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It is even worse in Europe where you are often required to have Master's degree before you can even start a PhD. People in my country usually start PhD. at 25 and take at least 6 years to finish, because the universities use them as cheap workforce and aren't incentivised to allow students graduate quickly.
I was once told by a professor who I respected very much how he gives advice to prospective PhDs. When someone asks "should I get my PhD?" the answer is always "no". Because the only people who will enjoy grad school are the ones who will do it anyways. I have found this to be good advice for people who are thinking of starting companies too.
I was once told by a professor who I respected very much how he gives advice to prospective PhDs. When someone asks "should I get my PhD?" the answer is always "no". Because the only people who will enjoy grad school are the ones who will do it anyways. I have found this to be good advice for people who are thinking of starting companies too.
I didn't get the logic behind this advice ! if they would enjoy it, shouldn't the advice be to do it ?
It is even worse in Europe where you are often required to have Master's degree before you can even start a PhD. People in my country usually start PhD. at 25 and take at least 6 years to finish, because the universities use them as cheap workforce and aren't incentivised to allow students graduate quickly.
At least I knew this when I started. And it motivated me to get finished in 3 years.
Someone did give me the advice in this article before I started. Which was good. I wasn't in it for the money. It was the freedom to work on things that interested me that mattered.
What no-one told me later, when I started a post-doc, was that the chances of getting a full-time academic job were close to zero... now that did feel like 3 years wasted.
It is even worse in Europe where you are often required to have Master's degree before you can even start a PhD. People in my country usually start PhD. at 25 and take at least 6 years to finish, because the universities use them as cheap workforce and aren't incentivised to allow students graduate quickly.
Wait, you can do a PhD without having a Master's degree? In Holland, most PhD's build on the knowledge you gain in a Master's programme.
It is even worse in Europe where you are often required to have Master's degree before you can even start a PhD. People in my country usually start PhD. at 25 and take at least 6 years to finish, because the universities use them as cheap workforce and aren't incentivised to allow students graduate quickly.
Depending on how cheap that may not be such a bad thing. You are effectively having a "real job" from 25 (if a slightly worse paid one than in industry), and most importantly you get the PhD without accumulating any more debt. This is an important factor in equality and recruitment meaning not only those that can afford grad school will do it.
It is even worse in Europe where you are often required to have Master's degree before you can even start a PhD. People in my country usually start PhD. at 25 and take at least 6 years to finish, because the universities use them as cheap workforce and aren't incentivised to allow students graduate quickly.
This used to be the situation in Europe but it got out of hand, as a result all new PhDs in Europe must be advertised as three year programs, and completed in four at a maximum.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on how cheap that may not be such a bad thing. You are effectively having a "real job" from 25 (if a slightly worse paid one than in industry), and most importantly you get the PhD without accumulating any more debt. This is an important factor in equality and recruitment meaning not only those that can afford grad school will do it.
It's europe, there's not that much debt.
A PhD is a license to do deep research. Deep research careers are very rare, but for the right kind of person, they're great. However, deep research by definition means it probably won't work, and there's just a lot more money in doing things that will probably work vs things that probably won't. So it helps to be extremely talented at deep research if you want to pursue the PhD. Also, most engineering PhD's are bogu…
> Also, most engineering PhD's are bogus because most engineering "research" is actually not deep research. Hello! Engineering researcher here. I toy with things that are both wildly theoretical (information bounds for algorithms, inference in stochastic dynamical systems, etc.) to things that are fantastically and directly useful (design of photonic structures for LIDAR, (much) better AR/VR lenses, etc.). While you'…
I often get asked about what my views on doing a PhD are (I am more-or-less finished with one now), and one of the ways I frame it is the following: 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…