What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD

I loved grad school. Loved loved loved it. I wouldn't give up the worst day I had in grad school for almost anything. And I love having the skills it taught me. I am a much better engineer and researcher than I could possibly have been had I taken almost any other route. I was given freedom in grad school that just would not have been present in most industry jobs. I was given a hardware project - a submersible robot - that I was completely in charge of on day 1. I had to teach myself machining, how to do electrical and electonicd works, how to do embedded programming, how to tune a PID loop. How to work with other students. How to give a persuasive presentation. How to come uo with my own ideas, how to convince other people that they were worth pursuing, how to quickly become an expert in a topic.

That being said, I am not under any illusions about the financial loss I experienced. I spent ten years making a pauper's wage, when if I had chosen to go into industry I would have been a software engineer... in the Valley... in 1993.

I also was in a remarkable lab in grad school. It made top-ten lists of “coolest college lab”. And that wasn't hype. The caliber of student and of professor was off the charts. And they were not only smart, the vast majority of them were good people. A lot of places aren't like that. And as the srticle correctly said: a toxic graduate school environment is worse than most toxic work environments. In any practical sense, students don't have HR protections. If you can't get your advisor to write you a recommendation, getting into a different program is nearly impossible. You can be worked 100 hours a week. You can be blackballed for getting sick, for taking vacations, for taking maternity or paternity leave (even if it is - and it almost certainly will be - unpaid).

The key is to find an advisor who is doing good work and who is sane and moral. If you can find that you're golden. If you can't you may be completely screwed.

No, individual differences outweigh any pattern that I've seen.

You know how you've take a course before where the professor was just surprisingly awful at teaching? These professors are often some of the most knowledgeable people in a subfield of the subject you are taking, yet their teaching ability is severely lacking and you have to scramble to learn the material some other way (or just never learn it).

During a PhD, there is a decent chance that your adviser is similarly a bad manager. Unfortunately, having a bad manager for 5-7 years of your life can be a fairly awful experience. You will work with someone who you, on the one hand, look up to, but on the other hand, who seems to not care at all about your mental health, your possible career desires outside of academia, your work/life balance, or the exact reason why this week was a rough week for research in your (human) life.

I have a lot of other thoughts on the matter, but I thought I'd try to keep this post more concise =).

A PhD system trains you to think about unsolved problems in an given domain deeply with a larger time runway. The end goal is not a tangible product that reaches millions of people, but rather a set of ideas that can take a crack at the unsolved problems in your field in a novel way. A good work should inspire others in the field, and eventually a larger audience to pick them up and expand and build on top of it. To give a small example, a majority of the fundamentals of machine learning was charted out by many, many PhD works over the last 40 years. Implementing a linear classifier is 2 lines of code in 2018, but many Bothans died to bring us this information :-) .

The goals of industry are more immediate. Expect for a privileged few research labs in industry, your work is expected to be monetized, and rightly so. The goal is for you, if you run the business, else your management team to first figure out a problem of high relevance and monetary value. Build products/solutions for that problem, that can be used by someone who is less versed/ambivalent of your technical solutions. Efficacy of solving that particular problem often defines the merit of your contribution.

The fundamental of choosing the PhD or industry should be taking stock of what kind of contribution you want to make as an individual. If it is a few set of ideas to science, which on a later date might become something fundamental in our understanding of the world, then PhD is a good path. If it is a set of contributions towards a product/solution that eases the pain of many users then go into the industry first.