running a course. Not saying it always goes this smoothly, but I rarely felt like I wasn't moving towards the end goal. +1 to 'forget about becoming a professor though/pay is terrible' though!
I left the US to do a UK PhD for this reason. No teaching responsibilities and you can just do the PhD. And they really try to kick you out after four years (at least in Cambridge).
I did 1 year pre-apprenticeship, then 4 years apprenticeship (Baker). Then shortly after that I left the industry and got into IT.
shrug I think that life is a process of navigating obstacles while acquiring skills. Its not a RPG with you choosing a character that you have to stick with until the end.
Branch out... you'll be surprised at where your PHD learned skills will lead you.
I tend to agree with you, but I don't think it's that black though.
> Even if you implemented everything correctly, if your method is not better than the state of the art, you just wasted your time.
You didn't waste your time as you know now the state of the art, and also why your method isn't better.
> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings.
The world is a big place. There's more to academia than Ivy League in the US. And don't believe all professors are geniuses! I think it's possible to somewhat assess your odds to get an academic position when you start a PhD.
On the downside, academia is very competitive and being a second rank professor drowning in teaching and administrative duties isn't the most rewarding thing to do.
> Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.
This also depends in which industry you want to work. Not all fields/companies pay as a well as Google. And having a PhD can also open doors in industry.
Because who wants to be an assistant professor making $60k/yr or god forbid an adjunct making $30k/yr when you can work for a startup making $150k or FAANG making $400k or more?
Sorry, are the down votes because people don’t believe CS departments are hiring? My department has been hiring continuously for 6 years and has had many failed searches. Our peer institutions haven’t fared much better. There are tons of openings, just visit any academic job board to see for yourself.
I did a PhD. It was the most interesting and productive time of my life|*
Aside from actually enjoying the work, I had a salary / scholarship that where I went to school was the same or more than most of my peers who went right to work made (because of tax implications), and when I got a job, I got a better one than I would have otherwise. Plus, many people I started school with had barely finished their undergrad by the time I was done a PhD because of the usual breaks and major changes and failing courses and stuff.
I'm not saying this to brag (I've made all sorts of terrible choices since then), only to say that it's possible to do a PhD, have fun (specifically in the sense of learn cool stuff, although I enjoyed the social life), and not make a "sacrifice" in terms of money or starting a career. It's like any other job. You can make all kinds of early career decisions that help or hinder you later, generalizing a "phd" as some specific thing doesn't work
* (I like to think I'm coming back to another such period 15+ years later, but anyway)
I agree with your general experience, I'm in the middle of my PhD and so far I find it to be some of the most interesting and productive time I've spent thus far.
I'm not really interested in continuing on to academia, but this has been a good transition period for both building confidence and exploring other topics without having to worry about finances (besides of course making sure to keep up with advisor grants).
It has helped me learn and improve a lot about myself without the pressures of a more typical job. I'd say I was still pretty immature after undergrad, I wasn't really independent and didn't really think for myself (to the point that I didn't even realize I ought to be looking for a job until I had graduated and had family asking what my next step would be), which, after a year spent languishing led me to going for a Masters. Then my research work got me recruited for a PhD. Since then over the past 3 years I've been learning to be more independent which I feel works better when still having the freedom a PhD offers compared to a SWE job. If I had gone straight into the workplace I'd probably be in the process of overworking myself into burnout right now.
A side benefit is that having a PhD is very helpful for speeding up the immigration process and opening up possibilities elsewhere in case my current plans don't work out.
Out of curiosity. What was your family like, stable nuclear family? Middle income, did you fully support yourself, on your own during your studies? Did you have any other work or responsibilities? Did you get cash or material gifts and support from family? etc etc.
You described almost a very insta perfect version of the experience which doesn't play out most of the time.
They didn’t claim that their experience represented the average experience, instead describing the personal experience in their program.
I think this sort of response is extremely rude, and I know how dismissive and silly it sounds. It’s also extremely off-putting without adding much value. It feels like you’re looking for a reason to explain away their positive experience. I think the reason your comment has me flustered is that OP seemed to implicitly address many of your questions. Finally, is having a nuclear family really so remarkable and rare as to be a privilege worth sussing out?
>>>> You described almost a very insta perfect version of the experience which doesn't play out most of the time.
I got a PhD 30 years ago, and had similar advantages: Supportive middle class family (both parents scientists), free ride plus stipend thanks to NSF, met my spouse there, etc.
I think that while it's correct to point out the benefits of such advantages, the same advantages apply to success in almost every realm, from K-12 through college, in business, even in the arts and professional sports.
Fields where a poor person has a chance at overcoming the obstacles and getting a lucrative job are few and far between, and computer programming is the only one that I can think of.
Note: I chose the word "chance" carefully, not "certainty."
Not OP, but had a similar graduate school experience.
What was your family like, stable nuclear family?
No - child of divorced parents
Middle income, - yes
did you fully support yourself, on your own during your studies? - my dad chipped in $4k toward the first year of undergraduate, after that I was completely on my own.
Did you have any other work or responsibilities? I did work through school - event setup, grounds crew, working in a computer lab, and eventually working with a group on campus that helped professors put their courses online.
Did you get cash or material gifts and support from family? etc etc. - nothing beyond the $4k mentioned before. But I did get straight As, so I had academic scholarships that helped with tuition. At least during my undergraduate years.
Do you have any evidence to support that? AFAIK most people I went to grad school with were supporting themselves with the stipend offered by the school, and did not have other work or responsibilities.
I had a great time in grad school and think it was definitely worth it, and you don’t have to be rich to go, but at the same time I wouldn’t recommend it if you have others financially depending on you.
I know a number of first generation grad students who get really mad at the "unlivable poverty wages" rhetoric when they're making more than anyone in their family does.
The only colleague I’ve ever had who was supporting herself via work during her PhD was an international student. Everyone else was close to the experience you call “insta perfect”
To give one data point, at Stanford CS this year we're paying PhD students $64,110 a year plus fully funded health insurance and tuition, but that figure comes with some caveats:
- A chunk of your money will go towards a Stanford-subsidized dorm room or apartment
- Even beyond housing, the cost of living around here is not cheap
- You may not love Stanford's student health plan, in which case if you're over 26 (and can't be on a parent's plan), you're looking at paying for your own health insurance via the ACA market or otherwise
- To be making the full $64,110, you need to have advanced to candidacy (generally this is 3rd-year students and later) and stay for the summer with a "full-time" [90%] RAship. Many students do summer internships in the industry instead, in which case you're probably making way more money.
- Even with recent economic pressures, this is still much less than you can probably make in the industry, and for some subareas of CS, much much less.
I think the summary would be that if you're in a place where you have the luxury of mostly just needing to support yourself, and your health needs are well-met by a student health plan, you can afford to get a PhD here and focus 100% on it and enjoy a reasonable "student+" lifestyle for the 6ish years that will take. (Or a better lifestyle if you take summers to intern in the industry.) There's still a huge opportunity cost. The people for whom this doesn't work are often people with families to support (e.g. children and/or a partner without their own source of income) or other demands on their time or finances.
(I took two tries to get a PhD, but the second time was great!)
I got a Ph.D. in computer science a long time ago, and I think it was the worst mistake of my life. 6 years wasted, for no obvious benefit. I don't know why I did it, other than wanting to learn more computer science stuff. And I think I could have learned a lot more by just working in the industry.
> I got a Ph.D. in computer science a long time ago, and I think it was the worst mistake of my life
I can't tell you how many PhD's I know the resemble your remarks. Quite a few of them (most?) are not doing anything related to their field of study. For example, one with a PhD in Physics owns a small vocational school teaching nursing and some IT courses.
The following is going to sound horrible. Over the years, having worked with thousands of people over a career spanning about five decades and across a range of disciplines, I developed this strong belief that if you need to get things done you should not hire PhD's.
In fact, speaking of technology, some of the most creative and talented people I have worked with were university dropouts who, for the most part, got tired of the slow pace and wasted efforts (i.e., having a year of general education coursework for an EE or CS degree) and went off on their own. I am talking about people who had a direct hand in delivering millions of dollars of revenue for the companies who employed them and doing so at breakneck speed. The going joke at one place where I used to work was something like: If you need it done right and in 6 to 12 months, get a college dropout with enough schooling to be able to do the job. If you have four years and don't are about making a prouct, hire a PhD.
I know, harsh. I did warn it would be.
That said, I have met many brilliant PhD's. I just don't know how the skills, capabilities, creativity and productivity metrics distribute in that population. No clue at all.
You missed the point of hiring PhDs. You don't usually need them unless you are on the literal bleeding edge of a very minute subfield-of-a-subfield.
You hire PhDs as a value signal. "We have 6 PhDs from ivies working on solving X, Y, and Z". It doesn't even matter what X, Y, and Z are. People will THROW, THROW money at you.
The only PhDs who, by my estimation, enjoy themselves are in their late 60s to mid 70s, have had tenure for 25+ years, and just do whatever they want in the fields they enjoy. It's equivalent to earning something like an Engineer in Research position. The utility you bring to industry as a PhD is almost nothing - except those 3 letters. Who would've thought 3 letters could net you so much damn money from stupid investors.
This discussion reminds me of a book called Range. The author’s premise is that most high achieving inventors, creatives etc are not successful because of high level of specialisation, rather it’s a their broad sampling across unrelated domains and their ability to essentially cross pollinate from their experiences that is their key to coming up with novel ideas. The kinds of people who rapidly sample and acquire range I’d say are also likely to be college dropouts.
It's not en entire benefit, that six years could have been spent making a salary, saving up retirement, starting a family, etc. It's pretty disheartening watching your peers while in graduate school
its a waste of time if you are not the elite landlords whose children academia was made for
out of several hundred or really thousands of years, its only been several short decades where everyone else was unobjectively convinced that academia was relevant for them, and now we are reverting to the mean
I do sympathize for many graduate students who are chasing dreams of making a contribution in their fields and to push the edge ever so slightly, not pursuing graduate school purely for vanity sake.
But it's apparent to me that academia is straining under the system in which it exists. Incentives are misaligned, from the bottom of the hierarchy to the top. Economic strain puts pressure to produce rushed research, at the expense of PIs and the students and limits the allocations of grants to proven institutions and individuals.
The issue is so complicated that I don't even know where to begin to address it without sounding like a Kacyznski-nut. From a naturalist's perspective, maybe this was bound to happen as 'real' innovation dries up.
It seems that the only rational conditions to pursue a graduate degree in this economic climate is 1) purely for intellectual reasons, the challenge and the growth, 2) to put a small pimple on the butt of your field and given that it takes off, pick the fruits until the tree is bare. To expect glory and honor is setting yourself up for bitterness and from a purely vocational perspective, many have remarked at the negative opportunity cost.
> The issue is so complicated that I don't even know where to begin to address it without sounding like a Kacyznski-nut.
I don't find it complicated at all. The root issue is that there is too much supply and too little demand. There are too many people willing to work in the academia, while the rest of the world is only willing to feed far fewer academics. Everything else is just symptoms. This was already clear when I did my PhD 10-15 years ago. In the past couple of years, the job market finally reached some kind of breaking point and started to rebalance itself.
A Ph.D. really is about the journey. I'd be surprised if anyone ever thought it represented more money. It's unlikely to matter for that.
The time I spent getting a Ph.D. was one of the best times of my life. Not just the work, but the environment, the other people in the same situation, and the personal growth. I pursued it because 1) I really did love learning about Computers, and 2) I just loved the University environment. Every time I "graduated" I just signed up again for the next degree.
I never thought much about "using it" after I got it. I think it got me a higher starting title at a company or two and impressed a few (probably easily impressed) people along the way. I think the most measurable* impact however was listing it on my dating profile.
Again - it was a journey worth taking without much thought of the destination.
I think part of the problem for current graduate students (well, for the last generation or so) is that while the past idea / lore of graduate school modeled by mentors (professors, parents) was built on a growing post-war pyramid of faculty jobs and research opportunities, now it has become a saturated pyramid in many fields. So then students find themselves not competing easily for a growing number of jobs, but waiting to see which senior professor retires or dies and opens up a spot. Or else leave for industry. And woe to those who go into fields where there is not a lot of industry to exit to.
You've probably heard in your field of the old professors who got a faculty job after one postdoc, or even out of grad school? Well, those days of yore are long gone. And don't think that it was just because they were incredibly smart (well, some of course were) but that the field had ripe jobs for them to fill. Do you see some colleagues going to "odd" countries for positions lately? It's where the money is -- we just didn't realize in the past it actually was tied to where the money was (hidden in the form of jobs).
Anyway, also now it has almost become a baseline credential for certain jobs or advancement (like college), further filling up the pipeline with competitors for those jobs.
Don't get me wrong, for some people graduate school can be great, a great time to explore and satisfy an intellect that wants to gather and contribute to knowledge. But for others, the idea of graduate school is no longer what it was. You're in for a multiple-postdoc, where-is-this-going-on-the-faculty-track questioned existence, seemingly at the whim of advisors who hardly have time to spend on helping your career.
Of course, it varies by field. Chemical engineering, probably ok no matter how relatively bad it seems. Astronomy? Not so much. Biology? Better exits, but you're also competing against everyone who can afford a hot plate and PCR rig. Computer science / ML? Your competition is every student in China who has access to a couple hundred hours of GPU time. (exaggerating a bit of course)
> I think part of the problem for current graduate students (well, for the last generation or so) is that while the past idea / lore of graduate school modeled by mentors (professors, parents) was built on a growing post-war pyramid of faculty jobs and research opportunities, now it has become a saturated pyramid in many fields. So then students find themselves not competing easily for a growing number of jobs, but waiting to see which senior professor retires or dies and opens up a spot. Or else leave for industry. And woe to those who go into fields where there is not a lot of industry to exit to.
I was basically told I would not graduate my PhD program if I didn't do my dissertation in a machine learning application of my field of interest.
The intersection existed but after a year of trying to motivate myself I could not. I ended up quitting. It's more politics than it's worth and I was in competition with students from other countries who had infinitely more funding, infinitely more time, and infinitely more energy than me. I was doing night classes and spending every other waking hour I wasn't working pushing my research.
There is a lot of myth baked into the PhD along with a lot of romanticization of deep innovative work. From school that is pretty much fed to you of scholars and that you need to get a PhD to be known as one. E.g. Newton, Gauss, Kelvin, Tesla, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, etc.
There is a massive misreading of the general situation though like the parent comment mentions. I think until before WWII academia was a rich mans profession. I would bet that people who got into academia were those whose parents had the means to support their education and that they could either independently or through patronage carry out research. This is what most people miss about a PhD or a scholar. It was exclusively a rich mans (and in very exceptional cases a woman married to a rich man or a man married to a rich woman) business. A more extreme example Carl Jung’s wife supported her husband’s research even when he was having an affair with another woman. Remember that cabin he built so eloquently described in “Deep Work” with a walk in the woods. It might have been with the wife’s money.
Post WWII government funding for research exploded but there were not enough researchers. Universities brought in more and more professors for their government funded programs and government funded student loans. All professors want tenure track. To handle tenure track you need publications. But now we have a problem - the professors aren’t wealthy. They need to apply for patronage (ahem - government grants) and need to write proposals. The problem is “professorship” is an up or out profession. You get 7 years to move up or get out. In time, the government grants have reduced, the number of professors has ticked upwards. You have a complete rat race for scraps. There are some well-funded departments that continue to attract great students. But by and large its the stress of grant writing that will eat at you.
So, in the end the profession itself hasn’t changed much. You’re still petitioning the “rich man” for “patronage”. It’s just that now there are many more petitioners. It’s just not worth it.
That being said, there needs to be some mechanism to acquire deep advanced skills as you continue along your professional journey. A masters with a thesis mostly works and can get you a considerable way through. It could be specialized so that you get more time for focused research as opposed to filling up your time with pointless credits. I did a PhD when I was working. It was stressful - but only from a time perspective. I never had stresses of money or career for which I’m thankful. I also had a very considerate advisor. I cannot think of a position in industry today except in research labs that really need a PhD. Everyone going for it needs to look out and understand that.
> I think part of the problem for current graduate students (well, for the last generation or so) is that while the past idea / lore of graduate school [...] Astronomy? Not so much. [...]
Ph.D. in astronomy has been "do not expect a job" for at least 2 full generations now. I recall talking to an astronomy professor from (?) Univ. of Michigan ~1982. Supposedly, it was SOP to tell the kids in UM's "freshman astronomy for potential astronomy majors" course that Ph.D.'s should not expect jobs. Jobs were "possible" at lower levels, if you were clever about it. (Make sure you got lots of experience running the planetarium, maintaining high-end astronomy equipment, etc.)
I'd been working as a research assistant in a university lab during and after my undergraduate degree, for about a year, and my supervisor was trying to convince me to do a PhD with him.
However, I'd already had several months of getting to know PhD students there and in neighbouring labs, and it made me realise two things. Firstly, how much stress and long working hours they were all enduring. Secondly, for many of them, how fascinated they seemed with their research topics despite this.
I quickly realised I didn't really give much of a shit about doing any more of this research, at least not compared to the obsessive PhD students I was working alongside, and ended up pivoting to a vulnerability research career instead. Which has been much, much more rewarding and interesting than anything I was doing previously.
I'm incredibly glad I didn't get stuck wasting my life away in academia, which for a time seemed like the default path to take. For a while afterwards I felt like I'd let myself down somehow by not continuing along this path, but I look back in relief knowing now what a nonsense attitude that was.
I did a PhD and it completely changed my trajectory in life.
I would maybe compare the academic path to more like a start up life : most fail, but you will learn a lot and you will be in charge of your own destiny.
Of course the pay and living can be brutal depending on where you choose to do your PhD. But there are phd programs that pay a generous wage (with benefits like health care and retirement) at affordable cities.
I am happy I was able to roll the dice with academia. If it didn’t work out I would still be doing fine in industry.
I don't think that you are truly "in charge of your own destiny" at many programs. I get the comparison, but it's more like you're a startup in an oversaturated market with funders who have very little invested in you (and may not even know/care about you) and constantly demand that you perform circus acts to keep them funding you (sometimes in very paltry amounts) for just a bit longer. They will also be very disappointed if you turn out to be anything other than a unicorn.
And on top of all this, you could just be out of luck due to factors outside your control. I've seen multiple cases of well-published researchers with excellent teaching records, good social skills, and prestigious postdocs spend 2-3 years on the market and get nothing. It's a random roll of the dice, and I would discourage most people from trying it.
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You never know if you will finish your PhD. In fact, 50% drop out. Imagine spending 4 years of your life and then quitting with little to show for it.
First of all, PhD is too long (in the US). You spend 1 - 1.5 years taking grad classes that have little relevance to your subfield. If you haven't done research in undergrad, you spend the first year figuring out what is research. IF you did, there's still a lot less hand-holding as a PhD researcher compared to an undergrad researcher.
Now let's talk about research. First, you need to come up with a good idea that no one thought of it before. This requires understanding of all the previous research.
Then you try to implement the idea. Even if you implemented everything correctly, if your method is not better than the state of the art, you just wasted your time. (Of course, you need to implement the state of the art also)
Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings. Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.
I'm not even talking about PhD in other subfields like Physics, where people become Google's SWE after finishing their PhD. Such a waste.
For example, in Spain:
- Typical PhD duration: 4 years. It's not even possible to go beyond 5 years (there is a hard cap) and if you want to do it fast, typically 3.5 years or so is enough in most fields if you do it full time.
- Tuition is a symbolic amount (something like 100 €/year or so).
- Most students do their PhD either with a grant or a contract. So it's basically a normal job. Not a high-paying one, mind you, but a job. You typically get something in the range of 1200-1600 €/month and social security. Enough to live reasonably well (not luxuriously, but comfortably) in almost any city that is not Madrid or Barcelona (in those two you'd need to share a flat and it wouldn't be very good, but in most of the rest of the country, a typical rent is around 600 €).
- I don't have figures on drop out but I don't think it's anywhere near 50%, if I had to give a pessimistic estimate I would say 20% at most.
Of course, the bit about becoming a professor is still true (although the competition is somewhat different, less about brilliance and more about sweat... very roughly speaking, churning out more papers than your competitors even if the papers aren't that great. But there are still much fewer professor jobs than PhD candidates).
The capped length sounds nice, but I think the years they shave off are mostly just at the start, not the years you spend grinding out research. The first year of a US PhD would typically be separated out as an independent Master's degree in Europe.
I have no idea what the academic culture is like over there, so I can't actually say whether it would've been better with regards to the things I disliked about PhD. But the facts you presented don't make me optimistic. A lot of them I don't consider problems in the US personally, and the absolute biggest problem for me is the ridiculous professorship job pipeline.
I'd also be cautious about that 50% US drop out number. It is likely < 20% at a T25 program in any STEM field in the US, certainly in my field that is the case. Perhaps it is higher in CS because people intentionally master out after 2 years to take a lucrative tech job. But I wouldn't consider that failing with the kind of connotation "drop out" has.
I would suggest extra caution before attending a mediocre (or worse) program of course.
> It's not even possible to go beyond 5 years
And we still wonder why nobody is trying to paint a new Giocconda now, and where are the big results
First they repeat "ad-nauseam" that only want the very passionate and ambitious people, but then force you to choose a mediocre theme to work on it, or to solve very complex problems that nobody has figured before in a couple of years, plus one to land and other to write.
- "We have very serious environmental problems that treat our survival as species. What we could do?... Oh; What if we give the people only four years to solve it and save everybody. Just to create suspense?"
This happens by two very simple rules
1. Anybody starting in science must be dumber than this boss. Scientists must be all mediocre and equally talented, have the same background and fit to the current ideas.
If I want to study a complex problem for six or ten, or twenty years with my own money, well... is my problem. I repeat. Is -my- problem.
No other fields have this restriction. You will never see things like:
- "You are an architect? If you can't build an airport or major monument in <4 years you quit and everything is burnt down. This called Sidney Opera is taking too much to build, I can't understand this shape, lets start again and trow the investment in the dumpster"
- "You are a politician?. If you don't became president in three years and a half (or are more than 30 Yo), you are fired"
Who are the politicians to say how much of my time I can invest in something, when they don't apply the same rule to themselves?. Oh, I forgot the second rule:
2. Any grant money graciously given for a politician must benefit the politician career. Period. This means that science is now crushed to fit electoral intervals of four years
Unexpected maternity? Two years of covid?, say bye to your career and the investment of decades of study
And then they delay the grants payment for two or three years, just for laughs.
Is that €400 total to complete a PhD programme? Or do you mean specifically _tuition_ fees are small, but there are still other fees applicable? (Just clarifying, cause in Ireland when I was at university, they spoke a lot about "free tuition fees", but universities still charged thousands per year to students for "administration fees", to cover everything that wasn't explicitly tuition).
Also worth bearing in mind that international students (i.e. non-EU) often have higher fees, which can be as high as double or triple what home students (EU) pay. (Though if the total is only €400 that's still obviously really good!)
- Usually 3 year (a post graduate education expected, otherwise 5 years) - Considered a job, you are paid USD ~4k a month (depending on field)
Great summary! This is exactly how it feels at 3 years in. Every sentence in a paper is a careful balance between adhering to science, the funding agency, the supervisors, and myself.
It’s important to try working with multiple mentors if you can. I actually started with a different person, and he probably would have been considered by most to be ideal. I was basically totally funded to do whatever I wanted with very little mentor interaction. Interestingly, this wasn’t great for me. In part I wasn’t interested in the subject, but more than that I greatly benefit from weekly mentor interaction to check in with my direction. Now I don’t have funding (working to support myself while doing research), but I’m happy as a pig in mud.
And the ones that do pay orders of magnitude more.
There are senior high - paying FAANG roles outside webdev where quantitative skills like the ones acquired in subjects like Math/Physics/Theor. CS are imperative, in which you can get straight into after graduation without even having to go through the absurd LeetCode hiring process (it's significantly easier if your advisor recommends you to an old friend on the industry).
> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings. Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.
This is very accurate, especially in the US where tenure seems to be largely reserved for people that come from financially strong families who effectively support them from undergrad to tenure track.
shrug I think that life is a process of navigating obstacles while acquiring skills. Its not a RPG with you choosing a character that you have to stick with until the end.
Branch out... you'll be surprised at where your PHD learned skills will lead you.
> Even if you implemented everything correctly, if your method is not better than the state of the art, you just wasted your time.
You didn't waste your time as you know now the state of the art, and also why your method isn't better.
> Do you want to become a professor? Forget about. There are so many bright PhDs competing for a few academic openings.
The world is a big place. There's more to academia than Ivy League in the US. And don't believe all professors are geniuses! I think it's possible to somewhat assess your odds to get an academic position when you start a PhD.
On the downside, academia is very competitive and being a second rank professor drowning in teaching and administrative duties isn't the most rewarding thing to do.
> Even if you become a professor, it will take 10 years and a lot of work to get tenure. And if you finally become a professor, the pay is terrible compared to the industry.
This also depends in which industry you want to work. Not all fields/companies pay as a well as Google. And having a PhD can also open doors in industry.
Unless you want to be a professor of computer science. There, everyone is hiring.
Aside from actually enjoying the work, I had a salary / scholarship that where I went to school was the same or more than most of my peers who went right to work made (because of tax implications), and when I got a job, I got a better one than I would have otherwise. Plus, many people I started school with had barely finished their undergrad by the time I was done a PhD because of the usual breaks and major changes and failing courses and stuff.
I'm not saying this to brag (I've made all sorts of terrible choices since then), only to say that it's possible to do a PhD, have fun (specifically in the sense of learn cool stuff, although I enjoyed the social life), and not make a "sacrifice" in terms of money or starting a career. It's like any other job. You can make all kinds of early career decisions that help or hinder you later, generalizing a "phd" as some specific thing doesn't work
* (I like to think I'm coming back to another such period 15+ years later, but anyway)
I'm not really interested in continuing on to academia, but this has been a good transition period for both building confidence and exploring other topics without having to worry about finances (besides of course making sure to keep up with advisor grants).
It has helped me learn and improve a lot about myself without the pressures of a more typical job. I'd say I was still pretty immature after undergrad, I wasn't really independent and didn't really think for myself (to the point that I didn't even realize I ought to be looking for a job until I had graduated and had family asking what my next step would be), which, after a year spent languishing led me to going for a Masters. Then my research work got me recruited for a PhD. Since then over the past 3 years I've been learning to be more independent which I feel works better when still having the freedom a PhD offers compared to a SWE job. If I had gone straight into the workplace I'd probably be in the process of overworking myself into burnout right now.
A side benefit is that having a PhD is very helpful for speeding up the immigration process and opening up possibilities elsewhere in case my current plans don't work out.
Dead Comment
You described almost a very insta perfect version of the experience which doesn't play out most of the time.
I think this sort of response is extremely rude, and I know how dismissive and silly it sounds. It’s also extremely off-putting without adding much value. It feels like you’re looking for a reason to explain away their positive experience. I think the reason your comment has me flustered is that OP seemed to implicitly address many of your questions. Finally, is having a nuclear family really so remarkable and rare as to be a privilege worth sussing out?
I got a PhD 30 years ago, and had similar advantages: Supportive middle class family (both parents scientists), free ride plus stipend thanks to NSF, met my spouse there, etc.
I think that while it's correct to point out the benefits of such advantages, the same advantages apply to success in almost every realm, from K-12 through college, in business, even in the arts and professional sports.
Fields where a poor person has a chance at overcoming the obstacles and getting a lucrative job are few and far between, and computer programming is the only one that I can think of.
Note: I chose the word "chance" carefully, not "certainty."
What was your family like, stable nuclear family?
No - child of divorced parents
Middle income, - yes
did you fully support yourself, on your own during your studies? - my dad chipped in $4k toward the first year of undergraduate, after that I was completely on my own.
Did you have any other work or responsibilities? I did work through school - event setup, grounds crew, working in a computer lab, and eventually working with a group on campus that helped professors put their courses online.
Did you get cash or material gifts and support from family? etc etc. - nothing beyond the $4k mentioned before. But I did get straight As, so I had academic scholarships that helped with tuition. At least during my undergraduate years.
I had a great time in grad school and think it was definitely worth it, and you don’t have to be rich to go, but at the same time I wouldn’t recommend it if you have others financially depending on you.
- A chunk of your money will go towards a Stanford-subsidized dorm room or apartment
- Even beyond housing, the cost of living around here is not cheap
- You may not love Stanford's student health plan, in which case if you're over 26 (and can't be on a parent's plan), you're looking at paying for your own health insurance via the ACA market or otherwise
- To be making the full $64,110, you need to have advanced to candidacy (generally this is 3rd-year students and later) and stay for the summer with a "full-time" [90%] RAship. Many students do summer internships in the industry instead, in which case you're probably making way more money.
- Even with recent economic pressures, this is still much less than you can probably make in the industry, and for some subareas of CS, much much less.
I think the summary would be that if you're in a place where you have the luxury of mostly just needing to support yourself, and your health needs are well-met by a student health plan, you can afford to get a PhD here and focus 100% on it and enjoy a reasonable "student+" lifestyle for the 6ish years that will take. (Or a better lifestyle if you take summers to intern in the industry.) There's still a huge opportunity cost. The people for whom this doesn't work are often people with families to support (e.g. children and/or a partner without their own source of income) or other demands on their time or finances.
(I took two tries to get a PhD, but the second time was great!)
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Sure, it might make sense for a few. A very select few.
I can't tell you how many PhD's I know the resemble your remarks. Quite a few of them (most?) are not doing anything related to their field of study. For example, one with a PhD in Physics owns a small vocational school teaching nursing and some IT courses.
The following is going to sound horrible. Over the years, having worked with thousands of people over a career spanning about five decades and across a range of disciplines, I developed this strong belief that if you need to get things done you should not hire PhD's.
In fact, speaking of technology, some of the most creative and talented people I have worked with were university dropouts who, for the most part, got tired of the slow pace and wasted efforts (i.e., having a year of general education coursework for an EE or CS degree) and went off on their own. I am talking about people who had a direct hand in delivering millions of dollars of revenue for the companies who employed them and doing so at breakneck speed. The going joke at one place where I used to work was something like: If you need it done right and in 6 to 12 months, get a college dropout with enough schooling to be able to do the job. If you have four years and don't are about making a prouct, hire a PhD.
I know, harsh. I did warn it would be.
That said, I have met many brilliant PhD's. I just don't know how the skills, capabilities, creativity and productivity metrics distribute in that population. No clue at all.
You hire PhDs as a value signal. "We have 6 PhDs from ivies working on solving X, Y, and Z". It doesn't even matter what X, Y, and Z are. People will THROW, THROW money at you.
The only PhDs who, by my estimation, enjoy themselves are in their late 60s to mid 70s, have had tenure for 25+ years, and just do whatever they want in the fields they enjoy. It's equivalent to earning something like an Engineer in Research position. The utility you bring to industry as a PhD is almost nothing - except those 3 letters. Who would've thought 3 letters could net you so much damn money from stupid investors.
Or you could struggle, go through tons of stress, have no time to give to friends (and lose touch with friends), no time for a relationship, etc. etc.
Not to mention the financial opportunity cost
out of several hundred or really thousands of years, its only been several short decades where everyone else was unobjectively convinced that academia was relevant for them, and now we are reverting to the mean
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But it's apparent to me that academia is straining under the system in which it exists. Incentives are misaligned, from the bottom of the hierarchy to the top. Economic strain puts pressure to produce rushed research, at the expense of PIs and the students and limits the allocations of grants to proven institutions and individuals.
The issue is so complicated that I don't even know where to begin to address it without sounding like a Kacyznski-nut. From a naturalist's perspective, maybe this was bound to happen as 'real' innovation dries up.
It seems that the only rational conditions to pursue a graduate degree in this economic climate is 1) purely for intellectual reasons, the challenge and the growth, 2) to put a small pimple on the butt of your field and given that it takes off, pick the fruits until the tree is bare. To expect glory and honor is setting yourself up for bitterness and from a purely vocational perspective, many have remarked at the negative opportunity cost.
I don't find it complicated at all. The root issue is that there is too much supply and too little demand. There are too many people willing to work in the academia, while the rest of the world is only willing to feed far fewer academics. Everything else is just symptoms. This was already clear when I did my PhD 10-15 years ago. In the past couple of years, the job market finally reached some kind of breaking point and started to rebalance itself.
I'm overstating it but there is some ironic truth in that observation.
The time I spent getting a Ph.D. was one of the best times of my life. Not just the work, but the environment, the other people in the same situation, and the personal growth. I pursued it because 1) I really did love learning about Computers, and 2) I just loved the University environment. Every time I "graduated" I just signed up again for the next degree.
I never thought much about "using it" after I got it. I think it got me a higher starting title at a company or two and impressed a few (probably easily impressed) people along the way. I think the most measurable* impact however was listing it on my dating profile.
Again - it was a journey worth taking without much thought of the destination.
*Note, I said "measurable", not "good" or "bad"
You've probably heard in your field of the old professors who got a faculty job after one postdoc, or even out of grad school? Well, those days of yore are long gone. And don't think that it was just because they were incredibly smart (well, some of course were) but that the field had ripe jobs for them to fill. Do you see some colleagues going to "odd" countries for positions lately? It's where the money is -- we just didn't realize in the past it actually was tied to where the money was (hidden in the form of jobs).
Anyway, also now it has almost become a baseline credential for certain jobs or advancement (like college), further filling up the pipeline with competitors for those jobs.
Don't get me wrong, for some people graduate school can be great, a great time to explore and satisfy an intellect that wants to gather and contribute to knowledge. But for others, the idea of graduate school is no longer what it was. You're in for a multiple-postdoc, where-is-this-going-on-the-faculty-track questioned existence, seemingly at the whim of advisors who hardly have time to spend on helping your career.
Of course, it varies by field. Chemical engineering, probably ok no matter how relatively bad it seems. Astronomy? Not so much. Biology? Better exits, but you're also competing against everyone who can afford a hot plate and PCR rig. Computer science / ML? Your competition is every student in China who has access to a couple hundred hours of GPU time. (exaggerating a bit of course)
Just go into it knowing the situation.
I was basically told I would not graduate my PhD program if I didn't do my dissertation in a machine learning application of my field of interest.
The intersection existed but after a year of trying to motivate myself I could not. I ended up quitting. It's more politics than it's worth and I was in competition with students from other countries who had infinitely more funding, infinitely more time, and infinitely more energy than me. I was doing night classes and spending every other waking hour I wasn't working pushing my research.
There is a massive misreading of the general situation though like the parent comment mentions. I think until before WWII academia was a rich mans profession. I would bet that people who got into academia were those whose parents had the means to support their education and that they could either independently or through patronage carry out research. This is what most people miss about a PhD or a scholar. It was exclusively a rich mans (and in very exceptional cases a woman married to a rich man or a man married to a rich woman) business. A more extreme example Carl Jung’s wife supported her husband’s research even when he was having an affair with another woman. Remember that cabin he built so eloquently described in “Deep Work” with a walk in the woods. It might have been with the wife’s money.
Post WWII government funding for research exploded but there were not enough researchers. Universities brought in more and more professors for their government funded programs and government funded student loans. All professors want tenure track. To handle tenure track you need publications. But now we have a problem - the professors aren’t wealthy. They need to apply for patronage (ahem - government grants) and need to write proposals. The problem is “professorship” is an up or out profession. You get 7 years to move up or get out. In time, the government grants have reduced, the number of professors has ticked upwards. You have a complete rat race for scraps. There are some well-funded departments that continue to attract great students. But by and large its the stress of grant writing that will eat at you.
So, in the end the profession itself hasn’t changed much. You’re still petitioning the “rich man” for “patronage”. It’s just that now there are many more petitioners. It’s just not worth it.
That being said, there needs to be some mechanism to acquire deep advanced skills as you continue along your professional journey. A masters with a thesis mostly works and can get you a considerable way through. It could be specialized so that you get more time for focused research as opposed to filling up your time with pointless credits. I did a PhD when I was working. It was stressful - but only from a time perspective. I never had stresses of money or career for which I’m thankful. I also had a very considerate advisor. I cannot think of a position in industry today except in research labs that really need a PhD. Everyone going for it needs to look out and understand that.
Ph.D. in astronomy has been "do not expect a job" for at least 2 full generations now. I recall talking to an astronomy professor from (?) Univ. of Michigan ~1982. Supposedly, it was SOP to tell the kids in UM's "freshman astronomy for potential astronomy majors" course that Ph.D.'s should not expect jobs. Jobs were "possible" at lower levels, if you were clever about it. (Make sure you got lots of experience running the planetarium, maintaining high-end astronomy equipment, etc.)
However, I'd already had several months of getting to know PhD students there and in neighbouring labs, and it made me realise two things. Firstly, how much stress and long working hours they were all enduring. Secondly, for many of them, how fascinated they seemed with their research topics despite this.
I quickly realised I didn't really give much of a shit about doing any more of this research, at least not compared to the obsessive PhD students I was working alongside, and ended up pivoting to a vulnerability research career instead. Which has been much, much more rewarding and interesting than anything I was doing previously.
I'm incredibly glad I didn't get stuck wasting my life away in academia, which for a time seemed like the default path to take. For a while afterwards I felt like I'd let myself down somehow by not continuing along this path, but I look back in relief knowing now what a nonsense attitude that was.
I would maybe compare the academic path to more like a start up life : most fail, but you will learn a lot and you will be in charge of your own destiny.
Of course the pay and living can be brutal depending on where you choose to do your PhD. But there are phd programs that pay a generous wage (with benefits like health care and retirement) at affordable cities.
I am happy I was able to roll the dice with academia. If it didn’t work out I would still be doing fine in industry.
And on top of all this, you could just be out of luck due to factors outside your control. I've seen multiple cases of well-published researchers with excellent teaching records, good social skills, and prestigious postdocs spend 2-3 years on the market and get nothing. It's a random roll of the dice, and I would discourage most people from trying it.