Ask HN: Will getting a PhD lead to a more interesting life?

The question of, "is it worth it?" is complex and only can be answered for yourself.

Most people will say that if you don't plan on working in academia that the PhD will lead to a suboptimal career income. You could spend that 4+ years building your skills working for a company and end up earning considerably more. The other side effect is that there is a definite bias against PhDs for most jobs in industry.

For me, it was all about the journey and I wouldn't change any of it for the world. Any decent PhD program will expand your horizons more than nearly anything else. There is no way I would be in the same position now without my previous experiences. I do have to say though that my "detour" through grad school and being a professor means that I didn't start earning real money until my mid 30s and puts me financially behind some friends of mine who started earlier. Seriously though, the experience was amazing as it expanded so much about how I think about the world.

If you do a PhD, you should be doing it for yourself and your own learning. If you do it for the title/paycheck, there are far better ways to get there.

It might sound similar, but it is not. Let me explain the difference:

A person performs a study creating lots of data. If he wanted to contribute to human knowledge he would publish the data with no comments, as he is probably not the best person in the world to analyze this data. If on the other hand he was a PhD he would not publish the data, instead he would publish some pet theories related to the data so that he can build his brand, and most of all he will absolutely not publish the data since it could possibly be used to prove that his pet theories are not relevant or maybe even wrong which would be disastrous for his brand.

Now there are of course PhD's who do the right thing but it doesn't benefit their career at all.

However, I don't think that going for an industry job now would "surrender your chances for a PhD". I also got a MSc in computer science, then I worked in the industry for 5 years before going back to academia and start a PhD. Depending on your field, this can be a more or less dauting process.

Working in the industry before going back to a PhD has a number of pros:

- you can make a better decision about what you want to do because you have actual industry experience

- you can save some money for your PhD

Cons:

- Going from an industry salary to a PhD salary is really sad

- The process of getting accepted in a PhD program after you've left academia for a number of years can be difficult (but not impossible!)

You seem to be quite sick of student life during your MSc, so be aware that during a PhD it is about the same or worse. Getting yourself an industry job now can let you breathe some air and make a better decision about what you want to do next.

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